The Great Imperial Hangover Read online

  THE GREAT IMPERIAL HANGOVER

  About the Author

  SAMIR PURI is Adjunct Professor in the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Visiting Lecturer in King’s College London’s War Studies department. He has advised the Ministry of Defence on global strategic trends and the Commonwealth Secretariat on countering violent extremism. Before academia he served in the Foreign Office (2009–15) and began his career at RAND (2006–09). He appears on news programmes for Al Jazeera, the BBC, CNBC, Sky and TRT World, and has written for publications including the Guardian.

  Published in hardback and trade paperback in Great Britain in 2020 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Samir Puri, 2020

  The moral right of Samir Puri to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  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, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 832 8

  Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 025 5

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 834 2

  Printed in Great Britain

  Atlantic Books

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.atlantic-books.co.uk

  For my grandfather

  Kishori Lal Dhiri (1914–1990)

  who spanned three continents and one empire

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1 America’s Imperial Inheritance

  2 Britain’s Grandeur and Guilt of Empire

  3 The European Union’s Post-Imperial Project

  4 Russia’s Embrace of its Imperial Legacy

  5 China’s Janus Faces of Empire

  6 India’s Overcoming of the ‘Intimate Enemy’

  7 The Middle East’s Post-Imperial Instability

  8 Africa’s Scramble Beyond Colonialism

  Conclusion: The World’s Intersecting Imperial Legacies

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  We are in the first empire-free millennium in world history since ancient times, but the world remains in the throes of a great imperial hangover. Empires are still shaping the twenty-first century in profound ways through their abiding influences on present generations. The purpose of this book is to identify these legacies and explain why understanding the world’s history of empire can help to unlock many of the most troublesome conundrums in contemporary global affairs.

  Even a cursory glance at the news suggests that the world appears to have gone mad or, at the very least, to have lost the semblance of regularity that makes us feel safe. Terrorism, Trump and Brexit have led many people to question the coherence of the Western world; Turkey and Russia slip deeper into authoritarian rule; war tears at the fabric of the Middle East and parts of Africa; a vast exodus of refugees flee for a better shot at life; and all the while China’s economic tentacles spread further across the globe. Barely one-fifth of our way into the twenty-first century, it is not unreasonable to seek explanations as to what ‘world order’ means today, and how we can strive towards it.

  Why turn to the apparently fusty legacy of empires to explain today’s uncertainties? The end of the world’s many empires is no longer at the forefront of our minds, overtaken by more pressing concerns about what lies round the next corner. And yet empires continue to haunt our minds in all manner of ways, stalking our subconscious understanding of who we are and of our place in the world. Empires have helped to construct national identities and carve out geopolitical realities and mentalities that prove hard to escape. This is as true for those whose great-grandparents were imperialists as it is for those whose countries have lived through subjugation and national liberation. Cities, institutions and infrastructure were built in the name of empires. Borders were hastily drawn and populations rearranged. Assets were stripped to enrich the colonizers at the expense of the colonized.

  Merely to point out that the past has an influence on the present is too obvious. The real prize is in learning how this influence is being felt, and in working out what we can do to better fathom and manage the wars, terrorism, political shocks and global tensions that dominate our headlines. While this book is rooted in historical experiences, it is fundamentally forward-looking. It is not concerned with extensive retellings of imperial histories, although I will provide some summaries where necessary. Nor will I provide a running commentary on the minutiae of today’s turbulent politics. Rather, this book straddles history and current affairs. It asks: how do the lingering half-lives of collapsed empires continue to shape such matters as security, foreign policy, international aid and global commerce today?

  I will avoid picking any one national perspective, or picking sides in arguments that either categorically denounce or whitewash imperial legacies. Instead I will embark on a world tour, taking in the many varied post-imperial experiences of Europe, Asia, America, the Middle East and Africa. I will not argue that we are entering a new imperial age. Rather, my argument can be expressed concisely: twenty-first-century world order is a story of many intersecting post-imperial legacies. When these legacies collide, misunderstanding, friction, schism or even war can result.

  This book is a plea to have greater awareness, as individuals and nations, of how our varied imperial pasts have contributed to why we see the world in such different ways. Our perceptions and beliefs concerning empires are coloured by our own inherited backgrounds, which is why there are rarely right or wrong answers to the questions that empires have thrown up.

  Hence my own motivations for writing this book. My family roots are in Britain’s former East African and Indian colonies, which means that my relatives were on the receiving end of British colonialism. Generations later, no matter how assimilated I might feel in contemporary Britain, I retain some identification with non-white regions of the world once subjugated by the British Empire. Innate, unspoken and familial, this is more an awareness of my roots than the stuff of rebellion. Indeed, I took a patriotic career path and signed up to serve the British Foreign Office in a role that would certainly have been closed to my ancestors.

  The very fact that I could join the Foreign Office, and work on international security issues, shows that Britain has progressed substantially in the intervening decades since my family arrived after decolonization. Ethnic minorities in modern Britain can expect to receive far warmer welcomes than their parents did, which has meant that even though I was born in ethnically diverse and impoverished east London, I too could become an ‘Englishman’, just so long as I followed the cultural cues. Later, as a civil servant, I was proud to serve my country, but the experience left me with lingering questions around identity – both my own identity and Britain’s national identity in a rapidly changing world, given what seem to me to be the lingering anachronisms in the mentalities of its elite institutions of state and academia.

  And there my thoughts might have stopped, but for war erupting in Ukraine in 2014. I spent a year there, monitoring w
hat was happening on the front line as part of an international diplomatic mission. We were not peacekeepers, so we had no means to stop the fighting, only to try and prevent things escalating further. Russia was clearly an aggressor, destabilizing a country that was part of its historical empire, with the goal of preventing Ukraine’s government from drawing closer to the European Union – a club of democratic states that, despite lacking the motivations of the empires of old, had acquired its own empire-like traits, not least in its incessant expansion.

  I was outraged that Russia would resort to war to stake its claims for influence in Ukraine. But the experience also convinced me how vital it is to tell different post-imperial stories, because they all matter in our diverse world – especially when they clash.

  Returning from Ukraine, I became an academic, lecturing on the subject of wars past and present. Writing this book has afforded me insights into how people around the world interpret their inherited experiences of empire, and this forms the basis of what follows.

  How did we get here?

  It is a matter of great significance to live in a world without empires. By this, I mean the end of the formal empires of the past, where an outwardly expanding metropolitan core gobbled up territories via conquest. Nowadays, this kind of formal empire seems to be extinct. While certain countries will always be more powerful than others, the outright subjugation of one by another is now rare. Iraq annexed Kuwait in 1990, but was kicked out by a US-led military coalition a year later. Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and while it was too strong to dislodge, this has not yet set a precedent for others. Rather, the ways in which powerful states dominate others have evolved to become more like informal empires of political and economic influence.

  If empires had not existed, then it would have been necessary to invent something like them, to foster and upscale human progress. Empires have been vessels for order, modernity, culture and conquest since ancient times. Throughout history, civilizations have encountered one another at different stages of technological and political development. It is from here that the pattern of people imposing their will upon others arises. Some empires were notoriously more wicked than others, but the pattern itself holds true.

  Understandings of empire changed, depending on who was doing the understanding, and when. The great English writer Samuel Johnson (1709–84) offered this definition in his Dictionary of the English Language:

  EMPIRE [empire, French; imperium, Latin]

  1. Imperial power; supreme dominion; foreign command. Affect, ye fair ones, who in judgement fit, Your ancient empire over love and wit.

  2. The region over which dominion is extended. A nation extended over vast tracts of land, and numbers of people, arrives in times at the ancient name of kingdom, or modern of empire.1

  As Dr Johnson’s definition suggests, the age-old notion of kingdoms building their realms by attaching adjacent territories to one another had evolved into ever more expansive empires.

  Ancient empires, arising from early civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and India, and from city-states like Athens and Rome, spread their visions of civilization and order by bringing nearby peoples into their orbit. These empires spread far and wide, across distances that seemed grandiose to their protagonists, BCE (‘before the current era’).

  The monotheistic empires that developed alongside Christianity and Islam provided new impetus in the ‘current era’ (ce). Ancient polytheistic peoples had used empires to promote their own cultures. But the proselytizing of the Islamic conquests in the seventh century, and of the later Christian Crusades, channelled different energies. This spilled out into the wars between rival dynasties and denominations, which characterized Islam’s split into its Sunni and Shia branches, as well as the schisms of the Christian Church.2

  Nomadic empires, including those of successive generations of Mongols like Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan and Tamerlane, could cover enormous distances as they scythed through the locals, connecting different parts of the world as they went. Some nomadic warriors tried settling down in one place, but their empires ultimately lacked staying power.

  Sprawling land-based empires, by comparison, were built around the core of an imperial centre and an established civilization. They became typical in the medieval and early modern eras, such as the Byzantine, Ottoman, Russian, Habsburg and Mughal empires. The most enduring of them lasted into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although by that point those that remained had reached their dotage. Creaky and old-fashioned, they had been overtaken by the latest imperial innovation.

  Maritime colonial empires were, for a while, the way of the imperial future. From the late 1400s, European nations competed with each other to explore the full extent of the globe, in pursuit of knowledge and profit. Over time, these voyaging Europeans realized they could overwhelm local African, Asian and American kingdoms. Early on, Spanish conquistadors annihilated the Incas in South America and the Aztecs in Central America. The old inland empires in Asia and the Middle East could still hold their own against the Europeans. It was only in the 1700s and the 1800s, as the equilibrium between the world’s empires began to tip decisively in the Europeans’ favour, that they conquered much of the rest of the world.3

  This shift was driven by advanced European nations experiencing industrial revolutions at home – bursts in productivity partly fuelled by resources extracted from the colonies. Colonialism, and in particular settler colonialism, is a specific form of imperialism. To reduce a territory to a colony was to claim exclusive rights over its sovereignty.4 Settler colonies involved communities being dispatched from the imperial core to populate this land, in all likelihood to disempower or displace the previous inhabitants.

  Occasionally those very settlers would fall out with their own imperial metropole (the parent state of the colony), usually because they wanted more lax independence.5 This brings us to the birth of the USA, which ultimately proved to be a game-changer in the history of empires. Its Independence War was waged by settlers to kick out the British Empire, and the Declaration of Independence in 1776 became a rallying call to this end. Later US presidents took further steps to discredit the ability of Europeans to meddle in their affairs. After Britain was defeated for a second time by America’s fledgling republic, its fifth president, James Monroe, issued a doctrine in 1823 that set out why the Old World should stay out of the New World. Nearly a century later President Woodrow Wilson used the tragedy of the Great War – which Europe’s rival empires had brought upon themselves – to argue why colonies should be replaced by sovereign states.

  The twentieth century turned into a story of collapsing empires. The First World War, or Great War (1914–18), claimed the Russian tsarist, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and the Kaiser’s German empire – old dynastic empires of the mould that had predominated for centuries. The Second World War (1939–45) was waged to crush the nascent Third Reich, Japanese and Italian imperial projects. It also accelerated the decline of Europe’s older overseas empires, and the British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Spanish and Portuguese lost their remaining overseas colonies after 1945.

  Decolonization completely changed the world. Nationalism spread like wildfire, as those who had been subjugated by empires gained inspiration from each other’s independence struggles. The torch-paper of anti-colonialism was lit by freedom fighters around the world, desperate to kick off the imperial yoke. Not all independence struggles were successful, but those that were birthed a host of new countries. The age of empires had inadvertently bequeathed nationalism to the world.6

  The Cold War (1946–91) was the other defining event of this time. It was an ideological contest in which each superpower assembled global coalitions to support their causes. Whereas the USSR still held a land-based empire (which it had seized from the ashes of the old Russian Empire), the USA did not seek an equivalent. Instead, it engaged in a game that both superpowers were willing to play: seeking client states. No sooner had Asia, Africa, Latin America and th
e Middle East breathed in the free air of the post-colonial age than the superpowers came knocking with their own list of obligations: to support the communist or capitalist camps, and to receive money and arms in return.

  The seemingly underhand ways in which power and influence were projected became an inflammatory topic. Kwame Nkrumah (1909–72) was a revolutionary who agitated against British rule in its Gold Coast colony. After independence, he named the new country Ghana, in homage to the pre-colonial name of its former kingdom. He became Ghana’s first president in 1960 and authored a tract against imperialism’s newest mutation, writing:

  The essence of neocolonialism is that the State that is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality, its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside . . . Neocolonialism is also the worst form of imperialism. For those who practise it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress.7

  Neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism are still bywords for explaining international bullying. As broad-brush terms, they can appeal to the instincts of fair-minded people the world over: that the ‘big guys’ shouldn’t run rampant over the ‘little guys’ who want to choose their own path.

  The extinction of formal empires came (for now) in 1991, with the fragmenting of the Soviet Union and the resultant creation of another brace of newly independent states in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Today there are 193 fully recognized sovereign states,8 effectively quadrupling the number in less than a century. A community of sovereign states seems to be a far nobler way of ordering the world, as opposed to carving it up for the unashamed benefit of the small handful of conquerors and colonizers. But while a world comprising sovereign states of apparent legal equivalence is all well and good in principle, in practice it cannot replace the hierarchical jockeying for influence that has always been the game of states.