Imperial expansion agents replaced man-made law with the law of expansion justified by success.

Evidence

It is obvious that these secret and anonymous agents of the force of expansion felt no obligation to man-made laws. The only “law” they obeyed was the “law” of expansion, and the only proof of their “lawfulness” was success. They had to be perfectly willing to disappear into complete oblivion once failure had been proved, if for any reason they were no longer “instruments of incomparable value.” As long as they were successful, the feeling of embodying forces greater than themselves made it relatively easy to resign and even to despise applause and glorification. They were monsters of conceit in their success and monsters of modesty in their failure. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 555

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘law of expansion’ as the operative norm of imperial agents, opposed to man-made law — a core toolkit concept.
• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s later argument that totalitarian rule replaces law with the ‘law of nature’ or ‘law of history’ — the same substitution mechanism. — connects to: Law turned from a multiplier of royal power into its subtractor. — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 161