Yes—Elleke Boehmer
Is killing other people bad? Yes. Is rapacious invasion bad? Absolutely. And so it must follow that empires are bad, as they typically operate through killing and invasion. Across history, empires have involved the imposition of force by one power or people upon others. That imposition generally involves violence, including cultural and linguistic violence, such as the suppression and subsequent loss of native languages. As Joseph Conrad and, more recently, Teju Cole have written, empires divide humanity into the rulers and the ruled, the wounders and the wounded. The rulers harm with guns and bullets, but also by using more subtle forms of destruction and domination.
There are few or no neutral parties in empires. No one is free of its psychological or physical harms. Its middlemen are in their own ways damaged, while being employed to rule through inflicting harm. The magistrate in JM Coetzee’s colonial parable Waiting for the Barbarians comes tortuously to realise that he is as much an instrument of imperial rule as the feared militia.
Everyone in the modern world is a product of empire in some way; we are shaped by the wars it propagated and migrations that followed, and the drawing and changing of borders that it introduced. We cannot unthink the process of our making, nor the conditions of domination. We are especially disinclined to do so when our own people have held the upper hand. Yet we should try, especially those of us whom imperial history has favoured, to think critically about empires of which we are all a part. For empire requires exclusion to operate. It separates communities on the basis of small differences which over time has major consequences, spawning wars and genocides, and restarting the vicious imperial cycle over again. The time of empire, as Coetzee’s magistrate writes, is a “spinning,” circular kind of time.
No—Tom Holland
Empires create their own reality. An imperial state, if it is to flourish, cannot depend on military or economic muscle alone. It must also succeed in reconciling the conquered to their own conquest. Empires tend to endure, not by imposing obedience at the point of a sword, but by bringing subject peoples to embrace the ideological self-justifications of their rulers.
Do this effectively, and it is possible, over the centuries—or indeed millennia—for the boundary between victors and vanquished to blur, and then to vanish altogether. In this way an ideology that initially might have constituted a licence for bloodshed and exploitation can end up coming to define, for almost everyone within a given imperial order, what constitutes “good” and “bad.” Nothing is either good or bad, but an empire makes it so.
“Across history,” you write, “empires have involved the imposition of force by one power or people upon others.” Indeed. It is why the beginnings of imperialism are signposted by scenes of conquest and violence: why, on a 5,000-year-old stone tablet, the first pharaoh of a united Egypt is portrayed smiting a hapless adversary with a mace, and why, on the obverse of the tablet, he stands resplendent in front of 10 decapitated corpses.
Are these scenes “good” or “bad”? By the standards of most Prospect readers, I would suspect, “bad.” But by the standards of the ancient Egyptians themselves? Scholars debate what precisely the tablet illustrates: either a historical event—the conquest of Lower Egypt by Narmer, King of Upper Egypt—or the symbolic victory of royalty over the forces of chaos. Either way, it heralded an understanding of good and bad that was destined to endure for some 3,000 years: that it was the responsibility of the Egyptian king to uphold the divinely ordained pattern of the universe, and that his subjects—those on the lower reaches of the Nile no less than the upper—would in consequence enjoy security, order and peace.
To condemn this as “bad” seems, at a distance of 5,000 years, not a little arrogant—or in cultural terms, verging on the imperial.
Yes
The gist of your response is that empires are a fact of history and we should accept their collateral damage. You take as read the mental colonisation involved. This brushes over the centuries-long decimation of indigenous cultures involved in “pacification”—a word Chinua Achebe rightly wields with devastating force at the close of his anti-colonial classic Things Fall Apart. Imperial violence meanwhile is par for the course, so that to challenge any of it, to call a pharaoh of 5,000 years ago bad for stamping his authority, is now to foist imperial-like judgment upon him. Without imposing hierarchical authority through force, you suggest, the law and order in whose name empire rules would be impossible to achieve.
But no empire sets out to bring law and order to other peoples in the first instance. That is not empire’s primary aim. The first motivating forces are profit and more profit. Commerce, Christianity and civilisation were all watchwords of British colonialism—but the greatest was commerce. The 19th-century myth of the Pax Britannica, the period of relative peace too casually attributed to Britain’s establishment of imperial dominance across five continents and on the seas, springs suddenly to mind.
Turning again to imperial pacification—the force required to “reconcile the conquered” to their conquest—this had harmful repercussions not only for the colonised, but the colonisers. Colonialism is not only an economic and political system but a psychic one. The condition of the colonised is nervous, as Martinique-born French psychiatrist Frantz Fanon writes, but the coloniser, too, suffers from nightmares arising from the experience of colonising, from the theft of others’ lands, to say nothing of killing. Even those imperialists not inclined to doubts about empire experienced well-documented harm—crippling insecurities, corrosive hatreds, the widely prevalent fear of “their” women being raped by the colonised; multiple anxieties about the loss of self.
For the coloniser lives always within the sight of the surviving colonised, with their watchful and invariably accusatory stares.
No
My argument is not that we should accept collateral damage inflicted by empires. It is rather that the most enduring and successful empires have been capable of putting down ideological roots so strong that in time all who live within them, conquered as well as conquerers, come to accept their existence as a self-evident good.
“The whole world has been adorned by you like a pleasure garden.” So the orator Aelius Aristides, travelling to Rome in the second century AD, praised the people of the city. Aristides himself came from Anatolia, a region brutally pacified by the legions two centuries previously. Was he suffering, then, from false consciousness? No. The genius of Roman imperialism was to persuade the provincials of Anatolia, not just that the Pax Romana was a blessing of the gods, but—in the long run—that they themselves were Roman. So far were they from fixing the imperial elite with accusatory stares that in the 5th century AD, when Rome fell, they not only continued to identify as Roman, but saw in the continued existence of an empire ruled from Constantinople, the “New Rome,” a manifestation of God’s plan for humanity.
That God not only approved of imperial conquest, but had directly mandated it, was a conviction held no less devoutly by the people who, in the 7th century, emerged as the Romans’ deadliest rivals. The Arabs believed that they had been given, in the form of the Qur’an, God’s final revelation to humanity. War against those who refused to accept it came to be enshrined as a positive duty. “Kill them, seize them, besiege them, wait for them at every lookout post.” Arab rule duly came to extend from the Atlantic to the frontiers of China. Yet submission—islam in Arabic—came to offer for multitudes of conquered provincials a liberation. Today, the flourishing of Islam in Morocco, and Iran, and India, not to mention the one-time Roman capital of Constantinople, bears enduring witness to the advance of Muslim arms. Is this “bad”? Muslims do not think so. Who are we, then, to say they are wrong?
Yes
Your interesting examples in which empires are accepted as a self-evident good by the conquered, the “provincials of Anatolia” and “Muslims,” are in a sense irrefutable. As we both suggest, we cannot unthink the historical processes of which we are a product, empire first and foremost.
It must be this inconceivability that prompts your piling up of examples of empire praised and un-condemned. I think of the wreckage mounting up before Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, back turned to the future, helpless to make whole what has been smashed. You also imply that those who accept the fruits of empire as beneficial might be seen as history’s pragmatists, accepting the inevitability of conquest.
Your examples operate collectively as a strategic diversion. We cannot come to a moral judgment on empire with the piling on of historical examples, no matter how high the pile, or how diverse the examples. Focus the titular logic of bad and good on the European empires that ended in the post-war period, including the British Empire, and do we conclude we have to accept where history has landed us? Or do we decide that the various “benefits” of empire—curry as a delicious national dish; the English language as a global lingua franca, say—cannot be judged as goods worth having for the price of this much harm inflicted by empire itself? In a real sense, these are the wrong questions.
What we, in modern times, might be without empire is unthinkable. Even so, one GCSE history revision website is in no doubt that the “advantages” and “disadvantages” of empire can be totted up. The table tells us the British Empire’s benefits include the “giving” of infrastructure to the colonies, “such as better roads and railways,” the “bringing” of democracy worldwide, and, of course, the spread of English. Against this, the costs are slavery and extinction of indigenous peoples. Bookkeeping terms throw into relief the inadequacy of cost-benefit analysis when it comes to empires. That is why it is important finally to give an ethical, rather than a quantified, cost-benefit response: in psychic effect, as well as its massacres and genocides, empire generally does more harm than good.
No
You neglect to mention what might well be considered the most paradoxical of British imperialism’s legacies: the widespread assumption that empires are necessarily bad. Obviously, back when the British were painting the world red, they did as imperial peoples have invariably done, and sought to justify their empire as “good.” But that is not all they did. By exporting their language, religion and culture, they also exported a wide range of ideological assumptions that, as it turned out, could be used to undermine the legitimacy of their rule. This was true of the Spanish, the Dutch and the French as well as the British. Anti-colonialism was fashioned less in the colonies than in the imperial metropoles.
You have mentioned Fanon. Though raised in Martinique, his education was impeccably French. His vision of terror—as a means of purifying the world, banishing oppression, raising up the poor and casting down the rich—would have been familiar to Robespierre. Yet Fanon, a man of intellectual honesty, recognised the ultimate source of this tradition. Although contemptuous of religion, he had been raised a Catholic and read the Bible. Explaining what was meant by “decolonisation,” he turned to the words of Jesus: “Its definition can, if we want to describe it accurately, be summed up in the well-known words: ‘The last shall be first.’”
Hence the paradox. No other conquerors, carving out empires, had done so as the servants of a man tortured to death on the cross at the orders of a colonial official. No other conquerors, dismissing with contempt the gods of foreign peoples, had installed in their place an emblem of power so deeply ambivalent as to render problematic the very notion of power. No other conquerors, exporting an understanding of the divine peculiar to themselves, had so successfully persuaded peoples around the world that it possessed a universal import. Few things, then, bear more enduring witness to the impact of European imperialism than this: the assumption that imperialism is necessarily “bad.”
