Empires and Imperialism

Benefits to the conquerors, if any. Benefits to the conquered, if any. How sound is Arendt's distinction between simple empires and imperialism, ``expansion-for-expansion's-sake''?

How have the techniques of imperial rule changed over the last three or four thousand years? For instance, some empires have just expanded by reducing other polities to tribute-payers, but left the government intact; or installed a viceroy or satrap at the top, but left the old power-structure in place; while others have imposed a full administrative apparatus of their own. The Chinese were the supreme example of the last in pre-modern times, but the Romans weren't slouches in this department, either. What determines the difference? And, while we're on the subject, how did the Romans and the Chinese get so good at constructing empires? What distinguished the Romans from any other pissant Italian tribe gaping at the Etruscans?

How did Europe --- of all places --- come to conquer the rest of the world? Could, e.g., Islam or China have done likewise?

It's sometimes said that institutions like the World Bank are part of a de facto ``Empire of the West''. How strong is this case? Is this necessarily a bad thing? Would it be a bad thing if the empire took seriously its responsibility for preventing bloodbaths in the satrapies? Does the first world still exploit the third world today --- and if so, is that exploitation any worse than the first world's exploitation of itself? (My family has been militantly anti-imperialist for generations; I feel quite uncomfortable asking these questions. But.)

Hannah Arendt, Imperialism [= Part II of The Origins of Totalitarianism. But her economics is bad.]
Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past [The first section has a very interesting discussion of the determinants of imperial size]
William McNeill [Excellent works, whose main flaw is a tactful silence about the American and even the Soviet empires.]
- The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society since A.D. 1000
- The Global Condition: Conquerors, Catastrophe and Community
Alfredo G.A. Valladao, The Twenty-first Century Will Be American

David B. Abernathy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415--1980
Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance
Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy
Lea Brilmayer, American Hegemony: Political Morality in a One-Superpower World
Gerard Colby, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil
Randall Collins, Marcohistory: Essays in the Sociology of the Long Run [Detailed discussion of the determinants of the rise and fall of imperial power, which oddly seems to ignore technology!]
Alex Cooley, Logics of Hierarchy: The Organization of Empires, States and Military Occupations [Blurb]
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World
Robert B. Edgerton, The Fall of the Asante Empire: The Hundred-Year War for Africa's Gold Coast
Senator Fulbright, The Price of Empire and The Arrogance of Power
David N. Gibbs, The Political Economy of Third World Intervention: Mines, Money, and U.S. Policy in the Congo Crisis [Blurb. There will be a prize for guessing which Congo crisis this refers to.]
Jonathan A. Grant, Rulers, Guns, and Money: The Global Arms Trade in the Age of Imperialism
Daniel R. Headrick
- The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century
- Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present [blurb]
Patrick Colm Hogan, Empire and Poetic Voice: Cognitive and Cultural Studies of Literary Tradition and Colonialism
Henry Kamen, Empire [History of the Spanish empire, 1492--1763]
John H. Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires
V. Kieran, The Lords of Human Kind
Bruce Lincoln, Religion, Empire, and Torture: The Case of Achaemenian Persia, with a Postscript on Abu Ghraib [Blurb]
William McNeill, The Rise of the West
Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France [Blurb, ch. 1]
Mark Rupert, Producing Hegemony: The Politics of Mass Production and American Global Power
Christioher T. Sandars, America's Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire
Bernard Semmel, The Liberal Ideal and the Demons of Empire: Theories of Imperialism from Adam Smith to Lenin
George Steinmetz, The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa [blurb]
Jennifer Wenzel, Bulletproof; Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond [blurb]
There ought to be a study of European imperialism someplace which has sound economics, and not Marxist babbling about labor-value; but I've not found it. (For a quite annihilating leftist critique of Samir Amin, Arghiri Emmanuel, et al., see Alec Nove's The Economics of Feasibly Socialism.)

Notebooks

Empires and Imperialism