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The Concept of Empire
From: London School of Economics and Political Science
| By:
Dominic Lieven |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 The history of both Europe and Asia can be seen as an unending succession of empires. Yet, from Assyrian domination in the sixth century BCE to the Soviet bloc in the twentieth century, the definition and experience of empire has meant very different things. In this interview with Fathom, Dominic Lieven, professor of Russian government at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the author of Empire and himself the offspring of the inhabitants of various empires, reflects on the contested territory that is the concept of empire. |
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| Dominic Lieven explains his definition of "empire." | |
Fathom: Can you explain how you think about the concept of empire? |
Dominic Lieven: Firstly, many people and many scholars have very different concepts of empire. But what I mean by an empire is first and foremost a very great power--but a very great power of a certain sort. In other words, a power which rules over huge territories and a multitude of peoples and one which is not legitimised by the formal consent of the people it governs. This seems to me an interesting way of thinking about empire, because managing multinationality and enormous space has always been among the greatest challenges facing any empire. |
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| Dominic Lieven discusses whether empires need to rule their dominions directly. | |
Fathom: What about the actual role of the empire? It seems that there has to be some sort of direct rule over the dominion for a power to be classified as an empire. Or can it still be so through indirect rule? |
Lieven: Most empires in history have ruled certain territories directly and others indirectly, to a greater or lesser degree. There is usually an outer periphery of each empire in which the imperial power may have a predominant influence but isn't really in a position to dictate directly to local rulers and indeed doesn't feel any need to do so. In a sense, this leads you back to how you define an empire and the whole issue of whether empires still exist in the contemporary world. For example, the United States, although imperial in certain respects, might in the modern era find it more efficient to use power in a way which isn't traditionally imperial--for instance, by direct rule over an alien territory. So again, it comes down to definitions as much as anything. |
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| Dominic Lieven on the different meanings and connotations of the word empire. | |
Fathom: How has the term been used over time and across cultures? I think we in Britain have a very specific idea of empire which we tend to use to talk about our sense of national self and the empire that we once were. Do you think that changes drastically if you look at other cultures? |
Lieven: It certainly does. The British have a particular, although not entirely uniform, conception of empire rooted in their specific past. After all, within Britain itself there are now and always have been very different views on the virtue or lack thereof in empire. This is even more the case in Germany, where the word for empire is Reich and of course Reich can be taken to mean the First, Second or Third Reich, all of which were very different types of polity. |
People who support empire can be as different as Otto von Habsburg, a member of the European parliament, who thinks of empire as the old Holy Roman Empire, a very decentralised community based on certain common legal and ethical principles with a very loose system of central government, a polity which he believes can be turned into an effective modern form in contemporary Europe. Indeed, he sees the European Union to some extent as the descendant of that tradition of empire. |
Obviously, there is another set of conceptions linked to the word Reich. It is entirely different and comes down from the Protestant Prussian historians of the nineteenth century, and is much more to do with an empire which was defined as a single polity embodying German power and culture and which to some extent was taken over and of course corrupted by the Nazis. So Reich in Germany has endless different meanings, and people could fight forever about it. You can actually find yourself arguing at complete cross purposes, both across cultures and within a single culture as well as across eras, about empire simply because what you mean by empire is quite different from what the people you are talking to mean by it. |
If you use the word "empire" now, it is virtually always, at least in contemporary political debate, an insult. If you call any state an empire, it generally means you do not like it. It also implies that you think it is out of date and inappropriate, quite apart from being immoral. One hundred years ago, empire had far more positive connotations. If you go 100 years prior to that, things were more mixed. It had positive connotations for some people and very negative ones for others. So even within the Anglophone political tradition, empire and its various meanings and connotations have shifted enormously over time. |
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| Dominic Lieven describes how he became interested in the subject of empire. | |
Fathom: How did you become interested in the concept of empire? |
Lieven: I think it was the collapse of the Soviet Union as much as anything else. I am, after all, primarily a Russianist, and so I was compelled to study this great polity disintegrating in front of my nose. Because I am a historian, and first and foremost a historian of tsarist Russia, I was forced to make the comparison especially as the last decades of imperial Russia were my natural frame of reference. To be perfectly honest, I believe it was a rather better frame of reference for understanding the last years of the Soviet regime than the framework from which most Sovietologists drew. Fairly enough, they found it very difficult to comprehend that the polity to which they had devoted their lives was actually in the process of disappearing. I had always cultivated an amateur interest in other imperial polities and it was (from my viewpoint) a series of happy coincidences which enabled me to combine long-held amateurish interest in these empires, comparisons with tsarist Russia, and the collapse of the Soviet empire which was occurring right in front of my nose. |
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| Dominic Lieven talks about his family connections with various empires. | |
Fathom: Your ancestors are Russian or related to the Russian aristocracy and seem to be very much a product of various empires. Can you talk a little about this? |
Lieven: They were Russian in the broad sense of the word. They were ethnically very mixed. Most people would have called my father's family Balts, implying that they were Baltic Germans. This was only partly true. My mother's family was also very much involved in empire--in this case, the British empire--and in some ways rather like the Baltic Germans in the Russian empire in that she was of Catholic Irish origin, though partly French, therefore only equivocally British. However, parts of her family were involved in the running of the British empire as administrators or as soldiers. She was herself born in India. Again, on her side of the family there were all sorts of ambiguities, both as regards Irish attitudes towards what was a British empire and from more traditional attitudes in the family, which were pro-French and had a very strong sense of Catholic and even Jacobite solidarity. |
Her own grandfather, after the death of her grandmother, his first wife, married an Indian woman, and there was a sad and spectacular tragedy in the family when his Indian wife and one of my grandmother's sisters were blown up by Bengali terrorists, as they would have been called then by the British. It was an accident, but it certainly made a big impact on my grandmother's life. I was very close to her. I was also very close to her half sister, who was the only survivor of that second marriage. And therefore there were all sorts of romantic and fascinating stories coming down from both sides of the family but also a great many ambiguities and very personal tragedies, which of course added a certain spice and interest to the story from the point of view of a child and adolescent, if only because there were certain subjects one was not allowed to bring up, for instance, the death of my great-aunt's mother and her own experience of racial prejudice. |
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| Dominic Lieven surveys some of the leading scholars in this field. | |
Fathom: Considering some of the other leading scholars in the field, who do you think would be important and relevant reading for somebody interested in this area? |
Lieven: Most of the scholars in the field are historians of specific empires, and they are more numerous than leaves on a tree. Many of them are absolutely splendid. I could never conceivably have approached this subject or written the book I did without borrowing from them enormously. The academic who was of most immediate service to me as regards the British empire was Christopher Bayly in Cambridge, who is professor of imperial history there. But there are legions of historians of specific empires. |
Getting people who actually talked about the concept of empire and made comparisons is a great deal more difficult and problematic. The best-known social scientist who has tried to compare empires would be Michael Doyle, or, if you are talking about a rather different type of empire, you would have to first look to Shmoel Eisenstadt. He is more interested in the traditional great bureaucratic empires such as ancient China and the great empires in the Middle East, whereas Michael Doyle is more interested in the modern West European maritime empires. |
The best-known historian who compares empires is Paul Kennedy, though his book on the rise and fall of the great powers was not specifically about empire and was therefore somewhat narrower than what I was trying to do. Narrower does not necessarily means any worse; he was studying a narrower range of subjects than I was when looking at empire. |
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| Dominic Lieven discusses Paul Kennedy's thesis on the rise and fall of empires. | |
Fathom: Would you say that Paul Kennedy considers power primarily in economic terms? And how does this tally with your own thinking? |
Lieven: For Paul Kennedy, economics is the single most significant element in power. There is a lot to be said for this. However, when I try to look at power and to analyse the rise and fall of empires in terms of power, I actually stay closer to Michael Mann, who talks about four sources of social power, of which economic is one, military is another, political is a third and cultural/ideological is a fourth. To those I would definitely add two more of my own, one of which is geography or geopolitics and the other of which is demography. So even when I am looking at the question of power, I would want to be less monocausal, more all-inclusive than Paul Kennedy. |
Your approach to the subject partly depends where you are coming from. If you are someone who has spent his or her life studying Russia, and above all the Soviet Union, it is not easy (if you're talking about the decline and fall of the Soviet Union) to leave out the question of ideological power. It is ultimately the failure of socialism in its Soviet definition which in my view is the biggest single cause for the collapse of the system. In a sense, ideology includes the economy, because the socialist command economy is rooted in ideology. It is not rooted in Russian history. It is a specific conception of how a modern economy ought to be run in order to maximise the creation of wealth and make its distribution most just and efficient. That is absolutely at the core of the whole Marxist-Leninist vision, and that is precisely why the failure of the economy had the most disastrous effect on the self-belief of the elites and the legitimacy of the whole setup. |
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