Are there any empires

Yet for subject and conquered populations, the capacity to be enslaved created insecurity. Empires feed inequalities and depend on coerced labour to do so. European empires in Africa also fought to control human and material resources, first through slavery, then through forced labour. They did not introduce these paradigms to Africa, but transformed existing institutions.

Whether during the Atlantic slave trade, the Scramble for Africa, or the Cold War, the African experience depended on social position: elite gatekeepers of people and resources could expand prestige, even as subject populations were impoverished.

As the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney wrote, the African experience of empire was of the alliance of African and European elites at the expense of the African poor. This is in many ways a silly question and one that no serious historian would ever pose.

Today, the notion that history can be reduced to a moral binary is most often seen in public debates concerning the British Empire. That label, however, does nothing to help us understand why the event occurred the way it did, nor how it was justified or criticised at the time.

Rather than a meaningful question in and of itself, what must be interrogated is the perceived need to attach simplistic and ahistorical labels to historical events and structures. Head to Head. Empires have been part of human history for millennia. Are they, of necessity, a bad thing? Related Articles. What about the Romans in the heyday of their empire: did they have the same kind of confidence in the permanence of their empire the Chinese have always had?

And if they did — what happened to that confidence? People in antiquity were certainly aware that civilisations could rise and fall. It is, in a sense, the great geopolitical theme of the Bible. In the Book of Daniel, the prophet dreams that he sees four beasts emerge in succession from a raging sea; and an angel explains to him that each beast represents a kingdom.

Gold and purple, in the Bible, are cast as merely the winding-sheets of worldly greatness. The Greeks, too, with the example of the sack of Troy before them, were morbidly aware how impermanent greatness might be. Herodotus, the first man to attempt a narrative of how and why empires succeed one another that did not look primarily to a god for its explanations, bookends his great history with telling passages on the precariousness of civilisations.

I will pay equal attention to both, for human beings and prosperity never endure side by side for long. Then, in the very last paragraph of his history, he provides what is, in essence, the first materialist theory as to why civilisations should succeed and fail.

The Persians, having conquered a great empire, want to move from their harsh mountains to a richer land — but Cyrus, their king, forbids it. Implicit in his narrative, written at a time when Athens was at her peak of glory, is a warning: where other great powers have gone, the Athenians will surely follow. The Romans signalled their arrival on the international stage by fighting three terrible wars with a rival west Mediterranean people: the Carthaginians.

At the end of the third war, in BC, they succeeded in capturing Carthage, and levelling it to the ground. Nevertheless, it is said of the Roman general who torched Carthage that he wept as he watched her burn and quoted lines from Homer on the fall of Troy.

Then he turned to a Greek companion. There were many, as the Romans continued to expand their rule across the Mediterranean, who found themselves hoping that the presentiment was an accurate one. Rome was a brutal and domineering mistress, and the increasing number of much older civilisations under her sway unsurprisingly felt much resentment of her autocratic ways.

Rome and her empire were engulfed by civil war. In one particular bloody campaign, it has been estimated, a quarter of all citizens of military age were fighting on one side or the other. No wonder that, amid such slaughter, even the Romans dared to contemplate the end of their empire. But the Roman state did not die. In the event, the decades of civil war were brought to an end, and a new and universal era of peace was proclaimed.

Virgil, perhaps because he had gazed into the abyss of civil war and understood what anarchy meant, proved a worthy laureate of the new age. All the world has been adorned by you as a pleasure garden. In the event, the garden would turn to brambles and weeds.

Intruders would smash down the fences. New tenants would carve up much of it between themselves. Yet the dream of Rome did not fade. Its potency was too strong for that. He was not the first barbarian to find in the memory of Rome — the splendour of its monuments, the vastness of its sway, the sheer conceit of its pretensions — the only conceivable model for an upwardly mobile king to ape.

Indeed, one could say that the whole history of the early-medieval west is understood best as a series of attempts by various warlords to square the grandeur of their Roman ambitions with the paucity of their resources. There was Charlemagne, who not only had himself crowned as emperor in Rome on Christmas Day AD, but plundered the city of pillars for his own capital back in Aachen. Then there was Otto I, the great warrior king of the Saxons, a hairy-chested lion of a man, who in was also crowned in Rome.

The line of emperors that he founded did not expire until , when the Holy Roman empire, as it had first become known in the 13th century, was terminated by Napoleon. Yet the joke was not quite fair. As the decline of the U. Aside from their leadership model, the only other thing they all have in common is that each of them disappeared.

This empire began when Mohammad died in AD and his followers scrambled to acquire his empire while the great prophets family prepared for his funeral. Despite being a Caliphate or religiously governed empire , the conquered of other faiths were given good treatment.

They were allowed freedom to practice their own religion as long as they paid taxes to the Caliph. The Portuguese Empire was the first global empire in history, as well as the longest-lived modern European colonial empires. The empire began with the capture of Ceuta in and ended in with the handover of Macau. The empire's most valuable colony, Brazil, won its independence in Following a war in to overthrow the regime, the empire's government recognized the independence of all its colonies, except for Macau.

Macau was returned to China in The Abbasid Caliphate covered 4. While population numbers are unknown, the empire lasted from to and only went into decline as the Turkish army rose to power. The Umayyad Caliphate covered 5.

The second Islamic caliphate was founded in Arabia after the Prophet Muhammad's death and while the Umayyad family originated in Mecca but chose Damascus as its capital. The Umayyad Caliphate, whose name comes from the great-grandfather of the first Umayyad caliph, ruled between and A. The Yuan Dynasty covered 5. Five years after founding the dynasty, Kublai Khan captured the capital of the rival Southern Song Dynasty and unified all of China.