Runciman on Empire’s improbable perpetuity
Reproduction Probability Only in 1 Society [with impersonal institutions]
W. G. Runciman wrote:
To a comparative sociologist, empires have a twofold interest. They are, in the first place, a distinctive type of social formation. They are neither big societies on the one hand nor leagues of independent societies headed by a dominant partner on the other: they involve the exercise of domination by the rulers of a central society over the populations of peripheral societies without either absorbing them to the point that they become fellow-members of the central society or disengaging from them to the point that they become confederates rather than subjects. But empires are interesting also on account of their impermanence: they are easier to acquire than to retain. The prospect of disengagement may look for a time as remote as the prospect of absorption. But no empire lasts forever, or anything like it. Why not? …
… Empires may be as loosely controlled … The peripheries may be … geographically remote … The centre may be represented in the peripheral territories by a handful of traders, missionaries and soldiers or by large commercial enterprises, implanted networks of temples, mosques or churches, and permanent military garrisons. The peripheries may be colonies or vassals or tributaries or clients of the centre. But the most useful single word for the relationship is ‘protectorate’ as Lord Halsbury defined it in 1890: ‘a convenient state between annexation and mere alliance’.
In what follows, I approach the study of the ‘convenient state’ from within the terms of current neo-Darwinian sociological theory … The capacity of the critical memes and practices to sustain an empire in being then depends on the extent to which their local environment either enhances or diminishes their probability of continuing reproduction. Sociologists can accordingly borrow with profit from biologists a ‘reverse engineering’ approach. They can examine in hindsight more and less long-lasting empires in such a way as to infer the features of their design which have enabled the rulers at the centre to maintain their hold over the peripheries without being driven to either absorption or disengagement.
Short-lived empires are of little value for this purpose, since they haven’t had time for what might have been adaptive memes and practices to evolve … The success of the longer-lasting has often had much to do with what, from a sociological perspective, has to be regarded as luck – the contingencies, that is, of individual ability and temperament, or of the location and accessibility of valuable mineral resources, or of the nature and timing of technological advances in the means of waging war. But whatever the combination of accident and design in any chosen case, some imperial societies have found better ways to prolong the ‘convenient state’ than others have …
… To many of the rulers of even the most durable-looking empires, the difficulties which they face in holding on to them are as familiar as they become in due course to their historians: the costs are so high, the distances so long, the frontiers so exposed, the revenues so elusive, the administration so cumbrous, the resentments so intractable, the ethnic and tribal loyalties so entrenched, the trade routes so riddled with extortion, contraband and piracy, the enmity of rivals so threatening and the monopoly of superior military technology so short-lived. But given the resources at the disposal of the centre compared with the peripheries, is there no way in which its political, economic and ideological power can be deployed which will maintain an empire in being for as long as the imperial society itself?
Rulers know that coercion alone will not keep an empire in being indefinitely. The ideology of the imperial centre has to be minimally acceptable to the population of the peripheries and economic exploitation kept sufficiently within bounds for the sources of the revenue which the centre extracts from the peripheries not to be exhausted. The locally optimal design will, accordingly, be one in which the practices defining the roles to which there attaches the power of the imperial centre are mutually adaptive across all three dimensions of social design space. There must be effective collaboration between the viceroys, generals, governors and commissioners who control the means of coercion, the planters, contractors, farmers, entrepreneurs and financiers who control the means of production, and the teachers, ecclesiastics, missionaries, propagandists and local notables who control the means of persuasion. This does not mean that they need to behave in a manner that is culturally defined as ‘well’: corruption and favouritism may be more effective in aligning the interests of rulers and ruled than the impartial administration of policies and ordinances imposed on the peripheries from the centre. But successive incumbents have to succeed one another in stable political, economic and ideological roles which evolve neither in the direction of drawing the population of the peripheries directly into the centre …
.. For all the many differences between one empire and another, there is a dilemma which confronts the rulers of them all. The roles whose incumbents are charged with exercising political, economic and ideological control over the peripheries are, by definition, intermediate. Whether their incumbents are recruited locally from native-born members of the peripheral population … or despatched from the centre for a fixed term of office … the power vested in their roles must not be so great that they are effectively beyond the reach of the centre nor so limited that the centre’s control of the periphery becomes no more than nominal. There is an inherent risk that a colonial elite hitherto loyal to the imperial government … may come to demand a degree of privilege culminating in independence. Conversely, formal acknowledgement of subordination …may be little more than a diplomatic device to help them resist encroachment by predatory neighbouring states … But if the centre is perceived in the periphery as too weak for the threat of annexation to be credible, disengagement becomes a correspondingly more realistic ambition. The rulers of the central society may, if their coffers are full, their armies well manned and equipped, and their ideological hegemony unquestioned, put down periodic rebellions, depose overmighty satraps, reintegrate breakaway provinces (or, in Islamic empires, caliphates), suborn potential opponents, disperse and resettle hostile local populations and apply the maxim ‘divide and rule’ to good effect. But for how long?
There is no lack of ingenious institutional designs on record by which imperial rulers and their agents have sought to maintain their political, economic and ideological control over their peripheries … But practices adaptive in the short term can turn out to be maladaptive in the long, often because they themselves change the environment in ways which diminish their probability of ongoing reproduction. This is not simply because the central society is drawn into territorial expansion beyond the point where the costs of maintaining control can be covered by the revenues available, or because of the hamfistedness of its local representatives, or because its policymakers underestimate the resistance which may be provoked by demands regarded as arbitrary or extortionate. Renegotiation of practices is intrinsic to the ongoing process of heritable variation and competitive selection by which social evolution is driven, and it is bound to be more problematic when the parties to it are neither fellow-members of a single society nor independent representatives of separate ones. Thus, tax-farming can seem a promising device for extracting resources from the peripheries without burdening the central exchequer with the costs of collection only for it to aggravate both the rapacity of the collectors and the resistance of the payers. Schools and mission-stations can seem a promising device for imposing on the children of the peripheral population the ideology of the centre only for the children to use their education to repudiate it. The recruitment of adult males in the peripheries into the army of the central society can seem a promising device for reducing the risk of rebellion only for the troops so recruited to mutiny. The dilemma then confronts the rulers once again: they have to choose between an exercise of power which will lead them in the direction of annexation and an exercise of diplomacy which will lead them in the direction of disengagement.
Rulers and their advisers can apply their ingenuity no less to devising strategies of cultural imperialism than to designing political, economic and ideological practices and roles which will maintain the ‘convenient state’. But not only do they have to recognise that the doctrine of benevolent paternalism and a mission civilatrice is more convincing to the population (including, where it applies, the electorate) of the centre than of the peripheries. They have also to recognise that the creation of an ‘empire of the mind’ in which the art, science, technology, dress, manners and lifestyle of the centre are adopted in the peripheries by imitation and learning may do nothing to persuade their populations of the merits of their institutional relationship of subordination to the centre … Nor does active manipulation of the information transmitted to the peripheries ensure that the hearts and minds will be any more likely to be influenced in the way that the rulers intend … There is no more a winning combination of memes in cultural design space than there is of practices in social design space by which imperial rulers can prevent the ongoing process of heritable variation and competitive selection from working to their disadvantage …
… There is, perhaps, a further way in which a neo-Darwinian approach can help to account for the impermanence of empires. Natural, as opposed to cultural and social, selection may seem relevant only to the extent that it has given all members of the human species their innate disposition for ethnocentricity and xenophobia. But in the past few decades, advances have been made from within the neo-Darwinian paradigm in palaeoanthropology, behavioural ecology, evolutionary psychology and evolutionary game theory which between them have brought to the top of the agenda of the human sciences the fundamental question how human groups and communities are held together at all once they have grown in size beyond the point that kin selection and reciprocal altruism are by themselves enough to explain it. It would be plausible to expect, given our biological inheritance, that aggregations much larger than the hunting and foraging bands in which our ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years would inevitably descend into anarchy. But big societies are often able to continue in being indefinitely despite both protracted internal conflict and defeat in war. Somehow, millions of unrelated strangers who interact directly with no more than a hundred or two of each other conform sufficiently to the same acknowledged notions of behaviour for large societies to remain stable enough for sociologists to analyse and compare them.
[MGH: final paragraph with concluding argument suggestive of Weber]
If natural selection had not given us our unique capacity for language, and therewith for rapid and cumulative cultural evolution, large societies could not hold together at all. But once that had happened, and then, many millennia later, the further transition had been made from hunting and foraging bands to expanding communities of sedentary agriculturalists and town-dwellers, selective pressure strongly favoured those populations whose members implemented two complementary strategies: on the one hand, punishment of non-conformists within the group (including a willingness to punish those who refused to punish the non-conformists), and on the other conditional co-operation with other groups outside the reach of punishment. Social … evolution brought into being economic, ideological and political institutions within which power was exercised through formal roles whose incumbents succeeded one another independently of purely personal or familial relationships. To some of these roles there attached the capacity to punish nonconformists by the delegated exercise of economic, ideological or political sanctions, and to others (which might be occupied by the same individuals) there attached authority to negotiate with out-groups on behalf of the in-group. This, in the broadest and simplest terms, is the way in which competition within and between increasingly large societies has been acted out for the past 10,000 years …
The Source:
W. G. Runciman, ‘Empire as a Topic in Comparative Sociology’, in Tributary Empires in Global History, edited by Peter Fibiger Bang and C. A. Bayly, Palgrave Macmillan 2011 [pp. 99-107]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.