Hobbes among others made the comparison

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The Aztec Empire was so top heavy as to be easily toppled by a handful of direspectful desperadoes who defeated its leadership. The Celestial Empire of China was not able to resist the force of British commercial interests. The decision by the Emperor Tao-kuang to strengthen the anti-opium laws in the early nineteenth century set the Celestial Empire on collision course with them. The Chinese were soundly defeated and the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 forced the Chinese to revise their restrictions on the opium traffic.

The official cause for which Britain had been fighting job function email list in the Opium war was, as T.B. Macauley, secretary of state for war, declared in the House of Commons, the protection of the safety of English subjects. For any empire, the protection of the liberties of its subjects abroad and the protection of their commercial interests and therefore of the empire itself are the same thing. In fact the military history of an empire begins with a government deciding to protect its merchants or settlers from harassment or to clear a monopoloy for them. The bottom line is commerce.


A kingdom to a body. The comparison works for an empire too, excepting only that a body has natural limits and an empire does not. There are certain vital organs to the body and certain useful but expendable ones. A living organism operates a cooperative system of cells for the acquisition of wealth. An empire does no differently. All must contribute to the whole. Competition within the body is wasteful and the body's mechanism seeks to extirpate it. An empire always seeks a monopol.

In fact many empires begin as a quest by a small nation or city state to impose and extend trading monopolies. The first concern of an empire is the successful imposition and maintenance of a universal will emenating from a centre for the purpose of obtaining a given monopoly or monopolies. Empires establish codes, laws, bureaucracies. Their universal laws and taxes, administered by their bureaucracies, constitute from the imperial standpoint "the framework of civilization". Separate identities are tolerated within such a framework but not independent ones.