Victorian History — The British Empire

“Names designate, they do not describe. There is no reason to expect states which we happen - say - to call the British or Roman or Chinese empires to have any more in common than a series of individuals whom we happen to call "John". When we use the term "empire" other than as part of a proper name, its meanings are equally various. Henry VIII used it to mean a sovereign kingdom. For most Japanese, it means a state, irrespective of other considerations, ruled by a soi-disant emperor. Ronald Reagan used it as a mere term of abuse. Jean-Bedel Bokassa used it without apparently thinking of its meaning at all, in a fit of Napoleonic megalomania. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a period often referred to as an age of empires, there were at least thirty states in the world that historians denote as such. They had no common characteristics that collectively distinguished them from other states of the time. So there can be no restrictive theory of empire, and the current vogue for comparative and general histories of empire is doomed to failure if pegged to an attempt to define the indefinable. Yel historians and political scientists persist in hunting this Snark.” — Felipe Herández-Armesto, “Imperial Measures,” TLS (9.24.10): 8.

“Empire has been the world’s most common form of political organization for the past 2,500 years. Most humans during these two and a half millenia lived in empires . . . . All human cultures are at least in part the legacy of empires and imperial civilizations, and no academic or political surgery can cut out the imperial legacies with out killing the patient.” — Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens (191, 204)