EMPIRES

Though empire resists definition, it is possible to profile typical cases. Not all empires are large, but they tend to be conspicuous for scale, and bigger than other states of their day. Not all include different ethnicities, but there should be more than one historically distinct community in every empire. Not all are formed by conquest, but some measure of coercion is typical. Not all have strong governments or transcendent identities, but there is always a focus of allegiance or of claims to allegiance. Many states conform to the type without attracting the name: India, Brazil, the United Kingdom and Israel have all been proposed for inclusion without the usage really taking hold. But the typology does not have to be universally applied to hold good in qualifying cases. Thanks to historians who have tried to think about empires in general, the great lessons of imperial historiography of the past fifty or sixty years have been that empires can be studied conspectually or comparatively with advantage; and in all of them indigenous peoples are participants whose stories have to be included if we are to understand what went on. Clarke and Macquarrie have missed those lessons entirely.
On the face of it, the empires they have selected for study look disparate. The Incas’ Tawantinsuyu occupied contiguous territories in a relatively small part of a single continent for a brief spell in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, with rudimentary military technology – no wheels, no iron or steel, no cavalry, no mechanization, not even anything we normally class as writing for purposes of communication. The British Empire was a vast, globally sprawling hotchpotch, created with advantages of industrialization: rifles and machine guns, railways, steamships, longitude-finding mechanisms, mass-produced medicines, canned food, and the sort of tropical kit you used to be able to buy in Piccadilly or the Turl.
Yet as empire-builders the British and the Inca had surprising similarities. Both were relatively small peoples, starting from places considered marginal in their respective worlds. Both found ways of compensating for their deficiencies in numbers by mobilizing subject peoples and collaborationist elites on their behalf. Both used political muscle to create networks of exchange of goods across vast distances. Both created what were, in their days, probably the most ecologically diverse empires in the world, embracing just about every habitable environment – from ice to torrid forest and from arid desert to bog and swamp. Both succumbed in large part because of the disruptive effects of unanticipated foreign invaders: Spaniards in the Inca case, Japanese in that of the British.