Back in the fifth century, I expect there was a great deal of jeering from the beaches as the Britons watched the Romans leave our shores – after all, what had they ever done for us? It wasn’t as though they invested in our roads and infrastructure. They didn’t give us access to higher learning or teach us anything new, did they? And once they were gone, trade wasn’t interrupted with the rest of the world, was it? Bloody immigrants, they said, and then they were promptly invaded by the Saxons.
It’s not fashionable to talk about the ‘Dark Ages’ anymore. Modern historians point to the amount of continuity elsewhere in the world and accuse earlier scholars of being narrow-minded. Even though Rome was sacked, Constantinople continued for another thousand years. They also point to the rise of the Islamic empire in the Middle East, with their discoveries in astronomy, medicine and mathematics as evidence that it wasn’t quite so dark after all. And China rolled on as it always has.
There’s also a biased view against imperialism in general. It’s a dirty word, especially among nationalist historians. Empires are evil, they say. Democracy is king. Thus, when the Romans left Britain, the tribes were free to make their own choices. They could choose their own leaders. They took back control of their lives.
You can see where I’m going with this, can’t you?
Democracy is, of course, a delusion. In the referendum on whether to stay part of the European experiment, 17 million votes decided the fate of sixty-million people. That’s not how democracy was supposed to work. (And if any American readers are feeling fairly smug about your own system, just bear in mind that your candidates for government are chosen by just .02% of your population – the same as the candidates chosen to govern Hong Kong under the Chinese system.) But I digress.
There’s no denying Europe was a poorer place after the Roman Empire declined and fell. Like the European Union, it was founded on the back of various wars and to ensure peace, Rome offered the tribes they conquered the olive branch of trade. As a citizen of Rome, you had access to the whole of the empire to do business in, the benefit of its army keeping the peace, and even though you had no say what-so-ever in the choice of emperor, he did provide coins with his image to trade with.
While it’s true to say that trade didn’t die out completely when the Romans left, the volume certainly did. Trade requires trust, co-operation and security to thrive and without them, Europe soon declined.
For the next four hundred years, from the Romans leaving to the rise of Alfred the Great, life on these islands was chaotic, brutish and lacked any kind of refinement. Except for the Christians hiding away in the far north, it was relatively illiterate. People built their houses from sticks rather than stone. The roads fell into disrepair.
I think the parallels with what’s happening in Britain right now are frighteningly similar. The tribalism in evidence on our streets and in the news echoes what happened when we became isolated from the rest of Europe following the fall of Rome. Our culture is shrinking. We are becoming less civilised. We are disconnecting from Europe, from the rest of the world and we’re entering a new dark age.
The age of Imperialism is over. The fall of the USSR in the early 90s marks the end of an era that stretches all the way back to the renaissance. In just a hundred years, the great (and I use the word ‘great’ to suggest big rather than good) empires have evaporated. Spain in 1898, Austro-Hungary in 1918, Germany, Italy and Japan in the 1940s, France in the 1950s, Britain in the 1960s...
Very few of the countries they left behind have mourned their passing, especially the Chinese under the Japanese or the Somalis under the Italians, or anybody subjected to the brutality of the Nazi regime. There is no excuse for that kind of imperialism and it’s right that they’re gone. But what has replaced them has often proven equally unstable and unjust.
I would also argue that the British and French empires were not as bad as many people like to claim; we built railways, dug canals, invested in businesses and connected the territories under our umbrella with the rest of the world. Some of those colonies have done rather well - Canada and Australia in particular.
Belonging to any large organisation, whether it’s the Roman Empire or the European Union, has more positive benefits than negative ones. People living under the umbrella of the British Empire had access to investment and opportunities. Average Africans and Indians are now worse-off than they were a hundred years ago. There is wide-spread corruption and injustice. Incomes are down. The British Empire wasn’t perfect by any means but everyone was equal under the law - pax Britannicus rather than pax Romana.
Will there be another empire in the future? I suspect it won’t be called an ‘empire’ but it will happen. In a sense, it’s an imperative of our survival. Just as the empires of the past forced the evolution of different societies, for good or ill, so a single dominating ideal will be necessary to solve the planet’s increasing problems.
My money is on the machines – not terminator-style robots or the world of the Matrix, but something more subtle; a gradual and imperceptible taking-over by the systems that currently decide what we want to buy from Amazon or see on Google, for example. The vast amounts of data that are being squirrelled away for the future will become our government (small ‘g’) one day. There will be a second renaissance after years of tribalism and isolation. A new Rome will rise and the dark age, however you want to define it, will be over. I just hope, given the pace of change in the modern world, compared to the ancient one, it won’t take four hundred years.
Veni, Vidi, Vereor...
Comentários