Thoughts on empire:1. All political power us ambivalent. Vertical violence of ‘the state’ tends to limit horizontal power between people and between tribes. There is new oppression, but also a measure of new peace and unity.

2. ALL political formations are ambiguous like this: a strong family conquers weaker ones to make a tribe; strong tribe weaker ones to make a kingdom. Then strong kingdom weaker ones to make empires etc.

3. Not only is this vertical violence nonetheless the deliverer of a certain if not fully real peace (Augustine) but it is also linked to the quest for universal truth in China, India, Greece and Rome.

4. Thus the history of civilisations is mainly the history of empires.

5. Nation states are not nec more virtuous than empires. They too are the result of conquest. And by monopolising sovereignty in the centre and focussing on ethnic identity they are less subsidiarist and less pluralistic.

6. The best example is the Holy Roman Empire compared with the Prussian State that later conquered Germany in effect. German militarism and racism is to do with nationalism and not classic imperialism, contra Hazony.

7. As to European overseas empires one needs to do a counter factual thought experiment. Could they not have happened. Answer is surely no. Why?

8. For them not to have happened this would have needed at least the sense that tribal cultures are often equally sophisticated to ‘civilised’ ones. But no civilisation realised this before 20thC ethnography came to this correct conclusion.

9. But even supposing early modern Europeans had come to see the equal validity of tribes (and even Las Casas did not quite get there) they would have had to be protected from all the freebooters and traders by the political powers. That would have involved ‘empire’.

10. Indeed to a considerable extent, alongside appalling use of it, this kind of reining back of private exploitation, this semi-inhibition of capitalism, WAS part of the (very complex, various and contradictory) process by which the overseas empires were formed.