STRANGE EMPIRE:

Anglosphere: The logic of empire (JAMES C. BENNETT, 01/11/2003, UPI)

The key to both the historical question of the Second British Empire and the issue of whether the United States today has, or should be, creating an empire, is the question of whether any political system beyond national scale should be thought of as an empire at all, in the classical sense. In empires prior to the Industrial Revolution, the issues were simple. Empires typically consisted of a metropolitan center commanding a wide variety of tributary provinces, which might or might not be ethnically distinct from the metropolis.

Economically, the provinces supported the metropolis, usually very directly. The provinces paid taxes in money or in kind; cash or food flowed from the provinces to the center. The paradigmatic case was Rome's rule over Egypt: Rome sent soldiers; Egypt sent grain; the Roman populace ate the bread the Egyptians grew and sent. Rome exploited Egypt and existed thereby.

The First British Empire, primarily the Caribbean and North America, contained some relations of that nature. British planters seized the sugar islands and Southern plantation lands, and imported slaves to work them. They sent the sugar to England and the slaves lived at bare subsistence level: classic pre-industrial empire. However, already a difference had emerged. The sugar colonies provided luxuries sold for cash; the metropolis produced more than enough basic foodstuffs to feed itself, thanks to the Agricultural Revolution that had begun the take effect in the 17th and 18th centuries. Britain profited from the First Empire but did not depend upon it.

The Industrial Revolution changed the picture for good. By the early 19th century, the wealth of the industrial sector began to eclipse that of the old sugar islands. American independence had cut off the mainland plantation lands. Money still spoke in Parliament, but the voice of dissenting abolitionist factory-owners now spoke louder, with their newfound riches, than the old planter classes. It was this change that made gradual abolition politically possible.

Subsequent imperial acquisitions were justified on a mix of trade, strategic, and humanitarian grounds. Markets, natural resources, naval bases, and the need to rescue the natives from various situations were all arguments frequently used in various combinations. However, none of these real or imagined benefits ever became proven equivalents to the old agricultural exploitation benefits.

Markets could almost always be kept open by means far cheaper than annexations. Access to resources was dependent more on overall control of the sea than formal control of real estate: Germany's formal control of Cameroon or Tanganyika gave them no benefits in World War I, while Britain was free to import from the rest of the world, because it and not Germany controlled the sea lanes. If colonies provided cheaper resources than free-trading independent states, then the era following decolonization in the 1960s and 1970s should have seen rising resource prices; for the most part, increased competition drove them down, even eventually in petroleum.

Ancient Rome needed to maintain political control over its provinces to keep the grain ships coming. Modern America is awash in surplus grain from its own fields, which it gives away to the Third World. This brings up the interesting question: if the United States is to have an empire, what is the point of it?

Mr. Bennett's excellent question is particularly applicable in Iraq where the Left is referring to a "war for oil", as if we needed to take control of the fields, despite the fact that we are currently the biggest purchasers of Iraqi oil. Why bother with war if we're getting the oil anyway? Posted by Orrin Judd at January 13, 2003 12:06 AM