The Empire Debate: Thinking at an Angle

I may be seven years too late on this one. In the months after 11 September 2001, when the United States had finished bombing Afghanistan and was gearing up for another round in Iraq, the word "empire," with its many meanings, past, present and possible, was seemingly on everyone's lips. When Donald Rumsfeld caustically stated, "We don't do empire," the floodgates were opened and historians poured into the breach. The historical balance sheet of previous empires, which almost exclusively meant our apparent predecessors the British (with a few token references to the schoolboy debater's favourite retreat, the good old Romans!), were furiously calculated from both the Left and the Right with a view to answering a surprising question: not merely whether empire was good or bad, but should the United States become one? And if it was one already, should it continue, or even try harder, to be one?

The arguments against the position that the U.S. has an imperial role to play in today's world have been made ad nauseam, and I have no intention of repeating them here. They usually involve a simple rhetorical tactic: directly rebut the apologists' claims that previous empires (read: the British) had done "good things." Thus, the critics started listing a whole lot of "bad things," from famines to massacres to institutionalised racial and economic discrimination. This calculus went back and forth until the only thing a reasonable person who hadn't yet made up their mind about this could conclude was that empires had done both good and bad things, and picking a side was by and large a question of political preference.
An altogether more interesting thing to do is to take the imperial apologists' claims at face value and see how they measure up to their own promises; in other words, to dissect the internal logic of the argument itself.

Summarised quickly, the "good things" the British Empire gave to the world include economic development (the shining example being India's railroad system), parliamentary democracy (plus the rule of law and notions of citizenship and liberty), and some cultural fun stuff like the English language and team sports (cricket). All of these things make it easy for countries like India to be part of a modern, globalising world. Now, if we agree that this is indeed good, the question then becomes, what is the role of empire in the process?
One ingenious critique of the idea of empire was suggested by Amitav Ghosh in the essay "Imperial Temptations," published at the height of the debate in 2003. Empire as a way of bringing good things to the world was bound to fail because it "cannot be the object of universal human aspirations." In other words, not everyone can have an empire, which relies on a permanent hierarchy of ruler and ruled. Ghosh says the idea of a nation-state, whatever its failings, at least holds a generalisable promise: that everyone, everywhere, can be a citizen with equal rights in his or her country. He also points out that empires tend to inevitably expand, leading to overreach and conflict. This is a useful rebuttal to the notion that the U.S. should be the world overlord lest we all descend into a Dark Age of petty squabbling states; instead, hegemonic U.S. power is likely to strain its own resources and give rise to a host of competitors large (China) and small (various terrorist networks and rogue states) all striving to bring down the giant. Perhaps this point has only become clearer since 2003.

But even if empire is a rotten way to get it done, what of those good things? The internal logic of the argument "Empire brought good things therefore empire is good" is fundamentally flawed for a simple reason. All those good things can be fully enjoyed only after the empire is gone! For example, Indians can use their railroads today because the British are no longer there to impose the many restrictions they were built under. Saying this is not necessarily agreeing with the "drain of wealth" theory. On balance, however small the advantage, it's better for Indians to use all the railroads for their own purposes all of the time. Next, parliamentary democracy. Only after a political independence movement that created a separate nation can Indians have constitutions and elections. And so on, until we are left with only cricket (and maybe not even that, considering how deeply Indianised the sport has become).
The conclusion here is that empire needed a powerful counter-force (for example, anti-colonial nationalism) to dissolve itself and spread its good things to the very people it had meant to help all along. An apologist could counter that the British Empire was not brought down by nationalism but by its own weakness and lack of will. Thus, if India and the rest were colonised some more, perhaps a few more decades or centuries until all the good things were in place, the empire could have left of its own accord and its subjects would be better off. This ignores quite forcefully the last thirty or so years of the British Empire: political reforms in India, for example, were not handed down smoothly according to some beneficent master-plan but fought for tooth-and-nail by nationalists (who realised themselves only after many years and internal squabbles that they wanted to be independent). The point is that nobody knew when the end would come, let alone planned it. Without resistance of any kind, it is conceivable that the British Empire would have gone on forever with less of the good things and more of the bad.
This brings me to the final nail in the coffin of the pro-empire argument. Frederick Cooper has brilliantly written in his book Colonialism in Question that when the British and French empires "tried to make themselves more forward-looking economically and more legitimate politically, they could not face the escalation of claim-making their actions encouraged, the tensions that followed from their economic interventions, and the high cost of making an empire meaningful as a unit of belonging." In other words, when empire tried to bring more good things it found the demand so overwhelming it had to give it all up fast. Or, as I've put it above, empire required its own demise to complete its mission, which means that empire is ultimately unable to do the job.

There is one more line of reasoning that could yet salvage the empire: counterfactuals. If empires are doomed to fail, is it not better that we had them for a while, considering the alternatives? Wasn't the British Empire better for its colonies than the German or the Russian? Here there are multiple confusions and nuances. First of all, critics do not condemn the British Empire because it was British but because it was an Empire. The very phenomenon of European imperialism is in question. Secondly, it follows that we cannot imagine a scenario in which only the British would not start an empire. A reasonable historical counterfactual would instead suppose that if one European power did not expand, neither would the others. The conditions that gave rise to imperialism (technological progress, maritime exploration, the interconnected European economy with its industrialising tendencies) gave rise to many empires, often because of competition with each other (i.e. the British became powerful in the late 18th century in large part because they had overtaken the Dutch, then the French). Indeed, as Amitav Ghosh reminds us, if the mark of success for a nation is having an empire, then all nations who aspire to success will want one.
The only counterfactual that remains is, if Europe had not expanded, would the rest of the world be better off evolving on its own, India going forth from the Mughals and so on. This question is impossible to answer, because modernity and empire happened to have progressed together. England in the 18th century, if you didn't know what the future would bring, was not a much better place to live in than Mughal India. And when living conditions and economic development and all that began to improve, they did so in metropole and colony at the same time, to the disadvantage of the colonies. Scholars dreaming up "alternative modernities" can do so at their leisure. Like it or not, the modern world and empires are inseparable. It only remains to be seen if this still holds true.