When Constantine embraced Jesus as his own, he redefined the meaning of Jesus’s life and teaching to claim for himself and the empire the moral authority of the prophet of justice, peace, and love. In the words of Christian writer Walter Wink:
Once Christianity became the religion of the empire… its success was linked to the success of the empire, and preservation of the empire became the decisive criterion for ethical behavior.… The church no longer saw the demonic as lodged in the empire, but in the empire’s enemies. Atonement became a highly individual transaction between the believer and God; society was assumed to be Christian, so the idea that the work of Christ entails the radical critique of society was largely abandoned.19 (italics in the original)
122 To this day Christianity remains divided between those who embrace Jesus’s teachings of love and forgiveness as the foundation of Christian morality and those who invoke the name of Jesus in the pursuit of righteous vengeance, imperial conquest, and authoritarian rule.
FEUDAL FIEFDOMS
By 700, the unified Roman Empire that had once encircled the Mediterranean Sea had been replaced by competing Byzantine, Islamic, and western Christian empires. Thus began what historians refer to as the Middle Ages, the period of European history between the Roman Empire and the rise of the modern European nation-state during which no individual ruler or nation was able to establish dominion over the whole.
Europe’s early Middle Ages (600–1050), sometimes referred to as the Dark Ages, were days of classic feudalism. Power was fragmented among competing fiefdoms. The roads, water-supply systems, and other public infrastructure created by the Roman Empire, as well as its cultural life, went into decline. The Church of Rome, with its vast bureaucracy and influence over spiritual life, acted in shifting political alliances with secular rulers to provide the only unifying force among those European countries previously united under Rome’s secular rule.
Life during this period was harsh. Starvation and disease were commonplace. Intellectual and artistic achievements were undistinguished. There were repeated invasions by Vikings, Hungarians, and Muslims. By contrast, the period of Roman secular rule had been a time of comparative stability, security, and prosperity.
In the High Middle Ages (1050–1300) the harshness of life gradually eased. Improved agricultural methods and the use of water and animal power allowed for the support of a growing population, transformed Europe from a primarily agricultural to an increasingly urban civilization, and substantially improved living standards for the nobles. National monarchies began to assert their authority over competing fiefdoms, although they often found that the loyalty of their subjects to the authority of the Crown was subordinated to their loyalty to the authority of the Roman Church.
Corruption remained rampant within both the religious and political establishments as each vied for imperial power. This was the period of the largely disastrous Crusades, carried forth as uncoordinated 123initiatives by various princes and independent brigands in response to the call of the pope. Lacking either a secure political base or coherent leadership, the Crusades were largely a form of violent adventurism with no capacity to capture and incorporate new territory into an imperial structure.
The late Middle Ages (1300–1500) were a time of famine due to exhausted farmlands and bad weather, the pestilence of the Black Death, and protracted warfare among competing kings, princes, and petty nobles in search of dominion, independence, and personal enrichment from the spoils of war. Death rates soared and fortunes were in constant flux. This period, however, also marked the beginning of the European Renaissance, which brought a flourishing of art, culture, and philosophy beginning in Italy that with time launched a growing challenge to authority, whether secular or ecclesiastic, as a source of absolute truth.
On October 31, 1517, the act of a dissident Catholic priest sparked a rebellion against the religious monopoly of the Roman Christian Church, launched the Protestant Reformation, and added a new element of division and instability to European politics. Martin Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, in protest against a corrupt Roman Catholic Church that he charged had lost its moral authority and become a self-indulgent imperial power in its own right. He professed that the ultimate spiritual authority is the authority of conscience, not the authority of the church. The hundred years from 1560 to 1660 featured periodic outbreaks of religious slaughter of Protestants by Catholics and of Catholics by Protestants, often encouraged or aided by rulers whose political interests aligned with one side or the other. It was a time of destructive wars, rapacious tax collectors, and looting soldiers.20
Gradually the western European nations would resolve the chaos of competition and intrigue among feudal lords and feuding religious functionaries by consolidating the powers of monarchy in the institutions of the modern nation-state, which for most people offered a welcome relief from the turmoil of feudalism.
Those who lived in the Middle Ages might have looked back with justification on the comparative order and amenities of the Roman Empire, 124especially during the brief reign of the Five Good Emperors, as a better time than their own. Those who eulogize the Roman Empire in the age of the democratic ideal, however, should recall the violence, injustice, and debauchery that were hallmarks of Roman rule. Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Rome were three of history’s most celebrated empires. Each had its moments of greatness, but at an enormous cost in lives, natural wealth, and human possibility, as vain and violent rulers played out the drama of Empire’s inexorable play-or-die, rule-or-be-ruled, kill-or-be-killed logic.
Social pathology became the norm as the god of death displaced the goddess of life and the power of the sword ruled over the power of the chalice. The creative energy of the species was redirected from building the generative power of the whole to advancing the technological instruments of war and the social instruments of domination. Empire built great civilizations, but then swept them away in successive waves of violence and destruction as jealous winners sought to erase the memory of those they vanquished.
The sacred became the servant of the profane. Fertile lands were converted to desert by intention or rapacious neglect. Rule by terror fueled resentments that assured repeating cycles of violent retribution. War, trade, and debt served as weapons of the few to expropriate the means of livelihood of the many and reduce them to slavery or serfdom. The resulting power imbalances fueled the delusional hubris and debaucheries of psychopathic rulers who fancied themselves possessed of divine privilege and otherworldly power. Attention turned from realizing the possibilities of life in this world to securing a privileged place in the afterlife.
The ruling elites maintained cultural control through the institutions of religion, economic control through the institutions of trade and credit, and political control through the institutions of rule making and organized military force. Although elite factions might engage in ruthless competition with one another, they generally aligned in common cause to secure the continuity of the institutions of their collective privilege, often using intermarriage as a mechanism of alliance building.
If many of the patterns associated with ancient kings, pharaohs, and emperors seem strangely familiar to our own time of the democratic ideal, even though democracy has ended monarchy in its historic form, it is because the dominator cultures and institutions of Empire simply morphed into new forms in the face of the democratic challenge. To 125free ourselves from Empire’s deadly grip we must understand not only its historical roots, but as well its contemporary expression. So let us now take a brief look at the formation of the colonial empires of the modern European nation-states and their transmogrification into the institutions of the global corporate empires of the late twentieth century as the ruling class negotiated an end run around the modern democratic challenge to its power and privilege.
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CHAPTER 7
Modern Empire
No man can serve two masters: for either he
will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
Matthew 6:24
As we look deeper for the soul of capitalism, we find that, in the terms of ordinary human existence, American capitalism doesn’t appear to have one. In the economic sphere, efficiency trumps community. Maximizing returns comes before family or personal loyalty. What seems priceless in one realm may be wasted freely or even destroyed by the other.1
William Greider
By the reckoning of Western historians, the modern era began in 1500. The turmoil of endless and pointless wars in which rival noble factions fought one another to exhaustion for largely personal ends had created a readiness to welcome a restoration of rule by monarchs with the power to impose order.
Prior to 1500, empires had been based primarily on the expansion of borders through military conquest to incorporate new territory under the central military and administrative control of a city-state ruled by a king or emperor. Center and periphery were territorially contiguous, and the boundaries between them often lacked significant definition. Land and trade were the foundations of wealth, and the institutions of monarchy generally controlled and profited from the power to tax and allocate the rights to both. Independent commercial enterprises were individually far too small to challenge the power of the sovereign king.
The imperial model of the modern era replaced city-states with nation-states defined by clearly delineated territorial borders under a well-defined central administration. Rather than exhaust themselves in military campaigns against one another to redefine the territorial division of Europe, the European kings of the modern era satisfied their ambitions for imperial expansion by projecting their power outward 127over long sea routes from their relatively secure and stable domestic borders on the European continent and establishing dominion over the lands, peoples, and resources of distant colonies. By the logic of Empire, they were enormously successful. Although persons of European descent were only a tiny percentage of the world’s people, by 1878 they ruled 67 percent of the planet’s land surface.2
The transition from city-states to nation-states brought a growing challenge to the institutions of monarchy. Growing demands for the accountability of the institutions of the state gradually stripped monarchy of its absolute power. Monarchy died. Empire, however, retained its dominion in a new form.
CRIME LORDS AND SYNDICATES
National military forces and colonial administrations remained important to the new model of Empire, but for the most part the European kings of the modern era projected their power by granting commissions to favored adventurers, brigands, and corporations who worked for their own account in return for a share of the spoils. Thus began the transition from rule by imperial monarchs to rule by imperial corporations. Herein lies the story of how money came to rule the world.
Adventurers
Most of us know the period of Europe’s drive for colonial expansion primarily by the names of the great adventurers commissioned and financed by their sovereigns to carry out great voyages of discovery, plunder, and slaughter. In search of a westward sea route to the riches of Asia, Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) landed on the island of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in the West Indies in 1492 and claimed it for Spain. Hernando De Soto (1496–1542) made his initial mark trading slaves in Central America and later allied with Francisco Pizarro to take control of the Inca Empire based in Peru in 1532, the same year the Portuguese established their first settlement in Brazil. De Soto returned to Spain one of the wealthiest men of his time, although his share in the plunder was only half that of Pizarro.3 By 1521, Hernán Cortés had claimed the Mexican Empire of Montezuma for Spain.
Spain ultimately extracted so much gold from South and Central America that it ruined its own economy and fueled inflation throughout 128Europe. With so much gold available to purchase goods produced by others, Spain’s own productive capacity atrophied as it became dependent on importing goods from abroad. The result was a domestic economic decline from which it never recovered. It was a pattern disturbingly similar to that of the current import-dependent U.S. economy—with the primary difference that U.S. imports are financed not by stolen gold, but by foreign borrowing.
Although licensed by the Crown, these celebrated adventurers operated with the independence and lack of scruples of crime lords, competing or cooperating with one another as circumstances dictated for personal gain and glory. Their mission was to extract the physical wealth of foreign lands and peoples by whatever means—including the execution of rulers and the slaughter and enslavement of Native peoples — and to share a portion of the spoils with their sovereign. Securing lands for settlement would become important later but had no place in these early ventures.
Supported by improvements in the tools of navigation, Portugal and Spain initially led the way. By the mid-1500s, Spain had established control over nearly all of Central and South America. Highly profitable for Portugal and Spain, these conquests came at an unconscionable cost to the peoples of the colonized territories. The profits from Spain’s conquests in the Americas inspired the imperial exertions of the English, Dutch, and French, who were soon dividing Africa, Asia, and North America into colonies from which to extract plunder and trading profits for the benefit of the mother state.
Privateers
The competition for foreign spoils among the European powers led to the elevation of the ancient practice of privateering —essentially legalized piracy—to a major instrument of state policy and a favored investment for both sovereigns and wealthy merchants. Why endure the arduous exertions of expropriating the wealth of foreign lands through conquest and trade when it was much easier to attack and plunder the ships carrying the spoils on their way back to European ports?
Monarchs often found it advantageous to grant a license to privately owned, financed, and captained armed vessels to engage in this profitable enterprise. These privateers offered important advantages to cash-strapped rulers. They provided revenue with no cash outlay, and official 129responsibility could be disavowed more easily than if the warships of the Crown had pillaged the victim vessels. Crew, captain, private investors, and the commissioning king divided the revenues from the booty while the king’s license lent a patina of legality to the acts of plunder and granted the ships safe harbor. A new era was in gestation.
The English, Dutch, and French all had their commissioned privateers licensed to pillage the ships, lands, and treasure of their primary colonial competitors, especially Spain. English privateers first sought their fortunes in the New World during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558– 1603) by plundering Spanish shipping in the Caribbean. Elizabeth, who was preoccupied with conquering Ireland, largely left the English privateers to their own devices without support or supervision.4
Famous English privateers included Sir John Hawkins (1532–95), Sir Francis Drake (1540–96), and Sir Henry Morgan (1635–88).5 It was not only an honored vocation, as their titles suggest; it was also a lucrative one. British economist John Maynard Keynes referred to Drake’s profits from his three major privateering expeditions as “the fountain and origin of British foreign investment.” Tax records for 1790 indicate that four of Boston’s top five taxpayers that year obtained their income in part from investments in privateering—including John Hancock, famed for his outsize signature on the Declaration of Independence.6
Some privateers operated powerful naval forces. In 1670, Morgan launched an assault on Panama City with thirty-six ships and nearly two thousand buccaneers, defeating a large Spanish force and looting the city as it burned to the ground.7
In 1856 the major European powers, with the exception of Spain, signed the Declaration of Paris, declaring privateering illegal. The United States, which relied heavily on privateers as its primary source of naval power and a major source of commercial profits in its early years, declined to join the agreement on the argument that it lacked an adequa
te navy to protect itself in time of war. The United States, which to this day regularly declines to honor treaties aimed at securing the international rule of law, did not stop commissioning privateers until the end of the nineteenth century.8
Chartered Corporations
Over time, the ruling monarchs turned from swashbuckling adventurers and chartered pirates to chartered corporations as their favored 130instruments of colonial expansion, administration, and pillage. It is instructive to note that in England this transition was motivated in part by its incipient step to democracy.
By the beginning of the seventeenth century the English parliament, one of the first modern efforts to limit the arbitrary power of the king, had gained the authority to supervise the Crown’s collection and expenditure of domestic tax revenues. Chafing under this restriction, sovereigns such as Elizabeth, James I, and Charles I found that by issuing corporate charters that bestowed monopoly rights and other privileges on favored investors, they could establish an orderly and permanent source of income through fees and taxes that circumvented parliamentary oversight. They also commonly owned personal shares in the companies to which they granted such privileges.9
In addition, chartered corporations sometimes assumed direct responsibility for expenses that otherwise would have fallen on the state, including the costs of maintaining embassies, forts, and other naval, military, and trade facilities. English corporations were at times even given jurisdiction over Englishmen residing in a given territory.10
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