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

featured in this book were once autocratic imperial powers themselves. Sad to say, history also abounds
    with nonimperial rulers who brutally exploited their own people.
    Nonetheless, the implication that imperial methods remain viable
    because nonwestern peoples are still backward has allowed the naive,
    the venal, and the corrupt to continue to promise that imperial hard
    power can enhance national defense, improve international security,
    serve humanitarian causes, and fi ght the “war on terror.”
    18 THE RULE OF EMPIRES
    This top-down view of empire disguises the fundamental reality that imperial subjecthood was and remains intolerable. Even the
    liberal British and French empires of the last century were born of
    blood and conquest. Ferguson may have excused the initial violence
    of empire building as “imperial overkill,” but there is no escaping the
    almost genocidal viciousness in the satisfaction the British deputy
    commissioner of Bechuanaland took in the slaughter of Ndebele soldiers during the conquest of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). “I must confess
    that it would offer me sincere and lasting satisfaction if I could see the
    Matabele Matjaha cut down by our own rifl es and machine guns like
    a cornfi eld by a reaping machine and I would not spare a single one if
    I could have my way.”19
    The establishment of more formal rule ended the overt violence
    of these Orwellian “pacifi cation campaigns,” but Africans continued
    to die for imperial masters while working in the fi elds and mines.
    As in earlier eras, the labor of common people remained the only
    signifi cant source of profi t in the new empires. The supposedly modernizing imperial states of the last century relied on unfree labor,
    privileged foreign commercial interest, and discouraged the diversifi cation of commodity production. They were hardly free and liberal.
    Eloquently rebutting the imperial apologists’ balance sheets, the poet
    Aimé Césaire declared: “They throw facts at my head, statistics, mileages of roads, canals, and railroad tracks. I am talking about thousands
    of men sacrifi ced to the Congo-Ocean [railway]. I am talking about
    those who . . . are digging the harbor of Abidjan by hand.”20 Césaire
    was not exaggerating the lethality of imperial labor. The Belgian,
    French, and British authorities expended the lives of roughly eighteen hundred coerced African workers in the construction of a single
    railway line from Matadi to Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo.21
    Like the schools and hospitals enumerated by Gann and Duignan,
    the Matadi-Léopoldville line served western empire builders. If the
    new imperialists left independent African nations with a rudimentary capitalist infrastructure, it was by chance, not design.
    The common experience of imperial rule throughout history has
    been oppression. In their scorn for these supposedly “liberal” French
    and British empires, Césaire and the former soldier Daniel Nguta
    provide a powerful rejoinder to modern scholars and policy makers
    who invoke historical examples to extol the virtues and rewards of
    Introduction 19
    imperial ventures. For there were Daniel Ngutas in every empire, even
    ancient Rome. Imperial apologists can laud the Romans for bringing
    civilization to the British Isles because the names and experiences of
    the common Britons who became Roman subjects have been lost to
    history. Yet the story of how simple people have the power to thwart
    grand imperial projects begins in this remote and backward corner of
    the Roman Empire.
    Wall of Pius
    N
    Tweed R.
    Hadrian’s Wall
    Tyne R.
B R I G A N T E S
    Eburacum
    (York)
PARISI
    Humber R.
    Deva
    (Chester)
O R D O V I C E
    PARISI
    I C E N I
    E S
    R
    U
    L
D O B U N I Verulamium
    I
    S
    (St. Albans)
    Camulodunum
TRINOVANTES
    (Colchester)
    Londinium
    Calleva Atrebatum
    (Silchester)
B E L G A E
    Regnum
    I I
    (Chichester)
    N

D U R
    O
    O T R I G E S
    Gessoriacum
    N
    (Boulogne)
    M
    U
    Isca Dumnoniorum
    D
    (Exeter)
    0 10 20