On Empire Building

[Zor]

Here we have three main methods of Empire Building...

1-The Enforced Union: Imperator Zheng of Maxima sends out Ambasadors to other nations one by one, these tell them this rough message...

"I speak for Imperator Zheng of the Maximum Imperium. Here his most generous terms. Know that the Imperium's legions are Vast and Unmatched, its coffers full of wealth and its Imperator wise, strong willed, a master of strategy and ambitious. The Imperator offers to your nation the benefits of the Imperium, improvements with roads and trade and your lands defended by our legions. All for the minor price of a modest precentage of your annual income as tribute as well as a few of your fighting men to serve as auxileries to the Imperial Legions (which will have a few garisons in your borders) and you swearing fealty to the Imperial Throne. You shall be allowed to rule this land, allowed to worship your gods and preform your customs with no change. If you choose to decline this generous offer or strike down the bearer of this message, like these gentlemen did..." (Pulls out a couple of Severed heads of killed kings from a bag) "there will be consequences. Now, what will your responce be?"

Following through on this basic plan, kingdoms and nations which surrender get integrated peacefully while those that don't get violently conquered and Imperator Zheng put under the rule of one of your generals or a loyal local patsy. As a bonus, if two rivals are about to be conquered, approach them one by one and add to the offer the ability to conquer and rule said rival, thus sparing the lives of your men and giving the conquered looser population someone who is not you to point their anger at.

2-The Centralized Assimilator: Imperator Zheng of Maxima invades his rivals one by one. When he conquers them, he proceeds to hunt down everything that defined them as them and crush it under his boot. Old governments are torn down and replaced by a new centralized one ruled by Bureaucrats and military leaders loyal to the Imperator that report to the capitol. Old Elites are stripped of position. Old systems of writing are forbiddon. Old stories are forbiddon. Local Religions are eliminated. Old architecture demolished. History is re-written to make all that came before the arrival of Zheng's forces seem as horrible as possible. His occupying Legions make sure of it and back up these new laws by executing those who dissent as well as selling them into slavery or sending them off to prison camps in the backwaters of the empire and similar things. These are to be replaced by Maximum Culture, promoted through various agents which has a universal philosophy (Imperator Zheng brings civilization to all the people's of the world so all might live in peace and prosperity under the Imperium!). Among those aspects, loyalty to the Imperial Throne. In addition, the locals are encouraged to gain prominance in the Empire by volunteering to serve in the Army or getting into the Imperial Bureaucracy. The objective is to take this population and turn it into more loyal subjects that see themselves as being citizens of the Empire first.

3-Intermediate Empire: Imperator Zheng of Maxima employs a rough combination of the two previously described methods, based on the rivals that he is dealing with. For more sophisticated rivals he makes client kingdoms with some local autonomy that are vassalized (albiet with a few Bureaucrats to monitor things and to oversee a few projects). For others he conquers them and puts them under the control of his Bureaucrats and Generals. Either way, people are allowed a degree of freedom. That said, Citizens from Maxima are given some special priveleges which puts them at an advantage and are settled about the Empire, with citizen status being attainable by subject peoples as a means to gradually assimilate them into the Imperial population. The Imperial Government also funds various public works and events designed to show off the splendor of the Empire. Open rebellion against the Imperium are crushed and occasionally the Iron Fist of State Authority(tm) brought down on cultures that refuse to peacefully assimilate and integrate.

Of these three methods which one do you think is best?

Zor

[Stark]

Define best you fucking retard. PS it'll be best fit for the situation and not absolute and thus understanding the situation is more important than 'knowing' the 'best' 'solution'.

And man most of those 'ideas' wouldn't even work outside very specific requirements.

[Zor]

Define best

Best as in...
1-Creating an Empire that is the most capable capable of expanding its boarders
2-Creating an Empire that is most capable of acheiving long-term political stability
3-Creating an Empire with the longest lasting cultural and political legacy

Zor

[CaptainChewbacca]

#1 sounds a lot like the Mongolian Empire, which was very successful until it ran out of strong rulers.

[PeZook]

All three goals depend chiefly on who you want to conquer. There are empires which prospered under #2, and others which failed miserably, and yet others which succesfully integrated some people but not others.

Same for #1: for some unions, it works great: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a union and survived several centuries as one of the most powerful nations in Europe. Other states following #1 fell apart quickly because they couldn't handle the political forces tugging against each other (Alexander's empire comes to mind here).

[Bakustra]

In actual polisci, there are two main types of empire- hegemonic and territorial. Hegemonic empires govern by establishing themselves atop existing governments, territorial empires govern by conquering and installing their own governments. No empire is purely one or the other, mind. A major advantage of hegemonic empires is that they are cheaper to run (because you don't need to fund a massive bureaucracy and local clients fund their own armies), but a major disadvantage is that they are more loosely bound and thus more vulnerable to internal strife, and they generally are more diverse culturally. Territorial empires are less vulnerable to internal strife, but they are significantly more expensive to run, and their constituent cultures are more likely to run together if the empire lasts for a longer period.

In addition, there are four general approaches of government- those that rule through popular support (populism), those that rule through moral legitimacy (pluralism), those that rule through the threat of force ("great beast"), and those that rule through a bluff of authority ("great fraud"). All governments are a mix of these four (e.g. the USA rules through popular support, the belief that it's run by good people, and the rule of law, which includes all four if you think about it). The definition of "empire" says little about titles or the methods of government- it refers to multinational governments or power alignments (thus, "American Empire"). So we can say that there are eight tendencies of empire from these categorizations, but these are merely points on a broad spectrum. Your three are really all just fairly territorial empires, and really aren't all that diverse as far as empires go.

There is no method that is solely the best, because times and conditions vary. I say that hegemonic empires are culturally relatively diverse, but the Inka ruled a highly hegemonic empire that nevertheless followed a deliberate policy of cultural fusion, though it lasted too briefly to see those efforts bear fruit or wither.

[Simon_Jester]

I think I agree- Zor isn't sampling nearly enough of the available space for "this is how to make empires work" for the question to be very interesting. Looking over what Zor actually said, he seems to be confusing building an empire with running it, or assuming that the two processes automatically tie together so much that you can't define your approach to one without knowing your approach to the other. That's the part that really isn't true, because you can be very brutal in your initial conquest, then very bureaucratic instead of 'rule by fear' about how you go about running it.


[random musings and semantic stuff, not important, just me taking unfair advantage of my spring break]

Not sure the Inca lasted too briefly, as opposed to just having been more thoroughly destroyed than is normal for empires. Rome was conquered by barbarians, but after breaking it, the barbarians didn't smash up the pieces, jump up and down on them, and set them on fire the way the conquistadors did. So there's a lot more left to assess the Roman legacy.

Their hundred years or so might have been long enough to produce something lasting, if they'd been invaded and conquered by someone less inclined to overwrite other people's culture themselves.

Eh. That's not too important. Don't worry about it.

...

I suspect that, if you took those four general approaches and somehow quantify, you could come up with another set of 'dimensions' that would isolate various methods of empire-building. To me, the fact that all states combine a mix of populism, moralism, 'great beast' and 'great fraud' suggests that they're not the mathematically simplest of variables that can describe the system; they're just the ones that are easiest to explain and therefore useful. That they're "x plus a little y," "y plus a little z," and "z plus a little x," not actually x, y, and z in their own right.

Of course, working out a really mathematically elegant way to describe societies is a job for Hari Seldon if it's possible at all.