Inter-Imperiality

Abstract

This essay argues that recent scholarship in world history has accrued data calling for changed analytical models in postcolonial, Marxist and cultural studies. Documenting transcontinental interactions in ancient and medieval periods, scholars have rewritten longstanding narratives of finance, trade, labour, science and religion, with crucial implications for the arts as they operate within a (post)colonial and world-systems terrain. The data reveal a dialectic of historical materialism encompassing multi-directional interactions over a very longue durée: dynamic and uneven, yet systemic and accretive – and formative for ‘modern’ history. The essay offers one theoretical framework – of ‘inter-imperiality’ – for analysing this data so as to highlight dialectics in the material, the political and the cultural fields, which pre-date and prepare western European states' entry into an Afro-Eurasian world-system. An inter-imperial model on the one hand expands the relevance of postcolonial models, and on the other hand it transforms them – encompassing, as it does, a political–economic field of several empires operating simultaneously in every period since ancient eras, and in relation to capitalist formations. The essay argues finally that such a model clarifies how elite and non-elite actors occupy an ‘inter-imperial positionality’ from which they variously shape the emergence of economic, material and cultural infrastructures.

• Afro-Eurasian
• capitalism
• dialectic
• empire
• global
• inter-imperiality

Acknowledgements

This essay originated in part as a series of autumn 2010 Leverhulme lectures in the United Kingdom and Ireland. I would like to thank the Leverhulme Foundation and my Leverhulme host at the University of Exeter, Regenia Gagnier, as well as the audiences whose questions helped to refine the concept of inter-imperiality.

Notes

¹ Hopkins' (1999) remarks undoubtedly catalyzed some of the new research on empires in world history, yet his call has still barely been taken up: ‘What is needed is a fundamental appraisal of world history to bring out the extent to which, in recent history, it has been shaped by the interactions of several empires … Such an approach would capture both the differences between empires and their dynamism’ (203).

² Burbank and Cooper (2010) do justice to the crucial interactions among empires from the ancient to the modern period, including as these underlie the rise of European powers. Barbara Bush's thoughtful study Imperialism and Postcolonialism (2006) notes that ‘empires have been shaped in relation to each other since antiquity’ (9); but it includes only three pages on periods and empires ‘Before Modern Europe’, and the case studies of China and Japan are framed as a ‘long view of their responses to Western culture’ (100). Howe (2002) gives fuller attention to early periods but operates along similarly problematic lines in its characterizations of the Mongol and Abbasid empires, implying that they were weaker versions of land empires than the European ones (46). The Abbasid's nearly four centuries of central Eurasian hegemony hardly merit this implication.

³ Perhaps one of the most tenacious myths has been the notion of a unique Anglo-European adventurousness – the expression of a boundary-breaking will to change and experimentation. In his valuable revision of US history, for instance, Bender (2006) on the one hand agrees that ‘Europe's emergence was the result of its interaction with the societies of Africa, Asia, and America’ (Blaut and Pomeranz, quoted in Bender 2006: 25), but on the other hand he correlates the Atlantic ocean-crossing with new ‘cognitive developments’, indeed an ‘oceanic revolution’ in global consciousness (22) – eliding, among other things, the fact that earlier empires crossed the Indian Ocean and the Russians crossed the Pacific.

⁴ For other early scholarship that helped to catalyze recent scholarship, see Schneider (1977) and Chaudhuri (1990).

⁵ For further critical reflection on the term ‘medieval’ as used in a world context, see Varisco (2007).

⁶ For a study of the world-system's increasing dominance over and incorporation of relatively independent nomadic, tribal and semi-peripheral peoples, see Pomeranz (2007: 92–3).

⁷ Teschke and Lacher (2007) note that we find ‘“geopolitical competition” at each of the decisive conjunctures of capitalist development’ (578), and they call for more varied and close analysis of the interwoven but separate histories of competing states and capitalist formations; but they limit their ability to pursue such an analysis by thinking only in terms of the last two hundred years.

⁸ European empire builders have typically sought religious homogeneity within their empires and pursued projects of conversion or expulsion, while empires in other regions often developed more variegated rules and laws. Yet there are variations within these patterns: Napoleon diverged from the European pattern when he invaded Egypt, identifying himself with Muslim traditions and claiming he would not tamper with religious practices; some Christian empires were multi-confessional, such as the Ethiopian and Russian. These variations suggest that Christian forms of empire are not inherently driven by a proselytizing drive but rather that geography and politics play a role.

⁹ On the debates over what is sometimes called the ‘arabist theory’ of this influence on medieval European literature, see Boase (1977) and Amer (2008). For an overview of scholarship on the Afro-Eurasian influences on western Europe since the twelfth century, including public-sphere and court culture as well as philosophy, science, art and literature, see Doyle (2010: 201–6). Also see Goody (2010) on the diverse locations and sources of a ‘renaissance’ in the middle of the second millennium, although his account is in some ways still inflected by Eurocentrism.

¹⁰ For a discussion of ‘interpositionality’ in the Balkans, which has shaped my analysis of inter-imperiality, see Bahun (2012).

¹¹ For the fullest treatment of the historical and imperial context of the tales of 1001 Nights, see al-Musawi (2009). For an overview of its complicated history of oral traditions, manuscript versions and translations, see Haddawy (1990: intro.).

¹² See Benton (2002); also see Doyle (2009).