See Empires.
In Poul Anderson's Technic History, the Polesotechnic League represents free trade but is followed by the Terran Empire.
When Isaac Asimov's Galactic Empire falls and the Foundation's influence grows, its agents include first Traders, then Merchant Princes, but why was there an Empire in the first place?
Yet again, a passage from James Blish's Cities In Flight encapsulates how Blish's future history addresses the issue of trade and empires:
"We have already discussed the collapse under its own weight of the Hruntan Empire and the final reduction of the fragments by the recrudescent Earth police during the period 3545-3602. We have stressed this relatively minor aspect of Earth history not because it was at all unusual, but because it was typical of the balkanization of Earth's official power during the very period when its actual power was greatly on the rise. Our discussion of the history of one of the Okie cities, New York, N. Y., which began its space-flying career in 3111 and thus overlapped much of the history of the Hruntan Empire, may be compared to illustrate the difference in the treatment accorded by Earth to her two very different children, empires and Okies, and history shows the wisdom of the choice; for it was the wide-ranging Okies who were to make the galaxy an orchard for Earth for a relatively long period, as such periods go in galactic history."
-James Blish, The Triumph Of Time IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 467-596 AT PROLOGUE, p. 470.
An appropriate paragraph, worth quoting in full.
2 comments:
Empires have been and remain one of the major forms of human social organization since the late Neolithic (though earlier they're possiblew but we can't tell). There's no reason to believe this will change.
And we may be completely missing empires. We'd have no archaeological record of the Zulu empire and its offshoots without written sources from outside observers. -With- those we can trace developments, but the stones and bones would be ambiguous without; there were no cities, no forts, no elaborate burials for kings -- Shaka Zulu, the founder, was buried with one spear, a pot, and a kaross (skin blanket).
Archaeologists mostly interpreted Bronze Age northern Europe as a decentralized, village-based society over the past few generations -- but recently, a battle site has been found at Tollense, in eastern Germany, fought around 1250 BCE and involving thousands of warriors on both sides, many of them from hundreds of miles away and showing signs of being professional fighters.
That implies a degree and scale of political organization vastly greater than the "simple, village based" model.
Kaor, Paul!
And I agree with Mr. Stirling's comments. "Empire," however defined, has been probably been the single most common form of large scale socio/political organizations invented by the human race. And I emphatically include the US as well. We expanded westwards from the original 13 colonies to the Pacific coast by a mix both conquest and purchase of territory.
Ad astra! Sean
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