Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

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Comparative Imperial Pathologies:

Rome, Britain, and America

In late July [43 BC] a centurion from Octavian’s army suddenly appeared in the Senate House. From the assembled gathering he demanded the consulship, still vacant, for his general. The Senate refused. The centurion brushed back his cloak and laid his hand on the hilt of his sword. “If you do not make him consul,” he warned, “then this will.” And so it happened.

—TOM HOLLAND,

Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic (2003)

War came naturally enough to the British, after so much experience of it, and empire offered them a more or less perpetual battle-field.

—JAN MORRIS,

Heavens Command: An Imperial Progress (1973)

The English-speaking peoples are past masters in the art of concealing their selfish national interests in the guise of the general good.... This kind of hypocrisy is a special and characteristic peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon mind.

—E. H. CARR,

The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939)

In 1972, Henry Kissinger, then President Nixon’s national security adviser, was in Beijing talking with Zhou Enlai, China’s first postrevolutionary prime minister, about normalizing Chinese-American relations. At one point in their conversation Kissinger asked what the prime minister thought was the significance of the French Revolution. Zhou replied, “It’s too soon to tell.”

Zhou Enlai was not being as enigmatic as this sounds. The two men had been discussing the Chinese revolution of 1949, the most complex revolutionary upheaval in recorded history. A great deal of time will have to pass before we can begin to appreciate its various meanings, if we ever do. Zhou Enlai was also reminding Kissinger that historical significance is an extremely elusive concept and that comparisons, precedents, analyses, and claims of importance derived from history are almost invariably elements of arguments best judged by their contemporary purposes and whether or not they are persuasive, rather than by their claims of accuracy.

The most famous English-language study of ancient Rome is surely Edward Gibbons The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788). He contended, among other things, that Christianity brought down Rome because it sapped the Roman spirit, was hostile to Mediterranean culture, and displaced Roman imperial pretensions with monasticism and contemplation. Not many people today would buy that interpretation, particularly since the collapse of the Roman Republic into dictatorship preceded by a century the spread of Christianity. Moreover, Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in 312 AD imposed the autocratic style of Rome on the church as much as it Christianized the Roman empire.¹

So long as one is not dogmatic, it is perfectly logical to compare aspects of the American republic some 230 years after the Declaration of Independence with ancient Rome and the British Empire. Pundits of all sorts have been doing so for decades. In fourteen speeches to the U.S. Senate on Roman constitutionalism, in 1993, the venerable Senator Robert Byrd (Democrat from West Virginia) observed, “Many, if not most, of the Framers were conversant with Roman history and with the history of England. They were also familiar with the political philosophy of Montesquieu, whose political theory of checks and balances and separation of powers influenced them in their writing of the Constitution. Montesquieu was also influenced in his political philosophy by the history of the Romans, by contemporary English institutions, and by English history.”²

This is true and a good reason for putting the United States in a class with the Roman Republic as well as the British Empire. But I want to focus on the traditional Roman and British comparisons for other reasons, more germane to our moment. The collapse of the Roman Republic offers a perfect case study of how imperialism and militarism can undermine even the best defenses of a democracy, while enthusiasts for the American empire systematically prettify the history of the British Empire in order to make it an acceptable model for the United States today.

When it comes to the collapse of Roman democracy, Zhou Enlai’s dictum probably applies. Not enough time has passed to produce a universally accepted understanding of the events. The problem is not one of new materials, since short of a miraculous archaeological discovery, new sources that could alter our basic knowledge about ancient Rome are unlikely to appear. Writers today have roughly the same sources that Shakespeare consulted in writing his plays Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens—primarily, the Greek historian Plutarch. Contemporary historians can also consult remnants from the works of three Roman historians, Livy, Tacitus, and Suetonius. Nonetheless, Rome still inspires utterly contradictory interpretations, providing a classical backdrop for clashing contemporary political projects.

Three contemporary books illustrate the differences of opinion about the Roman Republic’s end that are alive and flourishing today. The British classicist Anthony Everitt’s Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician is a worthy example of what might be thought of as Western historical orthodoxy: the view that Julius Caesar was a military populist, the leader of the mob against entrenched representatives of the constitutional order, and a tyrant. In this analysis, Cicero, a senator and consul, acted selflessly to try to preserve constitutional government against implacable forces of corruption and the abuse of military power. “During his childhood and youth,” Everitt writes, “Cicero had watched with horror as Rome set about dismantling itself. If he had a mission as an adult, it was to recall the Republic to order.”³

Everitt’s Cicero reminds one of the remarkable career of Senator Robert Byrd, who first took the oath of office on January 7, 1959. While his state has profited from his powerful position in Washington—a great many public buildings in West Virginia are named “Byrd”—he has also tirelessly tried to educate his colleagues about the concept of a “republic” and why, when working properly, it is a bulwark of democracy.

In contrast, author Michael Parenti denigrates Cicero and other constitutionalists. Parenti portrays Caesar as a cross between Juan Peron and Franklin Delano Roosevelt—a ruthless populist. In his book The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome, Parenti stresses the class warfare that dominated much of Roman life. His hero is Caesar, a man who came from a well-established family but nonetheless devoted himself to the common man and was murdered in the Senate by a conspiracy of blue bloods. “Caesar seems not to have comprehended that in the conflict between haves and have-nots, the haves are really have-it-alls,” writes Parenti. “The Roman aristocrats lambasted the palest reforms as the worst kind of thievery, the beginning of a calamitous revolutionary leveling, necessitating extreme countermeasures. And they presented their violent retaliation not as an ugly class expediency but as an honorable act on behalf of republican liberty.”⁴ Parenti is repelled by what Cicero later wrote to Brutus, the leader of Caesar’s killers on the Ides of March, 44 BC: “That memorable almost God-like deed of yours is proof against all criticisms; indeed it can never be adequately praised.”⁵

Parenti’s book is not just a paean to Caesar but also a polemic against establishmentarian history. “In the one-sided record that is called history,” he contends, “it has been a long-standing practice to damn popular agitation as the work of riffraff and demagogues.”⁶ He is scandalized that in Gibbon, for example, there is “not a word ... about an empire built upon sacked towns, shattered armies, slaughtered villagers, raped women, enslaved prisoners, plundered lands, burned crops, and mercilessly overtaxed populations.”⁷ Parenti accepts that “democracy, a wonderful invention by the people of history to defend themselves from the power of the wealthy, took tenuous root in ancient Rome,” but he warns that “when their class interests were at stake, the senators had no trouble choosing political dictatorship over the most anemic traces of popular rule and egalitarian economic reform.”⁸

Tom Holland, a leading BBC radio personality who has written highly acclaimed adaptations of Herodotus’s Histories and Virgil’s Aeneid, has produced Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic. Though he comments that “the comparison of Rome to the modern-day United States has become something of a cliche,” he draws a picture of the late Republic that seems a model of the modern United States with its flamboyant excesses of wealth, bad taste, and arrogance, as well as its impulse toward militarism. His social history of republican decadence, highlighting a puerile Roman vision of politics and war, sounds very much like the second Bush administration and the shop-until-you-drop world of American consumerism.

“Celebrity chefs had long been regarded as a particularly pernicious symptom of decadence,” Holland observes. Quoting from Livy’s History of Rome, Holland explains that “back in the virtuous, homespun days of the early Republic, so historians liked to claim, the cook ‘had been the least valuable of slaves,’ but no sooner had the Romans come into contact with the fleshpots of the East than ‘he began to be highly prized, and what had been a mere function instead came to be regarded as high art.’ In a city awash with new money and with no tradition of big spending, cookery had rapidly become an all-consuming craze. Not only cooks but ever more exotic ingredients had been brought into Rome on a ceaseless flood of gold. To those who upheld the traditional values of the Republic, this mania threatened a ruin that was as much moral as financial.”⁹ Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

On empire building, Holland notes, “The Romans killed to inspire terror, not in a savage frenzy but as the disciplined components of a fighting machine.” After the worst Roman defeat of all time—the Carthaginian general Hannibal’s adroit use of his cavalry to destroy eight legions at Cannae in 216 BC—they adopted the same strategy that the United States turned to after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Never again, the Romans swore, would they tolerate the rise of a Mediterranean power like Carthage, “capable of threatening their own survival. Rather than risk that, they felt themselves perfectly justified in launching a preemptive strike against any opponent who appeared to be growing too uppity.”¹⁰

In 1992, when he was the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy, Paul Wolfowitz enunciated a similar strategy, which he and his colleagues began implementing in 2001 after Bush appointed him undersecretary of defense. According to Patrick E. Tyler, writing in the New York Times, “The Defense Department asserts that America’s political and military mission in the post-Cold War era will be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia, or the territory of the former Soviet Union.... The new [Wolfowitz] draft sketches a world in which there is one dominant military power whose leaders ‘must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.’ “¹¹ In 2002, this vision was officially embedded in the National Security Strategy of the United States, a key policy document. The goal of such megalomanic visions came to be called by the Romans a Pax Romana and by American pundits a Pax Americana.¹²

After the great Roman general Pompey’s conquests in Asia Minor (66-62 BC), including his storming of Jerusalem in 63, “What had once been a toehold in the east was now to be a great tract of provinces. Beyond them was to stretch an even broader crescent of client states. All were to be docile and obedient, and all were to pay a regular tribute. This, henceforward, was what the pax Romana was to mean.”¹³ Holland concludes that, ultimately, “Corruption in the Republic threatened to putrefy the world.”¹⁴ The American record has been comparable: the Bush administration waged preventive war against Iraq, “putrefied” that country through incompetence and massive corruption, and in the process produced global revulsion against the United States—similar to the “world of enemies” that eventually overwhelmed the Roman Empire.¹⁵

Even after two millennia there is little agreement on which of the multitude of comparisons Rome evokes are the most important, but perhaps the one most relevant to present-day America concerns how empire and its inescapable companion, militarism, subtly and insidiously erode the foundations of a republic. The United States took many of its key political principles from its ancient predecessor. Separation of powers, checks and balances, government in accordance with constitutional law, a toleration of slavery, fixed terms in office, the presidential “veto” (Latin for “I forbid”)—all of these ideas were influenced by Roman precedents. John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams often read Cicero and both spoke of him as a personal inspiration. The architects of the new American capital were so taken with Rome that they even named the now filled-in creek that flowed where the Mall is today the “Tiber River.”¹⁶ Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, in writing the Federalist Papers to argue for the ratification of the Constitution, signed their articles with the pseudonym “Publius Valerius Publicola”—who was the third consul of the Roman Republic and the first to personify its values. Yet, as Holland notes, “By the first century BC, there was only one free city left, and that was Rome herself. And then Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the Republic imploded, and none was left at all As a result, a thousand years of civic self-government were brought to an end, and not for another thousand, and more, would it become a living reality again.”¹⁷

The Roman Republic failed to adjust to the unintended consequences of its imperialism, leading to drastic alterations in its form of government. The militarism that inescapably accompanied Rome’s imperial projects slowly undermined its constitution as well as the very genuine political and human rights its citizens enjoyed. The American republic has, of course, not yet collapsed; it is just under great strain as its imperial presidency and its increasingly powerful military legions undermine Congress and the courts. However, the Roman outcome—turning over power to a dictator backed by military force welcomed by ordinary citizens because it seems to bring stability—suggests what might well happen sometime in the future as a result of George Bush’s contempt for the separation of powers.

Obviously, there is nothing deterministic about such a progression, and many prominent Romans, notably Brutus and Cicero, paid with their lives trying to head it off. But there is something utterly logical about it. Republican checks and balances are simply incompatible with the maintenance of a large empire and a huge standing army. Democratic nations sometimes acquire empires, which they are reluctant to give up because they are a source of wealth and national pride, but their domestic liberties are thereby put at risk.

Many current aspects of our American government suggest a Romanlike fatigue with republican proprieties. As Holland puts it, “The Roman people, ... in the end, grew tired of antique virtues, preferring the comforts of easy slavery and peace.”¹⁸ After Congress voted in October 2002 to give the president unrestricted power to use any means, including military force and nuclear weapons, in a preventive strike against Iraq whenever he—and he alone—deemed it “appropriate,” it would be hard to argue that the governmental structure laid out in the Constitution of 1787 bears much relationship to the one that prevails today in Washington.

The Roman Republic is conventionally dated from 509 to 27 BC, even though Romulus’s founding of the city is traditionally said to have occurred in 753 BC. All we know about its past, including those first two centuries, comes from the histories written by Livy and others and from the discoveries of modern archaeology. For the century preceding the republic, Rome was ruled by Etruscan kings from their nearby state of Etruria (modern Tuscany). In 510 BC, according to legend, Sextus, the son of King Tarquinius Superbus (“King Tarquin”), raped Lucretia, the daughter of a leading Roman family. A group of aristocrats backed by the Roman citizenry revolted against this outrage and expelled the Etruscans from Rome. The rebels were determined that never again would any single man be allowed to obtain supreme power in the city, and they created a system that for four centuries more or less succeeded in preventing that from happening. “This was the main principle,” writes Everitt, “that underpinned constitutional arrangements which, by Cicero’s time, were of a baffling complexity.”¹⁹

At the heart of the unwritten Roman constitution was the Senate, which, by the early years of the first century BC, was composed of about three hundred members from whose ranks two chief executives, called consuls, were elected. The consuls took turns being in charge for a month, and neither could hold office for more than a year. Over time an amazing set of checks and balances evolved to ensure that the consuls and other executives whose offices conferred on them imperium—the right to command an army, to interpret and carry out the law, and to pass sentences of death—did not entertain visions of grandeur and overstay their welcome. At the heart of these restraints were the principles of collegiality and term limits. The first meant that for every office there were at least two incumbents, neither of whom had seniority or superiority over the other. Office holders were normally limited to one-year terms and could be re-elected to the same office only after waiting ten years. Senators had to serve two to three years in lower offices—as quaestors, tribunes, aediles, or praetors— before they were eligible for election to a higher office, including the consulship. All office holders could veto the acts of their equals, and higher officials could veto decisions of lower ones. The chief exception to these rules was the office of “dictator,” appointed by the Senate in times of military emergency. There was always only one dictator and his decisions were immune to veto; according to the constitution, he could hold office for only six months or the duration of a crisis, whichever was shorter.

Once an official had ended his term as consul or praetor, the next post below consul, he was posted somewhere in Italy or abroad as governor of a province or colony and given the title of proconsul. For example, after serving as consul in 63 BC (the year of Octavian’s birth), Cicero was sent to govern the colony of Cilicia in present-day southern Turkey, where his duties were both military and civilian. Apologists for the U.S. military today like to compare its regional commanders in chief for the Middle East (Centcom), Europe (Eucom), the Pacific (Pacom), Latin America (Southcom), and the United States itself (Northcom) to Roman proconsuls.²⁰ But the Roman officials were seasoned members of the Senate who had first held the highest executive post in the country, whereas American regional commanders are generals or admirals who have served their entire careers away from civilian concerns and have risen through the military ranks generally by managing to avoid egregious mistakes.

It is also important that during Rome’s wars one or both consuls actually commanded the legions in the field. The American idea that the president acts as commander in chief of the armed forces probably derives from this precedent. But there was a difference: “The consuls may not have been always great, or even good, generals, but they were always soldiers of experience, because it was a requirement of a candidate for office in Rome during the Republic that he had to have a record of at least ten military campaigns.”²¹ During the administration of George W. Bush, neither the president, nor any appointive officer other than his first secretary of state, had any experience of war or barracks life.

Over time, Rome’s complex system was made even more complex by the class struggle embedded in its society. During the first two centuries of the republic, what appeared to be a participatory democracy was in fact an oligarchy of aristocratic families who dominated the Senate. As Holland argues, “The central paradox of Roman society . . . [was] that savage divisions of class could coexist with an almost religious sense of community.”²² Parenti puts it this way: “In the second century BC, the senatorial nobles began to divide into two groups, the larger being the self-designated optimates (‘best men’), who were devoted to upholding the politico-economic prerogatives of the well-born.... The smaller faction within the nobility, styled the populares or ‘demagogues’ by their opponents, were reformers who sided with the common people on various issues. Julius Caesar is considered the leading popularis and the last in a line extending from 133 to 44 BC.”²³ Everitt sees the problem in a broader perspective: “Since the fall of the monarchy in 510 BC, Roman domestic politics had been a long, inconclusive class struggle, suspended for long periods by foreign wars.”²⁴

After about 494 BC, when the plebs—that is, the ordinary, nonaristocratic citizens of Rome—had brought the city to a standstill by withholding their labor, a new institution came into being to defend their rights. These were the tribunes of the people, charged with protecting the lives and property of plebeians. Tribunes could veto any election, law, or decree of the Senate, of which they were ex officio members, as well as the acts of all other officials (except a dictator). They could also veto one another’s vetoes. They did not have executive authority; their function was essentially negative. Controlling appointments to the office of tribune later became very important to generals like Julius Caesar, who based their power on the armies plus the support of the populares against the aristocrats.

The system worked well enough and afforded extraordinary freedoms to the citizens of Rome so long as all members of the Senate recognized that compromise and consensus were the only ways to get anything done. Everitt poses the issue in terms of the different perspectives of Cicero and Caesar; Cicero was the most intellectual defender of the Roman constitution whereas Caesar was Rome’s, and perhaps history’s, greatest general. Both were former consuls: “Cicero’s weakness as a politician was that his principles rested on a mistaken analysis. He failed to understand the reasons for the crisis that tore apart the Roman Republic. Julius Caesar, with the pitiless insight of genius, understood that the constitution with its endless checks and balances prevented effective government, but like so many of his contemporaries Cicero regarded politics in personal rather than structural terms. For Caesar, the solution lay in a completely new system of government; for Cicero, it lay in finding better men to run the government—and better laws to keep them in order.”²⁵

Imperialism provoked the crisis that destroyed the Roman Republic. After slowly consolidating its power over all of Italy and conquering the Greek colonies on the island of Sicily, the republic extended its conquests to Carthage in North Africa, to Greece itself, and to what is today southern France, Spain, and Asia Minor. By the first century BC, Rome dominated all of Gaul, most of Iberia, the coast of North Africa, Macedonia (including Greece), the Balkans, and large parts of modern Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon. “The republic became enormously rich on the spoils of empire,” Everitt writes, “so much so that from 167 BC Roman citizens in Italy no longer paid any personal taxes.”²⁶ The republic also became increasingly self-important and arrogant, believing that its task was to bring civilization to lesser peoples and naming the Mediterranean Mare Nostrum (our sea), somewhat the way some Americans in the twentieth century came to refer to the Pacific Ocean as an “American lake.”

The problem was that the Roman constitution made administration of so large and diverse an area increasingly difficult and subtly altered the norms and interests that underlay the need for compromise and consensus. Rome was the first case of what today we call imperial overstretch. There were several aspects to this crisis, but the most significant was the transformation of the Roman army into a professional military force and the growth of militarism. Well into the middle years of the republic, the Roman legions were a true citizen army, composed of conscripted small landowners. Unlike in the American republic, male citizens between the ages of seventeen and forty-six, except slaves and freedmen, were liable to be called for military service. One of the more admirable aspects of the Roman system was that only those citizens who possessed a specified amount of property (namely, a horse and some land) could serve, thereby making those who had profited most from the state also responsible for its defense. The Roman plebs, being nonlandowners, did their service as skirmishers for the army, or in the navy, which had far less honor attached to it. At the beginning of each term, the consuls appointed tribunes to raise two legions—a legion never much exceeded six thousand men—from the census roll of eligible citizens.

“Among the Romans,” writes Holland, “it was received wisdom that ‘men who have their roots in the land make the bravest and toughest soldiers.’ . . . For centuries the all-conquering Roman infantry had consisted of yeoman farmers, their swords cleaned of chaff, their plows left behind, following their magistrates obediently to war. For as long as Rome’s power had been confined to Italy, campaigns had been of manageably short duration. But with the expansion of the Republic’s interests overseas, they had lengthened, often into years.”²⁷

Traditionally, when a campaign was over, the troops were promptly sent back to their farms, sometimes richer and flushed with military glory. Occasionally, the returning farmers got to march behind their general in a “triumph,” the most splendid ceremony in the Roman calendar and a victory procession permitted only to the greatest of conquerors. The general himself, who paid for this parade, rode in a chariot, his face covered in red lead to represent Jupiter, king of the gods. A boy slave stood behind him holding a laurel wreath above his head while whispering in his ear, “Remember that you are mortal.” In Pompey’s great triumph of 61 BC, after he swept the seas of pirates and conquered Asia Minor, he actually wore a cloak that had belonged to Alexander the Great. Behind the conqueror came his prisoners in chains and finally the legionnaires, who by ancient tradition sang obscene songs satirizing their general.²⁸ Suetonius has recorded for history one of the ribald verses Caesar’s soldiers sang during his Gallic Triumph, which is also evidence of Caesar’s numerous affairs with women:

Home we bring our bald whoremonger;

Romans, lock your wives away!

All the bags of gold you lent him

Went his Gallic tarts to pay.²⁹

By the end of the second century BC, in Everitt’s words, “The responsibilities of empire meant that soldiers could no longer be demobilized at the end of each fighting season. Standing forces were required, with soldiers on long-term contracts.”³⁰ The great general Caius Marius (c. 157-86 BC) undertook to reform the armed forces, replacing the old conscript armies with a professional body of career volunteers. Senator Robert Byrd explains: “Whereas the ownership of property had long been a requirement for entry into military service, Marius opened the door of recruitment to all, enrolling men who owned no property and were previously exempt. In accepting such troops, he remedied the long-standing manpower shortage and opened up a career for the employment of thousands of landless and jobless citizens. By this innovation, Marius created a new type of client army, bound to its commander as its patron.... Marius, in creating a professional army, had created a new base of power for ambitious men to exploit and use as an instrument of despotic authority.”³¹

Members of this large standing army, equipped by the Roman state, signed up for twenty to twenty-five years. Wlien their contracts expired, they expected their commanders, to whom they were personally loyal, to provide them with farms, which Marius had promised them. “From that moment on,” writes Holland, “possession of a farm was no longer the qualification for military service but the reward.”³² Unfortunately, land in Italy was by then in short supply, much of it tied up in huge sheep and cattle ranches owned by rich, often aristocratic, families and run by slave labor. The landowners were the dominant conservative influence in the Senate, and they resisted all efforts at land reform. Members of the upper classes had become wealthy as a result of Rome’s wars of conquest and bought more land as the only safe investment, driving small holders off their properties. In 133 BC, the gentry arranged for the killing of the tribune Tiberius Gracchus (of plebeian origin) for advocating a new land-use law. Rome’s population thus continued to swell with landless veterans. “Where would the land be found,” asks Everitt, “for the superannuated soldiers of Rome’s next war?”³³

Although the state owned a large amount of public property that theoretically could have been distributed to veterans, most of it had been illegally expropriated by aristocrats. Marius, who from the beginning allied himself with the populares in the Senate, was willing to seize land for military purposes, but this inevitably meant a direct clash with the established order. “Cicero detested Roman militarism,”and Marius was exactly the kind of leader he believed was leading Rome to ruin.³⁴ Utterly ruthless and caring little for the Roman constitution, Marius served as consul an unprecedented seven times, in clear violation of the requirement that there be an interval of ten years between each re-election. Suzanne Cross, an American scholar of classical antiquity, describes him as harsh and vengeful.³⁵ Marius was the first Roman general to portray himself as “the soldier’s friend.” Marius’s nephew, Julius Caesar, built on this framework, and Caesar’s grandnephew, Octavian, who became Augustus Caesar, completed the transformation of the republic from a democracy into a military dictatorship.

During the final century before its fall, the republic was assailed by many revolts of generals and their troops, leading to gross violations of constitutional principles and on several occasions civil wars. Julius Caesar, who became consul for the first time in 59 BC, enjoyed great popularity with the ordinary people. After his year in office, he was rewarded by being named governor of Gaul, a post he held between 58 and 49, during which he both earned military glory and became immensely wealthy. In 49 he famously allowed his armies to cross the Rubicon, a small river in northern Italy that served as a boundary against armies approaching the capital, and plunged the country into civil war. Taking on his former ally and now rival, Pompey, he won, after which, as Everitt observes, “No one was left in the field for Caesar to fight.... His leading opponents were dead. The republic was dead too: he had become the state.”³⁶ Julius Caesar exercised dictatorship from 48 to 44, and a month before the Ides of March he arranged to have himself named “dictator for life.” Instead, he was stabbed to death in the Senate by a conspiracy of eight members, led by Brutus and Cassius, both praetors, known to history as “principled tyrannicides.”

Shakespeare’s re-creation of the scenes that followed, based upon Sir Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch from the French edition of 1559, has become as immortal as the deed itself. In Shakespeare’s version of a speech to the plebeians in the Forum, Brutus famously defended his actions: “If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of Caesar’s, to him I say that Brutus’ love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: Not that I lov’d Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living, and all die slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all freemen?” However, Mark Antony, Caesar’s chief lieutenant, speaking to the same audience, had the last word, and turned the populace against Brutus and Cassius. He sent the crowd racing forth to avenge Caesar’s murder, as Shakespeare has him cynically say, “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.”

Antony and Octavian, Caesar’s eighteen-year-old grandnephew, formed an alliance to avenge the murder of Caesar. It would end with only one man standing, and that man, Caius Octavianus (Octavian), would decisively change Roman government by replacing the republic with an imperial dictatorship. Everitt characterizes Octavian as “a freebooting young privateer,” who on August 19,43 BC (just over a year after Caesar’s death), became the youngest consul in Rome’s history and set out, in violation of the constitution, to raise his own private army. Holland calls him an “adventurer and terrorist,” while Parenti, quoting Gibbon, says he was a “subtle tyrant,” who “crafted an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth.” Byrd laments, “There was absolute freedom of speech in the Roman Senate until the time of Augustus [Octavian],” who put limits on how far senators could go. “The boy,” says Everitt, “would be a focus for the simmering resentments among the Roman masses, the disbanded veterans, and the standing legions.”³⁷

Cicero, who had devoted his life to trying to curb the kind of power represented by Octavian, now gave up on the rule of law in favor of realpolitik. He recognized that “for all his struggles the constitution was dead and power lay in the hands of soldiers and their leaders.” In Cicero’s view, the only hope was to try to co-opt Octavian, leading him toward a more constitutional position, while doing everything not to “irritate rank-and-file opinion, which was fundamentally Caesarian.” Cicero would pay with his life for this last, desperate gamble. Octavian, still allied with Mark Antony, ordered at least 130 senators (perhaps as many as 300) executed and their property confiscated after charging them with having supported the conspiracy against Caesar. Mark Antony personally added Cicero’s name to the list. When he met his death, the great scholar, orator, and Grecophile had with him a copy of Euripides’ Medea, which he had been reading. His head and both hands were displayed in the Forum.³⁸

A year after Cicero’s death, following the battle of Philippi, where Brutus and Cassius were defeated and committed suicide, Octavian and Antony divided the known world between them. Octavian took the West and remained in Rome; Antony accepted the East and allied himself with Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt and Julius Caesar’s former mistress. In 31 BC, Octavian set out to end this unstable arrangement, and at the sea battle of Actium in the Gulf of Ambracia on the western coast of Greece, he defeated Antony and Cleopatra’s fleet. The following year in Alexandria, Mark Antony fell on his sword and Cleopatra took an asp to her breast. By then, both had been thoroughly discredited for claiming that Antony was a descendant of Caesar’s and for seeking Roman citizenship rights for Cleopatra’s children by Caesar. Octavian would rule the Roman world for the next forty-five years, until his death in 14 AD.

On January 13, 27 BC, Octavian appeared in the Senate, which had legitimized its own demise by ceding most of its powers to him and which now bestowed on him the new title of Augustus, first Roman emperor. The majority of the senators were his solid supporters, having been hand-picked by him. In 23 BC, Augustus was granted further authority by being designated a tribune for life, which gave him ultimate veto power over anything the Senate might do. But his real power ultimately rested on his total control of the armed forces.

His rise to power tainted by constitutional illegitimacy—not unlike that of our own putative Boy Emperor from Crawford, Texas—Augustus proceeded to emasculate the Roman system and its representative institutions. He never abolished the old republican offices but merely united them under one person—himself. Imperial appointment became a badge of prestige and social standing rather than of authority. The Senate was turned into a club of old aristocratic families, and its approval of the acts of the emperor was purely ceremonial. The Roman legions continued to march under the banner SPQR—senatus populus que Romanus (the Senate and the people of Rome)—but the authority of Augustus was absolute.

In response to the demands of empire, the army had grown so large as to be close to unmanageable. It constituted a state within a state, not unlike the Pentagon today. Augustus reduced the army’s size, providing generous cash payments to those soldiers who had served more than twelve years. Of course, he made clear that this bounty came from him, not their military commanders. He also transferred all legions from Rome to the remote provinces and borders of the empire, to ensure that their leaders were not tempted to meddle in political affairs. Astutely, he created a Praetorian Guard, an elite force of nine thousand men whose task was to defend him personally and he stationed them in Rome. Their ranks were drawn from Italy, not from distant provinces, and they were paid more than soldiers in the regular legions. They began as Augustus’s personal bodyguards, but in the decades after his death became decisive players in their own right in the selection of new emperors. It was one of the first illustrations of an old conundrum of authoritarian politics. If a bureaucracy, such as the Praetorian Guard, is created to control another bureaucracy, the regular army, before long the question will arise: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will watch the watchers?)

Augustus is credited with forging the Roman Peace (Pax Romana), which historians like to say lasted more than two hundred years. It was, however, based on a military dictatorship and entirely dependent on the incumbent emperor. Therein lay the problem. Tiberius, who succeeded Augustus, reigning from 14-37 AD, retired to Capri with a covey of young boys who catered to his sexual tastes. His successor, Caligula, who held office from 37-41, was the darling of the army, but on January 24, 41 AD, the Praetorian Guard assassinated him and proceeded to loot the imperial palace. Modern archaeological evidence strongly suggests that Caligula was an eccentric maniac, just as history has always portrayed him.³⁹

The fourth emperor, Claudius, who reigned from 41 to 54, was put in power by the Praetorian Guard in a de facto military coup. Despite the basically favorable portrayal of him by Robert Graves in his novel /, Claudius of 1934, and decades later adapted for TV (and played by Derek Jacobi), Claudius, who was Caligula’s uncle, was addicted to gladiatorial games and fond of watching defeated opponents being put to death. As a child, Claudius limped, drooled, stuttered, and was constantly ill. He had his first wife killed so he could marry Agrippina, daughter of Caligula’s sister, after having the law changed to allow uncles to marry their nieces. On October 13, 54 AD, Claudius was killed with a poisoned mushroom, probably fed to him by his wife, and at noon that same day, the sixteen-year-old Nero, Agrippina’s son by a former husband, was acclaimed emperor in a carefully orchestrated piece of political theater. Nero, who reigned from 54 to 68 AD, was probably insane as well as a tyrant. He set fire to Rome in 64 and executed those famed early Christians Paul and Peter, although his reputation has been somewhat rehabilitated in recent years as a patron of the arts.⁴⁰

After Augustus, not much recommends the Roman empire as an example of enlightened government. The history of the Roman Republic from the time of Julius Caesar suggests that imperialism and militarism— poorly understood by all conservative political leaders at the time— brought down the republic. The professionalization of a large standing army in order to defend the empire created invincible new sources of power within the Roman polity and prepared the way for the rise of populist generals who understood the grievances of their troops and veterans as politicians could not.

Service in the armed forces of the United States has not been a universal male obligation of citizenship since 1973. Our military today is a professional corps of men and women who commonly join up to advance themselves in the face of one or another cul-de-sac of American society. They normally do not expect to be shot at, but they do expect all the benefits of state employment—steady pay, good housing, free medical benefits, education, relief from racial discrimination, world travel, and gratitude from the rest of society for their “service.” They are well aware that the alternatives on offer today in civilian life include difficult job searches, little or no job security, regular pilfering of retirement funds by company executives and their accountants, “privatized” medical care, bad public elementary education, and insanely expensive higher education. They are ripe not for the rhetoric of a politician who followed the Andover-Yale-Harvard Business School route to riches and power but for a Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, or Juan Peron—a revolutionary, military populist with little interest in republican niceties so long as some form of emperorship lies at the end of his rocky path.

Regardless of who succeeds George W. Bush, the incumbent president will have to deal with an emboldened Pentagon, an engorged military-industrial complex, our empire of bases, and a fifty-year-old tradition of not revealing to the public what our military establishment costs or the kinds of devastation it can inflict. History teaches us that the capacity for things to get worse is limitless. Roman history suggests that the short, happy life of the American republic may be coming to its end—and that turning it into an openly military empire will not, to say the least, be the best solution to that problem.

One common response to this view is that ours is actually a “good empire” like the one from which we gained our independence in 1776. Whatever its faults and flaws, contemporary America, like England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is said to be a source of enlightenment for the rest of the world, a natural carrier of the seeds of “democracy” into benighted and oppressed regions, and the only possible military guarantor of “stability” on the planet. We are, therefore, the “cousins” and inheritors of the best traditions of the British Empire, which was, according to this highly ideological construct, a force for unalloyed good despite occasional unfortunate and unavoidable lapses.

The expatriate Scot and Harvard historian Niall Ferguson typically argues that the British Empire was motivated by “a sincere belief that spreading commerce, Christianity, and civilization was as much in the interests of Britain’s colonial subjects as in the interests of the imperial metropole itself.”⁴¹ He insists that “no organization [other than the British Empire] has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world” and that “America is heir to the empire in both senses: offspring of the colonial era, successor today. Perhaps the most burning contemporary question of American politics is: Should the United States seek to shed or to shoulder the imperial load it has inherited?”⁴² The Los Angeles Times’s right-wing columnist Max Boot thinks that “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.”⁴³

According to journalist Erik Tarloff, writing in the British newspaper Financial Times, “Claims that the British Raj redounded to the economic benefit of India as well as the mother country [are], I should think, irrefutable.”⁴⁴ Given that for two centuries—between 1757 and 1947— there was no increase at all in India’s per capita income, that in the second half of Victoria’s reign between thirty and fifty million Indians perished in famines and plagues brought on by British misrule, and that from 1872 to 1921, the life expectancy of ordinary Indians fell by a staggering 20 percent, the idea that India benefited from British imperialism is at least open to question.⁴⁵

The rewriting of history to prettify the British Empire has long been commonplace in England but it became politically significant in the United States only after 9/11, when the thought—novel to most Americans—that their own country was actually an “empire” began to come out of the closet. Beginning in late 2001, approval of American imperialism became a prominent theme in the establishment and neoconservative press. “It was time for America unabashedly and unilaterally, to assert its supremacy and to maintain global order,” writes Joshua Micah Marshall, editor of an influential Washington Internet newsletter. “After September 11th, a left-wing accusation became a right-wing aspiration: conservatives increasingly began to espouse a world view that was unapologetically imperialist.”⁴⁶

Bernard Porter, a professor at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and a recognized specialist on Britain’s imperial past, likes to argue that his country acquired its empire unintentionally. Apologists for American imperialism also contend that the United States acquired its continental girth as well as its Caribbean and Pacific colonies in a fit of innocent absentmindedness.⁴⁷ Despite his tendency to minimize the importance of the British Empire, Porter is an acute observer of trends in the candor with which this history has been approached. In the twentieth century, he observes, “Imperialism—in the old, conventional sense—suddenly became unfashionable.... [New books] took an entirely different line on it from before: hugely downplaying the glorious military aspects of it; almost giving the impression that most colonies had asked to join the Empire; stressing Britain’s supposed ‘civilizing’ mission; and presenting the whole thing as simply a happy federation of countries at different stages of ‘development.’ ... A new word was coined for it, which was thought to express this sort of thing better: ‘Commonwealth.’ A popular metaphor was that of the ‘family.’ “⁴⁸

In Porter’s view, the ordinary Victorian Englishman was never much interested in the empire, which was always a plaything of the military classes and those who wanted (or had) to get out of the British Isles. But in America, the idea that the British Empire was really nice—totally unlike its French, German, Russian, and Japanese contemporaries—had long been well received by novel readers and latter-day fans of the long-running TV series Masterpiece Theater.

During the post-9/11 period of American enthusiasm for imperialism, one of its most influential proselytizers was Michael Ignatieff, a Harvard professor and self-appointed spokesman for “humanitarian imperialism,” also known as “Empire Lite.” As the demand for his cheerleading faded in light of the Iraq war, Ignatieff decided to return to his native Canada and became a politician. Back in Toronto, he acknowledged to a journalist that his many essays and op-eds had all been written as if he were an American, and he apologized for having used “we” and “us” some forty-three times throughout his essay entitled “Lesser Evils,” which is a defense of official torture.⁴⁹

In the New York Times Magazine of January 5, 2003, Ignatieff proudly asserts, “Ever since George Washington warned his countrymen against foreign entanglements, empire abroad has been seen as the republic’s permanent temptation and its potential nemesis. Yet what word but ‘empire’ describes the awesome thing that America is becoming? It is the only nation that polices the world through five global military commands; maintains more than a million men and women at arms on four continents; deploys carrier battle groups on watch in every ocean; guarantees the survival of countries from Israel to South Korea; drives the wheels of global trade and commerce; and fills the hearts and minds of an entire planet with its dreams and desires.”

In numerous one-liners, Ignatieff sings the praises of American imperialism: “Multilateral solutions to the world’s problems are all very well, but they have no teeth unless America bares its fangs.... Regime change is an imperial task par excellence, since it assumes that the empire’s interest has a right to trump the sovereignty of a state.... The question, then, is not whether America is too powerful but whether it is powerful enough. Does it have what it takes to be grandmaster of what Colin Powell has called the chessboard of the world’s most inflammable region? ... The case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike.”⁵⁰

Ignatieff’s warlike prose comes from an essay entitled “The Burden,” an unmistakable reference to Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden,” written while he was living in Vermont and addressed to Americans as they prepared to subjugate the Philippines:

Take up the White Mans Burden

And reap his old reward

The blame of those ye better,

The hate of those ye guard.

Michael Neumann, a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, compares Ignatieff’s epistles to the Americans to “a sprig of cilantro on the nouveau-imperialist bucket of KFC [Kentucky Fried Chicken], transforming Bush’s blunderings into a treat for liberal white folks the world over.”⁵¹

Imperialism is, by definition, unpleasant for its victims. Even a supporter such as Niall Ferguson acknowledges that it is “the extension of one’s civilization, usually by military force, to rule over other peoples.”⁵² Regimes created by imperialists are never polities ruled with the consent of the governed. Evelyn Baring (later known as Lord Cromer), who was the British consul general and de facto overlord of Egypt from 1883 to 1907—officially he was merely an “adviser” to the formally ruling khedive—once commented, “We need not always enquire too closely what these people ... think is in their own interests.... It is essential that each special issue should be decided mainly with reference to what, by the light of Western knowledge and experience, ... we conscientiously think is best for the subject race.”⁵³ Lord Salisbury, Britain’s conservative prime minister at the start of the twentieth century, put it more succinctly: “If our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British empire would not have been made.”⁵⁴

Apologists for imperialism like Ferguson never consult the victims of the allegedly beneficent conquerors. As the American historian Kevin Baker points out, “The idea of Rome or the British empire as liberal institutions of any sort would have come as a surprise to, say, the Gauls or the Carthaginians, or the Jews of Masada; or, respectively, the Zulus or the Boers or the North American Indians or the Maoris of New Zealand.”⁵⁵ Eric Foner, the historian of American race relations, similarly reminds us that “the benevolence of benevolent imperialism lies in the eye of the beholder.”⁵⁶ What can be said, however, is that the British were exceptionally susceptible to believing in the “goodness” of their empire and, in this, the United States has indeed proved a worthy imperial successor. In his analysis of Jane Austens 1814 novel Mansfield Park, which depicted a wealthy English family whose comforts derived from a sugar plantation in Antigua built on slave labor, Edward Said observed, “European culture often, if not always, characterized itself in such a way as simultaneously to validate its own preferences while also advocating those preferences in conjunction with distant imperial rule.”⁵⁷

Actual, on-the-ground imperialists, as distinct from their political supporters and cheerleaders back home, know that they are hated; that is one of the reasons they traditionally detested imperial liberals, socialists, do-gooders, and other social critics remote from the killing fields, who criticized their methods or advocated the “reform” of some particular imperial project or other. Whether the imperial power is itself a democracy or a dictatorship makes a difference in the lives of the conquered, but only because that tends to determine how far the dominant country is willing to go in carrying out “administrative massacres,” to use Arendt’s potent term, when perpetuating its rule in the face of resistance.⁵⁸ A split between those who support imperialism and those who enforce it is characteristic of all imperialist republics. Both groups, however, normally share extensive rationales for their inherent superiority over “subject races” and the reasons why they should dominate and impose their “civilization” on others.

Those who supply such rationales of domination belong to what I call the “Jeane Kirkpatrick school of analysis.” As Reagan’s U.N. ambassador, Kirkpatrick once said, “Americans need to face the truth about themselves, no matter how pleasant it is.”⁵⁹ Historians like Ferguson are of this persuasion, which particularly flourished in the first years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, in Anglo-American countries. That Britons and Americans have proven so comfortable with the idea of forcing thousands of people to be free by slaughtering them—with Maxim machine guns in the nineteenth century, with “precision-guided munitions” today—seems to reflect a deeply felt need as well as a striking inability to imagine the lives and viewpoints of others. While this, too, is typical of any imperial power, it has perhaps been heightened in the cases of Great Britain and the United States by the fact that neither has ever been defeated and occupied by a foreign military power.

On the other hand, even defeat in war did not cause the Japanese to give up their legends of racial, economic, and cultural superiority. Although the Japanese after World War II “embraced defeat,” in the historian John Dower’s memorable phrase, they never gave up their nationalist and racist convictions that in slaughtering over twenty million Chinese and enslaving the Koreans they were actually engaged in liberating East Asians from the grip of Western imperialism.⁶⁰ All empires, it seems, require myths of divine right, racial preeminence, manifest destiny, or a “civilizing mission” to cover their often barbarous behavior in other people’s countries. As Foner points out, sixteenth-century Spaniards claimed to be “freeing” members of the Aztec, Mayan, and Incan civilizations from backwardness and superstition via Christian conversion, while Britons in the late nineteenth century liked to think that in massacring Africans they were actually helping to suppress the slave trade.⁶¹

There is, in fact, nothing new about such self-enhancing American military campaign names as “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” “Infinite Justice” (as Centcom called the 2001 U.S. attack on Afghanistan until Muslim scholars and clerics objected that only God can dispense infinite justice), and “Just Cause” (Bush senior’s vicious 1989 assault on Panama).⁶² Such efforts reflect both justifications for imperialism and strategies for avoiding responsibility for its inevitable catastrophes. The first recourse in justification has long been racism—or at least a sense of superiority—in all of its forms, including the belief that victory over the “natives” (including their mass deaths due to diseases the imperialists introduce) is evidence that God or the gods have divinely sanctioned foreign conquest. As the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr taught, “The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan values is the source of all religious fanaticism.”⁶³ Then there has been the long list of what writer Sven Lindqvist, in his book “Exterminate All the Brutes”] which is a gloss on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, usefully terms pseudo-scientific “ideologies of extermination”: eugenics, perversions of Darwinism, natural selection, survival of the fittest, Malthusian demography, and more.⁶⁴

Racist defenses of imperialism have often been linked to the argument that the imperialists have bestowed some unquestioned benefits, often economic, on their conquered peoples even as they pauperize or enslave them. Examples from the last two centuries include the benefits of “free trade,” globalization, the rule of (foreign) law, investor protection, “liberation” from other imperial powers or homegrown dictators, or “democracy.” In supporting Bush’s attack on Iraq, the Harvard historian Charles S. Maier notes approvingly, “Empires function by virtue of the prestige they radiate as well as by might, and indeed collapse if they rely on force alone. Artistic styles, the language of the rulers, and consumer preferences flow outward along with power and investment capital—sometimes diffused consciously by cultural diplomacy and student exchanges, sometimes just by popular tastes for the intriguing products of the metropole, whether Coca-Cola or Big Macs. As supporters of the imperial power rightly maintain, empires provide public goods that masses of people outside their borders really want to enjoy, including an end to endemic warfare and murderous ethnic or religious conflicts.”⁶⁵

Finally, in retrospect, there has been simple amnesia: the systematic omission of subjects that are impossible to square with the idea of “liberal imperialism.” For example, both Ferguson and the Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire skip lightly over the fact that the empire operated the world’s largest and most successful drug cartel. During the nineteenth century, Britain fought two wars of choice with China to force it to import opium. The opium grown in India and shipped to China first by the British East India Company and after 1857 by the government of India, helped Britain finance much of its military and colonial budgets in South and Southeast Asia. The Australian scholar Carl A. Trocki concludes that, given the huge profits from the sale of opium, “without the drug, there probably would have been no British empire.”⁶⁶

Other intellectual strategies have been concocted to avoid facing the reality of imperialist depredations. For example, the philosopher John Locke came up with the brilliant idea that the land in North America British colonists were stealing from the indigenous people was actually terra nullius, or “nobody’s land.” But let me expand briefly on just two of the rationalizations for imperialism: racism and economic benefits bestowed.

Racism has been the master imperialist rationale of modern times, one with which British imperialists are completely familiar. “Imperialism,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible ‘explanation’ and excuse for its deeds, even if no race-thinking had ever existed in the civilized world.”⁶⁷ But what, exactly, needed to be explained by racism? Initially, it was the growing dominance by small groups of well-armed, ruthless Europeans over societies in South and East Asia that in the eighteenth century were infinitely richer and more sophisticated than anything then known in Europe. As the historian Mike Davis observes, “When the sans culottes stormed the Bastille [in 1789], the largest manufacturing districts in the world were still the Yangzi Delta [in China] and Bengal [in India], with Lingan (modern Guangdong and Guangxi) and coastal Madras not far behind.”⁶⁸ In the early eighteenth century, India was a “vast and economically advanced subcontinent,” producing close to a quarter of total planetary output of everything, compared with Britain’s measly 3 percent.⁶⁹ As the British set about looting their captured subcontinent this reality proved an inconvenient one. It became indispensable for them to be able to describe the conquered populations as inferior in every way: incapable of self-government, lacking in the ability to reason, hopelessly caught up in “static” Oriental beliefs, overly fecund, and, in short, not members of the “fittest” races. In other words, their subjugation was not only their own fault but inevitable.

Joseph Conrad’s closest friend and correspondent was the Scottish aristocrat and socialist R. B. Cunninghame Graham, who looked on his country’s imperialism with a jaundiced eye. It seems likely that Graham’s letters and published works inspired Conrad to write the most important book in English on imperialism—his 1899 novel Heart of Darkness. In 1897, in a story entitled “Bloody Niggers,” Graham summed up the English imperial view of the world in the following fashion: “Far back in history, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Egyptians lived and thought, but God was aiming all the time at something different and better. He let Greeks and Romans appear out of the darkness of barbarity to prepare the way for the race that from the start was chosen to rule over mankind—namely, the British race.”⁷⁰

At its heart, British imperialist ideology revolved around the belief that history and human evolution—either divinely guided or as a result of natural selection—had led inexorably to the British Empire of the nineteenth century. As a result, the British extermination of the Tasmanians (“living fossils”); the slaughter of at least ten thousand Sudanese in a single battle at Omdurman on September 2, 1898; General Reginald “Rex” Dyer’s use of Gurkha troops on April 13, 1919, at Amritsar to kill as many Punjabis as he could until his soldiers ran out of ammunition; the sanctioned use of explosive dumdum bullets (meant for big-game hunting) in colonial wars but prohibiting them in conflicts among “civilized” nations; and many similar events down to the sanguine, sadistic suppression of the Kikuyu people in Kenya in the 1950s were not morally indefensible crimes of imperialism but the workings of a preordained narrative of civilization.

What changed over time was the idea that a divine hand lay behind such work. As Lindqvist comments, “During the nineteenth century, religious explanations were replaced by biological ones. The exterminated peoples were colored, the exterminators white. It seemed obvious that some racial natural law was at work and that the extermination of non-Europeans was simply a stage in the natural development of the world. The fact that natives died proved that they belonged to a lower race. Let them die as the laws of progress demand.”⁷¹ On this, Ferguson concurs: “Influenced by, but distorting beyond recognition, the work of Darwin, nineteenth-century pseudo-scientists divided humanity into races’ on the basis of external physical features, ranking them according to inherited differences not just in physique but also in character. Anglo-Saxons were self-evidently at the top, Africans at the bottom.”⁷² In this scheme of things, welfare measures and ameliorative reforms of harsh colonial practices should not be allowed to interfere with natural selection since this would only allow inferiors to survive and “propagate their unfitness.”⁷³ These ideas were much admired by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, where he wrote approvingly of Britain’s “effective oppression of an inferior race,” the Indians.⁷⁴

Racist attitudes spread throughout the British Empire and retained a tenacious hold on English thought well into the twentieth century. As P. J. Marshall, editor of the Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, observes, “The roots of South African apartheid, the most inflexible of all systems of racial segregation, can clearly be found in the period when Britain still had ultimate responsibility. The British were never inclined to condone racially mixed marriages, which were common in some other empires, and they rarely treated people of mixed race as in any way the equal of whites.”⁷⁵ Niall Ferguson deserves credit for noting the sexual hysteria of the Victorians that contributed to these racist policies.⁷⁶ That theme, for instance, infuses several of the great novels of Indian life— E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown (1966), Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust (1975), and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997). It is ironic, then, that Edwina, Lady Mountbatten, wife of the last British viceroy in India, had a passionate love affair with independent India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.⁷⁷

“The overt racism of the British in India, which affected the institutions of government, contributed powerfully to the growth of nationalist sentiment,” recalls Tapan Raychaudhuri, an emeritus fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. “All Indians, whatever their status, shared the experience of being treated as racial inferiors.... The life stories of Indian celebrities are full of episodes of racial insults.”⁷⁸ For all its alleged liberalism and the capitalist institutions it forced on its captive peoples, the British Empire bred, inculcated, and propagated racism as its ultimate justification. Even though it was history’s largest empire, its rulers seemed incapable of functioning without thoroughly deceiving themselves about why, for a relatively short period of time, they dominated the world. For this reason alone, the British Empire should not be held up as an institution deserving emulation, least of all by the first nation that broke free of it, the United States of America.

Racists though they may have been, Britons have long claimed that they bequeathed to the world the most advanced and effective economic institutions ever devised. “For many British people,” as P. J. Marshall puts it, “it is axiomatic that their record in the establishment of colonies of settlement overseas and as rulers of non-European peoples was very much superior to that of any other power.”⁷⁹ The popular Niall Ferguson, author of Colossus, an admiring if condescending book on America’s emerging empire, is primarily an economic historian, and his influential glosses on the British Empire stress, above all, its contributions to what later came to be called “globalization.” He is on the same wavelength with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, bestselling author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization and The World Is Flat, who also thinks that the integration of capital markets and investor protection contribute mightily to the well-being of peoples under the sway of either the British or the American empires. Though the idea does not survive close scrutiny, it has proved a powerful ideological justification of imperialism.

It is not news that somewhere around 1 billion people today subsist on almost nothing. With rare exceptions, the countries that the various imperialisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries exploited and colonized remain poor, disease- and crime-ridden, and at the mercy of a rigged international trading system that Anglo-American propagandists assure us is rapidly “globalizing” to everyone’s advantage. But, as the New York Times pointed out, “The very same representatives of the club of rich countries who go around the world hectoring the poor to open up their markets to free trade put up roadblocks when those countries ask the rich to dismantle their own barriers to free trade in agricultural products.”⁸⁰ According to World Bank data, 390 million of India’s 1.1 billion people— almost a third of them—live on less than one dollar a day.⁸¹ Typically, the former U.S. colony of the Philippines, a resource-rich country with a large Sino-Malay population, remains the poorest nation in East Asia, the world’s fastest-growing economic region—a direct result of U.S. imperialism. Similarly, impoverished Latin America still struggles to throw off the legacies of American “backyard” neocolonialism.⁸² All this is among the best-known economic information in the world.

According to the apologists for the British Empire, however, such bad economic news cannot be true, because these problems were solved over 150 years ago. Ferguson maintains that “the nineteenth-century [British] empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labor.”⁸³ After the Irish famine (1846-1850) and the Indian Mutiny (1857), the British “recast their empire as an economically liberal project, concerned as much with the integration of global markets as with the security of the British Isles, predicated on the idea that British rule was conferring genuine benefits in the form of free trade, the rule of law, the safeguarding of private property rights and non-corrupt administration, as well as government-guaranteed investments in infrastructure, public health, and (some) education.”⁸⁴

Unfortunately, this argument is an offshoot of the old nineteenth-century Marxist conception that politics are mere superstructural reflections of underlying economic relations, and that a single worldwide economic system is emerging that will usher in an era of unprecedented prosperity and peace for all. As the economic theorist John Gray observes, “It is an irony of history that a view of the world falsified by the Communist collapse should have been adopted, in some of its most misleading aspects, by the victors in the Cold War. Neoliberals, such as Friedman [and Ferguson], have reproduced the weakest features of Marx’s thought—its consistent underestimation of nationalist and religious movements and its unidirectional view of history.”⁸⁵

The idea that the British Empire conferred economic benefits on any groups other than British capitalists is pure ideology, as impervious to challenge by empirical data as former Soviet prime minister Leonid Brezhnev’s Marxism-Leninism or George Bush’s belief that free markets mean the same thing as freedom. At the apex of those who profited from British-style “free trade” at the end of the nineteenth century was the Rothschild Bank, then by far the world’s largest financial institution with total assets of around forty-one million pounds sterling. It profited enormously from the wars—some seventy-two of them—during Queen Victoria’s reign, and financed such exploiters of Africa as Cecil Rhodes.

Ferguson, who wrote a history of the House of Rothschild, knows these things and does not deny them when he turns from imperial panegyrics to history. “In the age before steam power,” he writes, “India had led the world in manual spinning, weaving, and dyeing. The British had first raised tariffs against their products; then demanded free trade when their alternative industrial mode of production had been perfected.”⁸⁶ The result was poverty and dependence for India. As Oxford historian Tapan Raychaudhuri puts it, “Early in the nineteenth century India lost its export trade in manufactures and became a net importer of manufactured goods and a supplier of mainly agricultural products to Britain for the first time in its history. ... In India the favorable terms granted to British exporters and the doctrine of laissez-faire meant that Indian industries received no protection and hardly any encouragement until the mid-1920s, and then only in response to persistent Indian pressure.”⁸⁷ Precisely at the time that the British were preparing India for its poverty-stricken modern fate, two other nations were laying the foundations for their own contemporary status as the world’s first and second most productive nations—the United States, protected from its inception to about 1940 by tariffs on manufactured imports that averaged 44 percent; and Japan, which kept itself free of imperialist domination and copied the economic practices of Britain, the United States, and Germany rather than paying much attention to their economic treatises on free markets.⁸⁸

What we are talking about here is, in Mike Davis’s phrase, “the making of the third world,” the poverty-stricken southern hemisphere that is still very much with us today. “The looms of India and China,” Davis writes, “were defeated not so much by market competition as they were forcibly dismantled by war, invasion, opium, and a Lancashire-imposed system of one-way tariffs.”⁸⁹ In a well-known formulation, the social theorist Karl Polanyi wrote in his seminal work The Great Transformation (1944): “The catastrophe of the native community is a direct result of the rapid and violent disruption of the basic institutions of the victim (whether force is used in the process or not does not seem altogether relevant). These institutions are disrupted by the very fact that a market economy is foisted upon an entirely differently organized community; labor and land are made into commodities, which, again, is only a short formula for the liquidation of every and any cultural institution in an organic society.... Indian masses in the second half of the nineteenth century did not die of hunger because they were exploited by Lancashire; they perished in large numbers because the Indian village community had been demolished.”⁹⁰

Ferguson agrees; it is just that he, like Marx, sees all this chaos as “creative destruction,” the birth pangs of a new world order, Lenin’s famous willingness to break eggs in order to make an omelet. (“But how many eggs must you break,” one wag famously asked, “to make a two-egg omelet?”) “No doubt it is true that, in theory, open international markets would have been preferable to imperialism,” Ferguson argues, “but in practice global free trade was not and is not naturally occurring. The British empire enforced it.”⁹¹

Thomas Friedman similarly acknowledges that contemporary American-sponsored globalization is not a naturally occurring process. American imperialism enforces it: “The most powerful agent pressuring other countries to open their markets for free trade and free investments is Uncle Sam, and America’s global armed forces keep these markets and sea lanes open for this era of globalization, just as the British navy did for the era of globalization in the nineteenth century.”⁹² If Mexican corn farmers are driven out of business by heavily subsidized American growers and then the price of corn makes tortillas unaffordable, that is just the global market at work. But if poor and unemployed Mexicans then try to enter the United States to support their families, that is to be resisted by armed force.

After all their arguments have been deployed, how do analysts like Ferguson and Friedman explain the nineteenth-century poverty of India and China, the several dozen Holocaust-sized famines in both countries while food sat on the docks waiting to be exported, and their current status as “late developers”? Students of communism will not be surprised by the answer. In India, Ferguson argues, the British did not go far enough in enforcing their ideas. “If one leaves aside their fundamentally different resource endowments, the explanation for India’s underperformance compared with, say, Canada lies not in British exploitation but rather in the insufficient scale of British interference in the Indian economy.”⁹³

When Mao Zedong introduced Soviet-style collective farms into China and did not get satisfactory results, he did not abandon them but turned instead to truly gigantic collectives called “communes.” This Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s produced a famine that took some thirty million Chinese lives, a monument to communist extremism similar to the extremes of laissez-faire that the British dogmatically imposed on their conquered territories—and that Ferguson would have preferred to be yet more extreme.

The historical evidence suggests a strong correlation exists between being on the receiving end of imperialism and immiseration. The nations that avoided the fates of India, China, Mexico, and the Philippines did so by throwing off foreign rule early—as did the United States—or by modernizing militarily in order to hold off the imperialists (and ultimately join them)—as did Japan.

Even so, the United States is the heir to the British Empire in at least one sense: it is still peddling the same self-serving ideology that its London predecessors pioneered. In a typical speech from the White House, given on September 17, 2002, President George W. Bush said, “The United States will use this moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe. We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world. ... Free trade and free markets have proven their ability to lift whole societies out of poverty—so the United States will work with individual nations, entire regions, and the entire global trading community to build a world that trades in freedom and therefore grows in prosperity.” This kind of rhetoric gives democracy a bad name.

Some who deplore the British Empire’s racism and the fraudulent economic benefits it offered its imperial subjects are nonetheless willing to applaud its gentlemanly endgame, arguing that the way the empire dismantled itself after World War II was “authentically noble” and redeemed all that went before. Ferguson takes up this theme, too. “In the end, the British sacrificed her empire to stop the Germans, Japanese, and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the empire’s other sins?”⁹⁴ Much of this is Anglo-American claptrap, but at its core there is a theoretical distinction that is important. First, a look at the argument.

P. J. Marshall asserts categorically: “The British entered into partnerships with their nationalists and extricated themselves from empire with grace and goodwill.. . . The unwillingness of the British government after 1945 to be dragged into colonial wars is irrefutable, even if it is not easy to explain.”⁹⁵ This idea, a staple of Anglophile romanticism, is simply untrue. When he was writing in 1996, Marshall was surely aware of the Malayan Emergency, a bloody colonial war to retain British possession of its main rubber-producing southeast Asian colonies that lasted from approximately 1948 to 1960. It was the British equivalent of the anti-French and anti-American wars that went on in nearby Indochina. Although the British claimed victory over the insurgents, much like the French did in Algeria, the long and deadly conflict led to independence for Britain’s colonies and the emergence of the two successor states of Malaysia and Singapore.

The so-called Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya from 1952 to 1960—in the immediate wake of the global war against fascism—was one of the most vicious colonial wars Britain ever fought. No one knows precisely what “Mau Mau” means or even what language it comes from, but it was the Kikuyu, Kenya’s largest ethnic group, some 1.5 million strong, who led the rebellion for freedom from British oppression. Kenya’s white settler population was different from similar groups in other colonies. A great many came from Britain’s upper classes, and they assumed privileges in their new East African enclave that had long since been abolished in their homeland. Caroline Elkins, an American historian who has reconstructed the revolt against these expatriates, writes, “Kenya’s big men quickly established a leisurely life-style aspired to by all Europeans in the colony. On their estates or farms or in European neighborhoods in Nairobi, every white settler in the colony was a lord to some extent, particularly in relationship to the African population.... [T]hese privileged men and women lived an absolutely hedonistic life-style, filled with sex, drugs, and dance, followed by more of the same.”⁹⁶

When the Kenyans rebelled against ruthless land seizures by the settlers and their adamant refusal to share power in any way, the British retaliated—in the name of civilization—by detaining, torturing, and executing huge numbers of Africans. They imprisoned in concentration camps nearly the entire Kikuyu population, whom the British contended were not freedom fighters but savages of the lowest order. This colonial war may have slipped the mind of the editor of the Cambridge History because the British government did everything in its power to cover up the genocide it attempted there, including burning its colonial archives relating to Kenya on the eve of leaving the country in 1963.

“On the dreadful balance sheet of atrocities,” Elkins explains,”... the murders perpetrated by Mau Mau adherents were quite small in number when compared to those committed by the forces of British colonial rule. Officially, fewer than one hundred Europeans, including settlers, were killed and some eighteen hundred loyalists [pro-British Kikuyu] died at the hands of Mau Mau. In contrast, the British reported that more than eleven thousand Mau Mau were killed in action, though the empirical and demographic evidence I unearthed calls into serious question the validity of this figure. I now believe there was in late colonial Kenya a murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people, a campaign that left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, dead.”⁹⁷ This was anything but an extrication from empire “with grace and goodwill.”

Without doubt Niall Ferguson also knows about the way the British crushed the Mau Mau, since he and his family lived in Nairobi in the late 1960s, but he makes no mention of the rebellion in either of his books on the British Empire. Instead, he writes, “We had our bungalow, our maid, our smattering of Swahili—and our sense of unshakable security. It was a magical time, which indelibly impressed on my consciousness the sight of the hunting cheetah, the sound of Kikuyu women singing, the smell of the first rains and the taste of ripe mango.”⁹⁸ The British seem to have no qualms about distorting the historical record in order to prettify their imperialism. Jan Christian Smuts, the Boer general who later defected to the British side and served twice in the early twentieth century as prime minister of the Union of South Africa, the British colony’s successor state, called British indifference to their violations of international law during the Boer War “very characteristic of the nation which always plays the role of chosen judge over the actions and behavior of all other nations.”⁹⁹

There are still other post-1945 colonial wars that contradict any claim of an honorable British abdication of empire, for example, the joint Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt in November 1956 in retaliation for Gamal Abdel Nasser’s act of nationalizing the Suez Canal. Nothing came of it because the United States refused to join this exercise in gunboat diplomacy. Nonetheless, the incident revealed that some eighteen years after the British occupation of Egypt had supposedly ended, Britain still had eighty thousand troops based in the canal zone and did not want to leave.¹⁰⁰ And then there is the British military’s 2003 return to what Toronto Sun columnist Eric Margolis calls “among the most disastrous and tragic creations of Britain’s colonial policy”—namely, Iraq.¹⁰¹ In 1920, following World War I, Britain violated every promise it had ever made to the diverse peoples of the Near East and created the hopelessly unstable country of Iraq from the Mesopotamian remnants of the Ottoman Empire. The new country combined mutually incompatible Kurds, Shia Muslims, and Sunni Muslims, whose struggles with each other were finally suppressed only by the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. In 1920, when the Iraqis revolted against the British, the Royal Air Force routinely bombed, strafed, and used poison gas against rebellious villages. It is remarkable that the British dared show their faces there again.

There are other problems with the thesis that the British Empire revealed its human greatness at its twilight. The bungled partition of India into India and Pakistan caused between two hundred thousand and a half million deaths and laid the foundation for the three wars to follow between the two countries and the ongoing conflict in Kashmir.¹⁰² Raychaudhuri explains, “The British perception that Hindus and Muslims were two mutually antagonistic monoliths, a notion not rooted in facts, became an important basis for allocating power and resources. Hindu-Muslim rivalry and the eventual partition of India was the end result, and the British policy makers, when they did not actually add fuel to the conflict, were quite happy to take advantage of it.”¹⁰³ In the partition, Lord Mount-batten, the last viceroy, openly sided with the Hindu-dominated Congress Party against the Muslim League.¹⁰⁴

An empire such as Britain’s that remains a democracy at home and a tyranny abroad always faces tensions between its people in the field and the home office. The on-the-spot imperialists usually exercise unmitigated power over their subordinated peoples whereas political leaders at home are responsible to parliaments and can be held accountable through elections. Writing about British imperialism, Hannah Arendt noted that “on the whole [it] was a failure because of the dichotomy between the nation-state’s legal principles and the methods needed to oppress other people permanently. This failure was neither necessary nor due to ignorance or incompetence. British imperialists knew very well that ‘administrative massacres’ could keep India in bondage, but they also knew that public opinion at home would not stand for such measures. Imperialism could have been a success if the nation-state had been willing to pay the price, to commit suicide and transform itself into a tyranny. It is one of the glories of Europe, and especially of Great Britain, that she preferred to liquidate the empire.”¹⁰⁵

Even though I believe Arendt overstates the achievements of Britain, her point is the main one I have tried to illustrate in this chapter. Over any fairly lengthy period of time, successful imperialism requires that a domestic republic or a domestic democracy change into a domestic tyranny. That is what happened to the Roman Republic; that is what I fear is happening in the United States as the imperial presidency gathers strength at the expense of the constitutional balance of governmental powers and as militarism takes even deeper root in the society. It did not happen in Britain, although it was more likely and altogether less noble than either Arendt or contemporary apologists for British imperialism imply. Nonetheless, Britain escaped transformation into a tyranny largely because of a post-World War II resurgence of democracy and popular revulsion at the routine practices of imperialism.

The histories of Rome and Britain suggest that imperialism and militarism are the deadly enemies of democracy. This was something the founders of the United States tried to forestall with their creation of a republican structure of government and a system of checks and balances inspired by the Roman Republic. Imperialism and militarism will ultimately breach the separation of powers created to prevent tyranny and defend liberty. The United States today, like the Roman Republic in the first century BC, is threatened by an out-of-control military-industrial complex and a huge secret government controlled exclusively by the president. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, cynical and shortsighted political leaders in the United States began to enlarge the powers of the president at the expense of the elected representatives of the people and the courts. The public went along, accepting the excuse that a little tyranny was necessary to protect the population. But, as Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1759, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Rome and Britain are archetypes of the dilemma of combining democracy at home with an empire abroad. In the Roman case, they decided to hang on to the empire and lost their democracy. In the British case, they chose the opposite: in order to remain democratic they dumped their empire and military apparatus after World War II. For us, the choice is between the Roman and British precedents.