Hegemons, Empires, and their Elites

• In Event: 198 - Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology Paper Session. Democracy, Development, and Decline

Abstract

Empires affect metropoles as well as the lands they colonize and dominate. Colonizers and metropolitan beneficiaries of empire and hegemony become new elites that then alter the overall structure of elite and class relations within the imperial or hegemonic polity, creating new sorts of conflicts and new dynamics of structural change. I compare ancient and modern empires and hegemons and the sorts of elites they generate. I highlight the crucial ways in which capitalism and modern states are able to exert deeper forms of power over formal and informal dominions, and identify the sorts of elites that are created by the exertion of such powers. I offer a typology of modern empires, differentiating them in terms of (1) the extent to which colonial elites were autonomous from the metropole and (2) the degree to which colonial elites had influence over the metropolitan political economy. This typology will allow me to distinguish between those sorts of control, which can be deployed by multiple empires and polities simultaneously, and hegemonic power, which is exerted by only a single polity at a time. I conclude with a series of arguments about how the elites in hegemons generate dynamics of conflict that undermine hegemony.

Author

• Richard Lachmann, State University of New York-Albany