I have recently emerged from a self-induced trance, the cause of this being me wondering why the Empire State Building is called The Empire State Building.
The first step is easy, I think. It’s in New York and New York State is the Empire State. I’m prepared to be wrong on what follows but I gather that NY State acquired this name because (a) George Washington said it was the seat of Empire in 1784 (although the nickname didn’t achieve wide currency until around 1820) or (b) the appellation Empire is indicative of great wealth and resources.
I’m curious to know how New York allowed this nickname, bearing in mind the negative connotations America may reasonably have applied to the word Empire (especially when preceded by the word British). I had always thought that the expression British Empire, as opposed to the concept, came into prominence following the end of the Seven Years War and the Treaty of Paris in 1763. And so:
(1) Can anyone confirm or deny the circa 1763 date for the first common use of British Empire.
(2) Has the meaning of the word empire changed more than somewhat over the past 250 years.
An Empire, by definition, has an Emperor (or Empress). I believe the term “British Empire” only came into vogue after Queen Victoria became Empress of India - long after 1763. Dunno what it was called before then - just “the Colonies”, I think.
The education of almost all the Founding Fathers would have included a great deal of classical material. Gentlemen studied Latin, which meant they read the Roman classics. And they all seemed to have identified at one time or another with Rome. So the Roman Empire, along with the Greek worlds it stemmed from, was the touchstone for how they viewed both the country they were creating (even before the Revolution) and Britain with its far-flung colonies. If Britain was the new Rome, then a British Empire was the logical next step, regardless of whether the King was officially an Emperor or not.
And in 1783, the Society of the Cincinnati was founded, after Cincinnatus, who, like Washington, left power to return to his farm. Washington’s association with Rome, and the new republic’s association with Rome, was very much on everybody’s minds in 1784.
They thought so in Britain as well. Volume one of Gibbon’s The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published in, by historical coincidence, 1776. If you don’t think there was supposed to be some commentary on England there…
And of course, Empire as a word had been in use for hundreds of years in English; there was the living example of the Holy Roman Empire, and the OED has English kings and empire connected for centuries.
The Online Etymology Dictionary says:
Has the word empire changed over 250 years? Of course. But many of the connotations they were making then are no different today.
Years ago when I worked for New York State doing PR, I tried time and again to have the chief executive title changed from Governor to Emperor, as it was an empire state.
Think of the wonderful publicity as candidates ran for Emperor!
For a very early use–albeit using the obsolete “Britannic” instead of British–see Milton’s Of Reformation, written in 1641:
Milton’s reference to her “daughter-islands about her” gives a clue as to how the words Britannic (or British) Empire were often used differently before the late Nineteenth Century, to refer to the British Isles themselves rather than the colonies overseas. The British Parliament became an Imperial Parliament when Britain joined with Ireland in 1801, leading to the oddity of a United Kingdom with an Imperial Parliament. Queen Victoria had an Imperial State Crown before she was formally Empress of anything.
From the standpoint of your question, this may not be a big deal. Neither the big British Empire, with colonies around the world, nor the small British Empire, with its four constituent parts, was really a role model for New York in 1784 or 1820.
But it illustrates how the secondary associations of a word can change over time.
In any case, those who applied the term to New York no doubt wanted to emphasize size and wealth, as opposed to (one hopes) despotism or the control of multi-ethnic colonies from a remote mother country.
But why would the word “empire” have negative connotations when ***not ***preceded by the word “British”? There have been many empires throughout history, and the word itself doesn’t necessarily have negative connotations.
There were no negative connotations to the word empire in the 18th century. It was the expectation for nations, and empires were a familiar sight all over the world. (The Ottoman Empire was also going strong at the time, e.g. So were the Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch, Mughal, and others. Napoleon would name himself emperor a few years into the 19th century, but the French had an empire well before that. ) And the Romans were a universal example in western culture of the grandeur of empire.
Empire and empire-building didn’t pick up the modern negative connotations until the 20th century. Some people objected to the U.S. acquiring the Philippines and freeing Cuba from Spain at the turn of that century as empire-building, but most of the nation thought it was our right as a coming power.
Chez Guevara is simply taking modern attitudes and wrongly thinking they were present in the past. Maybe that’s the change in the word empire he was looking for.
I thought the founding principles of imperialism is exploration, conquest, colonization, and exploitation of foreign lands to serve the home nation, this aside from a title of nobility of Emperor/Empress.
“Brittanic” survives on our passports - the declaration at the front begins “Her Brittanic Majesty’s Secretary of State Requests and requires…”. I suppose that’s a holdover from early formal diplomatic language.
See here for some interesting comments on usage of the word “empire” in the Eighteenth Century. Note especially:
I dare say the word has always had some negative connotations–even in the Eighteenth Century, classicists often viewed the Empire as inferior to the Roman Republic in manners and vigor, and the article cites Patrick Henry as worrying that United States-as-empire would be a bad thing.
I dare say also, however, that the ratio of negative to positive connotations is inordinately higher today than it was then. We’ve had generations of Communists and Third World nationalists denouncing “imperialism”, Reagan himself denouncing the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire” and–yes!–thirty years of the Empire in Star Wars to soften us up.
Were we nicknaming states today, I doubt that “Empire State” would make the cut.
All of which the U.S. has frequently been accused of, starting, as I said, with the war against Spain that begun in 1898. And not always negatively, either. Look at the writings of academics like Niall Ferguson, who wants the U.S. to be the new British Empire.
U.S. imperialism certainly started earlier than that, though, with wars against the Mexicans and various native nations. “Manifest Destiny” is imperial policy under a different name.
No, I have to disagree. The U.S. had no real intention of taking over Mexico and turning it into a colony. What it did want was to ensure that the lands that it considered to be part of the continental United States be controlled by Americans.
Same for Manifest Destiny. Reading imperialism backward into these actions misconstrues both imperialism and the intentions of the U.S. at the time.