Empires and Their Public Goods

Public goods and services are in the news these days, as President Trump and Elon Musk continue their efforts to dismantle American civil society. The administration’s strangulation of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) shines a light on the connection between public goods and empire. What do public goods have to do with empire? A LOT, it turns out. 

Surface of a Roman road, still useful after all these centuries.

Public goods, of course, are something of a signature for empires. We’ve already considered China’s Great Wall(s) or the Roman Legions, both of which served obvious functions in imperial expansion. But there is much more to the story of public goods than armies and defensive works, a story that will develop and be enriched after the turn to modernity.

Ancient and medieval empires provided currency, military protection, religious rituals, some form of justice, and other social and cultural structures. Today we would not perhaps recognize all of these as net positives, but they identified who belonged, gave structure and purpose to citizens’ lives, and offered certain forms of recourse to at least some imperial citizens. Later polities would liberalize such political and social structures, but in their day many peoples—both imperial and non-imperial citizens—considered the provisions of empire as suitable, and in some instances as better than what they enjoyed outside of the empire.

Consider the famed Roman road network. Public roads were vitally important to Rome, at least as important, and in many ways MORE important, than legions or emperors or even Latin itself. The Roman roads defined the empire by right and citizenship. The roads extended the physical geography of the empire, making the farthest reaches of the empire not merely accessible for tactical and logistical purposes, but making the far-flung edges of the empire truly Roman. Because of the roads, the edges of the empire were as Roman as the very heart of the city of Rome itself; roads extended Rome without dissipating Rome. The edge became the same as the center. And by extending Rome, Roman roads incorporated space into Rome and into Roman-ness. Thanks to the road network, space became not merely accessible (important enough), but ordered, secure, and stable. The unknown became knowable. The roads defined one side of the frontier as secure and knowable, from the other side of the frontier, which was unsecure and dangerous. Safety, status, and most of all, right are conferred and defined by the road. The Roman roads made the empire in fundamental ways, their decline and erosion a sure sign of the empire’s irreversible dissipation (How Do You Know if You’re Living Through the Death of an Empire? – Mother Jones).

​As with roads, so with all public goods conferred by empires. This is one of the key factors that makes empire so attractive: it provides, and defends, public goods. Security is one of the great goods provided by the metropole, whether Roman legions against marauding barbarians or U.S. Cavalry troops providing security and cover for land grabs from Native Americans. Control of slave, serf, or coolie labor is another key imperial contribution.  But there are also other, more benign, imperial goods on offer: Law, justice, services, infrastructure, a financial system, education, access to knowledge and technology, legal sanction of private enterprise(s): these are the hallmarks of modern empire, more or less. Imperial citizenship is one such public good: assault an imperial citizen anywhere within the empire, and one insults the empire itself. Public goods extend right and identity, they do not merely extend convenience. Because not all public goods are fully available to all residents of the empire, they help to define who belongs and to what degree. When public goods dry up, erode, or dissipate into private hands, so too does the right associated with those public goods.

The modern empires, notably Britain and the U.S., extended public goods beyond their own frontiers, certainly beyond their own borders. This problematized the promise of rights contained within public goods. The British free trade empire, and then certainly the American 20th century empire, made the free flow of commerce a central mission. In support of that mission, maritime security, juridical cover, and the promise of military protection vouchsafed the free trade held to not only promote, but convey, democracy and democratic right. Whether the UK or the USA would in any given circumstance extend that military protection to enforce the right vouchsafed by the public good was open to contingency, including realpolitik. But the promise of right contained within a proffered public good was certainly implicit. The U.S. made that connection vital and foundational.
Many Americans have come to regard markets as self-perpetuating and self-establishing phenomena. That belief is both economically nonsensical and historically illiterate. Markets are opened, usually or often by force. It was the UK’s “free trade imperialism” of the 19th century that first began to open, then knit together, what we now consider global markets. Military power—an obvious public good— is required to break local monopolistic practices and preferences, to safeguard trade routes that make markets relevant, and establish justice systems whereby contracts can be enforced and disputes resolved. Without the public goods provisioned by state power, “free enterprise” as we know it is simply impossible.

All empires extend public goods, in keeping with their identities and sense of mission. The British empire of the mid-19th century, the era of so-called “free trade imperialism,” provided naval protection and legal protections and recourse. The Americans in the 20th century offered much the same. Often called “hegemony” (more on that later), the American empire provided global public goods in the form of the dollar, as a reserve currency, making increased global trade possible; naval protection for maritime trade routes; and—not unproblematically—at least a veneer of adherence to international law that offered some scaffolding of international order. American hegemony offered other public goods as well, including a voracious domestic consumer economy to fuel global manufacturing, an apparently secure investment landscape into which to park foreign capital, and of course military security to allies ensconced within its orbit and system. The US empire provided intelligence and law enforcement support and cooperation, international aid (USAID!), education, technical assistance, and medical support. It provided scientific and research infrastructure, and higher education for many tens of thousands of foreign nationals. The Americans drove international cooperation on civil aviation, to allow national networks to connect to each other in an increasingly global network. That many foreign actors came to view some or all of these provisions as “rights” problematized America’s role in the world, but also secured that role.

The Americans, in fact, made themselves the center of a vast and sprawling international system—imperfect to be sure, often racist, generally overly militarized, and always too parsimonious—but a system nevertheless. It is in fact this role, this system, and these public goods to which the Trump administration has begun to take not a scalpel but a wrecking ball. The downstream consequences of this great unbuilding of what took generations of Americans decades to build are very much unforeseen at the moment but they are likely to be catastrophic.

​None of this is to say that private goods or actors played no role in empire-building. Nothing could be further from the truth, as the modern empires so ably attest. The great Dutch empire of the 17th and 18th century was almost entirely a private enterprise, to cite just one prominent example. The argument presented here is simply a counter to what has become an article of faith among early 21st century Americans: that public goods, public spheres, and public actors are of necessity a malignant or destructive force. Such is surely not the case, and I’ll be elaborating the point at greater length and in different directions later.