In honor of the return of “Empire,” this is the first installment of a mini-series on empires this week.
When you look at a globe and understand just how far India is from the UK, and how much more populous, the notion that the smaller country could rule the larger seems utterly preposterous. And yet, history doesn’t lie. How could this happen?
The key to being a successful imperialist is for both the vanquishing and the vanquished party to believe very firmly that the civilization represented by the imperialist is superior. It also helps if the subject society is politically divided, and the imperialist can play indigenous parties off against each other; that is the reason India fell completely within the British Empire, and China did not.
Empires typically begin as commercial ventures, but end up being justified as an effort to share the benefits of civilization with the natives. When the subject population no longer believes in the superiority of the imperialists, the empire is doomed.