'The Rise and Fall of the Great Empires' by Andrew Taylor, Quercus, 2008
Why do mighty empires rise, and why do they fall? The English historian Edward Gibbon spent a lifetime of intellectual energy examining why the Roman Empire disintegrated the way it did. From a historical vantage point, could we today come up with a case for the moral and political benefits of an imperialist policy in what is essentially a postcolonial, post-imperial world? "Empires seem to have gone out of fashion," Andrew Taylor says at the outset of this new work, although conceding that of late there has been renewed academic interest in American expansionism and the view of America as an 'empire'.
Looking back, it could hardly have been imagined that the East India Company would herald British rule in India for two centuries. The historian Sir John Seeley (1834-95) famously suggested that the British "seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind". Historian and economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) thinks that modern imperialism was only a throwback, the last expression of a medieval warrior aristocracy, soon to be swept away by the cosmopolitanism of capitalism. Vladimir Lenin's First World War manuscript Imperialism, published in 1916, held that imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism, the inevitable end result of the 'monopoly stage' of capitalism. Would the state of modern America, the Pax Americana, what historians such as Niall Ferguson consider the latest empire, warrant Lenin's thesis?
At the same time, historians do not desist from attempting to reconstruct empires, because they give us unique clues to the shape of the world we have inherited. They speak of the brutal tales of territorial aggrandisement and the lust for power and wealth that have undone mankind. Privy to the tales of a clash of ideologies, of cultures and civilisations locking horns and sometimes subsuming each other, we wonder how the national boundaries and alignments that we zealously guard today would fare in the massive welter of civilisational Darwinism. Another British historian, G M Trevelyan, once wrote, "There is nothing that more divides civilised from semi-savage man than to be conscious of our forefathers as they really were, and bit by bit to reconstruct the mosaic of the long forgotten past … How far can we know the real life of men in each successive age of the past?" It is for this reason that we treasure such works as A Short History of the World by H G Wells or A Study of History by Arnold Toynbee.