The Empires of the Future Will Be Empires of the Mind

On 6 September 1943, with the outcome of the Second World War still undecided, Winston Churchill received an honorary degree at Harvard and told his audience that the empires of the future would be empires of the mind. He was speaking about the shared language and institutions of Britain and the United States, but his phrase has outlasted the occasion. It suggests that conquest by armies is giving way to influence by knowledge, and that the next great powers will rule not by occupying territory but by shaping what people think, want and know.

There is much to support him. Joseph Nye coined the term soft power in 1990 for the ability to get what you want through attraction and not coercion. American films, music and universities have made English the language of science and business, and the world's students queue for places in them. Bollywood carried Indian songs to Russia and Central Africa long before any trade agreement did. South Korea built a global audience through K pop and television drama, and the country's exports of cosmetics and food followed the culture.

Technology has made the empire of the mind concrete. A handful of firms in the United States and China run the platforms through which billions of people talk, shop and learn. Their algorithms decide which news appears first, which posts spread and which voices remain unheard. A government that wanted to influence a foreign election once had to bribe a newspaper, but today it can try to flood a feed. No army is needed for this, and the territory is the attention of the person holding the phone.

Language itself is a medium of empire. About one and a half billion people speak English, most of them as a second language, and a scientist in Seoul or Sao Paulo who wants to be read must write in it. Words carry assumptions with them, so that the vocabulary of markets, rights and efficiency travels with the language that expresses them. Artificial intelligence sharpens the point, since the models that now draft essays and answer questions are trained on text that mostly reflects a few languages and cultures, and they pass on those assumptions to the people who consult them.

Standards are another quiet form of rule. Whoever writes the technical specification, whether it is the format for a payment, the protocol for the internet or the rules for an aircraft's safety, forces others to follow it or be shut out. India's Unified Payments Interface has been adopted by several countries and may become such a standard, spreading Indian practice abroad without a single ship. The pattern is not new, and it deserves remembering. Nalanda, the great university of the fifth to twelfth centuries, drew scholars from China and Korea and spread Buddhism across Asia. India has been an empire of the mind before.

A government that wanted to influence a foreign election once had to bribe a newspaper, but today it can try to flood a feed.

Yet the claim has a limit, and the limit is made of matter. The most advanced computer chips in the world are manufactured overwhelmingly in a single island, Taiwan, by one company on machines supplied by a single firm in the Netherlands. An empire of the mind depends on such physical choke points, and countries compete fiercely to control them. In February 2022 Russia sent its tanks into Ukraine, showing that a great power still believes territory can be taken by force. The ideas that sell films did not stop the shelling of Kharkiv.

Thucydides recorded the logic over two thousand years ago in the Melian dialogue, where Athenian envoys tell the small island of Melos that the strong do what they can and the weak accept what they must. Even the triumphs of soft power can be fragile, since foreign opinion polls showed American popularity falling sharply in many countries after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the attractiveness of a nation can be spent as quickly as its treasure when its actions contradict its ideals. Attraction works only among those who are already free to choose. For those who are not, soft power is a decoration on hard power, and the two have always worked together. The Roman empire spread its law and language along the routes its legions had cleared, and the British spread cricket, railways and English alongside the gunboat.

There is also a darker aspect of ruling the mind. Physical conquest is visible and so can be resisted, but a subtle shaping of tastes, beliefs and fears may not be noticed at all. Colonial education in the nineteenth century taught generations of Indians to study British literature and to doubt their own, as Macaulay intended in his minute of 1835 when he spoke of a class of people Indian in blood and colour but English in taste and opinions. Resistance in that case had to begin by recovering a sense of self. An empire of the mind is harder to throw off because the subject does not feel conquered.

For a country like India the policy lessons are practical, and they begin with humility about how slowly reputations are built and how quickly they are lost. It must invest in universities, research and languages, and also protect the infrastructure on which its own thinking runs, including data, networks and chip supply. A nation that rents its attention platforms from others risks losing control of its own conversation. The sensible course is to build capacity in ideas and in the material base that carries them, and to treat the two as parts of one strategy and not as rivals.

Churchill, who ended his speech with a hope that the English speaking peoples would stand together, did not say whether such an empire could be refused. A person can leave the territory of a state, but there is nowhere to go from an idea that has already settled in the mind. It is not obvious who, in an empire of the mind, is the ruler and who the ruled, since the persuaders are shaped by their own products too, and the answer may belong to no one.