Rational Empires: Institutional Incentives and Imperial Expansion by Leo J. Blanken (review)

social scientists and historians often address similar themes without paying much attention to each other’s methods or arguments. Here, Leo J. Blanken has produced a slim, methodologically complex book that applies theories taken from political science and international relations to the study of nineteenth-century imperial expansion and post-1945 contraction. However, I fear it is unlikely that this book will do much to bridge the unwelcome divide between historians and their more theoretically sophisticated counterparts in political science and international relations.

Blanken’s book combines “rationalist-materialist” and “constructivist” modes of analysis (3, 156). Regarding the ways in which empires supposedly expanded, Blanken gives special prominence to the role of domestic political institutions, especially the “informational aspect that domestic political arrangements may play in conditioning the beliefs of other actors” (3). Game theory provides the edifice of the book, with the algebra modestly tucked away in an appendix that we’re told can be ignored “without appreciable loss” (159). To the uninitiated this comes as a considerable relief. The problem is that the theoretical assumptions made at the outset must be accepted if one is to make sense of what follows: three case studies of Africa in the late nineteenth century, China as the Qing Dynasty fell apart, and the British in India. Blanken selects historical evidence to lend credibility to the theoretical framework. The practice is hardly unique, but this book may be one of the less disingenuous examples.

Take Europe’s carving up of “Tropical Africa,” where the author is “agnostic” about “causality” (74). Blanken rejects the term “scramble” for Africa as misleading. The process, he says, was actually orderly and peaceful, “courteous,” in fact (26). Reference to the Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885 merely demonstrates what has already been asserted: that “representative European states”—Britain, Germany, and France are all included in Blanken’s somewhat Procrustean category—”when faced with the challenge of opening a region without an assurance framework, engaged in fashioning a series of contracts to formally annex the region; further, these contracts were characterised by their peacefulness and durability” (74).

But can the question of causality be so neatly side-stepped? I would argue no, not necessarily because engaging with it disproves Blanken’s argument per se, but because it undermines one of his core working assumptions: namely, that an “idealized policy maker,” constrained first and foremost by “domestic institutional structures,” constitutes the “crucial consideration in the study of international relations in general and the analysis of patterns of territorial acquisition in particular” (10). Why such emphasis on domestic institutional structures?

The wide historical literature on the causes of European colonialism in Africa, which Blanken occasionally cites but largely avoids, suggests several factors that may call into question the importance Blanken attributes to metropolitan political processes. For example, since Blanken chooses to ignore the entire body of literature on the decision made by Great Britain (not “England”) to invade Egypt in 1882, we get no sense of whether the primary causes of the invasion were Britain’s imperial ambition, rivalry with France, defence of the suez Canal, a genuine fear of impending anarchy in Urabi Pasha’s Egypt and the mortal threat this posed to Egypt’s Christian minorities, the protection of bondholder interests (including W. E. Gladstone’s own considerable investments in Egypt), or some combination of the above. An examination of, for example, A. G. Hopkins’s well-known critique of Ronald Robinson andJohn Gallagher’s Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (1961), or an assessment of the so-called men on the spot thesis would have allowed Blanken to test his own theoretical assumptions about the paramount significance of domestic institutional structures against other interpretations. What is the relationship between Blanken’s ideas and Robinson and Gallagher’s “official mind”?

Some historians have offered theoretical explanations of imperial expansion that may support aspects of...