What else to illustrate this than Desolation, the fifth and final of the series of paintings The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole from 1833 to 1836 (public domain image)?
(4) VESTIGIAL EMPIRE
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust”
For me, vestigial empires inhabit that poetic realm somewhere between that handful of dust in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and the desolate statue of Ozymandias in Shelley’s poem – with Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach thrown in for good measure, that “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating to the breath of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world”.
As I stated in the introduction to my Top 10 Empires, my particular interest in empires is not so much in their robust rise, but in their decline and fall. However, not all empires are equal in their decline and fall. Some empires seem to collapse almost overnight, but others hold the line over incredible areas or incredible periods of time (or both), even rebounding or bouncing back as a resurgent empire.
It’s those empires that are tenacious in their decline and fall that give rise to those weakened or weakening versions of empire dubbed as vestigial empires – empires that still cling on or remain, but as patchwork pieces or shadows of their former selves, their influence declining and territory shrinking, occasionally down to just the imperial capital itself or close enough to it.
Indeed, an empire may be so vestigial in its decline and fall that it is difficult to identify its final fall.
They tend to leave behind monumental architecture or statuary as their most definitive feature but also a common tongue or lingua franca as well as still-working infrastructure or even institutions, the latter often mired with a decadent or residual elite.
There are many examples in history, but perhaps the archetypal one remains the Roman Empire, including its vestigial eastern half, known to history as the Byzantine Empire, which became a vestigial empire in its own right – one of those examples that essentially declined down to the imperial capital itself.
The vestiges of empire often outlast the empire itself – as with the Roman Catholic Church inheriting the capitol and pontifex as well as many of the trappings and much of the mystique of the western Roman Empire.