After Empire: Post-imperial Symbols of Power
Germania was the last serious attempt to create a city specifically designed to symbolize the rise of a new imperial state, while the shah’s vainglorius return to Persepolis was the last endeavour to revive a long-vanished empire. Both were doomed to failure in the twentieth-century world in which the traditional forms of imperialism were rapidly being consigned to history. The post-imperial powers, which played an increasingly important role in international affairs after the Second World War, may have sought to legitimize themselves by the return to old imperial capitals, but their ideological justification had little to do with past empires. Although they were in so many ways the inheritors of empire, they rejected everything these empires had represented and proclaimed the beginning of a new era in history. Purpose-built capital cities, such as Brasilia, and earlier on Canberra in Australia, came into being, but they were basically intended as the administrative capitals of federal states rather than displays of imperial power. Smaller states, such as Nigeria, also built federal capitals designed largely to hold together diverse and frequently antagonistic populations.
However, there was one intriguing, and unexpected, exception to this general pattern of functional capitals. The Soviet Union had been the first of the post-imperial powers and it was also the first to come to an end. When this massive federation collapsed in 1991, fourteen new sovereign states sprung into being in its place. Five of these were in Central Asia while the others were in European Russia. Some of them had never existed before as independent states while others, such as Armenia, had long and distinguished histories before being conquered and incorporated into the Russian Empire. The Soviet Union had also brought a number of other states around its perimeter into its sphere of influence and it was here that the first signs of the most unexpected development took place.
The most significant part of the old Soviet sphere of influence was Eastern Europe, with its six so-called ‘satellite’ states. As the Soviet grip weakened in the later twentieth century these states became less inclined to follow slavishly the Soviet line and began to embark on paths of their own. The most assertive of them was Romania, which by the last quarter of the twentieth century had largely disengaged itself from the Soviet sphere and was following a highly independent course. This took place under President Nicolae Ceauşescu who was in effect the dictator of the country for the quarter of a century between 1965 and 1989. He instituted a policy of strict controls and centralization in many ways harsher even than the Soviet Union during the time of Stalin. Independent elements within the state were removed and all opposition was hunted down and crushed. The aim of the dictatorship was to obliterate all evidence of the pre-communist Romania, including its religion and historic buildings, and to produce a mechanistic communist state which in many ways resembled Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.1 The Romanian capital, Bucharest, was turned into the centre of this fearsome operation and intimidating symbols of power arose in place of the older buildings.
The principal symbol of the dictatorship was the enormous House of the Republic, the construction of which necessitated razing to the ground large areas of the old city. This destruction was given the functional name of ‘systematization’ and its objective was to build a new communist city almost literally on top of the old one. In this respect it very much resembled the Germania project in Nazi Germany and was driven by the same megalomaniac dreams of power. When finished the massive House of the Republic was the largest building in Europe and was intended to house the national parliament, a convention centre and a museum. It was above all designed to be the presidential palace, the official residence of Ceauşescu himself. The architecture of the building was a severe form of neoclassical, always the favoured style of the power-hungry, and it was reached by a series of high steps which bore the visitor upwards to the great halls of power.
One of the few earlier official structures in Bucharest not only to survive but to be converted by the regime for its own use was the Triumphal Arch. Built in the 1930s in the style of the Arc de Triomphe, what had been intended as a national symbol became a symbol of what Ceauşescu wanted his nation to be.
In front of the House of the Republic was a massive square intended for great parades and mass expressions of solidarity with the leadership. Such rallies of popular support took place frequently and from the balcony of the presidential residence Ceauşescu received the adulation of the masses and stimulated them to ever greater efforts. On 1989, as things were changing rapidly throughout the whole communist world, the masses failed in their adulation and the dictatorship was ousted. It is ironic that it was when the dictator was on the balcony of the great palace, haranguing the crowds, that the revolt began in the square below, soon seeing the end of the dictatorship and the summary execution of its leader.
Deep in the heart of Asia within the Soviet sphere something very similar had taken place rather earlier. Following the fall of the Qing dynasty, Mongolia, long part of the Qing empire, detached itself from China. Sukh Bator, who emerged as leader after a complicated civil war, was a communist and chose to ally his country with the new Soviet Union. As a consequence, in 1924 the People’s Republic of Mongolia came into being as the world’s second communist state. In the 1930s its dictator, Choibalsan, modelled himself closely on Stalin and in many ways behaved in much the way Ceauşescu was later to do. He unleashed a reign of terror on his country and brought about a fearful transformation. Most of the country’s Buddhist temples were destroyed and the lamas slaughtered. Virtually all evidence of Buddhism, long the religion of the country, was eradicated. Even more, evidence of Mongolian pre-communist history removed and knowledge of their nation’s past was denied to generations of Mongolians. All opposition to this policy was dealt with in the most brutal manner. Large parts of the capital Ulaanbataar were razed to the ground, in the same way as at Bucharest, and a massive square replaced them modelled on Red Square in Moscow.2 On one side of this an impressive congress hall was built, in front of which was the massive tomb of the founder of the state, Sukh Bator. The whole complex was a colossal display of power and had a function almost identical to that of the squares in Moscow and Bucharest.
With the fall of the Soviet Union the communist regime in Mongolia also came to an end and was replaced by a government more in tune with the needs and desires of the people. Soon Sukh Bator had been replaced in the popular Mongolian affections by a return to Genghis Khan and a statue of the great leader was soon erected in the centre of the city. Significantly, Genghis Khan had been a great empire builder and the revival of knowledge of the country’s history gave birth to the idea of reuniting the whole Mongolian people. Large numbers of Mongols and similar peoples lived in adjacent Russia and China, and for a time reunification became a very real – if totally unrealistic – objective.3
Perhaps the most megalomaniac development of all took palace in North Korea on the far eastern side of the communist world. There the communist dictator Kim Il-Sung embarked on the creation of a communist state resembling what took place in Choibalsan’s Mongolia and Ceauşescu’s Romania. However, the Korean dictator did not share the fate of his Romanian counterpart. After his death in 1994 his son Kim Jong-Il succeeded and so began the only process of dynastic succession in the communist world. Sabre-rattling and aggressive, this increasingly isolated state drew its power from intimidating its people and threatening its neighbours, in particular South Korea.4 With the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of world communism, North Korea became even more aggressive in its stance and ever more harsh in its treatment of its own people.
By the end of the twentieth century the capital, Pyongyang, was filled with the symbols of power. After the manner of Bucharest, large parts of the old city were demolished to make way for spectacular new buildings. The Kumsusan Palace of the Sun was the centre of the power of the state and the official residence of Kim Il-Sung. The palace was built in the ‘socialist-classical’ style and looked out onto the huge Kim Il-Sung Square designed for military parades and popular assemblies. After the leader’s death the palace became a mausoleum with the embalmed body of Kim as its centrepiece. Around his tomb are statues of grieving people. Enforced mass grief became one of the rituals associated with the death of the leader and this was extended even to the statues. During the period in which Kim Jong-Il was in power the policy of aggressiveness continued and North Korea, a country in which the majority of the people lived in considerable poverty, devoted its resources to becoming a nuclear power. Following his death in 2011, the embalmed body of Kim Jong-Il soon joined that of his father in the mausoleum. It is the largest mausoleum in the communist world and is an obligatory place of pilgrimage for all North Koreans.
Other massive structures in the capital are the Arch of Triumph, built in honour of the first Kim, and the Arch of Reunification demonstrating in stone one of the principal objectives of the foreign policy of the North Korean state. The massive Juche Tower overlooks Kim Il-Sung Square and is intended to be a statement in stone of Juche, the official ideology of the North Korean state.5
In 2011 the grandson of Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-Un, became dictator and this harsh and extraordinary state continued to behave in much the same way as before. On attaining power the young ruler first embarked on the by now virtually obligatory policy of aggressiveness towards the country’s neighbours and also towards the United States, long considered to be the country’s greatest enemy. While the world had changed radically this state, in many ways a relic of the Cold War, continued to harbour its own strange illusions of power and mission.
As has been observed, these three incongruous and bizarre states clung around the edges of the Soviet Union, which had been founded on the principles of egalitarian communism and a hatred for most things western including inequalities, class systems and hereditary monarchies. These peripheral states, while at first claiming to be upholders of these principles, proceeded over the years to move towards unequal and even quasi-monarchical systems. This was enshrined in their chosen symbolism, much of which could be classed as a bizarre kind of neo-imperialism.
The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 soon produced more states which were in many ways similar to these. They were especially to be seen in former Soviet Central Asia and were born out of the old Soviet republics. Very soon they had reverted to being dictatorships even harsher than the ones they had replaced, the only real differences being that they replaced communism with nationalism and had a strong tendency to develop hereditary quasi-monarchical systems.
In Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, who had been the leader of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, became the first president of the new Republic of Uzbekistan. It was soon clear that he was determined to entrench himself in power and the presidential elections which continuously gave him huge majorities became ever more suspect. Uzbek nationalism replaced communism as the official ideology of the state and the Islamic religion, after a brief post-communist resurgence, was increasingly repressed. Corruption became rife and the Karimov family and its cronies came to occupy the choicest positions both in the state and the economy. The Karimov regime inherited the grand Uzbek capital Tashkent from the preceding regime. This had certainly been the most splendid city in the whole of the old Soviet Central Asia and had been intended as a showpiece for the triumph of communism in Asia. Under the Karimov regime this city was soon adapted from a display of the glory of the Soviets and of communism to the glory of Uzbekistan and its history. The old pre-communist city of Tashkent had been largely razed to the ground during the communist period and very little of it remained. The official buildings grouped around the grand central square collectively made a suitable backdrop, inherited from the communists, for the display of the newly rediscovered splendours of Uzbekistan. In the centre of the square, an equestrian statue of Timur Lenk, based on the Bronze Horseman in St Petersburg, became its most striking feature. This was intended to link contemporary Uzbekistan with its greatest historical hero and with the Timurid dynasty that followed.
The mausoleum of Timur in Samarkand and the great statue of his grandson, Ulugh Beg, nearby also became new places of pilgrimage. Significantly Timur, like Genghis Khan, had been a great empire builder, and as a result the idea of being the heirs to an illustrious empire, this time an Asiatic one, rather than a European import, was soon implanted in the minds of the Uzbek people. One striking building on the edge of the square in the traditional Timurid architectural style was actually built in 1970 to house the Museum of Lenin.6 After 1991 all evidence of Lenin was removed and the building was reincarnated as the museum of Uzbek history. An enormous mural in the entrance gallery displays the great heroes of Uzbek history and, as would be expected, Timur looms large. However, leading the cavalcade of Uzbek heroes is Karimov, positioned as the great contemporary hero firmly carrying on the great traditions of the Uzbek nation.7 A whole hagiography has now been developed around Karimov as heir to Timur who, interestingly, himself claimed to be heir to Genghis Khan. In Tashkent, built originally for the display of communism in Central Asia, Asian architecture was used to link communism with the culture of the region. Now this same architecture has been converted to symbolize the Central Asian, and in particular the Uzbek, identity, a change accomplished with considerable ease.
Neighbouring Kazakhstan is by far the largest of the five Central Asian post-Soviet republics. The chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Kazak SSR had been Nursultan Nazarbaev and in 1990 he was selected to be the first president of the new republic. The capital of the Kazak SSR was Almaty (formerly Alma Ata), situated on the edge of the magnificent snow-capped mountains in the south. Despite this backdrop, the city was far less impressive than Tashkent and was not built on the grand scale of the Uzbek capital. Tashkent, as has been observed, was designed for a far wider role. However, Kazakhstan is well endowed with reserves of gas and oil and this soon enabled the new country to engage in a number of major projects. The biggest of these was the building of a completely new capital city, Astana. This became the official capital in 1997 and is in a more central location in relation to the country as a whole. It was on the site of the old town of Akmola, large parts of which were demolished to make way for the new city.8
The National Museum of Uzbekistan, Tashkent. This originally housed the Lenin Museum but after the fall of the Soviet Union its Timurid architecture made it a good symbol for the new independent state.
Originally intended as an administrative city after the manner of Brasilia, it also had the objective of unifying this large and diverse country and of helping to secure its place in the world. The Palace of Peace and Accord, the architect for which was Norman Foster, was originally intended for this purpose and treaties laying the foundations for pan-Asiatic cooperation were signed there. The nearby Glass Pyramid contains a display of the various faiths to be found in the country and to which tolerance is extended. Like the rest of this part of Central Asia, Kazakhstan had before the Soviet period been mainly a Muslim country but the suppression of religion under the Soviets gave place to a more enlightened approach.
Towards the end of the century things began to change. In 1999 Nazarbaev was re-elected president and from then on his new Fatherland political party dominated the Kazakh parliament. There was a crack-down on the opposition and Islamists and their activities were highly curtailed. At further elections Nazarbaev continued to be re-elected by implausibly large margins. As the power of the president became more entrenched, the capital became more ambitious and grandiose. The early internationalism has been replaced by a greater emphasis on nationalism and this came to be reflected in the capital. Today Astana has a number of highly impressive buildings designed to reflect the glory of Kazakhstan and the power of the president. The splendid Orda Presidential Palace is in a prominent position. Kazakhstan cannot claim a historic figure of the stature of either Genghis Khan or Timur but important former leaders have been used to emphasize past glories. The Bayterek Tower supports a sphere and a statue of Kenesary Khan, a nationalist who had fought against the Russians. To commemorate the seventieth birthday of Nazarbaev in 2010 an enormous tent was erected covering a large part of the centre of the city. This was given the name of the Khan Shatyr after another Kazak national hero.
Kazakhs have a long history as conquerors and the twenty-first-century additions to the capital are very much intended to demonstrate that contemporary Kazakhstan is in this great tradition. As with other Central Asian countries such as Mongolia and Uzbekistan, nationalism has replaced communism as the official state ideology and this has been reflected in the increasing splendour of the new capital. The historical Central Asian imperialism has found new, and quite unexpected, outlets.
Thus around the peripheries of the old Soviet Union, and since 1991 within the corpse of the fallen communist giant itself, are evidences of the desire for the kind of grandeur associated with the great regimes of the past. Virtually all vestiges of communism have been jettisoned with little compunction and there was a rapid reversion to the kind of power associated with earlier regimes. Often this has been symbolized in extreme forms. However, as with the shah in the 1970s, these dreams of recreating past glory are completely unrealistic. They are examples of attempts to revive an old form of power quite inappropriate to today’s world. Most strange of all has been their particular association not with capitalist states but with the great communist state dedicated to the creation of a new and more egalitarian world. It seems that the dream of this new world has been rapidly transformed into a nightmare version of the old world at its most intemperate. With its fall, egalitarian communism gave birth to very unegalitarian dictatorship. The opposite of the original ideal has prevailed and this change has been very much symbolized in the capital cities.
In the capitalist world a very different situation has prevailed and this has been reflected in its symbols. The historic capitals examined in this book have usually been centres of absolute power. Virtually every aspect of state power has been contained within their walls. At their most absolute, such capitals attained complete control over vast territories. With the rise of democracy in the western world a very different political situation came to prevail. This entailed a devolution of power away from the centre which inevitably had a profound effect on the capitals themselves. Elements of power became more localized and many aspects of activity were detached from direct state control. These have included cultural, religious, educational and social activities and, perhaps most significantly, economic power. As economies have grown more complex, and industry has developed more widely, usually in response to the geographical potential of different regions, the devolution of economic power has become ever more necessary to allow for its proper functioning. At the heart of this has been control over finance, which by the seventeenth century had become the most essential requirement for the generation of new economic development. This has resulted in the rise of financial centres which have been to a large extent independent, and often quite geographically separate, from the centres of political power.
In states with long democratic histories something of this sort has been a feature for a very long time. In the case of London the separation of Westminster, with its royal and subsequently parliamentary power, and the City with its business and financial power has been a feature over many centuries. In effect there have been two cities which are contiguous but have developed quite different and separate functions within the state. The Civil War of the seventeenth century, although generally presented as Crown versus Parliament – in other words something taking place within Westminster itself – was rooted also in the confrontation between these two centres of power within the capital.
As the move towards forms of devolution developed further, so the emergence of an alternative centre of power became a concomitant and this alternative centre was often geographically separate. This was very much in evidence in the United States, which gained its independence in the late eighteenth century. Here the separation was to be seen early on between the two cities of Washington and New York, respectively the centres of political and financial power. Following the country’s independence from Britain, it was decided to build the new capital, to be called Washington after the first president, and the site was chosen because of its central location in relation to the original thirteen states of the union. However, from the outset, the powers of the federal government were highly limited both by those which remained vested in the individual states and by a system of government based on checks and balances which gave the president only a limited say over the country’s internal affairs.
By the nineteenth century New York was growing into the country’s most important alternative centre of power and gathering a great deal of cultural, educational, business and commercial activity. Most importantly, it was becoming the national financial centre, a role it maintained and enhanced during the twentieth century. Located at the mouth of the Hudson river and having good communications with the interior of the country via the Hudson-Mohawk gap, the city has grown up on a number of adjacent islands and peninsulas which from the outset made internal communications difficult. Furthermore, there were constraints on suitable building land and as the city grew this became ever more problematic. The city centred on Manhattan Island, the southern part of which soon developed into the main financial quarter. The urgent requirement for more accommodation was solved in a way that was at the time entirely new. It was the idea of building ever higher, and with the development of new architectural techniques and engineering possibilities the first ‘skyscrapers’ came into existence in the late nineteenth century.
By the early twentieth century these were being built on a huge scale and the competition among them resulted in their going up ever higher. This all rapidly transformed the Manhattan skyline into something that had never existed before. In 1931 came the most splendid of all the skyscrapers, the Empire State Building, which was higher than anything previously built in the world.9 Faced using oolitic limestone, it was certainly a clear demonstration of the new power in stone, a power that was present in New York more than any other city at that time.
The name of this magnificent building, Empire State, comes from an old nickname for New York. Many explanations have been given for this, including its pre-eminence among the states of the union. Another is that it proclaims ‘the imperial power of liberty’ which invokes the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty and its effect on the migrants who arrived in the New World hoping for a better life. In their Portrait of New York, written in 1939, Riesenberg and Alland asserted that, ‘We will discover and uncover this new Imperial City of Today, celebrating its peak of arrogance.’10 If New York were deemed ‘imperial’ it was certainly at the time a significant and novel use of the term. Yet it accords with the pre-eminence of this city among all the others in the United States. A telling assertion around this time made by a member of the Federal Writers Project was that, because of its monopoly of finance and business, New York had been for years virtually the capital of the United States. This same writer went on to dismiss Washington as being ‘merely the loudspeaker through which New York announced itself’.11 There can hardly have been a more powerful proclamation than this of the new form of power in the land.
The very different architecture of the two cities was a clear demonstration of a profound functional difference between them. By the middle of the twentieth century New York’s buildings were not only able to strike the newcomer with something akin to awe, but they also become the principal symbols of the new form of autonomous power deriving from business and finance. This symbolism had at first been inadvertent, imposed on the city by the necessities of the limited space available for further growth. However, it was soon transformed into something iconic of a rival power which was quite separate and different from that of the capital itself.
During the later twentieth century in other democratic states a similar devolution of power has also taken place and the New York type of symbolism has come to be widely copied. In the German Federal Republic, a high degree of devolution has always been the norm and from the beginning Berlin has been entrusted with only a limited range of powers. Frankfurt became the financial capital and its high-rise modern buildings are symbolic of their function.12 During the twenty-first century, one of the most spectacular such developments has taken place in China. In the 1980s the country moved away from the hardline communism of Mao to embrace a free-market economy under Deng Xiaoping. He transformed the country by introducing the so-called ‘socialist market economy’ and embraced capitalism pragmatically in a way which would have been quite inconceivable during the time of Mao. The principal financial centre of the new China has been Shanghai. This old port city, with its powerful international trading links dating back to the nineteenth century, was well equipped to lead the transformational change in China. This produced a massive building programme resulting in the old skyline of the ‘Bund’ being replaced by a new skyline of high-rise buildings. Some of these boast the most fanciful and astonishing architectural designs and collectively they make a powerful statement of the arrival of China as a powerful player on the world economic scene. They are also symbolic of the tremendous transformation which has taken place in China since the Mao era.
While the development of an alternative centre of power within a single state, together with the architectural symbolism associated with it, has been a most significant development, there has been another even more spectacular one. This is the rise of new centres of financial and economic activity outside the territories of the large states. These constitute new forms of city-states, and many of those which have flourished since the Second World War are the remnants of old maritime empires, notably the British. Both Hong Kong and Singapore are city-states that emerged out of the end of the British Empire.13 Originally intended as the bases of imperial naval, political and economic power in their regions, they have since evolved into important business and financial centres and the rapid building of skyscrapers has produced what has become the characteristic new skyline of such places. Like New York, constraints of space have been an important factor in both of them, so to build upwards, beside being symbolic, has been a natural thing to do.
The biggest concentration of city-states of this sort is now in the Persian Gulf and here some of the most spectacular architectural projects have been undertaken. While during the twentieth century oil became the most important resource in the Gulf, business and finance are now of paramount importance. Qatar and Bahrain are among the most important and both have achieved important roles in the business world.
The United Arab Emirates is a grouping of seven sovereign city-states of a similar type.14 One of its member states, Dubai, has since the 1980s been transformed into the largest business hub in the Middle East. The city also has some of the most spectacular new architecture and the first skyscraper in the Middle East, significantly called the Dubai World Trade Centre, was opened here in 1979. This was followed by a host of similar buildings, notable among which have been the Emirates Tower and the Al Kazim Twin Towers. There are other new buildings on an artificial island just offshore. Most spectacular of all, in 2010 the Burj Khalifa skyscraper was completed. At 828 m, this became the tallest building in the world just as the Empire State Building had 80 years earlier. With numerous Arab architectural features, it is in many ways the ultimate expression of the symbolism not only of the power of business and finance but of the Middle East region itself.
While clearly not completely replacing the old power, this new form of power has since the late twentieth century moved into the position of being the most important element in the running of the global business and financial world. The success of many nations increasingly depends more on the policies embarked on in these great financial centres than on anything their own governments can do. The latter have often proved powerless to challenge the agility of business in locating and relocating in accordance with what is perceived to be their own interests rather than those of the states in which they happen to be at any particular time. The unmistakable symbols of this new power are its buildings, in much the same way as with old power in the past. Political intimidation may have given place to forms of financial intimidation but symbolism remains an essential ingredient of the whole process. The desire to build ever higher has led to considerable architectural competition among rival centres, both in the Gulf and elsewhere, so asserting in stone the power that has become a major force in the twenty-first-century world.
As has been seen, the last attempt to revive an ancient empire died just across the Gulf in the sands of southern Iran in the 1970s. At the time the shah’s futile imperial charade was taking place in his empire’s ancient capital, on the other side of the Gulf the Dubai World Trade Centre was already taking shape. Within a few decades of the end of the shah’s quasi-imperial rule, the Burj Khalifa skyscraper was stridently proclaiming the significance of a very different form of power. This and the many other spectacular buildings rising in the adjacent city-states look out across the Gulf towards the centre of the empire which ruled the world over two millennia ago. Just as Persepolis was built to be the symbol of that ancient imperium, so the new buildings are symbols a new imperium, which has become a major force in shaping the world of the twenty-first century.
In this new world the attempts to perpetuate old power have continued but they have proved absurdly unrealistic in their aspirations. Money and resources have been squandered on creating the illusion of some kind of quasi-great power but the translation of such illusions into any kind of reality has proved impossible. Of course, the great new symbols of financial power have also entailed the expenditure of great wealth. In the competition to assert power, ever-more fantastic architecture has been employed in buildings, the practical uses of which have often been far from clear. The intentions behind the excesses of Pyongyang’s Kumsusan Palace of the Sun and the Burj Khalifa do not appear to have been that different. Both were seeking to convey the idea of power in stone and both entered into the realms of fantasy in order to achieve it.
Since the financial crisis which began in 2008, many of the buildings intended for the display of the new power have in many ways proved to be white elephants. They have drained resources in much the same way as did those of the past and the consequences have been not dissimilar. The financial as well as political results of the irresponsible squandering of wealth in the twenty-first century have proved in many ways quite as serious as the follies of Shah Jehan and Louis XIV in the seventeenth. The new form of power has yet to establish itself as a credible alternative to the old before it can seriously be seen as its legitimate heir, let alone a desirable development for mankind as a whole.
There are many possible paths which such a desirable course might follow but one which would detach itself most absolutely from the old could well be a contemporary version of Aristotle’s ‘good life’, which the philosopher saw as being the one facilitated by the Greek polis.15 To attain this, the possession of financial wealth is an essential prerequisite and the holders and providers of such wealth inevitably become crucially important. However, the polis achieved what it did not just because of its wealth but because of the political restraints placed on it; it was successful in Aristotelian terms above all because of the liberties it engendered and the use to which these were put. Unless this is done, and the wealth generated used for the wider good, its creators are on course to become the new emperors and tsars of the world rather than its liberators.
To liberate wealth for the wider benefit of humanity will certainly be a hard task necessitating the clarification of ideas about what such benefits may be expected to bring. If this process requires symbols, they are certainly not likely to be found in ever-larger palaces or ever-higher skyscrapers. Perhaps they can most appropriately be identified in less spectacular projects such as Bournville in Birmingham or New Lanark in Scotland. In them the ideals of philanthropic business people such as the Cadbury family and Robert Owen were put into practice to produce environments where the lives of human beings could be happier and more fulfilled. It may be that this is what ‘the imperial power of liberty’ really means.