On Empire

On Empire

From the comments, I'm not the only one whose eyebrows raised at a statement L.E. Modesitt, Jr. makes here: "any empire that is devoting a significant percentage of its resources to continual warfare isn’t going to endure that long."

Modesitt's essay here is On War, and I broadly understand the arguments he makes in the piece, quibble though I might. However, I have to scratch my head over the work that "significant" is doing in this statement.

In most cases we know of to date, all things flow to the Emperor. All things flow from the Emperor. This is the nature of Empire. China, Egypt, Rome, Imperial Russia, the Angevin Empire... the Empire belongs to the Emperor.

Cross him? Where does your property now go?

Conquer for him? Who decides for whom the conquered now toil?

Further, the bread and circuses must be paid for. And I do not use that phrase lightly: the Emperor must provide for the masses when famine and disaster stalk the land.

Otherwise, we need a new Emperor (or dynasty in the cases where the populace do not otherwise resort to the individual recourse).

"Continual" also does some work in Modesitt's statement. Look at England from William the Bastard through Henry Tudor. Was there a moment in that period where the English throne wasn't trying to hold onto its continental possessions, or take them back? And from Tudor's granddaughter through WW2 and Auntie Liz, was there a moment when the British Empire wasn't embroiled in some bullet tossing threat to its demesne?

To reverse the view, consider Imperial China, the Incans, and the Venetian Republic. Here then are empires for whom an inward focus is legendary, right?

Only, inward reflection in the case of China and the Incans seems mostly to have meant brutal suppression (or consolidation, depending) of their own people. War internally, rather than externally. China's turns to contemplation were not all meditation, the Tao, and pottery. Someone had to pay the piper, and the folks who raise the maize or the rice and tug their forelock when their betters ride by don't generally end up in the written record, except when they rebel because they can't take it anymore.

And the Venetian Republic survived past its confrontation with the Ottomans only to fade beneath Napoleon's boots.

But again, when you take the view over their whole history, both the Incans and the Venetians spent pretty much their whole time embroiled in conquest and consolidation.

One might then distinguish between expansion (U.S. Manifest Destiny, European Colonialism, Roman and Chinese Expansion) as a process of conquering with as few resources as possible, versus confrontation with peer states, ie. how the European Empires fought with each other, over and over again until WW2 and the current tenuous peace.

Only, it wasn't until the European states devoted essentially 100 percent of their resources to fighting each other in the WW1/WW2 period that they hit their limits. Before that, few of even their peer conflicts really threatened their imperial status, not in any real way.

After all: France didn't trade Empire for democracy. They simply changed what the structure at the top looked like. Algiers and Saigon came quite a bit later.

I could probably go on. One way to read post-WW2 history, for example (meaning this is both true and not true at the same time), is that Russia, China, and the U.S. all adopted command and control systems suitable to Empire (and fighting Empires) without the last step of complete devotion to Empire itself. Will that remain? Ask me again in a couple centuries, my crystal ball is fuzzy on the question.

What's my point? From this speculative fiction writer's point of view, it's ultimately this question: what's an Empire, when it's at home with its feet up?

In the future, will technology and social adaption allow for something resembling Empire that can devote itself to only peaceful expansion?

In the past, where does someone fit who does not devote themselves to Empire's purpose, that all-encompassing need for more worlds to conquer?

And in all cases, does it matter to anyone involved that an Empire devours without putting all its weight behind its teeth?