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 Legacies of Empire

The nation state is a fairly recent historical phenomenon. Human history

over the past two to four millennia has been dominated by empires, and the
legacies of these empires continue to shape the contemporary world in
ways that are not always recognized or fully understood.

Much research and writing about European colonial empires has focused
on relationships between them and their colonies. This book examines
the phenomenon of empire from a different perspective. It explores the
imprint that imperial institutions, organizational principles, practices
and logics have left on the modern world. It shows that many features of
the contemporary world – modern armies, multiculturalism, globalized
finance, modern city states, the United Nations – have been profoundly
shaped by past empires. It also applies insights about the impact of past
empires to contemporary politics and considers the long-term institutional
legacies of the ‘American empire’.

sandra halperin is Professor of International Relations and

Co-director of the Centre for Global and Transnational Politics in the
Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway,
University of London. She is the author of three cross-regional and trans-
historical comparative studies: In the Mirror of the Third World: Capitalist
Development in Modern Europe (1997), War and Social Change
in Modern Europe: The Great Transformation Revisited (2004) and
Re-Envisioning Global Development: A ‘Horizontal’ Perspective (2013).
She is also the author of articles on globalization, development theory,
historical sociology, nationalism, ethnic conflict, Islam and democracy in
the Middle East.

ronen palan is Professor of International Political Economy at City

University London. He has published many articles and books on the
subject of the offshore economy and theories of international political
economy.
Legacies of Empire
Imperial Roots of the Contemporary
Global Order

Edited by
sandra halperin
and
ronen palan
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107521612
© Cambridge University Press 2015
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2015
Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-107-10946-9 Hardback
ISBN 978-1-107-52161-2 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Contents

List of figures page vii

List of tables viii
List of contributors ix
Acknowledgments x
1 Introduction: legacies of empire 1
s a n dr a h a l p e r i n a n d r o n e n p a l a n

Part I Incomplete transitions from empires to nation

states 25
2 Political military legacies of empire in world politics 27
t a r ak b a rk a w i
3 The second British Empire and the re-emergence
of global finance 46
ro n e n p a l a n
4 Imperial city states, national states and post-national
spatialities 69
s a n dr a h a l p e r i n

Part II Legacies of non-European empires in today’s

world 97
5 The legacy of Eurasian nomadic empires: remnants
of the Mongol imperial tradition 99
i v er b . ne u m a nn a n d e i n a r w i g en
6 The modern roots of feudal empires: the donatary
captaincies and the legacies of the Portuguese Empire
in Brazil 128
be n j a m i n d e c a r va l h o

v
vi Contents

7 Imperial legacies in the UN Development Programme and

the UN development system 149
c ra i g n . m u rp h y

Part III The future legacies of the American Empire 171

8 Foreign bases, sovereignty and nation building after
empire: the United States in comparative perspective 173
alexander cooley
9 Empire, capital and a legacy of endogenous
multiculturalism 197
herman mark schwartz
10 The assemblage of American imperium: hybrid power,
world war and world government(ality) in the twenty-first
century 221
r o n n i e d . l i p s c h u tz

11 Conclusions 243
sandra halperin and ronen palan
Index 250
Figures

4.1 Changes in the nature of space: I page 71

4.2 Changes in the nature of space: II 71
9.1 Largest ethnic group by county, 2000 Census 214

vii
Tables

3.1 Top 20 international financial centres, 2010 page 50

3.2 Aggregative list of top international financial
centres, 2010 51
4.1 Regional inequality in Europe before 1945 84
5.1 Ideal-typical traits of European and Eurasian empires
compared 108

viii
Contributors

Tarak Barkawi is Reader in International Relations in the Department

of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political
Science.
Alexander Cooley is Tow Professor of Political Science in the
Department of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia
University.
Benjamin de Carvalho is a senior research fellow at the Norwegian
Institute of International Affairs.
Sandra Halperin is Professor of International Relations in the
Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway,
University of London.
Ronnie D. Lipschutz is Professor of Politics in the Department of
Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Craig N. Murphy is Professor of Global Governance at the
McCormack School of Policy and Global Studies, University of
Massachusetts, Boston.
Iver B. Neumann is Montague Burton Professor of International
Relations in the Department of International Relations, London
School of Economics and Politics, and an Associate of the Norwegian
Institute of International Affairs.
Ronen Palan is Professor of International Political Economy in the
Department of International Politics, City University of London.
Herman Mark Schwartz is Professor of Politics in the Department of
Politics, University of Virginia.
Einar Wigen is Lecturer in Turkish History in the Department of
Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo.

ix
Acknowledgments

This volume is a product of a collaborative research project sponsored

by the Leverhulme Foundation, the International Studies Association
and the British Academy.
The origins of the project are the result of a Leverhulme Foundation
Research Grant Project entitled Global Development: The Role of
Trans-National Elites in Afro-Eurasia. This project involved research
by Sandra Halperin and two colleagues (Yasmin Khan and Stephanie
Ortmann) on the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and
Russia and Central Asia. Its aim was to make visible a horizontal or
transnational set of connections, relations and processes that much
historiography and social science tends to obscure. We pursued this
aim by studying transitions from empire to independent states in the
post-Ottoman Middle East (MENA), post-colonial India and post-
Soviet Russia and Central Asia, and explored through comparative-
historical study how these moments were shaped by, and worked to
extend and reproduce, trans-national networks. Our hypothesis was
that if these networks survived the transitions from empire to ‘national
independence’ in MENA, South Asia and Russia and Central Asia, we
should find evidence that trans-local/cross-regional networks played a
larger role and exerted much more cultural and economic influence in
these transitions than traditional periodization and nationalist
narratives usually convey. Our plan of work involved much
discussion and comparison of our individual findings and the
securing of additional funds to support workshops and other
activities that would enable us to present our findings and receive
feedback from a broader community of scholars.
This is where Ronen Palan entered the picture, bringing with him
the notion of ‘legacies of empire’ to characterize a salient dimension of
our work. The term had resonance and, with it, we succeeded in
piquing the curiosity of a group of scholars from the UK, Europe

x
Acknowledgments xi

and the USA who were intrigued by the notion that the sorts of things
they have been exploring within their own areas of expertise might
better be understood as linked to the institutional inheritances and
impacts of empires. We were also able to secure grants to support two
workshops. The first was a Workshop Grant from the International
Studies Association that enabled us to hold a day-long workshop,
entitled Legacies of Empire, at the International Studies Association
53rd Annual Convention, 1–4 April, 2012, in San Diego, California.
The second was a British Academy Small Grants Scheme award that
enabled us to follow up with a second workshop in June 2012 at Royal
Holloway University of London’s central London base in Bedford
Square. We wish to thank all the participants who attended these
workshops: Tarak Barkawi, Alexander Cooley, Marcus Daeschel,
Yasmin Khan, Ronnie Lipschutz, Craig Murphy, Iver Neumann,
Stefanie Ortmann, Herman Schwartz and Einar Wigen. Though not
all were able to contribute their papers to this volume, all participated
in the discussions that inspired it, to many of the ideas included in its
introduction and conclusions and to the overall conception, which we
hope will be the basis for an ongoing programme of research.
We would like to acknowledge that Chapter 7 is based on material
previously published in pages 37–40 of Murphy, Craig, Evolution of the
UN development system, in Browne, Stephen and Weiss, Thomas G.,
Eds. Post-2015 UN Development: Making Change Happen. London:
Routledge, pp. 35–54 and would like to thank Routledge for granting us
permission to use this material.
We would like to thank our two anonymous referees, whose
insightful comments proved extremely useful in developing this
book. Last but not least, we would like to thank John Haslam and
the production team at Cambridge University Press for all their help
and support in bringing this volume to publication.
1 Introduction
Legacies of empire
sandra halperin and ronen palan

‘Empires and civilizations come and go’, or so it is generally assumed.

But what actually happens when imperial powers decline? Do the
institutions and logics of empire entirely disappear? A great deal of
historical and archaeological evidence suggests that they do not, that
they leave their mark on international structures and processes and on
the institutions, cultures, politics and legal systems of the peoples who
inhabit the territories of their former cores and peripheries. But if
empires never entirely disappear, why does it matter? What implica-
tions are there for how we understand the contemporary, supposedly
‘post-imperial’, system of national states?
Much has been written about the European colonial empires, largely
focusing on relations between imperial powers and their colonies, and
the impact of these relations on both. This book examines the phenom-
enon of empire from a somewhat different perspective. It explores the
imprint that empires – their institutions, organisational principles and
logics – have left on the modern world. Students of international
relations are accustomed to thinking of the contemporary world as
post-imperial, as divided among discrete political entities founded on
national communities, each jealously guarding its sovereignty and
power against the dangers of an anarchic world; facing each other, in
Thomas Hobbes’ colourful metaphor, ‘in the state and posture of
gladiators . . . their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one
another’ (Hobbes 1951: 79). Yet, the reality is very different. While
the contemporary world is conventionally seen as characterized by
national states and, as some of the globalist literature suggests, increas-
ingly post-national, it is our conviction that there is much to be gained
by viewing the contemporary world through the lens of empire.
It is often assumed, wrongly, that empire is a form of political
organization that existed in the past and that was eventually super-
seded or displaced by national states. Empire has not only been the

1
2 Halperin and Palan

norm throughout most of the past five or six millennia – but as recent
discussions of the USA, the Soviet Union and even the European Union
(Zielonka 2006) and rising powers such as China or India suggest –
imperial power and politics also remain very much a part of the con-
temporary landscape. In many important respects world history is
imperial history. Robert Gilpin says that ‘[t]he nature of international
relations has not changed over the millennia . . . One must suspect that
if somehow Thucydides were placed in our midst, he would . . . have
little trouble in understanding the power struggle of our age’ (1981:
211). Yet the world with which Thucydides was familiar was a world of
empires, not of nation states.
Why, then, do we call the field of study concerned with cross-border
relationships ‘inter-national’ relations? The concept of international
relations reflects a certain perspective on the world that emerged at a
specific time and within a specific social context. It made its appearance
during the French Revolution and has been associated ever since with
the theories and debates that accompanied the rise of European nation-
alism (Fédou 1971; Mairet 1997). The term implies that international
politics are concerned with relationships among organic social group-
ings that are genuine political ‘actors’ in their own right. It was during
the time of the French Revolution and its aftermath that a young
philosopher destined for greatness declared: ‘[t]he universal which
manifests itself in the State and is known in it – the form under which
everything that is, is subsumed – is that which constitutes the culture of
a nation’ (Hegel 1975: 53). And those nations that failed to constitute
themselves as states, he warned his fellow ‘Germans’ (most of whom
did not know they were Germans), would fall by history’s wayside.
Certainly the nationalist project promoted by the Fronde movement
in France and by early nationalists such as Hegel or Fichte proved
tremendously successful. Yet, as Daniel Chernilo points out, the nation
state is at best ‘an unfinished project that paradoxically presents itself
as an already established form of socio-political organization’ (2006:
16). It appears to us that the notion of an international system or
society of states, or of a ‘world capitalist system’ politically divided
into nation states, glosses over the mosaic of practices, institutions, and
social structures that remain as legacies of past empires and civiliza-
tions. It might be argued, in fact, that we can only really understand the
national project by considering it in the light of the diverse institutional
habitat in which it has flourished.
Introduction 3

In this book we explore how our understanding of the ‘international

system’ changes when we trace the extent to which the cultural, poli-
tical, military and economic legacies of empires remain embedded in,
and constitutive of, contemporary political life. Our concern, therefore,
is with continuities, with the durability and persistence of imperial
organization and logics, and with the military, political and socio-
economic continuities and pathways that remain during the times and
in the places that are characterized as ‘post-imperial’. What we are
concerned to explore is whether seeing the current order as, in some
part, constituted by legacies of empire illuminates dimensions and
dynamics of the contemporary world that are obscured by national
historiography and perspectives.
In exploring the world through the analytic lens of imperial legacies
our intention is not simply to substitute ‘empire’ for ‘state’ as the
central focus of inquiry in the study of international relations, but to
pose intrinsic conceptual and empirical problems for the whole of the
nationalist theoretical edifice. By bringing into clearer focus striated
spaces, historical nuance and a world in which legacies of the past are
pragmatically reconfigured and rebranded, the imperial lens challenges
the tendency of International Relations perspectives to treat political
units as homogeneous and human action and thought as universal and
unhistorical.
This book shows that empires have left their imprint on the contem-
porary world in a variety of ways that we often fail to appreciate. Its
aim is to enrich our understanding of the historical origins of the
complex mosaic of institutions, practices, habits of thought and orga-
nization that make up the modern world; to develop a more subtle and
nuanced understanding of the complex ecology of the international
system, and an appreciation of the richly diverse elements that make it
up. We hope that exploring the multiple dimensions of empires past
will also enable us to gain insight into how the current American
imperium will shape the future world.

The study of empire and its impacts

Empire is the focus of widespread public interest and academic debate.
Interest in empire has been linked to questions concerning the concep-
tualization of contemporary structures and processes and the origins
and nature of globalization. However, the lion’s share of research and
4 Halperin and Palan

writing on the subject has focused on the legacies of empire in former

imperial states and colonies and the lessons that past empires might
hold for the USA.
Legacies are elements of the present that are shaped by the past. The
legacies of European empires and imperial expansion include contem-
porary conflicts (e.g. in Palestine, Iraq, Kashmir, Burma, Sudan and
Nigeria), patterns of migration, art, legal systems and patterns and
conditions of nation- and state-building. There is a large literature
focusing on the persistence of British imperial legacies, both in Britain
itself as, for instance, with respect to post-imperial citizenship and
national identities in the United Kingdom (e.g. Goulbourne 2009),
and in successor states and former colonies (e.g. Kwarteng 2011;
Midgeley and Piachaud 2011; Centeno and Enriquez 2010; Darwin
2009; Moore and Thomas 2007; Reynolds 2006; Calhoun, Cooper
and Moore 2006).
Broader and more pervasive impacts of European empire are the
focus of a body of research and writing called Dependency Theory.
Andre Gunder Frank articulated its main tenet: that colonialism cre-
ated fundamental and interrelated structural distortions in the econo-
mies of Third World countries and that these were continuing to thwart
development.1 A key structural distortion and difference between
‘Western’ and contemporary Third World development is the coexis-
tence of an advanced or modern sector with a backward or traditional
sector (Sunkel 1973; Cardoso and Falleto 1973; Amin 1976; Frank
1972; Dos Santos 1970). ‘Dependency’ describes a situation in which
development is oriented to a restricted, limited elite-oriented type of
market and society (Cardoso 1973), in which capital cannot find its
essential dynamic component (Cardoso and Falletto 1979). The
foreign-oriented ‘corporate’ sector encompasses all capital-intensive
enterprise, whether in industry or agriculture, as well as utilities, trans-
port and the civil service, but there is no investment beyond the enclave:

1
Dependency writings in the 1970s delineated a variety of alternative paths
possible for capitalist development in the periphery, including the ‘semi-
peripheral’, ’dependent’, ‘associated-dependent’ and ‘unequal’ paths. See, e.g.
Evans 1979; Wallerstein 1974; Amin 1976; Cardoso 1973; Cardoso and Faletto
1979. Cardoso and Falletto (1979) also delineated different forms of
dependency. The theorization of these various types of peripheral development
continued to undergo refinement in the 1980s and 1990s (see, e.g. Hettne 1990;
Kay 1989; Larrain 1989; Becker 1987).
Introduction 5

profits are either reinvested there or exported, and improvements in

technology do not diffuse outward to agriculture or to cottage industry.
Thus, the economy as a whole is characterized by a lack of internal
structural integration: the coexistence of an advanced or modern sector
with a backward or traditional sector, the concomitant coexistence of
pre-capitalist and capitalist relations of production, and dependency
on outside capital, labour and markets.
In the 1970s and 1980s two perspectives on the colonial experience
emerged: post-colonial theory and subaltern studies. Post-colonial the-
ory investigates how Western knowledge systems are related to the
exercise of Western power: how knowledge of colonized people has
served the interests of colonizers, and how ‘Western’ canonical tradi-
tions and universalisms, as well as the colonial relationship itself,
repress, exclude, marginalize and objectify the ‘other’.2 It focuses, in
particular, on the legacies of nineteenth-century British and French
colonial rule for its subject people as, for instance, the difficulties
faced by former colonial peoples in developing national identity. The
subaltern studies project emerged from within this general perspective
beginning in the 1980s.3 Its key concern was to recover history from
‘the bottom up’: to bring to light and assert the value of alternative
experiences and ways of knowing and, in this way, illuminate the
history, agency and autonomy of the common people. According to
the subaltern studies perspective, elite-centred colonialist (Liberal),
nationalist and Marxist narratives are incapable of representing the
history of the masses in the Third World. They are forms of Western
teleology, ideologies of modernity and progress, meta-narratives of

2
Edward Said’s book, Orientalism (1977) is considered by many to be the
founding work of post-colonial theory. Said argued that ‘the Orient’ was a
construct of ‘the West’ that shaped the real and imagined existences of those
subjected to the fantasy, and that, in turn, this ‘othering’ process used the Orient
to create, define and solidify the ‘West’. The result, as Said notes in Culture and
Imperialism (1993) is that, while former imperial powers may have physically left
the lands they had ruled for decades and centuries, they still dominate them
ideologically, culturally and intellectually.
3
The 1988 Selected Subaltern Studies reader edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri
Spivak, with a foreword by Edward Said, defined the theoretical and
methodological contributions of the project. The original subaltern studies
collective of scholars were South-Asian historians working primarily within a
Gramscian tradition. The term ‘subaltern’ is taken from the writings of Antonio
Gramsci (1881–1937), whose perspective on the political and cultural basis of
hegemony has had an important impact, in particular, on Marxist thinking.
6 Halperin and Palan

the advance of capitalism and the triumph of the nation state, that
reproduce knowledges and practices grounded in European history,
and that seek either to endorse or to universalize Europe’s historical
experience.4
While the literature on European empires tends to emphasize eco-
nomic and cultural impacts on successor states and former colonies, the
literature that focuses on contemporary empire tends to emphasize
International Relations perspectives and concerns and, in particular,
states and their strategic interactions. This is evident in the large
literature on empire and the Cold War, much of which focuses on the
‘neo-colonial’ policies of powerful countries as a key element of that
period.
The term ‘neo-colonialism’ was originally applied to European poli-
cies that were seen as schemes to maintain control of African and other
dependencies.5 Neo-colonialism came to be seen, more generally, as
involving a coordinated effort by former colonial powers and other
developed countries to block growth in developing countries and retain
them as sources of cheap raw materials and cheap labour. This effort
was seen as closely associated with the Cold War and, in particular,
with the US policy known as the Truman Doctrine. Under this policy,
the US government offered large amounts of money to any government
prepared to accept US protection from Communism. This enabled the
USA to extend its sphere of influence and, in some cases, to place
foreign governments under its control. The USA and other developed
countries have also ensured the subordination of developing countries
by interfering in conflicts and in other ways helping to install regimes
willing to act for the benefit of foreign companies and against their own
country’s interests.
However, neo-colonial governance is seen as generally operating
through indirect forms of control and, in particular, by means of the
economic, financial and trade policies of trans-national corporations

4
See, e.g. Gupta 1998; Prakash 1996; Chakrabarty 2000, 1992; and, for an
overview, Young 2001.
5
The event that marked the beginning of this usage was the European summit in
Paris in 1957, where six European heads of government agreed to include their
overseas territories within the European Common Market under trade
arrangements that were seen by some national leaders and groups as representing
a new form of economic domination over French-occupied Africa and the
colonial territories of Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Introduction 7

and global and multilateral institutions. It operates through the invest-

ments of multinational corporations that, while enriching a few in
underdeveloped countries, keep those countries as a whole in a situa-
tion of dependency and cultivate them as reservoirs of cheap labour
and raw materials. It operates also through international financial
institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the
World Bank, which make loans (as well as other forms of economic aid)
conditional on the recipient nations taking steps favourable to the
financial cartels represented by these institutions, but that are detri-
mental to their own economies. Thus, while many people see these
corporations and institutions as part of an essentially new global order
and a new form of global governance, the notion of neo-colonialism
directs our attention to what, in this system and constellation of power,
represents continuity between the present and recent past.
Much attention has been devoted to the nature and impact of
American empire since the end of the Cold War and to investigating
the politics behind US imperial ambitions, either in the form of interest
groups or in the geo-political dilemmas of the post-Cold War world
(e.g. Lutz 2009; Lazreg 2008; Hardt and Negri 2004; Lal 2004;
Ferguson 2004, 2000; Johnson 2004; Mann 2003; Chomsky 2003;
Harvey 2003; Bacevich 2003, 2002; Calhoun, Cooper and Moore
2005; Barber 2003; Todd 2003). Unlike a formal empire, in which
emperors have claimed absolute sovereignty, not only over their inha-
bitants, but also sometimes over the rest of the planet or even the
entire solar system, the USA is seen as pursuing practices associated
with what has been described as ‘informal empire’.6 Here, the empire
does not claim to be an empire, at all: the title is bestowed upon it by
its rivals or enemies. With the end of the Cold War, interest became
focused on the causes, processes and consequences of US imperial
decline. A resurgence of interest in this subject was prompted by Paul
Kennedy’sThe Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, published in 1987.
Kennedy argued that imperial great powers inevitably tend to extend
themselves beyond their means, and that the United States is follow-
ing the same pattern.

6
Comparative studies have endeavoured to distinguish between different types
of empires and imperial practice. See e.g. Parsons 2010; Steinmetz 2005;
Eisenstadt 1963.
8 Halperin and Palan

Empires and nation states

As we have seen, much of the literature that explores the impacts of
European empires on their successor states and former colonies is con-
cerned with understanding problems of national development and
national identity as legacies of former empires or imperial domination.
While this literature has brought to light many aspects of the imperial
enterprise that had previously been insufficiently understood and appre-
ciated, it also tends, by defining a sharp distinction between empire and
nation state, to obfuscate key dimensions of the contemporary political
order. Though it has been pre-eminently concerned to ‘liberate “history”
from the meta-narrative of the nation-state’ (Chakrabarty 1992: 19),
much of the scholarship associated with the subaltern studies project has
tended to assume and reinforce the nation as a concept and as a bound-
ary. This is also true of post-colonial studies. We would argue that
analyses of imperial legacies generally work within a national frame.
By assuming that empires have been entirely supplanted or displaced by
nation states, they obscure the extent to which imperial institutions and
practices shape supposedly post-imperial times and places.
Empires and nations are typically defined in opposition to each other
by reference to a number of analytic distinctions. In contrast to the
imaginary proto-socialist collectives depicted in ideologies of the nation
state, each pursuing a collective, ‘national interest’, empires are hierarch-
ical structures, and those who use the term ‘empire’ to describe contem-
porary political formations such as the USA, the Soviet Union or even the
European Union, emphasize the existence of hierarchy and the role of
power within them.
Unlike nation states, empires have a geographically, politically, eco-
nomically and culturally identifiable core and periphery, and, with one
or two important exceptions, the core consists of a large city in control
of a vast peripheral hinterland. In contrast to empires, the nation state
exists in a world of like units, each of which is considered formally
equal to the others (sovereign), and each of which is predominantly
concerned with security because of the absence of a central governing
authority within the overarching system. The security problems faced
by nation states are external. It is assumed that inside the boundaries of
properly run nation states things are reasonably stable; if there is a
problem, it is caused by external factors and agents. In contrast, the
histories of empires are about the great logistical, cultural, political and
Introduction 9

economic difficulties in sustaining the great imperial venture. Empires

decay or implode; their problems are as much internal as external.
Indeed, very often, external dangers are used to mobilize against the
more real and present ‘internal’ dangers.
However, if we view the world through the lens of empire, rather
than from within the national frame, a different story emerges, one that
is less narrow and one-dimensional, less national and uniform, and
more varied and complex, than the one that conventional international
relations scholarship often presents. From this angle of vision it is less
easy to distinguish the social, economic and institutional characteristics
of national and imperial states, and the world of nation states from that
of empires.
In Nations and Nationalism (1990), Eric Hobsbawm showed that,
between 1830 and 1878, when intellectuals and state personnel in
Europe were concerned with defining the principle of nationalism, the
theoretical discourse of those engaged in debate and discussion about
nations held that:
1. nations had to be of a sufficient size to be economically viable – thus,
the principle of nationality applied only to nationalities of a certain
size;
2. the process of building nations was inevitably a process of expansion –
national movements were expected to be movements of unification or
expansion; consequently
3. nation states would be nationally heterogeneous.
There were only three criteria that allowed a people, in practice, to be
firmly classed as a nation: the historic association with either an existing
state or one having a lengthy and recent past; the existence of a long-
established cultural elite; and a proven capacity for conquest. The history
of the Age of Nationalism in Europe is consistent with this discourse and
practice.
Although the term ‘imperialism’ came to be used exclusively to mean
the direct or indirect domination of overseas colonial territories by
modern industrial states,7 the process of building states in Europe
and empires abroad was essentially identical. Underlining the similarity

7
The original meaning of ‘imperialism’ referred to the personal sovereignty of a
powerful ruler over numerous territories, either in Europe or overseas. See
Koebner and Schmidt 1965.
10 Halperin and Palan

between this process and the colonial situation, a number of scholars

have referred to this dimension of the state-building process in Europe
as ‘internal colonialism’.8 Like colonialism, it involved reshaping the
social and economic institutions of the conquered areas to the needs of
the centre. A militarily powerful ‘core’ imposed physical control over
culturally distinct groups. These groups are discriminated against on
the basis of their language, religion or other cultural forms. Often, they
are treated as objects of exploitation, ‘as a natural resource to be
plundered’, and with the brutality that states treat conquered foreign
countries (Gouldner 1977–78: 41). The economy of the peripheral area
was forced into complementary development to the core and generally
relied on a single primary export. Juridical and political measures
similar to those applied in overseas colonies were imposed in order to
maintain the economic dependence of these areas. Members of the core
monopolized commerce, trade and credit while in the peripheral area
there was a relative lack of services and lower standard of living.
Movements to form ‘nation states’ in Europe during the nineteenth
century were thoroughly bound up with imperialism. In fact, their stated
aim was not to form ‘nation states’, but to resurrect or create empires.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Napoleon fused French national-
ism with the Roman imperial idea and, as the alleged heir of Charlemagne,
united France, Western Germany, Italy and the Low Countries in a new
empire. At the peak of its power (1810), France directly governed all
Germany left of the Rhine, Belgium, the Netherlands and North
Germany eastwards to Lübeck, as well as Savoy, Piedmont, Liguria and
Italy west of the Apennines down to the borders of Naples, and the Illyrian
provinces from Carinthia down to and including Dalmatia. German
nationalists put forth claims to territory regardless of whether the popula-
tion directly concerned really desired to change its sovereignty.9

8
Numerous scholars have underlined the similarity between processes of nation
building and the colonial situation, including Antonio Gramsci (1957: 430),
Fernand Braudel (1984: 42, 328–52), Eugen Weber (1976: 490–93), Maurice
Dobb (1947: 194, 206–7, 209), Michael Hechter (1975: 30–33), Alvin Gouldner
(1977–78) and Oscar Jaszi (1929: 185–212).
9
The annexation by Germany of French Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 against the will
of the population, was justified by Heinrich Treitschke, as follows:
We Germans . . . know better than these unfortunates themselves what is good for
the people of Alsace, who have remained under the misleading influence of the
French connection outside the sympathies of new Germany. We shall restore
them to their true selves against their will. Quoted in Macartney 1934: 100.
Introduction 11

This served as a template for subsequent ‘nationalist’ movements in

Europe. Many in the Pan-German movement demanded ‘union’ of the
Swiss, the Dutch and even the Scandinavians with Germany in a great
racial Nordic brotherhood.10 Italian nationalism became bound up
with a mission to ‘complete the Risorgimento’ (unification movement)
through expansion into contiguous and overseas territories. This was a
theme of Giuseppe Mazzini, a leader of the Risorgimento, no less than
it was of Mussolini. Mussolini shared Mazzini’s hope for a ‘Third
Rome’ which would exercise world leadership as the Rome of the
Caesars and the Rome of the Popes had done (Kohn 1955: 81). The
champion of Russian pan-Slavism, Nikolai Danilevsky argued that
Russia must create and lead a Slav federation (in order to destroy ‘the
rotting west’ for the benefit of all mankind) consisting of Russia (with
Galicia, the Ukrainian parts of Bukovina and Hungary, and the
Carpatho-Ukraine added), Trieste, Gorizia, Istria, the major part of
Carinthia, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece and
Constantinople.11 Polish nationalists sought and won from the Peace
Conference following World War I a resurrection of the supra-national
seventeenth-century Polish commonwealth. Hungarian nationalism, as
embodied in Lajos Kossuth’s programme of March 3, 1848, envisaged
not a Magyar nation state, but incorporation of Croatia-Slavonia,
Transylvania and the co-called Military Frontier in the Kingdom of
Hungary. When Balkan nationalisms came to the fore in the early
nineteenth century, none of the Balkan nationalist movements, or
their Great Power sponsors, was interested in dividing the Ottoman
Empire according to the principles of nationality. The ideological
cornerstone of Greek national politics until recent times was the
Megali idea, based on the notion of the resurrection of the glory and
power of the Byzantine Empire (Petropulos 1968: 455–57). The Megali
idea culminated on August 4, 1936, when General Johannes Metaxas
established a Fascist regime, inaugurating the ‘Third Hellenic
Civilization’, with the Spartan salute as its symbol (Daphnas 1955).
During the nineteenth century, nationalists were not concerned with
forming ‘nation states’, but with resurrecting or creating empires.

10
The classical work on the Pan-German League is Wertheimer 1924.
11
From Russia and Europe (1871) a collection of Danilevsky’s articles; cited in
Kohn 1946: 200. Similar plans were proposed by Rostislav Fedeeyev in his
Opinion on the Eastern Question (1871).
12 Halperin and Palan

Nationalists and nationalist writers (Fichte, Treitschke, Mazzini,

Garibaldi, D’Annunzio, Kossuth, Obradovich, Danilevsky and others)
did not call for political independence of national communities within
national frontiers: they demanded the resurrection of the historical
empires of Byzantium and Rome, of Charlemagne, Caesar, Dushan
and Simeon. Even where there was no imperial past to recall, nation-
alist writers and leaders called for the widest possible extension of
national boundaries, regardless of ethnic considerations and in fun-
damental opposition to the national idea: the Great Germany
Crusade; the Italian fascist crusade to recreate a Roman empire; the
Russian Pan-Slav movement and, within the pan-Slav movement, a
Greater Croatia movement; Greater Macedonia, Greater Serbia,
Greater Bulgaria. Still others are the pan-Celtic movement, to unite
the Gaels, Welsh and Bretons, which was formed in the late nine-
teenth century; the Polish nationalist crusade to resurrect the supra-
national Polish Commonwealth; and the Lithuanian ambition to
resurrect the Kingdom of Lithuania.
Processes of ‘nation building’ as they originally unfolded in Europe
bore all the political, economic, cultural and military features of
imperialism and colonialism. The process involved territorial expan-
sion from political centres or ‘cores’, and the absorption of areas with
distinctly different traditions and political institutions. Western
European states were formed by groups who conquered and colonized
territories and subjugated, massacred, expelled or forcibly assimilated
their native populations. Where territories contained ethnically
heterogeneous populations, claims were often based on ‘historical
rights’ going back to medieval or even ancient times. Additional claims
often enlarged the original territory on the basis of ‘strategic’ or eco-
nomic considerations. These territories frequently contained either
the most ethnically heterogeneous or the most homogeneously for-
eign population of the territories claimed by the state. Once statehood
was achieved, the ruling nation in the new multi-national entity often
finished the work, usually already well under way, of expelling,
exterminating or forcibly assimilating ethnic minorities and other
portions of the population with separate territorial claims or with
the potential power to challenge the rule of the dominant group.
Later, elite-led ‘national’ movements, with funds and military assis-
tance provided by existing states, organized crusades to acquire ter-
ritories for which they had created and advanced cultural or other
Introduction 13

claims. In sum: nationalism, in its essence, its origins and its methods,
was similar to colonialism and imperialism, and its impact on large
populations within Europe was similar to the impact of colonialism
on Third World populations.
Some might argue, however, that cultural factors are, nonetheless, at
the root of nationalist drives and aims. But in most cases, so-called
‘national’ cultures had no existence prior to the desire to form states
and to foment nationalist movements, but were deliberately created for
political purposes. National movements in Europe in the nineteenth
century began with philological revivals whose political function was
to prove the possession of a language fit for literature and, conse-
quently, the right to national sovereignty. The purely cultural national
movement was almost everywhere accompanied by a political ambi-
tion. Of the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century all, except
perhaps the Belgian, were preceded and accompanied by the construc-
tion of a ‘national’ culture. In the nineteenth century, new states created
in Europe (Italy, Germany, Greece, though perhaps not Belgium), as
well as nationalist movements that arose within the Ottoman,
Hapsburg, and Russian Empires (Romanian, Croatian, Slovenian,
Serbian, Hungarian, Czechoslovakian, Bulgarian, Finnish, Polish and
Albanian) and within existing ‘nation states’ (Welsh, Scottish, Catalan,
Basque, Jurassic, Alsatian, Breton, Corsican Guadeloupan, South
Tyrolean, Frisian and Greenlandish) all created ‘national’ cultures
with materials that were either new or long dead, or some combination
of the two.

Institutional legacies
There is an important, ongoing methodological debate in the social
sciences about the utility of synchronic ‘variable-oriented’ versus dia-
chronic or historically sensitive case-oriented methodologies of inves-
tigation.12 Both serve useful purposes, as Charles Ragin (2000) argues,
but there is a gulf between them that is difficult to bridge. An assess-
ment of the historical legacies of empires, both as a concept and as a set
of practices, and their impact on the contemporary world, inevitably
draws on the latter.

12
Much has been written on the topic. For an excellent summary of recent debates
see Collins 1974, Redding 2005 and Tilly 2001.
14 Halperin and Palan

While variable-oriented studies are undoubtedly ‘powerful vehicles

of generalisation’, their homogenising assumptions ‘structure how
social scientists view populations, cases, and causes and thus constrain
the dialogue between ideas and evidence in ways that limit discovery’
(Ragin 2000: 5). Their tendency to dissolve cases into single variables
blocks ‘their ability to test the kind of configurational ideas which are
part and parcel of sociological theory’ (Agevall 2005: 9).13
Case-oriented studies, in contrast, ‘are good at capturing complexity
and diversity’ because they tend to adopt what might be described as
the ‘heterogeneity principle’: the assumption that the apparent unity of
political order belies incredible diversity.14 Historically oriented case
studies, Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek observe, reveal the
extent to which ‘it becomes less meaningful to talk about a political
universe that is ordered than about the multiple orders that compose it
and their relations with one another’ (Orren and Skowronek 2004:15).
Variable-oriented approaches tend to view the state in systemic terms,
and even when they disaggregate the state and focus on its constituent
parts – groups, classes, ethnicities, regions and so on – each of the
disaggregated factors is treated as a part of some rational whole. In
contrast, case-oriented approaches tend to view states as patchworks of
institutional logics and rationalities, ‘existing at a specific time’, and
‘representing nothing more than imperfect and pragmatic solutions to
reconciling past conflicts’ (Van der Ven 1993: 142). They consist of
‘[i]nstitutions, both individually and collectively, [and] juxtapose dif-
ferent logics of political order, each with their own temporal under-
pinnings’ (Orren and Skowronek 1994: 320). This is an important
point: while case-oriented approaches disaggregate the political pro-
cess itself into its different historical constituents, variable-oriented
approaches assume that the political process is animated necessarily
by one pervasive political rationale.
There are practical reasons for the juxtaposition of logics and tem-
poralities in the makeup of modern states: historically, states proved
themselves highly adept at picking up ideas and institutions ‘simply
because [they] find them functioning’ (Ellul 1965: 243). The successful
journey of the state as an organizational model was, in Braudel’s

13
See also King 1989 and Büthe 2002 for analysis of the limitations of variable-
oriented modelling techniques and historical analysis.
14
See Palan 2012 for a discussion of the heterogeneity principle.
Introduction 15

colourful language, a typical journey of war and conquest: the state

‘shaped itself around preexisting political structures, inserting itself
among them, forcing upon them whenever it could, its authority, its
currency, taxation, justice and language of command. This was a
process of both infiltration and superimposition, of conquest and
accommodation’ (Braudel 1981: 520). The modern law is an amalgam
of Roman, Greek, Germanic and biblical norms and practices, as well
as the ‘common’ law of the Anglo-Saxon people. The commercial laws
that were introduced, or ‘nationalized’, were drawn from the practices
of the law merchants of the Hanseatic League, the lex mercatoria.
Techniques of administration and centralization of the absolutist
state were more probably diffused from the East, perhaps from China
and Persia through Byzantium to its neighbouring and highly successful
Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and from there to Europe at large. To this
assemblage of techniques and technologies Foucault added his highly
original theory of the diffusion of power technologies from the prison,
the clinic and the army.
This book contributes an additional dimension to the study of
‘empire’, understood as an assemblage of institutions and techniques
of power and organisation. We ask: have empires gone completely, or
have they infiltrated the modern state system in ways that may not be
readily apparent? And, if so, how are they present in those institutional
juxtapositions we call ‘states’? Contributors to this volume have, with
the aid of historical analysis, disentangled the spatial construct we call
‘the state’ and shown how it is able to contain within it different
political rationalities. Following this overall logic, some of our contri-
butors have suggested that the ‘international system’ might best be
treated, as well, as a patchwork of institutional arrangements and
rationalities that possess, perhaps, only a minimal degree of coherency
among them.
What this book explores, therefore, is the impact that empires –
many of which are assumed to have disappeared without a trace –
continue to have on the modern world. It has four aims. The first is to
enrich our understanding of the historical origins of the complex and
delicate mosaic of institutions, practices, habits of thought and orga-
nizations that make up the modern world. Its second aim is to develop a
more subtle and nuanced understanding of the complex ecology of the
international system, and an appreciation of the richly diverse elements
that make it up. Third, the book aims to discover whether such an
16 Halperin and Palan

historically nuanced understanding of the nature and characteristics of

the international system may shed light on contemporary processes and
developments. Finally, it aims to discover whether the legacies of past
empires might tell us anything about the likely impact of the American
empire in future years.

Legacies of empire
What, then, are the broad legacies of empires in the modern world?
This book does not present a comprehensive inventory of legacies of
empire in the contemporary world, nor does it offer a theoretical
perspective on them. Rather, the book illustrates how legacies of
empire operate today and how they might shape the future. The indi-
vidual chapters show how scholars, with different disciplinary orienta-
tions and research interests, confront legacies of empire in their
exploration of the contemporary political world. They demonstrate
the durability of institutions and practices over time: for instance,
certain practices that are characterized as ‘corrupt’ in the area of former
Mongol Empires that include post-Soviet entities which may, in fact,
represent the survival of elements of Mongol political rule in that area.
They show that the governance structure of the United Nations can be
understood as representing a continuation of the imperial civil services
as, for instance, with respect to the themes and organization of ‘devel-
opment’; and that the British Empire left its imprint in an integrated
London-based set of finance centres that encompasses British depen-
dencies such as the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the old imperial
outposts of Singapore and Hong Kong. Many old city states around the
world that were revived or reproduced by the Spanish in the Americas,
the Portuguese in India and East Africa, and by the British in other
areas of the world are masquerading today as nation states. Colonial
armies were transformed into armies of the new states and continued to
function chiefly as instruments of ‘internal security’ tied to external
powers. Together, these present a challenge to the conventional oppo-
sition between ‘nation’ and ‘empire’, and to the notion that nation
states have supplanted or displaced imperial logics and practices.
Our starting point is to investigate structures of constituted power of
peoples and territories. The imperial legacies discussed in this volume
and their role in shaping contemporary regional and global structures
and processes suggest that the international sphere is far more
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