electrical communication after 1850.

One manifestation was the spread of

European empires across much of Asia and Africa. Everywhere weavers
and other artisans suffered severely from a flood of cheap, machine-made
goods coming from newfangled European factories, powered first by
flowing water, then by steam and later by electricity. But before very long
Asian factories, especially in Japan, China and India, began to produce
cheaper and, more recently, also better goods than Europeans (and
Americans) did; and European empires all collapsed soon after World War
II.
From the long term point of view, therefore, recent mass migrations and
widespread disruption of village patterns of life by roads, trucks, buses,
radio, TV and computers look more like another wave of intensified human
interaction, comparable to its predecessors and far from unique.
Argument about whether continuity or uniqueness prevails among us
today is really pointless. Each moment is unique in every human life; yet
continuities are strong and undeniable, both privately and publicly. It is
always tempting to exaggerate the unprecedented character of the
problems we face. My personal cast of mind prefers to seek commonality;
and one such indisputable commonality is that in recent centuries, as social
change accelerated, each generation felt uniquely challenged, yet survived
in greater numbers than before. No clear end of that process is yet in view,
unsustainable though it is sure to be across any lengthy future.
. . . I conclude that the world is indeed one interacting whole and always
has been. Human wealth and power have sporadically increased, spurting
towards unexampled heights lately. Limits to that spurt may now be close
at hand. But ingenuity and invention remain alive among us as much as
ever. So we and our successors may perhaps continue to stumble onward
like all preceding human generations, meeting with painful disappointments
and changing behavior accordingly, only to provoke new risks and meet
fresh disappointments. That has always been the human condition, and
seems likely to last as long as we do.

IMPERIAL TRAJECTORIES

Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper

We live in a world of nearly two hundred states. Each flaunts symbols of

sovereignty—its flag, its seat in the United Nations—and each claims to
represent a people. These states, big and small, are in principle equal
members of a global community, bound together by international law. Yet
the world of nation-states we take for granted is scarcely sixty years old.
Throughout history, most people have lived in political units that did not
pretend to represent a single people. Making state conform with nation is
a recent phenomenon, neither fully carried out nor universally desired. In
the 1990s the world witnessed attempts by political leaders to turn the
state into an expression of “their” nationality: in Yugoslavia—a country put
together after World War I on terrain wrested out from the Ottoman and
Habsburg empires—and in Rwanda, a former Belgian colony. These efforts
to create homogeneous nations led to the slaughter of hundreds of
thousands of people who had lived side by side. In the Middle East, Sunnis,
Shi’ites, Kurds, Palestinians, Jews, and many others have fought over state
authority and state boundaries for more than eighty years since the end of
the Ottoman empire. Even as people struggled for and welcomed the
breakups of empires over the course of the twentieth century, conflicts
over what a nation is and who belongs within it flared around the world. . .
.
. . . The endurance of empire challenges the notion that the nation-state
is natural, necessary, and inevitable, and points us instead toward
exploring the wide range of ways in which people over time, and for better
or worse, have thought about politics and organized their states.
Investigating the history of empires does not imply praising or condemning
them. Instead, understanding possibilities as they appeared to people in
their own times reveals the imperatives and actions that changed the past,
created our present, and perhaps will shape the future.
. . . Not that every significant state was an empire, but . . . for most of
human history empires and their interactions shaped the context in which
people gauged their political possibilities, pursued their ambitions, and
envisioned their societies. States large and small, rebels and loyalists and
people who cared little for politics—all had to take empires, their ways of
rule, and their competitions into account. Whether this imperial framework
has come to an end is a question we [will] address. . . .
We begin with Rome and China in the third century BCE, not because
they were the first empires—their great predecessors include Egyptians,
Assyrians, Persians, Alexander the Great’s enormous conquests, and more
ancient dynasties in China—but because these two empires became long-
lasting reference points for later empire-builders. Rome and China both
attained a huge physical size, integrated commerce and production into
economies of world scale (the world that each of them created), devised
institutions that sustained state power for centuries, developed compelling
cultural frameworks to explain and promote their success, and assured, for
long periods, acquiescence to imperial power. Their principal strategies—
China’s reliance on a class of loyal, trained officials, Rome’s empowerment,
at least in theory, of its citizens—had lasting and profound effects on how
people imagine their states and their place in them.
We next consider empires that tried to move into Rome’s place—
resilient Byzantium, the dynamic but fissionable Islamic caliphates, and the
short-lived Carolingians. These rivals built their empires on religious
foundations; their histories display the possibilities and limits of militant
monotheism as an arm of state power. The drive to convert or kill the
unfaithful and to spread the true faith mobilized warriors for both
Christianity and Islam, but also provoked splits inside empires over whose
religious mantle was the true one and whose claim to power was god-
given.
In the thirteenth century, under Chinggis Khan and his successors,
Mongols put together the largest land empire of all time, based on a
radically different principle—a pragmatic approach to religious and
cultural difference. Mongol khans had the technological advantages of
nomadic societies—above all, a mobile, largely self-sufficient, and hardy
military—but it was thanks to their capacious notions of an imperial society
that they rapidly made use of the skills and resources of the diverse
peoples they conquered. Mongols’ repertoire of rule combined intimidating
violence with the protection of different religions and cultures and the
politics of personal loyalty.
The Mongols are critical to our study for two reasons. First, their ways
of rule influenced politics across a huge continent—in China, as well as in
the later Russian, Mughal, and Ottoman empires. Second, at a time when
no state on the western edge of Eurasia (today’s Europe) could command
loyalty and resources on a large scale, Mongols protected trade routes
from the Black Sea to the Pacific and enabled cross-continental
transmission of knowledge, goods, and statecraft. Other empires—in the
region of today’s Iran, in southern India or Africa, and elsewhere—are not
described in any detail here, although they, too, promoted connections and
change, long before Europeans appeared on the great-power scene.
It was the wealth and commercial vitality of Asia that eventually drew
people from what is now thought of as Europe into what was for them a
new sphere of trade, transport, and possibility. The empires of Spain,
Portugal, France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain do not enter our
account in the familiar guise of “the expansion of Europe.” In the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries Europe was unimaginable as a political entity, and
in any case, geographical regions are not political actors. We focus instead
on the reconfiguration of relations among empires at this time, a dynamic
process whose consequences became evident only much later.
 “European” maritime extensions were the product of three conditions:
the high-value goods produced and exchanged in the Chinese imperial
sphere; the obstacle posed by the Ottoman empire’s dominance of the
eastern Mediterranean and land routes east; and the inability of rulers in
western Eurasia to rebuild Roman-style unity on a terrain contested by
rival monarchs and dynasts, lords with powerful followings, and cities
defending their rights. It was this global configuration of power and
resources that brought European navigators to Asia and, later, thanks to
Columbus’s accidental discovery, to the Americas.
These new connections eventually reconfigured the global economy and
world politics. But they were a long way from producing a unipolar,
European-dominated world. Portuguese and Dutch maritime power
depended on using force to constrain competitors’ commercial activity
while ensuring that producers and local authorities in southeast Asia,
where the riches in spices and textiles came from, had a stake in new long-
distance trade. The fortified commercial enclave became a key element of
Europeans’ repertoire of power. After Columbus’s “discovery,” his royal
sponsors were able to make a “Spanish” empire by consolidating power on
two continents and supplying the silver—produced with the coerced labor
of indigenous Americans—that lubricated commerce in western Europe,
across southeast Asia, and within the wealthy, commercially dynamic
Chinese empire.
In the Americas, settlers from Europe, slaves brought from Africa, and
their imperial masters produced new forms of imperial politics. Keeping
subordinated people—indigenous or otherwise—from striking out on their
own or casting their lot with rival empires was no simple task. Rulers of
empires had to induce distant elites to cooperate, and they had to provide
people—at home, overseas, and in between—with a sense of place within
an equal but incorporate polity. Such efforts did not always produce
assimilation, conformity, or even resigned acceptance; tensions and violent
conflict among imperial rulers, overseas settlers, indigenous communities,
and forced migrants appear throughout. . . .
Empire, in Europe or elsewhere, was more than a matter of economic
exploitation. As early as the sixteenth century, a few European
missionaries and jurists were making distinctions between legitimate and
illegitimate forms of imperial power, condemning Europeans’ assaults on
indigenous societies and questioning an empire’s right to take land and
labor from conquered peoples.
It was only in the nineteenth century that some European states,
fortified by their imperial conquests, gained a clear technological and
material edge over their neighbors and in other regions of the world. This
“western” moment of imperial domination was never complete or stable.
Opposition to slavery and to the excesses and brutality of rulers and
settlers brought before an engaged public the question of whether colonies
were places where humans could be exploited at will or parts of an
inclusive, albeit inequitable, polity. Moreover, the empires of China, Russia,
the Ottomans, and Habsburgs were not imperial has-beens, as the
conventional story reads. They took initiatives to counter economic and
cultural challenges, and played crucial roles in the conflicts and
connections that animated world politics. . . .
. . . [I]mperial expansion across land—not just seas—produced distinct
configurations of politics and society. In the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, the United States and Russia extended their rule across
continents. Russia’s repertoire of rule—inherited from a mix of imperial
predecessors and rivals—relied on bringing ever more people under the
emperor’s care—and of course exploitation—while maintaining distinctions
among incorporated groups. American revolutionaries invoked a different
imperial politics, turning ideas of popular sovereignty against their British
masters, then constructing an “Empire of Liberty” in Thomas Jefferson’s
words. The United States, expanding as Americans conquered indigenous
peoples or acquired parts of others’ empires, created a template for
turning new territories into states, excluded Indians and slaves from the
polity, and managed to stay together after a bitter civil war fought over the
issue of governing different territories differently. In the late nineteenth
century the young empire extended its power overseas—without
developing a generally accepted idea of the United States as a ruler of
colonies.
Britain, France, Germany, and other European countries were less
reticent about colonial rule, and they applied it with vigor to new
acquisitions in Africa and Asia in the late nineteenth century. These
powers, however, found by the early twentieth century that actually
governing African and Asian colonies was more difficult than military
conquest. The very claim to be bringing “civilization” and economic
“progress” to supposedly backward areas opened up colonial powers to
questioning from inside, from rival empires, and from indigenous elites
over what, if any, forms of colonialism were politically and morally
defensible.
Empires, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as in the sixteenth,
existed in relation to each other. Different organizations of power—
colonies, protectorates, dominions, territories forced into a dominant
culture, semi-autonomous national regions—were combined in different
ways within empires. Empires drew on human and material resources
beyond the reach of any national polity, seeking control over both
contiguous and distant lands and peoples.
In the twentieth century it was rivalry among empires—made all the
more acute by Japan’s entry into the empire game and China’s temporary
lapse out—that dragged imperial powers and their subjects around the
world into two world wars. The devastating consequences of this
interempire conflict, as well as the volatile notions of sovereignty
nourished within and among empires, set the stage for the dissolution of
colonial empires from the 1940s through the 1960s. But the dismantling of
this kind of empire left in place the question of how powers like the United
States, the USSR, and China would adapt their repertoires of power to
changing conditions.
What drove these major transformations in world politics? It used to be
argued that empires gave way to nation-states as ideas about rights,
nations, and popular sovereignty emerged in the west. But there are
several problems with this proposition. First, empires lasted well beyond
the eighteenth century, when notions of popular sovereignty and natural
rights captured political imagination in some parts of the world.
Furthermore, if we assume that the origins of these concepts were
“national,” we miss a crucial dynamic of political change. In British North
America, the French Caribbean, Spanish South America, and elsewhere,
struggles for political voice, rights, and citizenship took place within
empires before they became revolutions against them. The results of these
contests were not consistently national. Relationships between democracy,
nation, and empire were still debated in the middle of the twentieth
century.
Other studies of world history attribute major shifts to the “rise of the
state” in the “early modern period,” two terms tied to the notion of a single
path toward a normal and universal kind of sovereignty—the “western”
kind. Scholars have advanced different dates for the birth of this “modern”
state system—1648 and the Treaty of Westphalia, the eighteenth century
with its innovations in western political theory, the American and French
revolutions. But expanding our outlook over space and back in time and
focusing on empires allows us to see that states have institutionalized
power for over two millennia in different parts of the world. A story of
European state development and other people’s “responses” would
misrepresent the long-term dynamics of state power in both Europe and
the rest of the world.
To the extent that states became more powerful in England and France
in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these transformations
were a consequence of empire, rather than the other way around. As
powers trying to control large spaces, empires channeled widely produced
resources into state institutions that concentrated revenue and military
force. War among empires in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth
centuries set the stage for revolutionary movements that challenged
Europe’s empire-states.
In other words, this study of empire breaks with the special claims of
nation, modernity, and Europe to explain the course of history. It is an
interpretive essay, based on analyses of selected imperial settings. It
suggests how imperial power—and contests over and within it—have for
thousands of years configured societies and states, inspired ambition and
imagination, and opened up and closed down political possibilities.

ON THE STUDY OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Immanuel Wallerstein

Change is eternal. Nothing ever changes. Both clichés are “true.”

Structures are those coral reefs of human relations which have a stable
existence over relatively long periods of time. But structures too are born,
develop, and die.
Unless we are to use the study of social change as a term synonymous
to the totality of social science, its meaning should be restricted to the
study of changes in those phenomena which are most durable—the
definition of durability itself being of course subject to change over
historical time and place.
One of the major assertions of world social science is that there are
some great watersheds in the history of man. One such generally
recognized watershed, though one however studied by only a minority of
social scientists, is the so-called neolithic or agricultural revolution. The
other great watershed is the creation of the modern world.
This latter event is at the center of most contemporary social science
theory, and indeed, of the nineteenth century as well. To be sure, there is
immense debate as to what are the defining characteristics of modern
times (and hence what are its temporal boundaries). Furthermore, there is
much disagreement about the motors of this process of change. But there
seems to be widespread consensus that some great structural changes did
occur in the world in the last several hundred years, changes that make the
world of today qualitatively different from the world of yesterday. Even
those who reject evolutionist assumptions of determinate progress
nonetheless admit the difference in structures.