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The Comparative Study of Empires*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2011

Phiroze Vasunia
Phiroze Vasunia*
Affiliation:
University of Reading
*
p.vasunia@reading.ac.uk
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Extract

On the basis of a random sample of English-language internet websites about empires, we can now formulate the first law of comparative imperialisms as follows: as an online discussion of empire grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving the Roman Empire approaches 1. (This is a variant of the general law that states that ‘as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1’.) The comparative study of empires is thriving, and the recent intensity of interest is connected, at least in part, to the international military interventions of the United States. But comparisons between empires are nothing new, and, in the 1960s, Peter Brunt wrote an insightful article on British and Roman imperialism. That analysis was the product of the age of decolonization, an age which also acted as a spur to comparative approaches within classical scholarship: witness Nicole Loraux's suggestion that it was anti-colonial movements associated with the Algerian and Vietnam wars that led Jean-Pierre Vernant to embark on his series of comparative investigations into Greek thought and religion. Brunt's article was written in a retrospective key at a time when it was possible to look back to the completion, or the near completion, of a major period of European colonialism and arrive at a sort of reckoning. Some two generations prior to Brunt, in the early twentieth century and at the apogee of the British Empire, Lord Cromer delivered an address to the Classical Association on ‘Ancient and Modern Imperialism’ in which he found it unimaginable to think of independence for Britain's overseas colonies. Francis Haverfield responded sympathetically to Cromer and in his own writings associated the British and the Roman empires. Any discussion of comparative imperialisms, therefore, will need to consider not just the recent concentration of debates over empire but also a lengthy trajectory that extends back to Cromer and Haverfield and indeed further beyond into the eighteenth century. None of the books under review reflects in detail on the intellectual history in which they may be situated, but this is a subject that at least needs to be acknowledged and that we shall have occasion to return to later.

Type
Review Articles
Information
The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 101 , November 2011 , pp. 222 - 237
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011. Published by The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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Footnotes

*

I am very grateful to Miriam Leonard, Catherine Steel, and three other readers for their help with this review article.

References

1 ‘Godwin's law’ is mentioned by Timothy Garton Ash, in ‘We've seen America's vitriol. Now let's salute this US pioneer of global civility’, The Guardian, 13 January 2011, main section, 33.

2 For recent comparative treatments that range widely in history, see e.g. Alcock, S. E., D'Altroy, T. N., Morrison, K. D. and Sinopoli, C. M. (eds), Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History (2001)Google Scholar; Motyl, A. J., Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (2001)Google Scholar; Pagden, A., Peoples and Empires: Europeans and the Rest of the World, from Antiquity to the Present (2001)Google Scholar; Bayly, C. A. and Bang, P. F., ‘Introduction: comparing pre-modern empires’, The Medieval History Journal 6 (2003), 169–87Google Scholar; Wood, E. M., Empire of Capital (2003)Google Scholar; P. Pomper (ed.), Theorizing Empire, theme issue of History and Theory 44 (2005); Calhoun, C., Cooper, F. and Moore, K. (eds), Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power (2006)Google Scholar; Chua, A., Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance — and Why They Fall (2007)Google Scholar; Münkler, H., Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States, trans. Camiller, P. (2007)Google Scholar; Bang, P. F., The Roman Bazaar: A Comparative Study of Trade and Markets in a Tributary Empire (2008)Google Scholar; Hurlet, F. (ed.), Les empires: antiquité et moyen âge. Analyse comparée (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Burbank, J. and Cooper, F., Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (2010)Google Scholar.

Three comparative initiatives on empire that involve the ancient world are Tributary Empires Compared: Romans, Mughals and Ottomans in the Pre-industrial World from Antiquity till the Transition to Modernity, 2005–2009, co-ordinated by Peter Bang; the Stanford Ancient Chinese and Mediterranean Empires Comparative History Project, co-ordinated by Walter Scheidel; and the Network on Ancient and Modern Imperialisms, co-ordinated by the author of this review. Scheidel's collection on Rome and China grew out of his project; Rome and China is said to be the first of many works that will be published on ‘the comparative institutional study of ancient Rome and early China’ (7).

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5 Earl of Cromer, Ancient and Modern Imperialism (1910). See also Lucas, C. P., Greater Rome and Greater Britain (1912)Google Scholar. On Cromer and Lucas, see Majeed, J., ‘Comparativism and references to Rome in British imperial attitudes to India’, in Edwards, C. (ed.), Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–1945 (1999), 88–109Google Scholar, and Harrison, T., ‘Ancient and modern imperialism’, Greece and Rome 55 (2008), 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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11 As Morris suggests, the naming of the ‘Athenian Empire’ is not a question of definition alone but of the nature of Athenian rule. On this issue, see Low, P., ‘The Athenian empire’, in Boys-Stones, G., Graziosi, B. and Vasunia, P. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies (2009), 65–76Google Scholar, with the classic essay of Finley, M. I., ‘The Athenian empire: a balance sheet’, in Garnsey, P. and Whittaker, C. R. (eds), Imperialism in the Ancient World (1978), 101–26Google Scholar, and reprinted in Finley, Economy and Society in Ancient Greece (1981), ch. 3

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13 Keith Hopkins died in March 2004, and this chapter may be his last published work. He made astute use of Chinese evidence in his article, ‘The political power of eunuchs’, PCPS 189 (1963), 62–80Google Scholar, revised in Conquerors and Slaves (1978), ch. 4.

14 See also Scheidel, W., ‘The divergent evolution of coinage in eastern and western Eurasia’, in Harris, W. V. (ed.), The Monetary Systems of the Greeks and Romans (2008), 267–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Scheidel, W. and Friesen, S. J., ‘The size of the economy and the distribution of income in the Roman Empire’, JRS 99 (2009), 61–91Google Scholar.

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16 M. Malamud, Ancient Rome and Modern America (2009), which is partly on the subject, is reviewed in this issue of JRS below.

17 J. R. Fears, ‘The Lessons of the Roman Empire for America Today’, Heritage Lecture 917 (19 December 2005); the lecture is available online at the website of the Heritage Foundation (http://www.heritage.org/). The classical scholar Victor Davis Hanson was also a strong public supporter of the invasion of Iraq; many of his publications are available online at http://victorhanson.com/.

18 See B. Gates, ‘Comparing America and ancient Rome’ (posted 21 October 2010), http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Learning/article.aspx?ID=175.

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25 See, e.g., the letter to Holroyd, J. B. (15/5/75) in Norton, J. E. (ed.), The Letters of Edward Gibbon, 3 vols (1956), no. 303Google Scholar.

26 In relation to Gibbon, this question may be approached via the sequence of volumes on Barbarism and Religion (1999–, 5 vols to date) by J. G. A. Pocock.

27 Mattingly, op. cit. (n. 9), 13.

28 The latter works are frequently oriented toward Greece rather than Rome. See, e.g., the many studies of Lloyd, G. E. R., Adversaries and Authorities: Investigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Science (1996)Google Scholar; The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China (2003); Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections: Philosophical Perspectives on Greek and Chinese Science and Culture (2004); The Delusions of Invulnerability: Wisdom and Morality in Ancient Greece, China and Today (2005); Principles and Practices in Ancient Greek and Chinese Science (2006); and Lloyd, and Sivin, N., The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece (2002)Google Scholar. See also Raphals, L. A., Knowing Words: Wisdom and Cunning in the Classical Traditions of China and Greece (1992)Google Scholar; Shankman, S. and Durrant, S. W., The Siren and the Sage: Knowledge and Wisdom in Ancient Greece and China (2000)Google Scholar; Shankman, and Durrant, (eds), Early China/Ancient Greece: Thinking through Comparisons (2002)Google Scholar; and cf. Tanner, J., ‘Ancient Greece, early China: Sino-Hellenic studies and comparative approaches to the Classical world’, JHS 129 (2009), 89–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar.