European Imperialism: The Roman Empire
What exactly is an empire? Macedonia, Rome, Byzantium, Ottoman Turkey, China, Peru, the Soviet Union, the United States, even by its enemies, the European Union have all been described as empires. We talk of “informal” and “economic” empires, of “business” empires, even of the empire of the heart or reason’s empire. “Empire” has become as much a metaphor as the description of a particular kind of society. today the word is generally used as a term of abuse, although one that is also often tinged with nostalgia. “Empire” suggest the ruthless exploitation of largely defenseless, technologically unsophisticated peoples by the forces of technologically sophisticated ones-the kinds of empires carved out first in the Americas, then in Asia, and
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The term has therefore linked the history of European imperialism very closely to the legacy of the Roman Empire. Originally it meant little more than “sovereignty,” a sense it retained until at least the eighteenth century. Ever since the days of the Roman Republic, however, “empire” has also been a word used to describe government over vast territories. When, for instance, in the early first century A.D., the historian Tacitus spoke of the Roman world as an “immense body of empire,” he was alluding as much to its size as to its sovereignty, and ultimately it would be size that separated empires from mere kingdoms and principalities. In 1914, the great Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen calculated that the Russian Empire had been expanding at an average daily rate of fifty-five square miles for over four centuries, or more than twenty thousand square miles per year, an area roughly the size of modern Belgium. In terms of territory the Russian Empire was the largest the world has ever known, although most of it was unoccupied. But similar sorts of figures could be conjured up for most other imperial peoples. Under Philip II, the father of Alexander the Great, the Macedonian monarchy ceased at the Aegean and the Black Sea. By the time of Alexander’s death in 323 B.C.E., it reached from the Adriatic to the Indus, from the Punjab to the
The term has therefore linked the history of European imperialism very closely to the legacy of the Roman Empire. Originally it meant little more than “sovereignty,” a sense it retained until at least the eighteenth century. Ever since the days of the Roman Republic, however, “empire” has also been a word used to describe government over vast territories. When, for instance, in the early first century A.D., the historian Tacitus spoke of the Roman world as an “immense body of empire,” he was alluding as much to its size as to its sovereignty, and ultimately it would be size that separated empires from mere kingdoms and principalities. In 1914, the great Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen calculated that the Russian Empire had been expanding at an average daily rate of fifty-five square miles for over four centuries, or more than twenty thousand square miles per year, an area roughly the size of modern Belgium. In terms of territory the Russian Empire was the largest the world has ever known, although most of it was unoccupied. But similar sorts of figures could be conjured up for most other imperial peoples. Under Philip II, the father of Alexander the Great, the Macedonian monarchy ceased at the Aegean and the Black Sea. By the time of Alexander’s death in 323 B.C.E., it reached from the Adriatic to the Indus, from the Punjab to the