Hegemonic Empire: Difference between revisions
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**Fitzroy Maclean, a british adventurer visiting Stalinist Russia gave descriptions of Moscow worthy of Orwell but when he got out among the tribes, on the frontier, they just lived their grubby old lives the way they had for thousands of years.
*[[The British Empire]] was intentionally this. How much to interfere locally at any given time was often a philosophical controversy(and counterintuitively some of the nastiest stuff, like Cecil Rhodes' designs were done without the central government's direct approval). Local cultures were encouraged and often had political power; as well there was a circle of semi-independent client states around often with armed forces of their own. This was especially the case with "white" countries like Canada and Australia, but even in other places one would have to look at them one by one to say how independent they were. The results of the empire are both admired and disliked depending on who you ask.
* New France in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth century was a tangle of overlapping influences of Indian tribes, French-Canadians, and whomever the King had sent out. There were various power centers including the fur cartels, the Church, the (French) army and so on strung out over the wilderness tied together by the common military interest and desire to make money.
* This was common in the Middle Ages where politics were not so much about territorially cohesive states as about polities of various kinds and strengths in various degrees of dependency. It is still the case in much of the world. In fact the states recognized in the UN often do not reflect the true facts on the ground there.
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