School of War - Ep 160: Thomas Barfield on Empire and Imperial Strategies Today

Episode Date: November 26, 2024

Thomas Barfield, Professor and Chairman of the Anthropology Department at Boston University and author of Shadow Empires: An Alternative Imperial History, joins the show to discuss empire.   ▪️ Times      •      01:15 Introduction      •      03:20 Understanding Afghanistan      •      05:15 Classifying empires      •     09:59 Failures and features       •      12:24 Borders     •      15:30 Exogenous empires     •      21:36 Brits and Athenians       •      26:40 Vulture empires      •      32:21 Taking responsibility      •      37:15 Empires of nostalgia     •      44:50 Vacuum empires       •      51:05 American/Athenian policy      •      54:53 China and empire today Follow along on Instagram or YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

I'm very excited about today's episode, which draws together themes of geopolitics, political analysis, history, conquest, in a way that I hope is becoming a signature of school of war. When I got back from Afghanistan some years ago and started the process of trying to understand what I had just participated in, there was one author who more than anyone seemed to understand how Afghan politics actually worked. That's Thomas Barfield. He's joining today. We'll talk about Afghanistan, but also about his new book, which is on the nature of empire and the extremely potent strategic legacy that empires have left behind. Let's get into it. It is the script for war this Iraqi invasion of late.

December 7, 1941, a date which will live in history. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the great situation. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing ground, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram,

Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm going to do something now that I don't normally do here on this show. With your permission, I'm going to make a case for something. I think it may be of interest to some listeners out there. A main reason I started this show is because the study of military and diplomatic history of statecraft

is clearly in decline on the American University campus. So I'm really happy to share a neat opportunity for college students and young professionals who listen to School of War, the Hurtog Security Studies Program, a summer fellowship that I'll be leading next year in Washington, D.C. It's a four-week program. It's sponsored by the Hurtog Foundation. I'll kick things off in week one. I'll be joined by Mike Gallagher for a seminar on geopolitics.

We'll be followed by General Frank McKenzie, who will teach for a week on political military affairs. That's the former commander of Sentcom. He'll be followed by Vance Surchuk, who will teach for a week on U.S. Russia relations. Vance is brilliant to former Senate aid with long experience in these issues. And then the final week will be led by Dan Blumenthal, spent on the show numerous times. He's a China expert and will be leading a class on China. You can apply for the full four-week fellowship and be recognized as a Grand Strategy Fellow, gain a comprehensive understanding of U.S. National Security,

or you can apply for individual one-week seminars to tailor the experience to your schedule. So no matter the path you choose, you'll hear from top policymakers and experts. Past, yes, lecturers have included folks like Senator Tom Cotton, Jackie Deal, and Victor Davis Hansen. Applications are now open at hertog Foundation.org. That's H-E-R-T-O-G Foundation.org. Again, this program is for college students and young professionals, so people very near the start of their careers. Maybe that's you.

Maybe it's a young person you know. And in that case, I'd be grateful if you flagged it for them. Whether you're passionate about geopolitics or history or strategy, I think this program is a really incredible opportunity to deepen your understanding of those issues and connect with leaders in the field. Please join me next summer for the Hurtog Security Studies program. Today I'm delighted to welcome to the show Tom Barfield. He is the author most recently of Shadow Empires, an alternative imperial history.

He is professor of anthropology at Boston University. He's the author of other books and many, many articles. And I have to say, it's a great honor to meet you and interview you because your book on Afghanistan, which came out must be, what, a little over a decade ago now, something like that, was extraordinarily influential to me in helping me process. what I had experienced and learned but not, you know, sort of known but not understood when I was in Afghanistan and really helped me learn about politics at a deeper level than I think I had before reading that book. So it's an honor to have you on the show and thank you so much for

for making the time. Thank you. And I should say that there's a second edition of the book. I recently came out in 2010. I brought it up to date to the fall of the government. It came out about a year ago. So second edition. So excellent. And it's the American experience. And I've catched them. Excellent. I will, I need to read that, and I strongly, strongly recommend it to listeners. As I do, this most recent book on imperialism and the complicated nature of imperialism, which we can get into now, you know, your argument begins with a sort of paradigm case of what empire is, is often understood to be a kind of base case in which you would put places like the, you know, the Chinese empire, the Persian Empire, the Roman Empire, and you call these endogenous empires. But there's variation, even within them. So maybe if you wouldn't mind starting by just telling us about, well, I guess let's say even before that, tell us about how you started thinking about all this and thinking about empire. And then there's a point that you make in your Afghanistan book that taught me a

great deal about Afghanistan, this comparison of American cheese governance and Swiss cheese governance, that then becomes important in your understanding of the base case of empires in the new book. Please walk us through your thinking. Back that up again. I had actually, more than 20 years ago, I was invited to a conference at the Winnegrin foundation did on comparative empires, mostly archaeologists and historians. And with all of these cases, it immediately became clear that some of the cases fit really easily China, Persia robe. But what about ones that I did nomadic empires in China, or could you really call the Carolingian

Empire anywhere near, you know, doing Rome? And so I realized that perhaps one of the problems is that by putting everything into one box and calling it an empire, we were creating problems for ourselves. I was intended to get back to that, but the United States went back into Afghanistan just after that work was published, and I spent more or less the next 20 years working on Afghanistan, got back to empires more recently and made a distinction we call endogenous empires. These are sui generis. They arise on their own with the most important distinction about them is they survive on their

own resources. The bigger they are, the bigger their resources. space. So we see them start in the center. They expand. But as you imply, there are some big differences because if we look at what we consider to be classic empires, well, let's take China and Persia. Persia is actually the oldest. Well, 5 million square kilometers, both maybe 40, 50 million people. But the way they think about government was entirely different. The Persians started first and familiar with Afghanistan or Persian or Central Asia. What you can remember is there, There's pieces of population, dense populations, irrigated areas, and then mountains, deserts and stuff.

So it's like an archipelago, really, an islands of culturing population. China is very different. High population, spread out all over the map, but relatively consistently. So when the Persians had to create an empire, they did what I call the Swiss cheese model. It is, most of the territory that they ruled was not worth ruling, mountains, deserts. and they just decided to focus on the cheese and not the holes. And the essence of a Persian Empire is to delegate authorities. That's why the first Persian Empire emperor is called a king of kings,

which implies their subordinate kings. And these were often people that represented the local culture, the local political structure, and the deal was you let them rule their own people using more or less their own tools, as long as they were loyal to the empire, they paid their taxes. That's one variety of this. a decentralized emperor. China was just the opposite. If you look at the beginning of this with the Chin dynasty, its ruler was all under heaven and no subordinate rulers, no king of kings. There's only one

king and he's an emperor. And you send out bureaucrats. You send out foreigners to rule, but you don't want people to rule their own own ones. So I call that the American cheese model, that if you look at the map, a whole is a defect. It must be corrected. So these are like, even though they're famous empires what they believe is necessary to run such an empire is almost entirely different and that affects their politics so yes they're empires they're both endogenous empires that arose in their own areas set the templates for that part of the world and rely on internal resources how they chose to do that was diametrically opposed when i talked about rome rome sort of started out in a persian kind of you know agglomeration of different pieces brought to

together by the time of the emperor, particularly in second, third century AD. It's very Chinese-like in which you, there are no more autonomous kings, it's all provinces, everything's ruled directly. So Rome is an interesting example that we see a transition. And one of the difficulties that we,

or I speak for ourselves as a Westerner, is we start with Rome, which is a very messy case. And the clearer examples are either China or version. Right. And just to bring this to Afghanistan For a minute, though, it's not my purpose to spend the whole hour talking about Afghanistan, but I think the American experience in Afghanistan is one of showing up and just assuming that all politics is American cheese.

Yeah. And this is something you, I mean, you certainly taught me the language to think. I sort of intuited this, but in co-itly while I was there, I couldn't have explained it until I read your book. But the, you know, if you think this one guy shoots another guy just on the Afghanistan side of the Afghan Pakistan border, it is simply the American assumption that there's going to be an Afghan police officer of some sort who's going to take an interest in this crime and if and solve it or try to solve it there'll be process and if there isn't a processable this is a failing state right

but that's not historically how afghan it's not a historically state and that's also because not only to successful empires in afghanistan rule the 12 percent of afghanistan as opposed to the population irrigated agriculture and deal with those frontier peoples differently even the british did that on the northwest frontier. They have the most powerful empire in the world. But I also teach a little bit of political science. And I try to explain it to people that Afghan rulers, the people that we deal with are Hobbesie.

So they say, you must help us create the Leviathan. One rule, the high of Lordor, over everything. And the tribal people that we deal with are Lockees. They believe government is a condevious. And it can be done away with it when it's not fit to serve. So you have two diametrically oppose views of what politics is, one from the capital, Hobbesian, help us build Leviathan, and the other Lockean is if governments don't serve the purpose, you have the right to replace the ruler or change the whole system.

And as the British first notice, when they went in there, there's a bit of discrepancy in the understanding of government, which has led to no ends of problems at happen. It turns out that those regimes that have foreign backing do their best to make the partners create a Leviathan, which is indigestible at the lovable level. So it's, again, when I'm looking for these models and some of these things are actually quite old in political science, but we often don't apply then. Where we're, if in one model, something is a failure. And another thing, it's a feature, not a buck.

Right, right. And in the Rome example, I always took this to be the upshot of, to make reference to another book that has been important to my education, but Edward Lodbach's grand strategy. of the Roman Empire. I always took one upshot of his argument to be that actually the transition from Swiss cheese to American cheese, that is to say the transition from this complex diplomacy of the Augustine age where you're, you know, you're sort of propping up kings who appear to their own people as sovereign, but they know they are their sovereignty to Rome and everything. It's a very complicated system, but a cheaper system and kind of a flexible system, you can lose

a bit and gain a bit and it's not a threat to your legitimacy, that actually the transition to annexation, direct rule, bureaucracy, etc. And borders, borders is a look back's big thing, that that's more expensive, more militarily demanding and kind of brittle. Like once you destabilize one part of it, you're kind of calling into question the whole, right? You create a front line that has to be defended. If you look at the way the Persians can lose all of Central Asia periodically and maybe

they get it back, maybe they would. Their heart was, you know, still in. both the Russians and the Chinese came up with this eventually the Chinese early, the Romans later a fixed frontier which must be defended. But what it means is that frontier is breached. The cost of that can bring down the entire central government because you put more or lower resources on the frontier. And the early Russian or Roman period is what we see is all of those quiet kingdoms were between

them and the Persians. So if the Persians began moving towards Syria or Anatolia, it was your client kings that were taking the brunt of it. And you had deniability. Maybe we'll take it back. Maybe we once it becomes Roman. You've got to defend it. Same thing with the Germanic tribes or along the dead youths. But the problem is that leaders of empires tend to, except for the Persians, tend to aspire to the Chinese model.

That's what a real empire is. If you don't control the farthest margins, you're a failure. Our constant talk about failed states doesn't ask, well, what does a state do? And who is it failing? Is it failing the people who are running it? Or is it failing the people that experience it. Right. This is a great Patricia Crono line about pre-modern politics that the shepherd exists for his flock

to protect them, indeed, but only to fleece them, which is another thing that I think Americans, I would speak for myself here, Americans, that's not how we learn about politics. That's not what we understand politics. It's not what we're for. We have cultural templates, kind of difficulty of cultural templates. The Chinese certainly have this because they do not understand

how the nomads can be so powerful is because they have all of the information, but everything is seen as an exception or a problem that can be solved. When if it was looked differently, you would realize it. often implicitly, even in China, they discover, actually, when we pay the nomads to guard the frontier. The Romans sort of began doing that in the late Western period as well. It's not a great,

it's not a great strategy if your empire is sort of losing at the center, but it kind of, it actually reverts back to the earlier period of why do we have to make everybody enemies where we can make half of them allies. They might not necessarily be our friends, but we share similar interests. So with all that said about sort of the options or variations that exist within maybe politics very broadly, but certainly empire more narrowly, an endogenous empire specifically, I want to get to actually the main part of your argument, which is not endogenous empires like Persia or China, but other kinds of empires, which your book, the title dramatically describes as shadow empires, nice literary flare, and then you have

a more technical term exogenous empires. Exogenous empires, yes. Because, it's And they exist, two things that are different. They come into existence as a result of interaction with other empires. It's, you don't want to be eaten, become one yourself. But you've got to become one of a different size or a different shape or a different structure. And so they come into existence usually as the result of a military challenge by an empire. But they support themselves not by taxing their own people direction. or agricultural productions, their resources are external.

And so if we look at the nomads in China, China unifies, they go after the nomads. The nomads are defeated. The nomads get themselves together internally. Well, how do you unite a million nomads that are scattered, you know, over close to 2,000 miles? One of the ways to do it is say, because now we're together. Why don't we raid China? Very popular. It's an enemy.

You get to bring stuff. But then you go to the Chinese and say, you know, if you would not prefer to be rated, you could just send us the stuff and save us both a lot of trouble. And diplomats in China quickly realized that, yeah, it's cheaper to pay these guys off. Now, appeasement has a very bad reputation in modern political science. But that's always the assumption is the, if you appease somebody, you're just building them up so that they can take you over. What they forget is there are certain polities.

whose raison d'etra is to be appeased. And the thing about the nomads is they never attempted to conquer China. They attempted to extort it. The one time that extortion failed and they ended up conquering China game was the Mongol Empire, which was huge. But they had to, they started out, I might say a startup extortionist that became, you know, a Google-sized monopoly. You have to run it a little bit differently.

But there's other ways. I mean, the nomads have, of course, Calvary. They had archered. So even though there weren't many of them, they had military parity with China. But they never had to defend any Chinese land. So they were famous, even the ancient Scythians are famous. When attacked, they were run away. And both the Persians and the Chinese said, these people have no honor.

Whenever they lose or think they're going to lose, they run away. When they think they're going to win, they attack. And their thing is, that's not cheating. That's our advantage. And it is. But there are other shadow empires, like when the Persians went after the Greeks, that's not worse Calvary. This is a couple of centuries before that. It's maritime empires. The Athenians create a maritime empire based on an alliance turned into an empire. But it's a question of dominating the seas. And that requires relatively small military force compared to creating an

indogenous empire. But it comes into existence, essentially because the Persians invade and the Greeks unite in order to, at least the Athenians unite the Greeks, to do this. But it creates a different kind of empire, one than I call a maritime empire. So there's all sets of the shadow empires that you can see them coming to resistance. But if you were to prepare Mongolia with Greece, you would say, oh, they have nothing in common. I mean, you know, like one's sea, one's land, one's literate, one's illiterate, you know. But in terms of strut. they get because the Athenians got their resources largely by dominating the trade system, not by dominating the people who produce the stuff.

And the nomads in Mongolia were successful because they extorted, oh, this is maybe, you know, 100 BC or thereabouts, you know, maybe it's 100 AD, I think that one third of China's revenue went to the guys on the frontier. I mean, it was just enormous. But from the empire's point of was a good payoff. The Byzantius are the same thing to the hunts. When Attila begins

ravaging all in the area around Constantinople, they send them literally a ton of gold. But if you check, that was cheaper than trying to fight Attila, and Attila wanted the gold.

He didn't want to be the emperor of Constantinople. He was following this nomad thing when I call the terroristic outer frontier strategy. Scare your opponent so badly that he will treat you as an equal, even though they're saying,

who are these people? A couple hundred thousand nomads? I mean, how can they stand up to people like us? And after a few interactions with them, it doesn't matter what do you think about him. It's how do we get rid of them? And we get this symbiotic relationship that takes place. And actually in China,

it becomes a dependency relationship because as the dynasty declines, the last people that defended are the nomads because they're being paid. They don't want to see the dynasty ball. They'll actually send in troops to put down the Chinese peasant rebellion. That's something that Chinese history tends not to recognize. But you can see that why is it the nomads since they were the historic enemies?

Why were they the last loyalist? It's because they've been paid for so long and paid so well. You get Chinese warlords. They don't pay. One of the striking things about your account and the way you compose your account is the longevity of these models, how the strategy is sort of available again and again over a span of literally millennia and in an in a attenuated way even today, which we can get to. But sticking with, I mean, there are other types that we should talk about,

but sticking with nomadic steppe empires and maritime empires as sort of two key cases, the step empires, I mean, forms of that continue well into the second millennium AD. And then you could argue, I mean, the British Empire doesn't fall until the Cold War. Now, it transforms, as you point out, into a kind of endogenous empire of its own. Maybe that's an interesting case to talk about. Maybe we can stick with the Brits for a minute. What did the Brits have in common with the Athenians after all those years? And then how does it change for the Brits?

They don't have as much in common except for their dependence on maritime empires. But the other thing, interestingly enough, with the exception of Portugal, every maritime empire is some kind of democracy or republic. No autocrats. So the thing about a maritime empire is its military, its elite, is designed to economically serve, not a single ruler, but an economic class. So you don't want a powerful king or a ruler in a maritime empire because he'll look at all that merchant wealth and say, why isn't it mine? That's what Chinese emperors too, calls it. And that's true of the Athenians. The Athenians have a democracy.

So, whoever leading it has to, you know, support, give benefits to the people that are keeping the power. What I didn't realize, Carthage is also a republic, the famous Venetian Republic, the Dutch Republic, the English government, the parliamentary system. The Portuguese are the only kings, but it's a merchant kind of king. So what we find is the British actually are gaining power by control of the maritime trade going to in. But until the early 18th century, they only have three little ports in India and they're vassals of the mogul emperor. But as the mobile empire begins to fall apart and they seize Bengal and become the rulers of that, they now have to administer directly, right?

They are taxing the people of Bengal, the East India Company, as Edmund Burke put it, was born in trade and ended in empires. because the British and the Dutch actually created their imperialism by privatizing. The Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company, both for it around 1600, are private companies that are in power to act like states. And the British East India Company does not lose its legal control of India until 1858 after the Sepoy Rebellion. That before that, actually, India is not part of the British Empire.

is part of the East India Company. But what happens is the more land, the more prices that the British control, they begin after rule like a regular endogenous empire. Their income is not coming so much from trade anymore as it is taxation. But they never lose, and this is similar to the Athenians, is that maritime empires like to work through intermediaries.

So when they capture a princely state, they put the prince back in charge, now subject to the British, which is why when the British left, there were all these little princely states. They like to work through intermediaries, because what they want to do is they want to control the money. So even if we look at the China trade, why does Britain go to war with China? The opium wars. That's a purely, when Britain wins the opium war, we do not see them like beginning to conquer southern China. All they keep is like Hong Kong, some trading rights, because their fortune is exploiting the drug economy that they are facilitating in China, not wanting to rule it. And what I argue is that maritime emperors don't

really want to rule. And with the exception of Britain, none of them did. But Britain, partially because of what was happening in India domestically, take it over. Once they do, they have to rule. They have to create a Raj. They have to create a real government. But they never lose their maritime bias towards indirect rule, towards money comes first, that's entirely different than an endogenous empire. So it's possible, and indeed, almost all my shadow empires at one point not only become endogenous empires, they become the world's largest endogenous empires. The British, the Muslim Caliphate, the Mongol Empire, all of these start out as shadow empires. and indeed so does Russia and so does the Manchu rule China that divide Eurasia between them

all start out as shadow empires by the time most of us pay any attention to them say well they're just regular empires but if you look at how they run the manchus do not run them the same way ethnic con Chinese do and the way the Russians run their empire is entirely different than what Europeans are used to or how the British would run a colonial empire well let's let's talk about some of those cases then you described in a little bit of detail just now the process by which what's the famous joke which doesn't seem to be all that true but in a sort of fit of absence of mind that silly some of the british slowly at least do become endogenous in india it's not always slow you you named the caliphate is one example the mongols or another alexander the great you talk about

in the book though his project kind of comes a cropper with his death you know what what just speaking at a broad level, what causes these shadow empires to suddenly go for the jugular? It's when they move from the indirect business to actually controlling an empire. So, for example, what I call lulcher empires, an empire falls apart, people on the periphery move in. They often, they try to retain, this is particularly in China, they retain a Chinese bureaucracy in a smaller area, it's not run as well. They provide the military. It's, as I put it in the book, they are one-eyed men in the land of the blonde. Pretty good for the time.

But as China begins to get at sight, they are going to be replaced by a real endogenous empire. The only way to avoid that is what the matchews did. You take over all of China and do it relatively rapidly. And the same thing with the caliphant. If we look at the Arabs, they defeat both the Byzantines and the Sussians. The Byzantines only lose, only Egypt. in Syria. And Ibn Caldun said, you know what? They could lose those because Constantinople was their

heart. As long as the empire has its heart, it's not going to die. They said the Sasanians, when the Arabs took Tessafon, the Sasanian capital, it ripped out the empire's heart. And Ibn Caldun said, no matter how many outer provinces the old regime had, he was not going to be able to hold together. So we find them. We also find the Mongols, try to engage. extort the dynasties in North China. They refused to pay. There's like a 20-year war. They end up conquering all of North China. It's at this point, both with the Caliphate and with the Mongols, there's a debate within the society. Do we really want to go in this direction? And the old elite says, no, but let's not go into this ruling empire. That's not who we are.

So in Mongolia, it's, yeah, let's keep our capital in Mongolia. We're horse riding people. But you have people like Kubla Khan, whose Feefiz northern China, who realizes, you know, if you have Mongol cavalry and a Chinese economic infrastructure, you could beat those guys on the step because I am sending food to the step every day. And when a civil war breaks out, he cuts off the food. And suddenly the Mongols in China realize, I guess the Chinese that might be okay, but against their Mongol cousins or in some cases, brothers, they're losers. and we see that transition take place.

Hence, suddenly, the Mongol Empire is no longer just in extortion. It's interested in conquest. The Song Dynasty was willing to pay the Mongols a huge amount just to go away. Other nomadic empires would have done that. But Qibla Khan is no. I'm not to me that. I'm third generation from Jeviz Khan. My goal and the goal of my brothers, one of whom I have sent to Contra Persia and

kill the last Caleb, we're going to run the whole thing. And the British, as things are going in India, as the 1700s go, they get more and more into that, in part because they lost the North American colonies. They had a good settler colonialism thing going on the east coast of what becomes the United States, and they lose it. And we all remember Cornwallis surrenders to Washington to end the Revolutionary War, but Americans don't ask, so what does Cornwallis's next job? They send him to be vice-roy of India. Okay? It's like, and what is his job is to make sure we, you know, not to combine with the local Hindus and Muslims to create a new elite

because look, I'd happen with that old elite in America or British. They wanted to share our, we're going to create a real empire. But we're going to have to focus on India because we've lost most of our most valuable North American and Dodgers part. It's gone. So let's go back to our roots. and the more that's there, it's like, that is like, well, you know, if you see the diamond, take it up. They just keep moving and moving.

You know, the French try to interfere, others try to, and the British just keep moving and moving. But the interesting thing is, how are they conquering in India? It was an army of sepoys or trained in English fashion. They have European military, but it's like 85% Indians. And that army was bigger than the British army in Europe, right? So we see them building a counter state in a way, but the fact that they never declared themselves rulers of that state, technically, legally, and the British are very equalistic. We own India as vassals to the moguls.

The lobles own India, and we're just their friends. It was a threadbare excuse, but actually it was an excuse that the Rajputs, the Persians, and the Persians would also use when they conquered down. Nobody got rid of the moguls because they were the official rulers of India work, at least technically through that. It's not until really the high point of industrial capitalism of late 19th century that the British say, I guess we are an empire and we don't need no loggals. And that's when Disraeli is able to tell Queen Elizabeth, Indy is the jewel of bureaucrat because it wasn't a jewel in the crown before. It was a privately owned subsidiaries of which the British government. owned a good shock of the story.

And that was, but that there was like a liberal, a right thinking dimension to that as well, right? In the sense that the, the, the, the, sort of perceived and actual depredations of company rule, had generated a crisis. And so the empire, direct control of the empire was self-explained, not as greater rapaciousness and greater power for power sake. It was an improving, it was it going to be a better way of government. And then this was the example where you become full. endogenous, you have to take responsibility. The essence of exogenous, shadow empires,

is they don't take responsibility. A nomadic empire can burn south, you know, half of North China and say, not our problem. When you conquer it as the Mongols, it is your problem. There was the first Mongol ruler to convert to Islam and Iran actually sent a memo, so to speak, to his people. He said, you've got to stop attacking. the peasants. All right. You know, they are our subjects. We tax them. If you want, you know, you and I together could raid these peasants. You know, nobody can do it better than me. But if you don't stop doing this, I'm going to have to punish you because they pay taxes to the state. And therefore, they are subject to be protected, not targets of predation.

It took close to 100 years, like for that lesson to, you know, to go out because the Mongols retained, as did the Huns and others, like, if we see it, we take it. And once you are, once you become the owner of a place, that is a bad strategy. But it requires that you actually convince your polity, your people, the people that are helping you run it, is that we have to operate on different rules, right? The Monbo's first, this was after Jingas Khan's death, famously proposed maybe we should kill all the Chinese peasants because then at least the place This would be decent horse pasture. And Yellow Chubesai was Oguni, his genius con's son, his prime minister, he says,

don't do that. Give me an opportunity. And he gave a huge amount of taxes that he would bring. And the Mongols said, we stole everything. There's not that much money, but you can have a year. And if that year came in, all of this stuff came in, silver, gold, silk, you know. And they said, where did you find it? I mean, you know, like, we're pretty good.

He says, if you don't kill people, but tax them, you can have this every year. And so at that point is, okay, maybe we should do that. But that is not the kind of blessing that other people, particularly anybody that was familiar with China, would have even had to learn. But if your strategy is purely predatory convincing people that you eat all the animals, you're going to starve. It's like losing for being a predator to a shepherd. A hunter and a shepherd are different.

They may ultimately both live off the animals, but the shepherd is expected to take care of the animals, even if it's all. his own Bennett. And that's the kind of thing that came really hard for these really fast expanding empires. Because part of the old elites said, why should we come up the old way? It's fun to pillage, loot, burn. And the other saying, as there was a Seljuk leader, they captured the city of Nishaport. And his brothers wanted to loot it. And they were younger brothers naturally. They said, now that we have caught the city, it is our city. We would be looted. We would be looting our own house.

Oh, we hadn't thought about it. So don't do it. But again, you do not have to tell most conquerors that when you conquer a city, it's your, you protect it from your troops. You know, they can't loot for three days, may. And don't kill the people. We need them. But if your strategy was different, as these nomads were, is that we raid, we attack,

because it's not our place, we only need to extort, we only need to scare them. It's a different worldview. And it changes, it's forced to change. And usually the more pragmatic ones say, you've got to go endogenous. There's just no other way about it. And the reactionaries, if they don't agree, are generally pushed out because they just wrong economically. You know, the whole system will not hold. Among the many observations that you make about pre-modern or imperial history that hold true

is the role of younger brothers as forces of destruction. That is absolutely the case for this day. So again, I want to sort of finish and linger on present-day relevance, but before we do, there's two other types that I want to at least spend a minute on, empires of nostalgia and vacuum empires, empires of nostalgia being kind of the most intriguing to me. It's just among the, among the reasons to read your book. Not only is it a just a really interesting extended discussion of things we're going through quickly right now. But it also serves. Your chapter on Empires of Nostalgia is almost like,

you met you out of modesty, may reject this, but it's a little bit of a capsule history of the Middle Ages in Europe. It's not designed for that purpose. It leaves a lot out, but it really is a way to orient yourself quickly according to a cleverly constructed model

to things that happened. And I had, you know, I had been aware of the ways in which legitimacy is gained by making reference to old things, but you lay it out in a really compelling way. What are, What are nostalgic empires or empires of nostalgia?

Yeah, in mostly like in China, there was always a nostalgia for empire. You know, a lost empire, the end of the Hondas, the end of the Tongue, out of the States. And the foreigners that moved in to take North China, that was deadly to them, because that nostalgia they caused, right? But nostalgia was useful in China, but it didn't last long. You were either going to create a new empire or you're going to be destroyed or Eden by way. the west is unusual because the west this is why i don't think it makes good templated empires the west is only part of an empire western europe is only part of an empire during the roman period

in every other place when an empire collapses it comes back i there's a thousand years where you can see the persians interruption alexander the great then the parthians then the sassadians that's like you know 550 bc to 650 a d all the same structure. China, Han, Tong, Sol, me. Every time it collapses, the belief is that an empire, a united China is the default, even when it doesn't exist. In Europe, it never came back. And of course, there's whole books and questions, why didn't it come back? What are the consequences of that? But the interesting thing is, and of course, it did continue to exist as Roman Empire East. We call it the Byzantines, but they were just Romans as far as they were

sorry, we jettisoned the West. But in the medieval period, there's this idea of, wouldn't it be great to have an empire? Because we've gone to these war banners, these chieftans, I mean, there's not much honor and glory in that. And what we see is an alliance, sort of with the Catholic Church, which is the last remnant of hierarchical,

sort of Roman rule, getting together, trying to get an alliance with what we call the Carolingians, like going back to Charles Mollart. hotel and in France. And you guys represent not just some grimy group attacking some other groups, but a protection of the Catholic Europe and expanding against pagans. And everybody who joins gets a piece of this charisma.

So we get Charlemagne, who's crowned as emperor. It rules maybe 10 million people, maybe 2 million square followers. It's big. But the interesting thing, this desire. for Roman Empire came from the Germans. It was the German X. Now, acculturated tribes and said, we want the empire back, but they don't want the empire of the Caesar's back. They want a Christian Roman empire back, okay? The empire of the saints, if you will. And the interesting thing here is the Germans are the people that prevented the Romans from like crossing the Rhine and making them true Romans. And they're in

invasions are the ones that brought down the West. And then the ones that say, yeah, trans Rhine, you know, we should all be together. We're Catholics under a banner, not of a particular ethnic group, but as an empire. So it's nostalgia for something actually that exists in people's minds, but it's something to aspire to. And it makes you seem, if you're a ruler, much more powerful than you are. You're better than any king. You have the right to attack pagan sacks,

you have the right to make slog your tributaries. And even if you can't hold it together, because one of the problems is by the time of Charlemagne's great-grandsons, after the end of Louis the Pius who actually tries to be a real emperor, as the book explains, it doesn't quite work out. His sons divide his empire up into three kingdoms.

The interesting thing is, maybe 60 years later, A new group of Germans creates the Holy Roman Empires, which is most famous for it's put down neither an Holy Roman nor an empire. And first of all, that is not exactly correct because Holy Roman is not two things. It's one. Only Roman meets Christian Roman, empire, and it had an elected king. It went through like seven dynasties, and it lasted for 900 years. It had a demon court system, but it had no capital. It did have a parliament, and it had no imperial army.

It worked entirely on the realm of the mind. And what did it do? It protected more than 300 little Germanic duchies that used to include Northern Italy going into Germany, trans-Rine, and they could sue each other in court. And it could solve problems for people. And it survived even the Protestant Reformation, which, if anything, should have brought it down.

It didn't. And so the so-called Treaty of Westphalia is not a creation of, like, the nation states as most, political science like to say is in fact a reformation to the Holy Roman Empire. It's like, okay, we can deal with Protestants and Catholics because we'll pretend they're all the same Christians like they were in 30080s. And the only thing that can kill it is another idea. And that's revolutionary France.

When Napoleon appears on the gates of Vienna, the Holy Roman Emperor dissolves it. It says everybody's free to go their own way. I will be the emperor of Austria. But the reason that he has to get rid of it is the Holy Roman Empire protects hierarchy. It protects, if you will, the classic feudal system. The French Revolution says, we don't need no feudal systems. We are an equalitarian revolution. And since the vast majority of the people were not a member of these, you know, clergy and feudal noble estates,

it brought it down with a thud, not through military means, but because nostalgia. was caught. Nobody wanted it. From that period on, nostalgia stops existing and people start going after utopias. Wouldn't it be great if? And utopian political thought runs sort of from the French revolution. I essentially say to the fall of the Soviet Union, and since the fall of the Soviet Union, we're back to nostalgia. To understand the power of nostalgia politically, I think, look at Europe at this touch and particularly see how does something so ephemeral survive for so long and when you begin to look at it as as a type of quality as an unusual type of empire I think you get a better a better understanding and as I argue later I think that's what the EU is to you know is that it's using

that model unacknowledged but it's using that model last last question before we come to to our conclusion in the present day but if I have my Halford McKinder Giorger hat on, it can't help but notice the sort of obvious link between your different types and then just different kinds of terrain. You know, obviously, step empires live on the step, you know, the Arab explosion comes out of a desert, which is a kind of step, or I guess a step is a kind of desert. So that's one kind, and it tends to a kind of nomadism and tribalism. Then you have your maritime sea powers, which tend to be democratic.

That's another kind. There's empires that live in the mind, as you just eloquently outlined. And then this last kind, which I had never really. really thought of as a category before, but there's a forest land type, the Northern European forests, these vacuum empires, as you call them. What are they? Well, the vacuum empire is, it's empire in a far zone. And what you see is not even state level systems of organization there until the medieval period. I mean, it's, and I have to look at Southeast Asia, but far zones in general seem to be tough to put together politically. Why do you get states, let

alone empires. And what you find is that the economy gets monetized through international trade. How does that happen? With my other things, in terms of not so much McKinder's idea, not sort of a central Eurasia, but all of my shadow empire sit on the margins in some way. And the vacuum margin is nothing here but far as swamps and bucks. Who would want that? Well, it turns out it also, there are, sources there, particularly furs, but also slates. And as the caliphate begins to grow, it has a pension for furs. It loves furs. And who gets the furs for them? The Turkic nomads that live in now to Ugray, southern Russia, the Caspian Black Sea steppe, the Khazars. So they move into the far zone

or their agents move to the far zone and extract tribute in furs. They sell those while other people come in to do business at first. And historian Newton has looked in this, and there are millions of d-Rs that flow in silk. So suddenly, silver dinars are everywhere. They flow up to the Baltic where the Vikings say, where are these d-Gyars come from? And they go down, there's an effort, the Nister, the Volga, in search of them. And those are the russ. And what we see is an outside force, because the russ are Vikings, but they intermarry

with the local Slavs, the local things. It's sort of a composite kind of thing. but they put together an empire that's largely based on the export of stuff and in which there is no center. I say it's a, I compare it to a jellyfish. It's a system of nodes that any part could be broken off and it comes back. You know, Keith is the center of the ruse. Lithuania, Dilnius takes that place. Then there's Muscovy, then there's St. Petersburg.

I mean, a British ruler, a French ruler couldn't move out of Paris or France. They're center places or wrong. Here, wherever the ruler is, because it's different nodes. And as both Napoleon, Hitler, and others discover, you could bite off any piece of it, and the rest of it seems to regenerate. And this is, it's an unusual characteristic of these vacuum empires because they're networks of relationships, of scattered resources, but very valuable export resources. And they only really become a state because it's the Mongols that got rid of the Kiev and Rus.

And then the Muscovites become, they learn their state craft from the Mongols. It's only when the steppe empires, the golden whoreg begins to collapse, then Moscow becomes a real empire and begins moving out of the far as zone. But it's not really until Catherine the Great that Russia is able to break out of that far zone. it doesn't have the Ukraine. It doesn't have the step on the Black Sea. It doesn't control the Caspian Sea. It's confined to the pharism.

And that's when I say it moves into the endogenous. When it's able to do that, it has to change the way it's doing business, starting with Peter the Great, mostly with Catherine the Great. And then maybe we should free this earth. There's a difference, but it's an unusual kind of empire. And it's one that we don't think about and it's one of our difficulties of understanding. understanding Russian expansion. I begin, it may be in a probable road to Catherine the Great.

I have no way to defend my borders, but to expand it. The other thing is that who were the enemies of the Russians? It turns out the Poland-Lithuanian condominium is, and the Swedes could have done it too, because Peter the Great came very close to being knocked out by the Swedes. Any one of those places could have been the center of a new vacuum embargo. So regardless of what Vladimir Putin says, because Moscow was not preordained to be in charge of anything and could have ended up a peripheral branch of something else.

But if you understand the logic of these vacuum empires, you can understand why they're so amorphous in a way and why their centers can move from one place to another. That even the collapse of the Soviet Union would kill Russia in a way because despite 70 years of centralized rule, It had maintained sort of vacuum characteristics of being a set of nodes and not being a highly integrated empire that lose the part, lose the heart. The whole thing goes. So in a few minutes we have left, I'd like to talk about the way in which some of these exogenous strategies are still available to states.

And really some of the mindsets sort of live on in ways that people are not always fully conscious of, even as they sort of dance to these tunes. And let's start with America, which is relevant, obviously, to you and to me and to most of the audience. America, it comes from a British tradition. There's an obvious maritime military strategy at work. If you look at America's role in the globe, certainly from the turn of the 20th century on. I don't know if you're familiar with this is a brilliant naval historian that you have a lot intellectually in common with on these subjects. That is to say, the two of you think quite similarly named Andrew Lambert. he wrote a book on sea power states where, again, you and he are arguing in parallel with one another.

But I had him on the show a couple times, and we kind of discussed what America has inherited from the British Empire and what it hasn't. And he was quick to emphasize the differences. Well, look, but you have to keep in mind, America's big land power too. It's a big land empire. And that complicates things. And obviously, that's true on one level. On another level, if you zoom out completely, it's easy to draw the parallels between the American strategic situation today and the British strategic. situation at the start of the 20th century, you know, as Britain is to Europe, so North America

kind of is to Eurasia. Help us understand what it means that America has this inheritance. What is relevant? What's what's not? You know, what's sort of new under the sun? If you wouldn't mind, keep your comments to just a couple of minutes. Yeah, well, it's if we're looking at it, yes, the United States inherits its maritime mindset from the British. And our focus on the coasts it still kind of shows that. But I think the mistake is to compare it to the British Empire at its height, and I go back to the Athenians, is the Americans actually, perhaps unconsciously,

adopt an Athenian policy, which is we want to control economics, not territory. And the British Empire, when it became endogenous with India and others, had to control all of these territories. That violates the spirit of a maritime empire. It's expensive, and the British. couldn't afford it to go out of the empire business. The United States, pretty post-World War II, goes back and it takes its two biggest enemies,

Germany and Japan, and it turns them into allies. And it sets up a set of alliances, right? NATO, but also with Korea, with Japan. That's what the Athenians did. You work on alliances. You dominate the economic system. And within certain limits, just as the Athenians wanted to push an operas seat, we also the stakes that we support, they need to be some kind of liberal democracy. But beyond that,

they're free to do whatever they want. And we create a system in which the United States benefits and actually provides the military capacity to defend this economic creation that is done in the ways that the Athenian Navy protected its Aegean, what they called Arca. So there's an American archa which we protect. And so let the Europeans create the European Union come together. They don't have an army. Why not? Because the United States provides it.

The advantage that the United States has over the Athenians is precisely because we do have Kuchuk and North America. We do not force our clients to pay for it. So they see it as a great advantage, even though critics might say, yeah, but it's the Americans are getting more advantage out of it. But this is a maritime thing. We wish to dominate the economy. Our dollar is supreme just as the Adinian track moas. We set the terms for trade. The British Empire was too much focused on colonies. America doesn't need colonies. You don't seize oil wells when you control the oil market. I mean, why do the work?

So I think the thing is that the United States runs this maritime system, which is based on alliances, in which you actually have real partners, not just clients. It takes this so for granted it doesn't even realize it's doing it. But its enemies, like China or Russia, cannot figure this system out because they don't believe in clients. They don't have any clients. The Chinese in particular, you're either a client, a tributary, or you're an enemy. China has no friends and will never make any. It doesn't know how to be an equal.

It cannot conceive of being equal. And that's a very different kind of political system. Well, let this be my last question. And on China, it's now, you know, in Washington foreign policy conversations that concern China, it's a truism that there is this Chinese imperial legacy and it's the Middle Kingdom. And essentially the point you just made, I would say whether or not it's deeply understood is a commonplace. But you, in your conclusion, you raised this sort of fascinating possibility that there are periods in Chinese history where if not friends exactly, China's rulers have to accept that it has peers. And so this is, as you put it, the Tang versus Song choice. Talk a bit. We're clearly in the former right now.

Well, Xi Jinping is definitely tall. China dominates East Asia. It turns other neighboring countries into client. That's its model. Sung Dynasty loses North China to be barren dynasty. So is China among equals? And it's lost the Chinese heartland, the Yover River Valley. Yet Chinese culture thrives in the South. And they decide we're not going to reconquer in North China. Number one, the places like Bankrupt has historic legacy, but it's not worth it.

In fact, we will pay these people off not to bother us. the Qatans and the Jurchans that control that. But the Song Dynasty is the most technologically innovative of any of China's dynasties. It's remarkably profitable in terms of creating an economy. And it also creates not a national navy, but Chinese and Chinese vessels start moving all over Southeast Asia. It's a remarkably open economy.

And their belief is, what do we need North China for? We have the highest standard of living. We have the highest culture. So we don't have all at East India. It's a money loser. And what I argue in terms of looking at China is, as compared to the Soviet Union, in which power did not pass in an hereditary fashion, Stalin's kids didn't run it.

But also the Politburo, they were relatively poor people. Yeah, they had a whole gun on Dasha, but not much. The Chinese elite now are multi-billionaires, maybe trillionaires. They are tied into this world. So Xi Jinping creating a world in which China will be great again, the Song Dynasty cuts off the rest of the world.

I mean, the Tong Dynasty cuts off the rest of the world. The Song Dynasty is open. How much of the Chinese elite is going to find that actually the Sun, including Xi Jinping's relatives, who will know a lot. That's foreign practice. Find Sun superior.

And also, he wants to compete on the world stage in high tech. Where is Chinese? is high-tech located South China, not the Rust Belt of the North, at which point are the Southern Chinese saying, we're being screwed by these April operations. And we'll bring a good chunk of the Communist Party elite with them who said, yeah, who cares getting Taiwan back? The American strategy would be, so buy it. Deal with it. Whether it flies your flag or not is not that important. But that's a different way to look at the world. And I would argue it is possible

given China's many different dynastic histories, that it has models in which it is amazingly strong, culturally-adapted world power that are not militarily threatening. At the moment, it happens to be at a different mode. But will we talk about China as if it was one thing and China has one history, we are making a big stick? And if we realize there's plenty of people in China that would benefit from a different system, including within the Chinese elite come is already elite, I think it would make our policy a little bit more subtle than what we have now. Thomas Barfield, author most recently of Shadow Empires and Alternative Imperial History. We've never met before, but you principally through first year Afghanistan book,

now more recently this one, you've been an important part of my education. So I'm grateful to you for your work and for making the time today. Well, thank you very much for the opportunity. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.