VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 9, SECTION 1
Expansion, From Territory to Colony to Many Dimensions
Last chapter covered why centralized authority works. But a question surfaces here: since centralized authority can concentrate strength and make thousand-year arrangements, what in the end are these capacities for? The answer is one word, expansion. This section is about expansion being the ultimate goal of political institutions, and then looks at its three forms in history, from the territorial expansion of antiquity, to the colonization of the modern age, to the multidimensional expansion of today.
Having covered why centralized authority must win, we go one layer deeper. Centralized authority can concentrate strength, meet outside challenges, integrate inner resources, and make thousand-year arrangements, but why are these capacities so important to a political institution? The answer is that the underlying running logic of every political institution is to expand. A group that does not expand consumes its resources within a fixed boundary, necessarily turns inward or overflows once its population grows, its inner tensions accumulate without release, and while its outside rivals expand and it does not, it is overtaken, and over the long run it declines. A group that expands increases its resources, releases its inner tension, enlarges its outer influence, and its civilization can endure and develop. This is the deepest running logic of a political institution, underlying governance itself, and every political institution is at bottom expanding, only the way and the object of expansion differ. Groups in history that did not expand nearly all vanished, certain closed small states, certain civilizations that chose a closed self-sufficiency, all eliminated or swallowed over the long run by outside shocks. Why is expansion the ultimate goal? Because a political institution is at bottom a tool for a group to keep its own existence and development, and for a group to keep its existence and development it must be able to take in outside resources, enlarge its range of influence, and meet outside challenges, and all of this needs expansion. Expansion is the survival instinct of a political institution, and not to expand is to be swallowed by a rival that does. The root reason centralized authority must win is precisely that it can expand better than scattered politics, spreading itself outward faster, deeper, and wider.
The expansion of antiquity was fairly single in form, mainly territorial expansion. Nearly every great empire in history expanded from a small state into a large one. The Persian Empire expanded from the Persian homeland to a great stretch including today's Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Egypt. The empire of Alexander expanded within a dozen years from Greece to the Middle East, Iran, and the northwest of India. The Roman Empire expanded from the Italian peninsula to the whole rim of the Mediterranean. The Han and the Tang expanded from the central plain to a vast territory. The Mongol Empire expanded from the Mongolian plateau to most of the Eurasian landmass. The Ottoman Empire expanded from Anatolia to the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa. The expansion of these empires was all through military campaign plus territorial occupation. Military campaign, sending armies to beat rivals. Territorial occupation, taking the rival's land into the map. Population management, taking the local population into one's own governing system. This is the standard model of ancient expansion, land as the object and force as the means, the main way of expansion across several thousand years of human political history.
By the modern age, from about the sixteenth century, Western countries developed a new form of expansion, colonialism. Colonialism has likenesses to ancient territorial expansion, also occupying other regions, but with several key differences. First, the distance was greater, expansion across oceans, European countries colonizing the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Second, the aim was more economic, ancient expansion driven mainly by land, population, and political authority, colonialism clearly driven by resources, trade, and cheap labor. Third, the means were more systematic, a complete colonial administrative system, trading companies, forced trade, and the slave trade built up, an institutionalized operation. Fourth, the destruction of the local was more thorough, often destroying the local political structure, economic structure, and cultural structure, turning the colony wholly into a dependency serving the mother country. The samples of colonialism are heavy. One power colonizing the Americas destroyed the native civilizations there, a great many of the indigenous dying of disease, war, and enslavement. One power colonizing a great southern land in Asia gradually controlled it through a trading company and remade it into a market and a source of raw materials, and during that rule repeated great famines caused the deaths of tens of millions. Some colonial rule, to extract resources, used forced labor plus violent oppression, causing the deaths of several million. The trans-Atlantic slave trade shipped about twelve million people from Africa to the Americas, of whom about two million died in transport at sea, and the rest were enslaved for generations in the Americas. Colonialism built the Western domination of most of the globe from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, one important driver of the modern rise of the West, and it also left deep historical wounds, and today's global north-south gap, the poverty of many developing countries, and many conflicts among peoples all have historical roots in colonialism.
Entering the late twentieth century and especially the twenty-first, the form of expansion changed at the root. Territorial expansion nearly stopped, after the Second World War international law clearly opposing wars of aggression and territorial annexation, the territory of nearly every country holding stable over the past decades. But expansion did not stop, it turned multidimensional. The first new expansion, the expansion of culture and institution. Some countries are not large in home territory, yet the language, law, parliamentary institutions, and commercial rules they left behind still run in dozens of independent countries, the home political power drawn back while the institution and culture expanded across the globe. The second new expansion, the expansion of commerce and technology. Multinational enterprises are one of the strongest expanding forces today, some enterprises' operating systems, search engines, e-commerce platforms, communications equipment, and short-video platforms becoming the daily tools of billions worldwide. Multinational enterprises occupy no territory, but they occupy the way of use, the technical standard, the way of consumption, the deepest form of expansion today, softer, wider, and more lasting than territorial occupation, and once an enterprise's product becomes the global standard it is hard to replace, an expansion that can last generations or even centuries. The third new expansion, the expansion of ideology and values. Some countries, through trade, investment, aid, military allies, film and music, top universities, and international organizations, expand their own discourse, institutional model, and values across the globe, occupying no other country's territory, yet their influence shaping the running order of the world, an expansion more hidden, wider, and deeper than colonialism. The fourth new expansion, the expansion of infrastructure and economic cooperation. Some countries, through large initiatives, offer infrastructure building and economic cooperation to dozens of countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America, occupying no other country's territory, enlarging their presence and influence through building and economic relations. The expansion of today is multidimensional, not limited to territory, including culture, language, institution, technology, standards, ideology, economy, and infrastructure, every dimension that can be expanded being expanded, the running order of the political institution of the new age.
So here is the position this section lays down. We set the first half of this layer: expansion is the ultimate goal of a political institution, and every political institution is at bottom expanding, only the way and the object of expansion differ. A group that does not expand is eliminated over the long run, a group that expands can endure and develop. The expansion of antiquity was mainly territorial, through military campaign plus territorial occupation. The expansion of the modern age, colonialism, was mainly economic plunder plus forced trade plus the slave system, leaving deep historical wounds. The expansion of the new age, multidimensional, includes culture, institution, technology, commerce, ideology, infrastructure, and economic cooperation, many dimensions.
But by here a most important sense of proportion must be set. Of these many kinds of expansion, colonialism, ideological output, infrastructure cooperation, which is right and which is wrong? This book passes no verdict of right or wrong on any expansion, it only lets the regularity surface on its own. But passing no verdict is not the same as seeing no difference, and different expansions carry different undertones, and the side expanded into lives through a different experience. The next section sets firm this method of laying out both sides, and then looks at what distinctive samples the expansion of Chinese civilization has in history.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.