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Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women by Christina Lamb (2025)

Warning: This review contains details of really disgusting and evil sexual violence perpetrated against women and girls that goes far beyond rape. If you’re of a sensitive disposition or prone to nightmares, don’t read it.

The more places I went to, the more prevalent I found rape was.

‘It is an everlasting nightmare.’
(Lola Narcisa Claveria, Filipino survivor of Japanese sex slavery, page 351)

This is a deeply upsetting but profoundly important book, often devastatingly depressing but sometimes genuinely inspiring. Christina Lamb is an award-winning journalist who has covered a variety of warzones in her career as well as writing 10 factual books. From early in her career she realised just how prevalent rape was as a weapon of war, not just as random outrages, but used systematically to demoralise enemy forces and terrorise entire populations. What she learned about the vicious sexual abuse of women in conflict after conflict was sickening and disgusting. But she also came to realise that the scale of the violence and abuse against women was often overlooked in journalism and history books overwhelmingly written by men (p.459); and by international bodies and courts more often than not run by men.

Everything has to start with the evidence and this means the first-hand testimony of the survivors. Telling their stories not only offers some form of closure for the victims, and the psychological validation of knowing someone believes them. It is also the start of gathering evidence, for use not only in possible court proceedings but to begin to be used in larger historical narratives, to begin to redress the gaping silence about one of the most overlooked and neglected parts of war and conflict – the unspeakable crimes, violence and abuse directed against women and girls, often on an industrial scale.

‘When I saw them laughing and humiliating us, I decided we needed to break the silence. If we didn’t talk about what we went through, and if they were not punished, what could we expect from their children but the same or greater evil?’ (Bakira Hasecic, founder of Association of Women Victims of War in Bosnia, p.167)

And so this substantial book (474 pages) records Lamb’s odyssey, over a seven year period, to track down, interview and record the testimonies of women who have suffered unbelievable horrors in conflict after conflict around the world.

Destinations

Lamb goes to:

2016 August: Leros, Greece The Greek island of Leros was used to house refugees from war in the Middle East including Yazidis who had been enslaved and trafficked by Islamic State.

2016: Baden-Wurtenberg The German province which took in 1,100 Yazidi women and children who had been treated as sex slaves by ISIS.

2016: Northeastern Nigeria: On 15 April 2014 the brutal Islamic terror group Boko Haram kidnapped 276 mostly Christian schoolgirls from the town of Chibok and carried them off into sexual slavery. #BringBackOurGirls or #BBOG went viral. Hardly any of the girls have been recovered.

2017 December: Bangladesh: Kutupalong To interview survivors of the 2017 massacres and mass rapes of Rohynga women by Burmese soldiers. In three months more than 650,000 were driven out of the west Burmese state of Rakhine, two-thirds of the Rohynga population.

Every single shack had terrible stories and I had never come across such widespread violation of women and girls. (p.75)

Bangladesh: Liberation War Museum, Dhaka and Sirajganj Up to 400,000 were women raped by Pakistani soldiers in Bangladesh’s war of independence as official Pakistan military policy. Lamb learns that the survivors were called birangonas from the Bengali word bir meaning war heroine (p.92).

‘Often when the women were raped the soldiers had grabbed their babies and stomped on them to death or thrown them so hard their brains had come out.’ (Safina; p.110)

Rwanda Aftermath of the 1994 Hutu genocide of Tutsis, itself the sequel to the 1959 Hutu Revolution, and pogroms of 1963 and 1973.

‘Of course they raped me… Wherever you were hiding under a tree a man would find you and rape you and sometimes kill you. There were lots of different men doing this and they used sticks and bottles into the private parts of many women right up to their stomach…’ (Serafina Mukakinani, p.132)

2018, March: Yugoslavia: Sarajevo The appalling atrocities of the Serbs in Bosnia, and the heroic efforts of Bakira Hasecic and her Association of Women Victims of War, founded in 2003, to bring the Serb torturers, murderers and rapists to justice.

Yugoslavia: Srebrenica Dragana Vucetic, senior forensic anthropologist at the International Commission of Missing Persons. On 11 July 1995 Serb militias took away about 8,300 Muslim men and boys, drove them out into fields or football grounds, then massacred them, shooting or bludgeoning them to death. Dr Branca Antic-Stauber who runs a charity for rape survivors and uses horticulture therapy.

2018, October: Berlin Stories of the vast mass rapes of German women and girls during the Red Army’s conquest of eastern Germany and Berlin at the end of the Second World War. In towns and villages every woman from eight to eighty was raped multiple times. ‘It was an army of rapists’ (Natalya Gesse, Soviet war correspondent, p.194) It is estimated that up to 2 million women and girls were rapes and scores of thousands of Germans committed suicide, and killed their children, rather than fall into the hands of the Russians.

2018, November: Buenos Aires In 1976 a military junta seized control of Argentina and rules for 7 years during which up to 30,000 leftists, trade unions and activists were kidnapped off the streets and ‘disappeared’. Estela Barnes de Carlotta, president of the Grandmothers or Las Abuelas (p.214).

2018, March: Mosul Lamb attends the hurried trials of a handful of the 30,000 or so people charged with being members of ISIS. Justice is a farce. The court doesn’t consider rape as a separate offence, all offences are grouped together as terrorism.

2018, April: Iraq: Dohuk The prevalence of suicide among Yazidi survivors of ISIS sex slavery.

2019, February: Democratic Republic of Congo: Bukavu In 2010 Congo was called the rape capital of the world. Lamb interviews Dr Denis Mukwege, founder of the Panzi Foundation, who has treated more rape victims than any other doctor in the world.

In the Second Congo War stories of women who were not only gang raped but then shot in the vagina, or had bayonets shoved in their vagina, or sticks soaked in fuel which was then set alight. Lamb discovers that Dr Mukwege’s clinic is seeing more and more raped babies. Some men believe that raping babies will give them magical powers; they are told this by witchdoctors (p.337).

In a gruelling book this chapter (chapter 13, pages 300 to 334) contains probably the worst atrocities (the 86-year-old who was raped, women’s vaginas set alight or hacked off, the mother who was forced at gunpoint to eat her own baby); but also the most inspiring moments. Lamb meets the inspiring Christine Schuler Deschryver, founder of City of Joy, a safe haven for survivors in Congo.

‘It’s about giving a woman value… I hug them and then they are healed and people say I have magic hands but it’s just love… I’m convinced you can change the world only by love’ (p.330)

It also contains the most telling evidence of the way rape used as a weapon of mass terrorisation is tied into broader economic and political structures. Because Deschryver points out that 1) Congo contains more of the rare metals needed to create mobile phones and batteries (cobalt, coltan) than any other country on earth; 2) if you drew a map of the rapes you’d see they cluster around mining areas, and so 3) rape is used as a strategy of terror by the militias and groups who control the mines and the regions around them. Which leads her onto her fourth point, 4) if the international community really wanted to end conflict in the Congo it could but, in Deschryver’s view, it suits multinational corporations to preserve Congo as an unstable mess the better to plunder the country of its cobalt, coltan and gold (p.331).

Democratic Republic of Congo: Kavumu Village where scores of babies and very small girls have been abducted, raped and their genitals destroyed, allegedly by the ‘Army of Jesus’, a militia controlled by a local warlord whose members have been told by a witchdoctor that the blood from raped and mutilated babies will make them invulnerable in battle (p.339). Although the warlord was eventually taken to court and convicted, the case went to appeal and none of the villagers knows whether he and his henchmen are in prison or not. Meanwhile, having lost all faith in the justice system, they have started to take the law into their own hands with lynchings and beheadings of suspect young men (p.348). Thus, chaos.

Manila Lamb meets surviving ‘comfort women’, enslaved by the occupying Japanese Army during the Second World War. They prefer to the term lolas which means grandmother in the local Tagalog language and which they use as an honorific, hence Lola Narcisa and Lola Estelita.

Concluding chapter 2020

Sexual violence against men

  • in eastern Congo a quarter of men in conflict zones have experienced sexual violence
  • in Afghanistan bacha bazi or the abuse of boys is common
  • in Syrian prisons under Bashar al-Assad, men and boys were submitted to horrifying sexual violence

The challenge of achieving justice Lamb jumps between a number of cases, showing the dedicated work of investigators, researchers, lawyers, prosecutors and judges, but how gruellingly slow it is and how pitifully few convictions are achieved. The Yazidis wait, the Rohingya wait for justice.

Guatemala During the 36-year-long civil war over 100,000 women were raped, mostly Mayans in an attempt to exterminate their ethnicity (p.387). In 2016 11 Mayan women secured the conviction of a retired army officer for sexually enslaving them.

Peru Over 5,000 women raped during the 11-year-long civil war with Shining Path guerrillas.

Colombia Sexual crimes have been included in crimes heard by the tribunal set up at the end of the 52-year-long civil war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Chad Successful conviction of Chad’s despicable sadist president, Hissène Habré, who ruled through a reign of terror till his overthrow in 1990. In 2000 he was arrested and put on trial in neighbouring Senegal. In 2016 he was convicted of crimes against humanity, torture and rape and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Women in charge Lamb makes the telling point that most of these convictions were only secured when women were judges or prosecutors in the case.

2025 update

2022, May, Ukraine: Berestianka The Russians are back and they’re raping again. And looting everything they can to take back to their pitiful slum of a country. Gang rapes, torture, rape in front of the rest of the family etc (p,409). Rewarded by Putin on their return home. According to Lamb domestic violence is not criminalised in Russia and widely accepted. Figures. Whenever I read about Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky despising the decadent West, this is what I think of. Russia, home of domestic violence, epidemic alcoholism and rapists.

For the first time Ukraine established a court and started prosecuting Russian war criminals while the war was still ongoing (as it is today).

2023, autumn, Tel Aviv On 7 October 2023 Hamas fighters broke through the wall dividing Gaza from Israel and went on a rampage at multiple sites, massacring 1,200 civilians and taking 251 others back to Gaza as hostages. Lamb meets survivors, and speaks to the many first responders, therapists and women’s activists regarding the widespread evidence of sexual violence against the women victims: gang rapes and sexual mutilation i.e. shooting women in the vagina. In her interviewees’ opinion the intention was the most primitive one imaginable of attacking your enemies’ procreative ability, plus the more modern one of spreading not just terror but horror. The barbaric cruelty was exemplary in the sense that it was intended to traumatise an entire nation (which, arguably, it did).

Hebron in the West Bank. Lamb meets Palestinians who live under extraordinarily tight Israeli supervision, and then survivors of sexual violence inflicted by the Israeli Defence Force, and lawyers and NGOs who have reported on it. Interestingly, the main targets have been men and boys, designed to cause maximum humiliation in revenge for 7 October. The accusations of sexual humiliation in captivity sound identical to the Americans at Abu Ghraib.

‘It was me and two other prisoners and three border police. They filmed us naked then began to touch our bodies and make jokes and insulted us. One of them had a metal detector which he tried to put in our anuses.’ (Palestinian Thaer Fakhoury, p.448)

Avignon, December 2024 Lamb is introduced to Gisèle Pelicot, the woman drugged by her  husband who then invited men from a website group to come to their home and rape her. The police found thousands of videos on her husband’s laptop clearly identifying the men which allowed a trial to go forward with 50 accused. The key thing is she waived her right to anonymity in order to speak out and so became a heroine to anti-rape activists, feminists and ordinary people around the world.

Summary When she completed the first edition in 2020 Lamb couldn’t imagine that sexual violence in conflict would return to Europe, in the form of Russian soldiers raping Ukrainian women, or the horrors of the Hamas attack on Israel, or the eruption of brutal civil war in Sudan. Every year the UN presents a report on conflict-related sexual violence. The 2024 report concluded that conflict-related sexual violence is increasing.

Historical retrospective

Spain The really systematic mass rape of large populations of women probably first occurred in the Spanish Civil War 1936 to 1939. It was carried out by General Franco’s Falangist forces. ‘Not just rape but appalling evisceration of peasant women of Andalucia and Estremadura’, including the branding of their breasts with fascist symbols (historian Antony Beevor, quoted p.203).

Nanking The rape of Nanking, December 1937 to January 1938, where the Japanese accompanied mass murder of Chinese civilians with mass rape of women and girls.

Comfort women Euphemism for the hundreds of thousands of women and girls, predominantly from Japanese-occupied Asian countries, who were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces before and during World War II.

Vietnam War 1961 to 1973: My Lai massacre and Tet Offensive.

Khmer Rouge 1975 to 1979. Cambodians murdered 2 million other Cambodians accompanied by mass rape.

Turkish invasion of Cyprus 1974, triggered widespread Turkish soldier rape of Greek women.

Timeline

1863 Abraham Lincoln issues general order 100 making rape carried out by soldiers of the Union Army punishable by death.

1919 Commission of Responsibilities established with rape near the top of the list of 32 war crimes.

1946 but at the war crimes tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo not a single prosecution for sexual violence.

1949 Geneva Convention, Article 27:

Women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault.

1973 Bangladesh declares rape a crime against humanity.

1993 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY):

Men and women came forward to recount evils beyond imagining – women and girls locked up in schools and suffering repeated anal, oral and vaginal rape, people having their tongues cut off, or being burned alive as human torches as they ‘screamed like cats’ (p.160)

1994 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) established in Arusha in Tanzania: Lamb interviews raped Tutsi women who testified in the first rape-as-war-crime trial. It was the first time rape was recognised as an instrument of genocide and prosecuted as a war crime.

‘I was raped countless times. The last group that raped me were so many people and one man shouted, “I can’t use my penis in that dirty place so I’ll use a stick.” I know many women who died like that. They sharpened the sticks and forced them right through their vaginas.’
(Cecile Mukurugwiza, p.141)

1998 first conviction for rape as a war crime.

1998 Rome Statute which established the International Criminal Court defined rape as a war crime.

2000 UN Security Council Resolution 1325 was the first formal and legal document from the Security Council that required parties in a conflict to prevent violations of women’s rights, to support women’s participation in peace negotiations and in post-conflict reconstruction, and to protect women and girls from wartime sexual violence; for ‘the greater inclusion of women in peace and security’.

2008 UN Security Council passed Resolution 1820 stating that ‘rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide’.

2009 established the office of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict.

2010 Bangladesh sets up an International Crimes Tribunal. As of 2019 88 collaborators and party leaders had been tried for torture, murder and rape.

2011 In a video sent to a Nobel Women’s Initiative conference about sexual violence, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi said:

‘Rape is used in my country as a weapon against those who only want to live in peace, who only want to assert their basic human rights. Especially in the areas of ethnic nationalities, rape is rife. It is used as a weapon by armed forces to intimidate the ethnic nationalities and to divide our country.’

2014 then UK Foreign Secretary William Hague organised a four-day conference calling for the end of sexual violence in conflict.

2016 International Criminal Court convicts Pierre Bemba of murder, rape and pillage carried out by his men during the 2002-3 war in the Central Africa Republic.

2018 Nobel Peace Prize awarded jointly to Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad “for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict”

2019 first conviction by the International Criminal Court for rape in wartime.

2019 report of the UN Special Representative listed 19 countries where women are being raped in war, by 12 armies and police forces and 41 non-state actors.

2019 Gambia took Myanmar to court over the Rohingya genocide, the first time one state had taken another to court over war crimes it had committed. Tried at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, resulting in orders against Myanmar carrying out any further genocide.

2020 first criminal trial of a member of Islamic State for crimes against the Yazidi, held in Germany, resulting in conviction and life imprisonment.

Learnings

Systematic mass rape, sexual violence, sexual torture and sexual mutilation are far more widespread than the bleakest pessimist could ever have expected.

Rape in conflict is rarely ad hoc, random and incidental. More often it is the result of encouragement or orders from the highest levels of military and political leadership, as in: mass rapes in Germany; mass rapes in Rwanda; mass rapes in Bosnia; mass rapes in Syria, and so on.

These kinds of mass rapes are now recognised, not as accidental by-products of the chaos of war, but as conscious war strategies, and as such, defined as war crimes. They are also associated with genocide, the conscious attempt to wipe out a people or group.

The genocidal intent is demonstrated in cases like the mass rape of Bangladeshi women and girls by the army of Pakistan, or the mass rapes of Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serbs, or the mass rape of Rohingya women by Burmese soldiers. In each instance the intent wasn’t sexual per se, the intent was to wipe out the victims’ ethnic group by breeding a new generation with the blood of the conquerors in them. In Bangladesh:

‘They had orders of a kind from Tikka Khan [Pakistan’s military governor in the East]… What they had to do was impregnate as many Bengali women as they could… so there would be a whole generation of children in East Pakistan that would be born with blood from the West.’ (p.97)

In Bosnia:

The victims ranged from between six to seventy years old and were raped repeatedly and often kept captive for several years. Many women were forcibly impregnated and held until termination of the pregnancy was impossible. The women were treated as property and rape was used with the intent to intimidate, humiliate and degrade. (p.156)

This same motive – ethnic triumphalism – explains why foetuses were cut out of pregnant women, babies were bludgeoned to death, and children were shot or had their throats cut.

Speaking about it helps. Sharing their stories in safe, supportive environments helps the survivors.

‘It’s all about giving them respect and them owning their stories. After a month, when they begin to tell their stories, sometimes OMG… and the transformation after six is huge. We turn pain into power and give victims strength to be leaders in their communities.’ (Christine Schuler Deschryver, founder of City of Joy, Congo, p.327)

But it never goes away. These women are profoundly damaged forever, as are their families, all their relationships, and their wider communities. And that was the intention.

‘That’s why rape really was a calculated weapon. The fellows who raped them and planned to rape them: they knew you either die now or die later but you’ll never be human again after this ordeal.’ (Rwanda Justice Minister Johnston Busingye, p.153)

As much or more healing comes from having the state formally recognise their plight, a formal recognition that it happened and that it was a crime.

‘It’s not possible to heal from this forever but it helps to speak about it as soon as possible and to share the story with someone compassionate. What I have seen definitely helps their healing is when perpetrators get punished because that gives the victim confirmation by authority she was not the one at fault for what happened to her and that she’s innocent.’ (Dr Branca Antic-Stauber, p.190)

‘Talking to the judges was the beginning of my rehabilitation. For so many years society did not want to listen… But now we could tell our side of the story… Seeing the life sentences at long last, after all they did to us, truly, it gives you your life back.’ (Graciela Garcia Romero, p.238)

In conservative societies state recognition can support recognition at local, village and family level. A striking example is the way the first president of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who recognised the horrific scale of the mass rapes carried out by the Pakistan army and coined a term of praise for the victims, calling them Birangona, or ‘war heroines’.

Better still, though, is the healing effect of watching their perpetrators brought to justice, tried and convicted of their crimes. This validates the victims’ experiences and assures them that the world around them understands and values their suffering.

‘Their actions changed the law and criminal justice for every woman. The women showed you can take the worst trauma and turn it into a story of strength and victory.’ (Erica Barks-Ruggles, US ambassador to Kigali, on the rape survivors who travelled to the Rwanda genocide tribunal to testify against the perpetrators, p.149)

The only problem is it happens pitifully rarely.

Meanwhile, many of the women interviewed wanted their perpetrators to be killed (p.119).

‘I want the worst things to happen to the men that did this to me. I want them to die not in a quick or humane way but slowly, slowly, so they know what it’s like to do bad things to people.’ (Naima, a Yazidi enslaved by ISIS, p.264)

‘I feel so angry at what those Japanese did to me and my family, that if I saw them today I would kill them.’ (Lola Narcisa Claveria, Filipino woman enslaved by the Japanese p.357)

‘I hate them so much and wish death to all of them and Putin.’ (Vika, Ukrainian woman raped by Russian soldiers, p.403)

Charities have discovered that a good way to draw survivors out of their often disastrous mental suffering is to give them tasks, jobs, skills training and agency. Like the farm bought by Christine Schuler Deschryver, to be run by rape survivors in Congo (p.329) or Dr Branca Antic-Stauber’s idea of setting up a rose-growing business to employ survivors in Bosnia (p.185)

No index

There’s no index. Why?

Similarly no list of the organisations mentioned in each country, or organisations addressing sexual violence generally. I supply my own list below.

Human history

Well, I’ve explained my view of human history in a separate blog post:

History is an abattoir. What was written down is a tiny fraction of what happened, and it was written by the educated and privileged, mostly sucking up to kings and khans. The reality of human existence for most humans for most of human history has been unspeakably brutal.

Last thought

In his brilliant series of books about conflict and international order in the 1990s, Michael Ignatieff divides the world into zones of conflict and zones of safety. Every day I thank my lucky stars that I was born and lived all my life in what he calls a ‘zone of safety’. Way before you get to my white privilege or my male privilege, I give thanks for my safety privilege.

Credit

‘Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women’ by Christina Lamb was first published by William Collins in 2020. I read the updated 2025 paperback edition.

Organisations mentioned in the text

Support organisations

At the end of the Unsilenced exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, the curators give a list of support organisations, which I repeat here:

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The Penguin History of Latin America by Edwin Williamson (revised edition 2009) (1)

Because it comes with the bright orange and white spine of the new-style Penguin histories, and because it said ‘New Edition’ on the front cover, I hadn’t quite grasped that the main body of this hefty 700-page history of Latin America was completed by 1990, 35  years ago.

The new edition is ‘new’ because it tacks a 40-page chapter onto the end of the unedited main text, summarising events in Latin America between 1990 and 2008. Obviously quite a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since 2008, so I probably need to supplement reading this with a modern, modern history of Latin America.

The text is divided into three big parts:

  • The Age of Empire, pages 3 to 192 (189 pages)
  • The Challenge of the Modern World, pages 195 to 310 (115 pages)
  • The Twentieth Century, pages 313 to 566 (253 pages)

Note how the section on the 20th century, plus the forty pages of the ‘new’ chapter, is as long as the first two parts put together. Here, as everywhere, the more recent the history, the more of it there is, the more people there have been and the more records have been kept, until we reach the present age when every phone call, every text and every photograph anyone in the world takes is being recorded and stored. Soon we will drown in data.

The conquest of the Aztecs and Incas

Williamson dives right in with the early, legendary history of the Aztecs, when they were a group of nomads traipsing round central Mexico, before they established the largest empire in pre-Colombian America around 1400. Their only rival was the Inca Empire, down in modern-day Peru.

There is, of course, a lot to say about both, but the thing that struck me was the way both of them were empires carved out by one particular tribe or ethnic group which subjugated all their neighbours, and demanded tribute in food, precious metals and slaves (some then offered up as grisly human sacrifices).

Both empires generated complex religious ideologies accompanied by fascinating and complex theories of time – that it moved in cycles and was marked by moments of great significance – but the bottom line was that both the Aztec ruler and the Inca emperor believed they derived their authority from the gods, and were backed up in this conviction by the classes of priests and warriors which justified and defended them.

Of course the vast majority of the population was peasants, mostly living in abject serfhood, who slaved away for their short, unhealthy lives, producing the surpluses which paid for the elaborate costumes and rituals and treasures sported by their rulers. Which was also the fate of entire populations of conquered tribes, for both the Aztecs and Incas lived by war, by conquering, subjugating and exploiting neighbouring peoples.

The other striking thing was their backwardness. Both Aztecs and Incas, and all the hundreds of other tribes scattered across central and south America, were illiterate. The Aztecs and Incas had no written language, just a primitive system of markers – the important knowledge about the stars and the gods was handed down by word of mouth, hence the semi-divine regard for the caste of priests who, alone, knew this vital celestial information.

They didn’t have the wheel, nor beasts of burden – no horses or donkeys or camels or bullocks. Therefore they had to carry everything by hand. It is staggering to realise that the awesome Inca city of Machu Picchu was built by massive stones, carried 2,430 metres above sea level, by human power alone.

All this was doomed to come crashing to an end when the Europeans arrived. Williamson describes in detail the four successive voyages of Christopher Columbus, his first landfall in 1492, the chaotic mismanagement of the first islands he and his men settled – Hispaniola – the slow, establishment of colonies, the extension of Spanish rule onto neighbouring islands, and then, 27 years later, Cortez’s expedition to the mainland against the Aztecs (1519 to 1521).

The eeriest thing about Cortes’s conquest of the Aztec Empire, and then Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of Peru in 1532, is the idea that the rulers of both empires were too puzzled and confused by the invaders to respond adequately. They couldn’t believe that these little gangs of a few hundred men were serious about planning to overthrow their empires of tens of thousands of warriors – but they couldn’t figure out what it was they really wanted. Williamson attributes the conquistadors’ success partly to guns and horses but shows that in both cases, the conquerors really had very few of them – when Pizarro finally met with the Inca emperor Atahualpa, in nothern Peru, he had a force of just 110-foot soldiers, 67 cavalry, three arquebuses and two falconets.

More decisive was the Europeans’ superior grasp of strategy, in particular realising that the empires they were encountering were themselves highly stressed, riven by faction fights or stretched by the continual need to control their subject peoples. The Spanish made alliances with enemies and groups wishing to be liberated. They were good at building coalitions.

Williamson doesn’t say it in so many words, but the idea emerges that the Europeans triumphed because they were just more intelligent about strategy and warcraft.

The role of European diseases

Then there’s our old friend disease. As explained at length in Jared Diamond’s classic 1997 study Guns, Germs and Steel, wherever European explorers went they took with them the infectious diseases which, over thousands of years, they had built up immunity to – but which ravaged the native populations which had no immunity to them.

This view is reinforced by the revisionist history of America told by Alan Taylor in his brilliant American Colonies: The Settling of North America (2001). Taylor explains how the entire native civilisation of the Mississippi valley was wiped out by diseases, most probably smallpox, brought by a few shipwrecked Spanish sailors to the mouth of the Mississippi delta, which then spread catastrophically so that when, a century later, the first Anglo-Saxon explorers entered the region, they discovered entire cities with complex layouts, large palaces and temples and canals… all abandoned and overgrown by forest.

Indeed, Pizzaro’s job of conquering the Incas was made easier because the Incas were themselves in the middle of a bloody civil war, which was complicated by the fact that not one but two rival claimants to the throne had died from smallpox. Over the decades after the Spanish arrived, there was a catastrophic collapse in native populations caused by the invaders’ diseases. Some experts estimate as much as 90% of the native population of Mexico was killed by European disease within fifty years.

Still, Williamson is always at hand to say that in this, as in everything else, the reality on the ground, and across such vast areas as all of Mexico, Central America and Peru, were far more complex and uneven than contemporaries and many historians realise. Many other areas of the continent remained relatively untouched and life went on in the same old way, only now you had to pay a tribute of your produce to a new boss, who wore armour and rode a horse.

The geographic limits of Spanish settlement

The book is packed with thought-provoking ideas and insights. I was fascinated to understand more about the geographic limits to the spread of Spanish rule.

When the Anglo settlers arrived in North America in the 1600s they found it relatively easy to spread out into New England and all along the Atlantic coast. But the Spanish, having established their key centres of administration in Mexico City and Lima a century earlier, with waystations and ports in the Caribbean, found it difficult to expand beyond them. Why?

North of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital which the invaders had renamed Mexico City, lies a vast area of arid desert – the territory which centuries later would become Arizona and New Mexico – where the Spanish explorers discovered nothing but impoverished villages of Indians surviving on subsistence agriculture.

Over to the East there were repeated attempts to explore the peninsula they named ‘Florida’, but the Spanish found it consisted of endless everglades with few settlements and nothing to plunder.

Heading south, the Spanish took over the coastal strip west of the Andes, conquering the Inca empire, but found the Andes mountains themselves too high to settle. Only a handful of expeditions went over the Andes to explore east. Williamson describes some of these expeditions, which got lost in the vast Amazon rainforests, and encountered only the most primitive tribespeople, if, indeed, they lived to tell the tale.

So, in a nutshell, central and south America were more difficult for the Spanish to settle than North America would turn out to be for the Anglos. And this explains the quite startling fact that some parts of South America – Williamson singles out much of the interior of what is now called Argentina – weren’t really settled at all until the 20th century.

The other factor which limited the area of settlement was the Spaniards’ motivation. The conquistadors were adventurers, often from the very lowest parts of society. No nobles or aristocrats ventured their lives in the New World. Poor youngest sons of noble families led gangs of criminals and proles. None of them were the type of people who wanted to stake a claim and build a farmhouse and work the land – as the Anglo settlers were to do up north a hundred years later.

Instead, the Spanish wanted to exploit and loot as much wealth as they could from the New World before returning home and buying land, a house and a title. They came to loot. And here’s the important thing – you can only loot people who are already rich. The Spanish took over the two big empires, the Aztec in Mexico and the Inca in Peru, because an infrastructure was already in place whereby the native emperors and the upper class exploited large numbers of peasants in a well-organised system. The Spaniards simply took over the system, co-opting the best of the agricultural produce and all the treasure and artefacts for themselves.

It is this factor – the Spanish approach to colonisation – which explains the limited and very patchy nature of Spanish settlement. In the deserts of north Mexico, and in the south of the area they named California, were only desert dwellers, scraping a subsistence living from the soil by dint of elaborate water works. Nothing to steal. In Florida, endless swamps inhabited by scattered villagers. Nothing to steal, and no ‘society’ worth taking over. Ditto the Amazon rainforests. Nothing like an organised society whose power structures and tributes they could simply appropriate.

The Spanish only settled where there were established and relatively advanced societies which they could parasitise.

How Spain applied the Reconquista to the New World

Williamson lays out with beautiful logic and clarity just how that imperialist approach to colonisation had arisen in Spain.

It is an enormous historical coincidence that the year that Columbus made landfall in the Bahamas, 1492, just happened to be the very same year that – after nearly 800 years of war and crusade – the Spanish finally kicked the very last Muslim Moorish presence out of the south of Spain.

(Muslim forces had crossed the Straits of Gibraltar to seize Spanish territory way back in 711 – the fightback is traditionally dated to their first defeat by Christian forces, in 718 – and it took nearly another 800 years, of slow painstaking battles and piecemeal conquest, for native Christians, sometimes fighting alongside Christian warriors from the rest of Europe attracted by the periodic ‘crusades’ against the Muslims – to finally expel all the Muslim chiefs, emirs and so on from the final southern enclaves.)

The point of this historical background is that expelling the Muslims from Spain wasn’t achieved by a modern-style mass army and in a few years of continuous campaigning – but by ad hoc campaigns led by local Spanish warriors and adventuring knights, which liberated bits and pieces of territory, over a very long period of time.

As and when they seized territory from the Muslims, these adventurers applied to the king to rule it. (Spain itself was a very fractured entity, with a number of different kingdoms. It was only as the Reconquista reached its conclusion that the marriage of King Ferdinand of Aragon with Queen Isabella of Castile united most of Spain’s territory to form the basis of one unified Spanish monarchy.)

Sometimes large areas of land would be conquered and the new lords were granted what were known as latifundia, originally a Roman word describing a vast agricultural estate. The new owners co-opted the existing inhabitants as serfs to work the land, but often much of the original or Muslim population had fled and so the lords had difficulty filling them with workers and had to advertise for new workers to come in.

The point is that the Reconquista of Spain established a model for settling new lands, freshly conquered from the infidel, which was then applied wholesale to the new territory discovered by Columbus and his Viceroys across the ocean, and by the conquistadors and adventurers who followed them.

The Reconquista established the pattern of the monarch granting complete control over large swathes of territory, and all the people on it, to the conqueror or adelantado who had seized it. This resulted in a handful of rich swaggering lords riding among large populations of impoverished peasants working vast areas of land. In the New World it became known as the encomienda system and the grant holders encomenderos.

In fact it was a bit more complicated than that: the native Indians remained, nominally, free subjects of the Crown, which awarded encomenderos the right to enforce labour from the natives, but not complete power of life and death over them. That was the theory, anyway.

Williamson – once he has reported the main military and political events of the conquest – moves briskly on to discuss in considerable detail, this and all the other legal and administrative measures which the Spanish implemented in their new lands.

In fact, the ‘excitement’ of the narrative of Columbus’s voyages and the initial conquests of the Aztecs and the Incas which open the text, might give the reader quite a misleading impression of the book. Williamson is much more a historian of constitutional and administrative systems than he is a chronicler of exciting battles and against-the-odds expeditions. A lot of this book is quite dry. But he develops the constitutional and legal aspects of the conquest in such detail that, to my surprise, the conflicts between the settlers, and in particular between the Viceroys appointed to govern the new provinces and the monarchy back in Spain – and between both of them and Catholic church – at moments become quite gripping.

The Crown protects the Indians 

One counter-intuitive learning is that the Spanish crown, right from the start, was concerned about protecting the rights of the native Indians, indeed became their chief protector.

As Spanish adventurers opened up new territory and conquered more and more native peoples, the monarchs became concerned to make sure they were not simply enslaved. Queen Isabella personally forbade the enslavement of the natives, and a series of ‘Laws of the Indies’ tried to stem abuses wherever they were found. Encomenderos may have enjoyed almost complete power over the populations of their vast estates, but Spanish laws commanded them to also set up schools and hospitals, to educate the Indians, protect them from wars and raids, and to enact justice. This effort continued for the rest of the 16th century, for example with the ‘New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians’ of 1547, which explicitly forbade all forms of enslaving the native population. The New Laws prompted violent opposition among the oligarchies of Spanish settlers.

The Church takes the Indians’ side

It’s also surprising to read about the broadly sympathetic line taken by the Catholic Church. The Pope and the Catholic organisations which sent cohorts of missionaries out to the New World took the line that these were people made in God’s image, like us, with souls that needed saving. Certainly, some of the first cohort of priests accompanying the conquistadors helped in the wholesale destruction of priceless documents and artefacts which they considered pagan and devilish. But within a generation, a new wave of clerics began for all kinds of reasons to take the native Indians’ side, deploring their brutal exploitation by amoral Spanish lords.

On a pragmatic note, they also realised they couldn’t convert the natives by preaching at them in Latin or Spanish, and undertaking ‘mass baptisms’ where the Indians didn’t have a clue what was going on. So a whole project was undertaken to learn more about the natives’ languages, which quickly extended into documenting their histories and beliefs. Most of what we know about native Indian religion and history derives from these records taken down by Christian missionaries.

The classic man of this type was Bartolomé de las Casas, initially a coloniser himself, who became a Dominican friar and spent the last 50 years of his life fighting slavery and the colonial abuse of indigenous peoples. He was appointed by the Spanish crown the first ‘Protector of the Indians’, an administrative office responsible for attending to the wellbeing of the native populations, a function he enthusiastically carried out and which included speaking on their behalf in law courts and even reporting back to the King of Spain in person.

In 1550, Bartolomé participated in the Valladolid debate, in which Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (the noted Spanish Renaissance ‘humanist’, philosopher, theologian and… er… proponent of colonial slavery) argued that the Indians were less than human and required Spanish masters in order to become civilized. Las Casas maintained that the Indians were fully human and that forcefully subjugating them was morally, legally, and theologically, unjustifiable. Las Casas is a hero (not a perfect hero, but by the standards of his own time a brave and determined protector of the people.)

Williamson gives a long and detailed account of the numerous legal initiatives launched by the Crown to try and protect the Indians from exploitation, but in the end they all failed. No amount of legal or theological argumentation could avoid the fact that the Spanish remained the ruling caste with one law for them, while the Indians remained a separate caste, subject to completely different laws. Williamson calls them the Republic of the Spaniards and the Republic of the Indians.

And nothing could alter the simple fact that, on the ground, most of the laws designed to protect the Indians were ignored by the settlers, who looked after each other’s interests.

Theories of conquest and bureaucratic structures

I could have done with more about where the silver was discovered in the New World, and the technology of how it is mined and purified. We are told that mercury was vital to the purification process, but not really how or why. I had to google it to find out. He does eventually have three pages on the silver mines (with two on gold-mining), but in general Williamson is light on that kind of thing, on technology, and on the diverse resources of the region.

Instead, as the book settles into its stride, you realise that Williamson is going to devote most of his energy to the legal and theological justifications of Spanish rule along with detailed descriptions of the bureaucratic structures the Spanish set up.

Thus there is a long passage explaining how the theory of monarchy evolved in Spain from its late-medieval form to the theory which underpinned the role of Philip II as head of an empire which stretched from California to Sicily. He explains the role of the Catholic Church as a vital prop to royal authority, and gives long explanations of the laws and the administrative structures set up to run the colonies.

He explains the main theories by which the Spanish justified their conquests, both to themselves and to the rest of the world (especially to their critical opponents in the Protestant world). There were two main ones:

  1. The well-established Law of Conquest, by which one ruler conquers another and is allowed to seize his land and titles, which had been worked out over long centuries of theological and legal debate during the Middle Ages.
  2. The more modern notion that the Crown of Spain had a ‘right’ to rule the Indians because the Europeans would convert the natives to Christianity and so save their souls. This was accompanied by a kind of sub-argument, which many missionaries put forward: that the New World represented an opportunity for Christianity – which had, by the early 1500s become widely associated with corruption and worldly ambition – to start again. Here, in the Garden of Eden, were a new kind of Adam and Eve, a First People uncorrupted by the Old World, and one thread of early colonisation is the devout wishes of the early missionaries to create a Christian Paradise on earth. Of course it was not to turn out that way; the secular settlers – and the terrible European diseases – made sure of that.

How the silver was squandered

Williamson does, however, clarify something which has always puzzled me, which is: if the Spanish monarchy began receiving ever-increasing amounts of silver from the New World (as the result of great silver strikes in North Mexico and Peru in the 1540s), how come Spain steadily declined in power and influence in the century and a half after the conquest?

Indeed, Williamson points out that by the death of Philip II in 1598, Spain was technically bankrupt and had experienced state bankruptcies (i.e. been unable to repay its debts) in 1557, 1560, 1569, 1575, and 1596!

Where did the Spanish silver go? The answer turns out to be simple: paying for Spain’s wars.

Even though it never accounted for more than 20 per cent of imperial revenues, silver was the fuel that drove the Spanish war machine. (p.106)

Philip II’s father had been Holy Roman Emperor and when Philip came to the throne in 1556, he inherited responsibility for territory in every continent known to Europeans – from the extensive empire in Central and South America to the newly conquered territory of the Phillippines, from the kingdom of Naples and Sicily in Italy, to the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands which began a protracted war of independence against Spanish rule in 1568. Not only this, but Philip saw himself as the defender of all Christendom in its wars against the Ottoman Turks in the East. He it was who organised ‘the Holy League’, bringing together ships from Spain, the Republic of Venice, the Republic of Genoa, the Papal States, the Duchy of Savoy and the Knights of Malta, to inflict a decisive defeat on the Ottomans at the naval Battle of Lepanto in 1567.

Philip also saw himself as the defender of Catholic orthodoxy against the shocking new Protestant heresy. Thus Philip gave large financial support to the Catholic League fighting the Protestants in France, and then went directly to war with the French King Henry IV, an intervention which secured the future of France as a Catholic country.

Last but not least, as we Brits know, Philip II built, armed, provisioned and manned an enormous armada which was designed, with the blessing of the pope, to conquer England, overthrow the Tudor dynasty and the Church of England, and impose Philip as the Catholic ruler of a Catholic Britain.

So that’s where the silver endedup going – hacked out of dangerous and unhealthy mines in the New World by Indian slaves and serfs, perilously shipped back to the main entrepot at Seville, then frittered away funding the impossible ambitions of the over-extended Spanish monarchy.

Spain went into decline because of proliferating military commitments for which it could not pay. (p.116)

Credit

The Penguin History of Latin America by Edwin Williamson, revised edition, was published by Penguin Books in 2009.

Mexico reviews

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Posted by Simon on August 9, 2019

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Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire by Niall Ferguson (2004)

The United States invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 as a result of the 9/11 attacks. It invaded Iraq in March 2003 in response to the alleged threat of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

These acts prompted an unprecedented flood of articles in newspapers and magazines, TV documentaries, conferences, seminars, papers and hundreds of books speculating whether America was now, finally, at last revealed to be an ’empire’ with nakedly ‘imperial’ ambitions.

British economic historian Niall Ferguson entered the debate with a Channel 4 TV series and book on the subject – which also neatly complemented the C4 TV series and book he had published in 2003 about the British Empire.

When I bought it I thought, from its subtitle (‘The rise and fall of the American empire’), that it would be a history, maybe a chronological account of the growth of American power.

But it isn’t. Even more so than the British Empire book, this book is really an extended argument with historical examples. It is a polemical interpretation of history, written with a very strong point of view, which starts in the present day – the Preface, written in 2005 is full of references to contemporary events in Iraq, to ongoing debates in the media, policy statements by the Administration, learned articles etc – and, no matter what incidents from the past it describes, Ferguson is always emphasising their relevance to the present situation.

However, time has a way of advancing at a steady pace: it is now 12 years since the book (11 years since the preface) were published, and we have the usual benefit of hindsight, both on America’s strategic decisions, and on Ferguson’s interpretation of them.

The book can therefore be read and enjoyed on at least three levels:

  1. As a snapshot of contemporary thinking about US policy in Afghanistan/Iraq in 2003/4
  2. As an extended argument about the role of the US in global affairs, with which to agree or disagree
  3. For the illustrations of that argument which include a succession of fascinating accounts of episodes from US history which shed light on the empire thesis (and other things too)

An empire in denial

Ferguson’s thesis can be stated very simply: the US is an empire; despite all protests to the contrary, it always has been an empire; in fact it would be a good thing for the world as a whole if the leaders of America just accepted the fact and began to act more like an empire; instead of which America’s rulers have a long tradition of intervening for short periods in foreign countries, then withdrawing in a hurry and letting them revert to chaos/civil war/instability. Ferguson’s thesis is that Americans should stay in the countries they invade, and be prepared to pay the cost.

The way he puts it is that America is an ’empire in denial’. In reach and power, in its conviction of being a torch bearer of civilised values – freedom, democracy, free market capitalism etc – in the sheer fact that its armed forces outnumber the next ten or so nations’ armies put together, and that it has military bases in half the nations of the earth – America is an Empire in everything but name.

The book is – maybe intentionally – comic in the way it lines up quotes from US presidents and senators and commentators from the late 19th century onwards, all saying the US is not an empire and carrying on vowing it does not have imperial ambitions etc, through the Second World War – notably the fiercely anti-imperial Franklin Roosevelt, who played a large role in undermining the British Empire – and right up to the present day, asserting, ‘No empire, no way!’

Then follows all these denials with an account of

a) how America was created ie by killing Indians, seizing territory, fighting neighbouring countries, buying land
b) once the continental boundaries were settled, reaching out to acquire colonies in the Pacific and Caribbean, by sometimes pretty underhand dealing
c) the growing chorus of commentators who, especially after WW2, simply recognise US behaviour for what it’s been – stepping in to fill the power vacuum left by the bankruptcy of the British Empire and feeling free to intervene in conflicts anywhere in the world to influence them in the ‘right’ direction. The American direction. Korea, Suez, Iran, Vietnam, Iraq.

Not new

That America is an empire is not a new thought, in fact it is a cliché of our times. You only have to Google ‘American empire’ to be appalled at the amount of learned ink and journalistic hype which has been spilt debating the point back and forth for the past 15 years. Ferguson claims that what makes him stand out from this vast sea of discourse is that he thinks an American Empire would be a good thing, and that the Americans, alas, don’t go far enough. For Ferguson the Americans have, like it or not, become the world’s main guarantor of peace, liberty, democracy, capitalism and free trade – but are continually shooting themselves in the foot by not doing it properly.

For my money what makes Ferguson stand out from the scrum of people in this arena is that 1. very few of the political commentators have the breadth and depth of knowledge he brings to bear as a professional economic historian – and 2. not many of his fellow historians have a taste for writing such partisan and polemical pieces with such verve and confidence.

Structure

In the introduction Ferguson outlines the structure of the book in eight chapters:

  1. The imperial origins of the USA ie the way the Founding Fathers themselves (surprisingly) used the term ’empire’, and the way the young nation bought, fought and conquered its way across the continent and beyond.
  2. A fascinating account of America’s successes (Hawaii and Puerto Rico) and failures (the rest of central America and the Caribbean): drawing the conclusion that it has been most successful where it directly and permanently intervenes and governs, and repeatedly failed when it intervenes to overthrow a dictator and quickly withdraws (Panama, Nicaragua), leaving the fundamental problems of poor governance unchanged.
  3. Showing how 9/11 represented a culmination of decades of mismanagement of the Middle East and of growing Islamic terrorist organisations which the US did little to tackle.
  4. How the failure of the UN in the Yugoslav civil wars and the Rwanda genocide showed the US it could and should go it alone, proving that all decisive action in the post-Cold War world requires is a ‘coalition of the willing’; and how the disasters of small-scale US intervention in Somalia and Lebanon suggested that the US should only intervene in situations with a clear end-goal and then only with overwhelming force.
  5. Assesses the costs and benefits of America establishing a true empire, ie permanently occupying failed states.
  6. This is a detailed essay which could easily stand alone, assessing whether the US has the capacity, know-how or staying power to remain in Iraq long enough to build a viable nation state, cheekily comparing its quick-fix approach to the history of Britain’s long stay in Egypt. The British officially stated no fewer than 66 times that they would clear out of Egypt, starting within weeks of their unofficial ‘conquest’ in 1882; whereas they ended up staying for 72 years, Ferguson controversially argues, much to Egypt’s economic and legal benefit. Another element in America’s weakness is the reluctance of Americans to serve abroad. Most get postings to the Middle East for a year and are soon back home among the hamburgers and soccer moms. This makes you appreciate rather more the selflessness of lots of British administrators who devoted their entire lives to ‘serving’ in often very remote parts of the world, with little thanks at home or from the native peoples, stiffened by the ethos of service and self-sacrifice which had been drummed into them in Britain’s public schools. There is simply no equivalent in American culture.
  7. This chapter also feels like a stand-alone essay on the simple question: Is the European Union a viable new ’empire’ capable of asserting western values through unified force in a way which can challenge the United States? Well, No. Ferguson very thoroughly demolishes the idea and confirms one’s sense that the EU is a ramshackle bureaucracy dedicated to guaranteeing its employees a fabulous lifestyle and protecting French farmers, while completely failing to act decisively in any kind of emergency, from the Yugoslav civil wars to the the current Refugee Crisis via its wise and fair treatment of the defaulting Greeks.
  8. Many critics and commentators predict the American Empire will be brought low by what Paul Kennedy called ‘imperial overstretch’ and go bankrupt like the great empires before it. Ferguson brings his grasp of historical economics to bear to argue that the real threats to the US economy are in fact internal. The largest elements in the US budget are not military but the vast obligations of Social Security (pensions) and Medicare. Politically, the threat is not of over-stretch but of over-hasty withdrawal of forces form trouble zones, under pressure from domestic public opinion and ever-recurrent US isolationism. Once again, leaving the job half-done.

And this concern does seem to have been justified. As the Wikipedia article on the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq makes clear, President Bush held out against a Congress and public opinion calling for the troops to come home from 2007 onwards, signing an agreement that the last ones would leave in December 2011. Since that time the main development in the region has of course been the popular uprising in neighbouring Syria against President Bashar al-Assad, which led to a civil war, which, along with a power vacuum in northern Iraq, led to the swift emergence of a new force, Islamic State.

Whether the rise of ISIL could have been prevented by maintaining US forces in Iraq is something historians will debate forever. How many forces, exactly? And for how long?

Insights and stories

As with Empire, a lot of the basic story is familiar, especially the recaps of the disasters of the 1990s (Yugoslavia, Rwanda) and the detailed account of the diplomatic pussy-footing to get the UN resolutions and allies needed to invade Iraq. I feel like I’ve read hundreds of articles and books on the subject.

By contrast, his chapters on the early history of the American republic, and then its interventions in Latin America, the Philippines, Hawaii etc, were mostly new to me. Certainly the way they are interpreted in light of Ferguson’s thesis – ie from its earliest days the US has been imperial in ambition, and that its best interventions have been the most complete and overt ones – were new and thought-provoking.

  • The Louisiana Purchase (1803)
  • War of 1812 I hadn’t quite realised the States started this war simply to grab land, nor that the small British forces fought back so effectively that they pushed the Yanks back to Washington where – in the war’s most famous incident – they burned down the White House. Nor that the war helped create a sense of Canadian nationhood among the people that pushed back the Americans.
  • Mexican-American War (1846-48) resulting from the US annexation of Texas and leading to the acquisition of more land ie southern California and New Mexico.
  • Overthrow of Hawaii’s rulers I didn’t know how completely imperial the seizure of Hawaii was, with the overthrow of the native royal family by a small group of white businessmen. The reluctance of the authorities back in Washington to back the obvious greed and illegality of the men on the spot is like many episodes in the British Empire, where the central government was in fact more protective of native rights than the self-interested businessmen who behaved so high-handedly.
  • Spanish-American War (1898) On a trumped-up pretext the US invaded and annexed Cuba from Spain.
  • Philippine–American War (1899-1902) As part of the Spanish-American war, the US seized the Philippine Islands from Spain, on the other side of the world. Military victory was straightforward but followed by a prolonged counter-insurgency which the Americans tried to solve by driving the general population into concentration camps and shooting everyone found outside the camps without identification. Guerrilla war phase
  • Panama In the early 1900s the US supported Panama independence from Colombia so that it could instantly sign a treaty with the new ‘country’ to build, own and run the Panama Canal in perpetuity.
  • Puerto Rico is currently ‘an unincorporated US territory’. Reading the Wikipedia article about its ‘acquisition’ by the USA gives powerful evidence of the imperialist mind-set and language used by American leaders at the turn of the century.

And so on…

Is it or isn’t it?

So is America an empire? The obvious answer is, Who cares?

Well, who does care is the thousands of analysts, pundits, professors and think tank geeks, military experts and geopolitical strategists, who are paid to write and debate this kind of question ad nauseam. For them it means publication, reputation, careers to be made debating the finer points of the matter, creating subtler and subtler definitions of empire, making more and more ornate comparisons with previous empires, publishing sophisticated and thought-provoking prognostications, most of which turn out to be wildly wrong (eg Paul Kennedy’s predictions that the American Empire would soon collapse in his popular best-seller The Rise and Fall of The Great Powers of 1987).

A slightly more engaged answer would be: Since I have just read the views on the matter of some 50 people, from various Founding Fathers, through politicians and commentators in the 19th century, the Great War, the Second World War and right up to the present day, who themselves disagree wildly as to what an empire is and whether America is or isn’t one – how can I reasonably be expected to decide?

From the evidence in this book, the United States both is and isn’t an empire: it is by virtue of its military power and reach and it has a track record of annexing land (in the 19th century) and military intervention in other countries (in the 20th). BUT, as Ferguson points out, it rarely stays. It is obviously NOT in the business of seizing new colonies and permanently inhabiting them, as the Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, British, Germans, Belgians or Russians did with their empires. Hence: the US is and isn’t an ’empire’.

Whether any of this ocean of interpretation makes a blind bit of difference to the actual course of events, to the working out of US geopolitical strategy, seems unlikely. American politicians are trapped in the tight cycle of elections to the Senate, Congress and Presidency, which tend to prevent any long-term thinking and favour melodramatic gestures and simple-minded sound-bites (eg Donald Trump). From one point of view it was a triumph that President George W Bush managed to keep US troops in Iraq for so long, before giving in to domestic pressure, bringing them home, and letting the country collapse into fragments and then fall prey to a murderous new movement, ISIS.

Thirty years ago I attended a seminar which featured Ian Jack of the Observer and other foreign correspondents and experts debating whether Imperialism should be revived, whether the West should intervene – mainly in Africa – to overthrow brutal dictators or help collapsing states, and run them properly. Everyone there – white, middle-class intellectuals all – agreed it was obviously the best solution for a number of pitifully poor countries. But also agreed it was impossible in practice – because of the fierce opposition there’d be from the populations of the recolonised countries, from the UN and international community, from the surrounding nations and related bodies like the Organisation of African Unity, and from the Western countries’ own populations. Faced with opposition on all fronts, the idea of recolonisation was a non-starter: the West would have to resign itself to working through the various UN agencies, the IMF or World Bank, and its armies of NGOs and aid charities to make the best of a bad job. Direct intervention to ‘save’ collapsing or dictator-led countries could never again be a long-term possibility. Failed and chaotic states are on their own and can never again expect to be taken over and helped to rebuild.

Nothing I read in Ferguson’s book contradicts those conclusions.

Criticism

The most obvious criticism of this book, as of its predecessor, Empire, is that it gives little or no place for human experience, for the psychology of colonisation and oppression. An imperial colony’s legal system may be updated, its tax regime overhauled and its GDP improved by imperial control – and Ferguson gives plenty of examples of this in a wide range of countries, run by the British or Americans – but he takes hardly any account of people’s feelings, or of the cultural impact of being ruled over – and more or less overtly patronised by – an alien elite. For this absence of feeling, of compassion maybe, Ferguson has been criticised, especially by writers who come from former colonies and who have experienced the humiliations of empire.

My view would be that this high-level, heartless approach is hardly unique to Ferguson: all economists are like that. While Britain’s state industries were shut down, while the mining communities were thrown on the scrapheap during the Thatcher years, generations of culture were trashed, alcoholism and suicide rates soared among unemployed men, the Financial Times and its ilk were full of reports by economists discussing theories of money supply, the finer aspects of ‘Monetarism’, and the balance of payments deficit as if there was no connection between the graphs and pie charts and ruined lives. Or read how the plight of Greece was described in the Financial Times.

Economics isn’t called ‘the dismal science’ for nothing. Its fundamental strategy is to drain the humanity and life out of any situation and to reduce it to bone-dry, bloodless and – quite often, it turns out, laughably unreliable – numbers.

At least, unlike most other economic historians’, Ferguson’s books are thought-provoking, crisply written and hugely entertaining.

Related links

Bibliography

1995 Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation, 1897–1927
1998 The Pity of War
1998 The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild
1999 Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals
2001 The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700–2000
2003 Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World
2004 Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire
2005 1914
2006 The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred
2008 The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
2010 High Financier: The Lives and Times of Siegmund Warburg
2011 Civilization: The West and the Rest
2013 The Great Degeneration
2015 Kissinger: 1923–1968: The Idealist

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by Simon on January 31, 2016  •  Permalink
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