Chapter 9: The Material Conditions of American Exceptionalism

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It is a great dialectical irony that the written history of Britain begins with its colonization by the Roman Empire, who later abandoned its furthest colony willingly as a cost savings measure. British history would definitely go on to use those exact words many times over in the future, to put it mildly.

The Roman Empire was what the Confederacy aspired to be: an oligarchic slave empire that required continual expansion to maintain order among its free landless citizens. The word "proletarius" literally translates as "parent of a legionary" because that was the point of you if you were a Roman citizen but not an oligarch. You didn't really work for a living. I mean, you could, it wasn't illegal, but that's sucker work for Celts and Jews and barbarians, and the government is giving you free bread and circuses, so who cares? The point of you is to go fight the oligarchs' wars for them, and if you must get ahead in life, you can get free land you helped conquer and some barbarian slaves to boot when your term of service is up. But after that, all you're good for is as a military reserve force, and to get some other citizen knocked up so that there's more legions to mess up the Gauls and jack their shit. That can be used to pay for free bread and circuses so there'll be more proletarians, and on and on until whoops Teutoberg Forest time, and there isn't enough plunder anymore to keep the system going so what if the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic but, like, the entire Mediterranean basin and for like hundreds of years?

That's how Roman slavery ended, and more or less how Confederate slavery ended too, when the Emancipation Proclamation ended the flow of free shit to the Southern proletariat and Jeff Davis just turned the printing presses to 11 to compensate. We dwell on the nature of the empire that colonized Britain because why it came and why it left more or less matches the rise and fall of the British Empire. Being a slave empire, Rome was a coalition between its nazbol legionaries and the liberal patrician oligarchs they served. These patricians were too good to even speak "vulgar" Latin, but instead carried on their proceedings in classical Greek, and patronized the arts, to demonstrate their cultural sophistication. They were waited on hand and foot by slaves, whom they had the power of life and death over, and these slaves did literally everything for them. Rome had government-owned farms and factories that employed slave labor to produce for its military, just as the Confederacy would.

And when Britain first colonized the Americas, slavery was equally beneficial to their bottom line. They would carry on slavery in the same way that the Romans did - as something done to other people. To draw a bright line in who was allowed to be slaves (hint: refer to the chorus of "Rule Britannia"), slavery was absolutely banned in the British Isles themselves. Slaves could be imported to the Americas, and individual Whig and Tory oligarchs could grow massively rich off of it (see: the Cameron family, including their great-grandkid Dave, the screwup madlad that dared Britain not to vote for Brexit). But they just couldn't do it at home, so that the British proletariat would remain a loyal source of redcoats.

Britain was not the only place Rome conquered, but it was the only place Rome ever left of its own accord. It did this because Britain never turned the Roman Empire a profit, and times eventually grew so dire that Roman Britain became an unaffordable luxury. Roman Britain was unprofitable mostly because of the unending conflict with Celtic neighbors in Caledonia and Hibernia, as well as restive Britons only barely and tentatively conquered.

The place was Julius Caesar's Vietnam: sure, exploiting the natives was lucrative for a colonial government headquartered in Paris, but the toll exacted by the native guerrilla fighters meant it was cheaper in the long run to Nixonly declare victory and get the hell out, Britishize the war, and eventually watch the last refugees of the ancien regime flee from a place about to get renamed by the approaching conquerors. (It is dialectically downright eerie how well those examples fit together.) In Britain's case, the last Roman Britons fled to the new Frankish Empire, where they were given land in the northwest tip of Francia, then and still now known as Brittany as a result. (The people in the last helicopters out of Saigon didn't get their own province, just a tiny slice of Lincoln, Nebraska, and their expatriate community was studied by my graduate advisor.) Furthermore, the nazbol-consciousness proletarians that staffed the military in both cases wanted to get the hell out. The amount of swag to be looted wasn't worth the cost in their lives, so they turned against the war. Roman legionaries called the natives "Brittunculi," or "nasty little Britons" (Fall of Civilizations Podcast, episode 1, "Roman Britain: The Work of Giants Crumbled," 11:30-12:10, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glKe9njOB24). American GIs had equally colorful words for Vietnamese who were equally defending their homeland from foreign capitalist invasion.

Much of the later British Empire was never profitable as such. But British politicians were worried about the eternal manpower deficit between their army and the average European army, and painting a significant chunk of draftable male humanity red helped solve that dilemma for them. Sepoys from India and Africa were always used for Britain's colonial wars, but began seeing service in Europe right before, and during, the two world wars. The wars, and the colonial wars afterwards, made it obvious that it was cheaper for Britain to project military power with greater investment in research and development of military technology that would act as a force multiplier than through the maintenance of expensive colonies whose primary value was as a manpower reserve. (Jonathan D. Caverley, Democratic Militarism, 145.)

So decolonization was only resisted by those British bougies with direct investment in the colonies, such as anyone dim enough to put money into Kenyan groundnut schemes (looking straight at you, Labour sellouts); as well as anyone who'd spent part of their lives helping paint the globe red (here I'm looking at Churchill and the Tories). But British capital supported decolonization, and British capital usually got its way, so nazbol Rhodesia became differently-nazbol Zimbabwe.

That is important to grasp: as it was nazbollery in the Roman Empire that had conquered Britain, Britain would in turn have a strong nazbol bent in its ruling coalitions. Nazbollery in one's nation begets nazbollery in one's opponents, as the only true answer to military might is more military might. So this Roman imperial nazbollery was passed on to the Britons it was used against, and they in turn would pass it on to the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons that conquered them.

Continue reading Part II