James Laxer - Empire

Slavery Today

Kevin Bales & Becky Cornell

The Betrayal of Africa

Gerald Caplan

Sex for Guys

Manne Forssberg

Democracy

James Laxer

Empire

James Laxer

Oil

James Laxer

Cities

John Lorinc

Pornography

Debbie Nathan

Being Muslim

Haroon Siddiqui

Series Editor

Jane Springer

Genocide

Jane Springer

Climate Change

Shelley Tanaka

Copyright 2006 by James Laxer

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press

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Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West

1700 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710

We acknowledge for their nancial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the Ontario Arts Council. Special thanks to the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloging in Publication

Laxer, James

Empire / by James Laxer.

(Groundwork Guides)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-88899-706-7 (bound)

ISBN-10: 0-88899-706-X (bound)

ISBN-13: 978-0-88899-707-4 (pbk.)

ISBN-10: 0-88899-707-8 (pbk.)

1. Imperialism. 2. United StatesForeign relations2001-. 3. United StatesMilitary policy. I. Title. II. Series.

JZ1480.L39 2006 327.7309051 C2006-902733-1

To Julia and Benjamin

I am indebted to Patsy Aldana, who came up with the exciting concept for this series of books and proposed this book to me. Once again I am involved in a publishing venture with my good friend Patsy, a delight for me.

Jane Springer has done a wonderful job as editor, making suggestions to improve the structure and ow of the manuscript and honing its details. My literary agent, Jackie Kaiser, as always, has been there with support and encouragement.

Thanks to my partner, Sandy, for allowing yet another project to be a constant presence in our lives.

I am grateful to the team at Groundwood, Nan Froman, Michael Solomon and Sarah Quinn, for the wonderful job theyve done with this book and the series. And thanks to Leon Grek for the excellent maps.

Empires have existed for thousands of years. Indeed, the rst empires came into being at the very dawn of civilization. The imperial form of political and social organization has been one of the most persistent ways to govern societies, and continues to be extremely important in our world at the beginning of the twenty-rst century. Because empires take many different forms, a simple working denition is needed at the outset.

An empire exists when one nation, tribe or society exercises long-term domination over one or more external nations, tribes or societies. Through that domination the imperial power, or empire, is able to determine many of the key political, social, economic and cultural outcomes in the dominated society or societies. And that is the critical point the ability of the empire to determine what happens, the outcomes in the societies under its control, is what distinguishes an empire from other forms of political organization. Those who hold power at the center of an empire typically derive economic benets, access to important resources, control of militarily strategic territory and other forms of power as a consequence of imperial arrangements.

Typically, we have an image in our minds of an empire as an old-fashioned arrangement under which one power, say Rome or Britain, conquers and occupies the lands of many peoples and rules them from an imperial capital. Without Romes imperial legions or Britains navy such an empire could not have existed. Laws made in London or promulgated by the emperor in Rome were enforced across the empire. The Union Jack, the British ag, ew over the territories of the empire. This kind of formal empire has existed many times in different parts of the world. In addition to formal empires, however, there are informal empires. Informal empires much of the British Empire was informal exist when the imperial power does not actually annex the territories it dominates. In those territories, there is a local government in place, which may be national or tribal, and in theory, the laws of the imperial power are not in force there.

To prevent the Egyptian government from defaulting on bonds issued on its public debt and held by Europeans, and to secure the Suez Canal, the British military occupied Egypt in 1882, making the country effectively a part of the British Empire. British troops and ships were garrisoned in Egypt. Following the British seizure of control, Egypt was to all intents and purposes ruled by a British appointee whose modest title was British Agent and Consul-General. In theory, though, Egypt had its own ruler, and to make matters more complicated still, it remained a province in the Ottoman Empire, whose capital was Istanbul. But the Ottoman Empire was in decline and its sultan had no real authority in Egypt. In this case, there was an arrangement in which the old formal imperial power was collapsing, a new national Egyptian government was in place, but the crucial decision-making power lay in the hands of another imperial power, which in theory was not the ruler of the country. Empires, this illustrates, are not as simple as we may have imagined. And they come in many different shapes and sizes.

Today the American Empire is the worlds greatest power, universally recognized as the only superpower of our era. It is almost entirely an informal empire and the label empire is one that American political leaders never use to describe American global power. While for European states in the past, the word empire was positively embraced as in the cases of the British, French or German empires for Americans, the word has always had negative connotations. This is because in the American Revolution, the founding fathers of the United States and the patriots they led proclaimed that they were ghting against the British Empire and on behalf of the right, not only of Americans, but of all peoples, to be free of imperial rule. Later in this book, we will return to the case of the United States and make the argument that today there is an American Empire and that its policies determine economic, political, military and cultural outcomes for very large parts of the world.

The rst empires came into being with the establishment of the earliest civilizations. We dont know the names of those empires and we have few records of their existence. What we can conclude, however, is that empire came into being alongside another institution with a very long pedigree slavery. Slavery and empire came into existence in the same historical epoch and for much the same reasons.