Imperial Secrets: Remapping the Mind of Empire

by Patrick A. Kelley

Major Kelley chooses three empires with which to compare our current intelligence circumstances. Each of these faced challenges in understanding peoples; Rome in the first and second centuries AD, the Ottomans in the 16th to 18th, and Britain in India in the 18th to early 20th. Kelley feels these warrant study in light of our need to deal with peoples whom we may seek to influence. The author also "If power shapes knowledge, does knowledge also shape power?" This is a delightful exercise in erudition in which key postmodern insights and reasoning are used to gain political understanding. Full of surprises and insights, Kelley takes his readers through an enchanted forest peopled by Foucalt, T.E. Lawrence, J.S. Bach, Borges, Idries Shah, Hobsbawm, Jung, Baudrillard, and many more. One hopes our educated, certified, and degreed military and intelligence leadership can penetrate a work this rich, deep, and ultimately useful. (Originally published in color by the NDIC Press)

252 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Enrica Garzilli · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short but ambitious book to explore the limits of institutional knowledge. What does an empire know and how does it know it? Each of the three empires, the Roman, the Ottoman, and the British, shaped and processed information according to their own culture - general culture and military culture. Army Foreign Area Officer Maj. Patrick Kelley makes a cross-disciplinary analysis, which in some part offers a true new point of view. I quickly read the Roman part and I found it incomplete, a bit too superficial. The limit of this book is that it is too short to analyze all the 3 empires in full. I read the British part (Apocalypse: the Sepoy Revolt of 1857; Dress, discourse and imagination: How empires learn to know differently, Masquerade: agents and actors) and found it thought provoking. How, for instance, Lawrence of Arabia was kicked out from Waziristan, after the English and the only Afghan newspapers wrote about his activity -- he was an agent provocateur - and accused him of spying on Bolsheviks posing as a Muslim saint in Amritsar, while he actually was in Miranshah, disguised as a humble clerck of the RAF (he was a colonel), helping the frontier tribes along the Durand Line to rise up against the king. How the British Raj read the press, perceived the Afghan authorities, and processed the info. Reading his story makes you want to read the documents about his mysterious death, but I think it will be a long time before the British government decides to declassify them. It's still an Empire, or it wants to be.
An original book, I had never considered the empires under the Author's point of view. To read.