States Pursuing Empires Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

States Pursuing Empires - Essay Example political control by some political societies over the effective sovereignty of other political societies and that it can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, by economic, social or cultural dependence. (19) There are numerous reasons why states pursue empire-building. Economic motives however is the most applicable among these. The case of Western Europe, for instance, highlights this with the intensified political, economic, and military competition among rivals for resources, which by nature were scarce at any given time in any given place. (Deng 1999, p. 207) Here, European states and chartered companies such as the British East India Company and the Portuguese Estado da India, among others, sought new sources of wealth, which resulted to the sudden unleashing of market power, the spectacular growth in trade and the continuous expansion of overseas colonies. In addition, a number of great thinkers endorse empire-building as a means defending a country’s economic and political interests. Notoriously, even Karl Marx agreed in The Communist Manifesto that the gun is the best way to make the point when capitalism encountered â€Å"barbarians†. (Marx & Engels 1963) Machiavelli’s notion of necessita in his Discourse, also fundamentally supports empire building or the expansion of territories as necessary once its dominion had been extended beyond a certain scope. For him, it is important to expand – so much so that, as is well known, Machiavelli measures the quality of different possible constitutions for cities by how suitable they are to this end. (Bock, Skinner & Viroli 1990, 37) In his discussion of the Roman Empire, Machiavelli has argued that expansive government is pushed forward by the dialectic of the social and political forces of the Republic. There are those who criticize empire building including its modern version – imperialism. Hobson, for example, in Imperialism: A Study, wrote that empire-building denies many traditional