Empire: A Groundwork Guide

By James Laxer

 A fascinating look at empires and imperialism, and the new kind of empire the United States has become. An excellent introduction for young adults.

The United States presides over the most far-flung imperial system ever established. Empire compares the American Empire to those of the past, finding that much can be learned from the fates of the British, Roman, Chinese, Incan, and Aztec empires.

James Laxer draws ominous parallels with the British who discovered too late that empire building ultimately threatens the health of democracy at home. Documenting how the American Empire works and what it means to the rest of the world, Empire asks: Does the American Empire bring stability to a troubled world? Or, like its imperial predecessors, does it impose inequality and oppression on humanity? And what happens when an empire stumbles?

"[The Groundwork Guides] are excellent books, mandatory for school libraries and the increasing body of young people prepared to take ownership of the situations and problems previous generations have left them." -- Globe and Mail

Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.6.1

Cite textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.6.2

Determine a central idea of a text and how it is conveyed through particular details; provide a summary of the text distinct from personal opinions or judgments.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.6.3

Analyze in detail how a key individual, event, or idea is introduced, illustrated, and elaborated in a text (e.g., through examples or anecdotes).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Groundwood Books
• Release date: Jul 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781554980154

James Laxer

Award-winning author James Laxer has written many books and appears regularly on television discussions of issues of the day. He is a professor of political science at York University in Toronto. Visit James Laxer's blog: http://blog.jameslaxer.com/ Follow James Laxer on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jameslaxer/

Book preview

Empire, a Groundwork Guide by James LaxerGroundwork Guides

Slavery Today

Kevin Bales & Becky Cornell

The Betrayal of Africa

Gerald Caplan

Sex for Guys

Manne Forssberg

Democracy

James Laxer

Empire

James Laxer

Oil

James Laxer

Cities

John Lorinc

Pornography

Debbie Nathan

Being Muslim

Haroon Siddiqui

Series Editor

Jane Springer

Genocide

Jane Springer

Climate Change

Shelley Tanaka

Groundwork GuidesLogo: Ontario Arts Council

Copyright © 2006 by James Laxer

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, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press

128 Sterling Road, Lower Level, Toronto, Ontario M6R 2B7

Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West

1700 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the Ontario Arts Council. Special thanks to the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloging in Publication

Laxer, James

Empire / by James Laxer.

(Groundwork Guides)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-88899-706-7 (bound)

ISBN-10: 0-88899-706-X (bound)

ISBN-13: 978-0-88899-707-4 (pbk.)

ISBN-10: 0-88899-707-8 (pbk.)

1. Imperialism. 2. United States–Foreign relations–2001-. 3. United States–Military policy. I. Title. II. Series.

JZ1480.L39 2006 327.7309’051 C2006-902733-1

To Julia and Benjamin

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Patsy Aldana, who came up with the exciting concept for this series of books and proposed this book to me. Once again I am involved in a publishing venture with my good friend Patsy, a delight for me.

Jane Springer has done a wonderful job as editor, making suggestions to improve the structure and flow of the manuscript and honing its details. My literary agent, Jackie Kaiser, as always, has been there with support and encouragement.

Thanks to my partner, Sandy, for allowing yet another project to be a constant presence in our lives.

I am grateful to the team at Groundwood, Nan Froman, Michael Solomon and Sarah Quinn, for the wonderful job they’ve done with this book and the series. And thanks to Leon Grek for the excellent maps.

Contents

Chapter 1 What Is an Empire?

Types of Empire

Chapter 2 Past Empires

The Egyptian Empire

The Roman Empire

The Han Chinese Empire

The Spanish Empire

The British and French Empires

The Second British Empire

Challenges to the British Empire

Chapter 3 The American Empire

Pillars of the American Empire

How the American Empire Works

American Intervention

The Bush Doctrine

Chapter 4 Cracks in the American Imperial Armor

Chapter 5 Resistance to Empire

Timeline: The Duration of Selected Empires

For Further Reading

Chapter 1

What Is an Empire?

Empires have existed for thousands of years. Indeed, the first empires came into being at the very dawn of civilization. The imperial form of political and social organization has been one of the most persistent ways to govern societies, and continues to be extremely important in our world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Because empires take many different forms, a simple working definition is needed at the outset.

An empire exists when one nation, tribe or society exercises long-term domination over one or more external nations, tribes or societies. Through that domination the imperial power, or empire, is able to determine many of the key political, social, economic and cultural outcomes in the dominated society or societies. And that is the critical point — the ability of the empire to determine what happens, the outcomes in the societies under its control, is what distinguishes an empire from other forms of political organization. Those who hold power at the center of an empire typically derive economic benefits, access to important resources, control of militarily strategic territory and other forms of power as a consequence of imperial arrangements.

Typically, we have an image in our minds of an empire as an old-fashioned arrangement under which one power, say Rome or Britain, conquers and occupies the lands of many peoples and rules them from an imperial capital. Without Rome’s imperial legions or Britain’s navy such an empire could not have existed. Laws made in London or promulgated by the emperor in Rome were enforced across the empire. The Union Jack, the British flag, flew over the territories of the empire. This kind of formal empire has existed many times in different parts of the world. In addition to formal empires, however, there are informal empires. Informal empires — much of the British Empire was informal — exist when the imperial power does not actually annex the territories it dominates. In those territories, there is a local government in place, which may be national or tribal, and in theory, the laws of the imperial power are not in force there.

To prevent the Egyptian government from defaulting on bonds issued on its public debt and held by Europeans, and to secure the Suez Canal, the British military occupied Egypt in 1882, making the country effectively a part of the British Empire. British troops and ships were garrisoned in Egypt. Following the British seizure of control, Egypt was to all intents and purposes ruled by a British appointee whose modest title was British Agent and Consul-General. In theory, though, Egypt had its own ruler, and to make matters more complicated still, it remained a province in the Ottoman Empire, whose capital was Istanbul. But the Ottoman Empire was in decline and its sultan had no real authority in Egypt. In this case, there was an arrangement in which the old formal imperial power was collapsing, a new national Egyptian government was in place, but the crucial decision-making power lay in the hands of another imperial power, which in theory was not the ruler of the country. Empires, this illustrates, are not as simple as we may have imagined. And they come in many different shapes and sizes.

Today the American Empire is the world’s greatest power, universally recognized as the only superpower of our era. It is almost entirely an informal empire and the label empire is one that American political leaders never use to describe American global power. While for European states in the past, the word empire was positively embraced — as in the cases of the British, French or German empires — for Americans, the word has always had negative connotations. This is because in the American Revolution, the founding fathers of the United States and the patriots they led proclaimed that they were fighting against the British Empire and on behalf of the right, not only of Americans, but of all peoples, to be free of imperial rule. Later in this book, we will return to the case of the United States and make the argument that today there is an American Empire and that its policies determine economic, political, military and cultural outcomes for very large parts of the world.

The first empires came into being with the establishment of the earliest civilizations. We don’t know the names of those empires and we have few records of their existence. What we can conclude, however, is that empire came into being alongside another institution with a very long pedigree — slavery. Slavery and empire came into existence in the same historical epoch and for much the same reasons.

In the earliest days of human existence, techniques for gathering food and acquiring shelter were so rudimentary that no surplus of any sort was possible. A small number of people living together in a band could only scrape together enough food to feed themselves. It was perfectly possible for such groups to have enemies, rival bands with whom they fought over a particular habitat. But there was no point for the victors in such squabbles to take the vanquished into slavery. The slaves would only have been able to generate enough food to meet their own needs. But imagine then a very small improvement in food-gathering techniques that would allow, for the first time, the reaping by an individual of more food than he or she could consume. Imagine, therefore, the creation of the very first surplus production as a consequence of human labor. Though the surplus was not large, it opened up the possibility that a privileged few could live off the surplus produced by an enslaved many. It now made sense, as the consequence of a victory over foes, to enslave the survivors rather than simply killing, or in some cases, even eating them.

Slavery was the seminal institution in the launch of civilization, and with it came empire. The surplus production of slaves allowed for the creation of a small privileged class of rulers who could spend their time freed from the most menial kind of labor. The privileged ones could be rulers, warriors or priests. They could even be, at a somewhat later time, thinkers, people with that most valuable of commodities, free time to devote to activities other than the relentless struggle for mere survival.

Slavery and Empire

In 1878, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s close collaborator, wrote a famous passage establishing the link between the institutions of slavery and empire. Engels advanced the idea that at the dawn of recorded history production had so far developed that the labour power of a man could now produce more than was necessary to keep that man alive. To

Reviews for Empire

[amynorthmartinez · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

James Laxer, the dust jacket tells us, is an award winning author of 16 books, and is a political science professor at York University in Toronto. When I picked up this book and read the dust jacket, I got the impression that this book had an agenda. The table of contents lists chapter titles and topical subheadings. Both simply identify the key historical topics Laxer is putting forth on those pages. Before I began reading, I suspected this book might be one of two things. A history of the world, by way of answering these questions: In each era, who were the major players and how did they run things? Or, it was this Canadian’s anti-American version of “info-tainment”, à la Fox News. As soon as I got into the first chapter, however, I realized that James Laxer was not just giving us a brief history of empirical forms of government. He wrote an awesome argumentative research paper. Form following function, this book is organized very much like a five point argument. Chapter 1 functions as our thesis statement. America is an empire.Laxer acknowledges that some people do not agree with this classification, and briefly explores why. He explains that empires function in various ways. Some are “formal” and some “informal”. Beyond that there are various types: slave empire, mercantile empire, capitalist empire, and global empire. The author makes a connection between empire states and their need for slave labor. Laxer includes some quotes from Frederick Engels’ philosophical writing, in order to validate his claim that slavery and empires are sister institutions, historically speaking. There are no maps in this section, but the Engels quotes and their context are displayed in an Information Insert. The insert takes up one entire page. (Maybe I should say, just one page. One of the later inserts takes up three pages.) The copy is in a different font to distinguish it from the main argument. The font color is black and it is in a grey box. The information included in the later inserts are all relevant to the argument that Laxer presents, but this method of quarantining certain details allows him to preserve some brevity when he is connecting major points. In Chapter 2 Laxer briefly outlines 12 empires in history. There are five maps in this section that provide the reader with a reference for the scope of various empires, insofar as to show the time period they held power, and their physical borders and territories. Indigenous American empires, Hitler’s Third Reich, the Soviets, and the French are not illustrated, though they are discussed. This book is not an all-inclusive history of empirical forms of government throughout human existence. In Chapters 3 and 4, Laxer focuses on the actions of American Empire. It is a tight, thorough, convincing argument. The final chapter is not a summation; rather Laxer details some of the societal consequences of empirical governance. It transfers the author’s sense of urgency, and inspires the reader to pick a side. There is no formal Afterword, but directly after the text of the final chapter, Laxer details two uprisings to British Imperial authority that occurred almost simultaneously with two Information Inserts: The Quest for Irish Freedom and India’s Struggle Against the British Raj. Using these final 13 pages, Laxer delivers a potent warning that empirical domination can breed terrorism. He also shows us the potential for incredible cruelty in the name of preserving the ruling empire’s authority. Before I read this book I was unfamiliar with Groundwood Books and the Groundwork Guide series. Based on the way it was presented on the cover, my fear was that Laxer would have written a sensationalized, poorly sourced book. Or, even worse, that it would be a fear mongering collection of clichés and buzz words. I would gladly dispel any fears about the tendency to sensationalize and generalize. I would, save for one map. One map. For the most part, the maps drawn by Leon Grek are wonderful. They include accurate, concise details, and they provide the visual context we need to conceive these global happenings. The final map (and the book’s only global map) annotates American military bases using an inflammatory graphic: the silhouette of a semi-automatic pistol. This is the one instance that I wish the editor had made a more pedestrian choice. There is no glossary included in the text. It does not seem necessary. Most of the challenging words are nestled in context clues. For example: “Laws made in London or promulgated by the emperor in Rome were enforced across the empire. “Or, “The surplus production of slaves allowed for the creation of a small privileged class of rulers who could spend their time freed from the most menial kind of labor.” Following the last Information Insert, there is a timeline called The Duration of Selected Empires. Following the timeline, we find bibliographical information in chapter notes and Further Reading. The book ends with a very thorough topical index. I think this book is perfect for 7th and 8th graders. Groundwood Books and Anansi Press recommend 14 and up. The text includes plenty of historic detail to articulate Laxer’s thesis. At times I felt Laxer had left out some detail, or I wanted him to mention subjects that were excluded (i.e. the Ottoman Empire), but the material is appropriately challenging for late-middle school students, and the text does this without committing the sin of being so detailed that a 13 year-old would consider it totally irrelevant. My intention would be to introduce the students to topics that they will be studying throughout their high school years. Because of the easily digestible format of the book, I would incorporate this text into a curriculum about writing a structured argument. Another activity would be to fill in the historical holes. Students could find empires not discussed in the book and research them. I would have them search for the kinds of details that Laxer discussed. Also, this book has not been updated since 2006. So, I would have the kids research current events and ask them if these new details support or contradict Laxer’s argument.

[meditationesmartini · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What a good idea! Progressive politics for well-meaning idiots! This volume in the "Groundwork Guides" series takes its cue from Engels' observation that it was slavery that makes civilization possible and runs us through six thousand years of imperialism's greatest hits, describing the structural differences between ancient, mercantile, capitalist and "neo-" or informal empires and the reasons for their rise and fall in dialectical-materialist terms, and falling in with Chris Harman's analysis of imperial decline as, basically, the rich getting a bit too greedy every time. It all provides nice context for a rundown of the Bush administration' misdeeds and their underlying imperial logic. There's nothing here you don't know, even if you're not political in the slightest, but it's a good primer if you'd like to get better versed - gives you a framework and gets you ready to make your own connections.