EMPIRE AND AFTER^423tus, power, and wealth, "empire" and "imperialism" have been (once
were) proud words. Thus the last gasp of King George V in January
1936: "How is the Empire?"
To note that empires go back to the dawn of history may seem a tru
ism, but in fact it is no trivial assertion. Some insist, for example, that
imperialism, which peaked around the end of the nineteenth century,
is somehow an invention or by-product of modern capitalism—in
Lenin's words, "the highest stage of capitalism." Building on this, they
argue that empire was necessary (indispensable) to the prosperity and
survival of modern capitalism. The tenacity of this belief can be mea
sured by a copious literature averring that imperialism aimed above all
at material gain, even where it manifestly cost and lost.^1
History belies such intrinsic links to capitalism. Consider the an
cient empires of Egypt, China, Assyria, Persia, Rome, etc.; or, in mod
ern times, the late, unlamented Communist-Socialist empire of the
Soviet Union. That so much ink has been spilled on this issue reflects
the need to discredit the imperialists and capitalists by way of encour
aging resistance and revolution. They're in it for the money—what
can be worse? Meanwhile bad definitions and explanations lead to bad
conclusions.
Colonialism is imperialism writ dark: "For many it implies unjust so
cial asymmetries, human abuses, and moral imperatives, which call for
acts of resistance, demands for justice, and struggles for liberation."^2
The word "colony" started innocentiy enough: in the ancient world it
meant a place of distant settlement—the Phoenician colony of
Carthage or the Greek colonies in Italy. But settlement, we now know,
implies some kind of displacement (nothing is so scarce as empty land),
hence cannot be good or virtuous, at least not for the victims; so that
settlement as system (colonialism) is clearly bad. In recent discourse,
colonialism has broadened to denote "any economically or politically
dependent condition," whether or not it leads to displacement of the
native population.^3 This pejorative quality has led modern critics of for
eign (Western) dominion to prefer colonialism to the older term of
imperialism. Colonialism sounds worse.
European imperialism (colonialism)—I shall use the two terms in
terchangeably—goes back to the Middle Ages, to the Drang nach
Osten (push to the east) of Teutons conquering Slavic lands, to the in
vasions by Norsemen of England and Normandy and by the English of
Ireland, to the reconquista in Spain.^4 Much of this expansion took the
form of absorption. The conquerors melted into the indigenous pop
ulation, to the point of effacing their own identity, or swallowed the