(10) IDEOLOGICAL EMPIRE

A term I’ve coined for a particular type of hegemonic empire where the hegemony – or driving force of its expansion – is ideology, religious or political.

Ideological empires are surprisingly prevalent, particularly if you include religion as ideology. Of course, it has to be a particular type of religion – essentially missionary religion, prompting my quip that the four great missionary religions are Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Marxist-Leninism.

Of my top ten empires, no less than four were ideological empires by way of missionary religion – the Maurya Empire by Buddhism, the Arab Caliphates and Ottoman Empire by Islam, and the Spanish Empire by Catholicism.

As for ideological empires by way of political ideology, they essentially arise from one of three modern political ideologies. Fascism is the most straightforward but also short-lived as it does not offer its imperial subjects much by the way of hegemony, but the other two are more paradoxical as they are nominally anti-imperialist – communism (hence my Marxist-Leninism quip as missionary religion quip) and liberalism. The latter is particularly striking in the modern European empires, which often juxtaposed domestic liberal democracies with their empires elsewhere, although ultimately the paradox became too much for those empires to bear – as it did for Soviet communism.