Samir Puri - The Shadows of Empire: How Imperial History Shapes Our World

For my grandfather

Kishori Lal Dhiri (19141990)

who spanned three continents and one empire

W e are in the first empire-free millennium in world history since ancient times, but the world remains in the throes of a great imperial hangover. Empires are still shaping the twenty-first century in profound ways through their abiding influences on present generations. The purpose of this book is to identify these legacies and explain why understanding the worlds history of empire can help to unlock many of the most troublesome conundrums in contemporary global affairs.

Even a cursory glance at the news suggests that the world appears to have gone mad or, at the very least, to have lost the semblance of regularity that makes us feel safe. Terrorism, Trump and Brexit have led many people to question the coherence of the Western world; Turkey and Russia slip deeper into authoritarian rule; war tears at the fabric of the Middle East and parts of Africa; a vast exodus of refugees flee for a better shot at life; and all the while Chinas economic tentacles spread further across the globe. Barely one-fifth of our way into the twenty-first century, it is not unreasonable to seek explanations as to what world order means today, and how we can strive towards it.

Why turn to the apparently fusty legacy of empires to explain todays uncertainties? The end of the worlds many empires is no longer at the forefront of our minds, overtaken by more pressing concerns about what lies round the next corner. And yet empires continue to haunt our minds in all manner of ways, stalking our subconscious understanding of who we are and of our place in the world. Empires have helped to construct national identities and carve out geopolitical realities and mentalities that prove hard to escape. This is as true for those whose great-grandparents were imperialists as it is for those whose countries have lived through subjugation and national liberation. Cities, institutions and infrastructure were built in the name of empires. Borders were hastily drawn and populations rearranged. Assets were stripped to enrich the colonizers at the expense of the colonized.

Merely to point out that the past has an influence on the present is too obvious. The real prize is in learning how this influence is being felt, and in working out what we can do to better fathom and manage the wars, terrorism, political shocks and global tensions that dominate our headlines. While this book is rooted in historical experiences, it is fundamentally forward-looking. It is not concerned with extensive retellings of imperial histories, although I will provide some summaries where necessary. Nor will I provide a running commentary on the minutiae of todays turbulent politics. Rather, this book straddles history and current affairs. It asks: how do the lingering half-lives of collapsed empires continue to shape such matters as security, foreign policy, international aid and global commerce today?

I will avoid picking any one national perspective, or picking sides in arguments that either categorically denounce or whitewash imperial legacies. Instead I will embark on a world tour, taking in the many varied post-imperial experiences of Europe, Asia, America, the Middle East and Africa. I will not argue that we are entering a new imperial age. Rather, my argument can be expressed concisely: twenty-first-century world order is a story of many intersecting post-imperial legacies. When these legacies collide, misunderstanding, friction, schism or even war can result.

This book is a plea to have greater awareness, as individuals and nations, of how our varied imperial pasts have contributed to why we see the world in such different ways. Our perceptions and beliefs concerning empires are coloured by our own inherited backgrounds, which is why there are rarely right or wrong answers to the questions that empires have thrown up.

Hence my own motivations for writing this book. My family roots are in Britains former East African and Indian colonies, which means that my relatives were on the receiving end of British colonialism. Generations later, no matter how assimilated I might feel in contemporary Britain, I retain some identification with non-white regions of the world once subjugated by the British Empire. Innate, unspoken and familial, this is more an awareness of my roots than the stuff of rebellion. Indeed, I took a patriotic career path and signed up to serve the British Foreign Office in a role that would certainly have been closed to my ancestors.

The very fact that I could join the Foreign Office, and work on international security issues, shows that Britain has progressed substantially in the intervening decades since my family arrived after decolonization. Ethnic minorities in modern Britain can expect to receive far warmer welcomes than their parents did, which has meant that even though I was born in ethnically diverse and impoverished east London, I too could become an Englishman, just so long as I followed the cultural cues. Later, as a civil servant, I was proud to serve my country, but the experience left me with lingering questions around identity both my own identity and Britains national identity in a rapidly changing world, given what seem to me to be the lingering anachronisms in the mentalities of its elite institutions of state and academia.

And there my thoughts might have stopped, but for war erupting in Ukraine in 2014. I spent a year there, monitoring what was happening on the front line as part of an international diplomatic mission. We were not peacekeepers, so we had no means to stop the fighting, only to try and prevent things escalating further. Russia was clearly an aggressor, destabilizing a country that was part of its historical empire, with the goal of preventing Ukraines government from drawing closer to the European Union a club of democratic states that, despite lacking the motivations of the empires of old, had acquired its own empire-like traits, not least in its incessant expansion.

I was outraged that Russia would resort to war to stake its claims for influence in Ukraine. But the experience also convinced me how vital it is to tell different post-imperial stories, because they all matter in our diverse world especially when they clash.

Returning from Ukraine, I became an academic, lecturing on the subject of wars past and present. Writing this book has afforded me insights into how people around the world interpret their inherited experiences of empire, and this forms the basis of what follows.

It is a matter of great significance to live in a world without empires. By this, I mean the end of the formal empires of the past, where an outwardly expanding metropolitan core gobbled up territories via conquest. Nowadays, this kind of formal empire seems to be extinct. While certain countries will always be more powerful than others, the outright subjugation of one by another is now rare. Iraq annexed Kuwait in 1990, but was kicked out by a US-led military coalition a year later. Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and while it was too strong to dislodge, this has not yet set a precedent for others. Rather, the ways in which powerful states dominate others have evolved to become more like informal empires of political and economic influence.

If empires had not existed, then it would have been necessary to invent something like them, to foster and upscale human progress. Empires have been vessels for order, modernity, culture and conquest since ancient times. Throughout history, civilizations have encountered one another at different stages of technological and political development. It is from here that the pattern of people imposing their will upon others arises. Some empires were notoriously more wicked than others, but the pattern itself holds true.