subjects are prepared to make the necessary political compromises
with the primary needs of the empire.
Such empires have generally been characterised by the develop-
ment of an extensive cash economy, permitting complex economic
exchanges over long distances. These same distances have required
efficient means of communication amongst the ‘civil servants’ of the
empire, who must also be capable of working together in a co-
ordinated fashion. The empire can only survive militarily by deploy-
ing its military resources over long distances to optimum effect. Thus
literacy and bureaucracy as well as good roads (or a navy) and
professional soldiers become a necessity.
The Chinese mandarinate is a good illustration of many of these
themes (Gerth and Mills, 1948: Chs. VIII and XVIII). China was
unified for centuries by an administrative pyramid of mandarins,
linking the court and the rural districts, who were required to pass
examinations in a common core of knowledge. This centred upon
literary and historical texts and was mostly concerned with develop-
ing an educated gentleman with a good knowledge of ritual. Good
government was mainly seen in terms of political stability rather
than social and economic progress. Despite this, some writers stress
the role of the Chinese bureaucracy in regulating the drainage and
waterway system of China just as the Egyptian priesthood served the
pharaoh, sacrificed to the gods, and controlled the waters of the Nile
through an elaborate drainage system (Wittfogel, 1957: 17–18,
26–27). Whatever the usefulness of the services they performed, it is
clear the cohesion of the system was vastly assisted by the common
origins, knowledge and attitudes of these administrators who were
amongst the first who could reasonably be described as ‘bureaucrats’
(see Chapter 8).
One final point worth emphasising is the contrast between the
ancient empires and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century European
colonial empires in their attitudes towards their subjects. Basically
this may be encapsulated in one rather nasty word – racism. The
European empires increasingly were based upon a core metropolitan
state that claimed to be a nation and often a democracy. The empire
was a separate area of colonies whose dependence on the metropolitan
area could only be easily justified by an allegation of the incapacity of
their inhabitants to rule themselves. Nineteenth-century anthro-
pologists’ findings were used and abused to justify a doctrine of the
SYSTEMS 37