The sign of the Empire must be everywhere

[samiaseo75]

For those who live outside it, the empire often casts a long shadow. The order and quiet of an empire is often sinister. "Mordor", "the Empire of Darkness", "the Empire strikes back", "Shmersch" (the name means "death" in Russian), "the Empire of Death" etc. Natural or national affiliation is replaced by the law, for the cement of imperial cohesion is a universal legal system and universal taxes. As imperial power is wielded by a tiny group over myriads, the totems of authority and the symbolic act are all important, from Charlemagne's cutting down of the sacred oaks of the Saxons to the anointment of the Holy Roman emperors.

The stamp, the crest, the seal, the flag, the imperial head on the coin, the lingua franca, the universal coinage itself. In 1500 B.C. the political and diplomatic language of the Orient was Babylonian. The phone number list British made English the language of the educated in India and introduced in 1830 a common currency, the rupee, which is still used today. Those who do not speak the language of the law givers are regarded as "backwoodsmen", "stubborn" and "without ambition", although an empire rarely enforces knowledge of the imperial tongue. Economic necessity ensures that. But in contrast to a nation, the imperial units or currencies, language or law does not replace what already exists so often as they are super- imposed. Here empires are more tolerant than nation states, for imperial uniformity may well be no more than a superstructure: not one law, but one supreme law, not one language but one supreme language.

Empire builders are literally that: builders. The Taj Mahal and the Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (20 walls 22' thick with a radius of 50 miles according to Herodotus), the Great Wall of China (the only man-made feature on this planet visible from outer space), the Piles of Samath, Nero's Rome, Jenan's Delhi, Emperor Frederick's Castel del Monte, the Vatican Palace, the Kremlin, the palaces of all the imperial rulers of history, the stupendous never-to-be realised designs for Imperial Berlin: monuments to victory, to their own magnificence and the magnificence of their rulers, but also monuments erected to proclaim to the world and to posterity that this is civilization.