The basic point was that it was far harder to create an empire in Europe than overseas. Ideology was a factor here. Within Europe, the French Revolution had glorified concepts of nationhood and popular sovereignty which in principle were the antithesis of empire. The experience of Napoleon’s wars – economic as much as military – did nothing to legitimize the idea of empire in Europe to Europeans. Meanwhile, however, on the whole European opinion was becoming more inclined than before to accept the idea of Europe’s civilizing mission and inherent cultural superiority over the rest of the world. The French, with some justice, saw themselves as the leaders of European civilization and they regarded the continent’s eastern periphery in particular as semi-civilized. Even they, however, would hardly have applied to Europeans a British senior official’s view of ‘the perverseness and depravity of the natives of India in general’. Nor would many Europeans have believed them had they done so.53
More immediately important was the fact that the British in India were the heirs of the Mughals. Empire was hardly a novelty in India and the regimes which the British overthrew were not in most cases very ancient or deeply rooted in their regions. Despite some subsequent claims by nationalist myth-makers, in Europe too Napoleon was not usually faced by nations in the full modern meaning of the word. But many of the regimes he faced were deeply rooted in the communities they ruled. History and ancient myths, common religions and vernacular high cultures linked rulers to ruled.54
Above all, the geopolitics of Europe was different. General Levin von Bennigsen’s comments go to the heart of British geopolitical invulnerability in India. A would-be European emperor was faced with a much harder task. Any attempt to dominate the continent would bring down on one’s head a coalition of great powers with a common interest in preserving their independence and with military machines honed by generations of warfare at the cutting edge of technology and organization. Even if, as with Napoleon, the would-be emperor could conquer the continent’s heartland, he was still faced by two formidable peripheral concentrations of power in Britain and Russia. To make things worse, the conquest of these peripheries demanded that the conqueror mobilize simultaneously two different types of power. In the British case this meant seapower, in the Russian a military-logistical power sufficient to penetrate and sustain itself all the way to the Urals. This challenge – subsequently faced by the Germans in the twentieth century – was very difficult.
There are usually three stages in the creation of empires, though these stages often overlap. First comes the conquest of empire and the elimination of foreign threats. This is generally a question of military power, diplomatic craftiness, and geopolitical context. To survive, however, an empire needs institutions, otherwise it will disintegrate with the death of the conqueror and his charisma. Establishing these institutions is the second stage in creating an empire and is often harder than the first stage, particularly when huge conquests have occurred in a short period. The third stage requires the consolidation of imperial loyalties and identities in the subject populations, and above all, in the pre-modern world, in their elites.55
Napoleon made great progress in the first stage of empire-building, took some steps towards creating imperial institutions but still had a very long way to go in legitimizing his power. To do him justice, he faced a daunting task. A thousand years after the death of Charlemagne, it was rather late in the day to dream of restoring a European empire. Three hundred years after the printing of the vernacular Bible, the imposition of French as a pan-European imperial language was unimaginable. An imperial project backed by a universalist, totalitarian ideology might have gone some way towards establishing empire in Europe for a time. But Napoleon was in no sense a totalitarian ruler, nor was his empire much driven by ideology. On the contrary, he had put the lid on the French Revolution and done his best to banish ideology from French political life. Even the uprooting of local elites in conquered Europe went well beyond Napoleon’s desires or his power. In 1812 his empire was still very dependent on his personal charisma.56
Many European statesmen understood this and acted accordingly. On the eve of his departure for the Americas in 1809, Count Theodor von der Pahlen, the first Russian minister to the United States, wrote that
