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  • Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors by Charles S. Maier
  • Thomas R. Metcalf
Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors. By Charles S. Maier. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Charles Maier’s Among Empires, a refreshingly original and thoughtful book, provides an excellent introduction to the daunting question of how to define and identify empires, as well as tracing out the processes of rise and decline that have led to the current U.S. ascendancy in the world. For the historian of the British Empire by far the most useful section is the first part, on “recurring structures.” The temporal and geographic range here is breath-taking, from antiquity to the present, and from Rome to China via Mughal India. For this exercise Maier has consulted an impressive range of secondary sources, and he provides not just banal descriptions of these varied empires but reflections, most impressive in the case of ancient Greece and Rome, upon their enduring nature. As it forces the reader to think afresh about large issues, the book works well in teaching, as I discovered when I assigned sections of it in both my undergraduate course on the British Empire, and my graduate seminar on the historiography of empire, in spring 2007 at Berkeley.

Especially suggestive is Maier’s attempt to wrestle with the difference between “being” an empire and “having” an empire. The British Empire of course was of the latter variety, symbolized perhaps most visibly by Queen Victoria’s designation as Empress of India, while the government firmly eschewed extending that title to Britain (43). Maier also argues persuasively that nations emerge from empires rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around. As empires “decay,” that is, fragments break off and then reconstitute themselves as nation-states (69). Post-Westphalia Central Europe, and the late Ottoman Balkans, are classic examples, as are of course the contemporary nations of most of Africa and South America.

Maier further pinpoints, often with sharp apercus, the critical differences that demarcate “empire” from “nation.” Nations, he points out, strive for a “homogeneous territory” administered equally, while empires, as in the case of “indirect” or chiefly rule, incorporate “enclaves with local liberties and charters.” Nations “are better at equality,” while empires, with their diverse ethnic communities, “offer group tolerance rather than individual participation” (29–30, 102). The decline of tolerance as nations become consolidated out of empire is amply visible in the partitions that marked the end of Britain’s empire from Ireland to Palestine to India. Then too end of imperial protection has frequently inaugurated a period of hard times for émigré communities, most notably the Indians of East Africa, left behind. One would like to have seen a bit more of the process of interaction between empires and those over whom they ruled. Indians, for instance, until the 1920s, for the most part sought equal citizenship within the empire rather than, conceiving of themselves as mere subjects, a nationalist break from it. On this central question Frederick Cooper’s Colonialism in Question (2005), with its suggestive account of “claims making” on the part of colonized subjects, is perhaps more revealing.

The most powerfully argued chapter of Among Empires is, in my view, chapter 2 on “frontiers.” While everyone knows that empires have frontiers, and that they must be defended, scholars of empire rarely pay much attention to frontiers or their role in the imperial state. Even the famed Northwest Frontier of India figures more in literature, such as Kipling’s Kim, than in scholarly work. Indeed, the most compelling account of the imperial frontier is to be found in J. M. Coetzee’s fictional Waiting for the Barbarians. So it is welcome that Maier, both in his general discussion of empire and in his account of the Cold War, gives the problem of the frontier its due. Although his “typology” of different kinds of frontiers is somewhat labored — can one really differentiate between the “anti-incursive” and the “anti-adversarial” frontier? — still, as Maier insists, territoriality even in the age of the internet cannot be ignored. As he concludes, rather coyly, “Something there may be that doesn’t love a wall, but...

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