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Empires: A Problem of Comparative History : Susan Reynolds
Empires: A Problem of Comparative History : Susan Reynolds
Empires:
Article
aResearch
problem
ofLtd
comparative
history
Blackwell
Oxford,
Historical
HISR
0950-3471
XXX
Institute
UK
Publishing
of
Historical
Research 2006
Abstract
Most historians of empires probably start by assuming that what they are interested
in are relatively large polities that consist of a ruling part (the metropolis) and
other parts (colonies or peripheries) that it dominates as a result of military
conquest or political or economic bullying, and that are retained and governed
separately from the metropolis rather than being directly absorbed in it. Not all
the polities called empires over the centuries, however, have had all these
characteristics. Surveying some of the variations in characteristics may help in
deciding what it may be most profitable to compare with what.
152
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prototype empire, the great result of great conquests, with supreme, even
virtually universal, authority. Much as I have learned from sketchy reading
about non-European and modern empires, I still think that looking at the
way earlier Europeans referred to empires and took their words and ideas
about them to the rest of the world explains some of the anomalies of
modern usage and the varying phenomena included in the whole category.
That, of course, is what a medievalist who has rashly undertaken to talk
about empires in general would say.
Romans used the word imperium for all kinds of authority and power
from that of heads of households up. When they used it for what we call
the Roman empire they apparently only occasionally gave it a territorial
connotation, as when they said that Palmyra lay between the summa
imperia of Romans and Parthians. The word imperator also started with
wider uses before it came to be used as the title of the emperor.4 After
the collapse of the western half of the empire, while a Roman emperor
still, of course, continued to rule in Byzantium, rulers in the west could
also be called emperors if they had or claimed authority over other kings
and kingdoms, that is, over polities that would have normally been
thought of as independent.5 Kings who claimed some kind of authority,
for instance over other kings within Britain in the early middle ages and
within Spain for longer, could be said to have imperium or to be called
imperatores. But much more formally and importantly the title belonged to
Charlemagne and his successors whose coronation in Rome symbolized
their claim to revive its ancient glories and, after them, to German kings
who were similarly crowned there as emperors. It is sometimes said that
the title was an empty one, but both Carolingian and, until at least the
end of the twelfth century, German emperors were the most powerful
rulers of Europe. Since they ruled multiple kingdoms, with their power
base in the kingdom of Germany, the rest of their dominions could rank
in our terms as peripheries or colonies, with Germany as the metropolis.
Their empire could therefore, for what it is worth, come within the
modern category, allowing perhaps for a shifting kind of inner metropolis
in whatever part of the kingdom of Germany the current emperor had
his particular base. In the twelfth century a foreigner could refer to the
emperor as emperor of Germany, but it was not until imperial authority
had become restricted to Germany, and within Germany, in the later
4
Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare (Oxford, 1982), pp. 842 4; P. A. Brunt, Laus
imperii, in Garnsey and Whittaker, pp. 159 91.
5
D. Bullough, Emperors and emperordom from late antiquity to 799, Early Medieval Europe,
xii (2003), 377 87; R. Folz, Lide dempire en occident du ve au xive sicle (Paris, 1953), pp. 66
81, 11423; J. L. Nelson, Kingship and empire, in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political
Thought c.350 c.1450, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 21151; and J. L. Nelson,
Kingship and empire in the Carolingian world, in Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation,
ed. R. McKitterick (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 5287.
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middle ages that the empire came to be officially called the Holy Roman
Empire of the German Nation.6
It is not only wrong to suppose that the medieval western empire, far
from being an empire in our sense, was just an insubstantial dream; it is
also wrong to suppose that it was generally thought to have authority over
all the kingdoms of Catholic Europe. It is true that universal authority
was sometimes claimed on its behalf, but these claims, like those about the
ancient Roman empire that they copied, were rhetorical or polemical. 7
Most often they were made by lawyers engaged in disputes between
emperor and pope that solipsistically ignored not only Byzantium and
non-Christian lands known to western Christendom, but all the kingdoms
within western Christendom that were not involved in the particular
controversy. An anecdote about twelfth-century diplomacy may warn
those who meet excessive claims about empires in other periods or
societies with less good records neither to accept them nor to discount
them too easily.
In 1157 King Henry II of England sent a letter to the emperor
Frederick I in which he said that his kingdom was under Fredericks
authority and that all within it would be ordered at the emperors nod
and command. He also said that he was sending Frederick rich presents,
which one could perhaps interpret as tribute to a superior. But, as Karl
Leyser pointed out nearly thirty years ago, historians who have used the
letter to show that other kings accepted the empires claims to authority
over them have ignored its ending. The letter ended with a brief remark
that Henrys ambassadors would give by word of mouth his reply to what
Frederick had said (in a now lost letter) about the hand of St. James. This
needs explanation. Henrys mother had been the daughter of Henry I of
England, and before marrying Henry IIs father, had married an earlier
emperor and king of Germany, also confusingly called Henry. They had
no children, and when he died in 1125 she came home to her father,
bringing a good deal of loot from the imperial treasure, including at least
two crowns and the hand of St. James. The hand had been a precious
relic in the imperial chapel and, by the time Frederick was asking Henry
II to return it, enjoyed the same status in Reading abbey. Henry II gave
his ambassadors the unpleasant task of saying No, Frederick could not
have his hand back. It remained at Reading.8 Flattering the emperor with
6
William fitz Stephen, Vita . . . sancti Thomasii, in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket,
ed. J. C. Robertson (7 vols., 187585), iii. 99101; cf. John of Salisbury, Letters, ed. W. J. Millor
and others (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1955 79) (hereafter John of Salisbury), i. 202 6; L. Scales, Late
medieval Germany: an under-Stated nation?, in Power and the Nation in European History, ed.
L. Scales and O. Zimmer (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 166 91.
7
L. E. Scales, France and the empire: the view of Alexander of Roes, French History, ix
(1995), 394 416 (and references in n. 80).
8
K. Leyser Frederick Barbarossa, Henry II and the hand of St. James, Eng. Hist. Rev., xc (1975),
481506 (repr. in K. Leyser, Medieval Germany and its Neighbours, 900 1250 (1982), pp. 21540).
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professions of humble obedience was good cover for denying his request.
The episode does not demonstrate either the overweening pretensions of
the medieval empire or their emptiness. Frederick I was a powerful ruler,
even if his military campaigns, like those of other powerful rulers (even
today), did not always go according to plan. He presumably thought the
recovery of St. Jamess hand worth the exertion of diplomatic pressure on
the king whose mother had taken it from Germany. What the story
illustrates is the importance of applying a modicum of scepticism to the
language of international relations.
That is not to say that diplomatic language or rhetoric is not historically
significant. It clearly is. Henrys letter was kept and used by Fredericks
spin-doctors as evidence of his greatness and that of his empire. The claim
to universal or quasi-universal rule mattered, but on a rhetorical level,
like, I suggest, similar claims about other empires. Rulers who spent as
much time and trouble on defending or advancing their borders as did,
for instance, those of ancient Rome, Byzantium or China, were clearly
aware on a practical level that they did not really rule the world in the
way that some of their flatterers suggested.9 Calling ones country the
Middle Kingdom, for example, shows that while, like most people, one
thinks that one is the centre of the world one also knows that there are
other kingdoms outside. How different is the rhetoric of universalism
from that of talking about an empire on which the sun never sets?
In the later middle ages, although other western kings did not, I think,
call themselves emperors, their kingdoms were sometimes called empires.
Henry VIII of England is sometimes said to have made new and
revolutionary claims by calling England an empire, but the idea, with its
implication of absolute independence, was not a new one in England and
had long been a commonplace in other kingdoms where Roman law was
more studied.10 The word imperium and its vernacular equivalents were
used by western Europeans, to judge from a casual and superficial survey,
9
F. Millar, Emperors, frontiers and foreign relations 31 B.C. to A.D. 378, Britannia, xiii
(1982), 123; C. R. Whittaker, Frontiers of the Roman Empire: a Social and Economic Study
(Baltimore, Md., 1997); D. Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe 500 1453
(1971), pp. 10821, 159 62, 200 21; J. Gernet, Comment se prsente en Chine le concept
dempire, in Le concept dempire, ed. M. Duverger (Paris, 1980), pp. 397 414; N. Standen,
Frontiers of 10th-century north China, in Frontiers in Question: Eurasian Borderlands, 700 1700,
ed. D. Power and N. Standen (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 55 79; M. Rossabi, Introduction, in
China among Equals: the Middle Kingdom and its Neighbours, 10th14th Centuries, ed. M. Rossabi
(Berkeley, Calif., 1983), pp. 113.
10
John of Salisbury, ii. 580; Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (Oxford, 1975),
i. 1249; A. A. M. Duncan, The Kingship of the Scots, 8421292: Succession and Independence
(Edinburgh, 2002), pp. 115, 260, 270 1; F. Calasso, I glossatori e la teoria della sovranit (3rd edn.,
Milan, 1957), pp. 22 40; Folz, pp. 11423; P. Munz, Frederick Barbarossa: a Study in Medieval
Politics (1969), p. 233; W. Ullmann, The development of the medieval idea of sovereignty,
Eng. Hist. Rev., lxiv (1949), 133; J. R. Strayer, Les gens de justice du Languedoc sous Philippe le
Bel (Toulouse, 1970), p. 44 n.; M. J. Rodriguez-Salgado, Christians, civilized and Spanish:
multiple identities in 16th-century Spain, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., 6th ser., viii (1998), 23353.
156
primarily for the Roman empire and the German empire, but sometimes
for any large or important and independent polity. The sense of territories
conquered overseas occurs occasionally in Spanish and English from the
seventeenth century, but did not apparently become common until latish
in the eighteenth.11 Meanwhile the title of emperor remained above all a
mark of status. An emperor did not necessarily have authority over kings
but he ranked above them.
As Europeans came into contact with more peoples elsewhere they
used either what they could make of the words, like khan or sultan, that
those people used for their rulers or such of their own words as seemed
suitable. While Marco Polo seems to have thought generally in terms of
kings and kingdoms and called the great khan the king of kings rather
than emperor, the thirteenth-century missionaries called him emperor.
Other rulers whom they met they called kings or used some version of
those rulers own titles.12 Later on emperor and empire came to be used
generally for any Asian rulers who seemed so rich and powerful and
maybe, above all, so dangerous that they deserved the grander title. 13
How the ruler of Japan came to be called an emperor is puzzling, at least
to me. In the seventeenth century European traders there gave the title
to the shogun and saw the other dignitary, whom the Japanese called the
tenno, as a sort of pope. In the nineteenth century they began to call him
the mikado. When the shogun was ousted at the Meiji restoration of
1868, they transferred the title of emperor to the mikado.14 Yet Japan
surely fitted none of the usual notions of an empire until the very late
nineteenth century.
In the eighteenth century, although European diplomats and politicians,
to judge from what one of them wrote, thought that a pompous style
11
Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edn., 20 vols., Oxford, 1989), v. 187 8; A. O. Meyer, Der
britische Kaisertitel zur Zeit der Stuarts, Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und
Bibliotheken, x (1907), 231 7; Dictionnaire historique de la langue franaise, ed. A. Rey (2 vols.,
Paris, 1993), i. 682; Le Grand Robert de la langue franaise (6 vols., Paris, 2001), ii. 20545;
J. Fisch, Imperialismus III, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. O. Brunner and others (8 vols.,
Stuttgart, 197292), iii. 1735; Diccionario de la lengua castellana (9 vols., Madrid, 1726 39), iv.
224 (facsimile repr. as Diccionario de autoridades (3 vols., Madrid, 1984)); J. H. Elliott, Spain and
its World 1500 1700 (New Haven, Conn., 1989), pp. 7 91; J. Lynch, Spain 1516 98: from Nation
State to World Empire (Oxford, 1991), pp. 95 6.
12
Marco Polo, Voyages (Paris, Socit de Gographie, Recueils de Voyages, i, 1824), e.g.,
pp. 301, 304, 312, 347, 466; Sinica Franciscana: Itinera et Relationes Fratrum Minorum saeculi XIII
et XIV, ed. A. van den Wyngaert (7 vols., Florence, 1929), i. 29 30, 137 142, 188, 201;
Matthaei Parisiensis, Chronica Majora, ed. H. R. Luard (7 vols., Rolls ser., 1872 84), iii. 488 9.
13
K.-H. Ruffmann, England und der russische Zaren- und Kaisertitel, Jahrbcher fr
Geschichte Osteuropas, new ser., iii (1955), 217 24.
14
History of Japan compiled from the Records of the East India Company, comp. P. Pratt (2 vols.,
New York, 1972), i. 24, 32, 38, 350, 85; J. W. Hall, Japan from Prehistory to Modern Times (New
York, 1970), pp. 247, 302 7; H. Bolitho, Japanese kingship, in Patterns of Kingship and
Authority in Traditional Asia, ed. I. Mabbett (1985), pp. 2443, although M. Satows work
(referred to there, n. 45) does not seem to support Bolithos exact dates.
Institute of Historical Research 2006.
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and emperor mean.18 But it is hard to be sure that we do when both have
long been used in ways that make the boundaries of the categories they
imply so difficult to draw. Some use the Latin word imperium as if it
represented a more exact concept than empire, but it is not clear that it
does or why it should.19 As I hope I have shown, it has had many
different meanings. Others avoid the word empire altogether. Quite apart
from the conquest of the U.S.A. itself from sea to shining sea, which
would fit some criteria of empire, the American acquisition and rule of
the Philippines, for example, and of Hawaii and Alaska until they were
made states of the union, suggest that the U.S.A. had something that
should rank as an empire long before it became fashionable to talk about
one.
My argument is not that historians of empires need a tighter definition
of the word, let alone one that would exclude some of the polities
traditionally called empires that seem not to fit the current models. What
I suggest if it is not impertinent for someone who does not herself do
any kind of imperial history to make any suggestion is that looking
directly at the variety, not to say confusion, of words and concepts that
we have inherited may make it easier to lay both words and concepts
aside for the moment and concentrate on deciding what seem to be the
most important characteristics of the phenomena with which I think that
historians of empires, particularly more modern empires, are concerned.
If some empires seem to lack certain of those characteristics that is not a
reason for saying they are not empires, but it may help in deciding what
it is most profitable to compare with what. Irrespective of the definition
that anyone uses or implies it is surely necessary when one is making
comparisons to identify the characteristics that one wants to compare.
If one starts by thinking of what we are interested in as, by and large,
relatively large polities that consist of a ruling part (the metropolis) and
other parts (colonies or peripheries) that it dominates as a result of military
conquest or some kind of political or economic bullying, and that are
retained and governed separately from the metropolis rather than being
absorbed in it, then one has to note that not all the polities that look
likely cases seem to have all these characteristics. Size, to start with, has
to be relative, depending on the technology of communications and the
nature of economies: polities comprising areas that support only thinly
scattered populations look more impressive empires on a map than those
that cover smaller but more densely settled and intensively exploited
18
E.g., J. F. Fletcher, Studies on Chinese and Islamic Inner Asia (1995), ch. 7 (Turco-Mongolian
monarchic tradition in the Ottoman empire); G. Rachewilz, Qan, Qaan and the seal of
Gyg, in Documenta Barbarorum: Festschrift fr Walther Heissig, ed. K. Sagaster and M. Weiers
(Wiesbaden, 1983), pp. 272 81; I do not find clear the distinction between state and empire
in T. J. Barfield, Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 527.
19
E.g., Barfield, p. 229; B. Porter, The Lions Share: a Short History of British Imperialism, 1850
2004 (4th edn., 2004), p. 8.
Institute of Historical Research 2006.
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rather the same way, but there some of the constituent kingdoms kept
their separate identities and some of their institutions for centuries, while
being effectively governed from Castile. Peninsular Spain might thus itself
count as an empire quite apart from its overseas dominions.25 But China
did not apparently develop like that. Different dynasties during the long
centuries of what is called the Chinese empire had different centres of
power, so that, although historians refer to metropolitan areas around
successive capitals that were differently governed from other provinces, it
is difficult (as in what became known as the Holy Roman Empire) to
identify a single and permanent metropolis in the sense that the word is
used by theorists of empires. China certainly had an outer periphery in
central Asia, where its rulers intermittently controlled, or tried to control,
areas beyond what they ruled more regularly, but a consistent distinction
between metropolis and peripheries within China is hard to find.26 Russias
conquests qualified it by size even if the date when it began to count as
an empire is a matter of opinion, but again the metropolis/colony division
is unclear. On the other hand, different as Russias nineteenth-century
land-based empire may look from the overseas colonies of other European
powers of the time, it is less exceptional if one takes a longer view. 27
Leaving aside cases of the absorption of neighbouring areas into the
kingdoms of medieval England or France, or into the U.S.A., the
distinction between metropolis and colonies also does not seem to fit, for
instance, all stages of the early Islamic empire or the Ottoman empire. I
do not, incidentally, take seriously the claim that in the last years of
French rule Algeria was part of metropolitan France.28
Variations in size, in methods of acquisition and in methods of
government clearly offer scope for comparisons that raise questions about
individual cases and the categories into which we put them. I propose to
look briefly at methods of government, which, I suggest, need to be seen
in the context of the norms and assumptions of those who made
conquests or acquisitions. Empires have been acquired not only by
monarchies but by what are called republics or even democracies
although it is surely slightly misleading to go on calling Athens a
democracy, given any of the senses that the word has in current English.
Leaving that aside, there is the fairly obvious point that, however
metropolitan states rule their colonies, they do not themselves need to be
25
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162
In Asia it was easier to ignore existing laws and rights of property if one
classed a society as an oriental despotism. Societies in north America, on
the other hand, could be seen as in a state of nature, with no property
rights at all. In practice a good many conquests (how many?) started with
mere tribute-taking and sometimes used existing systems and officials,
even those of rulers condemned as despots. However strange other aspects
of a newly conquered society may be, conquerors seem to find out about
their taxes quite easily. But, easy as it may be to take tribute once or
twice, one tribute does not make an empire. Getting payments and dues
regularly, and in amounts to satisfy growing demands, may then lead to
rebellion, fiercer enforcement and more formal and oppressive government.
How does this affect the metropolitan government itself and its norms?
Although oppression can be just as fierce in states without empires, I
wonder how much and in which empires repression abroad has affected
ideas about the rights of subjects or citizens at home. Whether they are
called subjects or citizens is, incidentally, I suggest, more a matter of
words than of substantive rights, although the different words may suggest
new ideas to those concerned. How much does empire lead either rulers
or their metropolitan subjects to think new thoughts about rights and law
in general and in their own country?
Comparison suggests that variations in the ways empires have been
ruled are endless and raises a lot of questions about possible reasons for the
variations. It may seem obvious that empires should have been nurseries
of bureaucracy, needing tax-lists and systems of written communication
between centre and periphery, if no more. Leaving aside the more fleeting
nomadic empires, the tendency seems to have been fairly general. China,
of course, although in some other ways non-imperial, was famously
bureaucratic, while the way that the Roman empire, although it started
with a very limited bureaucracy and delegation of a good deal of everyday
government to local elites, became more bureaucratic with time, may
illustrate the connection well enough.30 On the other hand, while empires
may tend to need bureaucracy, bureaucracy does not need empires. In
post-Roman western Europe it developed most notably in Italian citystates, the small kingdom of England and the papacy, which ruled neither
a state nor an empire.
Even the most centralized and bureaucratic governments, moreover,
whether of empires or any but the very smallest states, need to delegate
authority. They needed to do so especially when lines of communication
were long and travel was slow. Indirect rule through trading companies
was one way of managing far-flung empires; giving local governors some
freedom in making decisions was another; while co-opting existing local
elites and leaving local government to them might produce a system of
30
Garnsey and Saller, pp. 20 40; C. M. Kelly, Later Roman bureaucracy, in Literacy and
Power in the Ancient World, ed. A. K. Bowman and G. Woolf (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 161 76.
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greatness,33 like a good many other less lapidary judgments on the Roman
empire, looks even less convincing when one compares it with nonEuropean empires. Nor can I go into the meaning of imperialism or the grey
area of quasi-empires whether labelled as hegemonic, invisible, informal,
soft power, or simply put into quotation marks as empires. Some of the
labels are helpful in reminding us that degrees of effective control correlate
poorly with formal connections, but some of them have been chosen for
particular cases in a way that impedes comparison. Seeing British commercial
activity in south America in terms of informal empire was illuminating about
nineteenth-century British history and the growth of the British empire
but perhaps looks less easy to interpret in terms of empire in general
when United States involvement alongside is brought into the picture. 34
Anyone who works on any of the empires that I have mentioned in this
rush through time and space will realize how little I know about their
own field. I hope that my mistakes and misunderstandings will not enable
them to discount entirely my plea for more comparisons. The subject
cries out for more of them, including, I submit, comparisons between
periods, which some historians do not approve of although disapproval
does not always inhibit carefree allusions to the Roman or Chinese
empires. Even for those who are only interested in one case or one
period, comparison with others may surely be illuminating in raising
questions about assumptions and chains of cause and effect. The real
argument against comparison is that it is such hard work, especially when
it goes over different periods and demands a range of different skills, and
especially if it involves more than looking outside ones own field to pick
something out of its context elsewhere because it looks like something in
ones own. Even at the most superficial level there is another
impediment. Historians working in different periods and in different
national traditions of historiography, even if they do not have conscious
ideological differences, tend to work from different presuppositions and
within different paradigms. They therefore focus on different subjects and
use different terminologies (or the same terminology in different senses),
so that it can be hard, especially if one cannot read their sources, to be
sure that one is comparing like with like. I have found this when
comparing just a few aspects of a few kingdoms in medieval Europe.
Empires, however defined, pose much greater problems, even if one
ducks (as I have) the question of whether they were or are a Good Thing
or a Bad Thing. But grappling with these problems is a matter for the
historians of empires, not for a single lecture by a non-imperial historian.
33
E. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. D. Womersley (5 vols., 1994), ii. 509
(ch. 38, General observations).
34
J. Gallagher and R. Robinson, The imperialism of free trade, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser.,
vi (1953), 115; C. M. Dobbs, The Monroe Doctrine, in The Dictionary of American History,
ed. S. I. Kutler (3rd edn., 10 vols., New York, 2003), v. 446 7.