The question of the sustainability of an empire's modes of violence, and the consequences of that violence for its constituents and those subjected to its wrath, gets much more complicated if one is looking at the movement of time and the effects on multiple societies on each other, when the violence circulates and then washes back upon those doling it out.
This is a difficult and complex subject, which I'd like to keep open for future treatments. For now anyway, a quick illustration could be helpful to introduce the moving parts and the complicating variables.
One thing that history does well is afford a retrospective observation of more intangible forces like the social effects of violent struggle - forces which may be difficult to perceive on the ground - that pass through a society and between societies, which begin to show their form through the more visible systemic changes of social and historical development over a distinct period of time.
This gets more complicated fast when you consider that a given age is populated with multiple powers that are behaving in accordance with a larger environmental, technological, and global logic that is in part derived from the respective characters of those interacting powers, characters which are developed in long historical movements. Further, those powers are growing and aging in their own unique ways, changing the movement and effects of those previously mentioned intangible forces.
For example, the period of the Spanish-American War provides an interesting window into that process due to the very different back-to-back theaters in Cuba and the Philippines, and the ensuing change of public opinion throughout.
A young American empire was certainly no stranger to violence: it was born in armed revolution and then underwent a calamitous formation of identity through a bloody civil war, but then in the run up to the Spanish-American war, there was a pronounced reticence in getting involved in colonial conflicts and expanding outward. This was due in part to a prevailing founding ideology which insisted the nation not get involved in foreign conflict, itself informed by bitter experience and prevailing culture besides.
But the hawk faction won out, thanks to internal aggressive agitation, pushing commercial interests, collective ambitions, external conditions and escalations, and the like. The idea was that an armed expansion would not only secure geopolitical and cultural interests, but that the violence itself, as a romantic struggle, would lend meaning to young men's lives, toughen them up, and provide camaraderie.
And then the Cuban conflict, the "splendid little war" part of the conflict, did end up being short and rather successful. Aided by technical and tactical advances, and the efforts of the Cuban revolutionaries themselves, the US was able to smash the Spanish on that front. The fighting was relatively easy, and the romantic soldiers got their valiant charges and their camaraderie. Swift and confident success was splashed across the headlines. Public opinion was able to grow more warlike and jingoistic as a result, and many gazed enthusiastically up at a newly expanding young empire.
A newly confident nation then made its way over to the Philippines, and then proceeded to become bogged down in protracted, difficult guerrilla warfare, for various geopolitical and environmental and military reasons among many. The fighting lingered, and grew more vicious, and news and photos of various atrocities circulated, and then in a short amount of time public opinion grew despondent and the isolationist impulse crept back in, where it would linger until the first World War.
Here we could see the formation of a young empire, which was not even sure of what it wanted to be, or whether it was an empire at all, and within which various factions struggle over the direction and meaning of the application of geopolitical violence. And for public opinion to vacillate from one extreme to the other in such a short amount of time.
For all of our professed similarities to the Romans, this particular dynamic was less pronounced in ancient Rome, even in its formative years; this was a society which was famous for its rabid tenacity even in the face of grinding struggle and terrible and calamitous military loss. The forces of violence moved and expressed very differently in an ancient world governed by a very different relationship to violent conflict, and within a society that, for all of its general similarities, also worked very differently.
This is one series of illustrations, but as I said previously, we'll continue to explore these issues.
