Problematic Analytical Terms: Imperialism’’ and ‘‘Citizenship

Imperialism is an overused term among historians and social scientists, having taken on multiple meanings in modern usage. Familiar articulations become particularly problematic in understanding ancient empires, since Greek and Latin words and phrases used for one political community’s domination of another, such as arche, dunasteia, or kratos in the case of the Greek, and arx omnium gentium, principium imperii, or imperium sinefinibus in the case of the Roman, do not accurately map onto modern conceptions of imperialism (Finley 1978; Lintott 1981; Richardson 1991).

The term imperialism today usually carries the force of moral condemnation, but that has not always been the case. Some nineteenth century political commentators understood imperialism in racist terms, as a moral imperative for the improvement of the ‘‘inferior races,’’ most famously expressed in Rudyard Kipling’s poem of 1899 ‘‘The White Man’s Burden.’’ For a less renowned example, The Spectator, a British Liberal journal, stated in 1868 that imperialism ‘‘in its best sense’’ was ‘‘a binding duty to perform highly irksome or offensive tasks’’ (Koebner and Schmidt 1964: 28-9).

Others maintained that the term was strange and unfamiliar. In 1878 Henry Howard Molyneux Herbert, Fourth Earl of Carnarvon and the Conservative Prime Minister Disraeli’s estranged Colonial Secretary, said, perhaps somewhat disingenuously, that it was a neologism to him, and as late as 1900 the senior A. E. Stevenson, Democratic candidate for vice-president, stated that imperialism was a ‘‘new word in American politics’’ (Koebner and Schmidt 1964: 95, 153-5, 241). As these examples indicate, imperialism’s connotations have been many and varied. The term can therefore easily confuse more than it clarifies, inviting anachronistic interpretations of the ancient Mediterranean world (Champion and Eckstein 2004; cf. Raaflaub 1996a: 274-5).

Two of imperialism’s most influential theorists, J. A. Hobson and V. I. Lenin, viewed it as a phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, fueled by the capitalist mode of production (cf. collected essays in Chilcote 2000). According to Hobson and Lenin, capitalism at its most highly developed stage demanded new territories for products and new fields for investment. Both men saw imperialism as an interaction between developed industrialized nation-states and their colonized peripheries, and they lamented the fact that governments of the western powers supported these pernicious and exploitative ventures.

Imperialism as defined by Hobson and Lenin cannot therefore be productively applied to the ancient world without radical modification. Ancient Mediterranean economies, after all, were overwhelmingly agrarian and precapitalist. By modern standards, there were few industrial products in need of distant markets and little available capital for investment.

Postmodernist theories of empire and imperialism are even less helpful than the classical theories of Hobson and Lenin. According to some recent formulations, empire and imperialism are transnational, postcolonial, immanent, globalized, and cybernetic phenomena. Empire is seen as an all-pervasive force, with no apparent center, whose tentacles, assisted by ever more powerful technologies, penetrate everywhere (e. g., Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004, with critical essays in Balakrishnan 2003 and in Passavant and Dean 2004). Such post-Foucauldian, neo-Marxist critiques make for fascinating meditation on the early twenty-first century predicament, but they are useless when applied to ancient Greece and Rome.

Another towering figure in the modern study of imperialism, the economist J. A. Schumpeter, formulated a definition of imperialism that is more applicable to classical antiquity. In sharp contrast to Hobson and Lenin, Schumpeter believed modern imperialism was an atavistic survival of aggressive, militarized social structures of preindustrial times, which capitalism and modernity would ultimately eradicate. In a celebrated phrase, he described imperialism as ‘‘the objectless disposition on the part of a state to unlimited forcible expansion’’ (Schumpeter 1951: 7).

Schumpeter’s formulation is more promising for purposes of this essay than the ideas of Hobson and Lenin, insofar as it is compatible with the basic fact that polities of the ancient world were militaristic and aggressive (Hanson 1989; Rich and Shipley 1993; Hamilton and Krentz 1997; W. Harris 1979; Eckstein, this volume, chapter 16). But his definition remains vague; surely we need greater specificity in order to discuss ancient imperialism in any meaningful way. Moses Finley provided this with his six-point typology for characteristic, concrete forms of domination of imperial states over their subjects, which I will take as the definitional components of imperialism:

(1) restriction on freedom of action in inter-state relations; (2) political, administrative and/or judicial interference in internal affairs; (3) compulsory military and/or naval service; (4) payment of tribute in some form, whether in the narrow sense of a regular lump sum or as a land tax or in some other way; (5) confiscation of land, with or without subsequent emigration of settlers from the imperial state; and (6) other forms of economic subordination or exploitation, ranging from control of the seas and Navigation Acts to compulsory delivery of goods at prices below the prevailing market price and the like. (Finley 1982b: 45; cf. Finley 1978: 6)

The reader is invited to consult general histories of ancient Greek and Roman civilization in order to find Athenian and Roman examples for each of Finley’s six points, and to contemplate how useful these criteria may be for understanding the present, tasks beyond the scope of this essay. It will suffice here to say that according to Finley’s criteria, both classical Athens and republican Rome qualify as empires.

Next let us turn our attention to the idea of citizenship. After several attempts, Aristotle ultimately settles for defining the citizen (polites) as ‘‘he who enjoys the right of sharing in deliberative and judicial office’’ (Pol. 1275b19-20). On this definition, the arche, or office, comprises both specific magistracies with limited tenure and indeterminate offices, such as participation in political assemblies and jury courts, with no restrictions on tenure. On the basis of this passage, we might think of formal (officeholding) and informal (untenured, participatory) aspects of citizenship. But Aristotle also seems to recognize that even those who do not belong to either of these two groups (such as women, slaves, resident aliens, and children) are essential (Pol. 1277a5-12), in part because the household unit, or oikos, including its women, slaves, and children, is necessary as the basic building block of the state (Ober 1996:161-87). Moreover, even noncitizens possessed some legal rights. In Athens, for example, noncitizen women, children, and even slaves had certain rights against hybris, or violent assault and outrage against their persons (see, for example, Dem. 21.46-8).

Following Aristotle’s line of thought on the teleological progression from oikos to polis, we begin to get an idea of an even more informal criterion for citizenship. Accordingly, we might view Athenian and Roman citizenship in terms of what Manville (1994: 24) calls the ‘‘premodern and organic’’ paradigm. On such a view, citizenship recedes from the more or less formal political arena to the social realm; from the public to the private sphere. Pursuing this idea invites us to consider shadowy places between citizen and noncitizen status. We might even expand upon Moses Finley’s idea that various political and social differentiations constituted a ‘‘spectrum of statuses’’ in ancient Greece and Rome (Finley 1982b, esp. chs 7-9).

Since my concern in this study is with interrelationships between citizenship and imperial development, I define citizenship minimally as the right to participate directly in political processes in formal political assemblies, the ekkleesia in Athens, and the comitial assemblies in republican Rome. These were the political arenas where citizens could, at least according to formal constitutional arrangements, have had influence in the exercise of the powers outlined in Finley’s six-point typology of empire. In effect, of course, this delimitation means that our focus will be primarily upon adult male Athenians and Romans.

Imperial citizens resident in Athens and Rome certainly had some degree of ability to administer their empires, since their popular assemblies elected imperial magistrates, approved or rejected legislative proposals bearing upon imperial subjects, and ultimately controlled foreign policy. Scholars have long recognized this in studies of democratic Athens (e. g. Ober 1989), and in recent decades Fergus Millar (1984, 1986, 1989, 1998) has drawn attention to popular powers in the Roman Republic (but see Champion 1997; cf. Morstein-Marx 2004). Relationships between elites and masses and the locus of political power in classical Athens and republican Rome are likely to remain matters of intense scholarly debate, but constraints of space do not allow for further examination of these problems here. Clearly citizen status was highly desirable in both Athens and Rome, but my working hypothesis in what follows is that in Athens, though legal and cultural aspects were important, citizenship was primarily valued for its political dimension; whereas at Rome legal and cultural perquisites of citizenship were paramount. The following consideration of citizenship myths and legal disputes at Athens and Rome supports such a hypothesis.