Serguei GLEBOV. Historically, the term “empire” survived only as a designator for what scholars and observers perceived to be pre-modern, archaic, repressive and doomed for dissolution polities. In the project for new imperial history of Russia and Eurasia we assumed that this development was greatly influenced by the fact that the very emergence of modern humanities and social sciences in Europe occurred against the background of the rise of the nation-state as the key (and normative) concept to describe human polities. Do you think that “empire” still has a potential as a category of scholarly analysis (of course, distinct from the category of political practice)? On the other hand, how can we use an archaic concept as a category of scholarly analysis without first exploring its genealogy?

Anthony PAGDEN. Certainly. First, in the answer to the last part of this question: I am fairly well persuaded that one needs some kind of genealogy to understand what it is we are actually talking about and how it can best be used. The other thing I would like to say is that this then throws into relief something else, which is the extent to which the term like “empire” actually is something that is, as it were, shouldered aside by the rise of the social sciences and of the concept of the nation state. First of all, it seems to me, no definition is going to be very helpful here… And I have written one down, which I have used before, which is “an extensive state in which one ethnic or tribal group by one means or another rules over several others;” this is roughly what in the first century AD Roman historian Tacitus meant when he spoke of the Roman world as an immense body of empire; that would do as a rough definition but it’s so rough as to be almost useless. And it raises immediately the question which is at the center of this discussion, which is the question of sovereignty, because when Tacitus talks about “immensum imperii corpus,” the word “empire” there is being used in the terms not of extensive territoriality but in terms of a concept of sovereignty: sovereign “imperium” is, effectively, sovereignty. The first thing I want to say then is that we really need to look at the ways in which those people who have been in some sense involved in the imperial project (and this can come in many different types and forms) use the word. How do they use the word, what significance do they give to the term? Because it seems to me that what any genealogy is going to reveal is that first of all “empire” is effectively a rather late phenomenon, that’s to say that talk about a polity being an “empire” is something that doesn’t really come into being in Europe at least (in Western Europe – I can’t speak for Asia, and I can’t speak for Russia) until the later part of the 18th century. I mean there are people in the 18th century who are still speaking of empire as, in the terms of one 18th century British theorist, a “peculiar term,” alien to the English language. When Adam Smith uses it about the British empire he says the British empire is nothing more than a half-baked project, “shadow of an empire,” which has never been fulfilled. So the notion that there exists an empire – any sort of empire – in the early modern period is already problematical. As you probably know the Romans themselves don’t use the term for the state they’re talking about: it’s a “republic” and then later it becomes the “principate.” That is to say what is crucial here is the regime type that’s being used, it is the forms of sovereignty that’s being exercised and not, as it were, the extent or kinds of peoples over whom it is being exercised. The other point is of course that empire becomes a description of inclusion and that seems to me to evolve much more obviously after Rome and Christendom become harnessed together. In the sense then the Roman empire, as we understand it, is an invention of St. Augustine, I mean, that’s putting it too boldly, but in some sense, it is an invention of the Christian world. The idea that there is one unifying place on earth, which somehow will absorb the entire world, is already there in Cicero but it’s extremely vague. It becomes much more emphatic and makes much more sense when it’s linked to the idea of Christian eschatology. And then of course there is the reality, if you like, the political reality of the re-invention of the Roman empire by Charlemagne when it becomes eventually linked to the idea of the empire being not only Roman, but literally holy. And it’s worth reminding that during most of the early modern period we are talking about, that is to say before the creation of the nation state, the Holy Roman Empire is the only empire. So, the Spanish never use the term, the Portuguese never use the term to describe themselves. Interestingly, the only other large polity, which is ever described in Western Europe as an empire other than the Holy Roman Empire, is the Ottoman.
So, I think that what emerges in the 18th century when, as it were, the nation state begins to come into focus, so to say, is a series of condemnations of empire as archaic, in the sense that you are describing. Just three points taken randomly: Adam Smith in 1776 in the Wealth of Nations talks of empire as being something that is essentially part of the previous military culture, which is no longer viable and is due to be replaced by the new commercial society. In 1813, after the apparent collapse of the Napoleonic empire Benjamin Constant says the same thing, and then in 1918 we get Joseph Schumpeter saying again much the same thing. At each phase you have the idea, that empire is a form of archaism that belongs to a previous phase in the development of humanity, and will never return. Yet each time of course it returns again in a different mode. Which brings me back to the point I made earlier, namely that the word “empire” is used most consistently, most emphatically in the 19th century, when of course the nation states of Western Europe are fully formed. The largest extent of imperial expansion, or expansion overseas, by the English, and the French, and the Germans, and the Russians, all took place during that period. The empires of Britain and France and Germany, certainly, are expressions of nationalism, they are nationalist empires. There is indeed a sense in which being a large and powerful nation state requires you to have empire. So I don’t think you can, as it were, separate these two out. I think there is a possibility that you could say that in the languages of the social sciences as they evolved in the 18th century there was a firm belief in the triumph of commercialism, what is called “commercial society,” what we would call, roughly speaking, capitalism, and a conviction that this was going to erase all these archaic forms of polity from the face of the earth. That certainly is true. But it’s only true up until the 1820s and 1830s, and what then comes back is a completely new phase of empire building, which is very much linked to the evolution of the nation state and, it should be said, to a new form of thinking about social sciences.

SG. If you had to write the history of “empire” as a concept in European history, how would you determine the semantic fields that delimit this concept (and contribute to its formation)? How was “empire” related to discourses of religion, colonialism, civilization? How can we make a distinction between “empire” and “imperialism”?

AP. I think there is a real problem about the semantic field. Obviously, if you start, as I did in one book I wrote, by looking at what the word originally meant, you’re likely to get trapped, – as I did – trapped with the linguistics of it too easily, I mean the word very soon escapes its original meaning, but it’s worth… but it’s nevertheless I think important to note that the original meaning is about who holds sovereignty. And so I think we have to look very carefully at the whole development of the concept of “sovereignty” in Europe and beyond Europe in the period, say, from the 17th century, when the question of sovereignty becomes the central political theoretical problem within Europe, with the creation of, indeed, the nation state after the civil wars and wars of religion, leading up to the Treaty of Westphalia. After 1648 two different concepts of sovereignty emerge. One is the notion, which is very much confined to Europe, which is the sort of Hobbesian, Bodinian notion of sovereignty as being, to quote Bodin, “indivisible as the point in geometry.” The idea that the state is entirely sovereign, there can exist no sovereign bodies outside the state, and crucially, that sovereignty is not something that can ever be shared with anyone else or with any other political body. Then, on the other hand, there existed the imperial structures, which do gradually accept the idea that an empire is in fact a system of divided and shared sovereignty. I want to come back to this point later, for it seems to me crucial that the idea develops in legal terms within the context most clearly of the British occupation of India, that you cannot rule an empire, as Romans themselves discovered, without sharing sovereignty, with at least some of its overseas or dependent elites. Therefore you are forced into this idea that there is no single national sovereign entity within an imperial structure. I think this is one way in which this history can be traced – in terms of the evolving notions of sovereignty both within the European sphere itself and then beyond Europe. The attempts to create empires within Europe, in which sovereignty would be restricted in this way – I am thinking here about the most obvious case, which is the Third Reich, – rapidly came to an end for various reasons. The idea that sovereignty can be shared with anybody at all becomes impossible within the European context. And the same is very largely true, although it is not entirely clear what the final definition would have been of it, for the Napoleonic Empire… . The idea that there should be one central authority within Europe itself has always come to grief. But in Europe’s relationship with the non-European world, the world beyond Europe, shared sovereignty was a necessity of survival. The other aspect that I think needs to be looked at in this context (probably it belongs to the first question you asked) consists of two questions actually. The first is the issue of mimesis: there is a certain tendency to imitate. The translatio imperii – the translation of empire – is in some sense the idea that there is one single source of authority and sovereignty in the world, which derives from God and which is handed down from one group of persons to another throughout time. That notion itself involves the idea of some sense of mimeticism, or copying, if you like. The image of Rome, in particular, as the great civilizing power par excellence within European history has given enormous emphasis to this, and so have these other elements that you talk about – religion, for instance, colonialism, civilization. If we take the question of religion, I think I have already touched upon it, as far as Christianity is concerned, empire and Christianity go hand in hand. The Roman empire was a creation of Christianity. But equally Christianity was a creation of, in the Roman world (I mean the Church as it emerged after Constantine; not the original heresy of Judaism). Christianity came to be embodied in the Church, as the creation of the Roman world, the creation of the Roman imperial world; it identifies with the Roman imperial world, and cannot really be detached from it. And then there is a notion that evolves in the 18th century, (and John Pocock has written about this recently) that empire is a term which as almost identical with civility, that “civilization” – itself a curious coinage of the second part of the 18th century. But this empire is intended to be something new what Edmund Burke will call “the empire of liberty,” an empire involving, as it were, full cooperation of all its parts, all its members, and one that existed for the good of all of its members. Again, an empire in which sovereignty is fully shared among all. So civilization and religion, I think, certainly go hand in hand with empire, although the stages at which they do, and the ways in which they do, change over time. Because the 18th century conception of empire as civilization is largely a secular one, whereas the earlier Christian view of empire as Christendom and therefore also in some sense a civilization of course is very much predicated upon the notion of all persons, all people in that empire eventually becoming Christians, predicated that is upon the conversion of the whole world… So, you have, I think, a transition, from empire as religion to empire as civilization, a secularization of it in the course of the 18th and then into the 19th century, when notions of things like democracy and so on become involved in the process of civilizing other peoples, bringing them European institutions…
As for colonialism, it always seems to me a somewhat problematic term, because… obviously, colonialism is something different. When we talk about empire and religion, empire and civilization, the implication is that the peoples who make up this empire are, again, all in some sense involved in a shared project. Once you start talking about colonialism, you are talking about something different, you are talking about the creation of large settler populations, which displace indigenous peoples, or occupy lands which are literally empty, as in the case of large areas of Australia, and you create new hybrid societies, and this can go hand in hand, in the rhetoric of the imperial process – and throughout the early modern period it did go hand in hand – with some notion of “civilizing of the indigenous peoples,” but it was always about civilizing them once they had in some sense been displaced. So I see colonialism as, as it were, running uncomfortably, counter to, and against the grain of, the rhetoric, at least, the descriptive analytical rhetoric, of what might be described as the European imperial process. So there are two different things in a sense that are going on, and I think they are largely in conflict with one another, which is what leads in a sense in the 19th century to this curious hybrid phenomenon, which is the British empire, where all these things are present at once and nobody can find a satisfactory description for any of them. This brings me to one other point here, concerning the sense in which we can talk about the word “empire” and about using it as an analytical category. We have to bear in mind that if you look at domestic land empires of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, “empire” becomes a way of describing and giving an identity, a political identity, which is rather significant, to conglomerates, which otherwise would lack them. Take, for instance, the Habsburg Empire. The Habsburgs adopt this term, “imperium,” and use it very extensively, and adopt imperial titles (Caesar, Augustus, and so on and so on), they do this partly because of the connections with the Holy Roman Empire, which in a sense licenses them to do this – the ideas of being defendants of faith and so on. It’s part of the dynastic myth, it is what gives legitimacy to the dynasty, but it also is one which attempts to give a descriptive and analytical content to a polity which otherwise would not possess one. And in the process, at least around the court, so to speak, to give a political coherence to the society which would otherwise lacked language in which to represent itself to itself.

SG. Traditionally, historians of empire distinguished between “overseas and colonial” empires and “land and dynastic” empires. How useful is this distinction? Does it prevent us from seeing common features of large polities with diverse populations? Does it obscure similarities, such as colonialism and Orientalism in land empires?

AP. I think it largely depends on what your point of analysis is. I would say that the distinction is not so much between land and overseas as between colonial and dynastic. These terms really need to be disaggregated because although most overseas empires are colonial and most dynastic ones are land empires, it’s not universally the case, nor need it be so. Many land empires are not dynastic and a number of land empires were colonial. The distinction here I think is the one I tried to suggest before, which is the distinction between an empire which is colonial, that is to say which has a large settler population, and an empire which is one in which there is either no settler population or a very small settler population, of an administrative kind, or where a settler population, as it were, merges into the indigenous population. This would be the rough description, for instance, of the Ottoman empire, and the Roman empire. The Ottomans practiced quite extensive forced migration, moving peoples from Eastern Anatolia into the Balkans as a way of stabilizing these outlying regions, but these populations quite soon merged in with the locals, intermarried with the local peoples, and created new hybrid societies. So there is that process on the one hand, and then there is a process I was mentioning earlier, which is usually confined, it should be said, to states where there is a huge disparity in technological achievement, for instance, between Europeans and Amerindians, Europeans and Africans, and so on, where the settler population is able at least in the long term if not in the short, to displace, or enslave, or suborn in some way the indigenous population. And there you create a very-very different kind of societies, societies where there is virtually no intermarriage between the two groups, where a new hybrid society does not grow up or (take the case of Latin America) it does not grow up until after the imperial powers have departed, and where you have a clear distinction between the rulers and the ruled, and, again, in which sovereignty is in no way divided between them. So, I think, the distinction, as you put it, it is actually a rough and ready one, it is useful, but it shouldn’t be allowed confuse us about the similarities that can exist between both dynastic empires of, say, the Habsburg variety, on the one hand, and overseas empires (the Habsburg empire was both, of course), and it shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the fact that land empires, although they face very different technical problems than the overseas empires, at least in the early modern period, can often pursue exactly the same policies as overseas empires. As I said, the behavior of the Spanish, for instance, in parts of Europe, as a land based empire, or the Ottomans in the Balkans, is not very different from the policies pursued and the attitudes taken by the British in places like India. That would be my take on the issue of that distinction.

SG. Many explain the current rise of interest in empires by the contemporary political changes, such as the unprecedented expansion of American power, or the emergence of the European Union with its promise of overcoming the sovereignty of the nation state. In the project for new imperial history, we suggested that empires with their diverse populations, horizontal connections between groups, and cross-cultural contacts, offer a unique model to study processes strikingly similar to globalization. Can you comment on this recent interest in empires and on the possibility to gain insight into globalization through the study of empires?

AP. I think you’re obviously right. The interest in the history of empires in the last decade, more strikingly so, perhaps, in the last three or four years, has a great deal to do with the current political themes. I mean, it tends to be the case with histories – they tend to follow current political events in that way. It’s certainly true that 20 years ago nobody in Europe was much interested in the imperial process at all and the study of empires was relegated to the sidelines, at least within the academy. And it’s certainly true, I think, that the expansion of the American power and more significantly perhaps and more emphatically recently, the ways in which certain sectors of American society have embraced the idea of empire – not imperialism, I should say, but embraced the idea of empire as a description of what America is or might want or wish to become, particularly since the current administration came to power, has enormous amount to do with the current resuscitation of interest in empire. Having said that, I want to add that I do not think that America is an empire in a traditional sense. It doesn’t fit many of the features I described above – it doesn’t share sovereignty with overseas populations – doesn’t have any overseas populations of its own. It seeks to influence and control world events, that’s perfectly true, but that doesn’t necessarily make it into an empire. I think there is certainly an influence there on the rise of interest in empires, but I am not sure that empire, as an analytical category, is going to get us very far when discussing modern international relations. I do think that empire (and empire is currently understood in various and different ways) remains a category for analyzing past political and social structures. However, the fact that it has come back as a part of the modern vocabulary of international relations (and is increasingly being so used at least at the popular level) does demand that we take it very seriously, it does demand the kind of genealogical thinking I was talking about, because if you are a political agent, you are, say, an American Secretary of State, and you think that what you are doing is creating an empire, than it’s important to know what it is you think an empire is. So I think the historians and the new history has a lot to say about the current state of the evolution of modern international relations between the major powers. As for globalization, I see globalization as primarily an economic phenomenon. Because I think of empires as essentially political structures – it is true that the word is often used loosely, and the word “imperialism” even more loosely, to describe economic relationships, in particular economic relations of dependency – I don’t see globalization in terms of dependency, certainly not in terms of political dependency, so I am not entirely sure that empire is very helpful in that sense. Any time you try to examine with any detail what globalization actually means in terms of its outcome, you find that what we are talking about is an extremely loose set of trading regulations and rarely if ever more than that. As far as the European Union is concerned, you’re right in saying that it’s enemies often talk about it in these terms, in part because, of course, the word “empire” has been used as a dirty word for so long, so let’s never overlook that calling something an empire is often only a form of insult, an attempt to reduce a state’s political legitimacy. So, leaving that aside I think that the European Union is not an empire in the sense I understand it because here we have a case in which sovereignty is shared equally between all member states, it’s a federal union of states, and I don’t think that there is any model for that which might be described as imperial in the early modern world, or, say, before the 20th century. The only analogy I can think of, actually, paradoxically, is what Napoleon claimed from St. Helena he was trying to create, – although, certainly, it was not how he conducted his campaigns. But what he claimed, in retrospect, was that he had hoped to create something closer to the League of the Greek city states. And this model, (leaving aside for a moment that it was one of this league which was eventually transformed into the Athenian empire) this model of the League of the Greek city states is also the one that Madison and Hamilton referred to in conceptualizing the new United States in the period immediately after independence. So the idea of a large scale federation of states seems to me to be essentially an anti-imperial move, and if you think that the European Union as a political entity came into being in the aftermath of the collapse of the Third Reich and as an attempt to make sure that no further attempts would be made to create anything resembling an imperial structure within Europe, I see it very much as being an anti-imperial move.

SG. Well, if I may come back to this notion of globalization and the study of globalization through the optics provided by empire. What I probably had in mind is that within large imperial polities, and I of course tend to think about imperial polities in Eurasia first of all, you had situations, quite unprecedented elsewhere, such as the existence of Islamic societies within a state with a modernizing European regime, and for a relatively long period of time, which of course creates a unique relationship between the European state (with its discourses of European style modernization) and Islamic communities. It’s such contacts and interactions, cultural, political, and economic, within the diverse imperial polities that we had in mind as a quasi-model for globalization.

AP. I see. Yes, I think, in that case yes. I think one of the things you could say is that if you look at the histories of, say, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the former imperial structures were in fact very much better at handling this kind of divergences within their borders than modern nation states. So it’s possible that one can think of empire as having this property, certainly the empires within Europe, is that actually they were a great deal more tolerant to divergence within their borders – they have to be, it’s a question of necessity rather than choice, but they have to be rather tolerant to divergences within their nominal frontiers than was the case with the nation states. And this has a lot to do with what I was saying earlier: I think because sovereignty is divided you have to rely upon the compliance and the support of local elites to a far greater extent than in the nation state, where those local elites have been suborned or absorbed into the state itself. The existence of the need to cooperate in this way means that minorities fare a great deal better, or traditionally and historically have fared a great deal better under such societies. Now, what this tells us about the future, I don’t quite know. I think that the only modern state (or a modern community) which faces this problem to the same extent is precisely the European Union, and it might be supposed that in the future, say, minority groups that wish in some way to negotiate a way of preserving their traditional anti-modern stances (to cite Islamic cases), while benefiting from the modernizing process, are in the stronger position to do that while appealing to a European federation than they are to a nation state. The models for this, or the analogy for this, – because this hasn’t yet happened but it might well given the large numbers of immigrants flooding into the Union every day, – the model for this probably would be something along the lines of minority nations within Europe, Basques, Catalans, and so on, who have found it very convenient for their uses to be able to appeal beyond limits of the nation state to the Union itself. In any federalized state you have two sources of authority and of course it may well be the case that the federal authority – Strasbourg, Brussels, etc., – has a more sympathetic ear than whatever the local state sovereign authority may be. So I think in that case, if we see empires as entities which revolve, which I have been trying to suggest is the most useful way of seeing them, around the notion of where sovereign power lies, then I think they probably can tell us, or the study of their past can tell us, a great deal about the ways in which it might be profitable to proceed in the future with regard to this increasing phenomenon, which, as you are right to point out, is not just something which happened in the Ottoman state or the Russian empire but is becoming more and more a fact of life in Europe itself, where you have these host populations, which are nestling within societies with whom they have very problematic relationships. And I think that those relations can probably be resolved much more easily at the level of the federal government or the empire, whichever phase of history we are talking about, than it can be at the level of the nation state.

SG. My last question is relatively long and fairly theoretical even against the background of this highly theoretical discussion. We can assume that by attempting to describe empire, at least genealogically a pre-modern phenomenon, in terms of a modern language of humanities and social sciences with its logic of the nation-state as an ultimate goal of the historical process, we tend to inscribe into empire something that is not characteristic of it. At the same time, these modern categories prevent us, we might assume, from seeing something important. How can we compensate for this situation of the gap between our scholarly apparatus and the historical phenomenon? One possibility presupposes a search for some hypothetical “language of self-description” of empires. Most likely, it is not a developed self-reflection of a polity but some “visions” in geographic imaginations, literary discourses, historical metaphors, etc. Another research alternative requires a reconstruction of this language of self-description from a range of sources, possibly through the reading of languages of subaltern groups and social loci, the synthesis of these languages with self-representations of dominant groups, and the subsequent proclamation of points of intersection of these descriptions as representative of the language of imperial self-description. How can you comment on this research situation and can you offer some suggestions as to the contours of the future research agenda in this sphere?

AP. Yes, I think I have touched upon this already a little bit. As I said earlier, we must never overlook the fact that empire is a mimetic process, and I think that there is a sense, certainly within Europe, that there is a model. How that model is conceived over time and how it is changed and modified over time seems to me crucial. It’s no accident that the basic model is always Rome, it’s no accident that that’s the model that is so often trotted out nowadays with regard to the American empire, the new American empire as the new Roman empire, which is taken quite literally by people in the State Department who have actually commissioned an inquiry about three years ago looking at various empires to decide how close America comes, and it’s Rome and Britain that seem to be the two models that always emerge. It’s no accident that the British Empire to a very great extent derived its inspiration from Roman imperial models, not least of all in the use of what you described as the self-representation. So I think it’s a very fruitful, potentially fruitful research agenda. It’s also, as I tried to suggest, in certain areas, ways in which the existing polity or series of polities that can be brought together and given a coherence, a political coherence, an image which serves distinct political purposes, to bring together persons who might otherwise be opposed to it, and you can see this very clearly in the 19th century, for instance, the empire becomes a term which is used almost in the way that great power is used today: if you don’t have an empire, you don’t belong to some sort of a club, which is why the Americans get dragged into the imperial process in 1898, it’s why the Japanese insist on being referred to as empire right until and indeed through the Second World War, although the word empire is an importation from Western Europe. So the idea that there exist some kind of an image or model of empire, varied and diverse though it is, that we can track through a whole diversity, as you rightly point out, of languages and literatures, looking at, I think, different ways in which this is being perceived, and how those ways relate to each other, and you are certainly right about it in that we have a lot of writing about the ways in which, particularly recently, the British empire was conceived by people in Britain, about the ways in which the empire was perceived by settler populations overseas, which were often very different, and the ways in which it was perceived by subaltern groups of one sort or another, the way the conqueror is perceived by the conquered, and the conquered perceived by the conqueror. Through looking at these differing literatures of representation, one would arrive at a clearer understanding of, in a sense, why this concept has been so important for so long? Because it would be very easy to, in a sense, take all of those states that tradition described as empires throughout most of European history, and give them some other name. In fact, it has been done, words like “composite monarchy” and so on, these phrases have been used by various states in Europe during this period, in an attempt as it were to dispense with the idea of empire, because empire was seeing as simply muddling and archaic. But nevertheless, the actors involved at a number of different levels seemed determined to represent themselves as being engaged in something which looked like an imperial process, so I am entirely agree with you and it seems to me the most profitable source of research agenda, and, as you say, exactly in the study of the self-representation of these different groups and the ways in which they act together. And there has certainly been a series of books recently that look at different groups… What seems to be lacking in the historical literature so far is one, which attempts to integrate them, and this I think has a lot to do with the ideological charge related to empire. We are talking about it as if it is a mere academic interest but of course this is a highly charged area, and what we have seen is the rise of post-colonial studies, the rise of subaltern studies, and so on, which always stigmatizes the European imperial process as the kind of rampant evil. And I agree with what you suggested in the piece on the new imperial history of Russia that the ways the followers of Edward Said have tended to look at empires – they are monochrome, there is no divergence between them, there is no difference between different imperial processes, they all act and react in exactly the same way. Difference and variety comes only the side of the victim and never of the victor. This is obviously absurd. So we have to think very clearly about the myriad different kinds of imperial discourses, if you will, within all sections of the empire, and I think it is important to stress what I said earlier that no European empire could possibly have existed for long, for longer than the Third Reich did, unless it had very largely persuaded very large sections of its subordinate population that it was in its own interest to be part of that empire. So the processes by which the subaltern groups, if you like, themselves are drawn into the imperial process as active agents is also important. There is a historiography growing up now in Asia (I have a close colleague here, a very brilliant Indian historian, Sanjay Subrahmanyam^[1], who regards post-colonial studies as completely mistaken) – the idea that you should treat these very rich Asian cultures as if they were mere toys in the hands of superiur but malign Europeans is not only to present an entirely false picture of the relationships between the Europeans and the Indians, or the Asians in the Indian Ocean, but it’s also to denigrate and belittle these indigenous cultures themselves. They are enormously rich and enormously powerful and didn’t simply sit down under superior European technology. This is the point that I think is emerging now and what I would like finally to stress is that we have to get away from the idea these historical analyses are merely a way of apportioning blame to Europeans, to get away from the idea that all empires are necessarily evil structures and to see them much more widely in terms of what relationships existed between the conqueror and the conquered, between the empire-builder and the colonist and the colonizer, between the imperial administrator and the groups he or she was administrating, and to look at the relationship between subaltern and non-subaltern groups, for instance, and to try and do this, as it were, without seeing it as in some sense an ideological project that is an attempt to re-write the historical process from a different perspective. Having said that, I can see the value of post-colonial studies and subaltern studies (which seems to me to be a more serious and a better constructed enterprise): they were enormously influential in that they forced a new conception of empire upon imperial historians. What existed 20 years ago was a form of writing about empire, which was entirely top down, which was entirely viewed, as it were, from the colonial administrators’ point of view. We now have two historiographies, that old historiography, and we have a new historiography, which wants to see everything from the subaltern’s point of view, everything from the conquered, the colonized’ point of view, and wishes to see the subaltern and the colonized as essentially the victim of an historical process, which now needs to be reversed. What I think we now need to do is put these two together, to learn from what post-colonial studies have taught us, to look much more sensitively, to look much more deeply at what was going on in the minds of and the perceptions of those who were being colonized, those who were being occupied. But we also need to see it as a relationship between these two groups, and not one of mere antipathy or hostility.

Northampton – Los-Angeles, April 29, 2005.