The Concept of Empire PDF

Russell Foster (forthcoming 2017), ‘Empire’, in William Outhwaite and Stephen Turner (eds.
) SAGE Handbook
of Political Sociology. London: Sage Publishing (accepted for publication).
The Concept of Empire
RUSSELL FOSTER1
Dept. of European and International Studies
Kings College London
_____________________
ON 4TH DECEMBER 1977 Jean-Bédel Bokassa, who had recently dropped his title of President of the
Central African Republic, crowned himself Sa Majesté Impériale Bokassa Ier, Empereur de Centre-
Afrique, in an ostentatious ceremony which the global press savagely ridiculed as ‘clowning glory’
(Titley 1997) and which the world’s embarrassed monarchs and incredulous presidents, despite lavish
invitations, carefully avoided. Two years later Bokassa’s Western creditors, convinced that he was
clinically insane, overthrew him in a quick coup d’etat which ended the world’s last formal empire.
Nobody mourned Emperor Bokassa. Not least because in the late twentieth century, the idea of
empire was viewed with repugnance and ridicule, a relic of a distant and oppressive era of history which
apparently has no place in the new world order of nation-states, liberal democracy, and capitalist
economics. Yet empire remains an extraordinarily powerful concept which continues to influence
almost every aspect of contemporary society (Behr and Foster 2015).
Currently, the only Emperor in the world is the hereditary (and purely symbolic) ruler of Japan.
According to a Western literary convention which stretches back to Marco Polo in the thirteenth
century, the Japanese sovereign’s title 天皇 (tennō) is awkwardly transliterated into Western languages
as ‘Emperor’. However he is an Emperor without an Empire – Japan dropped its claim to imperial
status after surrendering to the Allies in 1945. But even though there are no official empires left, empire
remains highly significant. The first reason is the existence of ‘informal empire/imperialism’, an
ambiguous description used to criticise the foreign policies of the USA, China, the Russian Federation,
the European Union, and others (Harvey 2003; Ghosh 2012). The second reason is that, despite the end
of formal empire, empire casts a very long shadow over the modern world.
Empire is a frequently-used word, used to describe political, economic, cultural, and
commercial structures in the past, present, and future. It is used to describe civilisations and
organisations ranging from the Ancient Babylonians to the Microsoft Corporation to the villains of Star
Wars, and as a result the meaning of the word varies according to the context. But it is rarely used
positively. Even when used to describe large corporations, ‘empire’ retains an intimidating or even
sinister connotation (Foster 2016). It is also emotionally charged to an extent not seen with most other
1
russell.1.foster@kcl.ac.uk
1
Russell Foster (forthcoming 2017), ‘Empire’, in William Outhwaite and Stephen Turner (eds.) SAGE Handbook
political words, and it is wrapped up in contemporary political struggles. Yet surprisingly for a word
used so frequently, it is not clear just what empire is.
This chapter offers an answer to the question of what empire is. In the first part, the significance
of the word is established, along with the disputes over its meaning. The second part examines the two
most common answers to what ‘empire’ is – either a historical phase or a category of state – to
demonstrate why these answers are not only wrong, but Eurocentric and misleading. The third part
traces the genesis and evolution of ‘empire’ as a word, showing how its meaning changed in European
history and how this European imagination colours interpretations of the world beyond the West.
Finally, the conclusion provides a possible answer to what empire is. Not a historical phase or category
of state, but a belief, an imagination, a state of mind – a discourse – adopted by those who believe they
have the right, responsibility, authority, legitimacy, and destiny to exercise sovereign, universal,
unopposed rule. And although formal empire is finished, this discourse is still alive in the form of the
European Union.
Empire today
At the beginning of the twentieth century most of the human race lived under the control of political
regimes headquartered in London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Amsterdam, St Petersburg, Constantinople,
Peking, and Tokyo. A century of popular convention has caused these to be termed ‘empires’, as they
were indeed called at the time (at least by Europeans) (Mackenzie 1985, 1992, 2011). This ‘Age of
Empires’ (Hobsbawm 1987) is officially dead. The Chinese Empire imploded in 1911. The Turkish,
Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian Empires collapsed during or immediately after the First World
War. The Italian and Japanese Empires were dissolved at the end of the Second World War. Financially
and morally bankrupt after 1945, the British, French, Belgian, and Dutch Empires died lingering deaths
between 1945 and the 1990s. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, politicians and scholars
applauded the death of the last ‘evil empire’ (Stephanson 1995), whose fall apparently heralded the
beginning of a new era in human history defined not by empire, but by liberal democracy and
government by independent nation-states. However, empire does not disappear so easily.
The modern world in all dimensions – political, social, economic, cultural, religious, racial,
medical, legal, linguistic, biological, ecological, intellectual – is largely the result of Europeans who,
from 1492 onwards, spread European ideas, European skin tones, European germs, and European
technology to every part of Earth (Godlewska and Smith 1994, Ferguson 2004, Darwin 2013).
Sometimes the Europeans came as conquerors and sometimes they were invited by local collaborators;
sometimes European cultures assimilated the values of their conquered peoples and sometimes their
cultures clashed with alien ideas. But either way, European expansion was usually accompanied by
bloody violence and social repression. Today, the European ‘empires’ have disappeared but their legacy
is visible in almost every aspect of contemporary life, from architecture to zoology, all over the world
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(Said 1994; Halperin and Palan 2015). The civilisation we live in did not appear ex nihilo, out of
nothing. It appeared, in the words of Pankaj Mishra (2013), from the ruins of empire. Therefore the
modern world should not, and indeed cannot, be studied without reference to those extinct ‘empires’
which still cast a long shadow over current civilisation.
Related to this is empire’s emotional and political significance in contemporary society
(Macmillan 2009). Empire and its legacies are not confined to libraries and lecture theatres. In an ever-
more interconnected world where post-imperial multiculturalism increasingly clashes with resurgent
nationalism, the legacies of empire are bitterly contested by public figures who seek to condemn or
applaud empire as a part of peoples’ current identity (Foster et al 2014). Empire is saturated with
memory and emotion, ranging from nostalgia for the apparent ‘good old days’ of empire (Ferguson
2004) to memories of the terrible atrocities carried out in empire’s name (Drayton 2011). This is visible,
in microcosm, in the power of empire in fiction (Rajan and Sauer 2004). In popular culture, empire
frequently fulfils the role of the antagonist which the heroes must overcome – empire and its ideals are
not to be identified with, but against (Csicsery-Ronay 2003; Foster 2009). This denouncement of
fictional empire reflects the denouncement of actual empire and its legacies remain political issues over
which individuals, groups, and entire nations viciously argue (Macmillan 2009).
Many contemporary political and social movements not only point to historical empire as the
source of their grievances, but request restitution from whichever states or organisations emerged from
the ashes of those empires – who are not always willing to comply. In some cases these grievances are
unambiguous, such as the continued dispossession and social injustice suffered by Native Americans
or Australian Aborigines. In other cases their legitimacy is less obvious due to competing versions of
history, such as demands for the Elgin Marbles to be returned to Greece (Vernon 2012) or for statues
of Cecil Rhodes to be pulled down (Foster [forthcoming]). In more controversial cases, nationalist
politicians seek to deflect blame from their own actions and score points with voters by simply pointing
fingers at empire. To address just who (if anybody) alive today is responsible for ‘empire’ first requires
identifying just what empire is. This requires a process of ‘empire-writing’, or imperiography.
Imperiography
Many academic terms are essentially contested concepts, words whose definitions are not always agreed
upon. This is particularly so with empire. The word is used frequently, with wildly different meanings
which change depending on when, where, in what context, and by whom it is used. The connotations
of the word also change between time periods, places, and people, shifting between something to be
adored and emulated to something to be abhorred and fought against – and everything in between. It is
a subjective, emotionally-burdened word As a result, empire does not have a single meaning. It is
polysemic – it has multiple meanings. This makes empire a tricky concept to pin down. As a result,
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empire can be (and is) used in contexts which have little or nothing to do with the original meaning of
the word, making its definitions vague, fuzzy, and overlapping.
Empire is not alone. The word appears alongside its relatives imperial, imperialism, imperialist,
colony, colonial, colonialism, and colonialist. Meanwhile the twin of imperial, the crucial word
patrocinial, has been forgotten, but it will be explored below. All of these words can be further
complicated by adding pre-, proto-, post-, pseudo-, neo-, anti-, and pro-; all of which are wrapped up
in their own politics and emotions, and all of which are equally vague.
Outlining every use of these words and what they mean in which context, is impossible. Far
more helpful is to investigate the original meaning of the word and how it has changed over time. We
live in a world of mass education and instant communication, with an ever-increasing collection of
dictionaries, encyclopaedias, television documentaries, websites, magazines, and books which tackle
‘empire’. Wherever it crops up, ‘empire’ is almost always defined according to one of two
interpretations. These are empire as a historical phase, and empire as a type of government. Both
definitions are highly misleading.
What empire is not

Before tracing the history of the word and its concept it is essential to explore the two mainstream
interpretations of empire – either as a phase in history or a type of state defined by certain characteristics
– to show how these are flawed interpretations. Then the idea of empire as a discourse will be
established.
Empire is not a phase in history

Empire is often interpreted as a recent historical phenomenon that is rooted in European territories and
European attitudes, an Industrial Revolution expression of economic greed and systematic social
prejudice according to which Europe’s competitive capitalists conquered non-Europe in a quest for raw
materials, markets, cheap workers, and sheer prestige (for examples, see Hardt and Negri 2001; Darwin
2007). At present this interpretation is slightly unfashionable, being associated with the currently out-
of-vogue philosophies of Marxism and historical materialism, but it remains prominent in academic
texts. It is also tangled up with the related (but different) word imperialism, which itself needs to be
unpacked.
First, an overview. According to this interpretation, empire is an inevitable historical phase
which is the direct result of capitalism. Capitalists expand their industries and markets in their own
countries then, once everyone at home has been dragged into capitalist economics, the industrialists and
politicians look abroad for new markets and sources of raw materials. Those who will not willingly join
are conquered until everyone on Earth has been dragged into capitalism. At this stage the competitive
capitalists, with nowhere left to expand, start fighting each other.
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This interpretation has its roots in the later nineteenth century, beginning with the first
commentators on Karl Marx (although Marx himself barely mentioned empire). These early ideas were
gathered into a coherent theory by Vladimir Lenin, whose 1917 pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest
Stage of Capitalism made the above argument. In Lenin’s memorable phrase empire was ‘the last gasp
of a moribund system’, a sign that the capitalist countries had run out of peoples to conquer, triggering
the First World War between empires which had nowhere left to expand but into each other. In the later
twentieth century, this Marxist-Leninist interpretation of empire was enhanced to analyse empire as a
component of capitalism, not necessarily a consequence (Brewer 1980; Pieterse 1990: 186; Bottomore
1991: 223). Although sophisticated, there are two serious problems with this interpretation of empire
(and imperialism) as a recent, inevitable phase in human economic progress.
The first problem is interpreting empire as the inevitable consequence of historical forces.
Marxist accounts of history – in which abstract economic and sociological forces drive humanity
through historical phases, are problematic. ‘Empire’, even the late-nineteenth century European version
on which Marxists focus, cannot be attributed solely to abstract forces – or worse, to conspiracies
between scheming industrialists intent on enslaving the world. There was (and is) no grand strategy
behind empire and imperialism, even in the heyday of the Victorians. Consider as an example the British
Empire, which in Winston Churchill’s famous quip ‘was acquired in a fit of absence of mind’ between
the sixteenth and twentieth centuries (Quinn 1962, Ferguson 2005, Darwin 2007, Jackson 2013). In
these four centuries, a vast array of factors contributed to what Marxists call ‘empire’. Economic greed,
desire for prestige, geographical curiosity, mission civilisatrice (a belief that the non-European world
had to be ‘civilised’ by Europeans), military rivalry, strategic security, deluded beliefs of racial
superiority, religious zeal or a genuine desire to improve lives and save souls – all of these were cited
as motives for British activity, depending on the time, place, persons, and context involved. These
contradictory, sometimes competing, sometimes mutually-exclusive motives and individuals also
cannot account for individuals who acted without consulting their governments, presenting territories
and populations to the British Crown which neither wanted them nor knew what to do with them (Hart
2008). This was as true for the French, Dutch, Russians, and other great powers as it was for the British.
And given the extremely low levels of colonial trade and investment which characterised nineteenth-
century imperialism (Porch 2002: 189–195), a purely economic interpretation of empire is not adequate.
The second problem is that this theory considers empire and imperialism to be the same thing.
They are not. The word empire, elaborated below, existed centuries before ‘imperialism’ and had
nothing to do with economics. It is entirely possible for empire and imperialism to be separate (Barkawi
and Laffey 2002). Not every self-declared ‘empire’ pursues an aggressive policy of expansion, and not
every government which aggressively expands considers itself an empire. In Marx’s and Lenin’s
lifetimes, this distinction was even more visible. ‘Imperialism’ as a word appeared as late as the 1860s,
and referred specifically to the aggressive and meddlesome foreign policy of French Emperor Napoleon
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III, whose foreign adventures were cynical attempts to distract the French people from his incompetent
rule (Horne 1990: 14-34). By Lenin’s day ‘imperialism’ was starting to become tangled up with
‘empire’, but the two were still very much distinct. The beginning of the twentieth century saw the
apparent paradox of European activists who supported their empires, but despised imperialism.
Prominent anti-imperialists (i.e. people who publicly denounced overseas war and plunder) could be,
and frequently were, pro-empire (i.e. people who publicly defended empire as a way to lead humanity
into a civilised age) (see Foster 2013, 2015).
Ultimately, this deterministic approach to empire is inadequate. But even less adequate is the
current most popular interpretation, which considers empire a category of state.
Empire is not a type of state

In academic, commercial, and popular writing, ‘empire’ is overwhelmingly used as a similar word to
monarchy, republic, federation, and so forth, treating empire as a taxonomy or type of state (most
notably, see Burbank and Cooper 2011). According to this interpretation, empire is usually summarised
as ‘a large, composite, multi-ethnic or multinational political unit, usually created by conquest, divided
between a dominant centre and subordinate, sometimes far distant, peripheries’ (Howe 2002: 15). Also
according to this belief, an ‘empire’ is distinguishable from a kingdom, a republic, and so on because it
has certain characteristics (for prominent examples, see Doyle 1987, Burbank and Cooper 2011).
Exactly what these characteristics are, varies between individual thinkers, but a belief persists that ‘no
matter how they differ in culture and governance, [empires] reveal many common characteristics’
(Maier 2010: 3). Despite its enormous popularity, this approach is extremely misleading. There are
certainly similarities between different societies, yet their similarities are superficial and insignificant
compared to their differences. These differences are not minor, such as language or technology, but are
fundamental political and philosophical distinctions which override surface similarities.
Treating empire as a taxonomy usually relies on a checklist of characteristics. Any off-the-shelf
dictionary or popular website usually defines empire in exactly this way. The result is that because
researchers using this approach tick boxes on a checklist, wildly different societies are lumped together
into a vague category which varies from one individual to another. While there is variation in just what
goes on the checklist, depending on the specialism (or political agenda) of the author, the same few
characteristics appear time and time again. These are: territorial size, territorial expansion/coherence,
an ethnically/culturally diverse population, a single monarch, violence, and inequality.
First, size. This is the characteristic most popularly associated with empire (Howe 2002; Cox
2007), and defines the interpretation of empire as a geopolitical taxonomy; a section of the Earth’s
surface (geo-) controlled by a single political organisation (-politics). When this area is big and
contiguous (i.e. its provinces and components all connected by land), scholars tend to declare it an
empire. But there is a serious problem here. Just how big is “big”? And at what point does a state or
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society become an ‘empire’? There is no agreed size at which a republic or kingdom becomes an empire,
simply by acquiring another square metre of land. If this were true, then surely Canada and Kazakhstan
should be considered empires because of their sheer size? Equally, there have been much smaller states
in history which have called themselves, or been called, empire. Fifteenth-century Byzantium,
sixteenth-century England, and seventeenth-century Venice were all territorially small and (with the
exception of Venice) impotent in political and military matters. Yet these states were imagined,
according to their rulers and rivals, as ‘empires’ (Norwich 1998; Pagden 1998). Size is not exclusive to
empire, and without a clear tipping-point at which a state becomes empire (a point which would be
arbitrary anyway), size does not matter.
Neither does the second theme – territorial coherence and expansion. Coherence is irrelevant.
The late-nineteenth century British and French proudly spoke of their empires (Wilson 2002), despite
their isolated colonies being scattered across the planet. Territorial expansion is equally irrelevant.
Expansion is pursued by kingdoms, republics, theocracies and federations, most of which (in recent
decades) vehemently deny being empires. At the same time, some self-declared empires rejected
expansion. The Holy Roman Empire ceased to expand after 1495 (Wilson 2003). The Austro-Hungarian
Empire did not expand in its entire existence (Wheatcroft 1996). Equally, no scholar believes that
‘empires’ stop becoming empires when they lose territory. The Byzantine civilisation – which arguably
had the most legitimate claim to imperial status – steadily lost territory in its final centuries until it
consisted of little more than the city of Constantinople, yet this did not prevent contemporaries and later
historians from calling it ‘empire’. Outside Europe, the Chinese and Japanese Empires (although as
discussed below, this term is highly problematic outside Europe) were not expansionist; indeed the
Chinese exhibited such a scathing contempt for the non-Chinese world that they judged the world
unworthy of being conquered, while the isolationist Japanese quarantined themselves from the rest of
the human race for several centuries. Expansion, then, is not a defining feature.
Related to expansion is a third assumed characteristic; a diverse population dominated by a
particular ethnic group. Diversity and domination are certainly found among the populations of
historical ‘empires’ – Roman, Mongolian, Spanish – but this is not exclusive to empire. Princes,
presidents, and priests in history and the modern world have ruled over populations in which one or two
ethnic groups exert disproportionate power. Barbados, Chad, and Papua New Guinea all have diverse
populations under a dominant elite, yet they are not considered ‘empires’. Particularly problematic is
where to draw boundaries between population groups, which scholars tend to categorise according to
extremely vague notions of “culture”, “race”, or “ethnicity”, none of which are clearly defined or
mutually exclusive, and all of which should be treated with great caution (Cannadine 2013). As for the
domination of one ethnic group over others, this is simplistic. It would be ridiculous to claim that the
British Empire was run entirely by the English or the Roman Empire entirely by the Italians, as this
ignores the role of other ethnic groups who conquered, administrated, proselytised, and plundered on
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behalf of, or alongside, the “dominant” group (Howe 2002). A dominant group wielding coercive power
over diverse others is therefore not a characteristic of empire, as it is found in a wide variety of political
systems. And in the context of empire, this idea whitewashes the complicated, tortuous, and (for modern
nationalists) embarrassing reality that historical ‘empires’ were built and maintained by collaborators
as much as by conquerors.
Related to this is violence, the fourth apparent characteristic of empire: ‘the ambition of empire,
its territorial agenda, and its problematic frontiers create an intimate and recurring bond with the
recourse to force’ (Maier 2010: 19–20). Empire is assumed to be violent, a system which enforces its
rule through plunder, pillage, and genocide. Certainly, these have been committed in (and in the name
of) historical ‘empires’. But violence is another tricky concept. Again it is not exclusive to ‘empires’.
Every form of political organisation imaginable has committed some sort of violence. This leads to the
most significant problem with assuming violence as a characteristic – just what is violence? The Roman
Empire’s slaughter of the Jews at Masada, the French Empire’s mass torture of Algerian prisoners, the
British Empire’s concentration camps in the Second Boer War – all of these are obviously acts of
violence. But blood is shed by nation-states, principalities, and ecclesiastical states too. It is not
exclusive to empire. Furthermore, violence goes deeper than physical bloodshed.
In 1969, social theorist Johan Galtung persuasively demonstrated how physical violence is
merely the tip of an iceberg which dominates any society, encompassing the staggering array of legal,
political, and economic inequalities which make up structural violence. These are the result of social,
cultural, psychological, and even linguistic power relations of cultural violence which we are frequently
even unaware of. Structural and cultural violence do not necessarily result in slaughter, but they create
and perpetuate an entire social system built upon exclusion, inequality, denied rights and opportunities,
and raw prejudice – the essential ingredients of violence. It is hard to think of any society which does
not have these built-in inequalities and power dynamics. This is especially true of the applauded
successor to empire, the nation-state; a system of political organisation which has arguably been
responsible for far more prejudice, violence, and slaughter than any historical empire.
Related to violence is the fifth assumed characteristic of empire; a power structure under a
single Emperor or Empress. This is simply not true. Many of the ‘empires’ which scholars write about
have not been ruled by an Emperor. The Kings and Queens of Great Britain and Ireland, despite ruling
a quarter of the planet for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, did not have the title.2 Neither
did the democratically-elected Presidents of the next-largest regime, the French Empire, after 1870.
Some non-European rulers have had apparently vague equivalents to Emperor – Khan, Caliph, Pharaoh
– but as discussed below this is a superficial similarity, or a lazy assumption, or a well-meaning but
2
Indeed in 1801, King George III declined the title “Emperor” because he thought the British people would not
take him seriously. While British monarchs from 1876 to 1947 were “Emperor/Empress of India”, they were
never Emperors of the entire Empire (Foster 2015: 68 fn19).
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misguided consequence of Western scholars using Western concepts as lenses through which to squint
at a blurred interpretation of the non-Western world.
Finally, inequality. This is the only characteristic which can be fairly identified with empire.
Again, all forms of social organisation in human history have involved inequality, in infinite forms.
Frequently, as with nation-states or federations, this inequality is whitewashed or denied altogether. But
in ‘empires’ this inequality is not only acknowledged, it is proudly trumpeted as a sign that the imperial
society is bringing civilisation to the barbarians. True imperialists embrace and promote inequality by
advertising a self-anointed status as superior, righteous, and therefore imbued with both the right and
the responsibility to impose their version of order on the world – what the nineteenth-century French
termed ‘mission civilisatrice’ or ‘civilising mission’. This is arguably the only characteristic of empire
– a sense of superiority and a divine mission to civilise the savages. Other apparent criteria – size,
violence, and so on – are illusions as these criteria are either found among all forms of political
organisation, or are not all found in ‘empire’.
It is clear that empire cannot be understood according to one of these interpretations; either as
a historical phase or as a geopolitical taxonomy. Imperialism can perhaps be understood as a historical
phase of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, but even this is methodologically dangerous
as it assumes that all ‘imperial’ activities in this period were part of a conspiracy for capitalist
accumulation, strategic expansion, prestige, racialism, or religious conversion. Colonial expansion was
a mixture of some, all, or none of these, depending on circumstances and contexts. Equally, empire
should not be understood as a universal type of state or governance system, as this highly Eurocentric
idea is based on an arbitrary selection of equally arbitrary characteristics3 which can be applied to any
state or governance system, and are not unique to an ‘empire’. Empire is instead best understood as an
imagination, a discourse; one which emerged in a particular time and place. To understand empire it is
essential to investigate what the word originally meant in its European context, how its meaning
developed over the course of European history, and how that meaning influenced the actions of
‘imperial’ rulers.
IMPERIVM
Empire is a word with ancient roots. Paleolinguistics reveals that it stems from *pera, a word from the
Proto-Indo-European language spoken in western Eurasia long before written records began (its origins
beyond Proto-Indo-European are anybody’s guess). *pera translates roughly as ‘to do’. As this
prototype language split into regional variations, including early Latin, *pera survived. In Latin it
3
Peter Davidson (2011: 8) pokes fun at attempts to list characteristics of empire, defining empire simply as a
place of ‘murder, incest, and the wearing of expensive jewellery’.
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became impera then imperare, again meaning “to do” or “to command to be done”.4 It is worth noting
how the meaning starts to become slightly more flexible as the word evolves, as this is a defining feature
of ‘empire’.
As the growing town of Rome expanded its influence in the five centuries before Christ, two
additional words evolved – imperator and imperium. The two are symbiotic, as each refers to the other.
Imperator is the easier word. Originally the word was a title conferred upon a successful warrior,
roughly translatable as “He who has commanded” (Price 1969). According to writers in the Roman and
post-Roman eras, the word appeared in the hazy period of early Roman history, from which few records
have survived. By the time Rome became a powerful Republic gobbling up the lands around the
Mediterranean, the title Imperator was already a slightly old-fashioned honour, the highest which could
be bestowed on a successful military officer. From imperator comes the word for “Emperor” in most
European languages,5 and the word remains easy to define.
Imperium has a much foggier history. By the middle of the first century B.C. and the civil wars
which transformed the Roman Republic into a military dictatorship under the ‘Emperors’, imperium
was a word with many meanings. Inextricably connected with imperator, imperium initially referred to
the military or civilian power held by a military commander or civilian official. Not just the concept of
his power; also his right to wield that power and by extension, the legitimacy of his power (Richardson
1991; Richardson 2008). Even for Romans, imperium was a tricky word.
In the letters and courtroom speeches of Cicero (106 – 43 BC), imperium is elaborated. Cicero
(1998; 2008) does not give imperium a specific meaning, but uses it alongside a now-forgotten twin,
patrocinium. Reading Cicero, it is apparent that imperium signified ‘hard power’ and Rome’s right to
rule as the dominant military power of the known world. Meanwhile patrocinium signified ‘soft power’
and Rome’s responsibility to rule as self-appointed protector of the peoples of the world. Imperium did
not signify a type of state. The Romans did not think of the world as shapes on a map (Morley 2010),
and because Roman political philosophy was based on the idea that Rome ruled the entire planet, not
just the Mediterranean, other states and rulers were seen as illegitimate (Bryce 1871; Kantarowicz 1957;
Gibbon 1994). To the Romans, then, imperium was only one side of the coin (the other being
patrocinium) and imperium itself had two realms of meaning. In the first, imperium was a specific legal
and military jurisdiction – a meaning which faded with the transformation of the Roman world from a
Latin, pagan civilisation into a Greek, Christian society. In the second realm, imperium was a general
word which signified the right and responsibility to rule well, combining power with protection. It is
4
This still survives in other languages which distantly evolved from Proto-Indo-European. For example, the
English words “imperative” and “imperious” have closely related meanings and are descended from the same
root. For further reading, see (Richardson 1991; Richardson 2008; Foster 2015).
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Latinate languages base “empire” and “emperor” on imperium and imperator. Germanic, Slavic, and Turkic
languages base their words either on the proto-Germanic word rīx meaning ‘wealthy’ (e.g. Reich, Rijk) or the
name of Julius Caesar (Kaiser, Keizer, Kaysar, Czar, etc.). See (Foster 2015: 34-37).
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this meaning which survived the fall of Rome and influenced the imagination of ‘empire’ among the
surviving intellectuals of post-Roman Europe.
Empire in European thought

Empire and Europe go hand-in-hand. The history of Europe and the history of ‘empire’ – either within
Europe or carried overseas by Europeans – are synonymous. In every age, Europeans have looked back
to the imagined glories or horrors of the recent and distant past and tried to either imitate or shun the
actions of their ancestors (Smith 2005). This concept is still visible today. In the twenty-first century,
‘empire’ is a dirty word. Although a growing number of scholars are attempting to rehabilitate
Europeans’ colonial histories, which were always carrot and stick rather than just stick, the word
‘empire’ still conjures up the memory, real or imagined, of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-
century Europeans and their twisted philosophy of progress alongside (and through) slavery, plunder,
and genocide. To (most of) those Europeans, ‘empire’ was not a dirty word; instead it conjured up
imaginations of the order, peace, and civilisation brought by the Romans, who later Europeans so
desperately tried to imitate. This is a crude representation but it is sufficient to demonstrate how not
only the meaning, but the connotation, of empire oscillates through history. This is the phenomenon
which medieval philosophers called translatio imperii or transfer of power/legitimacy, believing that
the status of ‘civilisation’ was passed like a torch from one society to the next (Ullman 1965; Davis
1970; Le Goff 1988; Nederman and Watson 1993; Pagden 1998; Armitage 1998). This is the essence
of empire – not a universal taxonomy nor a recent historical phase, but a specifically European
imagination of the right and responsibility to rule, handed down through time.
To understand the idea of imperium as a status passed along in time, it is necessary to
understand two points. First, the transformation of the Roman world as paganism was replaced by
Christianity (Bowersock, Brown and Grabar 1999). Second, the subsequent medieval struggle for
political prestige between the inheritors of Rome – the Franks in the west and the Byzantines in the
east.
First, the religious change. As the Roman world adopted Christianity, early Christian thinkers
with influence over the Roman government – such as Saint Jerome, Augustine of Hippo, and Ambrose
of Milan – theorised that God’s divine plan for the universe required a single, universal rule in Heaven
(the Kingdom of God, represented by the Church) mirrored by a single, universal rule on Earth (the
Kingdom of Man, represented by the Roman government). Elements of Scripture, notably the Book of
Daniel (2:7-8) and the Revelation of Saint John (13), supported the concept that this single, universal
rule on Earth had been passed from earlier civilisations such as Babylon and Assyria, to Alexander the
Great’s Greece, and finally to Rome, as part of God’s plan (Fichtenau 1964). Therefore, according to
this view, the imperium wielded by the Romans was universal, legitimate, and supreme; not just a state,
but a status.
11
This raises the second point. Just who were the ‘Romans’? Although the Roman state had been
established by Italians, the Latin-speaking western inhabitants of the Roman world and the richer, more
numerous, Greek-speaking eastern inhabitants quickly developed into separate civilisations within the
same empire. So much so that in the fourth century the Roman world legally split into East and West,
each ruled by its own imperator, and each society jealously claiming to be the true ‘Romans’ and true
holders of imperium. Bankrupt, besieged by barbarians, and torn apart by civil wars, the Western Roman
world rapidly declined in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. When the last Western imperator in Rome
abdicated in AD 476, the Eastern imperator in Constantinople became the legal, de jure ruler of the
whole Roman world.6 And as the Romans believed that they had the right and God-given responsibility
to rule the entire planet, the Eastern imperator was imagined to be God’s sole political representative;
the one true imperator romanorum.
As the Early Middle Ages progressed, the imperators of the East treated the Germanic and
Frankish kings, who had carved out barbarian kingdoms from the ruins of the Western Roman Empire,
as their subordinates. This awkward diplomacy was made worse as West and East were increasingly
separated by differences between Germanic and Greek cultures, and by growing ecclesiastical rivalry
between the Pope (the most powerful figurehead remaining in the West) and the Eastern Church. These
tensions grew worse until they culminated in the resurrection of the concept of universal imperium on
Christmas Day 800 AD, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne, King of the Franks, as Imperator
gubernans imperium Romanorum – Emperor governing the empire of the Romans. Although ‘the
imperial crown brought with it not a single new subject or soldier, nor an acre of new territory’ (Norwich
1998: 55), it did bring the crucial element of ‘empire’ – status as the sole, legitimate guardian of
civilisation.
Charlemagne’s coronation was most likely staged as a public statement that universal power
had shifted back to the West. The Byzantines objected, and throughout the medieval period the
Byzantines and the descendants of Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperors, were locked in a constant
struggle for status as the one universal power on Earth which mirrored the one universal power in
Heaven. At the same time the realm created by Charlemagne – the Holy Roman Empire (Sacrum
Imperium Romanorum / Heiliges Römisches Reich) – was imagined by medieval philosophers as
superior in status and legitimacy to the other kingdoms of Europe. According to medieval philosophy
the Reich had inherited the imperium of the Romans, and therefore all kings and princes were
diplomatically subordinate to the Kaiser (Caesar) ruling the Reich; the one legitimate universal power
6
The Eastern Roman Empire, generally known as ‘Byzantium’. We retrospectively refer to the ‘Byzantines’ and
the ‘Byzantine Empire’, but nobody at the time called them this. To everyone, they were the Rhomaoian – the
Romans. See (Foster 2015).
12
over the world, chosen by God. 7 Meanwhile from Constantinople, the dying Byzantine civilisation
continued to claim that they were the one legitimate universal power, chosen by God.
This is the essence of ‘empire’. Not a state, but a status. The imagination that a political power
is universal, legitimate (as the guardian of civilisation), the inheritor of a grand, even divine, mission to
unite peoples under a single banner, superior to all competing governments, and a belief that the
‘empire’ possesses both the right and the responsibility to rule. This is the meaning which the word
empire had acquired by the late Middle Ages. When the Byzantine civilisation collapsed in the 1450s,8
its fall also closed the trade lanes carrying silks and spices from China into Europe. Europeans began
seeking a sea route to China. With them, they carried this meaning of imperium as ‘supreme power’, an
idea they maintained as Europeans encountered the non-European world.
Empire beyond Europe

Scholars who use empire as a taxonomy retrospectively apply the concept to societies which were far
away, in time and space, from the squabbles of Charlemagne and Constantinople which created the
discourse of empire. Ottomans, Japanese, Achaemenids, Zulus, Neo-Assyrians, Ashantis and Incas –
all of these and far more have been described and analysed as ‘empires’. Calling them ‘empires’ not
only assumes that peoples completely unaware of each others’ existence created exactly the same
taxonomy of state, but ironically, it is the imposition of a specifically Western imagination onto global
history and political sociology, demanding that the non-Western world adapts and conforms to an
assumed Western norm.
Perhaps the most dangerous consequence of treating empire as a taxonomy is assuming that it
existed outside of Western political philosophy and Western historiography. It did not. There are rough
analogies and perhaps vague equivalents outside of Western history, if certain words and concepts are
translated in certain ways. But assuming that empire is a taxonomy, a template, which can be applied
to the non-Western world and pre-Western history, is an ironically imperialist conceit. It is not possible
here to examine every non-Western society which Westerners have called empire. But it is possible to
identify a recurring theme.
As medieval Europeans set sail to find a new route to Asia, merchants, missionaries and
diplomats encountered societies which had previously been only vague rumours in the west, or were
utterly unknown to Europeans. European explorers therefore encountered political structures and
political philosophies which were completely alien. The result was that Europeans tried to apply their
own political framework from Europe, consisting of a tiered system of principalities and kingdoms,
7
Medieval philosophers called this the Reichsidee – ‘the imperial idea’. Like empire, reich is one of those
words which, due to recent history, has become unpalatable. But to avoid confusion over ‘empire’, Reich is used
here as shorthand for the Holy Roman Empire.
8
The Byzantines’ self-anointed status as the successor of Rome was passed to their ally, Russia, and the contest
for prestige continued until the Holy Roman Empire collapsed in 1806 and the Russian Empire in 1917.
13
with the Reich at the top. Subsequently, Europeans imagined non-European political systems according
to this concept and hierarchy not because the concept and hierarchy existed outside Europe, but because
Europeans lacked any other means of reference. The consequence is that non-European concepts and
non-European societies were described according to European concepts and slotted into a system which
had no parallel beyond Europe.
As an example, consider the concept of ‘Chinese Empire’. In Chinese, the state was expressed
simply as 秦 (Qin; ‘Lands of the Qin’), 中国 (Zhōngguó; ‘Middle/Central Kingdom’), or 天下
(Tiānxià; ‘Under the Heavens’). These words evolved either from ethnic placenames (in the case of
Qin) or from concepts rooted in Confucianist philosophy, which did not merge politics and geography
like imperium in Roman and Christian philosophy. The ruler of China was termed 中華帝國 (T‘ien
tẑu; ‘Son of Heaven’), 騰展佛葉 (Téng zhǎn fú yè; ‘The Current Buddha’); or 萬歲爺 (Wàn suì yé;
‘Master of Ten Thousand Years’). These are not even vague equivalents of the military title imperator
– they are completely different. But Europeans, lacking any other frame of reference, simply termed
him ‘Emperor’ and thereby imposed Western concepts onto a completely alien political structure. The
theme continues in ruling philosophy. The closest parallel to imperium is the Chinese political
philosophy 天明 (Tiānmíng; ‘Mandate of the Heavens’), which on the surface appears close to the
medieval Christian concept of imperium as universal, divinely-ordained rule – but this is only a
superficial similarity caused by the translation (Xingpei 2006; Lehner 2011). Applying words such as
‘empire’, ‘emperor’, and ‘imperialism’ to China is evidently inaccurate. Not only is it grotesquely
Eurocentric, but the Chinese concepts do not match those meant by Western words. Evidently these
words and the concepts they signify are not simply Chinese equivalents of ‘Emperor/Empire’ but are
independent concepts whose subtleties become obscure when lazily translated into a Western word
(Xingpei 2006; Lehner 2011).
This is not retrospective nitpicking – Europeans at the time were very wary of using the word
‘empire’ but lacked any kind of alternative (Lehner 2011: 143-148). China is not alone in this. The same
phenomenon is found in European accounts of civilisations as diverse as Japan, the Mughals of India,
and the Aztecs of Mexico. When faced with an alien concept, alien political philosophy, and alien
hierarchy, European explorers and historians simply used ‘empire’ as a generic description of an
apparently powerful society. This continues to influence our misleading imagination of empire as a
taxonomy of state, when ‘empire’ ought instead be understood as a specifically European discourse
according to which a political power’s rulers believe they has the sole, legitimate, exclusive, sovereign
right to rule as it is the guardian of civilisation and the standard against which all other societies should
be measured. This discourse of empire remains alive today – in the form of the European Union (Foster
2009, 2013, 2015a, 2015b, 2016).
14
What is Empire?
‘Empire’ cannot be pinned down to a single, static definition as it is a discourse; fluid, dynamic,
polysemic, and evolving in the communications between people spread through time, space, and
culture. Empire has been imagined in numerous ways, not all of which are fully satisfactory. Instead,
‘empire’ is best understood as a discourse – a philosophy, attitude, or mindset according to which a
political entity has the right and the responsibility to rule. This rule is (according to empire) legitimate,
universal, exclusive, inherited from history, and is based on freely-acknowledged inequality. The
‘imperial’ society is assured of its own apparent moral superiority and believes that it is obliged to
extend its rule to those who are not yet fortunate enough to enjoy it.
In addition to what empire is, it is useful to consider what empire is not.
First, empire is not simply a phase in human history and adjunct to capitalism. This is too
deterministic, it conflates ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’, and it relies on an unprovable and untestable
theory that human civilisation progresses through identifiable, inevitable phases. It is also highly
Eurocentric, assuming that Western political sociology is the norm by which all political sociology
should be measured.
Second, empire is not a geopolitical taxonomy defined by a checklist of characteristics. Any
such checklist is arbitrary and depends on the whims and agenda of the writer, and inevitably includes
societies whose people did not consider their rule ‘empire’, while ignoring those societies which openly
claimed to be imperial. This approach is also based on a misleading belief that human society can be
slotted into neat, comparable, measurable categories – it cannot (Cannadine 2005).
Third, empire is not a universal political phenomenon. It is a specifically European imagination
that is restricted to European political sociology, and attempts to use it as a template to understand the
Mongols, the Incas, or the Xhosae is well-meaning but misguided, assuming that the world can be
understood in European terms. Instead of using ‘empire’ to describe non-European societies, perhaps it
is time to start using those societies’ own words, as those words reflect political subtleties that are lost
when scholars crowbar a Western word into non-Western political history.
Fourth, empire is not neutral. It is saturated with the politics of memory, identity, and emotion.
Empire and imperialism – their historical legacies and contemporary forms – are the source of constant
controversy. In the name of empire, peace has been established and prosperity assured. In the name of
empire, entire peoples have been oppressed, dispossessed, and slaughtered. Empire will continue to be
dissected, denounced, and defended into the future. Empire is vague, and so long as it is vague it will
not be neutral.
Fifth and finally, empire remains an integral part of modern civilisation. It is ironic that although
formal ‘empire’ – the idea of universal rule – has ended, its legacies are universally visible. Empire
continues to influence the world, and in the case of a multinational bloc whose leaders pursue a
universal, exclusive rule in Europe – the EU – empire is back.
15
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19

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Russell Foster (forthcoming 2017), ‘Empire’, in William Outhwaite and Stephen Turner (eds.

The Concept of Empire

What empire is not

Empire is not a phase in history

Empire is not a type of state

Empire in European thought

Empire beyond Europe

Century. London: Edward Arnold.

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