A History of the Dark Times
A review of "Star Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire"
Star Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire certainly came out at the right moment.
Written by professional historian Chris Kempshall and modeled on works like The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the book presents a solid if occasionally overwrought in-universe history of the Star Wars mythos—complete with footnotes and citations to fictional documents and archives. It’s an admirable synthesis of decades of movies, television series, and other media into a coherent historical narrative. In telling the tale of the Galactic Empire’s rise and fall, moreover, Kempshall clearly draws on real-world insights to illustrate the weaknesses at the heart of supposedly strong autocratic regimes and show how these regimes sow the seeds of their own eventual demise.
Take Kempshall’s account of the Empire’s fractured and fractious security services: the Imperial Navy with its Star Destroyers, the Army with its AT-ST and AT-AT walkers, the Imperial Security Bureau, the Jedi-hunting Inquisitors under the command of Darth Vader, and Vader’s own abnormal but supremely powerful role within the entire system itself. These parallel security structures often worked at cross-purposes and fostered destructive rivalries between key leaders like Death Star project head Orson Krennic and Grand Moff Tarkin, as seen in the 2016 film Rogue One. If these divisions prevented the Imperial security services from overthrowing the emperor himself, they also made them ineffective at fighting—much less defeating—the Rebel Alliance.
Kempshall also seeks to clarify a number of open questions regarding Darth Vader’s role in the Empire that the films themselves never really answer. Vader, he concludes, “appears to have been an anomaly” within the Imperial system, a free agent given wide latitude by the emperor to pursue his own goals as he himself saw fit—a figure whose “power both transcended the rigid Imperial structure and defied easy definitions.” Though not part of the formal chain of command, for instance, Vader commanded fleets and forces that were “forced to constantly react to whatever Vader was doing or commanding in any given situation.” Indeed, Kempshall wonders whether Vader was fighting the same war as the rest of the Imperial military; he “cared little for administrative matters or, it seems, wider-scale strategy.” His obsessive pursuit of Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back turned what “should have been a decisive Imperial victory” against the Rebels at Hoth into a pyrrhic one instead.
With hopelessly fragmented security services and uniquely powerful figures like Darth Vader pursuing their own agendas, it’s not difficult to understand why the Empire fell to the Rebellion. Nor is it hard to see the similarities between Kempshall’s description of the Empire’s security services and those of actual autocratic regimes: supposedly powerful governments with organs of state security rife with internal rivalries and structured to prevent coups or otherwise ensure regime security rather than accomplish their stated missions.
These parallels extend even further to the Empire’s reliance on raw power and fear as mechanisms of control—and to the inevitable weakness inherent in those mechanisms. In Kempshall’s telling, neither Emperor Palpatine nor Darth Vader had much interest in the nuts and bolts of galactic governance; “Palpatine wanted to rule the galaxy,” he remarks, “but he had no interest in running it.” That task was outsourced to “a complicated collection of departments, organizations, and bureaus often working at cross purposes,” designed, as with the Imperial military, to foster internal competition and rivalries that would consume the attention of the bureaucracy and divert any ambitions its leaders might have to seize power for themselves.
This indifference to governing and reliance on bureaucratic dysfunction left the Empire with one choice for rule: force and coercion. The Empire used maximum force to instill fear across the galaxy and, ultimately, acquiescence to Imperial rule; the destruction of Alderaan by the Death Star (as depicted in the original Star Wars) represented the ultimate expression of this strategy. But as Kempshall’s narrative argues, regimes founded on fear and force reveal their own intrinsic frailty and fragility. Contrary to the Empire’s expectations, the annihilation of Alderaan served as “a motivating factor rather than an oppressive one”—an act so heinous that it fueled the nascent Rebellion rather than suffocated it. Imperial power could destroy entire planets and despoil the galaxy, but it proved too brittle to withstand the stresses of rule and the setbacks of rebellion.
The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire has a good deal more to tell readers about the wider Star Wars mythos. Imperial racism, for instance, plays a central role in Kempshall’s history, even if attentive Star Wars fans can be forgiven for their surprise at assertions that the Empire was founded on human supremacy. The Empire’s racist underpinnings are indeed a part of the deeper Star Wars lore, but much existing Star Wars media does not provide much in the way of evidence for Imperial racism. While it’s true that virtually all Imperial officers we see in the original trilogy are human, for example, the same could be said for the Rebel ranks until Return of the Jedi—something that has as much to do with limited budgets and filmmaking technology of the late 1970s and early 1980s as anything else. Indeed, the Empire’s racism has only recently begun to receive indirect attention in mainline Star Wars media like the movie Solo and the video game Jedi: Fallen Order.
Kempshall also devotes an entire chapter to the atrocities, massacres, and genocides perpetrated by the Empire—a reminder that, contrary to some apologias, the Galactic Empire truly embodied evil. As Kempshall puts it, “Death was almost the mortar that held the Empire together.” Vicious reprisals and civilian massacres, the enslavement of the Wookiees of Kashyyyk and Twi’leks of Ryloth, and the destruction of Mandalore and Alderaan all testify to “the Imperial principle that mass violence was the simplest solution to any problem.” The immediate resort to the most savage and cruel expressions of force speaks to the underlying weakness at the heart of autocratic regimes like the Empire: the substitution of brute force and raw power for reasoned persuasion and earned allegiance. Terror produces acquiescence, not loyalty.
Though Kempshall’s narrative lays bare the storytelling trainwreck of the recent sequel trilogy, the reemergence of the Empire does allow him to make one rather acute—and sadly relevant—observation: “that [Imperial] ideology offers something to ordinary people. The promises it makes to them and the awful things it gives them permission to do.” It’s a common enough feature of authoritarian governments and political movements, but one we seem to have forgotten—or at least can’t seem to quite remember often enough as we try to explain our own current political predicament.
The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire ends with an appeal to keep the memory of past horrors alive to prevent their future recurrence. But as our own recent experience suggests, accurate historical memory isn’t enough to inoculate societies against making the very mistakes their grandparents and great-grandparents had to fight against and give their lives to stop. On its own, historical memory cannot make up for the deficits in philosophy and morality that gave rise to our own present circumstances.
Still, The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire has much to offer Star Wars fans. It pulls together the various strands of the mythos developed over decades into a single, coherent narrative that both takes insights from the real world and offers an uncomfortable but necessary reflection on our own times.
