Clio’s Psyche 10:3 (Dec. 2003): 91-97
A Pax Upon You:
Preludes and Perils of American Imperialism
Lincoln P. Paine
Independent Scholar
The United States’ invasion of Iraq has given rise to a long overdue debate about whether the
Republic has become an empire and, if so, of what kind. Those who view the United States
as an imperial power usually point to the Roman or British empires as relevant or even
appropriate models, but their comparisons raise a number of objections. In the first place,
however we choose to reinterpret Roman or British forms of imperial governance and law in
hindsight, the ethical and ideological foundations of their empires are antithetical to the
privileges, responsibilities, and freedoms embodied in the United States Constitution. There
are echoes of Roman and British rule in the United States today, but they are—or should
be—as faint as cosmic echoes of the big bang. A second objection is that while neoimperialists rummage through history for precedents that might look good in the light of 21stcentury sensibilities, today’s architects of an imperial United States simultaneously flatter
themselves with the novelty of their ideas. It takes a fatal arrogance to imagine that the Bush
administration invented the pre-emptive use of brute force in defense of national interests, the
so-called “Bush Doctrine.” Mix this with the questionable belief that Western democracy is
the natural state of mankind and you have all the makings of a Pax Americana.
Empire-building has always comprised two elements, an economic end and an
ideological rationale. The latter is subject to variation, but there is always a vein of
continuity. The Bush administration’s claim that we had to change the regime in Iraq because
of its stock of non-traditional weapons resonates because of our recent experience with
terrorism. Likewise, overthrowing a tyranny to make way for a democratic government is
consistent with our nation’s self-image as the arsenal of democracy. Both these rationales
have something to do with reality, but in ignoring real world complexities, they leave us with
false options. The failure to recognize the dual nature of imperial enterprise—the one
ideological, the other material—makes it impossible to see our nation’s actions for what they
are, or to address the profound perils of a Pax Americana.
Grand though this Latin phrase sounds, it should strike fear in the hearts and minds of
Americans, our allies, and the objects of our covetous gaze. Whatever imperial apologists or
historical shorthand may say to the contrary, the peace of the Pax Romana and the Pax
Britannica were fictions. Peace was enforced by pacification, all but endless warfare in the
interest of winning strategic advantage for material gain. A Pax Americana can be no
different, and it can only undermine the institutions and high ideals upon which our republic
was founded.
The longing to emulate either the Roman or British empire is based on a selective
reading of their accomplishments and tactics. It will foster a clearer understanding of
American ambition to examine other imperial models as well. The first to consider is surely
that of Athens, in whose imperfect and short-lived democracy we like to see our political
origins. On closer examination, there is much to be said against it: slaveholding, women
without political rights, and a compulsion to worship the state gods, among other things,
including its brevity. Athens’ golden age lasted only half a century after her victory over the
Persian Empire in 479 BCE. In this period the Athenians sowed the seeds of their own
destruction by transforming a naval alliance created for collective defense against the
Persians into a grasping empire. Athens’ demise resulted not from alien invasion, but because
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of her erstwhile allies’ hostile reaction to her imperial reach, which culminated in the
devastating 27-year-long Peloponnesian War.
The resulting weakness led to the rise of the kingdom of Macedonia, whose people
contemporary Greeks regarded as barbarians. In a decade of military campaigns, a young
Alexander the Great trailed a thin veneer of Greek culture across a large swath of the Near
East as far as the Indus River, but he died on the march, well before he could take steps to
organize his rule. His conquests were divided among three of his generals, who embarked on
a great arms race to vie for control of the Eastern Mediterranean and its contiguous lands.
At the same time, in the central Mediterranean, Rome was also embarked on an
imperial career. We tend to view the accomplishments of the Roman Empire through rosecolored glasses that highlight its military successes, cultural attainments, and the logistical
sophistication that spread goods, people, and ideas—Romanitas and later Christianity—
across vast territories. It does not discount these achievements to acknowledge that they had
a tremendous human cost. Slavery was extensive, wealth was concentrated in the hands of a
few, and the people’s baser appetites were sated with liberal doses of panem et circenses—
bread and circuses. Most glaring, the price of imperial administration was exorbitant,
especially the maintenance of a large, highly trained professional army by whose arms the
empire was enlarged and protected.
Rome’s transition from republic to empire occurred under Augustus, who assumed
for himself an unprecedented degree of political power. But in its territorial expansion,
Rome had been an empire in the modern sense for hundreds of years. In the first century BCE,
Rome already controlled most of Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and parts of Spain, North Africa. and
the Balkans. By the death of Augustus in 14 CE, these gains had been consolidated: Gaul,
Britain, and Egypt (with its invaluable granaries), and vast tracts of Asia Minor and the
coastal Near East had been annexed. For several centuries thereafter, the empire was
preoccupied variously with the expansion and/or security of its long, heavily fortified
borders. In Roman Britain, Hadrian’s Wall stretched from the North Sea to the Irish Sea to
protect Romano-British settlements against invasion from Scotland, while a line of forts in
the west guarded against incursions from Wales. The empire’s continental border was
defined more or less by the Rhine and Danube Rivers, natural boundaries of considerable size
that the Romans nonetheless had to reinforce with more than a hundred forts. A further
measure of security was achieved by establishing colonies peopled by retired legionnaires as
a sort of veterans’ benefit for people whose allegiance was presumably assured.
It is a testament to the inherent instability of the empire that by the 300s, the Pax
Romana was being maintained by more than thirty legions. Ultimately, the armies and
associated bureaucracy upon which the state relied for its existence proved both unaffordable
and unreliable. The level of unrest in the empire varied by place and time, but they included
local uprisings (slave revolts and the Jewish revolts of the 60s and 130s CE, for instance), as
well as probes by Germanic tribes along the Rhine/Danube line, which culminated in the
“barbarian” invasions of the fourth century. There was also chronic instability in the East,
where security depended largely on the weakness of the Parthian Empire and the willingness
of buffer states to submit to Rome.
In addition to their intended role as guardians of the frontier, the armies played a
decisive role in domestic politics. In the first century of the Pax Romana, when the lands
ringing the Mediterranean were at their most serene, being emperor was at its most
dangerous. A large part of the army’s pay derived from booty acquired on campaign, which
more or less dictated that it be kept gainfully employed if the soldiery were to be kept in
check. Inattention to this fact, combined with other political pressures, often proved fatal.
Of the first 12 emperors, five were murdered and two killed themselves in disgrace.
In the United States, there is a comparable problem, not with the patriotic military
(hence the cavalier downgrading of veterans’ benefits), but with its self-serving civilian
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arm—the industries of the military-industrial complex. Their revenues depend on the
consumption of an enormous array of weapons, goods, and services, and these industries go
to great lengths to make sure their products are in demand. The degree to which military
contractors have perverted American politics and foreign policy can be seen in these
companies’ strategic establishment of factories and offices in virtually every single
Congressional district in the United States, a fact that enables them to exert an incalculable
influence on government from the local to the federal level. Against such an entrenched
interest, the Son of God would have to campaign on a platform of Pax Christiana rather than
of Pax Christi.
In its 19th-century phase, America’s conquest of the lands south and west of the
original 13 states towards the Gulf Coast, the Great Lakes, and the Pacific seems reminiscent
of the expansion of the Roman Republic, although there was greater technological parity
between Rome and her neighbors than between American settlers and Native Americans.
The American experience more accurately reflects that of the Russian Empire in its eastward
expansion into Siberia and North America from the 16th to the 19th centuries. With
exemplary bad timing, the Russians sold Fort Ross, in California, to John Sutter seven years
before the gold rush began at Sutter’s Mill in 1849, and then sold Alaska to the United States
three decades before the Klondike gold rush. Despite these losses, Russian expansion was
spectacular. Even after the break-up of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, Russia remains the
largest country in the world. The nation that began with 13 states on the eastern seaboard of
North America is the third.
An apt parallel for America’s more recent imperial exertions can be found in those of
15th- and 16th-century Portugal: evangelical, commercial, essentially non-territorial,
militarily advanced and often ruthless in the pursuit of its aims. Two forces drove Portuguese
expansion. As latter-day crusaders, the Portuguese believed it was their mission to fight
Muslims and convert heathens. As merchants, they sought access to the spice trade and to
monopolize it at the expense of Indian Ocean merchants (many of whom were Muslim) and
in the Mediterranean, where their chief rivals were fellow Christians. In much the same way,
the United States seeks to convert to democracy nations and regions where we have a
quantifiable economic interest. The war against Saddam Hussein came about not because the
people of Iraq suffered under the government, or because the regime’s weaponry posed a
clear and present danger to the United States, but because the government controlled vast
stocks of oil.
The man credited with kick-starting Portugal’s overseas adventures was Prince
Henry, whom a 19th-century British historian dubbed “the Navigator.” A strong advocate of
the Church militant, Henry cajoled his father to embark on a crusade against the Moors.
After casting about for a likely target, in 1415 Henry took part in the capture of the Moroccan
port of Ceuta, a place of little economic or strategic significance to Portugal. The victory
proved a white elephant, for the territory was costly to maintain but impossible to surrender
without losing face. A subsequent attack on the more powerful port of Tangier failed, and
Henry eventually turned to more commercial pursuits that took his caravels into the
archipelagoes of the western Atlantic, especially Madeira, and south along the Guinea coast
of West Africa, a source of gold, slaves, and cheap pepper.
The aims and rationale of this 600-year-old European anticipate the strained
arguments of the Bush administration. Although crusading was properly an altruistic activity
undertaken for spiritual rather than material gain, Henry was unquestionably a merchant
prince who had no problem mixing commercial opportunity with the work of the Church
militant. Similarly, President Bush’s version of militant democracy serves as an ideological
banner around which business interests rally in search of market share. In his denial of the
obvious economic rationale for U.S. adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq—but not in Saudi
Arabia, which has too much oil, nor in North Korea, which has none—he protests too much.
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Afghanistan gives access to the gas fields of Central Asia and Iraq has the world’s second
largest reserves of oil.
Rather than admit what the whole world knows, the Bush administration insists that
the American invasion of Iraq is not about oil. With some qualification, this is correct: It is
not about oil—alone. Any number of opportunists are hiding in the wings, from the
administration’s friends and associates at corporations such as Halliburton—whose former
chairman is Vice President Dick Cheney, and whose board of directors includes President
George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of State, George Schultz—and Bechtel—whose board of
directors includes George H.W. Bush’s other Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger.
Other luminaries who stand to gain enormously include American businessman and hawk
Richard Perle, and Saudi arms dealer and businessman Adnan Khashoggi, trusted veteran of
the Iran-Contra scandal. There are myriad ways to cash in on rebuilding and rearming Iraq, if
you know the right people and have the right access.
An especially striking parallel between Prince Henry and President Bush is their
staunch adherence to outmoded legal concepts to justify their actions. Prince Henry
promoted the notion that fighting Muslims was just war as sanctioned by the Church. His
insistence on this point disregarded a growing body of ecclesiastical and lay legal writing that
maintained that neither popes nor princes had the authority to wage war against non-Christian
states simply because they were not Christian. With similar ideological fervor, President
Bush has argued the need to export democracy to the people of Iraq, even if it means
disregarding international law and opinion, or even, as it may transpire, the wishes of the
Iraqi people.
At the end of the 15th century, the Crusader ethos was still alive and well in Portugal,
and when Vasco da Gama reached the Indian port of Calicut in 1498, one of his first acts was
to drive a wedge between the Hindu rulers and the city’s community of Muslim merchants.
So eager were they to find co-religionists with whom they could make common cause against
the Muslims that the Portuguese determined that the local Hindus belonged to a previously
unknown sect of Christians. This tendency to see things not as they are but as we want them
to be is a salient characteristic of Bush’s foreign policy, in which all issues are divided into
black and white and democracy is treated like a marketable commodity. The president’s
announcement that if you are not with us, you are against us, has a corollary of uncertain
value: if you are with us—in this case, against Hussein—you must also be like us, that is,
democratic.
This error is not unique to Bush. It was tragically made in Afghanistan during the
Soviet invasion, when we armed the fundamentalist factions who went on to form the Taliban
government and Al Qaeda. We are poised to make the same mistake in Iraq, where the antiHussein lineup comprises virtually every shade of the political spectrum from Kurdish
Communists, to Sunni clerics, to democrats-in-exile whose political credentials and
legitimacy are thin. This is not to suggest that no Iraqis believe in democracy, but opposition
to Ba’ath Party rule takes many forms, and it is not clear that a secular majority has much
chance of winning a clear mandate to form a democratic government, especially if the winner
is perceived as an American puppet. Any government that truly represents the fractured will
of the Iraqi people will have to make concessions and embrace ideologies that are anathema
to the militant democracy espoused by Bush’s own “Republican Guard.”
Once in the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese might have adapted themselves to the
laissez-faire patterns of an ancient network of trade that passed goods from East Africa and
China. Instead, they seized strategic ports; built and garrisoned fortresses; demanded
protection money from Muslim, Hindu, and other merchants; and attempted to monopolize
the Indian Ocean spice trade. In so doing, the crown relied upon soldiers who died by the
hundreds of disease or in battle, and on viceroys and governors who usually exploited their
offices for personal gain. The American empire already emulates this approach with military
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bases strung like a necklace around the world. The jewels in the western Indian Ocean
region include Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Iraq, and Diego Garcia (whose entire
population was forcibly removed between 1965 and 1973). Together these help shape the
patterns of world trade—especially the oil trade—in America’s interest. Those nations
dependent on Middle Eastern oil and Central Asian natural gas must tread lightly for fear of
antagonizing the United States.
The last empire to consider in this brief comparative survey is that of Great Britain,
one of several successors to the Portuguese and by most measures the most successful. At its
height, its territories were the most extensive in the world, including Canada, Australia, India,
vast tracts of Africa and Asia, and smaller holdings in the Americas, Antarctica, and
Europe—Ireland and Gibraltar. The underlying factors for English expansion in the 16th
century were essentially practical—a desire to compete for spices and to provide an outlet for
their domestic trade, which the Spanish had curtailed. But like the Portuguese before them,
the English were animated by a militant ideology, one originally founded on a virulent
hostility to Catholicism in general and to Spain and Portugal (by then part of the Spanish
empire) in particular.
This ideological foundation quickly took on a life of its own. In the early 1600s,
English propagandists decided that in their failure to develop the abundant resources
available to them in the European manner, Native Americans had effectively ceded their right
to the land. North America was considered “virgin” territory “that hath yet her maidenhead”
and which was, therefore, “attractive for Christian suitors.” The attraction was not, however,
absolute, and much of the raw labor for the colonies had to be provided by indentured
servants, criminals, and religious dissidents from the British Isles, and African slaves. The
latter were a staple of the English Atlantic trade for centuries, and when the slave trade was
finally abolished in the 19th century, British traffickers in human cargoes simply shifted to
the coolie trade—the shipment of Indian and Chinese laborers in conditions that abolitionist
Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, described as “almost as heart-rending as any that
attended the African slave trade.”
Despite their differences, abolitionists and slavers alike believed that the world was
filled with inferior races. They parted company on the issue of what to do about them. The
former argued they could be civilized, the latter that they were good for little more than brute
labor. One can sense the tension between these two lines of thought in Rudyard Kipling’s
turn-of-the-century ballad in which he urged people to “take up the White Man’s burden …
to serve your captives’ need.” By 1899, the British had their empire well in hand (their
meddling in the Middle East would have to wait until after World War I) and Kipling was
addressing himself to the people of the United States, who had just taken up “the White
Man’s burden—The savage wars of peace” in the Philippines, newly won in the SpanishAmerican War.
If religion and ideology account for the zeal with which the British undertook their
expansion, their success must be attributed to their relative commercial sophistication and
their essentially pragmatic approach to business. The chartered companies that initiated
foreign trade and colonization were run by merchants who were quick to adapt to changed
circumstances. Investors in the East India Company fully intended to profit from the spice
trade, but when the Dutch established a monopoly in the East Indies and shut them out, the
Company withdrew to India. At first, they were all but ignored by the Mughal court, but they
persevered, especially in Calcutta. As the Mughal Empire declined (as all empires must), by
the end of the 18th century the Company had all but annexed Bengal through the deft use of
trade, diplomacy, and arms. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, it exercised either direct or
indirect control over most of the lands that now comprise India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh.
The British government’s involvement in India grew gradually from the mid-17th century,
but it was only in 1858 that the government assumed formal control of India.
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A crucial reason for the British success in India was the lack of homogeneity in the
subcontinent. The East India Company exploited divisions of race, religion, and caste to gain
commercial and territorial concessions. Another was the British reliance on trafficking in
low-value, high-volume goods within the framework of traditional intra-Asian trade,
especially in Indian cotton, lead, silver, and pepper, and Chinese silk, porcelain, and lacquer
ware. Profits from these trades were significant, but, as important, such commerce did not
justify the imposition of a monopoly and the huge expenses required for its maintenance;
such costs ate deeply into the profits of the Portuguese and Dutch spice trades.
The East India Company’s trade remained profitable and balanced until the 1720s,
when demand for tea in Britain grew sharply, a development with profound consequences for
Britain, China, and indeed much of the world. Starting in the 1720s, tea comprised more than
half of the Company’s exports from China, and a century later it accounted for all of them.
The government’s keen interest derived from the duty it imposed on tea, which by the 1820s
accounted for 10 percent of government revenues. As China was self-sufficient for virtually
all its needs and traders had almost nothing they wanted in exchange for tea, Europeans were
forced to pay in silver. The British need for silver to pay for the Napoleonic Wars and for the
pacification and administration of India at the end of the 1700s forced the Company to search
for an alternative to bullion, which they found in the form of opium. So successful was the
East India Company’s cultivation of China’s appetite for opium that it stopped carrying silver
to China in 1805, and two years later it was actually importing silver from China. (American
merchants also shipped Turkish opium to China, to the chagrin of the British and the
consternation of the Chinese.)
The only problem with this trade was that it was completely illegal in China, where
the first laws proscribing opium had been enacted in 1729. The effects of opium use were
widespread and had both moral and economic effects that the Chinese could ill-afford. Trade
in daily goods declined as addicts devoted more and more of their income to the drug.
Bullion outflows from China had a direct impact on the treasury, which collected taxes in
silver. In response to these growing problems, in 1839 the emperor’s imperial commissioner
at Canton seized and burned about 140 tons of opium. In response, the British government
dispatched a force of 16 ships and 4,000 soldiers to demand satisfaction. The British victory
over the antiquated Chinese forces in what became known as the First Opium War was swift
and total. By the Treaty of Nanking, the British secured millions in restitution and forced the
Chinese to open additional ports to foreign trade. China lost two more drug wars, and Britain
ultimately secured the legalization of the opium trade, which towards the end of the century
brought in £10 million a year.
The opening of the treaty ports had a number of unintended consequences, two of
which are of particular relevance to the United States. Having observed the overwhelming
superiority of British arms against the Chinese, Japan responded promptly to U.S. demands to
open its ports to foreigners after several centuries of relative isolation. Thereafter, Japan
industrialized rapidly, working especially closely with Britain to develop its naval and
merchant fleets. In 1895, Japan overwhelmed the modernized Chinese fleet in the SinoJapanese War. Ten years later, it destroyed a powerful Russian fleet at the Battle of
Tsushima to find itself the dominant naval power in the Pacific. Forty years later, the
Japanese met their match at the hands of the United States, whose crushing but slow victory
in World War II helped pave the way for American hegemony in the Pacific—half a century
after taking up the White Man’s burden there—and dragged it deep into East Asian regional
politics.
The Opium Wars may have illustrated China’s technological and cultural decline
under the Qing dynasty, but the unequal treaties forced by the British undermined any
prospect that China would soon achieve its former stature on the world stage. In fact, the
drug-induced malaise fueled by the British certainly contributed to the collapse of the
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Celestial Kingdom in the 20th century and to the turbulent decades of civil war and
oppressive communist rule that followed. A century-and-a-half after Britain’s shocking and
awesome victory, China has begun to find its way in the world once again, while Britain’s
empire is virtually extinct, a victim of overreach and to a lesser extent its unintended clarity
in preaching the virtues of individual rights to the very people it sought to oppress on four
continents.
None of these imperial models is an exact fit for the United States at the start of the
21st century. But even a glance at their salient features offers a grim reminder that, stripped
of revisionist hyperbole, empires yield a ghastly human toll. No one can fault the bravery,
luck, and sheer force of will characteristic of imperial pioneers of any age. Against these we
must weigh their hideous legacy of brutal intimidation, human bondage, and appalling
exploitation.
What fruit will the current round of American imperialism in Iraq bear? A few
American businesses will reap huge windfalls from rebuilding the country’s infrastructure.
As of this writing, the Bush administration has installed a military authority to run the
country while it scrambles to install a puppet regime whose interests align with its own. This
will give the United States control of Iraq’s oil production and revenues, and an
unprecedented voice in OPEC. Such superficial achievements benefit only a small and shrill
minority of powerful interests, however. For the majority of Americans, this and similar
imperial ventures will provide no more than an outlet for demonstrations of jingo patriotism
and flag-waving xenophobia.
As for the loftier premises deployed to justify our imperial ambition, it takes a
chilling indifference to history to believe that people anywhere will swarm to democratic
ideals as articulated by an invading army, or that the people of the Middle East, who in their
day have shucked off many versions of Western imperialism—Greek and Roman,
Portuguese, British and Russian—have any inclination to be subject to a Pax Americana.
Three things are certain: Their reluctance will come at a high price. The burden of sustaining
the empire will be spread more evenly than the benefits of creating it. And for Americans, the
most immediate and gravest risk is to neither people nor property, but to that great preserver
of them both, the Constitution.
Lincoln P. Paine is an independent maritime historian. His publications include Ships of the
World: An Historical Encyclopedia (1997) and he is a contributor to the forthcoming Oxford
Encyclopedia of Maritime History and Oxford Companion to Exploration. He has lectured in
the U.S. and Australia, and has taught global maritime history at the University of Southern
Maine's Center for Continuing Education. He is currently writing a maritime history of the
world. He may be reached at <Lincoln.Paine@gmail.com>.