Imperialism: Lessons From History
By Victor Davis Hanson
Wayne and Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History,
Hillsdale College
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on the
Regent Seven Seas Mariner on June 30, 2023, during a Hillsdale College
educational cruise from Istanbul to Athens.
The word “imperialism” comes from the Latin word imperium.
It refers to a nation or a state implanting its rule on other states, treating
them as subordinates and in an inferior fashion. Some suggest today that
America is behaving imperialistically—we do, after all, have some 600 military
bases around the world. So it is worth recalling some historical examples of
imperialism to understand what the idea entails.
Looking at empires through history, we can identify several
things that most of them have in common. One is that their leaders often say or
seem to believe that their imperialist policies have little to do with
self-interest.
We can see an example of such denial in Pericles’ famous
funeral oration as recorded in the second book of Thucydides’ history of the
Peloponnesian War. The speech was delivered in 431 B.C., at the height of the
Athenian Empire. Athens was expropriating tribute from its subject states and
had built the Parthenon, the Propylaea, and soon the Erechtheion on the
Acropolis. In other words, the Athenians were diverting a good portion of their
allies’ tribute paid to them—which was supposed to be devoted to mutual
defense—to enhancing their city. And what does the imperialist leader Pericles
have to say of his grand visions? He calls Athens “the school of Hellas” and
proclaims that it will enjoy “the admiration of the present and succeeding
ages.”
Athens won’t need a poet like Homer to memorialize it,
Pericles continues. Why? Because, he says, “we have forced every sea and land
to be the highway of our daring, and everywhere, whether for evil or for good,
have left imperishable monuments behind us.” In other words, Athens is proud of
its mission to uplift the other Greek city-states—by force.
Likewise with the Roman Republic and Empire. Caesar went
into Gaul in 58 B.C. and in a nine-year period killed perhaps one million Gauls
and enslaved another million. And yet in Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and in later
Roman literature, we read that Rome brought civilization to Gaul. The elite of
Gaul were to wear purple togas, enjoy habeas corpus, and have aqueducts, so it
was all for the good.
Similarly with sixteenth century imperialist Spain, which
variously sent a force of 1,500 soldiers into Mexico in 1519 under Hernán
Cortés. In two years they destroyed Tenochtitlán, ancient Mexico City, wiping
out probably 200,000 people. And was the purpose to gain land, gold, and riches
to help in the fight against Protestantism and Islam in Europe? Not exactly,
according to Bernal Díaz, who was on the expedition. Rather it was more to
convert souls to Christianity and to stamp out sodomy, cannibalism, and human
sacrifice. To be sure, the conquest had these effects. But were the death and
destruction really all for the sake of the conquered?
“The White Man’s Burden,” a long controversial poem by
Rudyard Kipling, published in 1899, was addressed by a citizen of imperial
England to the United States, which was currently fighting what many saw as an
imperialist war in the Philippines. One of the poem’s stanzas reads, “Take up
the White Man’s burden / In patience to abide / To veil the threat of terror /
And check the show of pride / By open speech and simple / An hundred times made
plain / To seek another’s profit / And work another’s gain.” This sense of duty
sums up the common imperialist mindset: imperialism is a burden, undertaken
reluctantly and for the good of the uncivilized. There is little self-serving
about it.
Another trait empires have in common is obviously their
dependence for enforcement on some type of superior military power—most often a
navy. True, the Spartans controlled a land empire, as did the Soviet Union; but
those empires were confined with self-imposed limitations. If a state becomes a
naval power, as Alfred Thayer Mahan pointed out in his classic works on the
influence of sea power on history, then it can move troops around to the rear
of an enemy, impose boycotts, or modulate trade and supplies to help allies or
hurt recalcitrant colonies.
The greatest empires have always been maritime. The
Mediterranean, which the Romans referred to as mare nostrum or “our sea,” has
been the seat of empires throughout history because of its geography—it is a
convenient sea for imperialists in the middle of three land masses. The British
Empire, of course, was entirely a result of British naval superiority.
A third characteristic empires share in common—perhaps the
most interesting and thoughtworthy—is that for all the supposed advantages to
be had through imperial rule, a historical case can be made that it has never
quite penciled out. The costs of control seem to outweigh the benefits, even
though—human nature being what it is—the imperialists tend to be oblivious to
the expenses, perhaps because of the power and grandeur that come with empire.
One reason imperial policy seems superficially advantageous
in terms of costs and benefits is the seduction of absolute power, as implied
by the Caledonian (Scottish) nationalist Calgacus in 85 A.D. As recounted in
Tacitus’s history, Calgacus complains of the Romans in addressing his troops:
“To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make
a desert and call it peace.” In other words, if imperial powers can’t conquer a
country and bring it into the fold peacefully, they wipe it out as a signal to
others. So much for benefits to either the imperialist power or its subjects.
One corollary to the unprofitability of empire is that it
tends to corrupt the character of the imperial power.
The Athenian Empire was based on the idealism of 180 subject
city-states being offered the advantages of democracy. City-states conquered by
Athens were required to become democracies—and what can be wrong with that?
But in 415 B.C., a large Athenian naval force went to the
island of Melos and demanded that the Melians submit and begin paying tribute.
Thucydides recounts what ensued, the famous Melian Dialogue, in the fifth book
of his history: You’re either with us or against us, the Athenians threatened,
and if you are against us we will destroy you. The Melians countered that they
should be able to remain free and to maintain neutrality in Athens’ war with
Sparta. The Athenians rejected the idea of neutrality. The Melians further
argued that destroying Melos would result in anti-Athenian sentiment in Greece.
The Athenians replied that it would instead result in fear and awe at Athens’
power. In the end, the Melians refused to submit. Following a siege, the
Athenians massacred the adult men of Melos and enslaved the women and children.
As an aside, when I was 18 and just beginning my study of
the classics, I was astonished when I read in Thucydides that when the
Peloponnesian War broke out, most of the Greeks wanted Sparta to win. Was not
Athens a democracy and Sparta an oligarchy? Athens was the home of Socrates,
Pericles, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and Sophocles. Sparta was rural and backward
with no navy or beautiful temples or walls. It represented Doric severity as
opposed to the Ionic cosmopolitanism of Athens. Why would the Greeks prefer
that Sparta win? I didn’t understand the anomaly when I was 18, but the simple
answer soon became clear: Sparta was not then imperial—or at least not as
imperial as Athens. Empires like to think of themselves as having a lot of
friends, but they are often naive in forgetting the depth of the ill-will they
incur.
As if the destruction of Melos wasn’t enough to show the
hubristic corruption of imperial Athens, the following summer, Athens sent a
force of 40,000 troops to Syracuse to conquer or destroy the largest democracy
in the Greek world. The Sicilian Expedition, as it came to be known, was a
complete disaster. Thucydides says at the end of his seventh book, “they were
destroyed, as the saying is, with a total destruction, their fleet, their
army—everything was destroyed, and few out of many returned home.” For all
practical purposes—although the Peloponnesian War would go on for another nine
years—the Sicilian debacle marked the end of the Athenian Empire and
illustrated the follies of unchecked imperialism.
It can be argued that the Roman Republic underwent a similar
kind of imperial corruption. In historian Arnold Toynbee’s two-volume work,
Hannibal’s Legacy, he argued that the period in which Rome fought the three
Punic Wars—an era during which Rome achieved mastery of almost the entire
Western Mediterranean—was ultimately calamitous for Rome because it undermined
Rome’s republican habits, virtues, and character.
The Roman people, Toynbee argued, especially the independent
yeoman farmers, were sent off for long periods to fight as legionaries in
places like Spain and Numidia (present day Libya). Their places were taken by
some two million slaves from conquered provinces who were shipped back to
Italy. Huge amounts of money extracted from conquered lands poured into Italy
and enriched an elite class, whose members consolidated the farms of the
soldiers who were fighting abroad and forged them into large estates worked by
slaves.
In time the troops overseas—whose successes had been due to
the Italian virtues of hard work, independence, autonomy, and agrarianism that
one sees emphasized in Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics—became accustomed to
plunder. When Carthage finally fell in 146 B.C., its population of 50,000 (down
from 500,000) was enslaved, and the city was razed to its foundations. That
same year the Romans looted and destroyed Corinth, the cultural capital of
Greece.
The Rome of Virgil, Catullus, the younger Cato, and Cicero
was now busy obliterating defeated cities that posed little threat to Rome’s
security. The success that made Rome an empire, Toynbee argued, destroyed Rome
by degrading the elements that made it great. Toynbee may not have been right
in every respect, but there are certainly parts of his argument that ring true
about corrupting the center through incorporating the periphery or diluting a
republic by imperial ambitions.
This might remind us also of Britain, whose empire probably
reached its peak sometime between 1850 and 1860. But if we read Charles
Dickens’ Bleak House, published in 1852, we see that at the heart of the empire
in London, there were vast numbers of people who were in poor-houses at the
same time the country was spending its resources far and wide on its great
imperial civilizing mission.
This in turn might make us think of present day San
Francisco, where people are injecting themselves with drugs, fornicating,
urinating, and defecating on the streets, and downtown businesses are closing
in large numbers; or Chicago, where the murder and crime rates are making life
there unbearable for so many. Our major cities are going to rot at the same
time we are pledged to giving $120 billion to Ukraine, already making its
military budget the third largest in the world.
And the decay goes beyond the large cities. Think of those
gruesome scenes in East Palestine, Ohio, after the train crash that enveloped
the town in a toxic chemical cloud. East Palestine is full of working-class
people whom few of our establishment political leaders were willing to go
visit. The people of East Palestine form the demographic that died at twice the
numbers of the general population in our overseas wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yet few in our leadership class—many of whom had made one or more recent trips
around the world to Ukraine to visit the Ukrainian people and pose for photos
with Mr. Zelensky—went to East Palestine. I don’t know if one can properly call
the United States an imperialist power, but this phenomenon of neglected and
hollowed-out cores coupled with widespread overseas investments and commitments
tends to be characteristic of empires.
Looking outward, we can see two clear manifestations of
imperialism today. One is the Chinese brand of imperialism. China de facto now
controls 15 of the major ports in the world—ports that the Chinese have leased,
rebuilt, and refashioned. The Chinese are very farsighted, so these ports are
not just random acquisitions. They control the Panama Canal. They monitor the
entry into the Mediterranean at Tangiers and the exit at Port Said. The two
largest ports in Europe, Antwerp and Rotterdam, are in the hands of the
Chinese, as are the artificial islands in the South China Sea, a gateway for 50
percent of global oceanic traffic.
In other words, the Chinese control 15 points at which, in a
global crisis, they will be able to shut off trade and access to commercial
goods, oil, and food, not to mention the influence they have gained over local
governments. China has also invested in concessions of rare earth mining, oil,
and other natural resources in Africa. And due to the naive policies of the
current U.S. administration, the Chinese are developing very close ties not
only with Iran, but also with Saudi Arabia.
China today is creating something very much like the British
Empire, although the Chinese are more like the imperialists of the Ottoman
Empire than those of the British, in that they are neither apologetic nor shy
about what they are doing. If the Chinese have an imperial enclave in Africa,
they rope it off and don’t allow Africans nearby. Nor do they allow colonial
peoples, for the most part, to go to Beijing and be educated or integrated.
Like the Ottomans who conquered Constantinople in 1453, China has a monolithic
culture and makes no apologies for its ambition to be a global imperial power.
The other imperial power we see on the rise today is more
insidious. George Orwell’s nightmare dystopia in 1984 was a world in which
there were no nation-states, but rather three powers wielding absolute control
over three land masses into which everyone had been aggregated. Something like
this is the dream of Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum and his fellow
globalists (many of them American) who meet annually in Davos. Their vision is
of a transnational ruling class, consisting of elites drawn mostly from the
business, political, media, and academic worlds, with the power to issue edicts
on climate change, public health, diversity, human rights, and even taxes, that
override the will of national majorities.
If Chinese imperialism follows the tradition of the Ottoman
Empire, the globalist vision of Davos imperialism is in the tradition of
utopian empires gone astray. I think of Alexander the Great, who fought his
first great battle with the Persians in 334 B.C. at Granicus on the coast of
Asia Minor. When he died a decade later, he had probably killed over two
million people in creating what he envisioned as an everlasting Hellenistic age
based on an idea of the brotherhood of man. Alexander never thought of himself
as a mere killer. He was an idealistic conqueror. And to this day, if you were
to go to Greece and criticize Alexander, you would earn a hostile reaction.
Alexander was an effective propagandist, as is the Davos crowd with their
argument that the totalitarian rule they want to impose is for our benefit and
the larger brotherhood of man.
Let me close by saying that in 1897, Rudyard Kipling was
asked to present a poem at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, marking her 60th
year as queen. The British Empire, admittedly the most civilizing and humane of
any empire in history, was in full bloom—it had 420 million people under its
sway and covered 12 million square miles of territory, seven times the area of
the Roman Empire. Kipling originally planned to present “The White Man’s
Burden” at the event, but he decided instead to present “Recessional,” a bleak
poem that includes this stanza: “Far-called, our navies melt away / On dune and
headland sinks the fire / Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh
and Tyre / Judge of the Nations, spare us yet / Lest we forget—lest we forget!”
“Recessional” is a poem of lamentation in which Kipling,
known to be a great supporter of the British Empire, seems to be warning that
it is destined to fail. Maybe he had been studying history.
