A work that deserves a much wider readership is her Financial Missionaries to the World (Duke, 2003.) Here Rosenberg highlights an essential theme for this blog: the crucial distinction -- in America generally and in U.S. policy both foreign and domestic -- between the public and the private. We have been discussing public goods, and we have already considered how Americans generally regard conventional diplomacy as a public good, one that often carries overtones of regret, even distaste. As Financial Missionaries to the World shows, one particular genius of U.S. foreign policy has been to relocate many of diplomacy’s activities and aims to the realm of private goods, subject to private considerations, making those aims more palatable (for some) but also removing foreign policy from democratic accountability.

The essence of the argument is this: Americans tend to make a distinction between public and private goods, more or less along the lines I have been sketching thus far: governments provide public goods, private individuals (including commercial businesses) acting in their capacities as free men and women provide and consume private goods. Americans have generally preferred a world of limited governmental authority, in which private interests, and hence freedom, can thrive (as we shall see, the reality is far more complex than this ideological sketch.) This is why many Americans maintain a strict preference for markets rather than the political world of governmental authority: the free flow of goods and services within markets is the conceptual space where freedom is manifested and flourishes, as opposed to the world of political assignations and determinations, in which authority flourishes. Public goods, we often think, limit, even consume, our freedoms.
 
We take these traditional attitudes into our pursuit of foreign policy. Foreign policy is carried out as a public good, about which we Americans are traditionally dubious. American officials for decades after the Revolution lamented having to engage in foreign diplomacy of any kind. The world of international statecraft was and is a world of authorities, pressures, and intrigues directed by regimes typically not accountable to “the people.” It is a world that generally disgusted the first several generations of American diplomats, who earned a (not always deserved) reputation in foreign courts for their alleged naivety. But they were not naive so much as they were idealistic republicans. Public statecraft, for many of these early diplomats, was often deigned a sordid world in which freedom was curtailed and individual liberty intensely threatened. International statecraft was a necessary evil for many of them, such as John Quincy Adams (ironically, one of the best practitioners of statecraft) who famously declared that the U.S. “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy,” his picturesque depiction of this tradition of diplomatic reluctance. 
 
In more recent decades, diplomacy has caused intense political dispute. Americans only very reluctantly engaged in both of the 20th century’s world wars, after infamous provocations. Even more reluctant still did Americans embrace the ongoing diplomatic commitments required by the Cold War, and then only to protect what they saw as the threat to private markets from the encroaching statism of the Soviet Union. Growing accustomed to the deployment of our public power -- whether military or economic, covert or overt – has been a function of the Cold War where, as numerous historians have shown, even in those heated days policy choices occasioned profound disagreement.

Americans, in other words, enjoy a long history of engaging diplomatically with the world only reluctantly and as a last resort. This is an ironic observation to recent generations of Americans who have grown up accustomed to deployments of American power. But for very much of our history, Americans have been highly reluctant, or at least claimed they have been reluctant, to deploy American power -- military, economic, or otherwise. We are suspicious of public goods, and for much of American history that included our diplomacy.
 
This essential distinction carries enormous implications for how Americans understand our foreign relations, compared to how outsiders understand those relations. We have battled over, and accepted only grudgingly, the extension of power abroad. But Americans have never, to any significant degree, contested their rights to extend their private interests abroad. Indeed, American policy has almost always stood unanimously behind the conviction that American producers, American farmers, American artists and engineers and technicians, American missionaries and religious zealots – the lot of us – should all, always, be free to sell our wares, to find new customers, to market our products and services and ideas abroad. Indeed, we have defined freedom itself, one of our most essential values, in terms of how open foreign realms are to our private interests. When they have not been sufficiently open – as we shall see -- public pressures have often been brought to bear to force such an opening.
 
So the argument is this: defining our influence abroad in the public/private dichotomy that is traditional to Americans has disguised American empire from Americans themselves, who have never understood their private interests to be imperial. Taking refuge in myths of American reluctance to use its (public) power unless pressed to extremes, we tend not, until very recent times, to see ourselves as willing international players at all. Private interests do not count in this ideological formulation since they are, of course, private, merely the natural outgrowth of free individuals pursuing their God-given rights, abroad as at home. Private interests are freedom itself. They cannot be imperial.
 
But the state is not the only carrier of American power and influence abroad, whatever claims Americans traditionally make about it. The extension of private interests, and the subtle and not subtle influence that those private interests exert around the world, has also been part of what American power means. We have in that way exerted influence around the world independent of our public statecraft. And we have not always been aware of how extensive those interests are, how powerful they are, and what consequences they hold for those on the receiving end. And despite all the foregoing about traditional American ideology, the fact is that Americans have rarely been reluctant to call upon the powers of the state, powers that they have augmented over the centuries, to protect and serve those private interests. Much of this, too, has been hidden.
 
I’ll be presenting lots more evidence and argumentation in the weeks to come.
 
What are your thoughts?
​
Further reading: Frank Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century (Chicago, 1999)

Frontiers, it turns out, are not really barriers at all. Rather they are spaces, conceptual as much as geographical, where the imperial and the non-imperial confront each other in dynamic admixture. Frontiers may be the place where imperial civilization encounters savage barbarism, but as Turner rightly noted, that contact produced a dialectic out of which something new was produced. These interactions were cultural and technological and commercial, and as Burbank and Cooper point out, also political and military. The empire learns not only about the outside world at the frontier, but also about itself. Frontier meetings are undoubtedly asymmetrical – both sides almost certainly do not hold equal power – but they are places of meeting where mutual influence occurs in both directions.
 
The great historian Richard White studied the places where 17th and 18th century British, British American, French, and Native American forces met. He called these places “the middle ground,” a place of meeting, a zone of interaction, where “diverse peoples adjust their differences through what amounts to a process of creative, and often expedient, misunderstandings.” From these misunderstandings “arise new meanings and through them new practices – the shared meanings and practices of the middle ground.” (x).
 
Frontiers, in other words, are neither borders nor boundaries, places where influence and action are stopped. Instead, frontiers are much more like membranes, places where some interactions are blocked but others allowed to pass. It is these selections that define the character and identity of the empire itself. Through the frontier membrane passes influence, knowledge, ideas, and, yes, often violence. Coming the other way, the empire also allows knowledge to pass back to the metropole, as well as select ideas and practices. In the era of which White writes, a period of weak imperial presence at the frontier, the capacity of the various empires to control these filtering processes was limited. By the 19th and 20th century, British and American empires, with their mighty knowledge centers and their vast propaganda capacities, practiced a much more robust discrimination.
 
Thinking about frontiers as membranes is useful because it helps us see the two very different, even contrasting, processes that occur on either side of the frontier, and why empires are still so often misunderstood in our day. Beyond the frontier, the empire is clearly a force of revision. It seeks to alter the status quo, certainly politically and economically, and therefore also culturally and ideologically. Guided by imperial ideology, empires can be, and usually are, ruthless in their pursuits of regional (or perhaps global, depending on an empire’s reach and worldview) transformation.
 
Inside the frontier, in sharp contrast, the empire is obliged to deliver on its promises of order. Outside all may be revisionary violence, but inside all is (intended to be) tranquility. Hence frontiers are often arenas of violence, as the insidious outside is kept at bay while the structures of order – institutions, processes, structures, expectations – are problematically established. Empires, in short, are both agents of revision and agents of order, and the filtering processes at the frontier demarcate and define the limits of those processes. It is this filtering that accounts, in part, for the knowledge interruptions that occur between the metropole and the frontier-lands: because metropolitan citizens are shielded from events beyond the frontier, the realities of imperial violence are often not seen, and certainly hard to believe, for imperial citizens invested in and benefitting from domestic imperial stability. It is why many Brits can enjoy a good curry in London and yet remain ignorant of the history of British violence in India. Americans’ lack of knowledge about the outside world, even as they enjoy the commercial fruits of contact with that world, are legendary. Imperial citizens, in their ignorance of imperial operations outside, may be knowledge-victims (at least of a sort) of the same frontier membrane that projects physical violence abroad.
 
Frontiers are membranes, and as such they allow some ideas and practices to pass and others not. Borders, on the other hand, are the opposite of that. Borders reflect the surrender of the revisionary mission. Borders denote those places where the empire no longer wants to conduct its essential civilizing mission. The hardening of frontiers into borders signals the end, the furthest reach, of the empire. Think Hadrian’s Wall. Whatever effectiveness it maintained against recalcitrant Britannic barbarians, the Wall certainly signaled that the Romans had had enough: enough transmission, enough reciprocity, enough convincing of divine mandates, enough expansion. It took some centuries more for the denouement to take place within Rome itself, but when the wall went up, the imperial light certainly went out.
 
One clear marker of the history of American empire, and of the sclerotizing of imperial energy, and the conversion of imperial energy to imperial fear, is the evolution of the southwest: once a frontier for the (often violent) imperial energies of a restless people, it is now being steadily converted into a border. I’ll leave it to my American readers to discern for themselves what the erection of borders and walls means for American imperial energies in lands that have historically been thought of as frontiers.
 
Frontiers are crucial components of empire. Frontiers secure the imperial citizenry, but they also articulate the imperial mission and define imperial culture. Future discussion will focus on evolving conceptions of the frontier, especially through the twentieth century as technology transformed how Americans think of spatial relations, security, and opportunity. We will also discuss stock American hero tropes, so often men and women of the frontier, such as Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Sacagawea, and more, who were able to negotiate two worlds and produce out of that negotiation a meaningful third way. Their folk celebrity is itself a celebration of American empire.
 
Further reading:
Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History (Princeton, 2010)
 
Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, 1991)

The object here is several-fold. First, the graphic aims to account for the difference between what those of us who have studied “white supremacy” mean by the term, and what those who seek to deny white supremacy a place in American life mean by the term. Many white Americans consider racism and white supremacy to be purely psychological, an affliction of the mind, an emotional expression, and an individual orientation to prejudice. This narrow view of white supremacy is expressed in the personal: the use of racial epithets, the joining of a racist organization, the maintenance of personal racist standards (“I would never let my daughter date . . .”, etc.) By reducing white supremacy to the personal, the psychological, and the individual, practitioners and beneficiaries of white supremacy can deny that there is any systemic substance to racism at all. Hence the shop-worn denial of white supremacy with the altogether inadequate defense “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.”
 
Scholars, by contrast, understand personal racism to be merely the tip of an immense, widespread, interlocking, multi-layered, and adaptive system whereby African Americans and other minorities ultimately have their labor appropriated for the benefit of an advantaged white majority. This system is complex and inventive. I stress the creative and adaptive aspects of white supremacy because as a system, it has been required to be so. That is because white supremacy runs contrary both to the U.S. Constitution (as it has evolved in jurisprudence and law) and to the traditions of equality and human rights in which many Americans have professed belief. White supremacy is a system that has emerged in lockstep with the development of American capitalism (in various historical stages) and American empire, but also in opposition to American constitutionalism, and widespread American values of equality.
 
White supremacy’s adaptability is the story of Jim Crow in law and culture after the end of Reconstruction (c. 1877). Having been denied free labor by the 13th Amendment, most states of the former Confederacy enacted various restrictive laws and ordinances meant to control black movement, limit black economic freedom and political power, and determine black laboring conditions – the so-called post-Civil War “Black Codes.” In response, the federal government passed national civil rights legislation which it sought to enforce through federal power and also black political enfranchisement in the 14th and 15th Amendments. Those protections lasted, imperfectly to be sure, through the end of Reconstruction. When federal troops and other institutions of the federal presence were withdrawn in 1877, southern states and locales re-energized their anti-black campaigns, enacting new laws, new extra-legal procedures (such as poll taxes and literacy tests), a new policing presence, and a general campaign of terror (the KKK, lynching, urban and rural violence) to impose by extra-legal means the same set of limitations on black political and economic freedoms that could, barely plausibly, be said to conform to the post-Civil War Constitutional order. South Carolina’s state Constitution of 1895, for example, disenfranchised the state’s black population; the grounds of the state capitol building currently showcase a memorial statue to one of the principal architects of that racist constitution. 

Medgar Evers is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Evers, a WWII veteran, was shot and killed by white supremacists in his own driveway in 1963, returning from a meeting in his role as NAACP field secretary. Inside the house were his wife and three children, all of whom heard the gunshot that killed their husband and father.

​We know Anne Frank, young as she was, as a thoughtful and talented diarist. Readers may not be quite as aware that she also tried her hand at short stories. One of those short stories was a fanciful tale, “Delusions of Stardom,” in which Anne’s first-person dramatis persona “Anne Franklin” strikes up a correspondence with the real-life movie star Priscilla Lane. In the story, at Priscilla’s invitation, Anne Franklin is whisked off to Hollywood for her first trip to America. She lives for two months with Priscilla, is invited to audition for films, and briefly becomes a model for a tennis equipment company. Quickly souring on endless make-up touch-ups and constrictive posing, and yearning for her family, Anne Franklin quits her contract and flies back to Amsterdam. “Delusions of Stardom” ends too abruptly, but Anne Frank’s escapism would always come back to earth with a hard crash.
 
As her diary reveals, Anne Frank fantasized about a life of glamor and freedom denied in her hiding place behind the pectin factory. On the wall in her shared bedroom in the family’s secret annex, Anne taped cut-out photos of Hollywood movie stars: Ginger Rogers, Sonja Heine, Greta Garbo, Deanna Durbin, Ray Milland, and others. The Lane Sisters were there. She had other photos as well: the Dutch and English royal families, the great German star Heinz Rühmann, and photos of models and other personalities. The stars remain on Anne’s wall to this day. One notices the preponderance of émigré beauties who had found their own liberation in America.

​Rosemary, Lola, and the youngest, the vivacious blonde Priscilla Lane are not as well known today as in their heyday in the 1940s, but for a brief time corresponding precisely to Anne Frank’s young girlhood they were as bright as any star in the Hollywood firmament. Priscilla enjoyed the longest career, and would work with the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant, and Frank Capra. She quit the business in the late forties, misused as were so many others by the unforgiving studio system. Anne Frank would not bear witness to Priscilla’s later professional disappointments.

By public goods we mean a whole range of provisions generally provided (in liberal society) by governments, at taxpayer expense, and available of access by all without market limitations. Public infrastructure such as roads, bridges, and tunnels are certainly one example. Defense, police protection, access to courts, and a monetary system constitute another category of public goods. Modern America provides other forms, such as parks (national, state, local), broadcast entertainment (e.g., PBS), or, in some communities, public pools and public beaches. Governments can and do provide access to certain knowledge bases, such as public libraries, or social, economic, and commercial statistics such as provided by various government agencies. The air traffic control system, run by the Federal Aviation Administration, provides another kind of example. The list is potentially endless.
 
Both the American political right and left have largely removed public goods from the conversation: the right, for ideological and economic reasons, has argued heatedly since the New Deal of the 1930s (which provided so much of our contemporary public goods infrastructure) that public goods are “socialistic” and in every case inferior morally and economically to private goods. This has not always been the argument of American conservatism, as Alexander Hamilton’s establishment of a banking system or the Whig Party’s championing of transportation infrastructure, such as the Erie Canal, in the 1830s-50s attests. The left, which throughout much of the 20th century has been the stalwart champion of public goods, has increasingly for the last generation or two abandoned the defense of public goods in favor of a focus on identity politics.
               
There are at least two essential arguments in favor of public goods which we’ll outline here and develop in later postings. The first is that they are almost infallibly cheaper than private goods. Public goods achieve the economies of scale that guarantee lower costs, usually of production and almost certainly of use. One publicly-financed road is much cheaper to build and operate than a chain of private roads. A community (i.e., public) pool is much, much cheaper to build and operate than a warren of smaller, private, backyard pools. Imagine the costs, to say nothing of the complexity, if each airline operated its own air traffic control system.
               
The second argument in favor of public goods is that, as the economists say, they are "non-exclusive." That is, individuals cannot be kept from their use by their position in the market. Put another, and I think better way, public goods are those goods to which citizens have access by right. It is an American’s right to use a public park, or the interstate highway, or a community pool. By contrast, few of us would argue that a citizen has a right to an automobile or a pair of jeans; the price is the mechanism by which an individual registers the strength of his or her desire for a private good to which he or she does not otherwise have a right. Again, a toll may be imposed on a public good for some reason, and in contemporary society those tolls do in fact operate as a price mechanism: if you don’t pay the entrance fee, you can’t enter Yellowstone. Still, the distinction between price and toll is an important one, especially as it concerns rights. If you have the toll – which after all is generally kept as low as possible – you cannot be denied use of a public good. In contrast, even if you have the price – which by definition is kept as high as possible—you may still be thrown out of the Apple store.
               
Nothing in the foregoing should be understood to mean that public goods produce consensus in American life. Americans have always fought over public goods. Fierce battles over infrastructure, from the Whiggish heyday to the New Deal, have defined eras in American politics, and those epic struggles have given way to even more transcendent ideological struggles in our day over public versus private goods. And throughout our history, local but no less fierce debates have occurred about what sort of public goods might be built and where they should be located. And always, always, concerns about corruption—about private contractors and their political cronies feeding at the public trough have, rightly, been at issue.
               
Nevertheless there is reason to believe that public goods might get us beyond what is by now a very stale political polarization in American politics. A return to a public goods discourse would certainly re-energize and refocus the left. It also has the potential to provide political valences, and thus consensus, with a reformed right. Public goods may not solve all our political ills. But the discussion about rights is a historic sweet spot in American politics, an idea around which many of us regardless of where we fall on the political spectrum might rally. It’s worth talking about.
 
Expect to see much more about #publicgoods on the FractalPast blog as we develop the conversation. Share your thoughts below!

By ideology I mean the more or less coherent set(s) of animating ideas that win the participation and loyalty of people whom otherwise might balk at the pursuit of empire. Ideology constitutes the patterns by which humans understand a) how the world operates and -- even more importantly perhaps -- b) how the world should be. Homo sapiens is a pattern recognizing species. As the data that barrages our senses becomes overpowering, especially in human relations and human society, ideological pattern-seeking becomes even more important. Ideology is the term we give to those mental patterns of belief that help us make sense of the streams of data that assault our senses on a constant basis. As such, ideology provides both a filter to that data, sorting out what we believe important from what we believe trivial, and a shortcut to articulating solutions in a world of overwhelming challenge. At its best, ideology helps us sort the data of the world into manageable, correct, and just categories. At its worst, ideological patterns force us into maladaptive behavior even in the face of obvious contradictions.
 
Ideology is a basic feature of humanity but is particularly important to empires. Empires differ from non-imperial states in at least one very crucial way: while nation-states generally try to accommodate themselves to an international status quo, empires assert the need or desire to change that status quo, often radically. Empires are agents of normative, even revolutionary, change in the world (more on that later), which is the point of imperial expansion. Empires assert the need to transform, restore, or in some other way alter the present course of history. In this sense, empires see themselves as trans-historical (more on empire and history later too!). Imperial ideology offers a vision of what that change should be and what might be needed to bring it into effect.
 
But imperial ideology has an additional, paradoxical, task. Ironically, even as they assert a need for international change, empires are also agents of order, peace, and stability. Order is especially crucial if empires are to deliver the economic benefits promised to the imperial citizenry. Like all ideology, imperial ideology can help to reconcile this apparent contradiction between revolutionary change and (often reactionary) stability: most empires proclaim an ideology wherein order is the fulfillment of the imperial revolutionary mission. All empires are in this regard utopian, promising a coming paradise, be it a worker’s paradise, or the banishment of human conflict (the “end of history”), the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth, the final liberation of the Germanic peoples, or any one of a number of religious, quasi-religious, or economic utopias.
 
Thus, empires style themselves as revolutionary and unchangeable at the same time. Much of the reconciliation of this paradox is accomplished through ideology, in particular notions of temporality: FIRST the barbarian must be subdued, THEN peace will ensue. It is also accomplished geographically, at the frontier: here on one side peace and order prevails, on the other all is savage chaos. One thinks immediately of classic ideological statements such as “the war to end all wars” which attempts to banish the very paradox it airs. Thus through the workings of imperial ideology geographical, political, and even historical stability are asserted even in the face of (often) revolutionary violence.
 
Scholars have examined the ideological basis of the British empire, to give one example. David Armitage identified the seeds of the great global British empire in an idea, not about maritime colonization of the western hemisphere but rather an idea about the unification of the three kingdoms: England, Scotland, and Ireland. The empire, in other words, coalesced around the idea that England, Scotland, and Wales should be united, not in a co-equal state but in a British Empire, sorted into a classic hierarchical structure. Empire would solve the disorder of contested patrimonies and divided loyalties that characterized feudalism, making order out of disorder. Later evolution of British imperial ideology would come to incorporate the maritime sphere and the idea that British commerce, with its promises of free trade and alleged open markets, brought with it liberation from local and petty economic tyrannies. Neither English lords in the earlier period nor British voters in the latter were likely to make the exertions necessary in the absence of these apparently compelling ideological arguments.
 
Imperial ideology is sometimes expressed in formal policy, but it doesn’t need to be. It may be articulated in a speech, an epic poem, or a poorly conceived jailhouse memoir. Ideology can also be carried on the winds of popular culture, especially in the democratic and technological age in which we live, infusing the tropes and stereotypes by which a people come to know themselves. Like all ideologies, imperial ideas can combine, recombine, and accelerate each other, producing an imperial consensus greater than the sum of its parts.
               
The ideology of the American empire has given recent scholarship no end of avenues of exploration. How an anti-imperial republic gave rise, in very short order, to a globe-bestriding continental empire, is just the beginning. The massive and extraordinarily costly deployment of American power – economic, military, and cultural -- throughout the twentieth century and across the globe in alleged support of democratization, free markets, individual liberty, and global cooperation – known to scholars as “liberal internationalism” or, sometimes, “Wilsonianism” – constitutes only a more recent paradox. That so many Americans see no paradox there whatsoever is testimony to the seductive power of ideology at work.
 
Further reading: David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000)

Emblematic gadgetry is an essential part of our pop culture. Who is James Bond without his beloved DB5? My mind’s eye still sees the iconic shape of Captain Kirk’s Enterprise as a holy relic. The Lone Ranger's silver bullets, Speed Racer's Mach 5, Marty McFly's DeLorean, the list is endless. Superheroes, especially, are often defined by their heraldic accoutrements, from Superman’s cape, to Wonder Woman's golden lasso, to Thor’s hammer. Captain America’s shield is a particularly important entry in this catalog. The late rise in popularity of the character as a result of the Marvel movie franchise (the character has been in existence since the 1940s) at a time of profound uncertainty over the fate and role of the American empire strikes me as highly significant.

Captain America was born punching Hitler, and his decades-long career fighting international baddies both parallels and symbolizes the reach of American global power. That the star-spangled Captain America – his costume quite literally the American flag -- is an allegorical stand-in for American power and leadership in the postwar world is obvious. It is his peculiar choice of weaponry, however, that commands attention.

Accounting for the full range of economic activities, throughout history, and especially given modern corporate arrangements with their multi-national identities and complicated public-private relationships, is beyond the scope of one blog post. But we can note two stable dimensions of every empire’s political economy: their essential balance-sheet raison d'être and their differentiated social base.
 
Empires often appear to be enterprises of military conquest, and their broad catalog of violence rightfully attracts condemnation. But in fact empires are, at heart, economic activities. Their primary function is to produce economic benefits that flow into the metropolitan core. Empires exist to enhance, increase, or accelerate access to goods and services for imperial citizens. There are multiple means to accomplish this end including conquest and theft, political incorporation of one sort or another (e.g., colonization), or imposed or negotiated trade, rent, or arbitrage arrangements.
 
Like any well-run business, an empire seeks to maximize profits and minimize costs. The cost of war and military excursions are extraordinarily high. Thus, and contrary to what many critics of empire assert, empires do not habitually and casually engage in military adventurism. They can miscalculate, of course, and in many circumstances may deploy military force with murderous intent. But such deployments are very often the last resort, not the first. British forces were often as not sent in force to a region as a contingent response to a deteriorating imperial situation, not as an advance guard; read about Gordon in Khartoum, for instance. American military advisers in Vietnam were not the initial deployments of an inevitable military escalation. They were deployed in the hopes that they would be the last military intervention needed. The subjugation of Native Americans took many decades not because it wasn’t ruthless (indeed, it was) but because it was haphazard; policymakers first pursued the less costly alternatives (so it was thought) of relocation or cultural subjugation. When full-on military conquest was pursued, even that was piecemeal. We misunderstand empires (and their domestic support) when we suppose that their primary calling card in the world is military conquest. On the contrary, empires are always done on the cheap.
 
To achieve the economies of scale empires seek, a primary goal of imperial economics is to displace or dilute costs, to offload the bearing of costs to others. Hence empire always requires a subservient class, perhaps domestically and certainly internationally. Hence the near-universal reliance on some sort of slave or quasi-slave laboring class at home and abroad: Athenian helots, Roman slaves, Ottoman Janissaries, Spain’s New World “Indians,” colonized plantation workers across time and space. The domestic underclass will generally be typed and understood as foreign regardless of its location, as not quite the human measure of the dominant class, or as connected to the foreign periphery rather than to the nation. This has implications for imperial citizenship and the production of belonging which is one of the empire’s primary benefits. A subjugated class so defined in law and culture displaces costs to the periphery and concentrates benefits at the metropole. Subjugated classes usually have little or no political voice. The social structure of empire thus works to proliferate support for empire.
 
Another way to lower costs is to pursue economies of scale. Increasing the scope of the empire’s range and interests will generally lower unit costs: more sugar plantations means lower sugar costs for coffee drinkers back home. But economies of scale are also achieved within imperial society. That is, all empires rest on a foundation of a highly differentiated, specialized, and expert social base at home. Whether capitalist or not, a necessary foundation for empire is a dynamic and differentiated metropolitan society.
 
Diversification of function is crucial, because only an array of competencies can provide both the interest and the administrative functionality on which all imperial activity rests. Michael Doyle has made the crucial observation that an empire is the transnational extension of domestic life. For this extension to occur, agents and interlocutors, commercial and military actors, administrative and legal functionaries, and much more, are necessary. These are the commercial and trading people that forge overseas political and commercial links, and the lawyers, accountants, middlemen, shippers, insurance agents, and so forth, that structure those connections. This is as true of ancient Athens as it was true of the modern British empire. States that are largely or exclusively agricultural are unlikely to have the array of expertise and interest on which empire rests, and unlikely as well to provide the governing apparatus necessary to imperial activity.
 
The differentiated social base is a part of the political economy of empire and does several important things for it. First, a differentiated social base means lots of different economic interests are at stake in any given foreign policy question, increasing the potential scope of support for imperial activity. Think of the merchants, shipbuilders, sailors, slave traders, insurance agents, plantation owners, middlemen, warehouse operators, retailers, and consumers, and their associated political representation, to name only a few groups involved in the British sugar industry alone. This wide diversity of interest also provides enormous problem-solving and creative leverage potential. As we will see later, the seemingly infinite range of private American interests has given the American empire unrivaled scope to address the endless challenges it faces abroad.
 
Because many types of labor are displaced by the empire to the periphery, intellectual and administrative talent can develop within the metropole. More functionality is achieved at lower cost. Hence specialization at the metropole is crucially important. A kind of virtuous cycle sets in motion, with a differentiated social base giving rise to imperial expansion, which then necessitates further refinement of function and expertise. Circuits of knowledge and practice are established, requiring yet further administrative and managerial attention. This further differentiation offers additional interest and pathways for expansion, and so on. Doyle refers to this, in a nod to the historical development of Roman administrative efficiency, as the “Augustan threshold,” when the interest group penetration of the state has proceeded far enough that the economic interests of the state become institutionalized, regularized, and extended throughout the empire so that imperial administration becomes self-sustaining across the empire – for a time.
 
The search for a positive balance-sheet and the diverse social basis of empire: we’ll get a lot of mileage out of those two basic political-economic facts of empire. To maximize benefits along a stratified social hierarchy that generates the interest, produces the expertise, and conducts the work of empire, this is the basic political economy of empire. The tactics of empire – how benefits are to be won and costs displaced – is a topic for subsequent posts, and these tactics constitute a realm of particular genius for the American people. More coming.
 
Further reading: Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Cornell, 1986)