Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yet Spanish patriots extol the Numantians in Spanish – a romance language that is a progeny of Scipio’s Latin. The Numantians spoke a now dead and lost Celtic language. Cervantes wrote The Siege of Numantia in Latin script, and the play follows Graeco-Roman artistic models. Numantia had no theatres. Spanish patriots who admire Numantian heroism tend also to be loyal followers of the Roman Catholic Church – don’t miss that first word – a church whose leader still sits in Rome and whose God prefers to be addressed in Latin. Similarly, modern Spanish law derives from Roman law; Spanish politics is built on Roman foundations; and Spanish cuisine and architecture owe a far greater debt to Roman legacies than to those of the Celts of Iberia. Nothing is really left of Numantia save ruins. Even its story has reached us thanks only to the writings of Roman historians. It was tailored to the tastes of Roman audiences which relished tales of freedom-loving barbarians. The victory of Rome over Numantia was so complete that the victors co-opted the very memory of the vanquished.

It’s not our kind of story. We like to see underdogs win. But there is no justice in history. Most past cultures have sooner or later fallen prey to the armies of some ruthless empire, which have consigned them to oblivion. Empires, too, ultimately fall, but they tend to leave behind rich and enduring legacies. Almost all people in the twenty-first century are the offspring of one empire or another.

What is an Empire?

An empire is a political order with two important characteristics. First, to qualify for that designation you have to rule over a significant number of distinct peoples, each possessing a different cultural identity and a separate territory. How many peoples exactly? Two or three is not sufficient. Twenty or thirty is plenty. The imperial threshold passes somewhere in between.

Second, empires are characterised by flexible borders and a potentially unlimited appetite. They can swallow and digest more and more nations and territories without altering their basic structure or identity. The British state of today has fairly clear borders that cannot be exceeded without altering the fundamental structure and identity of the state. A century ago almost any place on earth could have become part of the British Empire.

Cultural diversity and territorial flexibility give empires not only their unique character, but also their central role in history. It’s thanks to these two characteristics that empires have managed to unite diverse ethnic groups and ecological zones under a single political umbrella, thereby fusing together larger and larger segments of the human species and of planet Earth.

It should be stressed that an empire is defined solely by its cultural diversity and flexible borders, rather than by its origins, its form of government, its territorial extent, or the size of its population. An empire need not emerge from military conquest. The Athenian Empire began its life as a voluntary league, and the Habsburg Empire was born in wedlock, cobbled together by a string of shrewd marriage alliances. Nor must an empire be ruled by an autocratic emperor. The British Empire, the largest empire in history, was ruled by a democracy. Other democratic (or at least republican) empires have included the modern Dutch, French, Belgian and American empires, as well as the premodern empires of Novgorod, Rome, Carthage and Athens.

Size, too, does not really matter. Empires can be puny. The Athenian Empire at its zenith was much smaller in size and population than today’s Greece. The Aztec Empire was smaller than today’s Mexico. Both were nevertheless empires, whereas modern Greece and modern Mexico are not, because the former gradually subdued dozens and even hundreds of different polities while the latter have not. Athens lorded it over more than a hundred formerly independent city states, whereas the Aztec Empire, if we can trust its taxation records, ruled 371 different tribes and peoples.¹

How was it possible to squeeze such a human potpourri into the territory of a modest modern state? It was possible because in the past there were many more distinct peoples in the world, each of which had a smaller population and occupied less territory than today’s typical people. The land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, which today struggles to satisfy the ambitions of just two peoples, easily accommodated in biblical times dozens of nations, tribes, petty kingdoms and city states.

Empires were one of the main reasons for the drastic reduction in human diversity. The imperial steamroller gradually obliterated the unique characteristics of numerous peoples (such as the Numantians), forging out of them new and much larger groups.

Evil Empires?

In our time, ‘imperialist’ ranks second only to ‘fascist’ in the lexicon of political swear words. The contemporary critique of empires commonly takes two forms: