EMPIRE
“a large, composite, multi-ethnic or multinational political unit, usually created by conquest, and divided between a dominant centre and subordinate, sometimes far distant peripheries” [Howe, Empire: A Very Short Introduction, 30]
“large political units, expansionist or with a memory of power extended over space, polities that maintain distinction and hierarchy as they incorporate new people” [Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, 8]
the term empire "suggests the ruthless exploitation of largely
defenseless, technologically sophisticated ones... conjures up images
of the Third Reich or Stalinist Russia, where oppressor and oppressed
come from much the same kind of cultures, and possess much the same
kind of technologies"; "empires represented as a mode of
political oppression, a denial by one people of the rights--above all
the right to self-determination--of countless others"
"in some sense artificial creations"; created by conquest; the
conquered kept in subservience by a mixture of simple force and some
kind of ideology (Rome: civilization; Spanish, French, British:
civilization
+ christianity; Ottoman: Islam; Soviet Union: Marxism); assumption that
the ruled would rise up and drive out their conquerors; much of this is
true, but "what we choose to call empires have not only varied greatly
from place to place and time to time, they have also marked the lives
of those whom they involved in sometimes radically different ways"
the terms empire, emporer, and imperialism all derive from
"imperium", [xxii] which indicated supreme power involving both
command in war and the magistrate's right to execute the law; a
term that is very closely linked to the legacy of the Roman Empire;
until the 18th c, it meant little more than sovereignty; but since the
days of the Roman Republic it has also meant government over vast
territories [Anthony Pagden, Peoples and
Empires, xxi-xxii]
"a situation in which a single state shapes the behavior of others,
whether directly or indirectly, partially or completely, by means that
can range from the outright use of force through intimidation,
dependency, inducement, and even inspiration" [Mary Ann Heiss, "The Evolution of
the Imperial Idea and U.S. National Policy," 513, quoting Gaddis
(1997), 27]