Imperial Visions
It’s not our kind of story. We like to see underdogs win. But there is no justice in history. Most past cultures have sooner or later fallen prey to the armies of some ruthless empire, which have consigned them to oblivion. Empires, too, ultimately fall, but they tend to leave behind rich and enduring legacies. Almost all people in the twenty-first century are the offspring of one empire or another.
V-T To consign something or someone to a place where they will be forgotten about, or to an unpleasant situation or place, means to put them there. 弃置 (某物于某处或某境地); 发落 (某人于某处或某境地)[正式]
例：For decades, many of Malevich's works were consigned to the basements of Soviet museums. 几十年来，马列维奇的许多作品都被弃置在苏联的博物馆的地下室里。
例：Shortfalls in aid will consign the MDG project to failure at enormous human cost.
例：But here in this south-eastern corner of Korea, few people are ready to consign it to the past.
例：The president's media adviser, John Nagenda, has said he will consign Mr Gersony's report to the rubbish bin.
Typically, they have been slowly digested by the conquering empire, until their distinct cultures fizzled out.
1. [口语](爆炸物)发出微弱的嘶嘶声后熄灭；未能爆炸
2. [口语]终成泡影；毫无结果(尤指开始很顺利)
例：The bomb fizzled out,and no one was hurt. 炸弹嘶嘶冒烟后熄灭，无人受伤。
例：The plan fizzled out for lack of money. 计划由于缺钱最终告吹。
例：Most economists in Japan expect the effects of the measures to fizzle out by late summer.
例：Just as the discussion seemed about to fizzle out, two new contributions have arrived.
例：The family moved south to the safety of Crimea, believing that the revolution would soon fizzle out.
How was it possible to squeeze such a human potpourri into the territory of a modest modern state?
N-SING A potpourri of things is a collection of various items that were not originally intended to form a group. 混杂物; 杂烩
例：...a potpourri of architectural styles from all over the world. ...一种世界各地建筑风格的荟萃。
例：On Thursday , the Commons sits at 9.30am for a potpourri of question times.
例：In addition to its authorization of the foregoing potpourri of preferential treatments, subsidies and outright grants, H.
例：It is only natural that a great bull market would spring from such a devastating potpourri of psychological trauma.
About 10 million Zulus in South Africa hark back to the Zulu age of glory in the nineteenth century, even though most of them descend from tribes who foughtagainstthe Zulu Empire, and were incorporated into it only through bloody military campaigns.
PHRASAL VERBIf you say that one thing harks back to another thing in the past, you mean it is similar to it or takes it as a model. 与…类似; 以…为模型；令人想起；重提旧事；hark back to the point 循迹
例：...pitched roofs, which hark back to the Victorian era. …与维多利亚时代风格类似的尖屋顶。
PP, meanwhile, likes to hark back to tax cuts when it ran Spain in the late 1990s.
例：These reports hark back to an era that never was, when the NYSE policed its own house.
例：Inside the highly secure Cookson factory in Birmingham's jewellery quarter many machines hark back to the firm's long heritage.
The most famous example of Cyrus’ innovative efforts to gain the approbation of a nation living under the thumb of his empire was his command that the Jewish exiles in Babylonia be allowed to return to their Judaean homeland and rebuild their temple. 活在...的控制之下
例：On this anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, those who are either ignoring politics or actively supporting the dramatic growth of government need to ask themselves: Do I want to live my life under the thumb of a new master, or do I want to be free?
例：But in the teashops of Yangon, Myanmar's biggest city, the talk two decades on is not of sanctions but of the need for dialogue, of frustration with the main opposition party, the National League for Democracy, and even with its detained leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and of the widening gap between those who oppose the junta from abroad and those who live under its thumb.
The appearance of essentially global problems, such as melting ice caps, nibbles away at whatever legitimacy remains to the independent nation states.
一点一点地咬掉；一点一点地拿走，蚕食
例：His glory was being nibbled away by years.他头上的荣光随着岁月的流逝慢慢地失去了光泽。
例：He nibbled away the apple peel, then ate the flesh.他先慢慢地咬去苹果皮，然后再吃果肉。
例：But the chief executive of Oodle, a classifieds search engine, is trying to nibble away at the problem.
例：Although the regime remains firmly in control, new newspapers were being allowed to nibble away at sensitive subjects, with one carrying pages of editorials exposing bureaucratic misconduct and corruption.
例：The conflict is now supposed to be about discrete issues such as boundaries, arms control and security arrangements, rights in Jerusalem and the like, issues that negotiators can nibble away at until the whole conflict is resolved.
汉英积累
输得起 sustain a blow and remain standing
忍无可忍 Roman patience snapped.
经过修饰润色，符合... is tailered to the tastes of; mould it in accordance with ...
如果说帝国就是样样不行，所有相关的事物都该抛弃，那世界上大多数的文化便将不复存在。 To color all empires black and to disavow all imperial legacies is to reject most of human culture.
生活在脏乱不堪的环境中。He is living in squalor.
这些好处有些显而易见，有些却可能是在挂羊头卖狗肉。 The benefits were sometimes salient, and sometimes questionable.
在这之后，民族隔阂彻底消失了。 After that, all the ethnic dams were let down.
A和B间的爱恨情仇 the love-hate relationship between A and B
抚摸丝绸 run their hands over fine Chinese silks
就在前面，你可能会看见一位饱经风霜、来自亚洲草原的土耳其组长，手柱拐杖，步履蹒跚，若有所思地摸着胡子。Just ahead you might have seen a weather-beaten Turkish patriarch from the Asian steppes, hobbling on a stick and stroking his beard thoughtfully.
常识
For example, when the Western Roman Empire finally fell to invading Germanic tribes in 476AD, the Numantians, Arverni, Helvetians, Samnites, Lusitanians, Umbrians, Etruscans and hundreds of other forgotten peoples whom the Romans conquered centuries earlier did not emerge from the empires' eviscerated carcass like Jonah from the belly of the great fish.
Jonah(also Jonas) 1. Na Hebrew prophet who, having been thrown overboard from a ship in which he was fleeing from God, was swallowed by a great fish and vomited onto dry land 约拿; 一个希伯来先知，他乘船逃离上帝，被抛入大海后遭大鱼吞吃并被鱼吐到一块干地上。
Emancipation Proclamation 奴隶解放宣言
The Emancipation Proclamation was a presidential proclamation and executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863. It purported to change the federal legal status of more than 3 million enslaved people in the designated areas of the South from "slave" to "free", although its immediate effect was less. It had the practical effect that as soon as a slave escaped the control of the Confederate government, by running away or through advances of federal troops, the slave became legally free. Eventually it reached and liberated all of the designated slaves. It was issued as a war measure during the American Civil War, directed to all of the areas in rebellion and all segments of the executive branch (including the Army and Navy) of the United States.
Issued after the Union victory at Antietam, the Emancipation Proclamation had both moral and strategic implications for the ongoing Civil War.
When the American Civil War (1861-65) began, President Abraham Lincoln carefully framed the conflict as concerning the preservation of the Union rather than the abolition of slavery. Although he personally found the practice of slavery abhorrent, he knew that neither Northerners nor the residents of the border slave states would support abolition as a war aim. But by mid-1862, as thousands of slaves fled to join the invading Northern armies, Lincoln was convinced that abolition had become a sound military strategy, as well as the morally correct path. On September 22, soon after the Union victory at Antietam, he issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that as of January 1, 1863, all slaves in the rebellious states “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” While the Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave, it was an important turning point in the war, transforming the fight to preserve the nation into a battle for human freedom.
LINCOLN’S POSITION ON SLAVERY
Slavery was “an unqualified evil to the negro, the white man, and the State,” said Abraham Lincoln in the 1850s. Yet in his first inaugural address, Lincoln declared that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists.” He reiterated this pledge in his first message to Congress on July 4, 1861, when the Civil War was three months old.
Did You Know?
When it took effect in January 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation freed 3.1 million of the nation's 4 million slaves.
What explains this apparent inconsistency in Lincoln’s statements? And how did he get from his pledge not to interfere with slavery to a decision a year later to issue an emancipation proclamation? The answers lie in the Constitution and in the course of the Civil War. As an individual, Lincoln hated slavery. As a Republican, he wished to exclude it from the territories as the first step to putting the institution “in the course of ultimate extinction.” But as president of the United States, Lincoln was bound by a Constitution that protected slavery in any state where citizens wanted it. As commander in chief of the armed forces in the Civil War, Lincoln also worried about the support of the four border slave states and the Northern Democrats. These groups probably would have turned against the war for the Union if the Republicans had made a move against slavery in 1861.
CONTRABANDS AND THE CONFISCATION ACTS
But the president’s role as commander in chief cut two ways. If it restrained him from alienating proslavery Unionists, it also empowered him to seize enemy property used to wage war against the United States. Slaves were the most conspicuous and valuable such property. They raised food and fiber for the Southern war effort, worked in munitions factories, and served as teamsters and laborers in the army. Gen. Benjamin Butler, commander of Union forces occupying a foothold in Virginia at Fortress Monroe on the mouth of the James River, provided a legal rationale for the seizure of slave property. When three slaves who had worked on rebel fortifications escaped to Butler’s lines in May 1861, he declared them contraband of war and refused to return them to their Confederate owner. Here was an opening wedge for emancipation, and hundreds of such “contrabands” voted with their feet for freedom by escaping to Union lines in subsequent months. By 1862 the trickle had become a flood. Some Union commanders gave them shelter and protection; others returned them to masters who could prove their loyalty to the United States. In August 1861 Congress passed a confiscation act that conferred “contraband” status on all slaves who had been used in direct support of the Confederate war effort. In March 1862 Congress enacted a new article of war forbidding army officers to return fugitive slaves to their masters. Before the war was a year old, therefore, the slaves themselves had taken the initiative that forced Northern authorities to move toward making it a war for freedom.
THE MOVE TOWARDS EMANCIPATION
Most Republicans had become convinced by 1862 that the war against a slaveholders’ rebellion must become a war against slavery itself, and they put increasing pressure on Lincoln to proclaim an emancipation policy. This would have comported with Lincoln’s personal convictions, but as president he felt compelled to balance these convictions against the danger of alienating half of the Union constituency. By the summer of 1862, however, it was clear that he risked alienating the Republican half of his constituency if he did not act against slavery.
Moreover, the war was going badly for the Union. After a string of military victories in the early months of 1862, Northern armies suffered demoralizing reverses in July and August. The argument that emancipation was a military necessity became increasingly persuasive. It would weaken the Confederacy and correspondingly strengthen the Union by siphoning off part of the Southern labor force and adding this manpower to the Northern side. In July 1862 Congress enacted two laws based on this premise: a second confiscation act that freed slaves of persons who had engaged in rebellion against the United States, and a militia act that empowered the president to use freed slaves in the army in any capacity he saw fit—even as soldiers.
By this time Lincoln had decided on an even more dramatic measure: a proclamation issued as commander in chief freeing all slaves in states waging war against the Union. As he told a member of his cabinet, emancipation had become “a military necessity…. We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued…. The Administration must set an example, and strike at the heart of the rebellion.” The cabinet agreed, but Secretary of State William H. Seward persuaded Lincoln to withhold the proclamation until a major Union military victory could give it added force. Lincoln used the delay to help prepare conservative opinion for what was coming. In a letter to journalist Horace Greeley, published in theNew YorkTribune on August 22, 1862, the president reiterated that his “paramount object in the struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery.” If he could accomplish this objective by freeing all, some, or none of the slaves, that was what he would do. Lincoln had already decided to free some and was in effect forewarning potential opponents of the Emancipation Proclamation that they must accept it as a necessary measure to save the Union. In a publicized meeting with black residents of Washington, also in 1862, Lincoln urged them to consider emigrating abroad to escape the prejudice they encountered and to help persuade conservatives that the much-feared racial consequences of emancipation might be thereby mitigated.
LINCOLN ISSUES THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION
One month later, after the qualified Union victory in the Battle of Antietam, Lincoln issued a preliminary proclamation warning that in all states still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, he would declare their slaves “then, thenceforward, and forever free.” January 1 came, and with it the final proclamation, which committed the government and armed forces of the United States to liberate the slaves in rebel states “as an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity.” The proclamation exempted the border slave states and all or parts of three Confederate states controlled by the Union army on the grounds that these areas were not in rebellion against the United States. Lincoln had tried earlier to persuade the border states to accept gradual emancipation, with compensation to slave owners from the federal government, but they had refused. The proclamation also authorized the recruitment of freed slaves and free blacks as Union soldiers; during the next 2 1/2 years 180,000 of them fought in the Union army and 10,000 in the navy, making a vital contribution to Union victory as well as their own freedom. Emancipation would vastly increase the stakes of the war. It became a war for “a new birth of freedom,” as Lincoln stated in the Gettysburg Address, a war that would transform Southern society by destroying its basic institution.
THE THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT
Meanwhile Lincoln and the Republican party recognized that the Emancipation Proclamation, as a war measure, might have no constitutional validity once the war was over. The legal framework of slavery would still exist in the former Confederate states as well as in the Union slave states that had been exempted from the proclamation. So the party committed itself to a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. The overwhelmingly Republican Senate passed the Thirteenth Amendment by more than the necessary two-thirds majority on April 8, 1864. But not until January 31, 1865, did enough Democrats in the House abstain or vote for the amendment to pass it by a bare two-thirds. By December 18, 1865, the requisite three-quarters of the states had ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, which ensured that forever after “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude … shall exist within the United States.”
The Reader’s Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Copyright © 1991 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
内容
An empire need not emerge from military conquest. The Athenian Empire began its life as a voluntary league, and the Habsburg Empire was born in wedlock, cobbled together by a string of shrewd marriage alliances. Nor must an empire be ruled by an autocratic emperor. The British Empire, the largest empire in history, was ruled by a democracy. Other democratic (or at least republican) empires have included the modern Dutch, French, Belgian and American empires, as well as the premodern empires of Novgorod, Rome, Carthage and Athens.
Size, too, does not really matter. Empires can be puny. The Athenian Empire at its zenith was much smaller in size and population than today’s Greece. The Aztec Empire was smaller than today’s Mexico. Both were nevertheless empires, whereas modern Greece and modern Mexico are not, because the former gradually subdued dozens and even hundreds of diʃerent polities while the latter have not. Athens lorded it over more than a hundred formerly independent city states, whereas the Aztec Empire, if we can trust its taxation records, ruled 371 diʃerent tribes and peoples.
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