GoKawiilAt long last, Relic Entertainment has announced that Age of Empires 4 is coming. Strategy gamers rejoice! I am excited – I played the first one back in ’98 (I may be dating myself here).
But the news brought me back to a common problem with many games of this type and with Age of Empires specifically: they don’t actually have any empires in them! And I am sure that some of you are a bit confused by this statement – after all, the games are full of Romans and Mongols and Persians and Assyrians and how can I say these weren’t empires? But there’s the thing – those were peoples who had empires. And it turns out that’s a pretty important distinction.
So today, we’re going to talk about what empire is, and (on a very basic level) how they work to see how games of this sort – not just AoE, but also the Civilization series and others – don’t reflect the mechanics of actual empires and why that matters.
What Is an Empire?
Let’s not bury the lede too far: an empire is a state where the core ruling population exercises control and extracts resources from a periphery which is composed of people other than the core group (linguistically/culturally/ethnically/religiously distinct). So an empire is a state where one set of people (the core) extract resources (typically by force) from another set of people (the periphery).
That definition goes back to the root of the word in Latin: imperium, literally meaning a command or control; imperium comes from the Latin verb imperio (lit: ‘to order or command’). Thus imperium was a sphere of command over others. In Roman politics, this could mean an individual had the authority to command an army or to set up courts (consuls, praetors and dictators had this sort of imperium), but the Romans understood their empire as a sort of command exercised by the Senate and People of Rome over non-Roman people, thus they called that too imperium – an imperium of the Roman people (imperium populi Romani), crucially over the non-Roman people; once cannot, after all, have imperium over one’s self. An imperium of the Roman people must be an imperium over someone else.
Contrary to the venerable Wikipedia, empire does not require a monarchy. Rome was an empire while it was still a Republic, and France continued to hold an empire after it stopped being a monarchy. Athens, famously, converted the Delian League into an Athenian Empire (the Greek word used is ἀρχή (‘arche’), pronounced ar-KHAY) while it was still, internally, a democracy. Often, when discussing the internal politics of these states (especially for Rome and France) we will distinguish between a period of ’empire’ and ‘republic’ to note the shift from a republic to a monarchy or vice-versa, but that sort of nomenclature should not be taken to disguise the fact that, for instance, the Roman Republic in 150 B.C. was very much possessed of an empire, while still functioning as a republic.
Empire, I should note, seems to be one of – if not the – dominant form of large-scale human social organization since at least the bronze age (which is to say: since as far back as our sources let us see clearly). Ideas like loose federations of states (e.g. the EU) or nation-states are relatively new; in many cases, our modern nation-states are merely the consolidated form of what were originally empires of various sizes (e.g. China, Russia, but also France (see: Crusade, Albigensian), etc.). We don’t think about them that way anymore, because the steady application of state power created the shared culture that subsequently formed the foundation for the nation (we’ll return to this – the way that how we think about these empires often disguises their nature – in a moment). In many respects, empire is normal (which, please note, does not mean it is good), whereas this modern world composed primarily of nation-states is an unusual aberration.
(As a side note, this to a degree exposes a bit of understandable but still amusing silliness in titling anything Age of Empires. There has never been an age without empires. We are certainly not living in an age without empires even now – ask the Tibetans, the Uighyrs, the Chechens how ‘ended’ imperialism is! And that doesn’t even get into the sticky question of if we might understand the United States as an empire (my own view is that it is better understood as a hegemony – but I could hardly blame a Guamanian, Puerto Rican or Navajo who begged to differ – and that, importantly, it is also not, and has never been, a nation-state, but that’s a contentious topic for another day).
Age of No Empires?
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