The Imperial Moment.

Gorman, Daniel

The Imperial Moment, edited by Kimberley Kagan. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2010. 250 pp. $49.95 US (cloth).

Edited collections of essays often lack coherence. The Imperial Moment, edited by Kimberley Kagan, is no exception. The book presents a series of historical case studies whose purpose is to demonstrate in comparative fashion the means by which states become empires. The empires in question are ancient Athens, Rome from the second century BCE until the 140s CE, when its conquest of the Mediterranean world was complete, Britain from the seventeenth century to 1815, Russia from its pre-Muscovy beginnings until 1917, China under the Qing, and the United States from its fin de siecle victories over the Spanish to the present. Kagan presents the titular concept of the "imperial moment," or the period when a state becomes an empire, as an organizing rubric, though the authors make at best occasional use of it in their individual chapters. Kagan's own concern is to better understand whether the United States has recently become an empire, and she writes from within the policy-oriented international relations community which has debated this question since the beginning of American-led military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq. The case studies themselves, however, demonstrate that the process of becoming an empire has always been incremental. Following their logic, the United States has thus either been an empire for a long time, and therefore recent "imperial moments" in Asia and the Middle East are not new, or that it is hOt an empire at all, and recent overseas wars are better seen as extensions of domestic "security-state" politics, paroxysms of aggressive self-defence that do not reflect the broader desire for overseas rule characteristic of empires. Kagan's efforts to stress the contemporary "policy-relevance" of her volume's historical empires are overly general (states become empires when they succeed in enforcing obedience from weaker powers, and when their leaders self-identify as imperialists); betray her realist preference for structural relations and Realpolitik over economic, social, and cultural analysis; and rely on standard political science conceptual frameworks like the levels of analysis which sit unevenly alongside empirically driven historical research.

No matter. The historical essays at the heart of this book are a pleasure to read. Chapters by Loren J. Samons II on Athens, Arthur M. Eckstein on Rome, Nicholas Canny on Great Britain, Pamela Kyle Crossley on Qing China, Paul Bushkovitch on Russia, and Frank Ninkovich on the "New Empire of the United States" are all models of concision, learning, and breadth. Each chapter assesses how its particular empire arose, and how it shaped the international system of which it was a part.

The chapters on Greece and Rome hew closest to Kagan's organizing principle, but at the cost of entering historiographical debates which non-expert readers of this comparative book may find difficult to follow. Samons argues that imperialism in the ancient Greek context meant political domination--here one thinks of international relations scholars' attraction to Thucydides's Melian Dialogue in the the History of the Peloponnesian War--and that it began with the coercive rule of the Athenian Delian League. Eckstein disagrees, arguing that only at its end was the Athenian alliance system seen as an arche, a broad term meaning rule. Drawing on Michael Doyle's international relations work on imperialism, he argues that the Roman imperium was able to command obedience from others, including the Greeks, making it the clearest ancient analogue to modern imperialism. Though they are not cited here, this argument clearly resonates with Robinson and Gallagher's notion of informal imperialism.

Canny focuses on the British Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, leaving its massive post-1815 expansion aside. He shows that early British imperialism was cast as anti-imperial, defending Protestant virtues against the imperial threat of the Catholic Spanish and Portuguese. The "First British Empire" of settlement first in Ireland and then the Americas, created for Britain defense responsibilities which led it into conflict with both its colonial subjects, who claimed a status equal to subjects at home and rebelled when it was not accorded them, and with European powers, culminating in the Seven Years and Revolutionary Wars. Britain's victory in the subsequent Napoleonic wars fundamentally reshaped its imperial goals, now directed more to trade than colonization. This is to ignore, however, the "Anglosplosion" of overseas British migration identified by James Belich, which grew exponentially in part due to Britain's Napoleonic victory.

The chapters on Russia and on Qing China present broad surveys of those empires' rise and ultimate collapse. Crossley argues that the Qing conquest created a new style of imperial rule which combined the adoption of Chinese practices from the Ming for ruling China proper with "Manchu" or other local practices of rule outside of the core, thus constituting a form of empire by adaptation and accommodation which mirrored that of the pluralistic Ottomans. The Qing used local authority figures when building their empire, but became more centralized and autocratic under the Qianlong emperor in the eighteenth century. The lack of communication in the early modern world made it easier to maintain such bifurcated imperial governance, as there was infrequent contact between the various communities of the ruled. This model fell apart in the mid-nineteenth century when the Qing could only suppress the Taiping rebellion with Western assistance, thus fatally compromising their imperial authority. Bushkovitch narrates Russia's two-pronged imperial expansion, west into the Baltic and Poland, and east and south into Asia. The former followed the logic of an agrarian land empire, the latter of commercial European imperialism. Echoing Dominic Lieven, Bushkovitch illustrates how the multi-ethnic nature of the Russian imperial elite made any imperial project of "russification" near impossible. He thus concludes that the USSR in the twentieth century was not a Russian empire per se, but rather a sui generis utopian project.

Finally, Ninkovich argues that the United States does not fit comfortably into conventional historical definitions of empire. As a debtor nation which imports consumer goods, America turns on its head the theory of economic imperialism put forth by Hobson and Lenin. Save for a short-lived and half-hearted spasm of expansion at the turn of the last century, the United States has not pursued formal empire abroad. If it is an empire, then, it is so only in the sense that its preponderance of power allows it to act as it wishes in the international arena. Empire may be its closest historical analogue, but it is not sufficient to understand America's present position. Rather, the emergence of a new, globalized international system born out of the geopolitics of the twentieth century has made imperialism redundant, creating instead new interconnected forms of political relationships.

Whether these essays shed further light on the laboured question of whether the United States is at present an empire may depend more on one's political than historical outlook. Judged on their individual merits, however, the synthetic scholarship on display in the chapters in this volume deserves a wide readership.

Daniel Gorman

University of Waterloo