The Rest Is History - 25. Empires

Episode Date: February 22, 2021

Is the age of empires over? And are they always a bad thing? Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland explore empires through history, examining the modern assumption that nation statehood is always the better way. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello and welcome to The Rest Is History. Today we're tackling one of the big beasts of historical arguments, the kind of subject that frankly is likely to get us cancelled. We're going to be talking about empire. What is empire? What's it for? Where's it come from? And can it ever be a good thing or is it always morally wrong

tom holland i've been uh dreaming since we started of getting you cancelled and this is my chance um well so let's start by saying what we are going to talk about yeah of course we're talking about empires very broadly aren't we we're not going to be talking about a specific empire we're going to span the whole of history and the idea well i mean let's get down to what is an empire would you say well um let's let's go to the etymology let's say you know where does the word empire come from uh it comes from a latin word imperium and the meaning of imperium over the course of the roman empire changes in a quite interesting way. So imperium is it's a command, but it's also the right that someone has to issue a command.

So an imperator. It's like authority almost. Yeah. So an imperator, conventionally translated as a general, is someone who has authority, who has power over the men who are subject to him um imperator becomes the title that augustus the first roman emperor gets and and our word emperor comes from imperator but and so it implies that he has imperium over a vast sway of of of the empire and of the people within it and it's during um aug Augustus's life that a great map of the empire goes up in the forum and that starts to that that's a kind of a symbol for the way in which the understanding of imperium changes to actually mean the physical territory that the Romans have power over. And I think that that sense of a physical

amount of territory, you know, in the Roman, classically, it's kind of subcontinental, it's a vast, vast array of territory, combined with authority, that one person, or perhaps, you know, a particular people have authority and power over other peoples. So I think that perhaps the two key elements of empire are that you have a centre, you have a dominant centre and you have peripheral. Yeah, you have a metropole and then you have peripheral regions. And also you have an idea that one, you know, that this metropolis, this metropole, this centre has authority and power over the peripheral regions. So I would guess that would be how I would describe empires. But Tom, could you not go, I mean, I don't want to play the whole fixture on away turf as it were. We should come further forward at some point, but couldn't you go further back

and say that the very first civilisations that we know of, let's say, you know, 5,000 years ago or whatever, the two kingdoms of Egypt, the Indus Valley, sort of Mesopotamia, Akkad and all these kind of places, that society itself originated often as empires. I mean, obviously, it didn't originate as nation states. Well, yeah. Sophisticated powers had elites that governed places with lots of different people who often

spoke different dialects or languages, or maybe worshipped different gods, and that they had a single authority. I mean, obviously obviously persia is the is the famous example of that isn't it which you've written about well there's this fantastic phrase imperio genesis the process by which empires come to be formed and you talked about egypt and you talked about mesopotamia um in egypt the figure of the pharaoh he's a figure within in the roman sense imperium he has power but he also has comes to have authority over the entire nile valley that comes to constitute the kingdom of egypt and um everyone who lives along the nile they speak the same language they essentially worship the same gods they acknowledge

the same ruler um and so in a i i guess that um ancient egypt approximates perhaps more closely to our sense of a nation state. In Mesopotamia you have different cities and each city has to build walls essentially because to keep the wealth within and to keep outsiders outside and Mesopotamia on top of that has to deal with the fact that beyond the flood plains of the Tigris and the Euphrates, you have predatory powers lurking in the mountains, perhaps lurking in the deserts, who would, you know, if they had the chance, would come and grab a bit of this. So you cannot survive as a city-state in Mesopotamia unless you have a degree of militarism. And this militarism, in turn, inevitably fosters an ambition. Famously, the first person to do it, it supposedly is this guy sargon of the city

of akkad who conquered starts to conquer other cities and so it's the tradition of imperialism in the the middle east really i think that is the kind of the great granddaddy of what today we would think of as empires because um what begins with akkad goes on to you you get Assyria you get Babylon Assyria is a famously brutal and predatory empire and essentially its rule is founded on military oppression and on terror so when the Assyrians conquer a rival people they They will deport them. Famously, they do this to the 10 tribes of Israel. And in time, over the course of the Assyrian Empire, people who are deported to Assyria come to be called booty. So they are, you know, part of the loot that the Assyrians are carrying off. Those who resist are kind of ritually and humiliatingly killed. People are, you know,

leaders are transported back, put in cages with wild animals outside the cities of Assyria so that people can watch them. Other people, you know, the kings have their heads cut off, their families will have their heads cut off, courtiers will be brought back to Nineveh, made to parade through the streets with heads round their necks. So these are spectacles of dread and terror. Assyria ends up basically being wiped from the face of the earth. Nineveh gets trampled down. And the reason for that is that terror and dread in the long run is insufficient to keep an empire. And the great empire that emerges, which expands far beyond Mesopotamia to rule Egypt and all the way to the Indus, is, as you said, the Persian Empire.

And the great thing that the Persians innovate is that they identify their empire with moral virtue. Their empire is a force for truth, is a force for light, is a force for goodness. And by defining their empire in that sense, it immediately means that those who oppose them are on the side of darkness and the lie. But, so, Tom, I mean, you obviously emphasised violence. And I guess a lot of, you know, 21st century scholars and people who sort of think about empire, think of empires in terms of violence and power and all this sort of oppression, I suppose. But there is obviously another way to think about this, which is that, let's say Persia, you give the example of Persia.

I know you've written about this in your book, Persian Fire. So the Persians have, you know, this amazing network of roads. They've got weights and measures. They've got a currency. They've got a currency they've got a sense of you know they view their own world as this kind of walled garden don't they and beyond is kind of barbarism and and savagery and within it all is order and presumably you could make an argument that if you're a sort of you you know, Joe Bloggs from media or from, you know, Mesopotamia or what's now Iran,

you might think, well, you know, life isn't actually so bad in the heart of this empire. We've got all this infrastructure. We've got all this stuff. Of course, there is always the ubiquitous threat that I might get my head cut off or whatever, but I'd rather that than live in an anarchic world of sort of savage clans fighting each other all the time

and invaders coming and going and a sort of Hobbesian struggle for existence. I mean, that's the justification for empire through history, isn't it? That it equates to order. Well, I suppose that the Near East has basically always been ruled by empires, pretty much from the time of Sargon of Akkad. And the earliest experience of empire by and large is terrible. And the famous, I mean, seismically influential articulation of this is what we call the Old Testament. Because the Israelites and then the people of Judah, the southern kingdom, are, you know, they're tiny're tiny they're small they're minnows

and so they're always being trampled down by the big powers by the Egyptians by the Babylonians by the Assyrians um and pharaohs and kings of Assyria in the old testament are are sinister figures um there is one exception that proves and this exception is cyrus who is hailed by isaiah as the messiah as the anointed one god's agent because that's cyrus the great cyrus the great what cyrus does is to say to the deported peoples who've been carried to mesopotamia you can go back home and among those are the people who will become the Jews who go back, you know, they've been weeping by the rivers of Babylon, they go back to Jerusalem, and they refound it. And so the Persians in the biblical tradition are remembered as good guys. And

absolutely, they, you know, for the people who become the Jews, the Persians are remembered very, very fondly, because basically, they, you because basically they provide peace, they provide order, they allow the people of Jerusalem to rebuild the temple. But isn't that how a lot of people living in the Persian Empire would have thought of Persia? So, for example, the classic thing, we talked in previous podcasts about Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great invades Persia

and he says he's coming as a liberator and a hero. And his story in the West is always told of this intrepid adventurer who goes into this sort of evil empire and cuts the suede through it. But presumably if you're, you know, Joe Bloggs living in Persia and this Macedonian turns up with his army and says, I'm going to tear down your empire, I'm coming as a liberator. I mean, it's a nightmare, isn't it? These people kind of who don't speak your language, kind of charging through your country, smashing everything up. Presumably a lot of people quite like living in the Persian Empire. Yes. And the roots of Greek rule are much more shallow. of the reason why um the eastern mediterranean ends up greek speaking through vast swathes across

vast swathes beyond greece is that um what the greeks bring to the imperial tradition is the kind of the glamour and sophistication of their culture so that's another way in which um imperial powers can kind of really cement their rule is if the culture that they bring is sufficiently kind of appealing that I guess initially elites and then perhaps it kind of percolates down through the various classes that they come to identify with it and that's essentially how and why Greek ends up being spoken across the Eastern Mediterranean. And it's the same kind of process that ultimately happens with Rome, that although Rome is an unspeakably brutally militaristic power, I mean, it's militaristic in a way that kind of rivals the Assyrians, really. ultimately the reason that the Roman Empire coheres for as long as it does is because it is able to sell the idea of Romanitas of being Roman to the degree that

beginning of the third century all male adults across the empire are given citizenship and even when the Roman Empire in the West falls, people in the eastern half, what we call Byzantium, are still identifying themselves as Romans. And when the Ottomans turn up in 1453, the people who are defending Constantinople think of themselves as Romans, even though originally the people in the East had been conquered very, very brutally by Roman armies. And really, the surest way that an empire can survive and put down roots is to get the conquered people to feel that their the conquest has been for their own good no but doesn't that then raise the question of the alternatives to empire

so if you're not living in an empire for most of human history, what are you living in? Well, in a sense, for most of Eurasian history, you have the great land empires. For most of Eurasian history, if you don't live in an empire, you're a barbarian. You're on the fringes. So you're on, you know, you're on beyond China, beyond Rome, beyond Persia, beyond the great empires of northern India.

So you're a nomad? You're a nomad, yes. And there's a sense in which empires come to define themselves against these nomads, against these barbarians. And that beds down the assumption that to live in a great empire is the kind of normal condition for humans. Now, in a sense, Europe is unusual in that after the Roman Empire implodes, it doesn't reconstitute itself. We did we did, you know, the episode on China where we were talking about, you know, is China one continuous empire?

Is it a sequence? I mean, it's a sequence of empires? And really it's both. But that idea of a Chinese empire as being the natural state of things is something that, you know, kind of splinters and that I think is a kind of crucial influence on the way that that we today in the West view empire because although we might be tempted to you know I think I think that there is a kind of sense very widespread that assumes that empire is basically synonymous with European colonialism but actually that's not the case at all what's distinctive about europe is precisely that empire has been a kind of very fleeting experience and that within the continent of western europe you know within western europe itself every attempt to reconstitute the roman empire has basically failed well i agree with that tom and i wonder whether, you see, what always strikes me when we talk about empires is this sense that the nation state is the norm. That's the assumption

now. That's what all 21st century sort of, all the discussion on social media or when people talk about it, they sort of say, why can't you leave people to govern their own affairs? Why can't they? But obviously, for most of human history, that was was not an option the nation state was not on the table as a as an alternative and most people would not have recognized it that way right so you talk about the roman empire when the roman empire fell um people didn't think to themselves oh brilliant we can have spain now we can live in you know know, we can live in Belgium. What they actually thought was that the fabric of order, the infrastructure on which we depended for trade, for exchange, for kind of promotion, for status, you know, for law and order is gone. And what is left is anarchy.

Well, no, I think that there were plenty of people who welcomed the collapse of Roman power, because I think by the end it had become incredibly... But they fancied power themselves, surely? That's true for the invaders, for the Franks and the Visigoths who take over the commanding heights of the imperial system. But I think for people lower down the social classes, I think that the collapse of Roman rule was often a liberation, because it meant that you weren't being oppressed by tax collectors. And by the end of the Roman Empire

in the West, it's become a hugely oppressive structure, because it depended on leeching vast amounts of money for taxes to pay for the military to keep it going. So the whole thing had become a kind of violently oppressive protection racket. Yeah, but surely there's a counter argument, which is that there's lots of people who are, I mean, there are sources that lament the death of the Roman Empire and that sort of say, oh, now we have to put up with, you know,

tens of thousands of, you know, vandals or Visigoths or whatever roaming across the countryside, you know, who are presumed, I mean, I'm sure they're not kind of, you know, borrowing jugs of milk and paying for them afterwards. Absolutely.

You know know the empire is kind of held together by sinews and when those sinews get cut everything falls to pieces and and trade basically does start to to collapse although it's far more protracted than the kind of stereotype of the roman empire goes out and everything turns to darkness would would convey um but i think that yes i mean you're pointing, you know, what would people rather have? Would they rather have liberty or would they rather have anarchy?

And that's the way that in the Western tradition, it's often been framed. Because I think that we are, you know, in the West, we're the heirs to two great traditions. We're the heir to, you know, we have the heirs to two great traditions um we're the air to you know we have the bible and in the bible empires are generally regarded as the baddies so we've talked about how the egypt you know pharaoh is a is the oppressor of the children of israel um the assyrians and the babylonians um you know they they destroy the kingdom of israel they destroy the kingdom of

judah these are idle that's because they don't have an empire it's because they don't have an empire of their own yeah they're small yeah yeah but but it means that that those scriptures are powerful influence on our assumption that there is something morally corrupt with empire and then in the new testament you know jesus is tortured to death by the apparatus of a great imperial power and in the book of revelation i mean it's one i think it's the most influential work of anti-imperial propaganda ever written. The Whore of Babylon is an emblem of power to this day. You know, you have, you know, Rastafarians will talk about Babylon, London, New York, the the rest of the world is an incredibly powerful image of Roman imperialism and is one that we still kind of are the heirs of to this day. But we're also the heirs to Rome itself though Tom aren't we because I mean we talked in the previous episode about America and Rome I mean we surround the British Empire the great European empires they

modelled themselves on Rome to some extent. So we sort of have a dual inheritance. Would you agree with that? But even that classical inheritance is ambivalent because, of course, you're right that the example of Rome is absolutely enormous. I mean, when we think of empire, that's what we think of. And European powers traditionally, when they've aspired to empire, have modelled themselves on Rome. Absolutely. But there is an ambivalence in that classical tradition. Because if we're the heirs of Greece, the great heroic conflict for the Greeks was their battle against the Persian Empire.

When the Persians sought to expand westwards into Greece. And the battles of Marathon, the battles of Salamis. This was cast by the greeks as battles for freedom and at the end of the book about this yeah someone should and and 479 the great land battle of pletia when the armed invasion of greece is ended um the spartan uh commander goes to the great tent of the king that's been left for the Persian general. He's been killed, left dead on the battlefield of Plataea. And he goes in and he marvels at the wealth of gold and robes and everything.

And he looks at this huge feast and he orders the Persian chefs to rustle up an enormous feast. And then he brings out the kind of traditional Spartan meal of disgusting broth. And he invites all the other Greek commanders in and says, look at this. Isn't this ridiculous? These Persians have come all this way to rob us of our poverty. And that's how the Greeks like to see themselves. As noble, as poor, as standing firm against imperialism. And that also is a part of our inheritance.

But let me jump in there, Tom. The Greeks had colonies. The Greeks established colonies in Sicily and, I don't know, southern Italy. They were colonisers themselves. So the idea of them as the sort of, you know, the rebel alliance of Star Wars, as these sort of noble, plucky Spartan freedom fighters, that surely doesn't hold water. The Greeks would have been perfectly happy to be imperialists they just weren't very good at it well and the Athenians and the Spartans in the

wake of the uh the the defeat of the Persians both have a go at empire I mean the Athenians basically take over the Persian Aegean empire and right so yeah there's a massive kind of streak of hypocrisy there um completely and there's a street and there's the same strain in rome as well because for the romans um they likewise lay a great emphasis on on libertas on on freedom uh on the the way in which um turnip turnip eating peasantry is kind of the essence of roman virtue and that to rule an empire is to be corrupting. So by the time that the Romans are kind of invading Scotland, you have senators like Tacitus, who are seeing the whole kind of apparatus of empire as inherently corrupting. And so he's putting words into the barbarians who are opposing the Romans.

And he gives to a Scottish chief in the famous line that they, you know, they create a desert and call it peace. that also in an accent I'm not gonna I'm not gonna risk turning off but but and but so that that's that also that Roman suspicion of empire is also a part of the cocktail that that we in the West inherit so we absolutely inherit that little Englanderism isn't that little Englanderism? Yeah, to a degree. But I mean, you know, it's the idea that empire is morally corrupting is something that we get from the Romans.

The idea that liberty is something worth fighting against enormous empires is something we get from the Greeks. And the idea that empires are morally corrupt is something that we get from the Bible. And that, you know, that is basically why the impulse to decolonize is incredibly western and so okay on that note on that note i'm going to stop you

talking enough of tom holland's moral corruption we are going to take a short break and brew that perfect embodiment of empire a cup of tea and we should be back with mr corrupt after the break goodbye i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment She'll be back with Mr Corrupt after the break. Goodbye. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip.

And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. Last Thursday, we brought you the fabulously outrageous subject

of sex in the 18th and 19th century cities. And this Thursday, we're looking inside the cauldron and we're examining the role of witches and witchcraft in British society and indeed European society. And now we're going to get into some of these questions about empire. But before we do, Tom, you haven't really answered the big question, which is, is empire always bad? No, because empires tend to create the standards by which they're judged so i've heard

you say that before i always think that's very evasive well so the classic example of that is the arab empire um right the empire surely not well so so the arab made that claim on so the arab empire um the emmaids the abbasids and then the the various inheritor empires that um carve up the original arab empire um they justify it in terms of islam and the people that they've conquered become muslim and therefore see their conquest as an expression of god's will i mean i does that not seem a reasonable argument you know i had this argument with somebody somebody recently and they said um you know they empires were always bad they're always oppressive and all the rest of it and i

said and of course when people have this conversation they're almost always thinking about european colonial empires of the 18th 19th and early 20th centuries aren't they and i said oh the ottoman empire a really bad thing and there was this sort of embarrassed pause European colonial empires of the 18th 19th and early 20th centuries aren't they and I said oh the Ottoman Empire a really bad thing and there was this sort of embarrassed pause didn't know what to say and then I said exactly what you said the Arab Empire are you going to argue that the Arab Empire was evil and of course nobody will make that argument not because they I think because they're afraid but because it's a self-evidently foolish thing to say, to look at something that lasted centuries, that most of its people took completely for granted,

and to just sort of write it off in this simplistic way, I think is just bizarre. And very similarly, the Romans, the Romeoi of Constantinople, when they're fighting to keep their city and their empire against the Ottomans, you know, they're doing it as Romans. Are they, they see that likewise? Yeah, but they, you know, they, these are people who were conquered very brutally by the Romans back in the second, first century BC. And by the 15th century, they are identifying the fact that they are Roman with God's purpose. So in that, you know, who are we to say

the Byzantine Empire was evil? I mean, also, isn't it just the case that basically, I mean, John Darwin, a historian at Oxford, makes this point in his book, After Tamerlane, which is a great history of empires. And he basically says empire is the natural unit. For most of history, empire has been a natural unit of human organisation. The more powerful you are, the richer you are, the more likely you are to have an empire.

The Venetians had an empire. You know, Portugal had an empire. Belgium had an empire. Basically, whenever you're at the top of the tree, you have an empire because it's an expression of influence and authority and all of those kinds of things. And a world without empires would be a world without human beings.

I mean, that would be my view because I don't think you can fragment the world into sort of happy, harmonious, democratic nation states. It just doesn't work that way. Well, I'm not sure I agree with that because the John Darwin book, After Tamerlane, is basically focused on Eurasia. And so it's focused on areas

where huge empires absolutely are the norm. So Persian Empire, Ottoman Empire, Chinese Empire, the various empires of the Silk Road that kind of rise and fall. But I do think Western Europe is different because I do think that it's, you know, we already talked about this in the wake of the collapse of the empire, the Roman Empire in the West. A unitary power never really succeeds in establishing itself for a lengthy period of time in in western europe and so for europeans the assumption is kind of hardwired that um as you say that there should be a kind of patchwork of of competing states um and yet and yet they're trying to get i mean the europeans have the the message you get from europe now is

that's the road to disaster and world war and you know giever hofstadt the um the sort of uh who sees himself clearly as the kind of count cavour of european unification the belgian mep for me the gift that keeps on giving he says you know europe should be an empire we live in a world of empires and the european union should be an empire and we should put aside all these petty national differences. And that is the kind of assumption of the Treaty of Rome and European unification, right? Ever closer union. So let's build an empire.

I think the processes within Europe that encourage states to fissure, attempts to construct European unity to fall apart, are as constant as the impulse to kind of bring them together. And there's never really been a kind of synergy. I mean, so this is the huge question for us now as Europeans is, will the European hold together? You know, is it a kind of new order? Has that age of fragmentation gone? But the paradox is that even as Europeans are trying to do this across the globe as reflected in the United Nations is a European assumption about how people should organize themselves that is absolutely rooted in the European idea of nation states and which was spread around the world by European colonialism

so the reason that the Middle East now is divided up into a patchwork of nations and does you know is not an empire basically for the first time since uh since since the achaemenid era the first persian empire is because of european colonialism and the power you know the huge paradox of kind of anti-imperialism in the west is that it's incredibly and irreducibly western it's yeah it's it's this fusion of biblical classical traditions melded together and to decolonize something is basically to make it more western it seems to me that i think that's i think that's a very good point but also i think it may not be that the future belongs to nation states because of course china is effectively an empire.

The United States, I would argue, is an empire. Russia is an empire. So the idea that we're living in a post-imperial age, I think, is a fantasy. Anyway, we have completely failed to get into the questions. Yes, so choose a question, Dominic. Well, why don't I just go for the first one, which is from Graffitology.

So he's talking about the British Empire, which we haven't really talked about at all. And it's not a podcast about the first one, which is from Grafitology. So he's talking about the British Empire, which we haven't really talked about at all, and it's not a podcast about the British Empire, but I suppose we can do a question or two on it. Grafitology says, on the subject of the British Empire, I'd love to hear your thoughts about how the perception of it has changed

from a good thing to a bad thing in British culture, whereas many in previous British Empire countries have fond recollections of those times. Do they? Well, I think, I don't know. mean i i my take on this is that people in previous um colonists of the empire uh don't really think about the british empire very much at all because they're too busy getting on with their lives and the people we hear from um are people who are unusually politicized or who are unusually interested in what is now the increasingly distant past.

I don't think the British are... If you look at recent polls, we're neither unusually proud nor unusually self-flagellating. It's the Dutch, isn't it? The Dutch are kind of insanely proud of their empire. Yeah. I mean, I always think, you know,

these polls are a bit ridiculous because i just don't think most people give a damn one way or the other they don't think about it very much there were brilliant surveys done in the mid 20th century so around about the high point of our empire and they would ask people to name colonies or name possessions of the british empire the most common one that you knew people usually in was scotland and i think something like lincolnshire was in the top 10 so that tells you how much people i think ever really cared about the british empire or knew about it so there was a kind of vague incoherent sense that it was a good thing wasn't it kind of lurking yeah i think you see my my

take on this right which we should get into in another podcast is that people didn't give a damn about the empire they like being top top nation. They liked status. But whether that status involved a particular colony or control of a given sea lane, I mean, they didn't know what was going on and they couldn't really care less. They just liked the impression of power and prestige. I think that's what has always mattered to European colonialists. And, of course, money.

Far more than the sort of... I don't think people ever obsessed about the nitty-gritty of their empires. But I think also running with that, right the way through the period of British imperial expansion and rule, is the sense that British people have that it's wrong. So... Well, there was always argument about it. Always argument, always kind of anxiety about it.

And I think that, you know, that that is also part of what the British export. So I was reading C.L.R. James's book on cricket beyond the boundary. And he's writing as a Marxist who's very, very anti-imperial. And yet what's manifest is it's an incredibly British book. It's absolutely saturated in English literature and, you know, obsessed with cricket, with everything about it. And reading it now, it's kind of positive about Britain in a way that very few British people today are. And I think it it kind of points to the way in which anti-imperialism what paradoxically was something that was exported by the British as well as as

as well as imperialism and even even as someone like Frantz Fanon um you know who's in in a way the kind of the great um the great spokesman for anti-colonialism born in and raised in uh the the french caribbean empire he is saturated in um philosophical assumptions that derive from yeah yeah yeah ho chi minh worked as a chef i believe under lescoffier subject that's a subject for another podcast so let's move on to another question which is on this sort of ground, which is from Tom Shaw. Tom Shaw says,

our attempts to come to terms with our imperial legacy, much of it traumatic, undermined by our rose-tinted view of ancient empires. The baffling idea, to Tom Shaw anyway, that India was lucky to be colonised by us, surely stems from a place of misplaced gratitude for Roman rule. And then he says, great pod.

Well, I, you know, to stick to Britain, I think that our attitudes to the Roman Empire, again, are incredibly paradoxical. Because for British people in the 19th and 20th century, who are they identifying with? Are they identifying with the Britons or are they identifying with the Romans? So outside the Houses of Parliament next to Westminster Bridge, you have a statue of Boudicca, whose name means victory, so Victoria. So she's an emblem of the British Queen, summoning up the idea that the Britons are destined to rule and to fight but of course buddhica is is a a rebel against imperial power and uh there's a sense as well that the british identify with the romans and that kind of tortured conflicted sense is i think still very much with us we're kind of conflated buddhica and britannia haven't we so the image of britannia that you used to used to be on the 50p the sort of the the Roman or Greek helmet and the shield and all that sort of stuff.

In the public mind, I think they're kind of the same. They sort of merge into this sort of Elizabeth I type, you know, this sort of feminine personification of Britain, which is both fighting foreign imperialists and an imperialist in and of itself. Well, but just to follow up on that, I think it's a commentary on the reality of roman imperialism that the first representation of britannia

shows her as a woman being raped by the emperor claudius oh so that doesn't doesn't tend to feature in the coins no i wouldn't go on you choose a question uh well there's one about christianity which i i suspect you don't want me to ask. We'll skip over that one. Here's one from George Ellingham. Do empires that intend to last aspire to become a single nation federal state, i.e. China and the Soviet Union, or is this a more modern nation? Oh, that's a good question.

That is an excellent question. Do they aspire to that? I think probably not at first though you do get so for example with russia you had you've had moments of kind of russification if that's a word and the the sort of tendency was to try and russify provinces let's say the baltic states or Ukraine, and to see them as kind of Russia's little brothers and to eradicate kind of national differences. Though it's interesting with Russia how, you know, Russia is still quite a sort of fragmented country. Politically, you know, if you look at the map, the way it's structured, it sort of follows um old patterns and you have tatarstan and so on kalmaikia and the caucasus i mean the caucasus is a very good example of how you can't just impose

a kind of imperial stamp and and turn everybody into little russians but caucasus is mountainous so that's a kind of another that's right you know that that empires tend to reach geographical borders where yes yeah i think that's absolutely right. And let's say China. I mean, China has limits. You know, China can't go on expanding forever. I think the Chinese recognise they had limits. And with the peoples who were on the sort of margins of their empire, the Uyghurs are the obvious newsworthy example,

they aren't, you know, they don't see themselves as Han Chinese. And hence the stories that you get in the media about camps and about indoctrination and all the rest of it. So, yeah, I think, George, empires may have that aspiration, but to realise it is a very different matter. OK, so following that up with a question from Neil Connolly, when do we stop calling it empire and empire?

So that's an interesting... Much of Russia is a result of imperial conquest, yet we happily consider its territory to be part of the state, likewise the Western USA and Northern Ireland. So actually not just the Western USA, the whole of the USA. I mean, the whole of the USA, the whole of America is an imperial project, isn't it? It is, right.

And I think it's very strange. You know, scholars have written books about American empire and American imperialism. And Americans themselves resist it because, of course, their nation, their sort of founding myth is the sort of Star Wars myth of, you know, plucky rebels fighting off the evil galactic empire, which is us. And so they sort of deny their own imperial nature.

But of course, the United States is an empire. It has all the trappings of empire. It has subject peoples, which is to say the Native Americans in their reservations. It has colonies. It has Puerto Rico and it had the Philippines. Has imperial conquest. And it has bases. Stuff taken from Mexico. Stuff taken. Exactly. It's got bases all over the Philippines. Has imperial conquest, stuff taken from Mexico?

Stuff taken, exactly. It's got bases all over the world. It exerts influence in a way that, you know, if you were a Roman strategist in the sort of third century, thinking about your rivalry with the Persians or with the sort of the peoples to your north and in Africa and so on, and the way in which you play those off against each other

and your client states and your buffer zones. And that's how American policymakers think. You know, that's what they study at West Point. That's what the people who are in the Council of Foreign Relations and all these things in Washington, D.C., they look back to Rome because they know that deep down that they are an empire as those previous states were too. OK, Dominoald i've got

the perfect follow-up for you that one uh is from kern o'neill um might it be said that the empires of today exist digitally rather than nationally google amazon microsoft um and of course facebook because as we're recording this facebook is in a kind of you know gunboat diplomacy style standoff with the Australian government. What's your take on that? That's a really interesting question because we have had commercial. I mean, the East India Company is a classic example. Yeah, and the Dutch. Of a private, of a company.

Yeah, the Dutch East India Company. So of companies that became empires. But then they were sort of, it's interesting how they were then subsumed within the idea of a kind of traditional i was about to say a national empire if that's not a contradiction in terms but you know what i mean yeah um the the the east india company was basically taken over by the british state or at least its possessions were um will that happen i mean at googler digitally i mean that's very hard to say, isn't it? Empires of the mind, I suppose. I remember I went to Silicon Valley and went on a tour around the kind of various campuses of the

big sites. And I think it was Google. They had a huge, great kind of sign with Google on it. And then we went around and looked around the back and it was um there on the back was some some fallen company and it had obviously yes it had obviously been recycled and you know you imagine google could afford a fresh um could afford a fresh sign but it's so it must have been deliberate a kind of trampling on the grave of the uh of the fall of empire which is kind of magnificent or something yes um okay here's one from lucas roth were people living in i was hoping you were gonna ask lucas roth were people live yeah were people in empire living in empires better off in inverted commas than people living outside the empire that is you know that takes us back to quite a lot of what

we've been talking about well it depends on your empire right i mean if you're living in the belgian congo i would say it's preferable to be living outside the borders of that particular territory because you don't want to have your hands cut off because you haven't collected enough rubber or whatever um were you better off to be in the roman empire than outside it or the persian empire than outside it let's say i mean my answer to that would probably be yes um because I think empire offered you you know if you were I mean obviously if you're unfortunate you know things are pretty rough under empires but if you're fortunate if you're blessed by talent for example um you have opportunities for advancement for travel um for economic prosperity and so on that you probably wouldn't get if you were born in the sort of germanic forests now

maybe that's just right prejudice talking yeah yeah you think well i think again we go that the great empires the kind of transcontinental empires china rome so on reach the natural limits where basically it it stops being worthwhile the the expense and effort of conquering so when the romans reach the rhine basically you know germany's not worth the effort it's not worth the effort of conquering um and then you start to get the situation where actually it's people beyond the empire who want a bit of the wealth. And the role that the various peoples who cross into the empire over the course of the fifth century is much debated. But clearly, I mean, they have a role to play. And they're coming in because they want a bit of it in exactly the same way that the Mongols famously invade and conquer China.

That people outside want what empires have because it's richer. And that sets up a kind of law of empire that you get in Herodotus, that you get in Tacitus, that you get in Ibn Khaldun. Namely, that empire softens people. And it's people outside empires who are tough, who are hardy, who have the virtues that the original imperial peoples had, but have now lost because they've become, you know... That's the sort of Spartan self-image, right?

Yes. Spartans versus the Persians or something. Yes, so the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs of the Imperial Age all have a kind of sense of themselves as a martial people who are better qualified for rule than the soft peoples that they conquer. But in due course, the empires that they establish, you know, they become kind of silken and soft in turn and then become prey to the barbarians beyond the border and this is seen by all these writers writing very different periods

as a kind of you know the rule of empire and i would i would not be surprised i don't know enough about china to know whether the same thing is identified in china i would guess it it probably is um but it's exactly what americans say now, that they've become distracted, self-indulgent. You know, they're sunk in a kind of malaise of introspection and quarrelling and that they've lost the, you know, the Spartan Republican virtues of the founding fathers and all this sort of stuff or of the greatest generation. So that that trope is still there in the way that Americans talk about their empire. OK, I think we've barely scratched the surface. We could talk about this for hours and hours, but it's a policy, must be a policy of this podcast not to outstay our welcome. So just one last question for you, Dominic, from David Nicholson. Is there historical veracity to the claim that all empires day in the sun lasts around 200 years and i ask

that not just because the question in itself is interesting but because of the the idea that there might be kind of almost the equivalent of biological laws that govern empires um can we you know can we say that empires do have a natural limit what do you think um i would say no and i don't think that 200 years works at all and i don't think there is a limit so china we had a whole podcast on china and china is the standing rebuke to that now i know there is this discussion about how is china has it always been one thing or has it been a succession of things on the same space but i think that it had the fact that it has inhabited the same space suggests continuity and suggests that you can keep it up.

I mean, if you take some of the empires that people often forget about, we mentioned the Ottoman Empire or its predecessor, the Eastern Roman Empire, which we now call the Byzantine Empire. We tell the story of Rome and we say, well, then Rome fell in 476. And then basically there was a successor state in the east but no one cares about that and it kind of went away and but that lasted a thousand years and it was a remarkably resilient and successful state attacked by lots of different predators and would-be conquerors and it lasted a very long time the Ottoman Empire lasted longer than you know the

British Empire the French Empire or whatever so I think empires can last for centuries. And I don't think there is actually a... The example of China, or indeed Russia, suggests that there isn't necessarily always this kind of sense of entropy. You don't have to fall apart. There is no biological... There's a point at which you can't expand. I think that's certainly true. Although maybe that law about expansion only applied in a pre-digital age because of transport and communications and so on

maybe you know the chance of a really big empire um is there in the 21st or 22nd century what do you think i don't i don't know what the future holds um i i know i know and i i say that because i you're right that i don't know whether um the opportunities presented by technology will facilitate the emergence of of new ways of structuring societies and different hierarchies and things like that. I mean, we haven't really talked about the role that technology plays in the emergence of empires. And that may be, you know, something for a future podcast. I mean, he's a good...

I don't know. I mean, and looking at China and the incredible skill with which it's utilising technology to, you know, entrench its rule over the kind of peripheral regions. I don't see the Uyghurs breaking free of Chinese imperial rule any time soon. So I wouldn't be able to answer that, really. Here's a forward-looking thought, though though we talked about europe earlier and about the failure of of a single state to dominate the european sort of peninsula um after the fall of the western roman empire surely the chance now you know in the next 100 years or so i mean the dream of of of european enthusiasts is that there will be a single state. The European Union will become this empire in all but name,

crossing national boundaries in a way that simply would not have been conceivable or possible in the 17th or 18th or 19th centuries. So to me, the idea that the age of empires is behind us or that empires indeed have this sort of inbuilt limit or there are places that are naturally resistant to empires i don't really buy any of that well it's a cheery notion which to uh on which depends if you like empires on which to end and um i think also you know what we've

realized from from this discussion is that there's fruit for large numbers of podcasts we've done about we've done about four percent of the questions which is yes we have so many many apologies there um but i think this is a subject definitely to come back to perhaps with a slightly narrower focus all right so i have a very nicely written um conclusion here by the producer which i want to read because it conjures up to me a very nice image. The Empire has fallen, Tom Holland has been chased out by angry locals and the podcast has been returned to its rightful ruler, me. We're back on Thursday with historian and TV presenter Susie Lipscomb as we are delving into the dark world of witches and witchcraft. Until then, thanks for

listening. See you next time. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.