When Empire is Everything
Empires are everywhere, but is it because we see them everywhere even when they are not there?
“The empire is everywhere, ubiquitous, omnipresent, and malevolent. It’s a beast, a monster, with an insatiable appetite for plunder. It seems utterly invincible, like a freakish storm that flattens everything in its path. Or else, it’s like a foul mist that rises in the dark of night and poisons all before it. All empires are evil and only evil. Let the word go forth, let every free man and free woman utter the cry: sic semper imperia, always [stick it] to the empires.”
That’s not a quote from a novel or movie. I made it up, but it certainly captures the plot of many books, movies, and even some academic papers.
Empires are dirty business as they do terrible things.
Defining “empire” is hard, there are different definitions, but I prefer the one given by Alexander Motyl: An empire is a “hierarchically organized political system with a hub-like structure - a 'rimless wheel '- within which a core elite and state dominate peripheral elites and societies by serving as intermediaries for their significant interactions and by channeling resource flows from the periphery to the core and back to the periphery” (Motyl, Imperial Ends, p. 4).
When we think of empires, several things probably come to mind.
The Roman Empire most obviously, known from various movies, classical literature, and things we’ve seen in museums. The Roman Empire, despite its laws, magnificence, and grandeur, was an empire born of evil, conquest, greed, slavery, and violence.
The Nazis temporarily created a European Empire that aspired to fashion an eternal “reich” that would swallow up all before it. It flooded across Europe with an unbridled lust for blood and resources until it was gloriously defeated.
After World War II, the British Empire, which had a very patchy history on any reading, began decolonizing its foreign holdings and transformed itself into the more benign British Commonwealth. Many of us still live in the aftermath of Britain’s global naval hegemony.
The villainous “Empire” in Star Wars is filled with deliberate echoes of both Rome, the British, and the Nazis. It is Nazis in space with Roman legions and English captains on battleships.
Also, with the demise of the Soviet Union and America flexing its military muscle after 9/11, empire became far more common in political discourse, in movies, and in media.
I listen to the Empire Podcast which is a great podcast about empires, ancient and modern, in all of their glory and brutality. Empire is a theme that garners attention!
There is even an Apple TV show called Empire about the machinations of a music mogul and his family.
Empire it seems is ubiquitous. I’m not the first one to notice this, Alexander J. Motyl writes:
Empire is a growth business these days. Amazon lists 10,513 books with empire in the title on its website; Barnes and Noble lists 10,210.1 Whatever the exact number of books that deal with empires as specifically political entities, empire clearly qualifies as a "hot ticket" item for scholars, journalists, pundits, policymakers, advertisers, and many others. When a word comes to dominate discourse, it has become a cultural phenomenon. But is empire also real?
In biblical studies, counter-imperial and post-colonial readings are all the rage. The Book of Revelation is interesting because it is one of the few ancient books that tells us what the Roman Empire looked like, not from the perspective of Caesars and senators, but from the perspective of those who had the empire’s foot on their throat. Unsurprisingly, John writes of a vision where Jesus and his people defeat the imperial monster. Empire and post-colonial studies are indeed a fruitful area of research, one that I dip into myself every so often as it provides a useful lens for reading the Bible in some instances.
And yet the danger is that Empires are studied monolithically, as cartoonish incarnations of evil, rather than with nuance and with due recognition for the complexity of the power structures between the empire and its subjects. Whether we are talking about the Assyrians, Macedonians, Persians, Ottomans, Mongols, Byzantines, British, Mughals, Tang, Incan, or Ashanti empires, the stories are complex, nothing is black or white, the sub-stories even more so.
Similarly, the danger is that everything we don’t like gets labeled as empire, or colonizer, or oppressor. As if the mere application of the label “empire” proves to be the definitive refutation of anything we find distasteful to our sensibilities. Is capitalism the highest point of empire, or, is communism the apogee of imperial violence? Much of it depends on the eye of the beholder!
Alas, when empire is everything, then empire means nothing.
Studies of empires, whether in antiquity or in the modern world, require a measured approach that acknowledges the varied historical dynamics, the asymmetry of powers, and the interfluential effects between the colonizer and the colonized. One must carefully and critically examine the ways in which empires have shaped societies, economies, and cultures, while also recognizing the agency and resistance of those who have been subjugated. Often this means reading accounts written by the powerful with due suspicion while trying to listen for the voices of those made silent. Other times, a discerning perspective means acknowledging that empires brought blessing and bane to the people that they encountered and to explore precisely how and to what extent.
What am I getting at?
Empire is a fascinating topic in history, in movies, in novels, in politics, and in the Bible.
We all live in empires or in the shadow of empires long since gone. Whether we are reading about the Persian empire in the Book of Ezra, or watching a news report about Chinese ambitions in the South China Sea, we must learn to think about empire(s) with critical acumen and not be content with shallow and superficial tropes about them.
Thanks Dr. Bird much to think about.
Thought provoking!!