Day of Empire Read online

  Praise for Amy Chua's

  DAY OF EMPIRE

  “Amy Chua smartly condenses the complex histories of the Persian, Mughal, Dutch, and other empires into an irresistible argument: that empires expand through toleration and contract through closed-mindedness. As with any shrewd and elaborate argument, the getting there is half the fun.”

  —Robert D. Kaplan, Atlantic Monthly correspondent

  and author of Balkan Ghosts and Imperial Grunts

  “Absorbing.”

  —The New York Times

  “Informative and charming…Chua's thesis is ingenious and thought-provoking.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “Brilliant.”

  —National Review

  “Ambitious and challenging…[Chua] has at once shifted and in some ways elevated the interpretive terrain.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Fascinating A lively read, full of intriguing factoids.”

  —Salon

  “From ancient Achaemenid Persia to the modern United States, by way of Rome, Tang China, and the Spanish, Dutch, and British Empires, Amy Chua tells the story of the world's hyperpow-ers—that elite of empires which, in their heyday, were truly without equal. Not everyone will be persuaded by her ingenious thesis that religious and racial tolerance was a prerequisite for global dominance, but also the slow solvent of that cultural ‘glue’ which holds a great nation together. But few readers will fail to be impressed by the height of this book's ambition and by the breadth of scholarship on which it is based.”

  —Niall Ferguson, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History,

  Harvard University, and author of Empire:

  The Rise and Demise of the British World

  Order and the Lessons for Global Power

  “Scintillating history, breathtaking in scope and chock-full of insight. Amy Chua argues persuasively that the real key to acquiring and maintaining great power lies in the ability to attract and assimilate, rather than to coerce or intimidate.”

  —Andrew J. Bacevich, author of

  The New American Militarism:

  How Americans Are Seduced by War

  “Amy Chua is a law professor, but in this book she writes as a sage historian. She draws lessons from the past that one who cares about the future cannot afford to ignore.”

  —Amitai Etzioni, author of Security First:

  For a Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy

  AMY CHUA

  DAY OF EMPIRE

  Amy Chua is the John Duff, Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She is the author of World on Fire and a noted expert in the fields of international business, ethnic conflict, and globalization. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her husband, daughters Sophia and Louisa, and their Samoyeds Coco and Pushkin.

  ALSO BY AMY CHUA

  World on Fire

  To Jed, Sophia, and Louisa

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION: THE SECRET TO WORLD DOMINANCE

  PART ONE: THE TOLERANCE OF BARBARIANS

  ONE

  THE FIRST HEGEMON

  The Great Persian Empire from Cyrus to Alexander

  TWO

  TOLERANCE IN ROME'S HIGH EMPIRE

  Gladiators, Togas, and Imperial “Glue”

  THREE

  CHINA'S GOLDEN AGE

  The Mixed-Blooded Tang Dynasty

  FOUR

  THE GREAT MONGOL EMPIRE

  Cosmopolitan Barbarians

  PART TWO: THE ENLIGHTENING OF TOLERANCE

  FIVE

  THE “PURIFICATION” OF MEDIEVAL SPAIN

  Inquisition, Expulsion, and the Price of Intolerance

  SIX

  THE DUTCH WORLD EMPIRE

  Diamonds, Damask, and Every “Mongrel Sect in Christendom”

  SEVEN

  TOLERANCE AND INTOLERANCE IN THE EAST

  The Ottoman, Ming, and Mughal Empires

  EIGHT

  THE BRITISH EMPIRE

  “Rebel Buggers” and the “White Man's Burden”

  PART THREE: THE FUTURE OF WORLD DOMINANCE

  NINE

  THE AMERICAN HYPERPOWER

  Tolerance and the Microchip

  TEN

  THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AXIS POWERS

  Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan

  ELEVEN

  THE CHALLENGERS

  China, the European Union, and India in the Twenty-first Century

  TWELVE

  THE DAY OF EMPIRE

  Lessons of History

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  I think of my father as the quintessential American. Both he and my mother were Chinese, but grew up in the Philippines. They were children during World War II and lived under Japanese Occupation until General Douglas MacArthur liberated the Philippines in 1945.

  My father remembers running after American jeeps, cheering wildly, as U.S. troops tossed out free cans of Spam. My father was the black sheep in his family. Brilliant at math, in love with astronomy and philosophy, he hated the small, back-stabbing world of his family's aluminum-can business and defied every plan they had for him. Even as a boy, he was desperate to get to America, so it was a dream come true when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepted his application. My parents arrived in Boston in 1961, knowing not a soul in the country. With only their student scholarships to live on, they couldn't afford heat their first two winters and wrapped blankets around themselves to keep warm.

  Growing up in the Midwest, my three younger sisters and I always knew that we were different from everyone else. Mortifyingly, we brought Chinese food in thermoses to school; how I wished I could have a bologna sandwich like everyone else! We were required to speak Chinese at home—the punishment was one whack of the chopsticks for every English word accidentally uttered. We drilled math and piano every afternoon, and we were never allowed to sleep over at our friends’ houses. Every evening when my father came home from work, I took off his shoes and brought him his slippers. Our report cards had to be perfect; while our friends were rewarded for Bs, for us getting an A-minus was unthinkable. In eighth grade, I won second place in a history contest and took my family to the awards ceremony. Somebody else had won the Kiwanis prize for best all-around student. Afterward, my father said to me: “Never, never disgrace me like that again.”

  When my friends hear these stories, they often imagine that I had a horrible childhood. But that's not true at all; I found strength and confidence in my peculiar family. We started off as outsiders together, and we discovered America together, becoming Americans in the process. I remember my father working until three in the morning every night, so driven he wouldn't even notice us entering the room. But I also remember how excited he was when he introduced us to tacos, sloppy joes, Dairy Queen, and “all-you-can-eat” buffets, not to mention sledding, skiing, crabbing, and camping. I remember a boy in grade school making slanty-eyed gestures at me, guffawing as he mimicked the way I pronounced restaurant; I vowed at that moment to rid myself of my Chinese accent. But I also remember Girl Scouts and hula hoops; poetry contests and public libraries; winning a Daughters of the American Revolution essay contest; and the proud, momentous day my parents were naturalized.

  Like many other immigrant groups, Asians weren't always welcome in the United States. In 1882, the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, banning Chinese—along with prostitutes, criminals, and lepers—from entering the country. As late as World War II, while my father was cheering on American troops in Manila, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the government's policy of evacuating Japanese Americans from their homes into internment camps.

  By the late 1960s, however, legal reforms had lifted many barriers for immigrants. For my father, as for many other newcomers who arrived during tha
t period, determination and hard work translated directly into success. My father got his Ph.D. in less than two years, became a tenured professor at the age of thirty-one, and won a series of national engineering awards. In 1971 my father accepted an offer from the University of California at Berkeley, and we packed up and moved West. My father grew his hair long and wore jackets with peace signs on them. Then he got interested in wine collecting and built himself a thousand-bottle cellar. As he became internationally known for his work on chaos theory, we began traveling around the world. I spent my junior year in high school studying in London, Munich, and Lausanne, and my father took us to the Arctic Circle.

  And yet there were always contradictions: about who we were, who we weren't, and what we were supposed to be. Even as we were thriving in the American melting pot, and indeed representing the United States abroad, my parents never let us forget that we were Chinese—not just by heritage, but by blood.

  As a child, one of the first things I learned was the difference between a Chinese person, a Han, and everyone else. The definition of a Chinese person, whether in modern times or thousands of years ago, has always been contrasted against the “foreign barbarian.” Moreover, it went without saying in my family that being Han was not something that could be learned or acquired through acculturation. A white person—no matter how fluent in Chinese, no matter how long he had lived in China—could never be Han. My mother spoke frequently of the magnificence of China's five-thousand-year history and the superiority of Chinese culture. She also talked about the “purity” of Chinese blood and what a shame it would be to dilute it. In my native Hokkien dialect, the height of insult is to describe someone as tzup jeng—literally, “of ten breeds;” the closest English equivalent is probably mongrel.

  In fact, the idea that there is a “pure” Han bloodline defining a “pure” Han people is not only a great myth, but a relatively recent one. Who has counted as Chinese throughout China's long history is far more complicated than is usually acknowledged. But I didn't know any of this as a child. Still, I always had trouble applying the concept of “foreign barbarian mongrel” in America. Everyone seemed to be of mixed ancestry; my best friend in Indiana was Scottish-Irish-English-Dutch-German. And what about the heroic GIs who liberated the Philippines? Were they barbarians? If so, perhaps being a barbarian wasn't so bad.

  Conveniently, there was no time for analyzing these questions. Instead, my father issued edicts, such as “You will marry a non-Chinese over my dead body,” which he declared when I was four. When it came time to apply to college, my father announced that I was going to live at home and attend Berkeley (where I had already been accepted), and that was that—no visiting campuses and agonizing choices for me. Disobeying him, as he had disobeyed his family, I forged his signature and secretly applied to a school on the East Coast I had heard people talking about. When I told him what I had done—and that Harvard had accepted me—my father's reaction surprised me. He went from anger to pride literally overnight. He was equally proud when I later graduated from Harvard Law School and when his next daughter graduated from Yale College and Yale Law School. He was proudest of all (but perhaps also a little heartbroken) when his third daughter left home for Harvard, eventually earning her M.D./Ph.D. there.

  Just before entering college, I visited China for the first time. My family and I spent the summer of 1980 in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. At that time, China was a backward Communist country, reeling from decades of xenophobic isolation and the anti-intellectual purges of the Cultural Revolution. Chengdu, once known as The Brocade City for its magnificent silks, was a concrete, Mao-suited eyesore. Our host, the president of the Engineering and Technology Institute, appeared to be an uneducated peasant. At our welcome banquet, he sprayed a fusillade of watermelon seeds from his mouth directly onto the sticky restaurant floor. Afterward, my mother wept. Was this all that remained of the Middle Kingdom's magnificent civilization?

  A lot has happened in the last quarter century—to the world, to China, to the United States, to my family. Despite my father's draconian injunction, I ended up marrying a Jewish American. Today, my father and my husband are the best of friends, and my parents could not dote more on their mixed-blooded, Mandarin-speaking American grandchildren.

  First and foremost, this book is a tribute to America's tolerance, which, for all its imperfection, drew my parents to this country and allowed my family to flourish, to change on our own terms, and to become Americans. At the same time, it is a study of power—colossal power—and the conditions that allow some societies to attain and maintain it. At yet a different level, this book is about the contest between ethnic “purity” and ethnic pluralism, each of which has its own allure and its own potency. Finally, this book is a warning. Tolerance, I will argue, has always been the true secret to America's success, and today, more than ever before, we are in danger of losing our way.

  THE SECRET TO WORLD DOMINANCE

  How fast the world changes. In the 1980s, the United States was a mere superpower, with an easy-to-hate authoritarian rival. Ten years later, it was the world's undisputed hyperpower, and American global dominance seemed almost boundless. Today, after the debacles of Iraq and Hurricane Katrina, people are already talking about America's decline.

  When the term hyperpower was first applied to the United States, it was not intended favorably. The word was coined by France's foreign minister Hubert Vedrine, one of the most outspoken critics of the United States, when he declared that France “cannot accept a politically unipolar world, nor a culturally uniform world, nor the unilateralism of a single hyperpower.” Although he meant “hyperpower” reproachfully, Vedrine captured a historical development of fundamental importance. As Vedrine described it, the United States had become “dominant or predominant in all categories”: America had attained not only economic, military, and technological preeminence, but also a “domination of attitudes, concepts, language and modes of life.”1

  Today, the idea of an America “dominant in all categories” does not ring quite as true. America remains the world's economic and military powerhouse, but it is beleaguered on many fronts, its confidence shaken, its reputation bruised, its fise depleted by hundreds of billions poured into a war it may not win. Meanwhile, other emerging powers are shifting and jockeying for position. The European Union has not only a larger population but a gross domestic product already almost equal to that of the United States. China, with a fifth of the world's people, is exploding after centuries of stagnation. Could China, the EU, or perhaps some other contender—such as India—overtake the United States, or at least gain sufficient strength to reestablish a multipolar world order?

  Whether America retains or falls from its hyperpower status is a question of immense consequence for both the world and the United States. Does the twenty-first century need an “American Empire,” as the British historian Niall Ferguson argues, to deal with genocide, rogue states, and “terrorist organizations committed to wrecking a liberal world order”?2 Or is an American hyperpower a threat to world peace and global stability, as others believe?3 From the U.S. point of view, would American decline mean unemployment, reduced standards of living, and increased vulnerability to attack? Or is America's role as hyperpower paradoxically leading the nation to bankrupt its future, incur the world's wrath, and make itself even more of a terrorist target?

  This book is about hyperpowers—not great powers, not even superpowers, but hyperpowers. Many have written about empires, ancient and modern, despotic and beneficent.4 Explaining the rise and fall of empires has been a particularly venerable pastime, dating back to the Greeks. Thucydides hinted that democracy was to blame for the fall of Athens.5 Edward Gibbon singled out Christianity as a primary cause of Rome's decline.6 In recent times, Paul Kennedy attributed the fall of great powers more sweepingly to “imperial overstretch,” while Jared Diamond in Collapse identified “environmental damage” as a chief culprit.7 After 9/11 and the invasions of Afghanistan an
d Iraq, writing about empires and imperialism, whether hopefully or condemningly, has practically become an industry.8

  To date, however, no one has systematically analyzed the far rarer phenomenon of hyperpowers, the remarkably few societies— barely more than a handful in history—that amassed such extraordinary military and economic might that they essentially dominated the world. This is a special category, acutely relevant to the present day, the hidden dynamics of which have yet to be laid bare. How does a society come to be not merely a great power but a world-dominant power} And once a society has achieved such dominance, what can bring it down? In the rise and fall of hyperpowers past, there are crucial lessons to be learned, reflecting both the similarities and the differences between the United States and its predecessors, with far-reaching implications for the twenty-first century.

  The thesis of this book is as follows. For all their enormous differences, every single world hyperpower in history—every society that could even arguably be described as having achieved global hegemony—was, at least by the standards of its time, extraordinarily pluralistic and tolerant during its rise to preeminence. Indeed, in every case tolerance was indispensable to the achievement of hegemony. Just as strikingly, the decline of empire has repeatedly coincided with intolerance, xenophobia, and calls for racial, religious, or ethnic “purity.” But here's the catch: It was also tolerance that sowed the seeds of decline. In virtually every case, tolerance eventually hit a tipping point, triggering conflict, hatred, and violence.

  Let me begin by clarifying what I mean by a “world-dominant power.” Defining this term is tricky, especially given that the world was so much larger two thousand, or even five hundred, years ago, before ships, planes, and technology drastically shrank it. Rome in its heyday, for example, was clearly a world-dominant power—if it wasn't, then no one was—even though halfway across the globe there existed another great empire, Han dynasty China, with which Rome had virtually no contact. If the point is that Rome was dominant in its world—the world it knew and inhabited— then weren't the Aztecs dominant in their world, the Egyptians in theirs, and so on? Isn't Tahiti a hyperpower in its own little world?