The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall Read Online Free PDF

United States risked emulating ancient Rome in shifting from an egalitarian republic to an
    authoritarian empire.15 Rather than rebutting the neoconservative
    hawks with the far more effective argument that imperial methods
    are no longer possible or feasible, these critics allowed themselves
    to be sidetracked into a moralistic debate over whether America
    had become an empire.
    The left’s failure to make this case effectively allowed the neoimperial lobby to win over the American public by resurrecting the
    myth of the liberal progressive empire. In doing so, they conveniently
    forgot how these empires came apart under the pressure of nationalism in the 1960s. What mattered was that the notion of empire still
    retained a seductive hold on the popular imagination. Western civilization courses teaching that modern nation-states are the heirs of a
    culturally advanced and nearly omnipotent imperial Rome promote
    an inherent respect for empire. Moreover, the media’s tendency to
    still depict nonwesterners as tribal, traditional, and backward meant
    that the civilizing propaganda that legitimized the new imperialism
    continued to carry weight with the general public in the United States
    and its partners in the “coalition of the willing.”
    Striving to legitimize the Iraqi occupation, the revisionists gave
    the failed imperial enterprises of the last century credit for introducing free trade around the world, imposing the rule of law on
    anarchic regions, protecting private property, installing responsible
    government, safeguarding speculative capitalist investment, and
    sowing the seeds of democracy in modern nonwestern nations such
    as India. The neoimperial lobby’s case rested on the balance sheet
    approach used by 1960s imperial apologists such as L. H. Gann and
    Peter Duignan to claim that the collective good of hospitals, schools,
    railways, roads, and industries far outweighed the sacrifi ces they
    required of individual subjects.16 This is how Niall Ferguson could
    Introduction 17
    argue that the evils of indentured servitude, which was a brutal but
    highly effective means of compelling subject peoples to work, was
    necessary to achieve the greater good of increasing the global output of rubber and gold.17
    To some degree, the attempt to rehabilitate the British and French
    empires represented an attempt by conservative Britons and Frenchmen to put a positive spin on their nations’ imperial record and legacy. The French politicians who managed to temporarily pass a law in
    2005 directing schools to teach the “positive role of the French overseas presence” clearly had this agenda. In this sense modern imperial
    romanticism is reminiscent of nostalgia in the American South for
    a lost and overly idealized antebellum slaveholding society. It also
    explains how most Americans conveniently overlook their nation’s
    mistreatment of subject Amerindians, Filipinos, and other marginalized peoples.
    The most serious fl aw of the unbalanced balance sheet defense was
    that it ignored, either accidentally or willfully, subject perspectives.
    At best, the common Africans and Asians who lived under these supposedly benevolent empires were simply missing from the equation.
    At worst, the apologists fell back on the dehumanizing, if not outright racist, ideologies that legitimized imperial ambitions in the fi rst
    place. Conversely, looking at empire from the bottom up exposes the
    mendacity of imperial balance sheets. As the anthropologist Nicholas
    Dirks aptly charged: “When imperial history loses any sense of what
    empire meant to those who were colonized, it becomes complicit in
    the history of empire itself.”18 Without question, subject peoples
    must be the central focus of any true assessment of an empire or the
    feasibility of imperial adventures.
    This is more than just an issue of morality. Defeated populations
    did not automatically become saintly when they became subjects, and
    many of the subject peoples