Ep 160: Thomas Barfield on Empire and Imperial Strategies Today

Thomas Barfield, Professor and Chairman of the Anthropology Department at Boston University and author of Shadow Empires: An Alternative Imperial History

Aaron MacLean:

I'm very excited about today's episode, which draws together themes of geopolitics, political analysis, history, conquest in a way that I hope is becoming a signature of School of War. When I got back from Afghanistan some years ago and started the process of trying to understand what I had just participated in, there was one author who more than anyone, seem to understand how Afghan politics actually worked. That's Thomas Barfield. He's joining today and we'll talk about Afghanistan, but also about his new book, which is on the nature of Empire and the extremely potent strategic legacy that empires have left behind. Let's get into it.

SpeAaron MacLean:

For more follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter @AaronBMacLean. Hi, I'm Aaron MacLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm going to do something now that I don't normally do here on the show. With your permission, I'm going to make a case for something. I think it may be of interest to some listeners out there. A main reason I started this show is because the study of military and diplomatic history of statecraft is clearly in decline on the American University campus. So, I'm really happy to share a neat opportunity for college students and young professionals who listen to School of War.

The Hertog Security Studies Program, a summer fellowship that I'll be leading next year in Washington D.C. It's a four-week program, it's by the Hertog Foundation. I'll kick things off in week one, I'll be joined by Mike Gallagher for a seminar on geopolitics. We'll be followed by General Frank McKenzie, who will teach for a week on political military affairs, that's the former commander of CENTCOM. He'll be followed by Vance Serchuk, who will teach for a week on U.S.-Russia relations. Vance is brilliant to former senate aide with long experience in these issues.

And then the final week will be led by Dan Blumenthal, who's been on the show numerous times. He's a China expert and will be leading a class on China. You can apply for the full four-week fellowship and be recognized as a grand strategy fellow, gain a comprehensive understanding of US national security. Or you can apply for individual one-Week seminars to tailor the experience to your schedule. So, no matter the path you choose, you'll hear from top policymakers and experts.

Past guest lecturers have included folks like Senator Tom Cotton, Jackie Deal, and Victor Davis Hanson. Applications are now open at hertogfoundation.org. That's H-E-R-T-O-G foundation.org. Again, this program is for college students and young professionals, so people very near the start of their careers. Maybe that's you, maybe it's a young person, and in that case, I'd be grateful if you flagged it for them. Whether you're passionate about geopolitics or history or strategy, I think this program is a really incredible opportunity to deepen your understanding of those issues and connect with leaders in the field.

Please join me next summer for the Hertog Security Studies Program.

Today I'm delighted to welcome to the show, Tom Barfield. He's the author most recently of Shadow Empires, An Alternative Imperial History. He is professor of Anthropology at Boston University. He's the author of other books and many, many articles, and I have to say it's a great honor to meet you and interview you because your book on Afghanistan, which came out must be what? A little over a decade ago now, something like that, was extraordinarily influential to me in helping me process what I had experienced and learned, known but not understood when I was in Afghanistan.

And really helped me learn about politics at a deeper level than I think I had before reading that book. So, it's an honor to have you on the show and thank you so much for making the time.

Thomas Barfield:

Thank you. And I should say that a second edition of the book, originally came out in 2010. I brought it up today to the fall of the government, came out about a year ago. So, a second edition ends the American experience in Afghanistan.

Aaron MacLean:

Excellent. I need to read that and I strongly, strongly recommend it to listeners. As I do this most recent book on imperialism and the complicated nature of imperialism, which we can get into now. Your argument begins with a paradigm case of what empire is often understood to be a base case in which you would put places like the Chinese Empire, the Persian Empire, the Roman Empire, and you call these endogenous empires, but there's variation even within them. So, maybe if you wouldn't mind starting by just telling us about, well, I guess let's say even before that, tell us about how you started thinking about all this and thinking about empire.

And then there's a point that you make in your Afghanistan book that taught me a great deal about Afghanistan, this comparison of American cheese governance and Swiss cheese governance that then becomes important in your understanding of the base case of empires in the new book. Please walk us through your thinking.

Thomas Barfield:

Let me back that up again. I had actually more than 20 years ago, was invited to a conference at the Winter Grand Foundation did on comparative empires, mostly archeologists and historians. And with all of these cases that immediately became clear that some of the cases fit really easily China, Persia, Rome. But what about ones that I did nomadic empires in China, or could you really call the Carolingian Empire anywhere near during Rome? And so, I realized that perhaps one of the problems is that by putting everything into one box and calling it an empire, we were creating problems for ourselves.

I was intending to get back to that, but the United States went back into Afghanistan just after that work was published and I spent more or less the next 20 years working on Afghanistan. Got back to empires more recently and made a distinction, we call it endogenous empires. These are sui generis, they arise on their own with the most important distinction about them is they survive on their own resources. The bigger they are, the bigger their resource space. So, we see them start in the center, they expand, but as you implied, there are some big differences because if we look at what we consider to be classic empires. Well, let's take China and Persia.

Persia is actually the oldest, well, 5 million square kilometers, both maybe 40, 50 million people. But the way you think about government was entirely different. The Persians started first and familiar with Afghanistan or Persia or Central Asia. What you can remember is there's pieces of population, dense populations, irrigated areas, and then mountains, deserts and stuff. So, it's like an archipelago really of islands of culturing population. China's very different, high population, spread out all over the map, but relatively consistently. So, when the Persians had to create an empire, they did what I call the Swiss cheese mob.

It is most of the territory that they ruled was not worth ruling, mountains deserts, and they just decided to focus on the cheese and not the holes. And the essence of a Persian empire is to delegate authorities. That's why the first Persian empire emperor is called the king of kings, which implies their subordinate kings. And these were often people that represented the local culture, the local political structure and the deal was you let them rule their own people using more or less their own tools, as long as they were loyal to the empire, they paid their taxes. That's one variety of a decentralized empire.

China was just the opposite. If you look at the beginning of this with the Qin dynasty, its ruler was all under heaven and no subordinate rulers, no king of kings, there's only one king and he's an emperor. And you send out bureaucrats, you send out foreigners to rule, but you don't want people to rule their own lands. So, I call that the American cheese model, that if you look at the map, a hole is a defect, it must be corrected. So, even though they're famous empires, what they believe is necessary to run such an empire is almost entirely different, and that affects their politics.

So yes, they're empires, they're both endogenous empires that arose in their own areas, set the templates for that part of the world and rely on internal resources. How they chose to do that was diametrically opposed. When I talked about Rome, Rome started out in a Persian kind of agglomeration of different pieces brought together. By the time of the emperor strictly in second, third century AD, it's very Chinese-like in which there are no more autonomous kings, it's all provinces, everything is ruled directly. So, Rome is an interesting example of we see a transition and one of the difficulties that we, or I speak for myself as a Westerner is we start with Rome, which is a very messy case. And the clearer examples are either China or Persia.

Aaron MacLean:

Right. And just to bring this to Afghanistan for a minute, though, it's not my purpose to spend the whole hour talking about Afghanistan. But I think the American experience in Afghanistan is one of showing up and just assuming that all politics is American cheese. And this is something you, I mean you certainly taught me the language to think of intuited this, but incoherently while I was there, I couldn't have explained it until I read your book. But if you think there's one guy shoots another guy just on the Afghanistan side of the Afghan-Pakistan border.

It is simply the American assumption that there's going to be an Afghan police officer of some sort who's going to take an interest in this crime and solve it or try to solve it, there'll be a process. And if there isn't a process, well this is a failing state, but that's not historically how Afghans-

Thomas Barfield:

It is not a historically state and that's also because not only do successful empires in Afghanistan rule, the 12% of Afghanistan as most of the population irrigate agriculture and deal with those frontier peoples differently. Even the British did that on the Northwest frontier and they had the most powerful empire in the world. But also teach a little bit of political science and I try to explain it to people that Afghan rulers, the people that we deal with are Hobbesy. So, they say, "You must help us create the Leviathan one rule, the eye of Mordor over everything."

And the tribal people that we deal with are Lockeans. They believe government is a [inaudible 00:10:36], okay? And it can be done away with it when it's not fit to serve. So, you have two diametrically opposed views of what politics is, one from the capital Hobbesian help us build the Leviathan. And the other Lockean is if governments don't serve the purpose, you have the right to replace the ruler or change the whole system. And as the British first noticed when they went in there, there's been a discrepancy in the understanding of government, which has led to no ends of problems in Afghanistan.

It turns out that those regimes that have foreign backing do their best to make the foreigners create a Leviathan, which is indigestible at the liberal level. So again, when I'm looking for these models, and some of these things are actually quite old in political science, but we often don't apply them. Where in one model something is a failure and another thing, it's a feature, not a bug.

Aaron MacLean:

Right. And in the Rome example, I always took this to be the upshot to make reference to another book that has been important to my education, but Edward Luttwak's grand strategy of the Roman Empire. I always took one upshot of his argument to be that actually the transition from Swiss cheese to American cheese, that is to say the transition from this complex diplomacy of the Augustan age where you're propping up kings who appear to their own people as sovereign, but they know they owe their sovereignty to Rome and everything. It was a very complicated system, but a cheaper system and a flexible system.

You can lose a bit and gain a bit, and it's not a threat to your legitimacy that actually the transition to annexation, direct rule, bureaucracy, and borders. Borders is look Luttwak's big thing that that's more expensive, more militarily demanding and brittle. Once you destabilize one part of it, you're calling into question the whole, right?

Thomas Barfield:

No, you create a front line that has to be defended. If you look at the way the Persians could lose all of Central Asia periodically, and maybe they get it back, maybe they wouldn't, their heart was still [inaudible 00:12:38]. Both the Romans and the Chinese came up with this eventually, the Chinese early, the Romans later a fixed frontier which must be defended. But what it means is that if frontier is breached, the cost of that can bring down the entire central government because you put more and more resources on the frontiers. And the early Roman periods is what we see is all of those client kingdoms were between them and the Persians.

So, if the Persians began moving towards Syria or Anatolia, it was your client kings that were taking the brunt of it. And you had deniability, maybe we'll take it back maybe we won't. Once it becomes Roman, you've got to defend it, same thing with the Germanic tribes or along the Danube. But the problem is that leaders of empires, except for the Persians, tend to aspire to the Chinese model. That's what a real empire is. If you don't control the farthest margins, you're a failure. Our constant talk about failed states doesn't ask, "Well, what does a state do and who is it failing? Is it failing the people who are running it or is it failing the people that experience it?"

Aaron MacLean:

Right. This is a great Patricia Crone line about pre-modern politics that the shepherd exists for his flock to protect them indeed, but only to fleece them. Which is another thing that I think Americans, I speak for myself here, Americans, that's not how we learn about politics, that's not what we understand politics as [inaudible 00:14:08]-

Thomas Barfield:

We have cultural templates. And the difficulty of cultural templates, the Chinese certainly have this because they do not understand how the nomads could be so powerful is because they have all of the information but everything is seen as an exception. Or a problem that can be solved when if it was looked differently, you would realize and very often implicitly, even in China, they discover actually when we pay the nomads to guard the frontier. The Romans began doing that in the late western periods as well.

It's not a great strategy if your empire is losing at the center, but it actually reverts back to the earlier period of why do we have to make everybody enemies where we can make half of them allies. They might not necessarily be our friends, but we share similar interests.

Aaron MacLean:

So, with all that said about the options or variations that exist within maybe politics very broadly, but certainly empire more narrowly and endogenous empire specifically. I want to get to actually the main part of your argument, which is not endogenous empires like Persia or China, but other kinds of empires, which your book title dramatically describes as Shadow Empires, nice literary flair, and then you have a more technical term, exogenous-

Thomas Barfield:

Exogenous.

Aaron MacLean:

... empires. Yes.

Thomas Barfield:

Two things that are different. They come into existence as a result of interaction with other empires. It's if you don't want to be eaten, become one yourself, but you've got to become one of a different size or a different shape or a different structure. And so, they come into existence usually as the result of a military challenge by an empire, but they support themselves not by taxing their own people directly or agricultural productions, their resources are external. And so, if we look at the nomads in China, China unifies, they go after the nomads, the nomads are defeated, the nomads get themselves together internally.

Well, how do you unite a million nomads that are scattered over close to 2000 miles? One of the ways to do it is say, "As now we're together, why don't we raid China? Very popular, it's an enemy, you got to bring stuff home." But then you go to the Chinese and say, "If you would not prefer to be raided, you would just send us the stuff and save us both a lot of trouble." And diplomats in China quickly realized that, yeah, it's cheaper to pay these guys off. Now, appeasement has a very bad reputation in modern political science, but that's always the assumption is if you appease somebody, you're just building them up so that they can take you over.

What they forget is there are certain polities whose raison d'etre is to be appeased. And the thing about the nomads is they never attempted to conquer China, they attempted to extort it. The one time that extortion failed and they ended up conquering China again, it was the Mongol Empire, which was huge. But they started out as, I wouldn't say a start-up extortionist that became a Google sized monopoly and you have to run it a little bit differently. But there's other ways, the nomads have horse cavalry, they had archery. So, even though there weren't many of them, they had military parity with China, but they never had to defend any Chinese land.

So, they were famous, even the ancient Scythians are famous when attacked, they would run away. And both the Persians and the Chinese said, "These people have no honor. Whenever they lose or think they're going to lose, they run away. When they think they're going to win, they attack." And their thing is, that's not cheating that's our advantage. And it is, but there are other shadow empires like when the Persians went after the Greeks. That's not horse calvary, this is a couple of centuries before that, it's maritime empires.

The Athenians created a maritime empire based on an alliance turned into an empire. But it is a question of dominating the seas, and that requires relatively small military force compared to creating an endogenous empire. But it comes into existence essentially because the Persians invade and the Greeks unite in order to at least the Athenians, unite the Greeks to do this. But it creates a different kind of empire, one that it call a maritime empire. So, there's whole sets of these shadow empires that you can see them coming to existence.

But if you were to compare Mongolia with Greece, you would say, "Oh, they have nothing in common." Like one's sea, one's land, one's literate, one's illiterate. But in terms of structure, because the Athenians got their resources largely by dominating the trade system, not by dominating the people who produce the stuff. And the nomads in Mongolia were successful because they extorted, oh, this is maybe 100 B.C. or thereabouts, or maybe it's 100 AD I think that one third of China's revenue went to the guys on the frontier, it was just enormous. But from the empire's point of view was a good payoff.

The Byzantines did the same thing to the Huns. When Attila begins ravaging all in the area around Constantinople, they send them literally a ton of gold. But if you check that was cheaper than trying to fight Attila, and Attila wanted the gold. He didn't want to be the emperor of Constantinople, he was following this nomad thing of what I call the terroristic outer frontier strategy. Scare your opponent so badly that he will treat you as an equal, even though they're saying, "Who are these people? Couple 100,000 nomads, how can they stand up to people like us?"

And after a few interactions with them, it doesn't matter what you think about how do we get rid of them. And we get this symbiotic relationship that takes place, and actually in China, it becomes a dependency relationship because as a dynasty declines, the last people to defend it are the nomads because they're being paid, they don't want to see the dynasty fall. They'll actually send in troops to put down the Chinese peasant rebellion, that's something that Chinese history tends not to recognize. But you can see that why is it the nomads, since they were the historic enemies, why were they the last loyalists? It's because they've been paid for so long and paid so well. You get Chinese warlords, they don't pay.

Aaron MacLean:

One of the striking things about your account and the way you impose your account is the longevity of these models, how the strategy is available again and again over a span of literally millennia. And in a attenuated way even today, which we can get to. There are other types that we should talk about but sticking with nomadic steppe empires and maritime empires is two key cases. The steppe empires being forms of that continue well into the second millennium AD. And then you could argue, the British Empire doesn't fall until the Cold War. Now, it transforms as you point out into an endogenous empire of its own.

Maybe that's an interesting case to talk about. Maybe we can stick with the Brits for a minute. What do the Brits have in common with the Athenians after all those years? And then how does it change for the Brits?

Thomas Barfield:

They don't have as much in common except for their dependence on maritime empires. But the other thing, interestingly enough, with the exception of Portugal, every maritime empire is some kind of democracy or republic, no autocrats. So, the thing about a maritime empire is its military, it's elite. It's designed to economically serve, not a single ruler but an economic class. So, you don't want a powerful king or a ruler in a maritime empire because he'll look at all that merchant wealth and say, "Why isn't it mine?" That's what Chinese emperors too, cost of it. And that's true of the Athenians, the Athenians have a democracy.

So, who ever leading it has to support, give benefits to the people that are keeping the power? What I didn't realize, Carthage is also a republic. The famous Venetian Republic, the Dutch republic, the English have a parliamentary system. The Portuguese are the only kings, but it's a merchant kind of king. So, what we find is the British actually are gaining power by control of the maritime trade going to India. But until the early 18th century, they only have three little ports in India and they're vassals of the Mughal emperor.

But as the Mughal Empire begins to fall apart and they seize Bengal and become the rulers of that, they now have to administer directly. They are taxing the people of Bengal, the East India Company, as Edmund Burke put it was born in trade and ended in empires. It's because the British and the Dutch actually created their imperialism by privatizing the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company, both for around 1600 are private companies that are power to act like states. And the British East India Company does not lose its legal control of India till 1858 after the Seaport rebellion.

That before that actually India is not part of the British Empire, it's part of the East India Company. But what happens is the more land, the more prices that the British control, they begin have to rule like a regular endogenous empire. Their income is not coming so much from trade anymore as it is taxation, but they never lose. And this is similar to the Athenians, is that maritime empires like to work through continued years. So, when they capture a princely state, they put the prince back in charge now subject to the British, which is why when the British left, there were all these little princely states.

They like to work through intermediaries because what they want to do is they want to control the money. So, even if we look at the China trade, why does Britain go to war with China? The Opium Wars, when Britain wins the Opium War, we do not see them like beginning to conquer Southern China. All they keep is like Hong Kong, just the trading rights because their fortune is exploiting the drug economy that they are facilitating in China not wanting to rule it. And what I argue is that maritime emperors don't really want to rule, and with the exception of Britain, none of them did.

But Britain, partially because of what was happening in India domestically, take it over. Once they do, they have to rule, they have to create a Raj, they have to create a real government, but they never lose their maritime bias towards indirect rule, towards money comes first. That's entirely different than an endogenous empire. So, it's possible and indeed, almost all my shadow empires at one point not only become endogenous empires, they become the world's largest endogenous empires.

The British, the Muslim Caliphate, the Mongol Empire, all of these start out as shadow empires. And indeed, so does Russia and so does the Manchu rural China that divide Eurasia between them all start out as shadow empires. By the time most of us pay any attention to them and say, "Well, they just regular run empires." But if you look at how they run the Manchus, do not run them the same way Ethnicon Chinese do. And the way the Russians run their empire is entirely different than what Europeans are used to or how the British would run a colonial empire.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, let's talk about some of those cases then. You described in a little bit of detail just now the process by which, what's the famous joke, which doesn't seem to be all that true, but is a sort of a fit of absence of mind, is that silly? But the British slowly at least do become endogenous in India. It's not always slow that you named the caliphate is one example, the Mongols or another, Alexander the Great you talk about in the book though his project becomes a cropper with his death. Just speaking at a broad level, what causes these shadow empires to suddenly go for the jugular?

Thomas Barfield:

When they move from the indirect business to actually controlling an empire. So, for example, what I call vulture empires, an empire falls apart, people on the periphery move in. They often they try to retain, this is strictly in China, they retain a Chinese bureaucracy in a smaller area, it's not run as well, they provide the military. It's as I put it in the book, they are one eyed men in the land of the blind. Pretty good for the time, but as China begins to get its sight, they're going to be replaced by a real endogenous empire.

The only way to avoid that is what the Manchus did, you take over all of China and do it relatively rapidly. And the same thing with the caliphate. If we look at the Arabs, they defeat both the Byzantines and the Sasanians. The Byzantines only lose, only Egypt and Syria and even Khaldun said, "You know what? They could lose those because Constantinople was their heart. As long as the empire has its heart, it's not going to die." They said the Sasanians, when the Arabs took Ctesiphon, the Sasanian capital, it ripped out the empire's heart and [inaudible 00:27:52] said, "No matter how many outer provinces the old regime had, it was not going to be able to hold together."

So, we find them, we also find the Mongols try to extort the dynasties in North China. They refused to pay, there's like a 20-year war, they end up conquering all of North China. And so, at this point, both with the caliphate and with the Mongols, there's a debate within the society, "Do we really want to go in this direction?" And the old elite says, "No. Let's not go into this ruling empire, that's not who we are." So, in Mongolia it's, "Yeah, let's keep our capital in Mongolia, we're a horse riding people."

But you have people like Kublai Khan whose feat is Northern China, who realizes, "If you have Mongol cavalry and the Chinese economic infrastructure, you could beat those guys on the step because I am sending food to the step every day." And when a civil war breaks out, he cuts off the food and suddenly the Mongols in China realize against the Chinese that might be okay, but against their Mongol cousins or in some cases brothers, they're losers. And we see that transition take place and suddenly the Mongol Empire is no longer interested in extortion, it's interested in conquest.

The Song Dynasty was willing to pay the Mongols a huge amount just to go away. Other nomadic empires would've done that but Kublai Khan is, "No, I'm not doing that. I'm third generation from Genghis Khan. My goal and the goal of my brothers, one of whom I have sent to conquer Persia and kill the last Caliph, we're going to ruin the whole thing." And the British, as things are going in India, as the 1700s go, they get more and more into that in part because they lost the North American colonies. They had a good settler colonialism thing going on the east coast of what becomes the United States and they lose it.

And we all remember Cornwallis surrenders to Washington to end the Revolutionary War, but Americans don't ask, "So, what is Cornwallis next job?" They send him to be Viceroy of India and what is his job? Is to make sure not to combine with the local Hindus and Muslims to create a new elite. Because look what happened when that old elite in America or British, they wanted to share our, we are going to create a real empire, but we're going to have to focus on India because we've lost most of our most valuable North American endogenous part, it's gone. So, let's go back to our roots.

And the more that's there, that is like, "Well, if you see a diamond pick it up." They just keep moving and moving, the French try to interfere, others try to, and the British just keep moving and moving. But the interesting thing is how are they conquering India? With an army of sepoys or trained in English fashion. They have European military, but it's like 85% Indians and that army was bigger than the British army in Europe. So, we see them building a counter-state in a way, but the fact that they never declared themselves rulers of that state technically, legally and the British are very equalistic.

We own India as vassals to the Mughals, the Mughals own India and we're just their friends. There was a threadbare excuse, but actually it was an excuse that the Rajputs, the Afghans and the Persians had also used when they conquered. Nobody got rid of the Mughals because they were the official rulers of India. Work, at least technically through that. It's not until really the high point of industrial capitalism of late 19th century that the British say, "I guess we are an empire and we don't need no Mughals."

And that's when Disraeli is able to tell Queen Elizabeth, "India is the jewel of your crown." Because it wasn't a jewel in the crown before, it was a privately owned subsidiary of which the British government owned a good chunk of the stock. But there was like a liberal, a right-thinking dimension to that as well in the sense that the mutiny, the perceived and actual depredations of company rule had generated a crisis. And so, direct control of the empire was self-explained not as greater rapaciousness and greater power for power's sake. It was an improving, it was going to be a better way of governance.

And this was the example where you become fully endogenous, you have to take responsibility. The essence of exogenous shadow empires is they don't take responsibility. A nomadic empire can burn south, half of North China and say, "Not our problem." When you conquer it as the Mongols, it is your problem. There was the first Mongol ruler to convert to Islam in Iran actually sent a memo, so to speak to his people. He said, "You've got to stop attacking the peasants, they are our subjects, we tax them. You and I together could raid these peasant, nobody can do it better than me.

But if you don't stop doing this, I'm going to have to punish you because they pay taxes to the state and therefore they are subject to be protected, not targets of predation." It took close to 100 years for that lesson to go out because the Mongols retained, as did the Huns and others like if we see it, we take it. And once you become the owner of a place, that is a bad strategy, but it requires that you actually convince your polity, your people, the people that are helping you run it is that we have to operate on different rules.

The Mongols first, this was after Genghis Khan's death famously proposed maybe we should kill all the Chinese peasants because then at least the place would be decent horse pasture. And [inaudible 00:33:56] who was Ogedei, Genghis Khan's son, his prime minister he says, "Don't do that. Give me an opportunity." And he gave a huge amount of taxes that he would bring. The Mongols said, "We stole everything, it's not that much money, but you could have a year." And as that year came in, all of this stuff came here, silver, gold, silk. And they said, "Where did you find it? We're pretty good." He says, "If you don't kill people, but tax them, you can have this every year."

And so, at that point is, "Okay, maybe we should do that." But that is not the kind of lesson that other people, particularly anybody that was familiar with China would've even had to learn. But if your strategy is purely predatory, convincing people that you eat all the animals, you're going to starve. It's like losing, proving up a predator to a shepherd. A hunter and a shepherd are different. They may ultimately both live off the animals, but the shepherd is expected to take care of the animals even if it's his own Bennett.

And that's the kind of thing that came really hard for these really fast expanding empires because part of the old elite said, "Why should we come up the old ways? It's fun to pillage, loot, burn." And the other saying, as there was a Seljuk leader, they capture the City of Nishapur and his brothers wanted to loot it and they were younger brothers naturally. They said, "Now that we have caught the city, it is our city, we would be looting our own house." "Oh, we hadn't thought about it." "So, don't do it." But again, you do not have to tell most conquerors that when you conquer a city, you protect it from your troops.

They're getting looted for three days and don't kill the people, we need them. But if your strategy was different as these nomads were, is that we raid, we attack because it's not our place, we only need to extort, we only need to scare them. It's a different worldview and it changes, it's forced to change. And usually the more pragmatic ones say, "You got to go endogenous, there's just no other way about it." And the reactionaries, if they don't agree, are generally pushed out because they're just wrong economically. The old system will not hold.

Aaron MacLean:

Among the many observations that you make about pre-modern or imperial history that hold true as the role of younger brothers as forces of destruction. That is absolutely the case for this day. So again, I want to finish and linger on present-day relevance. But before we do, there's two other types that I want to at least spend a minute on, empires of nostalgia and vacuum empires, empires of nostalgia being the most intriguing to me. And by the way, just among the reasons to read your book, not only is it just a really interesting extended discussion of things we're going through quickly right now.

Your chapter on empires and nostalgia is almost like, you out of modesty may reject this, but it's a little bit of a capsule history of the Middle Ages in Europe. It's not designed for that purpose, it leaves a lot out but it really is a way to orient yourself quickly according to a cleverly constructed model, to things that happen. And I had been aware of the ways in which legitimacy is gained by making reference to old things, but you lay it out in a really compelling way. What are nostalgic empires or empires of nostalgia?

Thomas Barfield:

Yeah. Mostly like in China, there was always a nostalgia for empire. You hope that a lost empire, the end of the Han Dynasty, the end of the Tang Dynasty and the foreigners that moved into take North China, that was deadly to them because that nostalgia they caused. But nostalgia was useful in China, but it didn't last long. You were either going to create a new empire or you were going to be destroyed or eaten by one. The West is unusual because the West, this is why I don't think it makes good template of empires.

The West is only part of an empire, Western Europe is only part of an empire during the Roman period. In every other place, when an empire collapses, it comes back. There's 1,000 years where you can see the Persians interruption Alexander the Great, then the Parthians, then the Sasanians. That's like five 550 BC to 650 AD all the same structure. China Han, Tang, Song, Ming, every time it collapses, the belief is that empire, a united China is the default even when it doesn't exist. In Europe, it never came back and of course there's whole books and questions, why didn't it come back? What are the consequences of that?

But the interesting thing is, and of course it did continue to exist as Roman Empire East, we call it the Byzantines but they were just Romans as far as they were going to start, we jettisoned the West. But in the medieval period, there's this idea of wouldn't it be great to have an empire? Because we've got all these war bands, these chieftains, there's not much honor and glory in that. And what we see is an alliance sort of with the Catholic Church, which is the last remnant of hierarchical of Roman rule getting together, trying to get an alliance with what we call the Carolingians, like going back to Charles Martel in France.

And you guys represent not just some grimy group attacking some other groups, but a protection of the Catholic Europe and expanding against pagans. And everybody who joins gets a piece of this charisma. So, we get Charlemagne who's crowned as emperor. It rules maybe 10 million people, maybe 2 million square kilometers, it's big. But the interesting thing, this desire for Roman Empire came from the Germans. It was the German ex, now acculturated the tribes and said, "We want the empire back," but they don't want the empire of the Caesars back. They want a Christian Roman Empire back, the empire of the saints, if you will.

And the interesting thing here is the Germans are the people that prevented the Romans from crossing the Rhine and making them true Romans and their invasions are the ones that brought down the West. And they're the ones that say, "Yeah, trans Rhine, we should all be together. How are we together? We're Catholics under a banner, not of particular ethnic group, but as an empire." So, it is nostalgia for something actually that exists in people's minds, but it's something to aspire to. And it makes you seem, if you're a ruler, much more powerful than you are, you're better than any king.

You have the right to attack pagan Saxons, you have the right to make slobs your tributaries. And even if you can't hold it together, because one of the problems is by the time of Charlemagne's great-grandsons, after the end of Louis the Pious who actually tries to be real emperor as the book explains, it doesn't quite work out. His sons divide his empire up into three kingdoms. The interesting thing is, maybe 60 years later, a new group of Germans created the Holy Roman Empires, which is most famous for its foot down, neither a Holy Roman nor an empire. And first of all, that is not exactly correct because Holy Roman is not two things, it's one.

Holy Roman meets Christian Roman Empire and it had an elected king. It went through like seven dynasties and it lasted for 900 years. It had a demon court system, but it had no capital, it did have a parliament and it had no imperial army. It worked entirely on the realm of the mind. And what did it do? It protected more than 300 little Germanic duchies that used to include northern Italy going into Germany, trans Rhine, and they could sue each other in court and it could solve problems for people. And it survived even the Protestant Reformation, which if anything should have brought it down, it didn't.

And so, the so-called Treaty of Westphalia is not a creation of like the nation states as most political science like to say, is in fact a reformation to the Holy Roman Empire. It is like, "Okay, we can deal with Protestants and Catholics because we'll pretend they're all the same Christians like they were in 300 AD." And the only thing that can kill it is another idea and that's Revolutionary France. When Napoleon appears on the gates of Vienna, the Holy Roman Empire dissolves it. He says, "Everybody's free to go their own way, I will be the emperor of Austria." But the reason that he has to get rid of it is the Holy Roman Empire protects hierarchy. It protects, if you will, the classic feudal system.

The French Revolution says, "We don't need no feudal systems. We are an equalitarian revolution." And since the vast majority of the people were not a member of these clergy and feudal noble estates, it brought it down with a thud, not through military means but because nostalgia was gone, nobody wanted it. From that period on, nostalgia stops existing and people start going after utopias. Wouldn't it be great if and utopian political thought run in the French Revolution? I would essentially say to the fall of the Soviet Union, and since the fall of the Soviet Union, we're back to nostalgia.

Is that Trump make America great again, Erdogan, "Yeah, let's bring back the Ottomans," the Chinese, "We've always been great." These are not forward-looking things, these are backwards, these are nostalgia. But to understand the power of nostalgia politically, I think look at Europe at this time and particularly see how does something so ephemeral survive for so long? And when you begin to look at it as a type of colony, as an unusual type of empire, I think you get a better understanding. And as I argue later, I think that's what the EU is doing is that it's using that model unacknowledged, but it's using that model.

Aaron MacLean:

Last question before we come to our conclusion in the present day. But if I have my Halford Mackinder geographer hat on, I can't help but notice the obvious link between your different types and then just different kinds of terrain. Obviously, steppe empires live on the steppe, the Arab explosion comes out of a desert, which is a kind of steppe or I guess a steppe is a kind of desert. So, that's one kind and it tends to a nomadism and tribalism. Then you have your maritime sea powers, which tend to be democratic, that's another kind.

There's empires that live in the mind as you just eloquently outlined. And then this last kind, which I had never really thought of as a category before, but there's a forest land type, the Northern European forest, these vacuum empires as you call them, what are they?

Thomas Barfield:

Well, the vacuum empire is its empire in a far zone. And what you see is not even state level systems of organization there until the medieval period. And I haven't looked at Southeast Asia, but forest zones in general seem to be tough to put together politically. Why do you get states, let alone empires? And what you find is that the economy gets monetized through international trade. How does that happen with my other things in terms not so much MacKinder's idea about a Central Eurasia, but all of my shadow empires sit on the margins in some way. And the vacuum margin is nothing here, but forest swamps and bogs.

Who would want that? Well, it turns out it also, there are resources there, particularly firs but also slates. And as the caliphate begins to grow, it has a penchant for firs loves firs. And who gets the firs for them? The Turkic nomads that lived in now Ukraine, Southern Russia, the Caspian Black Sea steppe, the Khazars. So, they move into the far zone or their agents move into the far zone and extract tribute in firs, they sell those, while other people come in to do business in firs. And historian Newton has looked into this and there are millions of dinars that flow in so.

So, suddenly silver dinars are everywhere. They flow up to the Baltic where the Vikings say, "Where these dinars come from?" And they go down to the Dnieper, the Dnister, the Volga in search of them, and those are the Rus. And what we see is an outside force because the Rus are Vikings, but they intermarry with the local Slavs, the local Finns. It's sort of a composite kind of thing. But they put together an empire that's largely based on the export of stuff and in which there is no center. I compare it to a jellyfish, it's a system of nodes that any part could be broken off and it comes back.

Kyiv is the center of the Rus, Lithuania, Vilnius takes that place. Then there's Muscovy, then there's St. Petersburg. A British ruler, a French ruler couldn't move out of Paris or France, they're center places or rung. Here, wherever the ruler is, because it's different nodes. And as both Napoleon, Hitler and others discover, you could bite off any piece of it and the rest of it seems to regenerate. And it's an unusual characteristic of these vacuum empires because they're networks of relationships of scattered resources, but very valuable export resources. And they only really become a state because the Mongols that got rid of the Kievan Rus.

And then the Muscovites become, they learn their statecraft from the Mongols. It's only when the steppe empires, the Golden Horde begins to collapse that Moscow becomes a real empire and begins moving out of the forest zone. But it's not really until Catherine the Great that Russia is able to break out of that forest zone. It doesn't have the Ukraine, it doesn't have the steppe on the Black Sea, it doesn't control the Caspian Sea, it's confined to the forest zone and that's when I say it moves into the endogenous. When it's able to do that, it has to change the way it's doing business starting with Peter the Great and mostly with Catherine the Great and then maybe we should free the serfs.

There's a difference but it's an unusual kind of empire and it's one that we don't think about and it's one of our difficulties of understanding Russian expansion. I begin it maybe in a probable road of Catherine the Great, I have no way to defend my borders, but to expand it. The other thing is that who were the enemies of the Russians? It turns out the Poland-Lithuanian condominium is and the Swedes could have done it too, because Peter the Great came very close to being knocked out by the Swedes. Any one of those places could have been the center of a new vacuum empire.

So, regardless of what Vladimir Putin says, Moscow was not preordained to be in charge of anything and could have ended up a peripheral branch of something else. But if you understand the logic of these vacuum empires, you can understand why they're so amorphous in a way and why their centers can move from one place to another. That even the collapse of the Soviet Union, including like kill Russia in a way, because despite 70 years of centralized rule, it had maintained a vacuum characteristics of being a set of nodes and not being a highly integrated empire that lose the part, lose the heart, the whole thing goes.

Aaron MacLean:

So, in the few minutes we have left, I'd like to talk about the way in which some of these exogenous strategies are still available to states and really some of the mindsets live on in ways that people are not always fully conscious of, even as they dance to these tunes. And let's start with America, which is relevant obviously to you and to me and to most of the audience. America, it comes from a British tradition. There's an obvious maritime military strategy at work. If you look at America and America's role in the globe, certainly from the turn of the 20th century on.

I don't know if you're familiar but there's a brilliant naval historian that you have a lot intellectually in common with on these subjects. That is to say the two of you think quite similarly named Andrew Lambert. He wrote a book on sea power states where again, you and he are arguing in parallel with one another. But I've had him on the show a couple of times and we discussed what America is and inherited from the British Empire and what it hasn't. And he was quick to emphasize the differences, saying, "Well look, but you have to keep in mind America's big land power too. It's a big land empire and that complicates things."

And obviously that's true on one level, on another level, if you zoom out completely, it's easy to draw the parallels between the American strategic situation today and the British strategic situation at the start of the 20th century as Britain is to Europe so North America is to Eurasia. Help us understand what it means that America has its inheritance, what is relevant, what's not, what's new under the sun. If you wouldn't mind, keep your promise to just a couple of minutes.

Thomas Barfield:

Yeah. Well, if we're looking at it, yes, the United States inherits its maritime mindset from the British and our focus on the coast still shows that. But I think the mistake is to compare it to the British Empire at its height, and I go back to the Athenians. Is the Americans actually perhaps unconsciously adopt an Athenian policy, which is we want to control economics, not territory? And the British Empire, when it became endogenous with India and others had to control all of these territories. That violates the spirit of maritime empire, it's expensive and the British couldn't afford it to go out of the empire business.

The United States, particularly post-World War II goes back and it takes its two biggest enemies, Germany and Japan, and it turns them into allies and it sets up a set of alliances, right? NATO, but also with Korea, with Japan, that's what the Athenians did. You work on alliances, you dominate the economic system and within certain limits, just as the Athenians wanted to push democracy, we also, the stakes that we support, they need to be some kind of liberal democracy. But beyond that, they're free to do whatever they want.

And we create a system in which the United States benefits and actually provides the military capacity to defend this economic creation that is done in the ways that the Athenian Navy protected its Aegean, what they called Archaic. So, there's an American archaic, which we protect, and so let the Europeans create the European Union come together. They don't have an army. Why not? Because the United States provides it. The advantage that the United States has over the Athenians is precisely because we do have good chunk of North America. We do not, unlike what Trump wants to do, we do not force our clients to pay for it.

So, they see it as a great advantage, even though critics might say, "Yeah, but it's the Americans are getting more advantage out of it." But this is a maritime thing, we wish to dominate the economy. Our dollar is supreme, just as the Athenian Drachma was, we set the terms for trade. The British Empire was too much focused on colonies. America doesn't need colonies, you don't seize oil wells when you control the oil market. I mean, why do the work? So, I think the thing is that the United States runs this maritime system, which is based on alliances in which you actually have real partners, not just clients.

It takes this so for granted, it doesn't even realize it's doing it. But its enemies like China or Russia cannot figure this system out because they don't believe in clients, they don't have any clients. The Chinese in particular, you're either a client, a tributary or you're an enemy. China has no friends and will never make any, it doesn't know how to be an equal. It cannot conceive of being equal and that's a very different kind of political system.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, let this be my last question on China. In Washington foreign policy conversations that concern China. It's a truism that there is this Chinese imperial legacy and it's the middle kingdom and essentially the point you just made, I would say whether or not it's deeply understood is a commonplace. But you, in your conclusion, you raised this fascinating possibility that there are periods in Chinese history where if not friends exactly, China's rulers have to accept that it has peers. And so, this is, as you put it, the Tang versus Song choice. Talk a bit, we're clearly in the former right now, but.

Thomas Barfield:

Well, Xi Jinping is definitely Tang. China dominates East Asia, it turns other neighboring countries into client, that's its model. Song Dynasty loses North China to these foreign dynasties, so is China among equals? And it's lost the Chinese heartland, the Yellow River Valley. Yet Chinese culture thrives in the South and they decide we're not going to reconvert North China, that's it. Number one, the places like [inaudible 00:55:40], it has historic legacy, but it's not worth it. In fact, we will pay these people off, not to bother us, the Khitans and the Jurchens control this.

But the Song Dynasty is the most technologically innovative of any of China's dynasties. It's remarkably profitable in terms of creating an economy and it also creates not a national navy, but Chinese and Chinese vessels start moving all over Southeast Asia. It's a remarkably open economy and their belief is what do we need North China for? We have the highest standard of living, we have the highest culture. So, we don't have all of East Asia, it's a money loser. And what I argue in terms of looking at China is as compared to the Soviet Union in which power did not pass in a hereditary fashion, Stalin's kids didn't run it.

But also, the Politburo, they were relatively court people. Yeah, they had the Volga and a Dasha, but not much. The Chinese elite now are multi-billionaires, maybe Trillionaires, they are tied into this world. So, Xi Jinping creating a world in which China will be great again. The Song Dynasty cuts off the rest of the world, I mean the Tang Dynasty cuts off the rest of world. The Song Dynasty is open. How much of the Chinese elite is going to find that actually the Song, including Xi Jinping's relatives who we all know has [inaudible 00:57:07], finds Song superior. And also, he wants to compete on the world stage in high tech. Where is China's high tech located? South China, not the Rust Belt of the North.

At which point are the Southern Chinese saying, "We are being screwed by these imperial ambitions and we'll bring a good chunk of the Communist party elite with them who said, yeah, who cares getting Taiwan back?" The American strategy would be, "So buy it, deal with it. Whether it flies your flag or not is not that important." But that's a different way to look at the world and I would argue it is possible given China's many different dynastic histories that it has models in which it is amazingly strong culturally adapt world power. They are not militarily threatening at the moment it happens to be in a different mode.

But when we talk about China as if it was one thing and China has one history, we are making a big stick. And if we realize there's plenty of people in China that would benefit from a different system concluding within the Chinese elite, Communist Party elite, I think it would make our policy a little bit more subtle than what we have now.

Aaron MacLean:

Thomas Barfield, author most recently of Shadow Empires, An Alternative Imperial History. We've never met before, but you principally through, first, your Afghanistan book now, more recently, this one, you've been an important part of my education. So, I'm grateful to you for your work and for making the time today.

Thomas Barfield:

Well, thank you very much for the opportunity.

Speaker 9:

This is a Nebulous Media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.