Types of Empires: Security, Conquest, and Trade

(A reflection on the nature of empire, actually bought on by China's current aggressively imperialistic stance... which I will discuss at another time. But this goes to a light rumination on the purposes of empire... Enjoy.)

I once made a joke, at a gathering of historians, that the most successful post colonial states could be considered a tribute to the Protestant Work Ethic. A very earnest lady tried to point out that there had been many Catholic Colonies as well, (which I thought was my whole point).

Nobody commented on post Muslim Colonies of course… as there aren’t any.

What I didn’t do was go into the issue of the Catholic Colonies being largely ‘robber baron’ states (see most of South and Central America and the Catholic belt of Africa such as the Congo for instance), whereas the Protestant Colonies were largely ‘trade’ states (see most of North America and Asia, and the more Protestant bits of Africa). But it did cause me to reflect on the different reasons Empires develop, and the different results.

So let's look at the difference between Empires founded for different reasons...

1. Security Empires

The earliest ‘empires’ were Security oriented. A band of hunter-gatherers -  who had no concept of individual property, and just took whatever they needed from the environment - finally settled, and became farmers. Fencing and cultivating and irrigating, and building surpluses which could be traded for items that would improve living standards. (Farmers in areas that CAN’T store surplus – mainly tropical areaswith year round crops – never made it further than village level agriculture, whereas farmers in areas with storable annual crops like grain – which can be stored and TAXED – went on to found empires…)

Unfortunately the initial problem with being farmers surrounded by hunter-gatherers who don’t understand property, is that such hunter-gatherers look at those nicely fenced grains and enclosed cows and sheep and goats as wonderfully convenient places to hunter-gather… (There is a reason the boundaries between hunter-gatherers and farmers are violent places, and all the crap written about ‘frontier wars' and extermination and the rest is just a shorthand for  - these two cultures cannot co-exist peacefully… Nomads are different.. they trade, therefore they understand property, therefore they can co-exist with farmers – though they will still raid where they can, be they Mongol or Viking!)

So farmers immediately face a law and order issue, which can only be solved if there is enough surplus available to provide a tax base that will allow an authority figure (chief, king, emperor, etc) to employ people to provide protection. At village level that is usually a warrior caste who can keep the competition at bay, but once surplus gets to a level that allows higher tech, that will mean states or empires.

To put that in perspective, if your local community collects a surplus, and can afford a local chief/lord/king to provide protection, the resulting tax system is almost always (in recorded human cultures) based on a percentage of production. (In fact the earliest versions of written communication are almost always record keeping for crops and taxation.) This means that the local lord immediately has both the majority of excess funds locally, and a strong incentive to increase local production so his take will increase.

When I ask the average class of secondary school students what sorts of things the local lord could invest in to improve productivity, they get the idea pretty quickly. Irrigation for fields; animals for farm work; blacksmiths for tools and axels; wheelrights; roads; bridges; mills; markets; guards; etc. This list is common to most parts of Europe, Africa, Asia, Central and South America and Australasia. The only places it never developes are the very early farming communities in places like New Guinea that have no storable or taxable food items to allow such a development.

So all early farming societies that can tax – without exception – become tax based hierarchical cultures. Some are even referred to as kingdoms or empires. And they are based on the idea of keeping the farmers safe, so they can be taxed. 

These early empires are all Security empires. In the Middle East they are often shown as large sprawls across the map, but such sprawls are fairly fanciful. In practice they usually refer to rich farm based river valleys, with an extended hinterland based on nomadic tribes that are trading with/employed by/or paid tribute to by the ‘imperial authority’ simply to keep other outsiders at bay.

Traditionally they fall when their hinterland nomadic allies are not strong enough to keep outsiders at bay, or become strong enough themselves to try a bit of conquest. At which point of course the conquerors find that they have to adopt the systems of the despised lowlanders they have just conquered if they are to keep the loot coming in and the system going. (One of my favourite historical analogies is the nomadic conquerors crucifying the old king on the walls of his palace and sneering that he could watch his city burn, only for him to point out that it isn’t his city anymore, it’s their city that’s burning…)

But such empires are limited. Even in cases like the Aztecs and Inca’s, they are empires limited to communication systems that can be walked, and to people’s that have no technology suitable to challenge the sheer numbers of warm bodies that can be provided by the ruler.

2. Conquest Empires

Empires can turn to becoming conquest empires on any scale only with the development of technologies that can overcome sheer numbers. 

Specifically, metal.

Soft metals are not for conquest empire. Gold, silver, copper, tin, etc, may be used for plates or posts or jewellery or skin scrapers, but they are not war fighting metals. Even the lightest leather armour or layers of feather padding makes them practically valueless for war fighting. Metal only becomes an imperial material when it can be made hard enough for combat purposes.

The first such metal is Bronze, which is made by combining different metals in compounds. Copper compounded with enough tin (usually 5%- 10%  percent) makes Bronze. Bronze can make armour and weapons and even axles and bearings. But copper (mined in mountains) and tin (usually from swamps) and the charcoal needed to melt them (from forests) combined in sufficient quantities for mass production (cities supported by taxed farmers), require extensive trade routes, and probably a stable currency of some sort. But once these elements can be combined, empires can give up on mere Security, and enter Conquest.

All the early Sumerian, Egyptian, Hittite, Persian, Greek, Roman, Indian and Chinese empires that we now scrawl across maps with lines to show how they conquered the territories of other empires are based on this simple concept. The Hittites with their Bronze, Egyptians with their chariots, and Romans with their Steel: being only different developments from the same basic 'metal technology' roots.

Yet this is where motive becomes uncertain. All these empires got into conquest, but in many cases they did it either to continue their security (by pushing the dangerous boundaries ever further), or to protect the trade that made their system work.  Conquest for the sake of conquest was certainly an element – particularly with rulers like Alexander the Great – but the original reason why Phillip of Macedon and his predecessors had developed the world’s most efficient fighting machine had more to do with constant threats from Persians and Greeks and other ‘barbarians’ than with any desire to get into the conquest game itself. Sometimes things done for security lead to expanded boundaries for  security, which then lead to expanding further for conquest. (Often because the system developed for paying those fighting for security requires conquest to pay them off… See Julius and many later Ceasar’s!)

3. Trade Empires

The final (and possibly ultimate) sort of Empire is the Trade Empire. These develop more because exploring traders have a need for safe bases and secure lines of communication to make their trade work. Theoretically trade empires could be land based (and both the American West and the Chinese spread down the Silk Road argue the case that they started as trade security rather than conquest… no matter how they finished). But in reality the main casue of and reason for trade empires is the devleopment of water transport. Specifically ocean transport.

So let us consider the motives of Empire in a few cases.

The Phoenicians had a magnificent trade empire, though with a few elements we find familiar from the more recent Viking version, or indeed the Venetian ‘Republic’ – namely a bit of raiding, and quite a bit of slave trading. All three broadened into a bit of conquest – Carthage, Normandy and the sack of Constantinople in the 4^th crusade come to mind – but all those offshoots were by products of the original cultures, and none of them became the norm for the ongoing home culture (each of which faded away as circumstances changed and they failed to adapt). So we could say that they were essentially trading empires.

Greece and Carthage and Rome were also trade empires, initially letting their security concerns drag them into a bit of conquest on the side. The difference in their cases was that the conquest element became dominant and completely changed the ‘homeland’. The city states of Greece becoming the world conquering hordes of Alexander, and completely undermining the vibrant city state cultures that had proceeded them. The Phoenecian trading city of Carthage becoming an expansionary conquest state that eventually pushed Rome too hard. And the Roman's overseas campaigns in Spain and North Africa completely undermining the independent farmer/citizen/soldier class of the Roman Republic, and replacing them with a system of professional troops whose loyalty could only be bought by ever increasing conquests by the emperors.

Naturally every expansion eventually reaches limits, and the concern reverts to trying to secure what you have, and hold the outsiders further away. Which is why, amusingly, people like the Romans and the Chinese came through their expansionary conquest phase, and then found themselves back in the position of having to protect the fringes through deals with tribes that can be traded with/employed by/or paid tribute. Cue Attila the Hun and his ilk.

So empires on the way down may also be considered trade and security empires I suppose, though many still had a conquest impulse (for fame or fortune or simply to pay the defenders off) built in, or tried to act as if they were still conquering hordes. Cue Constantinople and Belisarius.

In fact most empires will go through a variety of stages, though I think it fair to say that most empires have a core purpose and attitude, no matter how they tinker at the edges to deal with specific circumstances.

The Portuguese Empire for instance can be considered predominantly a trade empire for most of its influence on the world, though its possession of Brazil certainly would count as conquest. Though it could be suggested that Brazil was the aberration, as both before and after Brazli the majority of Portuguese effort went into trade, and most of their imperial possessions could be best described as trading posts, with minimal control of the hinterlands, and minimal interest in changing the social structures of those it was trading with in Africa and Asia.

Similarly the Dutch Empire was largely a trade empire, with its eventual domination of the Indonesian archipelago being more a consolidation of the many trading posts servicing the many different tribes and kingdoms of the area than a conscious plan to conquer a large part of the world.

The British Empire is similarly placed, and the description of one 19th century historian of it having been acquired “in a fit of absent mindedness”, is quite fair. The endless trading posts led to endless relationships with local tribes and principalities that eventually consolidated into states. But the British system of empire through treaties and arrangements with local governments and principalities bears little relationship to a serious conquest empire. The endless efforts of the British central government to avoid further responsibilities; diminish those they already had; and offer (abandon to) independence any state they thought might make it on its own: is not the usual perspective of a conquest empire.

The real conquest empires are as obvious as those of Alexander and the Ceasar’s. The Arab Muslim Empire is straight conquest, as was the Russian empire, and of course the American Empire.

The United States is a particularly good example. The ‘Declaration of Independence’ was in opposition to two things the British government was keen to enforce. An end to slavery, and an end of expansion into the land of the Indian tribes that the British had treaties with. In other words, the primary motive for the northern states was expansionary imperialism, while the primary motive for the southern states was slavery.

The expansion across the north American continent can be considered no less imperial than the Mongol or Russian expansions of similar vast areas in their time. An emphasis on imperial conquest that is not diminished by the insistence of re-conquoring the Southern States after the ‘Confederacy Declaration of Independence’. (Either both the 1776 and 1860 declarations of independence are reasonable and should be justifiable, or neither are. Only idiots can imagine that there could be any logic to the proposition that the first is acceptable and the second unacceptable. In both cases the arguments by the individual states remained exactly the same –  with the Northern states expanding into Indian Territory and the Southern states wanting to keep their slaves, being the cause of both conflicts.)

The US expansion to Hawaii by coup, and the Philippines by conquest, is straight expansionary imperialism in anyone’s language.

Interestingly the ‘opening’ of Japan by the US by force is more familiar to Trade Empires, and directly comparable to Britain’s ‘Opium Wars’ against China. But the repeated tendency for the US to invade its Central and South American neighbours and set up puppets (sorry democracies that would inevitably become dictatorships, usually requiring further intervention within a decade or so), set a bad precedent for indulging in the ‘gunboat diplomacy’ that has always been a fatal attraction to trade empires.

Trade becomes security.

The eternal problem for trade empires is that they almost inevitably reach a point where they become security empires wether they like it or not.

Britain for instance inherited responsibility for a century of the ‘Pax Britannica’ by the simple expedient of being the strongest economy standing after the Napoleonic Wars. (The United States – the only potentially economically healthy rival post the devastation of Europe – having shot itself in the foot by joining in briefly on Napoleons ‘anti-British coalition’ movement in 1812, and having it’s trade smashed and most of it’s ports and the capital reduced to smoking ruins as a result. Bad timing.)

The British government spent most of the next century being dragged – reluctantly – into being arbitrators of conflicts they wanted nothing to do with. Finishing with being stuck with the Great War, and then responsibility for some of the most hopeless basket case states handed over to ‘Mandate Powers’ by the Versailles peace… As one British minister presciently pointed out, no one wanted Palestine, and it would be nothing but a disaster for whoever gets stuck with it… (Fortunately for the US, their Congress repudiated Wilson’s ridiculous League of Nations before the plan to lumber the US with the Mandate for places like Georgia – the Russian bit on the Black Sea that is! – could be put through.)

It is unsurprising that the British taxpayer spent the next 50 years trying to get out of international police-keeping obligations. With the sole exception of reluctantly agreeing to fight against the expansionary dictatorships in World War Two, British taxpayers voted for disarmament and de-colonisation whenever they could. (Abandoning some states – particularly in Africa – that might eventually have developed into safe and secure states, way before they were ready for independence… Much to the cost of world peace and security since…)

The United States has had a similar experience more recently. Having inherited responsibility for maybe 50 years of the ‘Pax Americana’ by the simple expedient of being the strongest economy standing after the Second World Wars. (Their only potential rival being the British Commonwealth of Nations – who between them had 5 of the next 10 biggest and healthiest post war economies - being more than happy to let the dumb Americans have a go at being world policemen for a time, and see how they liked being blamed by everyone else for absolutely everything.).

The Americans discovered pretty quickly that the things they had been complaining about the British doing for the last 200 years were exactly what they had now signed up for, and finding even quicker that their taxpayers simply weren’t willing to carry the can, and take the blame, for very long at all. 

Arguably the US’s fun with being world policeman was already pretty much over after Korea, and certainly after Vietnam. It is notable that the first Gulf War was NOT paid for by the US taxpayer… the US troops turned up, but only if Saudi Arabia and Europe paid for them to do so. (And preferably with a British Division on one flank, Australian warships on the other, French special forces leading the assault, and NATO fighters overhead…) none of this ‘we will carry the can and our taxpayers will just cope’ crap for post Vietnam American taxpayers.

But the interesting point is the results.

Security Empires come and go. While they serve a purpose, their citizens are willing to pay the cost. When they become too expensive to maintain, they simply fold, or get ground under. They work to purpose, or stop.

Conquest empires rarely outlive their founders, or only last a few generations. Alexander’s generals, or Charlemagne’s children and grandchildren, dividing and subdividing into smaller and smaller units, is the norm for such empires. (If not straight collapse when the dictator holding it all together vanishes.) 

The only ‘conquest’ empires that have held up are those that send settlers into the lands of hunter -gatherers or nomads. The United States, Russia and Australia being good examples. (But the only reason they can hold up is if the captured territory can be converted into a functional part of the state and society.. something the US and Australia have largely managed… Russia’s attempts to enforce this unity by repression of it’s more developed conquored peoples have not been so successful over the last few centuries, and it is unlikely that China will do much better long term no matter how much repression it introduces into its recent conquests of established societies like Tibet and the Uyghurs.)

Which leaves only trade empires as potentially successful long term options. And only because their success is not measured by sustaining the political unity of the ’empire’, but by sustaining its economic goals.

The most successful empire in world history is the British empire, which could delightedly declare itself obsolete in the 1920’s, and again (after having to work mostly co-operatively to fight World War Two) in the 1950’s. Both times it encouraged the member states to go look after themselves (some successfully and some less so), and yet it still managed to leave an almost completely secure legacy for its existence… relatively safe international free trade routes. (The almost complete elimination of both piracy and slavery world wide just being minor side benefits of the British Empire.)

For an empire developed ‘in a fit of absent mindedness’, and as a byproduct of trying to develop free trade around the world: the measure of success has to be the Commonwealth of Nations – comprising 54 nations with about 1/3 of the world’s population, getting together to play cricket every year and hold a Commonwealth Games every 4 years.

This is not an empire that collapsed, or was destroyed. This is an empire that over a century or so (from granting independent Dominion status to Canada in 1886, Australia 1901, New Zealand and South Africa pre great War, Ireland and Egypt interwar, India and Pakistan post war, large parts of Asia and Africa in the 60’s and 70’s etc); nonetheless developed and secured the international free trade system that the world has embraced. (Including a re-integration by an early exit-er from the empire… the 13 out of 35 British north American colonies that became the United States… and who finally inherited the title of world policeman when the rest of the Commonwealth nations had got sick of the whole thing.)

In praise of trade...

In fact trade empires have really been the only successful basis for empires over time. Conquest Empires like that of Alexander or the Mongols cannot work unless the underpinnings of trade make them functional enough to do so. The reason that the Roman Empire(s) lasted so long was that their borders were the logical trading boundaries of the Mediterranean littorals, and they never really tried to incorporate the German forests, African deserts, or Persian plains which simply would not work into the trade and tax structure of their society. (Even the Rumanian plains or British forests were too isolated to work in their Mediterranean shipping grid structure long term.)

Trade empires work because their structure relates to the logic of real world interactions between peoples, and usually in a mutually beneficial way. 

Which means that while it is possible to be dubious about the long term effects of conquest empires; and simply accepting of the long term failures of security empires: it is impossible to be dismissive of the long term achievements of trade empires. 

Without trade empires in human history, we would not have such world order as does exist.