Oppression is seldom far from empire. Thucydides recounts in The Peloponnesian War—his account of the civil war that tore Greece apart in the 5^th century BC—that after the Corinthians finished their denunciation of Athens’ tyranny, the Athenians responded not by disavowing tyranny but rationalizing it. The weak had always been “kept down by the stronger,” they protested. Sparta and Corinth invoked “right and wrong.” Such concern, the Athenians countered, “has never yet deterred anyone from using force to make a gain.” The war that followed seemingly confirmed the Athenians. Athens and Sparta habitually expelled, enslaved or massacred the inhabitants of conquered cities. Few empires since have refrained from using force to make gains. 

Even during the Peloponnesian War however, force was confronted, if not mastered, by claims that empire rested on moral reputation. This confrontation was pronounced in Athens, a democracy at home and empire abroad. Athens eventually lost both. Yet the conflict between force and reputation endured. Centuries later, the American Revolution forced Britain, another empire organized around domestic freedom, to confront whether power was better preserved through force or reputation. Diverging from Athens, statesmen like Edmund Burke endeavored to base Britain’s empire on a humanitarian reputation. On that experiment hinged the question of how, and whether, great empires can ever wield their power in a morally legitimate way.

THE GREEK PROLOGUE 

Early in the Peloponnesian War, the general Pericles reminded Athenians that not only wealth and power, but character and reputation, distinguished their city. Athens was governed by majority interest, legal equality, “open and free” public discussion, and private toleration. “This character of ours,” Pericles reasoned, “built that power” which Athens enjoyed. More than an empire, Athens was an “education for Greece.” Athens’ character guided its foreign relations. Athenians made “friends by conferring benefit rather than receiving it.” Pericles celebrated “the way we help others” and how his countrymen spurned “calculation of self-interest.” Pericles’ imperial vision transcended mere force and profit. Athenian empire arose from Athenian freedom, and vindicated Athenian character.

War soon deformed this imperial ideal. Exhorting a plague-ridden Athens to keep fighting, Pericles warned “the empire you possess is now like a tyranny.” Perhaps such power was wrong to acquire, Pericles conceded. Yet it was “certainly dangerous” to relinquish it, exposing Athens to its subjects’ hatred. The plague claimed Pericles himself, but his war endured. Cleon, an ambitious demagogue who succeeded Pericles, professed to doubt whether empire and democracy were compatible. He rebuked Athenians for “succumbing to pity” by reconsidering whether to exterminate Mytilene after its failed revolt. The “three things most prejudicial to empire,” Cleon insisted, were “pity, addiction to argument, and fairness.” Mytilene was narrowly spared. Yet the will to power and unrestrained violence Cleon favored gained ascendancy. They contributed to Athens’ defeat as most of Greece turned against the hated empire. 

PAX BRITANNICA?

 Like Athens, Britain rapidly acquired a global empire. Victory in the Seven Years War (1754-1763) vastly expanded its once-struggling colonies. In Bengal alone, Britain acquired twenty million subjects. Managing this dominion exercised British politics. Waging war from the Mississippi to the Ganges quadrupled public spending. Confusion reigned over how to govern new subjects, including Francophone Catholics in Quebec, Black Caribs in the Caribbean, and Indian Muslims and Hindus. Old subjects on the North American seaboard, who resisted imperial taxes and commercial restrictions, vexed Westminster. Britons debated whether force or reputation would better maintain their empire.

Force found favor first. The British electorate and a youthful King George III empowered a faction of “authoritarian” Whig politicians. Eventually led by Lord Frederick North, these authoritarians abandoned earlier Whig principles of commercial empire and relative colonial autonomy. They championed a militarized, centralized empire, and responded to the troublesome American colonists with new taxes, anti-smuggling patrols, and a garrison of 10,000 soldiers. Elsewhere, subject welfare was subordinated to imperial gains. Bengal’s avaricious governor Robert Clive relished the “rich, populous, fruitful country” he could now tax. In 1755 troops had expelled the French inhabitants of conquered Acadia. After 1763, land-speculators sought the expulsion of St Vincent’s Black Caribs to enable sugar cultivation.     

For authoritarian Whigs, the unrest their measures provoked reconfirmed such measures’ necessity. The American colonists were “levellers,” replete with “rancorous and dangerous principles.” They demanded harshness. Endorsing the Coercive Acts against Massachusetts in 1774, an M.P. branded Boston “a nest of locusts.” Another requested the city be “knocked about the ears.” Renowned writer Samuel Johnson argued that the guilty and innocent alike must suffer when authority was challenged. When unrest erupted into rebellion in 1775, British authorities escalated from force to terror. General Thomas Gage threatened to burn Massachusetts towns. One of his officers fantasized about bombarding New England’s “miserable ports.” A Royal Navy captain fulfilled this wish, destroying the village of Falmouth for “unpardonable rebellion.” Terror spread as war did. British occupiers expelled Jewish communities suspected of rebel sympathies from Savannah and St Eustatius. In South Carolina, officers like Banastre Tarleton and Francis Rawdon behaved brutally to prisoners. If Cleon was right that pity doomed empires, Britain had little cause for concern. 

Unfortunately, Cleon’s advice grew no wiser with time. By 1780, Britain faced revolution in America, global wars against France, Spain, and Holland, estrangement from the rest of Europe, and conflict in India. A year later, its largest army in America was captured and France seemed poised to conquer its Caribbean colonies. The empire survived, but only just, and in amputated form. Many disheartened Britons agreed with the Holy Roman Emperor’s verdict that Britain was finished as a great power. It was here, however, that Britain diverged from Athens. Critiques of authoritarianism before the American Revolution developed during it into an alternative, humanitarian approach to empire which revitalized imperial confidence. 

A KINDER, GENTLER BRITISH EMPIRE?

Whig authoritarianism never lacked opponents from within Britain itself. Parliament ended military efforts to expel the Black Caribs from St Vincent out of concern that their expulsion was inhumane and tarnished Britain’s reputation. Horace Walpole named the Caribs “men as good as myself.” Burke acidly wrote the Caribs were being massacred “in the true manner of European civilization.” An Army officer ordered to fight the Caribs protested that doing so brought “infamy” to the “national character.” The Prime Minister relented. Similarly, Parliament reacted to famine in Bengal, exacerbated by Clive’s misgovernment, with investigation and (limited) reform. General John Burgoyne, soon to fight against the American rebels, decried Clive’s “extortions” and named him an “evil example” for Britain. 

Burke developed these critiques into an argument for protecting vulnerable subjects and moral reputation. Britain had erred from the start in America: it deployed troops sufficient to inflame the colonies but insufficient to control them. British troops’ subsequent “inhuman plunder and unjust oppression” hardened resistance. In 1775, Burke counseled that because “an Empire is an aggregate of many states,” its diverse parts enjoyed “local privileges and immunities.” Respecting subjects’ privileges strengthened empire, violating them frayed it. Unrestrained force also estranged foreign governments. North’s policies, Burke lamented in 1781, left Britain with “many enemies and no friends.” Empire was inseparable from character. To protect both, Burke urged Parliament to disavow “acts of barbarity” and reaffirm Britain’s reputation for “liberality and justice.” 

Postwar politics, supported by the religious revival led by clerics like John Wesley, elevated humanitarian causes aimed to protect vulnerable subjects and restore British moral confidence. Chief among them was the movement to end the slave trade. Human trafficking sustained Britain’s lucrative Caribbean sugar colonies. Yet after 1783 a chorus of voices joined abolitionist Granville Sharp in arguing the “infamous traffic” invited providential “retribution” against Britain. Two Royal Navy veterans, the surgeon Rev. James Ramsay and Captain Charles Middleton, made abolitionism the central cause of their religious circle at Teston. William Wilberforce, a young politician who had recently experienced an evangelical awakening, became their parliamentary spokesman. Long associated with slaveholder lobbyists, Burke  converted to the new abolitionist creed. He judged the slave trade “so horrid in all its circumstances,” that Parliament must “put an end to it.” Material interest, imperial or individual, he concluded, did not excuse injustice. Burke also led the effort to impeach Clive’s successor in India, Warren Hastings, whose abuses gave Britons reputations “as breakers of faith, destroyers of treaties, plunderers of the weak and unprotected.” To expiate this “stigma,” Burke asked Parliament to restrain “the pride, the fury, the avarice…the tyranny” of profligate imperial agents. 

Humanitarianism did not instantly, or completely, remake British imperialism. The slave trade only ended in 1807. Avarice and tyranny generally, and mistreatment of India particularly, endured as long as the British Empire did. Nonetheless, self criticism and humanitarian campaigning inspired an imperial ideal that distinguished Britain from rivals smitten with the rule of force like Napoleonic France or, most starkly, Hitlerian Germany. Critics of authoritarian empire like Burke neither dispelled tyranny from empire nor vindicated empire’s compatibility with freedom. They did show that force alone did not make Britain strong. Reputation, particularly for mercy, was as important as raw power for the fortunes of great powers—a lesson as salient today as it was in Athens.