Empire Without End
Imperial Achievements and Ideologies
Article Summary and Author Biography
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper's extensive volume and Timothy Parsons' selective survey are systematic treatments of empires; Richard Immerman's history is a focused critique of America's imperial career. None is an apologia for the United States.
CHARLES S. MAIER is Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University and the author of Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors.
Princeton University Press
2010
528 pp.
9780691127088
$35.00
Oxford University Press
2010
496 pp.
9780195304312
$22.95
Princeton University Press
2010
286 pp.
9780691127620
$24.95
Many leaders of the American Revolution welcomed the idea that their new nation would grow up to be an empire. To them, the concept was compatible with a republic; it meant size and benign influence. David Ramsay, South Carolina's delegate to the Continental Congress, wrote as early as 1778 that the grandeur of the American continent provided the basis for a realm that would make "the Macedonian, the Roman, and the British sink into insignificance." George Washington thought of the new country as a "rising" or an "infant" empire. Thomas Jefferson, who secured the vast Mississippi and Missouri valley corridors, famously envisaged an "empire of liberty." But whose liberty? The idea of empire as conquest or subjugation was curiously absent from this postindependence reverie. Cheered by the euphemism of "manifest destiny" deep into the nineteenth century, Americans of European origin continued to enjoy the incredible lightness of empire.
Subsequent observers would contend that the process of building and managing an empire is often violent, unfettered by concerns about law and equality. Empire, as Joseph Conrad wrote and American anti-imperialists came to acknowledge, had a heart of darkness. As Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, the authors of the massive comparative study Empires in World History, argue, "Terror was the hidden face of empire." And it has not always been so hidden, either.
The word "imperium" originally signified the authority delegated by the Senate of the Roman Republic to exercise command over the republic's own citizens and subdue others. It came to be applied to Rome's new territories throughout Italy and then beyond, even before Augustus founded the Principate, the first formal phase of the Roman Empire proper. More recently, in the United States, the growth of presidential power has periodically awakened concerns about what the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., termed "the imperial presidency," that is, the growth of executive authority at the expense of legislative supervision and public dissent.
Three recent books on empire -- Burbank and Cooper's comparative history, Timothy Parsons' The Rule of Empires, and Richard Immerman's Empire for Liberty -- are less concerned with how nominally representative institutions can give way to authoritarian leaders than with how one state or national group extends its rule and often territory at the expense of others. This focus is hardly surprising, since much of the literature on empires has responded to the string of interventions the United States has undertaken since the Cold War.
People who object to applying the term "empire" to the United States point out that it has never established permanent colonies beyond its borders. Those who apply the term insist that the project of filling out the continent was imperial from the outset, since it involved the forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of indigenous groups. As for American forbearance abroad, they argue, the United States has sought no permanent colonies or territories because it has not needed them. Occasional but decisive interventions have sufficed to protect U.S. interests, and hundreds of U.S. military bases continue to preserve a sphere of influence well beyond the United States' borders.
Other commentators have argued that Washington should be unapologetic about using power this way. The historian Niall Ferguson suggested in Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World that British colonialism brought valuable experience in parliamentary and economic practices to the United Kingdom's colonies, and he deplored the United States' apparent unwillingness to take on the long burden of tutelage. The writer James Traub, among others, has suggested that Washington should intervene in central Africa to stop civil war and genocide -- even if doing so would awake concerns about U.S. imperialism. And the historian John Darwin's masterly After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 accepts frankly, without any moralizing, that the United States is the most recent in a long series of transoceanic empires.
History suggests that it is not easy to maintain the distinction between humanitarian and imperial interventions. Before Iraq devolved into protracted civil conflict, it was much easier for champions of a muscular foreign policy, such as the writer Peter Beinart, in the liberal camp, and the usual neoconservative suspects, to argue that the "empire of liberty" must awaken from the torpor of indifference and intervene abroad. Immerman's history of the myopic intentions of U.S. leaders reflects the painful process of learning how difficult it can be to reshape other societies and institutions. To what degree meaning well mitigates historical responsibility remains a highly charged issue, although American society is relatively forgiving of policies whose major impact lies abroad and that exhibit the bravery of U.S. soldiers.
Such moral debates are unavoidable and important, but morality is hardly the only issue surrounding empire. Empires have existed since the organization of states in the river valleys of Africa and Asia. What characterizes them? How do they function? When do they arise? How and why do they collapse? The scientific study of empires has become a major inquiry. Burbank and Cooper's and Parsons' books are efforts to cover empires systematically; Immerman's is a more focused critique of the United States' imperial career. None is an apologia for the United States.
MANAGING DIFFERENCE
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