A New Roman Empire


It is 1850. Lord Palmerston is engaged in a campaign to make London the undisputed center of a new, worldwide Roman Empire. He is attempting to conquer the world in the way that the British have already conquered India, reducing every other nation to the role of a puppet, client, and fall-guy for British imperial policy. Lord Palmerston's campaign is not a secret. He has declared it here in the Houses of Parliament, saying that wherever in the world a British subject goes, he can flaunt the laws, secure that the British fleet will support him. ``Civis Romanus sum, every Briton is a citizen of this new Rome,'' thundered Lord Palmerston, and with that, the universal empire was proclaimed.

During the Napoleonic Wars, the British managed to conquer most of the world outside of Europe, with the exception of the United States. After 1815, the French--be they restored Bourbons, Orleanists, or Bonapartists--are generally pliant tools of London.

But in central and eastern Europe, there was Prince Metternich's Austrian Empire, a very strong land power. There was vast Imperial Russia, under the autocrat Nicholas I or the reformer Alexander II. There was the Kingdom of Prussia. Lord Palmerston likes to call these the ``arbitrary powers.'' Above all, Palmerston hated Metternich, the embodiment and ideologue of the Congress of Vienna system. Metternich presided over one of the most pervasive police states in history. Men said his rule was shored up by a standing army of soldiers, a sitting army of bureaucrats, a kneeling army of priests, and a creeping army of informers.

For Britain to rule the world, the Holy Alliance of Austria, Russia, and Prussia had to be broken up. There is also the matter of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. Starting with Lord Byron's Greek Revolution in the 1820s, British policy has been to play the card of national liberation against each of these rival empires.

The imperial theme was sounded in 1846 with the free trade policy, Britain's declaration of intent to loot the world in the name of the pound. Then, in January 1848, Lord Palmerston arranged an insurrection in Sicily, using British networks that went back to Lord Nelson.

That started the great revolutionary year of 1848, and in the course of that year, every government in Europe was toppled, and every monarchy badly shaken, at least for a time. Metternich of Austria and King Louis Philippe of France fled to London, where they now spend their time playing cards. There was war in Italy, civil war in Austria, barricades in Paris, and tumult in Germany.

The only exception to the rule was Russia, and now Lord Palmerston is preparing to invade Russia, with the help of his strategic catamite, Napoléon III, also known as Napoléon le Petit. That will start in about three years, and it will be called the Crimean War. As soon as the war against Russia is over, Palmerston and John Stuart Mill at the British East India Company will start the Great Mutiny in India, which some historians will call the Sepoy Rebellion. Muslim soldiers will be told that new cartridges are greased with pig fat, Hindu soldiers will be told the cartridges are greased with cow fat, and the result will be what you would expect. But in the conflagration the British will get rid of the Great Mogul and the Mogul Empire, and impose their direct rule in all of India. Typical John Stuart Mill. He, of course, is the author of ``On Liberty.''

The British would like to give China the same treatment they are giving India. Since 1842, Palmerston and the East India Company have been waging Opium Wars against the Chinese Empire, partly to get them to open their ports to opium from India, and also as a way to conquer China. Already the British have Hong Kong and the other treaty ports. By 1860, the British will be in Beijing, looting and burning the summer palace of the emperor.

Shortly after that, the British will back Napoléon in his project of putting a Hapsburg archduke on the throne of an ephemeral Mexican Empire--the Maximilian Project. These projects will be closely coordinated with Palmerston's plans to eliminate the only two nations still able to oppose him--the Russia of Alexander II and the United States of Abraham Lincoln. Lord Palmerston will be the evil demiurge of the American Civil War, the mastermind of secession, far more important for the Confederacy than Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee. And in the midst of that war, Palmerston will detonate a rebellion in Poland against Russian rule, not for the sake of Poland, but for the sake of starting a general European war against Russia.

But when the Russian fleets sail into New York and San Francisco, when Lee's wave breaks at Gettysburg, when the Stars and Bars are lowered over Vicksburg, the British Empire will be stopped--just short of its goal. Just short--and yet, British hegemony will still be great enough to launch the two world wars of the twentieth century, and the third conflagration that will start in 1991. And as we look forward for a century and a half from 1850, British geopolitics, despite the challenges, despite the defeats, despite the putrefaction of Britain itself, will remain the dominant factor in world affairs.