title: Empire

text: In 221 BC, China became an empire when the State of Qin ended the chaotic Warring States period through its conquest of the other six states and proclaimed the Qin Empire (221–207 BC). The Qin Empire is known for the construction of the Great Wall of China and the Terracotta Army, as well as the standardization of currency, weights, measures and writing system. It laid the foundation for China's first golden age, the Han Empire (202 BC–AD 9, AD 25–220). The Han Empire expanded into Central Asia and established trade through the Silk Road. Confucianism was, for the first time, adopted as an official state ideology. During the reign of the Emperor Wu of Han, the Xiongnu were pacified. By this time, only four empires stretched between the Pacific and the Atlantic: the Han Empire of China, the Kushan Empire, the Parthian Empire of Persia, and the Roman Empire. The collapse of the Han Empire in AD 220 saw China fragmented into the Three Kingdoms, only to be unified once again by the Jin Empire (AD 266–420). The relative weakness of the Jin Empire plunged China into political disunity that would last from AD 304 to AD 589 when the Sui Empire (AD 581–618) reunited China.


title: Empire

text: The Romans were the first people to invent and embody the concept of empire in their two mandates: to wage war and to make and execute laws. They were the most extensive Western empire until the early modern period, and left a lasting impact on European society. Many languages, cultural values, religious institutions, political divisions, urban centers, and legal systems can trace their origins to the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire governed and rested on exploitative actions. They took slaves and money from the peripheries to support the imperial center. However, the absolute reliance on conquered peoples to carry out the empire's fortune, sustain wealth, and fight wars would ultimately lead to the collapse of the Roman Empire. The Romans were strong believers in what they called their "civilizing mission". This term was legitimized and justified by writers like Cicero who wrote that only under Roman rule could the world flourish and prosper. This ideology, that was envisioned to bring a new world order, was eventually spread across the Mediterranean world and beyond. People started to build houses like Romans, eat the same food, wear the same clothes and engage in the same games. Even rights of citizenship and authority to rule were granted to people not born within Roman territory.


title: Empire

text: The Latin word "imperium", referring to a magistrate's power to command, gradually assumed the meaning "The territory in which a magistrate can effectively enforce his commands", while the term ""imperator"" was originally an honorific meaning "commander". The title was given to generals who were victorious in battle. Thus, an "empire" may include regions that are not legally within the territory of a state, but are under either direct or indirect control of that state, such as a colony, client state, or protectorate. Although historians use the terms "Republican Period" and "Imperial Period" to identify the periods of Roman history before and after absolute power was assumed by Augustus, the Romans themselves continued to refer to their government as a republic, and during the Republican Period, the territories controlled by the republic were referred to as ""Imperium Romanum"". The emperor's actual legal power derived from holding the office of "consul", but he was traditionally honored with the titles of "imperator" (commander) and "princeps" (first man or, chief). Later, these terms came to have legal significance in their own right; an army calling their general ""imperator"" was a direct challenge to the authority of the current emperor.


title: Empire

text: The legal systems of France and its former colonies are strongly influenced by Roman law. Similarly, the United States was founded on a model inspired by the Roman Republic, with upper and lower legislative assemblies, and executive power vested in a single individual, the president. The president, as "commander-in-chief" of the armed forces, reflects the ancient Roman titles "imperator princeps". The Roman Catholic Church, founded in the early Imperial Period, spread across Europe, first by the activities of Christian evangelists, and later by official imperial promulgation.


title: Empire

text: In Western Asia, the term "Persian Empire" came to denote the Iranian imperial states established at different historical periods of pre–Islamic and post–Islamic Persia.


title: Empire

text: In East Asia, various Chinese empires dominated the political, economic and cultural landscapes during this era, the most powerful of which was probably the Tang Empire (618–690, 705–907). Other influential Chinese empires during the post-classical period include the Sui Empire (581–618), the Great Liao Empire, the Song Empire, the Western Xia Empire (1038–1227), the Great Jin Empire (1115–1234), the Western Liao Empire (1124–1218), the Great Yuan Empire (1271–1368), and the Great Ming Empire (1368–1644). During this period, Japan and Korea underwent voluntary Sinicization. The Sui, Tang and Song empires had the world's largest economy and were the most technologically advanced during their time; the Great Yuan Empire was the world's ninth largest empire by total land area; while the Great Ming Empire is famous for the seven maritime expeditions led by Zheng He.


title: Empire

text: The Ajuran Sultanate was a Somali empire in the medieval times that dominated the Indian Ocean trade. They belonged to the Somali Muslim sultanate that ruled over large parts of the Horn of Africa in the Middle Ages. Through a strong centralized administration and an aggressive military stance towards invaders, the Ajuran Sultanate successfully resisted an Oromo invasion from the west and a Portuguese incursion from the east during the Gaal Madow and the Ajuran-Portuguese wars. Trading routes dating from the ancient and early medieval periods of Somali maritime enterprise were strengthened or re-established, and foreign trade and commerce in the coastal provinces flourished with ships sailing to and coming from many kingdoms and empires in East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe, Middle East, North Africa and East Africa.


title: Empire

text: In the 7th century, Maritime Southeast Asia witnessed the rise of a Buddhist thallasocracy, the Srivijaya Empire, which thrived for 600 years and was succeeded by the Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit Empire that ruled from the 13th to 15th centuries. In the Southeast Asian mainland, the Hindu-Buddhist Khmer Empire was centered in the city of Angkor and flourished from the 9th to 13th centuries. Following the demise of the Khmer Empire, the Siamese Empire flourished alongside the Burmese and Lan Chang Empires from the 13th through the 18th centuries.


title: Empire

text: In Southeastern and Eastern Europe, during 917, the Eastern Roman Empire, sometimes called the Byzantine Empire, was forced to recognize the Imperial title of Bulgarian ruler Simeon the Great, who were then called Tsar, the first ruler to hold that precise imperial title. The Bulgarian Empire, established in the region in 680-681, remained a major power in Southeast Europe until its fall in the late 14th century. Bulgaria gradually reached its cultural and territorial apogee in the 9th century and early 10th century under Prince Boris I and Simeon I, when its early Christianization in 864 allowed it to develop into the cultural and literary center of Slavic Europe, as well as one of the largest states in Europe, thus the period is considered the Golden Age of medieval Bulgarian culture. Major events included the development of the Cyrillic script at the Preslav Literary School, declared official in 893, and the establishment of the liturgy in Old Church Slavonic, also called Old Bulgarian.


title: Empire

text: At the time, in the Medieval West, the title "empire" had a specific technical meaning that was exclusively applied to states that considered themselves the heirs and successors of the Roman Empire. Among these were the "Byzantine Empire", which was the actual continuation of the Eastern portion of the Roman Empire, the Carolingian Empire, the largely Germanic Holy Roman Empire, and the Russian Empire. Yet, these states did not always fit the geographic, political, or military profiles of empires in the modern sense of the word. To legitimise their "imperium", these states directly claimed the title of "Empire" from Rome. The "sacrum Romanum imperium" (Holy Roman Empire), which lasted from 800 to 1806, claimed to have exclusively comprehended Christian principalities, and was only nominally a discrete imperial state. The Holy Roman Empire was not always centrally-governed, as it had neither core nor peripheral territories, and was not governed by a central, politico-military elite. Hence, Voltaire's remark that the Holy Roman Empire "was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire" is accurate to the degree that it ignores German rule over Italian, French, Provençal, Polish, Flemish, Dutch, and Bohemian populations, and the efforts of the ninth-century Holy Roman Emperors (i.e., the Ottonians) to establish central control. Voltaire's "nor an empire" observation applies to its late period.


title: Empire

text: In 1204, after the Fourth Crusade conquered Constantinople, the crusaders established a Latin Empire (1204–1261) in that city, while the defeated Byzantine Empire's descendants established two smaller, short-lived empires in Asia Minor: the Empire of Nicaea (1204–1261) and the Empire of Trebizond (1204–1461).


title: Empire

text: Constantinople was retaken in 1261 by the Byzantine successor state centered in Nicaea, re-establishing the Byzantine Empire until 1453, by which time the Turkish-Muslim Ottoman Empire (ca. 1300–1918), had conquered most of the region. The Ottoman Empire was a successor of the Abbasid Empire and it was the most powerful empire to succeed the Abbasi empires at the time, as well as one of the most powerful empires in the world. They became the successors after the Abbasid Empire fell from the Mongols (Hülegü Khan). The Ottoman Empire centered on modern day Turkey, dominated the eastern Mediterranean, overthrew the Byzantine Empire to claim Constantinople and it would start battering at Austria and Malta, which were countries that were key to central and to south-west Europe respectively — mainly for their geographical location. The reason these occurrences of batterings were so important was because the Ottomans were Muslim, and the rest of Europe was Christian, so there was a sense of religious fighting going on. This was not just a rivalry of East and West but a rivalry between Christians and Muslims. Both the Christians and Muslims had alliances with other countries, and they had problems in them as well. The flows of trade and of cultural influences across the supposed great divide never ceased, so the countries never stopped bartering with each other. These epochal clashes between civilizations profoundly shaped many people's thinking back then, and continues to do so in the present day. Modern hatred against Muslim communities in South-Eastern Europe, mainly in Bosnia and Kosovo, has often been articulated in terms of seeing them as unwelcome residues of this imperialism: in short, as Turks. Moreover, Eastern Orthodox imperialism was not re-established until the coronation of Ivan the Terrible as Emperor of Russia in 1547. Likewise, with the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), the Austrian Empire (1804–1867) emerged reconstituted as the Empire of Austria-Hungary (1867–1918), having "inherited" the imperium of Central and Western Europe from the losers of said wars.


title: Empire

text: In the thirteenth century, Genghis Khan expanded the Mongol Empire to be the largest contiguous empire in the world. However, within two generations, the empire was separated into four discrete khanates under Genghis Khan's grandsons. One of them, Kublai Khan, conquered China and established the Yuan dynasty with the imperial capital at Beijing. One family ruled the whole Eurasian land mass from the Pacific to the Adriatic and Baltic Seas. The emergence of the Pax Mongolica had significantly eased trade and commerce across Asia. The Safavid Empire of Iran was also founded.


title: Empire

text: In the Indian subcontinent, the Delhi Sultanate conquered most of the Indian peninsula and spread Islam across it. It later got broken with the establishment of the Bengal Sultanate. In the 15th century, the Mughal Empire was founded by Timur and Genghis Khan's direct descendant Babur. His successors such Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan extended the empire. Meanwhile, the Sur Empire was also established in the north by Sher Shah Suri.


title: Empire

text: In the 17th century, Muhammad Aurangzeb Alamgir expanded the Mughal Empire, controlling most of the South Asia through Sharia, which became the world's largest economy and leading manufacturing power with a nominal GDP that valued a quarter of world GDP, superior than the combination of Europe's GDP. It has been estimated that the Mughal emperors controlled an unprecedented one-fourth of the world's entire economy and was home to one-fourth of the world's population at the time.


title: Empire

text: After the death of Aurangzeb, which marks the end of the medieval India and the beginning of European invasion in India, the empire was weakened by Nader Shah's invasion.


title: Empire

text: The Mysore Empire was soon established by Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan, allies of Napoleone Bonaparte. Other independent empires were also been established, such as those ruled by the Nawabs of Bengal and Murshidabad and Hyderabad State's Nizam of Hyderabad.


title: Empire

text: In the pre-Columbian Americas, two Empires were prominent—the Azteca in Mesoamerica and Inca in Peru. Both existed for several generations before the arrival of the Europeans. Inca had gradually conquered the whole of the settled Andean world as far south as today Santiago in Chile.


title: Empire

text: In Oceania, the Tonga Empire was a lonely empire that existed from the Late Middle Ages to the Modern period.


title: Empire

text: In the 15th century, Castile (Spain) landing in the so-called "New World" (first, the Americas, and later Australia), along with Portuguese travels around the Cape of Good Hope and along the coast of Africa bordering the southeast Indian Ocean, proved ripe opportunities for the continent's Renaissance-era monarchies to establish colonial empires like those of the ancient Romans and Greeks. In the Old World, colonial imperialism was attempted and established on the Canary Islands and Ireland. These conquered lands and people became "de jure" subordinates of the empire, rather than "de facto" imperial territories and subjects. Such subjugation often elicited "client-state" resentment that the empire unwisely ignored, leading to the collapse of the European colonial imperial system in the late 19th through the mid-20th century. Portuguese discovery of Newfoundland in the New World gave way to many expeditions led by England (later Britain), Spain, France, and the Dutch Republic. In the 18th century, the Spanish Empire was at its height because of the great mass of goods taken from conquered territory in the Americas (nowadays Mexico, parts of the United States, the Caribbean, most of Central America, and South America) and the Philippines.


title: Empire

text: The British established their first empire (1583–1783) in North America by colonising lands that made up British America, including parts of Canada, the Caribbean and the Thirteen Colonies. In 1776, the Continental Congress of the Thirteen Colonies declared itself independent from the British Empire, thus beginning the American Revolution. Britain turned towards Asia, the Pacific, and later Africa, with subsequent exploration and conquests leading to the rise of the Second British Empire (1783–1815), which was followed by the Industrial Revolution and Britain's Imperial Century (1815–1914). It became the largest empire in world history, encompassing one quarter of the world's land area and one fifth of its population. The impacts of this period are still prominent in the current age "including widespread use of the English language, belief in Protestant religion, economic globalization, modern precepts of law and order, and representative democracy."


title: Empire

text: The Great Qing Empire of China (1636–1912) was the fifth largest empire in world history by total land area, and laid the foundation for the modern territorial claims of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China. Apart from having direct control over much of East Asia, the empire also exerted domination over other states through the Chinese tributary system. The multiethnic and multicultural nature of the Great Qing Empire was crucial to the subsequent birth of the nationalistic concept of "zhonghua minzu". The empire reached its peak during the reign of the Qianlong Emperor, after which the empire entered a period of prolonged decline, culminating in its collapse as a result of the Xinhai Revolution.


title: Empire

text: The Ashanti Empire (or Confederacy), also Asanteman (1701–1896), was a West African state of the Ashanti, the Akan people of the Ashanti Region, Akanland in modern-day Ghana. The Ashanti (or Asante) were a powerful, militaristic and highly disciplined people in West Africa. Their military power, which came from effective strategy and an early adoption of European firearms, created an empire that stretched from central Akanland (in modern-day Ghana) to present day Benin and Ivory Coast, bordered by the Dagomba kingdom to the north and Dahomey to the east. Due to the empire's military prowess, sophisticated hierarchy, social stratification and culture, the Ashanti empire had one of the largest historiographies of any indigenous Sub-Saharan African political entity.


title: Empire

text: The Sikh Empire (1799–1846) was established in the Punjab region of India. The empire collapsed when its founder, Ranjit Singh, died and its army fell to the British. During the same period, the Maratha Empire (also known as the Maratha Confederacy) was a Hindu state located in present-day India. It existed from 1674 to 1818, and at its peak, the empire's territories covered much of Southern Asia. The empire was founded and consolidated by Shivaji. After the death of Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, it expanded greatly under the rule of the Peshwas. In 1761, the Maratha army lost the Third Battle of Panipat, which halted the expansion of the empire. Later, the empire was divided into a confederacy of states which, in 1818, were lost to the British during the Anglo-Maratha wars.


title: Empire

text: The French emperors Napoleon I and Napoleon III (See: Premier Empire, Second French Empire) each attempted establishing a western imperial hegemony centered in France. The French colonial empire constituted the overseas colonies, protectorates and mandate territories that came under French rule from the 16th century onward. A distinction is generally made between the "first colonial empire," that existed until 1814, and the "second colonial empire", which began with the conquest of Algiers in 1830. The second colonial empire came to an end after the decolonizations of Indochina (1954), Algeria (1962) and French Africa. At its apex, it was one of the largest empires in history; including metropolitan France, the total amount of land under French sovereignty reached 11,500,000 km2 (4,400,000 sq mi), with a population of 110 million people in 1939.


title: Empire

text: The Empire of Brazil (1822–1889) was the only South American modern monarchy, established by the heir of the Portuguese Empire as an independent nation eventually became an emerging international power. The new country was huge but sparsely populated and ethnically diverse. In 1889 the monarchy was overthrown in a sudden coup d'état led by a clique of military leaders whose goal was the formation of a republic.


title: Empire

text: The term "American Empire" refers to the United States' cultural ideologies and foreign policy strategies. The term is most commonly used to describe the U.S.'s status since the 20th century, but it can also be applied to the United States' world standing before the rise of nationalism in the 20th century. The United States is not traditionally recognized as an empire, in part because the U.S. adopted a different political system from those that previous empires had used. Despite these systematic differences, the political objectives and strategies of the United States government have been quite similar to those of previous empires. Due to this similarity some scholars confess: "When it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it's a duck." Academic, Krishna Kumar, argues the distinct principles of nationalism and imperialism may result in common practice; that is, the pursuit of nationalism can often coincide with the pursuit of imperialism in terms of strategy and decision making. Throughout the 19th century, the United States government attempted to expand its territory by any means necessary. Regardless of the supposed motivation for this constant expansion, all of these land acquisitions were carried out by imperialistic means. This was done by financial means in some cases, and by military force in others. Most notably, the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the Texas Annexation (1845), and the Mexican Cession (1848) highlight the imperialistic goals of the United States during this “modern period” of imperialism. The U.S. government has stopped adding additional territories, where they permanently and politically take over since the early 20th century, and instead have established 800 military bases as their outposts. With this overt but subtile military control of other countries, scholars consider U.S. foreign policy strategies to be imperialistic. This idea is explored in the "contemporary usage" section.


title: Empire

text: In time, an empire may change from one political entity to another. For example, the Holy Roman Empire, a German re-constitution of the Roman Empire, metamorphosed into various political structures (i.e., federalism), and eventually, under Habsburg rule, re-constituted itself in 1804 as the Austrian Empire, an empire of much different politics and scope, which in turn became the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867. The Roman Empire, perennially reborn, also lived on as the Byzantine Empire (Eastern Roman Empire) – temporarily splitting into the Latin Empire, the Empire of Nicaea and the Empire of Trebizond before its remaining territory and centre became part of the Ottoman Empire. A similarly persistent concept of empire saw the Mongol Empire become the Khanate of the Golden Horde, the Yuan Empire of China, and the Ilkhanate before resurrection as the Timurid Empire and as the Mughal Empire. After 1945 the Empire of Japan retained its Emperor but lost its colonial possessions and became the State of Japan.


title: Empire

text: An autocratic empire can become a republic (e.g., the Central African Empire in 1979), or it can become a republic with its imperial dominions reduced to a core territory (e.g., Weimar Germany shorn of the German colonial empire (1918–1919), or the Ottoman Empire (1918–1923)). The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after 1918 provides an example of a multi-ethnic superstate broken into constituent nation-oriented states: the republics, kingdoms, and provinces of Austria, Hungary, Transylvania, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czechoslovakia, Ruthenia, Galicia, "et al". In the aftermath of World War I the Russian Empire also broke up and became reduced to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) before re-forming as the USSR (1922–1991) – sometimes seen as the core of a Soviet Empire.


title: Empire

text: After the Second World War (1939–1945), the deconstruction of colonial empires quickened and became commonly known as decolonisation. The British Empire evolved into a loose, multinational Commonwealth of Nations, while the French colonial empire metamorphosed to a Francophone commonwealth. The same process happened to the Portuguese Empire, which evolved into a Lusophone commonwealth, and to the former territories of the extinct Spanish Empire, which alongside the Lusophone countries of Portugal and Brazil, created an Ibero-American commowealth. France returned the French territory of Kwang-Chou-Wan to China in 1946. The British gave Hong Kong back to China in 1997 after 150 years of rule. The Portuguese territory of Macau reverted to China in 1999. Macau and Hong Kong did not become part of the provincial structure of China; they have autonomous systems of government as Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China.


title: Empire

text: France still governs overseas territories (French Guiana, Martinique, Réunion, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Saint Martin, Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, Guadeloupe, French Southern and Antarctic Lands (TAAF), Wallis and Futuna, Saint Barthélemy, and Mayotte), and exerts hegemony in Francafrique ("French Africa"; 29 francophone countries such as Chad, Rwanda, etc.). Fourteen British Overseas Territories remain under British sovereignty. Fifteen countries of the Commonwealth of Nations share their head of state, King Charles III, as Commonwealth realms.


title: Empire

text: In 2004 Eliot A. Cohen summarized the contemporary transition from empire: "The Age of Empire may indeed have ended, but then an age of American hegemony has begun, regardless of what one calls it."


title: Empire

text: The fall of the western half of the Roman Empire is seen as one of the most pivotal points in all of human history. This event traditionally marks the transition from classical civilization to the birth of Europe. The Roman Empire started to decline at the end of the reign of the last of the Five Good Emperors, Marcus Aurelius in 161–180 A.D. There is still a debate over the cause of the fall of one of the largest empires in history. Piganiol argues that the Roman Empire under its authority can be described as "a period of terror", holding its imperial system accountable for its failure. Another theory blames the rise of Christianity as the cause, arguing that the spread of certain Christian ideals caused internal weakness of the military and state. In the book "The Fall of the Roman Empire", by Peter Heather, he contends that there are many factors, including issues of money and manpower, which produce military limitations and culminate in the Roman army's inability to effectively repel invading barbarians at the frontier. The Western Roman economy was already stretched to its limit in the 4th and 5th Centuries C.E. due to continual conflict and loss of territory which, in turn, generated loss of revenue from the tax base. There was also the looming presence of the Persians which, at any time, took a large percentage of the fighting force's attention. At the same time the Huns, a nomadic warrior people from the steppes of Asia, are also putting extreme pressure on the German tribes outside of the Roman frontier, which gave the German tribes no other choice, geographically, but to move into Roman territory. At this point, without increased funding, the Roman army could no longer effectively defend its borders against major waves of Germanic tribes. This inability is illustrated by the crushing defeat at Adrianople in 378 C.E. and, later, the Crossing of the Rhine in 406 C.E.


title: Empire

text: Contemporaneously, the concept of "empire" is politically valid, yet is not always used in the traditional sense. Despite the semantic reference to imperial power, Japan is a "de jure" constitutional monarchy, with a homogeneous population of 127 million people that is 98.5 percent ethnic Japanese, making it one of the largest nation-states.


title: Empire

text: In his book review of "Empire" (2000) by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Mehmet Akif Okur posits that since the September 11 attacks in the United States, the international relations determining the world's balance of power (political, economic, military) have been altered. These alterations include the intellectual (political science) trends that perceive the contemporary world's order via the re-territorialization of "political space", the re-emergence of "classical imperialist practices" (the "inside" vs. "outside" duality, cf. the Other), the deliberate weakening of international organizations, the restructured international economy, economic nationalism, the expanded arming of most countries, the proliferation of nuclear weapon capabilities and the politics of identity emphasizing a state's "subjective" perception of its place in the world, as a nation and as a civilization. These changes constitute the "Age of Nation Empires"; as imperial usage, "nation-empire" denotes the return of geopolitical power from "global" power blocs to "regional" power blocs (i.e., centered upon a "regional power" state [China, EU, Russia, US, "et al".]) and regional multi-state power alliances (i.e., Mediterranean, Latin America, Southeast Asia). Nation-empire regionalism claims sovereignty over their respective (regional) political (social, economic, ideologic), cultural, and military spheres.


title: Empire

text: Since the European Union was formed as a polity in 1993, it has established its own currency, its own citizenship, established discrete military forces, and exercises its limited hegemony in the Mediterranean, eastern parts of Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. The big size and high development index of the EU economy often has the ability to influence global trade regulations in its favor. The political scientist Jan Zielonka suggests that this behavior is imperial because it coerces its neighbouring countries into adopting its "European" economic, legal, and political structures. Tony Benn, a left-wing Labour Party MP of the United Kingdom, opposed the European integration policies of the European Union by saying, "I think they're (the European Union) building an empire there, they want us (the United Kingdom) to be a part of their empire and I don't want that."


title: Empire

text: Characterizing some aspects of the United States of America in regards to its territorial expansion, foreign policy, and its international behavior as "American Empire" is controversial but not uncommon. The controversy stems in part from the fact the US itself was at one point a colony in the British Empire. However, founding fathers such as George Washington noted after the Revolution that the US was an empire in its Infancy, and others like Thomas Jefferson agreed, describing the constitution as the perfect foundation for an “extensive Empire”. Even so, the false ideology that the US was founded on Anti-Imperialist principles has prevented many from acknowledging America's status as an empire. This active rejection of imperialist status is not limited to high-ranking government officials, as it has been ingrained in American society throughout its entire history. As David Ludden explains, "journalists, scholars, teachers, students, analysts, and politicians prefer to depict the U.S. as a nation pursuing its own interests and ideals". This often results in imperialist endeavors being presented as measures taken to enhance state security. Ludden explains this phenomenon with the concept of "ideological blinders", which he says prevent American citizens from realizing the true nature of America's current systems and strategies. These "ideological blinders" that people wear have resulted in an "invisible" American empire of which most American citizens are unaware.


title: Empire

text: Stuart Creighton Miller posits that the public's sense of innocence about Realpolitik (cf. American exceptionalism) impairs popular recognition of US imperial conduct since it governed other countries via surrogates. These surrogates were domestically-weak, right-wing governments that would collapse without US support. Former President G. W. Bush's Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, said: "We don't seek empires. We're not imperialistic; we never have been." This statement directly contradicts Thomas Jefferson who, in the 1780s while awaiting the fall of the Spanish empire, said: "till our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them piece by piece". In turn, historian Sidney Lens argues that from its inception, the US has used every means available to dominate foreign peoples and states.


title: Empire

text: The chart below shows a timeline of polities that have been called empires. Dynastic changes are marked with a white line.


title: Empire

text: Similarly, Anthony Pagden, Eliot A. Cohen, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper estimate that "empires have always been more frequent, more extensive political and social forms than tribal territories or nations have ever been." Many empires endured for centuries, while the age of the ancient Egyptian, Chinese and Japanese Empires is counted in millennia. "Most people throughout history have lived under imperial rule."


title: Empire

text: Political scientist Hedley Bull wrote that "in the broad sweep of human history ... the form of states system has been the exception rather than the rule". His colleague Robert Gilpin confirmed this conclusion for the pre-modern period:


title: Empire

text: Historian Michael Doyle who undertook an extensive research on empires extended the observation into the modern era:


title: Empire

text: Expert on warfare Quincy Wright generalized on what he called "universal empire"—empire unifying all the contemporary system:


title: Empire

text: German Sociologist Friedrich Tenbruck finds that the macro-historic process of imperial expansion gave rise to global history in which the formations of universal empires were most significant stages. A later group of political scientists, working on the phenomenon of the current unipolarity, in 2007 edited research on several pre-modern civilizations by experts in respective fields. The overall conclusion was that the balance of power was inherently unstable order and usually soon broke in favor of imperial order. Yet before the advent of the unipolarity, world historian Arnold Toynbee and political scientist Martin Wight had drawn the same conclusion with an unambiguous implication for the modern world:


title: Empire

text: The earliest thinker to approach the phenomenon of universal empire from a theoretical point of view was Polybius (2:3):


title: Empire

text: Johann Gottlieb Fichte, having witnessed the battle at Jena in 1806 when Napoleon overwhelmed Prussia, described what he perceived as a deep historical trend:


title: Empire

text: Fichte's later compatriot, Geographer Alexander von Humboldt, in the mid-Nineteenth century observed a macro-historic trend of imperial growth in both Hemispheres: "Men of great and strong minds, as well as whole nations, acted under influence of one idea, the purity of which was utterly unknown to them."


title: Empire

text: The imperial expansion filled the world circa 1900. Two famous contemporary observers—Frederick Turner and Halford Mackinder described the event and drew implications, the former predicting American overseas expansion and the latter stressing that the world empire is now in sight.


title: Empire

text: Friedrich Ratzel, writing at the same time, observed that the "drive toward the building of continually larger states continues throughout the entirety of history" and is active in the present. He drew "Seven Laws of Expansionism". His seventh law stated: "The general trend toward amalgamation transmits the tendency of territorial growth from state to state and increases the tendency in the process of transmission." He commented on this law to make its meaning clear: "There is on this small planet sufficient space for only one great state."


title: Empire

text: Two other contemporaries—Kang Yu-wei and George Vacher de Lapouge—stressed that imperial expansion cannot indefinitely proceed on the definite surface of the globe and therefore world empire is imminent. Kang Yu-wei in 1885 believed that the imperial trend will culminate in the contest between Washington and Berlin and Vacher de Lapouge in 1899 estimated that the final contest will be between Russia and America in which America is likely to triumph.


title: Empire

text: The above envisaged contests indeed took place, known to us as World War I and II. Writing during the Second, political scientists Derwent Whittlesey, Robert Strausz-Hupé and John H. Herz concluded: “Now that the earth is at last parceled out, consolidation has commenced.” In "this world of fighting superstates there could be no end to war until one state had subjected all others, until world empire had been achieved by the strongest. This undoubtedly is the logical final stage in the geopolitical theory of evolution."


title: Empire

text: The year after the War and in the first year of the nuclear age, Albert Einstein and British Philosopher Bertrand Russell, known as prominent pacifists, outlined for the near future a perspective of world empire (world government established by force). Einstein believed that, unless world government is established by agreement, an imperial world government would come by war or wars. Russell expected a third World War to result in a world government under the empire of the United States. Three years later, another prominent pacifist, Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, generalized on the ancient Empires of Egypt, Babylon, Persia and Greece to imply for the modern world: "The analogy in present global terms would be the final unification of the world through the preponderant power of either America or Russia, whichever proved herself victorious in the final struggle."


title: Empire

text: Russian colleague of Russell and Neighbour, Georgy Fedotov, wrote in 1945: All empires are but stages on the way to the sole Empire which must swallow all others. The only question is who will build it and on which foundations. Universal unity is the only alternative to annihilation. Unity by conference is utopian but unity by conquest by the strongest Power is not and probably the uncompleted in this War will be completed in the next. "Pax Atlantica" is the best of possible outcomes.


title: Empire

text: Originally drafted as a secret study for the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor of the CIA) in 1944 and published as a book three years later, "The Struggle for the World..." by James Burnham concludes: If either of the two Superpowers wins, the result would be a universal empire which in our case would also be a world empire. The historical stage for a world empire had already been set prior to and independently of the discovery of atomic weapons but these weapons make a world empire inevitable and imminent. "The atomic weapons ... will not permit the world to wait." Only a world empire can establish monopoly on atomic weapons and thus guarantee the survival of civilization. A world empire "is in fact the objective of the Third World War which, in its preliminary stages, has already began". The issue of a world empire "will be decided, and in our day. In the course of the decision, both of the present antagonists may, it is true, be destroyed, but one of them must be." In 1951, Hans Morgenthau concluded that the "best" outcome of World War III would be world empire:


title: Empire

text: Expert on earlier civilizations, Toynbee, further developed the subject of World War III leading to world empire:


title: Empire

text: The year this volume of A Study of History was published, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced "a knock-out blow" as an official doctrine, a detailed Plan was elaborated and "Fortune" magazine mapped the design. Section VIII, "Atomic Armaments", of the famous National Security Council Report 68 (NSC 68), approved by President Harry Truman in 1951, uses the term "blow" 17 times, mostly preceded by such adjectives as "powerful", "overwhelming", or "crippling". Another term applied by the strategists was "Sunday punch".


title: Empire

text: A pupil of Toynbee, William McNeill, associated with the case of ancient China, which "put a quietus upon the disorders of the warring states by erecting an imperial bureaucratic structure ... The warring states of the Twentieth century seem headed for a similar resolution of their conflicts." The ancient "resolution" McNeill evoked was one of the most sweeping universal conquests in world history, performed by Qin in 230–221 BC. Chinese classic Sima Qian (d. 86 BC) described the event (6:234): "Qin raised troops on a grand scale" and "the whole world celebrated a great bacchanal". Herman Kahn of the RAND Corporation criticized an assembled group of SAC officers for their war plan (SIOP-62). He did not use the term bacchanal but he coined on the occasion an associating word: "Gentlemen, you do not have a war plan. You have a "eargasm"!" History did not completely repeat itself but it passed close.


title: Empire

text: According to the circumscription theory of Robert Carneiro, "the more sharply circumscribed area, the more rapidly it will become politically unified." The Empires of Egypt, China and Japan are named the most durable political structures in human history. Correspondingly, these are the three most circumscribed civilizations in human history. The Empires of Egypt (established by Narmer c. 3000 BC) and China (established by Cheng in 221 BC) endured for over two millennia. German Sociologist Friedrich Tenbruck, criticizing the Western idea of progress, emphasized that China and Egypt remained at one particular stage of development for millennia. This stage was universal empire. The development of Egypt and China came to a halt once their empires "reached the limits of their natural habitat". Sinology does not recognize the Eurocentric view of the "inevitable" imperial fall; Egyptology and Japanology pose equal challenges.


title: Empire

text: Carneiro explored the Bronze Age civilizations. Stuart J. Kaufman, Richard Little and William Wohlforth researched the next three millennia, comparing eight civilizations. They conclude: The "rigidity of the borders" contributed importantly to hegemony in every concerned case. Hence, "when the system's borders are rigid, the probability of hegemony is high".


title: Empire

text: The circumscription theory was stressed in the comparative studies of the Roman and Chinese Empires. The circumscribed Chinese Empire recovered from all falls, while the fall of Rome, by contrast, was fatal. "What counteracted this [imperial] tendency in Europe ... was a countervailing tendency for the geographical boundaries of the system to expand." If "Europe had been a closed system, some great power would eventually have succeeded in establishing absolute supremacy over the other states in the region".


title: Empire

text: In the 1945 book, "The Precarious Balance", on four centuries of the European power struggle, Ludwig Dehio explained the durability of the European states system by its overseas expansion: "Overseas expansion and the system of states were born at the same time; the vitality that burst the bounds of the Western world also destroyed its unity." Edward Carr causally linked the end of the overseas outlet for imperial expansion and World Wars. In the nineteenth century, he wrote during the Second World War, imperialist wars were waged against "primitive" peoples. "It was silly for European countries to fight against one another when they could still ... maintain social cohesion by continuous expansion in Asia and Africa. Since 1900, however, this has no longer been possible: "the situation has radically changed". Now wars are between "imperial powers." Hans Morgenthau wrote that the very imperial expansion into relatively empty geographical spaces in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, in Africa, Eurasia, and western North America, deflected great power politics into the periphery of the earth, thereby reducing conflict. For example, the more attention Russia, France and the United States paid to expanding into far-flung territories in imperial fashion, the less attention they paid to one another, and the more peaceful, in a sense, the world was. But by the late nineteenth century, the consolidation of the great nation-states and empires of the West was consummated, and territorial gains could only be made at the expense of one another. John H. Herz outlined one "chief function" of the overseas expansion and the impact of its end:


title: Empire

text: The opportunity for any system to expand in size seems almost a necessary condition for it to remain balanced, at least over the long haul. Far from being impossible or exceedingly improbable, systemic hegemony is likely under two conditions: "when the boundaries of the international system remain stable and no new major powers emerge from outside the system." With the system becoming global, further expansion is precluded. The geopolitical condition of "global closure" will remain to the end of history. Since "the contemporary international system is global, we can rule out the possibility that geographic expansion of the system will contribute to the emergence of a new balance of power, as it did so many times in the past." As Quincy Wright had put it, "this process can no longer continue without interplanetary wars."


title: Empire

text: One of leading experts on world-system theory, Christopher Chase-Dunn, noted that the circumscription theory is applicable for the global system, since the global system is circumscribed. In fact, within less than a century of its circumscribed existence the global system overcame the centuries-old balance of power and reached the unipolarity. Given "constant spatial parameters" of the global system, its unipolar structure is neither historically unusual nor theoretically surprising.


title: Empire

text: Randall Schweller theorized that a "closed international system", such as the global became a century ago, would reach "entropy" in a kind of thermodynamic law. Once the state of entropy is reached, there is no going back. The initial conditions are lost forever. Stressing the curiosity of the fact, Schweller writes that since the moment the modern world became a closed system, the process has worked in only one direction: from many poles to two poles to one pole. Thus unipolarity might represent the entropy—stable and permanent loss of variation—in the global system.


title: Empire

text: Chalmers Johnson argues that the US globe-girding network of hundreds of military bases already represents a global empire in its initial form:


title: Empire

text: Kenneth Pomeranz and Harvard Historian Niall Ferguson share the above-cited views: "With American military bases in over 120 countries, we have hardly seen the end of empire.” This “vast archipelago of US military bases … far exceeds 19th-century British ambitions. Britain’s imperium consisted of specific, albeit numerous, colonies and clients; the American imperial vision is much more global…”


title: Empire

text: Another Harvard Historian Charles S. Maier opens his "Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors" with these words: "What a substratum for empire! Compared with which, the foundation of the Macedonian, the Roman and the British, sink into insignificance."


title: Empire

text: One of the most accepted distinctions between earlier empires and the American Empire is the latter's “global” or “planetary” scope. French former Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine wondered: "The situation is unprecedented: What previous empire subjugated the entire world...?" The quests for universal empire are old but the present quest outdoes the previous in "the notable respect of being the first to actually be global in its reach." Another Historian Paul Kennedy, who made his name in the 1980s with his prediction of the imminent US “imperial overstretch,” in 2002 acknowledged about the present world system:


title: Empire

text: Walter Russell Mead observes that the United States attempts to repeate “globally” what the ancient empires of Egypt, China and Rome had each accomplished on a regional basis. Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Leeds, Zygmunt Bauman, concludes that due to its planetary dimension, the new empire cannot be drawn on a map:


title: Empire

text: "Times Atlas of Empires" numbers 70 empires in the world history. Niall Ferguson lists numerous parallels between them and the United States. He concludes: “To those who would still insist on American exceptionalism, the historian of empires can only retort: as exceptional as all the other 69 empires.” Fareed Zakaria stressed one element not exceptional for the American Empire—the concept of exceptionalism. All dominant empires thought they were special.


title: Empire

text: In 1945, Historian Ludwig Dehio predicted global unification due to the circumscription of the global system, although he did not use this term. Being global, the system can neither expand nor be subject to external intrusion as the European states system had been for centuries:


title: Empire

text: Fifteen years later, Dehio confirmed his hypothesis: The European system owed its durability to its overseas outlet. “But how can a multiple grouping of world states conceivably be supported from outside in the framework of a finite globe?”


title: Empire

text: During the same time, Quincy Wright developed a similar concept. Balance-of-power politics has aimed less at preserving peace than at preserving the independence of states and preventing the development of world empire. In the course of history, the balance of power repeatedly reemerged, but on ever-wider scale. Eventually, the scale became global. Unless we proceed to “interplanetary wars,” this pattern can no longer continue. In spite of significant reversals, the “trend towards world unity” can “scarcely be denied.” World unity appears to be “the limit toward which the process of world history seems to tend.”


title: Empire

text: Five scholars—Hornell Hart, Raoul Naroll, Louis Morano, Rein Taagepera and the author of the circumscription theory Robert Carneiro—researched expanding imperial cycles.


title: Empire

text: The founder of the Paneuropean Union, Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, writing yet in 1943, drew a more specific and immediate future imperial project: After the War America is bound “to take over the command of the skies.” The danger of “the utter annihilation of all enemy towns and lands” can “only be prevented by the air superiority of a single power ... America’s air role is the only alternative to intercontinental wars.” Despite his outstanding anti-imperialism, Coudenhove-Kalergi detailed:


title: Empire

text: This period would be necessary transitory stage before World State is eventually established, though he did not specify how the last transformation is expected to occur. Coudenhove-Kalergi's follower in the teleological theory of World State, Toynbee, supposed the traditional way of universal conquest and emphasized that the world is ripe for conquest: "...Hitler's eventual failure to impose peace on the world by the force of arms was due, not to any flaw in his thesis that the world was ripe for conquest, but to an accidental combination of incidental errors in his measures..." But "in falling by so narrow a margin to win the prize of world-dominion for himself, Hitler had left the prize dangling within the reach of any successor capable of pursuing the same aims of world-conquest with a little more patience, prudence, and tact." With his "revolution of destruction," Hitler has performed the "yeoman service" for "some future architect of a "Pax Ecumenica"... For a post-Hitlerian empire-builder, Hitler's derelict legacy was a gift of the Gods."


title: Empire

text: The next “architect of a Pax Ecumenica,” known more commonly as Pax Americana, demonstrated “more patience, prudence, and tact.” Consequently, as President Dwight Eisenhower put it, the NATO allies became “almost psychopathic” whenever anyone talked about a US withdrawal, and the reception of his successor John F. Kennedy in Berlin was “almost hysterical,” as Chancellor Conrad Adenauer characterized it. John Ikenberry finds that the Europeans wanted a stronger, more formal and more imperial system than the United States was initially willing to provide. In the end the United States settled for this “form of empire—a Pax Americana with formal commitments to Europe.” According to a much debated thesis, the United States became “empire by invitation.” The period discussed in the thesis (1945–1952) ended precisely the year Toynbee theorized on "some future architect of a Pax Ecumenica.”


title: Empire

text: Dissociating America from Rome, Eisenhower gave a pessimistic forecast. In 1951, before he became President, he had written on West Europe: “We cannot be a modern Rome guarding the far frontiers with our legions if for no other reason than that these are not, politically, our frontiers. What we must do is to assist these [West European] peoples.” Two years later, he wrote: When it was decided to deploy US divisions to Europe, no one had “for an instant” thought that they would remain there for “several decades”—that the United States could “build a sort of Roman Wall with its own troops and so protect the world.”


title: Empire

text: Eisenhower assured Soviet first secretary Nikita Khrushchev on Berlin in 1959: “Clearly we did not contemplate 50 years in occupation there.” It lasted, remarks Marc Trachtenberg, from July 1945 to September 1994, 10 months short of 50 years. Notably, when the US troops eventually left, they left eastward. Confirming the theory of the “empire by invitation,” with their first opportunity East European states extended the “invitation.”


title: Empire

text: Chalmers Johnson regards the global military reach of the United States as empire in its “initial” form. Dimitri Simes finds that most of the world sees the United States as a "nascent" imperial power. Some scholars concerned how this empire would look in its ultimate form. The ultimate form of empire was described by Michael Doyle in his "Empires". It is empire in which its two main components—the ruling core and the ruled periphery—merged to form one integrated whole. At this stage the "empire" as defined ceases to exist and becomes "world state". Doyle examplifies the transformation on the case of the Roman Emperor Caracalla whose legislation in AD 212 extended the Roman citizenship to all inhabitants of the Mediterranean world.


title: Empire

text: Doyle's case of the Roman Empire had also been evoked by Susan Strange in her 1988 article, "The Future of the American Empire." Strange emphasized that the most persistent empires were those which best managed to integrate the ruling core and the peripheral allies. The article is partly a reply on the published a year earlier bestseller The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers which predicted imminent US "imperial overstretch." Strange found this outcome unlikely, stressing the fact that the peripheral allies have been successfully recruited into the American Empire.


title: Empire

text: Envisaging a world empire of either the United States or the Soviet Union (whoever is victorious in World War III), Bertrand Russell projected the Roman scenario too: "Like the Romans, they will, in the course of time, extend citizenship to the vanquished. There will then be a true world state, and it will be possible to forget that it will have owed its origin to conquest."


title: Empire

text: To the case of Caracalla, Toynbee added the Abbasid cosmopolitan reformation of 750 AD. Both "were good auguries for the prospect that, in a post-Modern chapter of Western history, a supranational commonwealth originally based on the hegemony of a paramount power over its satellites might eventually be put on the sounder basis of a constitutional partnership in which all the people of all the partner states would have their fare share in the conduct of common affairs.”


title: Sex and the City 2

text: Sex and the City 2 is a 2010 American romantic comedy film written, co-produced, and directed by Michael Patrick King. It is the sequel to the 2008 film "Sex and the City", based on the 1998–2004 television series. Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, and Cynthia Nixon reprised their roles as friends Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda, while Chris Noth co-stars as Carrie's husband Mr. Big. It features cameos from Liza Minnelli, Miley Cyrus, Tim Gunn, Ron White, Omid Djalili, Penélope Cruz, Norm Lewis, and Kelli O'Hara.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: "Sex and the City 2" was released theatrically on May 27, 2010, in the United States and the following day in the United Kingdom. It was panned by critics but was a commercial success grossing $294 million on a $95 million production budget.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda attend the wedding of their friends Stanford and Anthony. Three of the four women are now married themselves but Samantha, aged 52, is desperately trying to keep her libido alive as she enters menopause. The wedding is officiated by Liza Minnelli who also performs a musical number, and Carrie serves as Stanford's "best man". Back home, Miranda quits her job after her firm's misogynistic new managing partner disrespects her once too often. Charlotte's two children are a handful, mostly her two-year-old daughter Rose's extreme and constant crying, and she is worried that her husband Harry is attracted to their buxom Irish nanny, Erin. Carrie's marriage to Mr. Big has settled down, although they differ on how to spend their spare time. Carrie wants to go out often to dinner, parties and big events, whereas Big prefers to stay in and relax on the couch.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: For their anniversary, Carrie gives Big a vintage Rolex watch engraved with the message "Me and You, Just Us Two" while he, much to her dismay, shows her a new TV in their bedroom as his gift, which Big says they can use to watch old films together, something they did at the hotel at Anthony and Stanford's wedding and seemed to enjoy. She is disappointed with Big's gift, as she had hoped for something more personal to show he realizes they must maintain the spark in the marriage. However, Big starts to watch TV more often, making Carrie feel unappreciated. In response she stays at her old apartment for two days to write an article, after which Big acts the way he did while they were first dating and they both enjoy a romantic night out. He enjoys it so much he suggests to Carrie that they take two days off every week, he can go somewhere for those two days to relax, watch TV and lie on the couch, and the rest of the time he will have more energy to do what she wants to do. Carrie does not dismiss this, but is hurt by the suggestion and worries it means they will drift apart.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: Meanwhile, Samantha is to devise a PR campaign for an Arab sheikh's business. He flies her and her friends on an all-expenses-paid luxury vacation to Abu Dhabi. Carrie is happy she will have time to think about Big's suggestion. Charlotte is worried about leaving her husband alone with the nanny. But Miranda, unfettered by a job for the first time in her life, is especially excited. Upon entering Abu Dhabi, Samantha's hormone-enhancing drugs are confiscated under United Arab Emirates law, rendering her devoid of estrogen and hindering her libido. Charlotte tries to call Harry every few minutes; Miranda revels in the culture surrounding her; and Carrie befriends her manservant, Gaurau, who is an underpaid temporary worker from India. He warns Carrie of men with watches trying to take advantage of her.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: On a visit to a local souq (market), Carrie runs into her former lover, Aidan. He proposes dinner "à deux" at his hotel, and she accepts. The dinner is very enjoyable, with the two discussing old times. Aidan remarks on the ways Carrie is "not like other women". In a moment of remembered passion, they kiss. Carrie runs away in panic and returns to her hotel, where Miranda and Charlotte are having drinks together and discussing the difficulties of motherhood. When Carrie wonders whether she should tell Big about the kiss, as they have no secrets between them, Miranda reflects on when her husband Steve told her about his affair. Samantha counsels Carrie to wait before deciding anything. Carrie opts to call Big to tell him. Big is silent upon hearing the news, and after saying a few words, hangs up.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: The four women find their Western style and attitudes clash with Muslim customs. For example, while on a date with a handsome Danish architect, Samantha is arrested for public display of affection after fondling him at a restaurant, giving him an erection in public and making out with him on the beach. With the Sheikh's intervention, Samantha is released but is left with a permanent police record. To make matters worse, the Sheikh cancels the PR meeting and ceases paying for the remainder of the women's luxurious stay. They quickly pack their bags and leave, but must return to the souq to find Carrie's passport that she accidentally left there when she ran into Aidan. When Charlotte is conned into going into a building to buy fake goods, Carrie, Samantha and Miranda save her. However one of the men chase after them and rips Samantha's purse, causing condoms to fall on the ground. When Samantha's liberal dress and western attitude incites an outraged mob among the local men, the women are rescued by a group of local Emirati women who share their sense of style hidden underneath their customary black robes. The Emirati women help to disguise the four American women in robes and veils so they can escape and make it to the airport in time.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: When Carrie returns home, she finds the bedroom TV removed and Big gone. She passes an anxious day, at the end of which he returns. Big tells her that although he was torn, he realizes that what she needs is something to remind her at all times that she is married. He hands her a jewelry box, which reveals an engagement ring set with a black diamond. When Carrie asks him why a black diamond, he says she is not like anyone else, echoing Aidan's earlier comment, showing he does appreciate her and they have not lost their spark.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: Big and Carrie combine their interests; Charlotte's nanny, Erin, turns out to be a lesbian and no threat to her marriage; Miranda finds a new job at a more laid-back and diverse law firm where she is appreciated; and Samantha remains unchanged, and even meets for sex on the beach with the Danish architect, this time in the Hamptons.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: After months of speculation, the cast confirmed in February 2009 that a sequel was in the works. Filming began in August 2009.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: The sequel is noticeably different from its predecessor and includes more exotic locales than the original. King credits this to the experience he had promoting the original film in such locales. He was also inspired by the recession to write something bigger more akin to the extravagant adventures and escapist comedies of the 1930s. The location of Abu Dhabi was chosen because of its high fashion culture (although the authorities later revoked filming clearance) and also that it was a location relatively free from the recession.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: All four stars, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis, and Kim Cattrall, returned in the sequel; Chris Noth also signed on to reprise the role of Mr. Big. Evan Handler returned as Harry Goldenblatt, John Corbett as Aidan Shaw, David Eigenberg played Steve Brady once more, Willie Garson returned as Stanford Blatch, and Mario Cantone again played Anthony Marentino, making the original cast almost complete. In addition, Michael Patrick King wrote and directed again, and Patricia Field once again took charge of the costumes and wardrobe. Hats were once again created by Prudence Millinery for Vivienne Westwood.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: "Entertainment Weekly" confirmed that the budget for the film was US$95 million, exactly $30 million greater than the budget for the first film. Sarah Jessica Parker was paid US$15 million plus residuals for her dual role as a producer and starring as Carrie Bradshaw.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: Filming in New York City was postponed to the end of July as Emirati authorities refused clearance for filming in the United Arab Emirates. Consequently, the Abu Dhabi segment of the film was filmed in Morocco. All four leading actresses and other cast and crew were photographed filming scenes in Morocco in November 2009, where they had originally planned to shoot for 13 days, which had to be extended to almost six weeks. Filming took place at several locations including the seaside town of Sidi Kaouki.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: In September 2009, American singer and actress Liza Minnelli confirmed to several media outlets that she appeared in a cameo role. Singer and actress Bette Midler had been photographed on set, but does not appear in the film. Penélope Cruz appears briefly as Carmen, a banker. Miley Cyrus appeared in one scene where she appears at the premiere of Smith Jerrod's new film, wearing the same dress as Samantha. On October 17, Oceanup.com posted several pictures of Cyrus filming the scene.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: John Corbett was seen on location in Morocco, confirming his speculated involvement in the film as Aidan.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: Promotion began in December 2009, when the official teaser poster was released online, featuring Carrie in a white dress and gold sunglasses which reflect a Moroccan backdrop, and the tagline "Carrie On", a similar pun of the lead character's name as "Get Carried Away" from the first film. The same image and tagline was used for the launch of the official "Sex and the City 2" website, also launched in December 2009.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: The teaser trailer premiered online on December 22, 2009. In March 2010, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon attended ShoWest 2010 in Las Vegas to premiere the full length trailer and discuss the film (Kim Cattrall was in London performing on stage in the West End, and joined the rest of the cast for promotion when her stage run ended on May 3).


title: Sex and the City 2

text: The full theatrical trailer premiered on "Entertainment Tonight" and online on April 8, 2010, featuring the New York City-themed single "Empire State of Mind" by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys, as well as Australian singer Ricki-Lee Coulter's song "Can't Touch It".


title: Sex and the City 2

text: A full-scale promotional tour with all key cast members—including television, press conference and print—commenced in early May 2010, and continued throughout the film's release, encompassing many different countries and cities. The New York City premiere of the film was held on May 24, 2010.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, reports that 15% of 220 critics have given "Sex and the City 2" a positive review; the average rating is 3.90/10. By comparison the first film received a score of 49% based on 183 reviews and has an average score of 5.70/10. The critical consensus is: "Straining under a thin plot stretched to its limit by a bloated running time, "Sex and the City 2" adds an unfortunate coda to the long-running HBO series." Metacritic gave the film a score of 27/100 based on a normalized average of 39 reviews indicating generally unfavorable reviews.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: The film was criticized for its portrayal of the Middle East. Stephen Farber of "The Hollywood Reporter" called it "blatantly anti-Muslim" and Hadley Freeman of the UK broadsheet "The Guardian" described the trailers as "borderline racist". Andrew O'Hagan of the "London Evening Standard" wrote that the film "could be the most stupid, the most racist, the most polluting and women-hating film of the year". Roger Ebert gave the film one star out of four; he wrote that the characters are "flyweight bubbleheads" and the visual style "arthritic", and criticized the voiceover narration as redundant.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: Lindy West wrote a noted review of the film, saying that ""SATC2" takes everything that I hold dear as a woman and as a human—working hard, contributing to society, not being an entitled cunt like it's my job—and rapes it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car. It is 146 minutes long, which means that I entered the theater in the bloom of youth and emerged with a family of field mice living in my long, white mustache. This is an entirely inappropriate length for what is essentially a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls."


title: Sex and the City 2

text: Toronto academic Mitu Sengupta said the film exploited women's and gay rights and "pitifully" turned them into "badges of national honor" and "smug patriotic pride". She wrote: "What's really worrying about "Sex and the City 2" is not its Orientalism or crass materialism, but how easily this seemingly benign bubble-gum flick ends up fighting a very macho war of global one-upmanship on the bodies of women and gay men." British critic Mark Kermode declared it the worst film of 2010, saying he could think of nothing "more poisonous, more repugnant, more repulsive, more retrograde, more depressing than "Sex and the City 2"". "Time" named it one of the 10 worst movies based on TV shows.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: "Sex and the City 2" received seven nominations at the 31st Golden Raspberry Awards, including Worst Picture. It went on to win three awards, including a joint Worst Actress award for the four “gal pals” (Parker, Cattrall, Nixon, and Davis). David Eigenberg expressed interest in receiving the Worst Couple/Screen Ensemble Razzie, which was awarded to the entire cast. According to Razzies founder John J. B. Wilson, "[Eigenberg] said that he had never won an award of any kind and if this was what he won, he would accept it." Eigenberg then collaborated with Wilson to make a humorous acceptance video which was posted on the official YouTube channel of the Golden Raspberry Awards.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: In 2015, comedians Tim Batt and Guy Montgomery watched the film every week for a full year for the second season of their podcast, The Worst Idea of All Time.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: "Sex and the City 2" opened in 3,445 theaters on May 27, 2010, setting a record for one of the widest release for a R-rated romantic comedy film. Playing in 2,000 theaters, the film grossed $3 million from its midnight premiere. On its opening day, the film topped the box office grossing $14.2 million, for a projected $60 million for a four-day opening weekend, plus $75 million for a five-day Memorial day weekend. But it debuted in second place behind "Shrek Forever After" with $31 million, and its total to $45.2 million, for its four-day opening weekend, plus $51 million on its five-day opening weekend (Memorial Day).


title: Sex and the City 2

text: Internationally, the sequel topped the charts in Germany for five weeks, the United Kingdom for three weeks, Australia for two weeks and exceeding the original in Japan and Greece. "Sex and the City 2" sold more tickets than the first part in many other markets. As of August 19, 2010, the film's total US gross stands at $95.3 million. As of August 1, 2010, internationally it has grossed $199.3 million—giving it a worldwide total of $294.7 million. Although 27% lower than the first film, it was 2010's highest-grossing romantic comedy.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: "Sex and the City 2" was released on DVD, Blu-ray, and iTunes on October 26, 2010, in the US where it entered the chart at number one selling almost one million copies in its first week. It was released on DVD and Blu-ray in the UK on November 29, 2010, also entering the sales chart at number one.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: Sex and the City 2: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack was released on May 25, 2010, by WaterTower Music.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: The score was recorded and mixed by Dennis S. Sands and Steve Kempster and performed by a large ensemble of the Hollywood Studio Symphony conducted by Stephen Coleman who orchestrated Aaron Zigman's score. Patrick Kirst also orchestrated.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: In December 2016, "Radar Online" reported that a script for the third film had been approved. However, on September 28, 2017, Sarah Jessica Parker confirmed that the third film was not going to happen. She said, "We had this beautiful, funny, heartbreaking,


title: Sex and the City 2

text: joyful, very relatable script and story. It's not just disappointing that we don't get to tell the story and have that experience, but more so for that audience that has been so vocal in wanting another movie." It was reported in 2018 that Kim Cattrall did not want to appear in the film when she learned of the storylines involving killing off Mr. Big and Samantha receiving sexting and nude pictures from Miranda's 14-year-old son, Brady. Cattrall later clarified in 2019 that she opted not to appear in a third film, explaining she "went past the finish line" portraying the character of Samantha because of her love for the franchise.


title: Sex and the City 2

text: The third movie plot was later readapted as the 2021 television series "And Just Like That...", with Cattrall not returning, as agreed. The series premiered on HBO Max on December 9, 2021. Originally billed as a miniseries, it was renewed for a second season in March 2022.


title: Stalinism

text: Stalinism is the means of governing and Marxist-Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union from 1927 to 1953 by Joseph Stalin. It included the creation of a one-party totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory of socialism in one country, collectivization of agriculture, intensification of class conflict, a cult of personality, and subordination of the interests of foreign communist parties to those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, deemed by Stalinism to be the leading vanguard party of communist revolution at the time. After Stalin's death and the Khrushchev thaw, de-Stalinization began in the 1950s and 1960s, which caused the influence of Stalin’s ideology begin to wane in the USSR. The second wave of de-Stalinization started during Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Glasnost.


title: Stalinism

text: Stalin's regime forcibly purged society of what it saw as threats to itself and its brand of communism (so-called "enemies of the people"), which included political dissidents, non-Soviet nationalists, the bourgeoisie, better-off peasants ("kulaks"), and those of the working class who demonstrated "counter-revolutionary" sympathies. This resulted in mass repression of such people and their families, including mass arrests, show trials, executions, and imprisonment in forced labour and concentration camps known as gulags. The most notorious examples were the Great Purge and the Dekulakization campaign. Stalinism was also marked by militant atheism, mass anti-religious persecution, and ethnic cleansing through forced deportations. Some historians, such as Robert Service, have blamed Stalinist policies, particularly the collectivization policies, for causing famines such as the Holodomor. Other historians and scholars disagree on the role of Stalinism.


title: Stalinism

text: Officially designed to accelerate development towards communism, the need for industrialization in the Soviet Union was emphasized because the Soviet Union had previously fallen behind economically compared to Western countries and that socialist society needed industry to face the challenges posed by internal and external enemies of communism. Rapid industrialization was accompanied by mass collectivization of agriculture and rapid urbanization, which converted many small villages into industrial cities. To accelerate the development of industrialization, Stalin imported materials, ideas, expertise, and workers from western Europe and the United States, pragmatically setting up joint-venture contracts with major American private enterprises such as the Ford Motor Company, which, under state supervision, assisted in developing the basis of the industry of the Soviet economy from the late 1920s to the 1930s. After the American private enterprises had completed their tasks, Soviet state enterprises took over.


title: Stalinism

text: Stalinism is used to describe the period during which Joseph Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union while serving as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 to his death on 5 March 1953.


title: Stalinism

text: The term "Stalinism" came into prominence during the mid-1930s when Lazar Kaganovich, a Soviet politician and associate of Stalin, reportedly declared: "Let's replace Long Live Leninism with Long Live Stalinism!" Stalin dismissed this as excessive and contributing to a cult of personality which he thought might be used against him at a later date by the same people who praised him excessively, one of those being Khrushchev - a prominent user of term Stalinism in Stalin's life who would later be responsible for de-Stalinization and the beginning of the Revisionist period in the USSR.


title: Stalinism

text: While some historians view Stalinism as a reflection of the ideologies of Leninism and Marxism, some argue that it stands separate from the socialist ideals it stemmed from. After a political struggle that culminated in the defeat of the Bukharinists (the "Party's Right Tendency"), Stalinism was free to shape policy without opposition, ushering forth an era of harsh authoritarianism that worked toward rapid industrialization regardless of the cost.


title: Stalinism

text: From 1917 to 1924, though often appearing united, Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky had discernible ideological differences. In his dispute with Trotsky, Stalin de-emphasized the role of workers in advanced capitalist countries (e.g. he considered the American working-class "bourgeoisified" labour aristocracy). Stalin also polemicized against Trotsky on the role of peasants as in China, whereas Trotsky's position favoured urban insurrection over peasant-based guerrilla warfare.


title: Stalinism

text: All other October Revolution 1917 Bolshevik leaders regarded their revolution more or less just as the beginning, with Russia as the springboard on the road towards the World Wide Revolution. Stalin would eventually introduce the idea of socialism in one country by the autumn of 1924, a theory standing in sharp contrast to Trotsky's permanent revolution and all earlier socialistic theses. However, the revolution did not spread outside Russia as Lenin had assumed it soon would. The revolution had not succeeded even within other former territories of the Russian Empire―such as Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. On the contrary, these countries had returned to capitalist bourgeois rule.


title: Stalinism

text: Despite this, by the autumn of 1924, Stalin's notion of socialism in Soviet Russia was initially considered next to blasphemy in the ears of other Politburo members, including Zinoviev and Kamenev to the intellectual left; Rykov, Bukharin, and Tomsky to the pragmatic right; and the powerful Trotsky, who belonged to no side but his own. None would even consider Stalin's concept a potential addition to communist ideology. Stalin's socialism in one country doctrine could not be imposed until he, himself, had become close to being the autocratic ruler of the Soviet Union around 1929. Bukharin and the Right Opposition expressed their support for imposing Stalin's ideas, as Trotsky had been exiled, whereas Zinoviev and Kamenev had been thrown out of the party.


title: Stalinism

text: Traditional communist thought holds that the state will gradually "wither away" as the implementation of socialism reduces class distinction. However, Stalin argued that the proletarian state (as opposed to the bourgeois state) must become stronger before it can wither away. In Stalin's view, counter-revolutionary elements will attempt to derail the transition to full communism, and the state must be powerful enough to defeat them. For this reason, communist regimes influenced by Stalin have been widely described as totalitarian. Other leftists, such as anarcho-communists, have criticized the party-state of the Stalin-era Soviet Union, accusing it of being bureaucratic and calling it a reformist social democracy rather than a form of revolutionary communism.


title: Stalinism

text: Sheng Shicai, a Chinese warlord with Communist leanings, invited Soviet intervention and allowed Stalinist rule to be extended to the Xinjiang province in the 1930s. In 1937, Sheng conducted a purge similar to the Great Purge, imprisoning, torturing, and killing about 100,000 people, many of whom were Uyghurs.


title: Stalinism

text: Stalin blamed the kulaks as the inciters of reactionary violence against the people during the implementation of agricultural collectivization. In response, the state, under Stalin's leadership, initiated a violent campaign against the kulaks. This kind of campaign would later be known as "classicide", though several international legislatures have passed resolutions declaring the campaign a genocide. Some historians dispute that these social-class actions constitute genocide.


title: Stalinism

text: As head of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Stalin consolidated near-absolute power in the 1930s with a Great Purge of the party that claimed to expel "opportunists" and "counter-revolutionary infiltrators." Those targeted by the purge were often expelled from the party, though more severe measures ranged from banishment to the Gulag labour camps to execution after trials held by NKVD troikas.


title: Stalinism

text: In the 1930s, Stalin became increasingly worried about the growing popularity of the Leningrad party head Sergei Kirov. At the 1934 Party Congress, where the vote for the new Central Committee was held, Kirov received only three negative votes (the fewest of any candidate), while Stalin received at least over a hundred negative votes. After the assassination of Kirov, which Stalin may have orchestrated, Stalin invented a detailed scheme to implicate opposition leaders in the murder, including Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev. From thereon, the investigations and trials expanded. Stalin passed a new law on "terrorist organizations and terrorist acts" that were to be investigated for no more than ten days, with no prosecution, defence attorneys, or appeals, followed by a sentence to be executed "quickly."


title: Stalinism

text: After that, several trials, known as the Moscow Trials, were held, but the procedures were replicated throughout the country. Article 58 of the legal code, which listed prohibited anti-Soviet activities as a counter-revolutionary crime, was applied most broadly. Many alleged anti-Soviet pretexts were used to brand individuals as "enemies of the people", starting the cycle of public persecution, often proceeding to interrogation, torture, and deportation, if not death. The Russian word "troika" thereby gained a new meaning: a quick, simplified trial by a committee of three subordinated to the NKVD troika—with sentencing carried out within 24 hours. Stalin's hand-picked executioner Vasili Blokhin was entrusted with carrying out some of the high-profile executions in this period.


title: Stalinism

text: Many military leaders were convicted of treason, and a large-scale purge of Red Army officers followed. The repression of many formerly high-ranking revolutionaries and party members led Leon Trotsky to claim that a "river of blood" separated Stalin's regime from that of Lenin. In August 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico, where he had lived in exile since January 1937—this eliminated the last of Stalin's opponents among the former Party leadership. Except for Vladimir Milyutin (who died in prison in 1937) and Stalin himself, all of the members of Lenin's original cabinet who had not succumbed to death from natural causes before the purge were executed.


title: Stalinism

text: Mass operations of the NKVD also targeted "national contingents" (foreign ethnicities) such as Poles, ethnic Germans, and Koreans. A total of 350,000 (144,000 of them Poles) were arrested and 247,157 (110,000 Poles) were executed. Many Americans who had emigrated to the Soviet Union during the worst of the Great Depression were executed, while others were sent to prison camps or gulags. Concurrent with the purges, efforts were made to rewrite the history in Soviet textbooks and other propaganda materials. Notable people executed by NKVD were removed from the texts and photographs as though they never existed. Gradually, the history of the revolution was transformed into a story about just two key characters, i.e. Lenin and Stalin.


title: Stalinism

text: In light of revelations from Soviet archives, historians now estimate that nearly 700,000 people (353,074 in 1937 and 328,612 in 1938) were executed in the course of the terror, with the great mass of victims merely "ordinary" Soviet citizens: workers, peasants, homemakers, teachers, priests, musicians, soldiers, pensioners, ballerinas, and beggars. Many of the executed were interred in mass graves, with some significant killing and burial sites being Bykivnia, Kurapaty, and Butovo.


title: Stalinism

text: Some Western experts believe the evidence released from the Soviet archives is understated, incomplete or unreliable. Conversely, historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft, who spent a good portion of his academic career researching the archives, contends that, prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of the archives for historical research, "our understanding of the scale and the nature of Soviet repression has been extremely poor" and that some specialists who wish to maintain earlier high estimates of the Stalinist death toll are "finding it difficult to adapt to the new circumstances when the archives are open and when there are plenty of irrefutable data" and instead "hang on to their old Sovietological methods with round-about calculations based on odd statements from emigres and other informants who are supposed to have superior knowledge."


title: Stalinism

text: Stalin personally signed 357 proscription lists in 1937 and 1938 that condemned to execute some 40,000 people, about 90% of whom are confirmed to have been shot. While reviewing one such list, he reportedly muttered to no one in particular: "Who's going to remember all this riff-raff in ten or twenty years time? No one. Who remembers the names now of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one." In addition, Stalin dispatched a contingent of NKVD operatives to Mongolia, established a Mongolian version of the NKVD "troika", and unleashed a bloody purge in which tens of thousands were executed as "Japanese spies", as Mongolian ruler Khorloogiin Choibalsan closely followed Stalin's lead.


title: Stalinism

text: During the 1930s and 1940s, the Soviet leadership sent NKVD squads into other countries to murder defectors and opponents of the Soviet regime. Victims of such plots included Yevhen Konovalets, Ignace Poretsky, Rudolf Klement, Alexander Kutepov, Evgeny Miller, Leon Trotsky, and the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) leadership in Catalonia (e.g. Andréu Nin Pérez).


title: Stalinism

text: Shortly before, during, and immediately after World War II, Stalin conducted a broad-scale series of deportations that profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union. Separatism, resistance to Soviet rule, and collaboration with the invading Germans were the official reasons for the deportations. Individual circumstances of those spending time in German-occupied territories were not examined. After the brief Nazi occupation of the Caucasus, the entire population of five of the small highland peoples and the Crimean Tatars—more than a million people in total—were deported without notice or any opportunity to take their possessions.


title: Stalinism

text: As a result of Stalin's lack of trust in the loyalty of particular ethnicities, ethnic groups such as the Soviet Koreans, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, and many Poles, were forcibly moved out of strategic areas and relocated to places in the central Soviet Union, especially Kazakhstan in Soviet Central Asia. By some estimates, hundreds of thousands of deportees may have died en route. It is estimated that between 1941 and 1949, nearly 3.3 million were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. By some estimates, up to 43% of the resettled population died of diseases and malnutrition.


title: Stalinism

text: According to official Soviet estimates, more than 14 million people passed through the gulags from 1929 to 1953, with a further 7 to 8 million being deported and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union (including entire nationalities in several cases). The emergent scholarly consensus is that from 1930 to 1953, around 1.5 to 1.7 million perished in the gulag system.


title: Stalinism

text: In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev condemned the deportations as a violation of Leninism and reversed most of them, although it was not until 1991 that the Tatars, Meskhetians, and Volga Germans were allowed to return "en masse" to their homelands. The deportations had a profound effect on the people of the Soviet Union. The memory of the deportations has played a significant part in the separatist movements in the Baltic states, Tatarstan, and Chechnya, even today.


title: Stalinism

text: At the start of the 1930s, Stalin launched a wave of radical economic policies that completely overhauled the industrial and agricultural face of the Soviet Union. This became known as the Great Turn as Russia turned away from the mixed-economic type New Economic Policy (NEP) and adopted a planned economy. The NEP was implemented by Lenin to ensure the survival of the socialist state following seven years of war (World War I, 1914–1917, and the subsequent Civil War, 1917–1921) and rebuilt Soviet production to its 1913 levels. However, Russia still lagged far behind the West, and the NEP was felt by Stalin and the majority of the Communist Party, not only to be compromising communist ideals but also not delivering satisfactory economic performance as well as not creating the envisaged socialist society. It was felt necessary to increase the pace of industrialization in order to catch up with the West.


title: Stalinism

text: Fredric Jameson has said that "Stalinism was…a success and fulfilled its historic mission, socially as well as economically" given that it "modernized the Soviet Union, transforming a peasant society into an industrial state with a literate population and a remarkable scientific superstructure." Robert Conquest disputed such a conclusion, noting that "Russia had already been fourth to fifth among industrial economies before World War I" and that Russian industrial advances could have been achieved without collectivization, famine, or terror. According to Conquest, the industrial successes were far less than claimed, and the Soviet-style industrialization was "an anti-innovative dead-end." Stephen Kotkin said those who argue collectivization was necessary are "dead wrong", arguing that such "only seemed necessary within the straitjacket of Communist ideology and its repudiation of capitalism. And economically, collectivization failed to deliver." Kotkin further claimed that it decreased harvests instead of increasing them as peasants tended to resist heavy taxes by producing less goods and only care about their own subsistence.


title: Stalinism

text: According to several Western historians, Stalinist agricultural policies were a key factor in causing the Soviet famine of 1932–1933, which the Ukrainian government now calls the Holodomor, recognizing it as an act of genocide. Some scholars dispute the intentionality of the famine.


title: Stalinism

text: Stalin considered the political and economic system under his rule to be Marxism–Leninism, which he considered the only legitimate successor of Marxism and Leninism. The historiography of Stalin is diverse, with many different aspects of continuity and discontinuity between the regimes Stalin and Lenin proposed. Some historians, such as Richard Pipes, consider Stalinism as the natural consequence of Leninism, that Stalin "faithfully implemented Lenin's domestic and foreign policy programs." Robert Service notes that "institutionally and ideologically Lenin laid the foundations for a Stalin [...] but the passage from Leninism to the worse terrors of Stalinism was not smooth and inevitable." Likewise, historian and Stalin biographer Edvard Radzinsky believes that Stalin was a genuine follower of Lenin, exactly as he claimed himself. Another Stalin biographer, Stephen Kotkin, wrote that "his violence was not the product of his subconscious but of the Bolshevik engagement with Marxist–Leninist ideology."


title: Stalinism

text: Dmitri Volkogonov, who wrote biographies of both Lenin and Stalin, explained that during the 1960s through 1980s, an official patriotic Soviet de-Stalinized view of the Lenin–Stalin relationship (i.e. during the Khrushchev Thaw and later) was that the overly-autocratic Stalin had distorted the Leninism of the wise "dedushka" Lenin. However, Volkogonov also lamented that this view eventually dissolved for those like him who had the scales fall from their eyes immediately before and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. After researching the biographies in the Soviet archives, he came to the same conclusion as Radzinsky and Kotkin, i.e. that Lenin had built a culture of violent autocratic totalitarianism, of which Stalinism was a logical extension. He lamented that, while Stalin had long since fallen in the estimation of many Soviet minds (the many who agreed with de-Stalinization), "Lenin was the last bastion" in Volkogonov's mind to fall, and the fall was the most painful, given the secular apotheosis of Lenin that all Soviet children grew up with.


title: Stalinism

text: Proponents of continuity cite a variety of contributory factors, in that it was Lenin, rather than Stalin, whose civil war measures introduced the Red Terror with its hostage-taking and internment camps; that it was Lenin who developed the infamous Article 58 and who established the autocratic system within the Communist Party. They also note that Lenin put a ban on factions within the Russian Communist Party and introduced the one-party state in 1921—a move that enabled Stalin to get rid of his rivals easily after Lenin's death and cite Felix Dzerzhinsky, who, during the Bolshevik struggle against opponents in the Russian Civil War, exclaimed: "We stand for organized terror—this should be frankly stated."


title: Stalinism

text: Opponents of this view include revisionist historians and many post-Cold War and otherwise dissident Soviet historians, including Roy Medvedev, who argues that although "one could list the various measures carried out by Stalin that were actually a continuation of anti-democratic trends and measures implemented under Lenin…in so many ways, Stalin acted, not in line with Lenin's clear instructions, but in defiance of them." In doing so, some historians have tried to distance Stalinism from Leninism to undermine the totalitarian view that the negative facets of Stalin were inherent in communism from the start. Critics include anti-Stalinist communists such as Leon Trotsky, who pointed out that Lenin attempted to persuade the Communist Party to remove Stalin from his post as its General Secretary. Lenin's Testament, the document which contained this order, was suppressed after Lenin's death. In his biography of Trotsky, British historian Isaac Deutscher says that, on being faced with the evidence, "only the blind and the deaf could be unaware of the contrast between Stalinism and Leninism."


title: Stalinism

text: A similar analysis is present in more recent works such as those of Graeme Gill, who argues that "[Stalinism was] not a natural flow-on of earlier developments; [it formed a] sharp break resulting from conscious decisions by leading political actors." However, Gill notes that "difficulties with the use of the term reflect problems with the concept of Stalinism itself. The major difficulty is a lack of agreement about what should constitute Stalinism." Revisionist historians such as Sheila Fitzpatrick have criticized the focus on the upper levels of society and the use of Cold War concepts such as totalitarianism which have obscured the reality of the system.


title: Stalinism

text: Pierre du Bois argues that the cult was elaborately constructed to legitimize his rule. Many deliberate distortions and falsehoods were used. The Kremlin refused access to archival records that might reveal the truth, and critical documents were destroyed. Photographs were altered, and documents were invented. People who knew Stalin were forced to provide "official" accounts to meet the ideological demands of the cult, especially as Stalin presented it in 1938 in "Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)", which became the official history. Historian David L. Hoffmann sums up the consensus of scholars: "The Stalin cult was a central element of Stalinism, and as such, it was one of the most salient features of Soviet rule. [...] Many scholars of Stalinism cite the cult as integral to Stalin's power or as evidence of Stalin's megalomania."


title: Stalinism

text: However, after Stalin died in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev repudiated his policies and condemned Stalin's cult of personality in his Secret Speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 and instituting de-Stalinization and relative liberalization (within the same political framework). Consequently, some of the world's communist parties who previously adhered to Stalinism abandoned it and, to a greater or lesser degree, adopted the positions of Khrushchev. Others, such as the Chinese Communist Party, chose to split from the Soviet Union, resulting in the Sino-Soviet split. The ousting of Khrushchev in 1964 by his former party-state allies has been described as a Stalinist restoration by some, epitomized by the Brezhnev Doctrine and the apparatchik/nomenklatura "stability of cadres", lasting until the period of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s and the fall of the Soviet Union.