Empires and nation states are typically understood as two distinct types of political organisation. There are states, it is claimed, that are empires and there are others that are nation-states. The key differences between them are as follows.
Nation-states are organised around points of commonality across factors such as language, culture, and tradition; whereas empires are seen to maintain heterogenous cultures within their boundaries. Nation-states are said to embody a horizontal order of rule whereby all members are equal citizens (or in the process of becoming so); empires, on the other hand, are seen as hierarchical and organised in relation to vertical lines of solidarity. The elites within nation-states share the culture of the people, whereas empires are regarded as having a cosmopolitan elite drawn from the various local cultures across the empire.
Finally, empires are associated with pre-modern societies, and will eventually, it is argued, give way to modern nation-states that emerge as a consequence of the break-up of empires.
However, here there is a problem. The period during which what are regarded as the archetypal nation-states of the British, French, and Dutch were becoming consolidated is the very same period in which they were establishing overseas empires. So, rather than nation-states coming to replace empires, what we see is nation-states emerging as empires. Moreover, these empires were significantly different from other types of empires.
In this talk, I address the apparent paradox inherent in the claim that the rise of modern nation-states involved the displacement of empire at the same time as overseas empires were being established by modern European nations.
Is colonialism the key?
The missing piece of the puzzle that would resolve this apparent paradox is a proper address of colonialism.
The fact that colonial processes are not systematically theorised as central to histories of the modern world is something that I have discussed, at length, elsewhere. Here, I wish to highlight the difference made by colonialism to the political form of European empire in the modern period.
The standard argument presents all types of empires as being essentially the same sort of political entity, but I want to suggest something different. First, there are fundamental differences between types of empires. Second, those states we have understood to be nations (with empires) are more adequately conceptualised as colonial states.
Specifically, I distinguish two types of empire – ‘empires of incorporation’ and ‘empires of extraction’ and I propose that there are three dominant forms of colonialism which interact and intersect over time to create a distinct and modern empire based on extraction.
The three types of colonialism are: ‘colonialism by corporation’; state practices of extraction of resources at a distance; and ‘emigrationist colonialism’.
The 17th century saw the growth of commercial organisations – specifically, the joint stock company – whose activities, commercial and more extensive, were backed by the power of their domestic national states. Their primary objective was the discovery of new trades, or trading routes, and marked a significant shift towards overseas commerce. Alongside trade, however, these companies came to be involved in territorial acquisition and the subjugation of populations abroad. Colonialism by corporation relied on conquest to engage in commerce.
The latter half of the 19th century saw a turn away from mercantile capitalism, or commercial colonialism, to state-managed colonialism. Various European states took over control of the colonies established by state-backed companies with the Dutch East Indies and the British Empire in India being two of the most prominent examples. However, some of the earliest and most significant state-backed practices of resource extraction at a distance included the Spanish extraction of silver from Potosi and the Portuguese initiation of the trade in human beings from Africa.
The difference with the subsequent modes of colonisation by the English (and then the British), the Dutch, and the French was the particular amalgamation of the state with the commercial colonial entities they had supported in establishing new European overseas empires.
The third form of colonialism is that of ‘emigrationist colonialism’. Despite the popular idea that what was confronted was ‘terra nullius’, there is no land to which Europeans ventured and settled that was not already populated and engaged in forms of husbandry that, in liberal theory at least, was the basis of a right of possession. During the 19th century, over 60 million Europeans left their countries of origin to make new lives and livelihoods for themselves on lands inhabited by others.
These forms of colonialism have consolidated European global dominance politically and economically and have brought into being the modern world. They have shaped our institutions and our understandings of the world and have established the difference between empires of incorporation and empires of extraction.
Distinguishing between empires
‘Empires of incorporation’, I suggest, emerge through the expansion and socio-economic development of pre-existing political formations. They involve processes of occupation and annexation of contiguous lands. This is primarily as a consequence of initiatives by rulers within any given territory and involves the development of centralised administrative and political institutions to govern a defined, if expanding, area.
Incorporation may give rise to resistance, but it was also generally inclusive in the order of rules and obligations that organised the claims to territory. In contrast, ‘empires of extraction’, I argue, operate at a distance and are organised through the colonial processes I set out earlier. They differ in three significant ways.
So first, expansion involved the subjugation of populations who were subject to rule by the colonising state but were not part of its order of rule, which was divided between nation and colony. The political conditions of government, for example, were not common across the territory of the empire and there were different legal systems in the metropole and the colonies.
The second difference between the two types of empires is that subjugation was organised on the assumption of civilisational, religious, and / or racial superiority by the colonising state. The mark of ‘colonial difference’, as Partha Chatterjee has called it, was central in defining who was understood as a national citizen or subject, and part of the order of rule, and who was not.
Third, the land and resources of the colonised population – including the populations themselves – were deemed to be available to the colonising state for its own purposes and without consultation with them. This included the enslavement of populations from the African continent who were coerced to labour in the Americas as well as modes of indenture and servitude across the Indian ocean world.
The three key factors in distinguishing between empires of extraction and empires of incorporation, then, are as follows. First, colonised populations being subject to rule but not part of a common order of rule. Second, legitimation of colonisation on the basis of some idea of civilizational difference and hierarchy, including that of scientific racism. Third, the extraction of resources (material resources, taxation, and human beings themselves) from the colonies for the primary advantage of those in the metropole.
These three aspects constitute empires of extraction as fundamentally distinct from empires of incorporation.
There have been a multitude of empires across world history, but, within that history, European overseas empires have been a distinct form that needs to be understood in terms of its specific characteristics. The differences are not simply of form but substantive; that is, those differences have political consequences that we need to reckon with. This task is made more difficult if we elide all differences between empires.
Gurminder K Bhambra FBA is Professor of Historical Sociology at the University of Sussex
