Robert Aldrich - The Age of Empires

ROBERT ALDRICH is Professor of European History at the University of Sydney, where he teaches and researches aspects of modern European and colonial history. He is the author and editor of several books on colonial history, including Banished Potentates: Dethroning and exiling indigenous monarchs under British and French colonial rule, 18151955 and, as co-editor, Crowns and Colonies: European Monarchies and Overseas Empires. He is also the editor of Gay Life and Culture: A World History and author of Gay Life Stories, both published by Thames & Hudson.

Utopia

Great Empires of Asia

Histories of Nations

Can Globalization Succeed?

Great Cities in History

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ROBERT ALDRICH

American schoolchildren for long recited the mnemonic celebrating the discovery of the New World by chanting: In fourteen hundred and ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Their British counterparts celebrated Empire Day, and French pupils reeled off the poetic names Chandernagor, Mah, Karikal, Pondichry, Yanaon of the French enclaves in India. Spaniards retained memories of the heroic conquistadors, and nurtured relations with the South American republics considered part of a large Hispanic family of nations. Camoens saga of the Portuguese discoverers, The Lusiads, was as famous to Lusophones as Kiplings or Conrads novels to Anglophones. Stanley and Livingstone, Brazza and Lyautey stood tall in the colonial gallery of great men of history. The heritage of trade in the East Indies suffused Dutch culture, from Delft ware modelled on Chinese porcelain to the searing novel of colonialism in Java, Multatuli. The Germans and Italians were less familiar with their short-lived overseas empires (though some Italians yearned for the grandeur of ancient Rome), while Americans and Russians often claimed, contrary to the evidence, that the United States and the Soviet Union were not imperialistic states. The disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires obscured some of the imperial dimensions of those deceased states.

Nevertheless, the colonial world, receding further into the past with each decade, has returned to the consciousness of both the former colonizers and the formerly colonized: in recent years, partly thanks to perspectives introduced by the new cultural history, and the approaches of post-modernism, gender studies, cultural studies, subaltern studies and post-colonialism. A spate of films ranging from cinematic versions of E.M. Forsters A Passage to India to Marguerite Duras Indochine brought colonialism to the big screen and a wider audience, while television series such as Queen Victorias Empire presented colonialism in prime time. Anniversaries the 500th anniversary of Columbus voyage, then the anniversary of Vasco da Gamas expedition in the 1990s provided the occasion for celebrations, contestations and scholarly reassessments of Spanish and Portuguese expansion, followed by commemorations of the 400th anniversary of the setting up of the Dutch East India Company in 2002. The bicentenary of British settlement in Australia in 1988, the fiftieth anniversary of the independence of Indonesia in the 1990s, fifty years since the end of the Franco-Indochinese War in 2004: all these dates gave opportunities for revisiting the colonial period, a backward glance sometimes tinged with fond remembrances of colonies past, at other times with recriminations at the sometimes still officially unacknowledged exactions of colonialism.

Empire, emperor or imperial in a word association game would conjure up a variety of images. Some might think of the Roman empire with its roads and aqueducts, the Forum and the Colosseum, toga-clad legionnaires and gladiators. To others, the words would evoke figures from European continental empires, Napoleon crowning himself in Paris, a bemedalled Austrian archduke or a Russian tsarina. Still others might picture an exotic potentate the glamorously infamous Dowager Empress Cixi of China, the long-lived Emperor Hirohito of Japan or the ill-fated Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. Asked about empire, however, many would immediately think of the colonial empires: Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama, planters in the West Indies and spice-traders in the East Indies, pith-helmeted adventurers hacking their way through equatorial forests in Africa or grand memsahibs presiding over tiffin in India. Interrogated about what empire means, respondents especially those not of European heritage might also speak of slavery, indentured labour, transported prisoners, conquest and war, and genocide.

Empire is not an easy word to define, though it may be seen at its most basic as the rule by a particular group in a political centre over a diverse and different set of other, often distant countries and peoples, generally as a result of military conquest. But if empire is not a precise word or an easily identifiable political regime, neither is it a colourless word. Promoters of empire, in whatever time and place, championed its merits and the benefits that it brought to both the colonizing and the colonized. Anti-colonialists, by contrast, saw in imperial rule humiliating battlefield defeat, unwarranted political domination, economic exploitation, social disenfranchisement and cultural alienation. Present-day observers are apt to take a more anti-colonial than pro-colonial perspective on empire, though a nostalgia for imperial days can be discerned in some quarters, and there have been attempts to rehabilitate imperial actions. If few would raise three cheers for imperialism, a generation after most European colonies gained independence, whether colonial expansion might be given one (or even two) cheers is a matter of historical debate and public disagreement. A comparative study of empires, across continents and historical periods, sheds light on colonial ambitions and accomplishments, and on imperial achievements and failures.

Empire is one of the key topics in human history, and tracing its origins involves returning to the earliest historical epochs. The ancient Egyptian pyramids were constructed for empire-builders, pharaohs who conquered Nubia and used coerced labour to raise their mausolea. The biblical Nebuchadnezzar ruled an empire in Babylon. The Greeks established colonies of settlers around the Mediterranean, and the Hellenistic Alexander the Great pushed his empire towards the Himalayas and the Ganges. The Roman empire stretched from the borders of Scotland to Syria, from Spain to the Black Sea. So profound was the Caesars imperial imprint on the world that later colonizers would study their writings and try to emulate their deeds. Roman administration, many subsequent colonial theorists argued, provided a template for the rule of distant provinces and different peoples, while the highways and trading networks of Romes empire survived as models for economic development. The spread of Latin formed an integral part of the classical civilizing mission, and the granting of prized Roman citizenship showed how worthy men from barbarous lands might be assimilated into the ruling body politic.