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The world’s leading professors explain the latest thinking in the humanities and social sciences in just 10 minutes.
My name is Gurminder Kaur Bhambra. I'm
Professor of Historical Sociology at
the University of Sussex. Today I'm going
to talk about the varieties of empire.
Empires and nation states are typically
understood as two distinct types of
political organisation. There are states,
it is claimed, that are empires and there
are others that are nation states. The key
differences between them are as follows.
Nation states are organised around points of
commonality across factors such as language,
culture, and tradition; whereas empires are
seen to maintain heterogenous cultures within
their boundaries. Nation states are said to
embody a horizontal order of rule whereby all
members are equal citizens (or in the process
of becoming so); empires, on the other hand,
are seen as hierarchical and organised in
relation to vertical lines of solidarity.
The elites within nation states share the
culture of the people, whereas empires are
regarded as having a cosmopolitan elite drawn
from the various cultures across the empire.
Finally, empires are associated with pre-modern
societies, and will eventually, it is argued,
give way to modern nation-states that emerge as
a consequence of the break-up of empires.
However, here there is a problem.
The period during which what are regarded as
the archetypal nation-states of the British,
French, and Dutch were becoming consolidated
is the very same period in which they were
establishing overseas empires. So, rather
than nation-states coming to replace empires,
what we see is nation-states
emerging as empires. Moreover,
these empires were significantly
different from other types of empires.
In this talk, I address the apparent paradox
inherent in the claim that the rise of modern
nation-states involved the displacement
of empire at the same time as overseas
empires were being established
by modern European nations.
The missing piece of the puzzle
that would resolve this apparent
paradox is a proper address of colonialism.
The fact that colonial processes are not
systematically theorised as central to
histories of the modern world is something
that I have discussed, at length, elsewhere.
Here, I wish to highlight the
difference made by colonialism
to the political form of European
empire in the modern period.
The standard argument presents all types
of empire as being essentially the same
sort of political entity, but I want
to suggest something different. First,
there are fundamental differences between
types of empires. Second, those states we have
understood to be nations (with empires) are more
adequately conceptualised as colonial states.
Specifically, I distinguish two types of empire
– ‘empires of incorporation’ and ‘empires of
extraction’ and I propose that there are three
dominant forms of colonialism which interact
and intersect over time to create a distinct
and modern empire based on extraction.
The three types of colonialism
are: ‘colonialism by corporation’;
‘state practices of extraction of resources at a
distance’; and ‘emigrationist colonialism’.
The 17th century saw the growth of commercial
organisations – specifically, the joint stock
company – whose activities, commercial and more
extensive, were backed by the power of their
domestic national states. Their primary objective
was the discovery of new trades, or trading
routes, and marked a significant shift towards
overseas commerce. Alongside trade, however,
these companies came to be involved in territorial
acquisition and the subjugation of populations
abroad. Colonialism by corporation, then,
relied on conquest to engage in commerce.
The latter half of the 19th century saw a turn
away from mercantile capitalism, or commercial
colonialism, to state-managed colonialism. Various
European states took over control of the colonies
established by state-backed companies, with
the Dutch East Indies and the British Empire
in India being two of the most prominent examples.
However, some of the earliest and most significant
state-backed practices of resource extraction at a
distance included the Spanish extraction of silver
from Potosi and the Portuguese initiation of
the trade in human beings from Africa.
The difference with the subsequent modes
of colonisation by the English (and then
the British), the Dutch, and the French was the
particular amalgamation of the state with the
commercial colonial entities they had supported
in establishing new European overseas empires.
The third form of colonialism is that of
‘emigrationist colonialism’. Despite the
popular idea that what was confronted was ‘terra
nullius’, there is no land to which Europeans
ventured and settled that was not already
populated and engaged in forms of husbandry that,
in liberal theory at least, was the basis of a
right of possession. During the 19th century,
over 60 million Europeans left their
countries of origin to make new lives
and livelihoods for themselves
on lands inhabited by others.
These forms of colonialism have consolidated
European global dominance politically
and economically and have brought
into being the modern world. They
have shaped our institutions and our
understandings of the world and have
established the difference between empires of
incorporation and empires of extraction.
‘Empires of incorporation’, I suggest, emerge
through the expansion and socio-economic
development of pre-existing political
formations. They involve processes of
occupation and annexation of contiguous lands.
This is primarily as a consequence of initiatives
by rulers within any given territory and
involves the development of centralised
administrative and political institutions
to govern a defined, if expanding, area.
Incorporation may give rise to resistance, but
it was also generally inclusive in the order
of rules and obligations that organised
the claims to territory. In contrast,
‘empires of extraction’, I argue, operate
at a distance and are organised through
the colonial processes I set out earlier.
They differ in three significant ways.
So first, expansion involved the subjugation
of populations who were subject to rule by the
colonising state but were not part of its order
of rule, which was divided between nation and
colony. The political conditions of government,
for example, were not common across the territory
of the empire and there were different legal
systems in the metropole and the colonies.
The second difference between the two
types of empires is that subjugation
was organised on the assumption
of civilisational, religious,
and/or racial superiority by the colonising
state. The mark of ‘colonial difference’,
as Partha Chatterjee has called it, was
central in defining who was understood
as a national citizen or subject, and part
of the order of rule, and who was not.
Third, the land and resources of the
colonised population – including the
populations themselves – were deemed to
be available to the colonising state for
its own purposes and without consultation
with them. This included the enslavement
of populations from the African continent
who were coerced to labour in the Americas,
as well as modes of indenture and servitude
across the Indian Ocean world.
The three key factors in distinguishing
between empires of extraction and empires
of incorporation, then, are as follows. First,
colonised populations being subject to rule
but not part of a common order of rule. Second,
legitimation of colonisation on the basis of some
idea of civilisational difference and hierarchy,
including that of scientific racism. Third,
the extraction of resources (material
resources, taxation, and human beings
themselves) from the colonies for the primary
advantage of those in the metropole.
These three aspects constitute empires of
extraction as fundamentally distinct
from empires of incorporation.
There have been a multitude of empires across
world history, but, within that history,
European overseas empires have been a distinct
form that needs to be understood in terms of its
specific characteristics. The differences
are not simply of form but substantive;
that is, those differences have political
consequences that we need to reckon with.
This task is made more difficult if we
elide all differences between empires.