Imperialism, territory, and liberation: on the dynamics of empire stemming from Europe

Abstract

This article tries to understand the deeply ambivalent role in modern global world history of imperialism originating from Europe. It follows a long, genealogical narrative, beginning in the inherent structure and tensions of empire per se on the European mainland. Nonetheless, there was a partially successful attempt at empire in the primarily spiritual ‘imperial’ power emanating from Rome, which in due course evoked a matching response in religious-ideological opposition of the Reformation. The subsequent weakening of the prospects of mainland empire encouraged maritime empires in the form of sovereign states, while the profound opposition to top-down power per se survived in the derivatives of Protestantism, primarily in North America. A compromise with that opposition was sketched in Protestant-inspired Lockean Liberalism, which saw virtue in territorial expansion in so far as a key motif from the start was a sense of autonomous liberation achievable through expansion into open territory as the pursuit of God’s purpose. That grew sharper in North America, as Europeans seeking progress in European society envisioned their own freedom from the state in the ‘empty’ space granted by the colonializing state itself for colonization and enclosure. Colonists’ and migrants’ aspirations for liberation thus found expression in a modern vision of territorial expansion as freedom. USA’s continental expansion in the nineteenth, and more sharply global expansion in the twentieth century, reiterated that vision in extending an intrusive liberal imperialism. There emerged a US-centered, Western oppressive dynamic of liberation, which is still present in the dissemination of values individual liberty and into the integration in global open space.

Keywords:

• empire
• imperialism
• legitimacy
• liberation
• territory

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to anonymous reviewers and Mark Haugaard for suggestions as to what I really wanted to say in this article, and for Mark and my fellow-editor Magali Gravier for their patience with the delays occasioned by my state of health.

Notes

1. As it has been for non-historians in their own way: e.g. the political researcher Stephen Haseler (Haseler 2004), together with the philosophers Jörgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Habermas and Derrida 2003).

2. I take heart in the early discussion from Tilly’s career (in Landes & Tilly 1971).

3. In point of fact, only one state that was not an Atlantic maritime empire made ground against the pressures limiting success on the European mainland: Sweden, which could be equally understood as the exception that proves the rule in a case of the Baltic Sea power. Sweden’s gains from the HRE and Denmark were essentially self-financing, just like the gains of other properly maritime states. The Swedish monarchy financed its extension across the Baltic sea from the money it made in Northern Germany (Roberts 1973).

4. That is the broad account provided from Tilly (1990).

5. Robin Blackburn’s study further argues that mass slave labor was an essential, early preliminary for European industrialization (Blackburn 1997).

6. Though Charlemagne’s exploitation of territory in northern Europe is comparable, in that case, the slaves had not been imported from a different continent.

7. That is, legitimizing practice that applies differentially or has different meanings across different societies within the periphery.

8. This is essentially a reading of MacCulloch (2003, chapters 3–4).

9. As in the self-governing community of the faithful (such as Presbyterian churches) a broad cluster of what is also today called ‘evangelical’ anti-authoritarian positions are visible within the latter: a belief in direct access to the Holy Spirit for the individual consciousness (Pentecostalism, as it is also called); and, of course, a general readiness to challenge top-down powers.

10. The English/British regime excluded Catholic rights from early on, but nonetheless spent the best part of two centuries to learn to straddle the currents within Protestantism itself.

11. Only Italy, the Papacy’s heartland, labored on well into the twentieth century with the problem of authority split over the division between earthly and spiritual.

12. Even though the latter were not empires formally speaking, they nonetheless figure as equals to the better established HRE. With the benefit of hindsight, however, it has since become normal to refer to both the French and the Swedish monarch’s territories of this time as empires. On Sweden, see note 4 above. At that time, even England could be called ‘empire’ according to the needs of the moment – in order to equal the highest authority in rank (MacCulloch 2003, pp. 198–102, De Carvalhi 2010).

13. Even though the latter were not empires formally speaking, they nonetheless figure as equals to the better established HRE. With the benefit of hindsight, however, it has since become normal to refer to both the French and the Swedish monarch’s territories of this time as empires. On Sweden, see note above. At that time, even England could be called ‘empire’ according to the needs of the moment – in order to equal the highest authority in rank (MacCulloch 2003, pp. 198–102, De Carvalhi 2010).

14. Already contained in the Golden Bull of 1356 (Teschke 2003, p. 241).

15. The French king’s newly acquired ‘sovereignty’ does not abrogate the unaltered privileges of those below him, such as the Duke of Lorraine (article LXXII), who now owes him fealty.

16. ‘… the whole jurisdiction of the magistrate reaches only to civil concernments … [T]he care of the souls of men is not committed to the civil magistrate … no man can … abandon the care of his own salvation [and] leave it to the choice of any other …’ (Letter concerning Tolerance, p. 19).

17. Harking back to Augustine via Luther.

18. Locke adds a further element to this picture with his The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695), putting flesh on the contention that a ‘reasonable’ Christian belief could be argued equally well from enlightened thought as from biblical revelation.

19. Property includes possession of influence and, unlike some of later conceptions of liberalism, stable responsibilities (Kramer 1997).

20. For ‘Locke’s interest in European colonizing and exploring activity’, see also (Tuck 1999, pp. 167–177).

21. On Locke’s debt to Protestant biblical narrative, see Dunn (1969) and Waldron (2002, chapter 7).

22. He participated through work with Ashley-Cooper (later the influential peer Lord Shaftesbury) on a constitutional document for Carolina – ‘The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina’ of 1669, which remained thereafter a significant point of reference (Swindler 1979). It proposed a hierarchy of palatine, proprietors, and landgraves, with an elected assembly of land-owning Christians, to replicate good order after the model of the hierarchy of property in contemporary England. The document, whose Article 97 also envisaged the assimilation of the displaced Indians into the Christian order, was never ratified by the colonial assembly and was finally abrogated by the Lords Proprietors in 1693.

23. But extended colonization calls for some adaptation of the picture. By now the US margin has been extensively peopled by Europeans, and covered by sovereignty claims by competing European monarchs. Yet the increasingly Europeanized societies that occupy US territory are still best managed by wiser European metropoles. When, in book LXXI, chapters 21–23, Montesquieu considers European colonial societies, he reaches an astute compromise over inter-monarchical competition, arguing for metropoles’ monopolies over their trade, but advocating free, peaceful competition between the metropoles.

24. The position he adopted became a cause célèbre after its use by l’Abbé de Pauw in Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains (1768). See Note 30.

25. Smith’s position was set out fully in Lectures on Jurisprudence (delivered in 1762–1766), and provides the basis for his account of social evolution in both The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments of 1759. The following argument is a reworking of part of the analysis published in Parker (1995). Harpham (1999) follows a somewhat similar path, but posits a way out in Smith’s ‘theory of the natural progress of opulence’; namely, an explanatory level between the primary model and the historical situation as it emerges in Smith’s Book III.

26. III.i.2 (All quotations from Smith (1976 [1776]). Numbering here follows this edition, indicating successively: book, chapter, paragraph) Commercial development has nonetheless occurred because, instead of maintaining their military resources, feudal lords spent on luxury goods from the towns (III.iii.12); an alliance between towns and monarchies then brought about feudalism’s demise. See Lectures on Jurisprudence, Smith (1978[1763], pp. 203–333).

27. Smith has difficulty with ‘the unfortunate law of slavery’ (IV.vii), which he comes close to excusing as the consequence of a shortage of labor. In disparaging Europe’s regulation of Americans’ use of their own property, he sees the need to claim that better treatment of slaves would be in the true interests of slave-owners, but admits that intrusive French government achieves better treatment for slave: ‘The condition of a slave is better under an arbitrary than under a free government …’

28. When British intellectuals dissented from the crown’s strategy, it was from opposition to the impositions of monarchies in general, or opposition to an overweening monarchy. Thus Burke, for his part, was primarily concerned about the effects on the domestic political order (Burke 1770). As the colonists’ resistance appeared, Smith’s opposition, set out in a pamphlet, saw them as yet further victims of misguided ‘mercantilism’ (Winch 1978, chapter 7, pp. 146–163).

29. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson reacted strongly to claims of so-called ‘American degeneracy’ in the writings of the Abbe de Pauw. Jefferson’s letter to Chastellux (7 June 1785) responded to Buffon’s earlier factual misapprehensions indulgently, but stoutly condemns Abbé de Pauw as regards claims of the negative effects of the American climate. See Gerbi (1973) and Vann Woodward (1993, chapter 1) for accounts of the dispute Rémond (1962, pp. 252–268). explains how the Buffon’s account turned into the old sore that Americans took exception to.

30. Polite cultivated society, secular education, scientific inquiry (notably on electricity), and the participation in politics of the articulate bourgeoisie. To further his early development, he spent three years in London. He wrote a Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure, and Pain; founded a series of Enlightenment institutions, including the forerunner of the University of Pennsylvania. For 25 years, he published, in Poor Richard’s Almanac, advocating in popular terms rational order in personal life. Seen by the British (e.g. as a witness before a committee of the House of Commons) and other Europeans as the authentic, understandable, voice of the colonists.

31. Lindberg (2005), p. 57. See alternatively: http://gwpapers,virginia.edu.farewell/transcript.html.

32. That specific expression was coined by John O’Sullivan in 1845: the US’s ‘manifest destiny to over-spread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us’.

33. Turner (1947, pp. 1–38). The paper was first read at the meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, 12 July 1893, and first appeared in print in the Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin for 14 December 1893.

34. Where it joined the European powers in suppressing the Boxer Rebellion.

35. But this is only explicitly referred with reference to the ‘Central Powers’, but US strictures were known to hold for the other major European belligerents.

36. This emerges even more clearly in the so-called Wilson’s ‘Four Principles’ speech with its opposition to ‘peoples and provinces [being] bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty …’ (Macmillan 2001, pp. 477–478).

37. Neil Smith’s study American empire: Roosevelt’s favourite geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Smith 2003) shows Bowman, chief US adviser at the conference and counselor of presidents from Wilson to Roosevelt, to be an iconic figure US inter-war thinking about the world.

38. That is, the European powers granted defeated states’ territories under a ‘mandate’.