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APPROACHES TO EMPIRES
Alfred J. Rieber
The study of empires remains a very much underdeveloped area
of research compared with its historical and conceptual rival the
nation state. There are a number of grand theories of nationalism
and nation building but comparatively few on building and
dismantling empires and imperialism. In the past decade, however,
a number of factors have renewed interest in the subject, and
several "empire projects" are well under way. On the one hand
interest has been aroused in the fate of empires by the collapse
of the last territorial empire, the Soviet Union. On the other
hand a debate has taken shape over the decline of the nation-state
in the face of challenges from three different directions in
contemporary politics and economics: globalism, regionalism or
localism and confederalism. The nation, the nation state and
nationalism may be far from disappearing from the historical
stage. But it is no longer possible to view them, as had been the
norm throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the
culmination of human endeavor in mobilizing resources,
establishing order and creating citizens, variously defined, with
equal rights, also variously defined, and a sense of common
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identity. As the last of the imperial species vanishes and its
successor shows signs of entropy, it is instructive to analyze the
legacy of past empires as well as speculating on the future
organization of mankind. There are at least two aspects of empire
that deserve careful scrutiny for those seeking lessons to be
learned: their longevity and their flexibility.
Approaches to empire are bound to be as different as the
number of individual examples of the species. But if it is a
species, that is a phenomenon with a number of fundamental shared
characteristics, then it should be possible at least to define a
research strategy to investigate it if not at this point to
provide a fully developed model or paradigm. The following essay
is designed along these more modest lines. It faces at the outset
the always formidable definitional problem, one which will specify
at least some of the fundamental shared characteristics mentioned
above. One caveat is in order here. In the over-all make-up of
empire, the relative strengths of the individual characteristics
and their relationship to one another will normally reflect the
changing contours of empires over time and throughout space.1
1 ?A useful starting point for both a textual and temporal analysis of the concept of empire is James Muldoon, Empire and Order: The Concept of Empire, 800-1800, (New York, 1999) although it is limited to Western European examples. An imaginative and
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With that in mind, the following definition aims at being as
inclusive as possible.
Empires are political organizations in which one self-defined
ethnic group achieves and maintains control over others within its
territorial boundaries. They are, then, conquest states. Their
boundaries are military frontiers extended or defended by force of
arms rather than any claims to be natural or cultural (that is
ethnic, racial or religious). Authority is vested in a ruler who
combines both secular and spiritual powers in varying proportions.
In order to legitimate and stabilize his power he or she relies
upon an imperial culture that combines a transcendent or mythical
concept of rulership with an elite of birth and or merit that
performs the main administrative, financial, military and
juridical functions of the state. Imperial culture in this essay
should be understood, then, as both system and practice. The
system consists of a set of symbols, institutions and spatial
relationships that define the authority of the ruler and the
ruling elites. Practice is the management or manipulation by the
ruler and the ruling elites of the constituent elements of the
more general definition is Thomas Barfield, Imperial State Formation along the Chinese-Nomad Frontier,” in Susan E. Alcock et al, Empires. Perspectives from Archaeology and History, (Cambridge, 2001), 28-33.
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system in order to maximize their power and achieve their ends.
However, imperial culture is not a sharply delineated, coherent
whole but often appears to be differentiated, contested, weakly
bounded and vulnerable to change.2
The relationship between the ruler and elite revolves around
two questions: whether his power is absolute or limited and if
limited to what degree; and whether the elite owes its status
mainly to merit or birth. In the early stages of empire the
legitimization of the ruler derives mainly from religious or
spiritual sources. In the twentieth century a major mutation
appears in the form of an empire that is secularized, though no
less mythologized, and reliant on more informal methods of control
characteristic of mass societies like propaganda and economic
instruments.
Even such a rough-hewn working definition suggests that large
scale causal questions such as why did empires last so long and
why did they disintegrate when they did can be best approached
from a comparative perspective. A comprehensive analysis at this
2 ? William H. Sewell, Jr. "The Concepts of Culture," in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Turn, (Berkeley, 1999), 51-55. Although the author is concerned with cultures as a whole his insights are equally applicable to the imperial elite cultures of Eurasia.
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level of generalization far exceeds the limitations of an essay.
Two limitations have to be set at the beginning. What are the
units of comparison, i.e. the individual empires and which are the
topics to be compared. There are four possible spatial and
temporal coordinates for comparing empires: first, empires that
are adjacent and contemporary such as the Ottoman, Habsburg and
Romanov; second, empires that succeed one another by virtue of
having undergone radical transformations in ideologies and
structures, such as from dynastic to communist in Russia and
China; third, "liberal empires" where the hegemonic power embraces
representative government in the metropolitan but not the colonial
territories such as the French, Belgian, Dutch and at times the
British and American; and four, a selective (and often eclectic)
mix of empires from the previous categories. Each type involves
some risky theoretical leaps. But this essay will seek to follow
the advice and example of historians like Marc Bloch by accepting
the first example that meets the criteria of close proximity in
time, duration and space. As Bloch suggested such a research
strategy allows for consideration of both endogenous and exogenous
factors. 3 However, this essay will immodestly expand the number
3 ? Marc Bloch, "A Contribution towards a Comparative History of European Societies," in Land and Work in Medieval Europe. Selected
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of cases from two, as in Bloch's example, to five, to be called
henceforth Eurasian Empires: the Habsburg, Ottoman, Russian,
Iranian and Chinese. Their selection has been guided then by three
major factors. They were temporally contemporaneous in the period
from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century; spatially they
shared at least one common frontier (and the Russian empire with
the four others); and they were periodically engaged in
competition for control of the frontier zones that separated their
culturally hegemonic centers from one another.
The geographical unity of continental, Eurasian empires, in
contrast to the scattered overseas possessions of the maritime
empires, posed special problems of security and integration. In
the course of expansion the Eurasian empires added a ring of mixed
ethno-territorial blocs along much of the periphery of the more or
less ethnically homogenous and politically dominant core. For the
German Habsburgs these were Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Serbs,
Slovenes and Italians; for the Ottoman Turks Arabs, Kurds,
Armenians, Greeks, south Slavs; for Russia the Finns, Baltic
peoples, Poles, Ukrainians, Caucasian and Central Asian peoples;
for the Persians (Farsi) Azeri, Kurds, Turkomens and the
Papers, ( Berkeley, 1967), 44-81.
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southwestern tribes; for Han China the northern "barbarians"
including Jurchen or Manchu, Mongols, Uighurs, various Muslim
peoples of the northwest, and the tribes of Yunnan. Because of
cultural differences and, in certain cases, pre-conquest histories
of statehood themselves, the peripheries constituted the most
unstable areas within the empires. Unlike strategic points in
overseas empires, these regions in rebellious or unfriendly hands
posed direct and immediate threats to the metropolitan core. The
rebellious British colonies of North America or French Haiti may
have caused heavy losses in men, money and prestige but they did
not threaten to undermine the foundations of the metropolitan
government. Nor did they lead to foreign intervention in the
imperial homeland. But rebellions in the peripheries of
continental empires, whether Polish, Hungarian, Serbian,
Bulgarian, or Turkomen raised the specter of a deposed government,
an overturned dynasty or a dismembered empire.
For the Eurasian continental empires the problem of
integration involved the nature of the governing institutions and
the control or regulation of population movements. Imperial
governments faced a dilemma in seeking to balance uniformity
against diversity in the administrative and legal order. Governing
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overseas possessions could be and almost always was an entirely
separate branch of government with its own rules, regulations and
bureaucratic hierarchies. But in continental empires there was
always the danger that separate status for each ethno-territorial
entity would either create administrative and legal confusion or
encourage separatist movements. The choice between religious
conformity and toleration took on a particular edge in continental
empires for several reasons. First, the religious diversity in the
Eurasian empires was far greater than most other states systems
where one tradition, Christianity, Islam or animism prevailed.
(India was of course an exception). Second, religious identity was
often intertwined with national ideology, the major threat after
the eighteenth century to the integrity of the imperial order.
Consequently, policies of official toleration or imposed
conformity and forced conversion could, depending on the
circumstances, spark different kinds of sectarian violence, either
of one religious group against another (pogroms) or as part of a
national independence movement (Catholic Poles against Orthodox
Russians or Orthodox Slavs against Muslim Turks).
Similarly, continental empires confronted special problems
with respect to large-scale population movements that could take
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either spontaneous or repressive forms. In the early period
nomadism had played an important role in the shaping and reshaping
of empires. It continued to leave its mark with diminishing force
until very late in the life span of the empires and in some cases
right to the end. Wars of conquest also affected demographic
trends, in particular the flight or departure of religious or
ethnic minorities after the defeat of their co-religionists.
Finally, rebellions often led to deportations and frequently
forced resettlement or colonization of de-populated areas by the
imperial governments.4
The final spatial connection that provides common ground for
a comparative analysis is the prolonged and complex rivalry of the
continental empires for control over the vast frontier zones,
which separated their metropolitan cores from one another. The
rise of the bureaucratic empires signified the decline of the
nomadic states in the steppe and the collapse of the early modern
kingdoms in southeastern and central Europe. These territories
became contest zones between powerful bureaucratic empires that
4 ? For a more detailed analysis of this question see Alfred J. Rieber, "Repressive Population Transfers in Central, Eastern and South-eastern Europe: A Historical Overview," in idem (ed.), Forced Migration in Central and Eastern Europe, 1939-1950, (London, 2000), 1-27.
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competed with one another in order to acquire more land,
population and resources. The Romanov or Vserossiiskii Empire was
the only participant in this struggle that competed with all the
others. This is one reason, though not the only one, why so much
of western historiography has portrayed "the expansion" of Russia
as unilateral and unlimited. It is undeniable that by 1914 the
Russian Empire appeared to have gained or was gaining a strategic
and economic advantage over its other continental rivals from the
Balkans to Xingiang. Its prestige had suffered a temporary setback
in Bosnia in 1907 and more seriously in Manchuria in 1905. But it
had recovered much of its political influence in southeastern
Europe retained extensive privileges in Manchuria and Outer
Mongolia and expanded its economic penetration of Iran and China.
The temporal dimension of this analysis of continental
empires refers to their coexistence and rivalry during roughly the
same historical time expressed, if you will, by several
chronologies that might be called conventional and revolutionary
time. Conventional time in this case signifies the span of
centuries from the foundation of empire or a significant dynastic
change as in the cases of Iran and China until their demise,
roughly the fifteenth or sixteenth up to the first two decades of
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the twentieth century. If the rise of new or the reconstitution of
old empires was a gradual process lasting decades or even longer,
their end was remarkably simultaneous and similarly violent
occurring in a set of revolutions between 1906 and 1923.
What might be called the revolutionary time refers to a
chronology of change brought about by the impact on the Eurasian
empires of the French political and English industrial
revolutions, what Eric Hobsbawm called “the dual revolution”.5 The
idea of popular sovereignty and new technologies of production and
organization profoundly altered three dimensions of power
relationships: between the West and the Eurasian Empires, between
the core and periphery of the empires and among the imperial
rivals. The continental empires were founded in pre-revolutionary
time and were all seriously weakened and ultimately destroyed by
their inability to accommodate their political institutions and
socio-economic structures to the multiple disruptive effects of
the dual revolution. But the word "ultimately" conceals an
adaptability however limited that prolonged the life span of all
the Eurasian empires a century or more after the dual revolution
had transformed the West.
5 ? Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848 (London, 1960).
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Once the units of analysis have been established, it remains
to identify the variables that appear to offer the greatest
potential for addressing the question of longevity. Without
denying the large role of coercion, the subject of a very large
literature, this essay focuses on alternative means of regime
maintenance. The imperial idea, the imperial bureaucracies and the
defense of the frontiers have been selected as three variables
emblematic of cohesion, adaptability and renewal within the
Eurasian empires.
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The personification of the imperial idea in the body of the
ruler can be best approached from three directions: concepts of
rulership embedded in ethical and/or religious systems, links to
older traditions and myths, and the languages of politics
articulated in visual symbolism and written texts.6 In all five of
the Eurasian empires the concept of rulership was not static but
underwent changes according to the individual preferences of
rulers, or in response to domestic crises or external threats. The
connection between the secular and divine attributes of the ruler
6 ? For the belief that royal persona whether kings or emperors possessed two bodies, the individual human and the abstract see Ernst Kanterowicz, The Two Bodies of the King: A Study of Medieval Political Theology, (Princeton, 1957).
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and the relationship between power and ceremonial rituals were
maintained in a delicate balance.7 Overall there was an evolution
toward a greater emphasis on the secular, but there were cases of
reversion to earlier religious myths especially in the final
decades of the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Rulers adopted or
modified their titles, enriched and elaborated the rituals and
ceremonies that established real and symbolic ties with the ruling
elite and the mass of the population. There were great differences
in the extent to which the rulers made themselves visible to the
ruled. The most dramatic form of public appearances was as the
leader of the armed forces but well orchestrated trips or visits
outside the capital also served to lessen the distance between
throne and village.8 The court could provide a milieu for
attaching the elite to the person of the ruler but also could
isolate him from the rest of society.9 The history of imperial
7 ? David Cannadine, "Introduction: divine rites of kings," in David Cannadine and Simon Price (eds.), Rituals of Royalty. Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies, (Cambridge, 1987), 1-19.8 ? In the words of E.P. Thompson: “Once a social system has become ‘set’ it does not need to be endorsed daily by exhibitions of power. What matters is a continuing theatrical style.” “Patrician Society, Plebian Culture,” Journal of Social History,7 (1974), 389. 9 ? Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, revised edition (London, 2000) especially pp. 389-97 on the "courtization of warriors" provides suggestive insights although his examples are drawn exclusively from central and west European monarchies.
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ideologies in the Eurasian empires illustrates a process I call
cumulative syncretist, that is a periodic re-invention of myths of
origin and mission.
Outside of China which is something of a special case, the
imperial culture systems of the Eurasian Empires had a common
source in the two great traditions of the ancient world, the
Roman-Byzantine and the Achaemenian-Sasanian. By the time of the
Renaissance the Habsburgs had evolved an elaborate imagery
combining pagan and Christian motifs in their bid to consolidate
secular power and priestly functions. They united a mythical
genealogy of pagan and Hebrew elements with a prophetic-
eschatogical tradition and a literary-historical discourse that
was transmitted by writers and artists but controlled by the
imperial court. The Austrian Habsburgs inherited from Philip II of
Spain the mythical link to the Byzantine emperors with their
quasi-sacerdotal powers. These were institutionalized in the
ceremonies of the eucharistic miracle introduced by Rudolph II and
the Order of the Golden Fleece.10 The Austrian Habsburgs had given
10 ? Marie Tanner, The Last Descendent of Aeneas. The Habsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor, (New Haven, 1993). Although the coronation ceremony continued to impressed observers, like Goethe for example, it was regarded as anachronistic by the "enlightened despot" Joseph II, an early indication of the problem for Austrian emperors of defining their imperial persona in a
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up the idea of a Universal Monarchy which in any case had become
moot once the empire of Charles V was divided between its Spanish
and Austrian parts. But it retained the image of the Christian
defender of the faith against the Muslim Turks, known as
"Austria's eastern mission." The Austrian pattern of empire
building provides one variation on the theme of cumulative
syncretism. Unlike the other empires it was not for the most part
a "conquest state." Rather its constituent parts were acquired
mainly by marriage and the relationships of the various parts were
extraordinarily complex and rooted in medieval contracts and
allegiances. The problem was succinctly summarized by Robert Kann:
"for the most part of the period between the time of the union of
Hungary, Croatia and Bohemia with the hereditary Habsburg lands in
1526-27 and the dissolution of the monarchy in 1918, the very
concept of a Habsburg Empire as a constitutional entity was
heavily contested."11 The apparent lack of cohesion within the
monarchy, according to Charles Ingrao, is most dramatically
consistent manner. See Derek Beales, Joseph II, vol 1, In the Shadow of Maria Theresa, 1741-1780, (Cambridge, 1987), 111-15.11 ? Robert A. Kann, "The Dynasty and the Imperial Idea," in idem, Dynasty, Politics and Culture. Selected Essays, (Boulder, 1991), 50. Kann attributed the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy more to constitutional weakness than to the nationalist problem. Ibid. 61.
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demonstrated by eight major crises that over three centuries shook
its very foundations and threatened dismemberment: in 1618-20,
1683, 1704-05, 1740-41, 1790, 1809-10, 1848-49 and 1916-18.12
Looked at from a different perspective, the changing concept
of the imperial ideal in the Habsburg Monarchy suggests a
remarkable flexibility on the part of the rulers and their
advisers reacting to the tides of cultural and intellectual
fashions that engulfed the social and political elites of Europe
in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
The desacralization of monarchy throughout Europe through the
image of the rational, dispassionate ruler - the enlightened
despot - created a wholly new utilitarian set of principles for
the exercise of absolute power.13 These principles were rooted
however in the cameralist variation of the Enlightenment
12 ? Charles Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618-1815, (Cambridge, 1994), 21. Ingrao attributes the survival of the monarchy to a process of recurrent "tinkering" in the forlorn hope of gaining its aims without genuine reform. Ibid. 19.13 ? Heinz Dollinger, "Das Leitbild des Burgerkonigtums in der europaischen Monarchie des 19. Jahrhunderts," in Karl Ferdinand Werner (ed.), Hof, Kultur, und Politik im 19. Jahrhundert, (Bonn, 1985), 337-43.The scholarly literature has given rise to a debate over whether Joseph II was in fact enlightened. For a review of the controversy see Derek Beales, "Was Joseph II an Enlightened Despot?" in Ritchie Robertson and Edmond Timms, The Austrian Enlightenment and Its Aftermath, (Edinburgh, 1991), 1-21. In his biography Derek Beales locates Joseph II squarely in the tradition of enlightened despotism of the cameralist variety.
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(Aufklarung) that owed more to Italian and German than to French
inspiration. The key idea, growing out of German natural law, was
that a happy and prosperous population provided the firmest
foundation for a wealthy and strong state. In return for obedience
and loyalty the state would protect the people's material
interests by the rule of law and guarantee their religious beliefs
by a policy of toleration.14 In a pre-nationalist world the
monarchy could promote two unifying ideas that would,
subsequently, contribute to the dissolution of the monarchy. The
first was the attention paid by the government to the use of
vernacular language, German throughout the empire as a common
tongue and other vernaculars at the local level for educational
purposes on the assumption that the key to culture as a national
language. The second was the dual concept of citizenship that
established a common empire wide Landespatriotismus and allowed
for a local patriotism based on the "nation" in the sense of a
ethno-linguistic group and religion.15 However, in the long
aftermath of the French Revolution, the coexistence of these ideas
14 ? H.M. Scott, "The Problem of Enlightened Absolutism," in idem (ed.), Enlightened Absolutism. Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth Century Europe, (London, 1990), 18-19.15 ? R.J.W. Evans, "Joseph II and Nationality: the Habsburg Lands," in ibid. 210-18.
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broke down. The local vernaculars and ethno-linguistic loyalties
found a more appealing location in the new concepts of the nation-
state and popular sovereignty thus undermined the foundations of
the imperial idea.
The French Revolutionary Wars, the dissolution of the Holy
Roman Empire and the coronation of the first "Austrian Emperor" in
1801 marked the final shift, underway since the mid-eighteenth
century, away from cultural standards set by French, Spanish and
Italian influence toward the triumph of German courtly culture.
After 1848 the monarchy, shaken by revolution engaged in a
desperate search for a principle of authority and a mission.
Constitutional experiments succeeded one another with great
rapidity. According to the Hungarian historian, Peter Hanak, even
after the creation of the Dual monarchy in 1867 six major
political concepts competed with one another for supremacy as the
guiding ideology of the empire.16 Despite these constitutional
crises the world view of Franz Joseph hardly changed. He adhered
to the idea of a Rechtsstaat and exhibited a broad toleration of
all the nationalities, or at least displayed no favorites. He
16 ? Peter Hanak, "Problem der Krise de Dualismus," in V. Sandor and Peter Hanak (eds.), Studien zum Geschichte der oesterreichisch-ungarnischen Monarchie, (Budapest, 1961) 338-385.
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remained deeply attached to Roman Catholicism yet he attended
religious rituals of all the faiths represented in the monarchy –
Orthodox, Jewish, Armenian Catholic and even Muslim after the
annexation of Bosnia in 1907.17
In the final analysis the imperial idea was to a large extent
embodied in the persona of Franz Joseph. He supervised the
revitalization and modernization of the court and court ritual by
introducing a stricter ceremonial but also opening the court to
commoners. He renewed the tradition of public display of Catholic
piety by participating in the Corpus Christi procession and the
foot washing ceremony on Holy Thursday. He encouraged public
participation in the celebration of his birthday and used trips
throughout the realm, beginning with Galicia in 1851 as a way of
displaying himself to the population. His largely successful aim
was to create the impression of stability at the center of the
empire.18 The cult of the monarch assumed extraordinary
proportions. His portrait was everywhere; popular demonstrations
17 ? Alexander Novotny, "Der Monarch und seine Ratgeber," in Adam Wanbruszka and Peter Urbanitsch, Die Habsburgermonarchie, 1848-1918, II, Verwaltung und Rechtwesen, (Vienna, 1975) 64-65.18 ? Daniel Unkowsky, “Reasserting Empire. Habsburg Imperial Celebrations after the Revolutions of 1848-1849,” in Maria Bucur and Nancy M. Wingfield, Staging the Past. The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe 1848 to the Present, (West Lafayette, 2001), 12-45.
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testified to his popularity. His many journeys to the provinces,
organized carefully to be sure, nonetheless were highly successful
in bringing the living image of the emperor to his people. The
spectacular jubilee celebrations of 1898 featured a parade of two
thousand drawn from all the nationalities (except the recalcitrant
Czechs) in their colorful national costumes.19 That the imperial
idea had shrunk to one frail man demonstrated the fragility of an
empire that had weathered many storms at the cost of losing much
of its raison d'etre.
From the sixteenth century the Russian tsar ruled as the
direct representative of God on earth and at times claimed or
enjoyed a semi-divine status.20 The rulers and their image makers
from Moscow bookmen to Over Procurators of the Holy Synod melded
aspects of the Byzantine Basileus, the Mongol-Tatar khan, the
Renaissance prince and the western absolutist monarch with the
Russian Orthodox and indigenous traditions going back to the Grand
Prince of Kievan Rus'.21 The changing title of the Russian ruler -
19 ? Jean-Paul Bled, Franz Joseph, translated from the French edition of 1987, (London, 1992), 220-21, 260-61 based on Petra Promintzer, “Die Reisen Kaiser Franz Joseph (1848-1867),” unpublished dissertation, University of Vienna, 1967.20 ? See the essays of Michael Cherniavsky, especially “Saintly Princes and Princely Saints,” in idem, Tsar and People. Studies in Russian Myths, (New York, 1969).21 ? Michael Cherniavsky, "Khan or Basileus: An Aspect of Russian
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five times in the half millennium following the thirteenth century
- was accompanied by revised enumerations of territories added to
the crown reflecting the extent to which imperial expansion shaped
the image of the gospodar-tsar-imperator and proclaimed to his
subjects and the external world his rule over a multicultural
society.22 In seeking divine legitimation for their rule the
Russian tsars were never entirely successful in establishing a
clear cut and stable relationship between his secular and
spiritual persona or his imperial and ecumenical mission. This had
less to do with church -state relations that were often stormy in
the pre-Petrine period and largely quiescent thereafter. Rather,
it was a question of how the tsars represented themselves in the
major ceremonial occasions and in their attitude and policies
Medieval Political Theory," Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959), 459-76; idem, "Ivan the Terrible as Renaissance Prince," Slavic Review 27 (1968), 195-211; Ihor Shevchenko, "Muscovy's Conquest of Kazan: Two Views Reconciled," Slavic Review 4 (1967), 541-47; Edward Keenan, "Royal Russian Behavior. Style and Self-Image," in Edward Allworth, Ethnic Russia - the USSR (New York, 1980), 1-16.22 ? Marc Szeftel, "The Title of the Muscovite Monarch up to the End of the Seventeenth Century," Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 13 (1979), 59-81. The use of the term "white tsar" for the Russian ruler by the Nogai Horde in the sixteenth century strongly suggests they regarded Moscow as one of the heirs of the Golden Horde. Michael Khodarovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier. The Making of a Colonial Empire 1500-1800,(Bloomington, 2002) 44 and literature cited.
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toward the whole Orthodox community (oikumene).
Even before Peter I the image of the tsar as a Christian
ruler was increasingly diluted by secular themes. Peter completed
the process of creating an "imperator" that placed the Russian
ruler in a lineal descent from the ancient pagan, that is Roman,
line rather than the Byzantine. The coronation of his empress,
Catherine I and his own funeral used religious symbolism in order
to sanction Western concepts of secular power. The new image of
ruler was as a conqueror and reformer.23 His successors refined and
elaborated the imperial myth and symbols, each succeeding ruler
reshaping the image of the ruler in order to suit his or her own
needs yet not until the very end of the dynasty surrendering the
central concept of absolute power. Richard Wortman calls these
changing symbolic representations of the Russian monarchy,
"scenarios of power." Beginning with Catherine II the two most
visible symbolic representations of empire were the coronations
and the journeys of the ruler outside the two capitals. As the
empire expanded the participation of exotic representatives of the
different national and ethnic groups at the coronation increased.
Ironically, these were most colorful and impressive under
23 ? Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power. Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy. (Princeton, 1995), I, 41, 63, 71, 80-3.
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Alexander III and Nicholas II who increasingly emphasized the
Russian (russkoe) as opposed to all-Russian (rossiiskoe) character
of the empire.24
It is difficult to determine how deeply the imperial idea
penetrated into the lower strata of Russian society. The meager
evidence suggests that a concept of popular monarchy existed among
the peasantry at least down to the end of the nineteenth century.
But it took strange forms that did not correspond to the
“scenarios of power.” Up to the end of the eighteenth century
peasant monarchism periodically expressed itself in the phenomenon
of the pretender (samozvanets). The myth of a benevolent tsar
persisted into the early twentieth century not simply in the form
of “naïve monarchism”, as Soviet historians would have us believe,
but also and perhaps predominantly as a means of opposing local
officials and landowners by invoking the highest authority in
order to justify their rebellious acts.25 There are hints too that
24 ? Ibid. For the journeys: Catherine II, I, 139-42; Alexander I, I, 239-41; Alexander II, I, 362-69; Nicholas I, I, 306-08; Alexander III, II, 173 and 282-83 (the only trip of a reigning tsar to the Caucasus); Nicholas II, II, 323-31 (the only trip of a reigning tsar to the Russian Far East). For the coronations: Catherine II, I, 114-16; Alexander II, II, 35-7; Alexander III, II, 215-17; Nicholas II, II, 351-52.25 ? Daniel Field, Rebels in the Name of the Tsar, (Boston, 1976); Cathy A. Frierson, Peasant Icons. Representations of Rural People in Late 19 th Century Russia , (New York, 1993), 18, 98,
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the Russian lower classes, at least those who were literate, took
pride in the empire. But they regarded the periphery as exotic and
exciting without idealizing the frontier or Russia’s civilizing
mission as was the case in western overseas empires or the United
State.26
Unlike the Habsburgs the Russian rulers fiercely resisted
constitutional experiments until the early twentieth century. At
the same time the Russian "scenario of power" under the reigns of
Alexander III and Nicholas II underwent a radical shift away from
the secular and cosmopolitan image of empire to a more constricted
national-religious myth.27 This mean that when a representative
assembly - the State Duma - was finally wrested from the monarchy
by the revolution of 1905, the ideological gap between ruler and
ruled had widened. No wonder then that the tsar Nicholas II
insisted that the "Fundamental Laws" that created the new
representative institutions did not limit his autocratic power
113.26 ? Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read. Literacy and Popular Culture, 1861-1917, (Princeton, 1985), 241-45 and “Imperial Dreams,” in The Russian Review, 3 (July 1994) 331-381.27 ? Richard Wortman calls this "the synchronic mode" in order to demonstrate the attempt to break with the official time frame in which the ruler was the maker of history in favor of a mythical past, the seventeenth century, when tsar and people were spiritually united. Scenarios of Power, II, 235-36.
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while some of his own advisers and the mass of the population
thought otherwise. No wonder too that the imperial couple Nicholas
and Alexandra slipped deeper into a mystical religious faith that
further alienated them from both the official church and the
Westernized elite.28
Despite their very different origins the Ottoman like the
Russian rulers also drew upon a variety of earlier traditions in
shaping their image and defining their power. They also exhibited
similar problems in establishing a clearly defined and stable
relationship between their terrestrial and divine identities and
missions. After the conquest of Constantinople the Ottoman rulers
who had originated as nomadic Islamic tribal leaders adopted a
syncretic concept of rulership that incorporated additional
elements from the Persian tradition of kingship (the padishah) and
the ritual of the Byzantine imperial court.29 They appointed men of
religious learning (ulama) to administer justice, minimizing the
28 ? Gregory Freeze, "Subversive Piety: Religion and the Political Crisis in Late Imperial Russia," The Journal of Modern History 3 (June 1996), 312-28 and idem, [G.Friz], "Tserkov', religiia i politicheskaia kultura na zakate starogo rezhima, " in V.S. Diakin, (ed.), Reformy ili revoliutsiia? Rossiia 1861-1917, (St. Petersburg, 1992), 31-42.29 ? Halil Inalcik, “Comments on ‘Sultanism’: Max Weber’s Typification of the Ottoman Polity,” in Princeton Papers in Near Eastern Studies, (Princeton, 1992), 49-72.
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liklihood of conflict between the secular and spiritual
authorities.30 Yet, at the same time, the ruling house relied on
customary law to weaken the egalitarian principles of the shar’ia
and to legitimize a cosmopolitan and formal court culture. By the
end of the sixteenth century the sultan was no longer expected to
rule in person, still less from horseback, but rather to preside
over an administration of grandees, graduates of the Palace
School. Throughout the seventeenth century court ceremonial
evolved away from public appearances at military functions toward
greater intimacy and privacy.31
Ottoman rulers adopted the secular title of sultan first
brought into Anatolia by the nomadic Seljuk Turks in the 11th
century. By virtue of taking power the Ottomans also claimed to be
sovereigns by divine right and lieutenants of God. Yet they did
not officially transfer the caliphate, the seat of the supreme
religious authority in Islam, from Cairo to Constantinople. This
continued the ambiguous relationship between the spiritual and
30 ? Idem. The Ottoman Empire. The Classical Age, 1300-1600 (London, 1963); C. Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire, (Princeton, 1986); Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples, (Cambridge, Mass. 1991), 214-25.31 ? Halil Berktay, “Three Empires and the Societies They Governed: Iran, India and the Ottoman Empire,” in Halil Berktay and Suraiyo Faroqui,(eds.), New Approaches to State and Peasant in Ottoman History, (London, 1992), 185-210.
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27
temporal elements in the Islamic world. The caliphate had since
its establishment in the early days of the Arab conquests,
inextricably combined politics and religion reflecting the
influence of the Sasanian (Persian) kingship upon the founders of
the first Arab empires. Its meaning had undergone several changes
over time although it gradually was identified more with the
spiritual rather than the coercive side of the Islamic state.32 The
decision of the Ottoman sultans to use the title without
officially adopting it suggests that they like the Russian
emperors after Peter perceived advantages in maintaining an
ambiguous attitude toward their religious obligations. Neither
tsars nor sultans sought to subordinate their dynastic and
political interests to the passions of religious wars while at the
same time they conserved their right to protect their co-
religionists wherever and whenever they considered it appropriate.
The Ottoman and Russian imperial ideas of extending
extraterritorial protection over co-religionists - the caliphate
and the oikoumene - came together for a brief moment in the Treaty
of Kuchuk-Kainardji in 1774. The sultan had enjoyed the
distinction among western diplomats of possessing the authority of
32 ? D. Sourdel, "Khalifa," Encyclopedia of Islam, new edition (Leiden, 1986) IV/2 946-50.
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28
the caliphate. In the treaty he was called "the imam of the
Believers and the caliph of those who profess the divine unity"
which appeared in the French version as "le Souverain calife de la
religion mahometane." Similarly, the treaty acknowledged the
tsar's right to protect the Orthodox population of the Ottoman
Empire and to make representations to the sultan concerning their
welfare.33 The formulations were sufficiently vague to allow
different interpretations. The Russians were quick to reject the
political implications of recognizing Ottoman influence within the
Russian Empire. The Turks also opposed the Russians' broad
interpretation of their right to intervene on behalf of the
Orthodox population of the Ottoman Empire.34 The mutual claims by
the Russian and Ottoman Empires of extraterritorial spiritual
authority added another level of conflict to their prolonged
rivalry over the borderlands.
In another revealing parallel with the evolution of Russian
33 ? Ibid, 946 and E.I. Druzhinina, Kiuchuk-Kainardzhiiskii mir 1774 goda, Ego podgotovka i zakliuchenie (Moscow, 1955), 278-307.34 ? For recent discussion of the debate over interpretations of the disputed passages leading to the Crimean War see David Goldfrank, "Policy Traditions and the Menshikov Mission of 1853," in Hugh Ragsdale,(ed.), Imperial Russian Foreign Policy, (Cambridge/New York 1993), 119-58 and V.N. Vinogradov, "Personal Responsibility of Emperor Nicholas I for the Coming of the Crimean War: An Episode in the Diplomatic Struggle in the Eastern Question," ibid. 159-72.
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rulership, there was a marked revival of the spiritual element in
the late Ottoman imperial culture. Like Nicholas II, Sultan
Abdulhamid II sought to revive and to bring under his control the
spiritual element by harkening back to his dynastic ancestors of
the early Ottoman period, that is before Mahmud II. Both autocrats
turned to the past in reaction to the idea of constitutional
reform aimed at establishing an equality of all citizens within
the empire. In the Ottoman case this was the doctrine of
Osmanlilik or "fusion" to be considered in greater detail in the
following section on bureaucracy. Abdulhamid never sincerely
embraced this doctrine. Instead he aimed to employ traditional
religious motifs and vocabulary, (both visual and literary) in
order to reconcile the institutions of the modern secular state
and the founding Islamic myths of the empire. These trends
manifested themselves in four forms: the display of public
symbols; the official iconography; the personal manifestation of
royal favor and symbolic language.35 The overall effect was, once
again similar to Nicholas II's ideological turn, to further
isolate the Ottoman sultan from his own subjects and reenforce his
35 ? Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains. Ideology and the Legitimization of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909, (London, 1998), 17-42.
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30
own suspicions of the modern world.
The Iranian Empire under the Safavid and Qajar dynasties
Was also heir to the ancient kingship traditions of the Sasanian
Empire with a heavy overlay of Islamic religious beliefs and
nomadic (Turkomen) tribal customs. The Sasanian kings ruled by
divine right but they were themselves not divine figures like the
Roman emperors and their power was limited by traditions and the
respect for the privileges of the nobility and clergy
(Zoroastrian) which became increasingly strong in late antiquity.
The ruler was regarded both as a heroic and knightly figure and as
a protector and impartial judge of his people; access to the
throne by the poorest was an old and hallowed tradition.36 Two
major changes in the concept of rulership came with the Arab
conquest in the mid-seventh century and the periodic waves of
nomadic conquests of Iran beginning with the Mongols and
continuing down the foundation of the Safavid dynasty in the early
sixteenth century.
The growth in the authority of the Muslim religious leaders
(ulama) and the power of the tribal aristocracies continued to
36 ? R.N. Frye, "The Political History of Iran under the Sasanians," in The Cambridge History of Iran (Cambridge, 1983) III, 136-148.
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31
exercise a restraining influence upon the ruling dynasts who had
been nomadic chieftains themselves. The creation of the Safavid
dynasty and a crystallization of a syncretic imperial idea was the
result of a popular rebellion by Turkic tribes from Azerbaizhan
dubbed qizilbashi (red turbans), according to legend for the
twelve red stripes on their caps in honor of the twelve imams of
the Shiites. They supported as their leaders the head of a Sufi-
dervish religious order from the Safavid clan that had been
linked, as early as the Mongol period, with the tradition of
popular rebellion. Under this leadership they formed a virtual
independent state in the southeast of the province from which they
launched attacks aimed at unifying Azerbaizhan and then all of
Iran.37 In 1501 they had raised to the throne of Iran Shah Ismail
Safavid, the founder of a new dynasty built on theocratic
principles with himself as heir to the chiliastic tradition of
Shi'ia. Originally, the tribal leaders regarded Shah Ismail as a
god. The qizilbashi gradually assumed the functions of a ruling
elite governing Iran's pastoral, agricultural and urban
communities according to the their tribal and religious
37 ? I.P.Petrushevskii, "Gosudarstva Azerbaizhana v XV v," in Akademiia Nauk Azerbaizhanskoi SSR, Sbornik statei po istorii Azerbaizhana, (Baku, 1949), I,197-210.
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principles. They regarded Azerbaizhan as the ideal Turkic state
where syncretic religious practices prevailed, blending pre-
Islamic local beliefs with shamanist beliefs from the steppe under
a thin veneer of Shiite Islam.38
By the end of the sixteenth century the theocratic basis of
imperial authority had eroded. Shah Abbas, had sought to
centralize the state and anchor his authority on the more
traditional foundations of absolutism even though he remained head
of the order of Sufis and venerated by his subjects as possessing
supernatural powers. But a centralized monarchy was not typical of
post-Mongol Iran. The imperial ideology did not overcome the
tribal and clan loyalties. Under weak rulers seduced by the harem
atmosphere, tribal revolts and widespread banditry became endemic.
Even a religious revival at the end of the seventeenth century
could not restore the authority of the shah. It was directed
against the Sunnis within the country, rather than the main
external enemy of the Ottomans, and thus antagonized some of the
most warlike tribal elements contributing to further internal
38 ? Jean Aubin, "Etudes Safavides. I. Shah Isma'il et les notables de l'Iraq persan," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, II:1 (January 1959), 37-81; idem, "Etudes Safavides. III. L'avenement des Safavides reconsidere," Moyen Orient et Ocean Indien, 5 (1988), 1-130.
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dissolution.39 During Iran's long period of troubles in the 18th
century, the concept of rulership became little more than a shadow
of the charismatic tribal leaders, men like Nadir Shah whose
brilliant military gifts won him great victories that evaporated
with his death.
The founder of the new dynasty Agha Muhammad Khan was himself
a tribal chieftain of the Qajars "lords of the marches in the zone
between Turkomen nomadic pastoralism and Iranian sedentary
agriculture [who] maintained an uneasy balance between the
traditions of the Iranian plateau and those of the steppes."40. In
1789 after almost a decade of continuous fighting to reunite the
country Agah Muhammad Khan took the title shah in a coronation
ceremony that followed the Safavid model. It blended Sufi
religious symbolism and pilgrimage to holy shrines with the
glitter of the old court. But there was no real attempt to restore
the trappings or the substance of a centralized theocratic
monarchy. Rather the Qajar relied more upon managing tribal
39 ? Lawrence Lockhart, The Fall of the Safavid Dynasty and the Afghan Occupation of Persia, (Cambridge, 1958), 21-2, 70-71, 102; Bert Fragner, "Central Asian Aspects of Pre-Modern Iranian History (14-19th century)," Central Asian Studies 4 (1993) 465-71.40 ? Gavin Hambly, "Agah Muhammad Khan and the Establishment of the Qajar Dynasty," Cambridge History of Iran, (Cambridge 1991), VII 107.
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34
politics and maintaining an uneasy truce with the ulama who had
adopted an oppositional stance toward the monarchy, considering it
as basically illegitimate in the absence of the "hidden imam" of
Shiite tradition.41 Thus in Iran as in the Ottoman Empire the
religious foundations of imperial ideology were shifting and
uncertain.
As they moved into “revolutionary time” the Eurasian empires
were confronted with the challenge of popular sovereignty, mass
participation in politics and the secularization of rulership. One
response, to be reviewed in the following section of this essay,
was to attempt through bureaucratic reforms from above to address
the symptoms but not the fundamental causes of discontent and
dissent. The second even less successful response by officials and
loyal intellectuals was to devise supra-national ideologies in
order to combat the rising tide of nationalist agitation in the
multicultural empires of the Habsburgs, Ottoman and Romanovs. Pan-
Germanism, Pan-Slavism and Pan-Islam or Pan-Turkism were not
officially embraced by any of the rulers of the three empires, yet
they exercised a greater or lesser degree of influence within the
41 ? Edvard Abrahamian, "Oriental Despotism: the Case of Qajar Iran," International Journal of Middle East Studies, 5 (1974), 3-31; Hamid Algar, Religion and State in Iran, 1785-1806. The Role of the Ulama in the Qajar Period, (Berkeley, 1969).
34
35
ruling circles and at times were a decisive factor in determining
policy.
There have been attempts to portray one or more of these pan
movements as proto-nationalist.42 While there is some truth in
this, it is important to make a crucial distinction among them on
the basis of their religious and racial components. Pan-Germanism
as preached by Georg Ritter von Schonerer was predominantly racial
and anti-semitic. It had little appeal even among the German-
speaking population of the Habsburg Monarchy, and its main
influence came after its dissolution and the rise of National
Socialism.43 Pan-Slavism or at least its Russian variant combined
religious (Orthodox) and racial (superiority of the Great
Russians). Never officially adopted by the imperial government its
proponents exercised an intermittently strong influence on foreign
policy, particularly in 1877 and after 1910.44 Of the three Pan-
Islam had the strongest religious component and was came closest
to official recognition by a ruler, the sultan Abdulhamid II, who
42 ? See for example, Nikki Keddie, "Pan-Islam as Proto-Nationalism," The Journal of Modern History, 1 (March 1969), 17-28.43 ? Andrew Whiteside, The Socialism of Fools: Georg Ritter von Schonerer and Austrian Pan-Germanism, (Berkeley, 1975).44 ? Hans Kohn, Pan-Slavism, Its History and Ideology, (New York, 1960).
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36
revived the office of the caliphate in the Ottoman constitution of
1876 (only implemented in 1908).45 Pan Turkism and Pan-Islam were
rivals in the Ottoman Empire mainly due to the secular and racial
emphasis of the former. But in the Russian Empire they were
complimentary particularly in the synthesis developed by Ismail
Gasprinskii (Gasprali).46 However, none of these supra-national
ideas gained a mass following under the empires. The reasons are
clear enough; they could not compete with the emotional and
psychological appeals of nationalism; for the imperial elites they
represented potentially disruptive rather than unifying ideologies
in multi-cultural societies and they carried dangerously explosive
implications for foreign policy.
The Chinese case was exceptional on several counts. First,
the concept of rulership was entirely autochthonous and remarkably
uniform over very long periods of time. Second the process of
45 ? A highly amorphous idea, Pan-Islam differed in important ways from other pan movements in the Ottoman Empire including Ottomanism and Pan-Turkism which were not free from an ethical-religious substratum but gave more prominence to secular reform. See Jacob M. Landau, The Politics of Pan-Islam. Ideology and Organization, (Oxford, 1988) especially chapter 1; Serif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought. A study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas (Princeton, 1962).46 ? Alexandre Bennigsen, "Panturkism and Panislamism in History and Today," Central Asian Survey, 3 (1985), 39-68; Landau, The Politics of Pan-Islam.
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empire building was shared by both indigenous and conquest
dynasties. The difference between them was that the conquest
dynasties, Yuan (Mongol) and Qing (Manchu) sought to use China as
a vast resource from which to expand their power over the Inner
Asian steppe from whence they had originated. The longevity of the
Chinese Empire was due in large measure to the combination of a
high level of cultural uniformity reenforced by a powerful
integrative mechanism together with a flexibility of response and
a toleration of alien traditions. A holistic cosmology was rooted
in the tradition of the divinity of the emperor and linked to a
highly developed moral-ethical system (Confucianism). Ritual codes
prescribed the functions of the bureaucracy and the commitments of
the emperor. When the Manchu emperors acquired an Inner Asian
Empire in the eighteenth century they embraced a non-Chinese
religious legitimization of their power. To Mongols and Tibetans
the emperor was "a living incarnation of the gods" in the form of
a reincarnation of the Buddhist Bodhisattva of wisdom.47
The emperor was the supreme law-giver, judge and executive.
His power was absolute in theory but constrained in different ways
47 ? David M. Farquhar, "Emperor as Bodhisattva in the Governance of the Ch'ing Empire," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 1 (June, 1978), 5-34.
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38
than the Russian tsar, Ottoman sultan or Habsburg monarch. The
emperor's authority could be challenged, although it took a brave
man, on matters of ethics as defined by the scholars relying on
their interpretation of the past. Accumulated precedents drawn
from the acts of previous rulers possessed great moral force. It
was possible for the emperor to proclaim "new beginnings" but for
the most part these did not substantially change the "ancient"
institutions like the examination system or the following of
prescribed rituals.48
Evidence of the political importance of ritual abounds in
Chinese history and reveals the inherent problem of reconciling
conflicting ethical norms. In the famous "rites controversy" of
1524 the Emperor Shizong sought to raise his parents posthumously
to the imperial rank as a sign of filial piety, one of the highest
virtues of the Confucian ethic. But this act contradicted
historical precedence and ritual correctness stemming from the
same source. The conflict between family and state values led to a
clash between the emperor and the majority of the scholar-
officials. It was resolved by the emperor's replacing the
officials whose only recourse was to submit or suffer for
48 ? F.W. Mote, Imperial China, 900-1800, (Cambridge, Mass. 1999) 98-9, 296.
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adherence to their ethical ideals.49
The Chinese emperor was not a public figure, more like the
Iranian shah or Ottoman sultans than the Romanov or Habsburg
dynasts. Exceptions were those endowed with military skills and
actually took the field with their troops like the first Ming
emperor Zhu Yuanzhang, or else those like the great Qing emperors,
Kangxi and Qianlong, who organized magnificent tours of the south
and other shorter visits to other regions. But the soldier-
emperors were generally founders of dynasties or former steppe
chieftains and the tours were so highly stylized that there was no
real contact with the population.50
The most ancient and persistent component of the imperial
ideal was the Mandate of Heaven that had its origin in the first
millennium B.C.E. It established an ethical principle of right
conduct as the basis for the emperor's legitimacy. For the emperor
to fail in meeting the standards of right conduct, meant that the
Mandate of Heaven had been withdrawn. Natural disasters and
49 ? Ibid. 644. During the civil war of 1399-1402 that preceded the founding of the Ming dynasty the future emperor Chengzu attempted to justify his usurpation of the throne from the legitimate ruler, his nephew, with the statement: "This is my family matter" claiming in effect that the dynasty was not a matter of state. Those who opposed this interpretation were mercilessly killed. Ibid. 589.50 ? Ibid. 867-68, 916.
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foreign invasions or other kinds of systemic crises could
seriously undermine the moral authority of the emperor and help to
justify rebellion or massive defection of officials and soldiers
from the reigning dynasty. This established a method of bringing
about violent change while guaranteeing for the new rulers the
renewal of divine sanction. But it was inconceivable until the
twentieth century that there was any alternative to the emperor's
absolute authority. At times, however, a real tension developed
over the relationship between the Confucian tradition and the
Mandate of Heaven. For example, under the early Manchus there were
disagreements over whether the legitimacy of the new dynasty
rested upon its absorption of the ethical standards of the Chinese
civilization or upon "unique and inherent favor by Heaven" that
preceded the conquest.51
The Confucian tradition provided a more detailed and
elaborate set of ethical ideals that could be transmitted to the
population through an administrative framework. The famous
examination system for bureaucrats required mastery of the ritual
cannons of Confucianism (which had little to do with the historic
Confucius). Based purely on merit, the examinations were open to
51 ? Pamela Kyle Crossley, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology, (Berkeley, 1999), 256-59.
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individuals from every stratum of the population. In theory at
least it was possible for the son of a poor peasant to rise
through the system to the very pinnacle of the bureaucratic
hierarchy. How deeply or widely Confucian values were distributed
throughout the society is a matter of dispute. However, American
sociologists conducting interviews in the nineteen sixties in
China concluded that "values inculcated as part of the 'great
tradition' spread beyond those who received formal training in the
Confucian classics."52
Confucianism proved responsive to changing political
circumstances and new intellectual currents. Although it lacked
any sense of the transcendental - there was no priestly hierarchy
- it did not reject alternative belief systems like Buddhism and
Taoism. The three teachings competed peacefully with one another
for the patronage of the emperor and for government resources.
Each successive dynasty produced its own ritual codes. On occasion
the system underwent more extensive revisions. For example, in
the Sung dynasty there was a noticeable shift toward a broader,
52 ? Richard Solomon, Mao's Revolution and Chinese Political Culture, (Berkeley, 1970), 92. A substantial section of this volume is devoted to uncovering evidence of the persistence of pre-communist cultural linkages between elites and peasants. Ibid. 99-159.
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devolved intellectual community, less court centered. Perspectives
on man became more universal with an emphasis on self-cultivation
and the quest for sagehood matched by a decline in court ritual.53
Ever since the Southern Song (twelfth century) there had been a
tension within the Confucian tradition between reason or
"evidential research" and idealism, or innate knowledge. The
controversy between advocates of each school testified to the
vitality of the tradition; as conditions changed and new problems
arose scholars explored new approaches to the ancient texts. As
the neo-Confucian synthesis of the Sung, the school of reason,
became more highly stylized and dogmatic over the following
centuries, it came under sharp criticism the sixteenth century by
Wang Yangming who attempted to reinvigorate the tradition of the
unity of thought and action.54 But Neo-Confucianism retained its
influence throughout the imperial period. Even after the collapse
of the last dynasty its ethical principles continued to influence
Chinese rulers, in particular Chiang Kai-shek.55
53 ? David McMullen, "Bureaucrats and Cosmology: the Ritual Code of T'ang China," in Cannadine and Price, Rituals of Royalty, 181-236.54 ? Mote, Imperial China, 144-49; 679-81; 931-35.55 ? Mary C. Wright, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The T'ung Chich Restoration, 1862-1874, (New York, 1966), chapter 12.; Kai-wing Chow, The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China: Ethics, Classics and Lineage Discourse, (Stanford,1994)
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Even a brief comparative survey of imperial elite cultures,
both as system and practice, reveals a surprisingly high level of
dynamism and flexibility. Traditions and myths were frequently
invented or reinterpreted in order to meet changing circumstances
and individual needs of rulers. The revisions were then
transmitted to the ruling elite and the rest of society through
new rituals, ceremonies and historical narratives. During certain
periods in the course of empire building the ruling elites
displayed a willingness to extend toleration to religions or
ideologies that stood outside the bounds of the hegemonic culture.
All of the Eurasian empires at one time or another were receptive
to external cultural influences long before the impact of the
French and industrial revolutions. Even when faced with the
potentially destructive impact of the dual revolutions, elements
within the ruling elites and individual rulers made efforts to
incorporate or synthesize new institutions and currents of thought
into the hegemonic culture. A discussion of these reformist
impulses belongs more properly to the following section on
imperial bureaucracies.
* * *
Imperial cultures expressed in rituals and ceremonies
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performed an important function in symbolizing a ruler's power and
glory. For the most part, however, the immediate visual effect was
felt only by the ruling elite, representatives of foreign states
and to a lesser extent the populations of the capital cities of
the empires. All empires shared a common problem in communicating
the symbols of power to the mass of people who were illiterate
peasants living for the most part at great distances from the
capital cities. The conversion of symbolic power into forms of
mobilizing human and material resources required an administrative
framework that extended into the towns and villages of the
countryside. The costs of imperial defense and the maintenance of
the court rapidly outstripped the capacities of the landed
nobility to provide both the necessary services and monetary
income. The imperial bureaucracy evolved in order to fulfill a
double function; first to serve as a visible, symbolic
representation of the imperial presence, wearing a uniform or
distinctive dress, displaying a badge of office, and second to
collect taxes, provide recruits for the army and administer
justice. As Max Weber expressed it: "The decisive reason for the
advance of bureaucratic organization has always been its purely
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technical superiority over any other form of organization."56
However, the view that bureaucratic efficiency is best
promoted by effective centralization has been challenged by recent
research. Building on the insights of Charles Tilly that state
building in Europe was as much the result of complex bargaining
between the central authorities and local populations as it was
the application of coercion, historians have explored different
ways in which the administrative structures of non-European
empires developed along similar though not identical trajectories.
Tilly placed emphasis on the dialectical relationship between
coercion and capital, that is the centralized authority of the
state and the countervailing power of commercial interests as the
two major players in the competition to extract resources for
waging war.57 His re-interpreters shifted the locus of bi-polar
tension to the central and local elites or even more suggestive
56 ?Max Weber, Economy and Society, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, (Berkeley, 1978), 973. Weber continues that "The more complicated nd specialized modern culture becomes, the more its external supporting apparatus demands the personally detached and strictly objective expert in place of the lord of older social structures who was moved by personal sympathy and favor, by grace and gratitude." Ibid. 975. To be sure the substitution of expert for lord was not complete in the imperial structure, and tension or rivalry between the two continued to exist.57 ? Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States AD 990-1992, (London, 1992).
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46
for the fate of empires to the central authority and the
frontiers.58 In either case the key to their relationship, again
taking a cue from Tilly is the process of "bargaining."59 Put
another way the central government, no matter how strong its
coercive power, was obliged to work out agreements with the local
elites or the frontier provinces in order to extract from its own
population the taxes and recruits necessary to protect the
territorial integrity of the country or acquire new resources by
expanding its boundaries. The army may have been the main coercive
elements of the Eurasian empires but if necessary they were not
sufficient guarantees of stability and security. As the ancient
Chinese proverb contended: "empires can be won on horseback but
cannot be governed from there."
Not surprisingly, China as the oldest continuous empire in
Eurasia was the first to develop the principles of bureaucratic
government. What is surprising is the stability of the original
design over a period of almost 2000 years. Although pre-Confucian
58 ? See for example, Ariel Salzman, "An Ancient Regime Revisited: 'Privatization' and Political Economy in the Eighteenth Century Ottoman Empire," Politics and Society, 4 (1993) 393-423; Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: the Ottoman Route to Centralization (New York, 1994); Dina Rizk Khoury, State and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire: Mosul, 1540-1834, (Cambridge, 1997); Crossley, A Translucent Mirror. 59 ? Tilly, Coercion, 99-103 and passim.
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in its origins, the Chinese bureaucracy was consolidated by the
examination system based upon mastery of Confucian texts. Highly
centralized - the emperor personally made all appointments -
rationalistic, hierarchical, mobile with built in control
mechanisms, the bureaucracy was able to govern an enormous
population with surprisingly few numbers; by the nineteenth
century from 30-40,000 officials of all ranks administered a
country of about 400 million inhabitants.60
The authority of the bureaucrats (sometimes called scholar
officials) did not stem from the rule of law or any constitutional
structures. Rather it drew its strength from a set of ethical
precepts allowing it to claim an autonomous position in relation
to the emperor and a mediating position between the emperor and
people. The first of these was cumulative tradition. Its main
features were propriety, wisdom, righteousness and truthfulness.
They were embedded in the classical texts but also were widely
spread in the villages and market towns by local officials,
literati, and traders more by example and oral transmission than
60 ? For the originality of the system see Herrlee G. Creel, The Origins of Statecraft in China. vol. I, The Western Chou Empire, (Chicago, 1970); for its functioning at its height, Thomas Metzger, The Internal Organization of Ch'ing Bureaucracy: Legal, Normative and Communications Aspects (Cambridge, Mass, 1974).
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written communication. The second precept was social practice,
being in touch with local affairs and serving as the conscience of
the people. The third was a sense of responsibility for popular
well being and domestic order that took the form of responding to
periodic calls by emperors for new ideas by claiming to represent
"the voice of the people on behalf of heaven." The final precept
was the belief in the power of the will of the individual to
uphold the high ethical ideals of the society even in the face of
pressure or persecution by an unjust ruler.61 The moral code of the
bureaucrats, although powerful, was not an iron-clad guarantee
against corruption or the amassing of great wealth. But the main
problem that complicated the role of the scholar-official was his
dual loyalty, one the one hand to his regional base and
bureaucratic ethos and on the other hand to the emperor who all
too often made demands upon him that could not be squared with his
conscience.62
If the scholar officials could not conceive of a state
without an emperor with absolute powers, so the emperors could not
61 ? Tu Wei-ming, "The Enlightenment Mentality and the Chinese Intellectual Dilemma," in Lieberthal et al, Perspectives on Modern China, 109-112.62 ? Vivienne Shue, The Reach of the State:Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic, (Stanford, 1988), 87.
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govern without the scholar officials. This lesson was brought home
with particular force whenever a conquest dynasty from the steppes
seized power in China. The Mongols and Manchus were not numerous
or experienced enough to administer a vast and populous sedentary
society without assistance from the Chinese bureaucrats. To be
sure, the new rulers, like Kubilai Khan, sought to staff the
government offices in so far as possible with Mongols and Western
Asians but even they had to be literate and have some knowledge of
Chinese bureaucratic methods. Kubilai Khan was himself a great
admirer of Confucian principles. In the early years of the Manchu
dynasty there was considerable tension between the Chinese scholar
officials and Manchu nobles who were given extensive lands by the
Qing emperors, but this gradually declined throughout the
eighteenth century. The emperors were more successful in
preserving the administrative autonomy of the northeastern
provinces (Manchuria) and maintaining the original organization of
their army into banners. But the banners were reduced to a
military arm of the government and lost their power to the
increasingly centralized Qing bureaucracy.63 Throughout the history
of imperial China there were periods of tinkering with the central
63 ? Mote, Imperial China, 489-94, 892-96.
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institutions of rule; there were also cases of vast purges of
officials, burning of texts and re-editing of the classics. But
the main supports of the structure remained unchanged including
the examination system that provided the glue necessary to hold
the state together.
Recently, however, historians have challenged the traditional
view of the centralized structure of the Chinese empire by arguing
that the bureaucracy engaged in a complex process of negotiating
or bargaining with “barbarians” on the frontiers of Inner Asia.
This took several forms including trade and tribute, a high degree
of religious toleration, especially toward Lamaism, different
administrative systems for the outer provinces, and various
resettlement projects some of which to be sure involved an element
of coercion.64 A more detailed analysis of the role of the frontier
in shaping the central institutions and policies of Chinese
governments appears in the third part of this essay.
To be sure in the long run, admittedly a very long run, the
64 ? Peter C. Purdue, "Manchu Colonialism," in International History Review 2 (1998), 255-262 and idem, "Empire and Nation in Comparative Perspective"Frontier Administration in Eighteenth Century China," Journal of Early Modern History, 2001, 282-304. Joseph Fletcher was perhaps the first to suggest the reciprocal influence of the frontier on Chinese administrative practice in "Ch'ing Inner Asia c. 1800," in Cambridge History of China, (Cambridge, 1978) X, 378.
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Chinese bureaucracy was unable to accommodate to the most radical
and subversive outside influences, those from the West. Moreover
it was not without its internal weaknesses. It suffered from an
overly rigid decision-making process and corruption. But it was
generally successful in carrying out its main functions until the
coercive intrusion of Europe into China in the mid-nineteenth
century forced a reevaluation of the traditional training and
functioning of the bureaucracy.
The response of the Chinese bureaucracy to the European
challenge has been called "the self-strengthening movement." At
first only a few leading officials recognized the need to change
the education system as a prelude to introducing western
administrative techniques and technology. Defeat by Japan in 1895
inspired the famous "Hundred Days of Reform" three years later.
But the fierce resistance of the overwhelming majority of
officials, who rightly perceived that their status and functions
were directly threatened by the changes, doomed the reforms and
the reformers. It required yet another crisis, the Boxer Rebellion
of 1900 to persuade the government to abolish the old examination
system. But the opening of new schools and sending students abroad
to study was not accompanied by fundamental changes in the
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bureaucratic hierarchy or the dominant Confucian mentality.
Consequently, students became rapidly alienated from the regime
and increasingly radicalized. Despite a reorganization of the
central ministries and preparations for a derogation of power to
the provinces, the reforming impulse proved too feeble in the face
of mounting pressure for rapid changes. The traditional
bureaucracy was incapable of controlling the transition to a
constitutional government.
If stability, orderliness and cohesion are the earmarks of a
successful imperial bureaucracy then the Iranian experience
represents the opposite extreme from China on the comparative
spectrum. To be sure the Sasanian Empire had fully developed a
bureaucratic organization by the 5th century.65 A Persian
officialdom continued to operate under the Arab conquest although
the ulama challenged its authority in several areas. But the real
change came with the Turkomen invasion. From the 11th to the 19th
century the dominant elements in the Iranian political system were
tribal and religious. There was a brief revival of a centralized
bureaucracy under the early Safavids in the sixteenth century. But
from the late sixteenth to the nineteenth century (the later
65 ? Frye, "The Political History of Iran”, 148.
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Safavid and the Qajar dynasties) the central and regional
bureaucracies were rudimentary.
The functions of the central bureaucracy were largely
confined to collecting taxes and customs duties. The provincial
governors had their own courts, administrative and revenue
officials. But their authority was frequently challenged by big
landowners and tribal chiefs of the surrounding countryside. The
ruler appointed the provincial governors, generally from his
relatives, and the treasurers a post that tended to be hereditary.
Almost all other offices were purchased, providing the Shah with a
major source of income. Aristocratic blood meant little. It was
possible to rise from humble or even non-Iranian origins. The
tenure of officials was uncertain; the Shah had the right to
confiscate the lands of officials who incurred his displeasure.66
Along with the tribal resistance the ulama presented an even
greater challenge to a centralized, secular, Iranian bureaucracy.
After the fall of the Safavid dynasty the Shi'a ulama was freed
from its dependence on the state and embarked on a process of
strengthening its hold over law, the judicial system, education
66 ? Gavin Hambly, "Iran During the Reigns of Fath Ali Shah and Muhammed Saha, in the Cambridge History of Iran, (Cambridge, 1991) VII, 150-51; Nikki Keddie, "Iran under the Later Qajars, 1848-1922," in ibid. 174-77.
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and charitable activities. The majority held the view that the
Qajar dynasty was illegitimate. This led increasingly to open
confrontation with the state bureaucracy and further complicated
the administration of the country. During the long reign of Nasi
al-Din (1846-1896) the ulama were jolted into political action by
the large-scale western economic and political penetration of
Iran. As in the Ottoman and Russian Empires a small group of
bureaucratic reformers had attempted to introduce western models
into the army, educational system and administration. But in Iran
the ulama became the chief opponents of secular influence. Tension
reached a climax when the government attempted to limit their
jurisdiction in courts, schools and charitable foundations while
at the same time granting extensive economic concessions to
foreigners.67 Although the ulama were divided over the issue of
changing the form of the state, the more liberal wing allied
itself with tribesmen, merchants and artisans to create what Ira
Lapidus has called "the first 'national' resistance to the Qajar
monarchy."68 Ironically, in Iran resistance to western influence
and bureaucratic reformers prompted demands for constitutional
67 ?Hamid Algar, Religion and the State in Iran, 1785-1806. The Role of the Ulama in the Qajar Period, (Berkeley, 1969).68 ? Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, (Cambridge, 1988), 577.
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reform, that is a western innovation, as the only means of
preventing the weakly centralized monarchy from falling into
complete dependence upon foreigners. During the constitutional
crisis of 1905-1911 the shah had to rely on outside help, mainly
the Russians, in order to defeat the constitutionalists and
restore the power of the monarchy. By this time it was clear that
Iran had become an empire with too many power centers - the court
and bureaucracy, the ulama, the merchants and tribesmen, none of
which could dominate the others.
Still the view inspired by Western travelers that the Iranian
bureaucracy was simply a vicious and venal system has undergone
revision. There was a tradition, however attenuated, of imperial
service going back at least to the Seljuk period that deserves
some credit for preserving the integrity of the state. The real
success of the Iranian bureaucracy over the long run was its
ability to reach accommodation with the tribes and the ulama
through a process of bargaining. As long as the government, and
especially the Shah, could demonstrate a modicum of piety it could
avoid a direct confrontation with the ulama. Its task was more
formidable than the Chinese bureaucracy not only because of the
power of its internal rivals but also because of the growing
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influence of Russia and Great Britain over the Iranian economy in
the nineteen and early twentieth century. One major difficulty
facing the Iranian bureaucracy in its abortive efforts to reform
was similar to that of the Chinese: namely its isolation from the
world beyond its frontiers. The success of the central power in
balancing on the knife's edge by making appropriate concessions to
the tribes and ulama prevented it from introducing the fundamental
reforms necessary for survival in the twentieth century.69
The Ottoman bureaucracy by contrast to the Iranian had been
based on a firm alliance of the Sultan's administrative elite
(ironically based upon the ancient Persian concept) and the Sunni
ulama. Another way of describing this symbiotic relationship was
the fusion of state law (kanun) that dealt with fiscal justice and
the moral order based on the application of the shari'a by the
provincial courts. In the early Ottoman centuries the bureaucracy
perceived the wisdom of modifying their fiscal policies and their
definition of landed property upon which the fiscal system was
based according to individual differences in the provinces,
69 ? Saul Bakhash, "The Evolution of the Qajar Bureaucracy, 1779-1879, " Middle East Studies, 7 (May 1971) 139-168; Colin Meredith, "Early Qajar Administration: An Analysis of Its Development and Functions," Iranian Studies, 4 (1971), 59-84; Hambly, "Iran during the Reigns of Fath Ali Shah and Muhammed Shah," 157-158.
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particularly those along sensitive frontiers. At the same time
they often granted provincial judges wide latitude in interpreting
the law.70 At least, such was the case in provinces to the east and
south where Muslims predominated.
Thus, the Ottoman government at its most successful depended
upon its ability to function at the central and local level
combining what has been called both accumulative and
redistributive institutions. The Sunni ulama who contrary to the
Shiite in Iran had no doctrinal difficulty in supporting the
sultan, performed the important function of helping to promote the
redistributive power sharing functions and spreading them
throughout the system. This represented not so much a division
between the center and the periphery as a balance between the
moral world of the shari'a and the fiscal requirements of the
state.71
The symbiotic relationship broke down in the nineteenth
70 ? Dina Rizk Khoury, "Administrative Practice Between Religious Law (Shari'a) and State Law (Kanun) on the Eastern Frontiers of the Ottoman Empire," Journal of Early Modern History (2001) 305-330 and for a more detailed study of one frontier region, idem. State and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire: Mosul 1540-1834 (Cambridge, 1997). 71 ? Isenbike Togan, "Ottoman History by Inner Asian Norms," in Halil Berktay and Suraiya Faroqui (eds.), New Approaches to State and Peasant in Ottoman History, (London, 1992), 185-210.
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century when the military and economic challenge posed by the
western powers forced a revival of the highly centralized
bureaucratic system. By the end of the eighteenth century Ottoman
diplomats and court officials sought to reverse the string of
military defeats and loss of territories by ending the power
sharing and restoring the centralized authority of the sultan.
Their attempts to introduce reforms, though rooted in traditional
views of the Islamic state (kanun) were opposed by the ulama,
Janissaries and provincial notables (ayan). The struggle
culminated in a series of confrontations under Selim III (1789-
1802) and Mahmud II (1808-1839) when the power of the Janissaries
and ayan was smashed and the status of the state servitors changed
from that of slaves of the sultan to servants of the state. Many
of the new bureaucrats had been trained in education centers
created in the eighteenth century for diplomats like the
Translation Office.72
This created a new bureaucratic ethos and spurred the rapid
growth of a self-confident, even arrogant elite of top officials
72 ? Halil Inalcik, “The Nature of Traditional Society in Turkey,” in Robert W. Ward and Dankwart A. Rostow, Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey, (Princeton, 1960), 42-63; Thomas Naff, “The Ottoman Empire and Europe,” in Headley Bull and Adam Watson, The Experience of International Society, (Oxford, 1985).
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who took over from the sultan the political authority to reform
administrative structure of the empire along western lines. The
Tanzimat or period of reform (1839-1877) was largely the creation
of an elite drawn from a limited number of families who had
hereditary claims on high office many of whom were Christian.
Influenced by western currents of thought, they sought to create a
constitutional system in which all religious and ethnic
discrimination would be eliminated and honest, efficient
government would reconcile the Christians as well as the Muslims
to an Ottoman identity (Osmanlilik). Their crowning achievement
was the constitution of 1876 that for the first time provided for
the elections of Christians to a representative assembly. A
triumph of bureaucratic reform it was greeted with enthusiasm by
Jews, Armenians and Greeks but not by the Slavs. And the sultan
almost immediately turned against the constitution, suspending it
for forty years and eliminating the chief reformers like Midhat
Pasha.73
Opposition to the reforms was not confined to the sultan.
Resistance developed among the lesser bureaucrats who were closed
out of the circulation of elites, the ulama who resented their
73 ? Roderic Davidson, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856-1876, (Princeton, 1963), 43-5, 92-8; 115-20; 362-90, 407.
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loss of influence and the army which was also sidelined by the new
bureaucrats.74 The leaders of the opposition, the Young Ottomans,
attempted to combine the Islamic principle of the biat (bai'a),
that is the ruler's obligation to consult with the community, with
western constitutional principles. They were critical of the
bureaucratic reformers for having abandoned Islamic principles
while at the same time failing to grant civil rights; for having
allowed foreigners to penetrate all aspects of Ottoman life and
control the economy. For them the constitution of 1876 installed
by the bureaucratic reformers was inadequate although it seemed to
embody many elements of their thought.75 The split in the
bureaucracy between the centralizers of the Tanzimat and the Young
Ottomans supported by the army and ulama seriously weakened the
reforming impulse and facilitated Abdulhamid's restoration of the
sultan’s despotic power over all the contending elements within
the political elite. The new sultan was not opposed to modernizing
the state. But his reforms of secondary and higher secular
education worked against his revival of the Islamic principles and
74 ? Serif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought. A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas, (Princeton, 1962) especially chapter four.75 ? Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, (London, 1961) especially chapter 5.
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the caliphate. Thus, as in China, Iran and, as will be shown,
Russia the attempts to reconcile a revitalized imperial ideology
based upon traditional moral or religious codes and secular
education destined to create a new class of efficient bureaucratic
servitors produced a radical student population that was
instrumental in bringing about revolutionary changes.
The predominantly German bureaucracy of the Habsburg Monarchy
most nearly approached the Weberian ideal type. But it too passed
through a series of historical changes that altered its
relationship to other corporate bodies in society and to the ruler
as well. It is possible to discern four major periods in its
evolution. During the seventeenth century it took shape in
reaction to threats to the integrity of the monarchy from the
Ottoman Turks and the Protestants. In alliance with the Catholic
Church and the army as the three bulwarks of the empire, the
bureaucracy fit easily into the hierarchical Baroque model of
government with its emphasis on conformity, rank, the formality of
inter-personal exchanges, submissiveness to authority and the
theatricality of public occasions. A different tradition
introduced by the enlightenment (cameralist) reforms under Maria
Theresa and Joseph II brought about immediate and direct
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improvements in the life of the serfs prompting the origins of the
Fuhrermythos, the almost religious trust of the peasantry in the
higher authority represented by the emperor.76 The bureaucracy
became a place of employment and refuge for writers, poets and
scholars committed to progressive, rationalist reform until a
reversal set in as a reaction to the French Revolution.
Nevertheless, the bureaucracy continued to carry out its
administrative duties in an orderly, reliable and honest fashion,
helping to create an upper middle class, a "second society" close
to but not identical with the nobility who maintained their
representation at the very top levels of government. The
bureaucracy became increasingly professionalized and collectively
advanced the cause of the rule of law (Rechtsstaat).77 On the other
hand, the strong reaction of Emperor Francis I against the
Enlightenment and the French Revolution led to what John Boyer has
called “almost a schizoid state” for the bureaucracy. Francis’
76 ? Ernst Hanisch, Osterreichische Geschichte, 1890-1990. Der lange Schatten des Staates: Oestereichische Gesellschaftsgeschichte in zwanzigsten Jahrhundert, (Vienna, 1994), 30-41.77 ? Waltraud Heindl, Gehorsame Rebellen: Burokratie und Beamte in Osterreich, 1780 bis 1848, (Vienna, 1991). In a tantalizing coda the author questions whether the Weberian model is not less applicable to the Austrian situation than the formulations of Franz Kafka.
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concept of the bureaucracy as the instrument of social conformity
and immobility diluted Josephinian ideals of social
rationalization and cameralism.78
After 1848 the social profile of the top-level bureaucracy
changed dramatically. The young emperor Franz Joseph’s chief
minister, Anton von Schmerling, appointed representatives of the
middle class to replace nobles who had been deeply shaken and
discredited by the revolutionary events.79 After 1867 they played
a decisive role in creating a welfare state earlier than almost
anywhere in Europe. The bureaucracy emerged from the
constitutional experiments of the fifties and sixties as one
element in a new tripartite administrative structure that included
a politically influential system of local and regional corporate
bodies where the nobles had taken refuge and the German Liberal
Party that emphasized individual political rights.80 Educational
reforms enabled more non-Germans, particularly Czechs and other
78 ? John Boyer, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna, (Chicago, 1981), pp. 4-5.79 ? Anton Adalbert Klein, Geschichte und Kulturleben Osterreichs von 1792 bis zum Staatsvertrag von 1955,(Vienna/Stuttgart, 1965), 288-90.80 ? John W. Boyer, "Freud, Marriage and Late Viennese Liberalism. A Commentary from 1905," Journal of Modern History 2 (March 1978) 72-4.
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Slavs to enter the bureaucratic ranks.81 By the last decades of the
monarchy the bureaucracy engaged the corporate bodies in an almost
continuous process of bargaining in order to circumvent the
deadlock in parliament produced by the conflict between the
nationalities.82 After 1897 ministerial appointments were made
increasingly from the higher levels of the civil service. The
bureaucracy retained and in some cases even strengthened its
control over a mass of internal administrative matters from
regulating trade and industry, sanitation and primary school
education to criminal justice. The political parties entered into
this mutually beneficial relationship in the hope that they could
use the powerful administrative state for their own advantage.83 At
the same time, the bureaucracy was increasingly politicized and
radicalized first in the 1860s and 1870s by the liberal party and
then in the 1880s and 1890s by the anti-semitic Christian Social
Party. This final act of accomodation by the bureaucracy created
81 ? Boyer, Political Radicalism, 278-80.82 ? Hanisch, Oesterreichische Geschichte, 232; for a case study of bargaining see Gary B. Cohen, Education and Middle Class Society in Imperial Austria, 1848-1918 (West Lafayette, Ind., 1996), especially 108-26.83 ? Gary B. Cohen,"Neither Absolutism nor Anarchy: New Narratives on Society and Government in Late Imperial Austria," Austrian History Yearbook, 1 (1998), 37-62.
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more tensions than it resolved.84 The pattern of symbiosis between
mass parties and bureaucracy continued after the collapse of the
empire, when the successor states combined a powerful centralized
bureaucracy with an elected parliament that was controlled, unlike
the discarded imperial model, by the dominant ethnic group in the
country and lacked the mediating presence of the emperor.
The role of the Russian bureaucracy in contributing to the
stability and longevity of the empire appears to be more complex
in comparative terms. Or else it may be simply that it has been
the subject of more scholarly attention.85 By introducing the Table
of Ranks Peter I created the framework for the modern Russian
bureaucracy. But, like many of his other innovations this one did
not mark a radical break with the past. Among the strong elements
of continuity with the previous century were the importance of
merit as well as birth, remuneration in salaries instead of land,
a fusion of the low born and the high born, and the strong
84 ? Boyer,Political Radicalism, 293-94, 304-05, 349-52, 415-16.85 ? Two bibliographical surveys of the literature up to the end of the nineteen seventies are Daniel T. Orlovsky, "Recent Studies on the Russian Bureaucracy," Russian Review 3 (October 1976), 448-67; Marc Raeff, "The Bureaucratic Phenomena of Imperial Russia, 1700-1905" American Historical Review, 3 (April, 1979). Additional collective works dealing with the bureaucracy as a reforming agency are Larissa Zakharova et al, Velikie reformy v Rossii, 1856-1874 (Moscow, 1992) and Theodore Taranovski (ed.), Reform in Modern Russian History. Progress or Cycle? Cambridge, 1995.
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presence of the intellectual elite in government offices.86 Peter's
reforms did introduce uniform ranking and a clear definition of
career development for the elite that only gradually replaced the
clan and family basis for advancement in office.87 The higher
nobles continued to dominate the top ranks well into the
nineteenth century. In the same way, within the state
administration the military as opposed to the civilian career
brought more prestige and until the mid-nineteenth century was the
best guarantee of rapid promotion.
The main changes in the Petrine pattern of bureaucratic
service came in the period between 1801 and 1848 with the
introduction of ministerial government and the growing importance
of formal education in the training of future civil servants. This
lead in turn to a growing distinction between the professional
bureaucrat increasingly divorced from the land and the landed
nobility, an increase in the specialization of function and the
86 ? Borivoj Plavsic, "Seventeenth Century Chanceries and their Staffs," in Walter M. Pintner and Don Karl Rowney, Russian Officialdom. The Bureaucratization of Russian History from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, (Chapel Hill, 1980), 19-4587 ? Nancy Shields Kollmann, Kinship and Politics. The Making of the Muscovite Political System, 1345-1547, (Stanford, 1987), 14-19 reviews the Russian and western literature noting that the latter stress the importance of "family, marriage, friendship and patronage" well into the eighteenth century. Ibid. 17.
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separation of the military and civil servitors.88
During the Great Reforms these changes gave rise to the
emergence of ministerial interest groups which were attached to a
set of aims and aspirations that went beyond the personality and
tenure of a single minister.89 Within their own spheres these
interest groups were able to bring about significant changes in
the social and economic life of the empire; they were the
architects of the great reforms. But the tsar, Alexander II,
remained to strongly attached to his autocratic power to allow the
formation of a united government, that is a homogeneous ministry
of like-minded reformers, even one under his own leadership.
Instead he preferred the role of the "managerial tsar," the
mediator among the conflicting interest groups and ministers.90
88 ? Walter M. Pintner, "The Evolution of Civil Officialdom, 1755-1855," in idem, Russian Officialdom, 190-226. An excellent study of the role of education under Nicholas I is Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia's Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825-1861, (De Kalb, Ill. 1982). The impact of education on the bureaucracy was particularly important in the technical ministries. See for example, Richard Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness, (Chicago, 1976), especially chapter 2. Compare Daniel Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform: The Ministry of Internal Affairs in Imperial Russia, 1802-1881, (Cambridge, Mass. 1981) who illuminates both the generalist character of the MVD and its "police power ideology" that emerged in the campaign against terrorism.89 ? A. J. Rieber (Riber), “Gruppovie interesy v bor’be vokrug Velikikh reform,” in Zakharova, Velikie reformy, 44-72.90 ? Ibid. 78-9.
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This strategy was pursued by his successors. As a result the
reforming process, guided by the bureaucracy continued but in an
partial, irregular, uncoordinated and often counter-productive
manner. The day to day maintenance of order in the provinces that
had always depended more on negotiations than repression was
beginning to falter with the decline of the patriarchal authority
of the governors, the personal representatives of the tsar.91
By the end of the century two contradictory processes
coexisted within the ministerial bureaucracies. On the one hand
there was an important shift in the composition of the
bureaucratic elite. The core was composed overwhelmingly of
Russians who were committed to spreading Russian language and
culture throughout the imperial borderlands, "to turn as much as
possible of their empire into something resembling a Russian
nation."92 On the other hand there was the emergence of a new
generation of enlightened, reforming bureaucrats who had no direct
connection with the first generation trained in the reign of
91 ? Richard G. Robbins, Jr, The Tsar’s Viceroys. Russian Provincial Governors in the Last Years of the Empire, (Ithaca, 1987)especially chapter 9.92 ? Dominic Lieven, Empire. The Russian Empire and Its Rivals, (New Haven, 2000), 283. For a more detailed analysis see idem, Russia's Rulers under the Old Regime,(New Haven, 1989). At mid-century from 15% to 20% of the central bureaucracy was still composed of Germans and Poles. Pintner, ”The Evolution,” 207-08.
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Nicholas I but who envisaged carrying to a conclusion the
unfinished business of the Great Reforms. They were responsible
for launching the industrial development of the 1890s and drafting
the Stolypin reforms.93 Over the past two decades western scholars
have disagreed over the effectiveness and efficiency of the
Russian bureaucracy. In one camp there are those who stress the
evidence of higher levels of education, growing
professionalization of outlook and a stronger commitment to
legality although they recognize that the process was uneven in
different ministries and between the center and the provinces.94 In
the other camp are those who emphasize the persistence of patron
client relationships, the absence of a unified bureaucratic
system and the failure to create a genuine rule of law
(Rechtsstaat).95 Both sides concur that deep tensions split the
93 ? David A. J. Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, 1861-1906: The Prehistory of the Stolypin Reforms, (De Kalb. Ill, 1987), 44-68. B. V. Ananich and R. Sh. Ganelin, Sergei Iul'evich Vitte i ego Vremia, (St. Petersburg, 1999).94 ? For example, George Yaney, The Systematization of Russian Government: Social Evolution in the Domestic Administration of Imperial Russia, 1711-1905, (Urbana, 1973) and Domenic Lieven, Russia's Rulers under the Old Regime, (New Haven, 1987).95 ? For example, Raeff, "The Bureaucratic Phenomenon";Andrew M. Verner, The Crisis of Russian Autocracy. Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution, (Princeton, 1990) 52-55; Walter M. Pintner and Don Karl Rowney, "Officialdom and Bureaucratization: Conclusion," in idem, Russian Officialdom,379; Robbins, The Tsar’s Viceroys.
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bureaucracy into factions.96 There is general agreement that in the
reign of Nicholas II the bureaucracy became increasingly isolated
from society on the one hand and detached from the person of the
tsar on the other. Nicholas had exchanged the role of a managerial
tsar standing above and mediating the bureaucratic conflicts to an
interventionist tsar who endorsed one political course of action.97
The peculiar strength of the bureaucracy proved in the long run to
be a fatal weakness. It had provided the empire not only with a
group of increasingly well-trained and hard-working civil servants
but had served as the main arena of politics where conflicting
points of view could be advanced and debated. Following the
creation of a State Duma and the growing hostility of the tsar to
any sign of opposition to his rigid political outlook, whether on
the floor of the Duma or within the imperial chancelleries, the
bureaucracy lost its main function as the link between the
96 ? According to the orthodox position the split was between liberals and conservatives or reformers and reactionaries. For an alternative view that such terminology derives from western European experience and is inappropriate for Russian conditions see Alfred J. Rieber, " Alexander II: A Revisionist View," Journal of Modern History, 1 (March 1971), 42-58 and idem ""Patronage and Professionalism. The Witte System," in B.V. Anan’ich et al, Problemy vsemirnoi istorii, (St. Petersburg, 2000), 286-97. 97 ? David M. McDonald, "United Government and the Crisis of Autocracy, 1905-1914," in Taranovskii, Reform,208-12; Verner, The Crisis of Russian Autocracy. especially chapter 2.
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autocrat and the people.
The responses of imperial bureaucracies to external threats
and internal crises demonstrates the fallacy of most theories of
decline. The long histories of the Eurasian empires reveal periods
of crisis and renewal, not to be sure in any regular cyclical
fashion, but rather in response to the specific challenges to the
imperial system. Although their functions and procedures were
routinized in the Weberian sense, they shared with intellectuals,
literati and religious thinkers the same educational system that
exposed them to the ethical sources whether ancient concepts of
kingship, the Koran, Confucian Analects, Christian theologies or
secular humanism in the shape of the Enlightenment. Except for the
Habsburg Monarchy reform from above through bureaucratic means
pre-dated Western influences and was rooted in indigenous
cultures. The challenge to imperial bureaucracies from Western
ideas was of a wholly different magnitude. It posed the problem of
how to justify change that appeared to be culturally subversive.
Although there were numerous attempts within the imperial
bureaucracies to reconcile the contradiction, none of them
succeeded. It had been considerably easier to absorb, adjust to or
bargain with the invasive steppe cultures that had comparatively
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few permanent institutions than to incorporate the complex
cultures of the west.
* * *
The ability of empires to manage their frontiers was the
third measure of their longevity. The term management is
preferable to that of defense because the process involved more
than a construction of military lines. A variety of techniques
were employed ranging from trade and tribute to repressive
population movements as well as the traditional use of armed
force. The multiplicity of means developed during the long history
of relationships between the sedentary empires and the steppe, on
the one hand, and among the competing empires themselves, on the
other hand.
The following section seeks to locate Eurasian frontiers
within a general typology of frontiers, analyze their shared
characteristics, identify intense zones of conflict to be called
complex frontiers and outline the persistent importance of
frontiers in shaping state institutions and ideologies. Eurasian
Empires represent a series of variations on three major types of
frontiers: the west European state frontier, the Islamic frontier
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and the dynamic frontier.98 The Habsburg and Russian frontiers,
like their symbol of the imperial double eagle, face in two
directions involving them in two kinds of frontier experience.
Their boundaries with European states share common characteristics
with the west European sub-type - stable and well defined by an
international treaty system. But to the southeast for centuries
the Habsburgs faced the Islamic type - military and culturally
contested while the Russians faced a dynamic frontier with its
sedentary agricultural population advancing against a nomadic
culture. The Ottoman and Iranian empires belong to the Islamic
type both in their relationship to one another - Sunni versus
Sh'ia - and with the non-Islamic world at least until the
eighteenth century when they were forcibly drawn into defining
their frontiers facing the Habsburg and Russian empires along the
lines of the West European state system. The Chinese belongs to
the dynamic type. Their centuries old interaction with the nomadic
world culminated in modern times with the advance of their
sedentary agricultural population into the grasslands and the
establishment of a West European type state boundary with Russia.
Thus the history of imperial frontiers is one of great complexity
98 ? Alfred J. Rieber, "Frontiers in History," International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, (Oxford, 2001), 5812-819.
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and change in response not only to external wars but also to a
shift in ecological conditions and population movements. Once
again it is a testimony to the flexibility of imperial structures
that they were able to cope with a great variety of frontier
conditions, adopt to the expansion, contraction and cultural
transformation of their state boundaries.
Despite the variations in the types of their frontiers, the
Eurasian empires shared a set of ecological and cultural features
that were shaped by the process of empire-building in the early
modern period and continued to evolve down to their dissolution or
their political reconfiguration in the early twentieth century.
They may be summarized as follows: 1) military contest zones of
rival multi-cultural empires with culturally homogenous core areas
edged by culturally heterogenous peripheries; 2) meeting grounds
of settled, semi-nomadic and nomadic populations and of mixed
ethno-linguistic and religious groups; 3) continuous cross border
interactions ranging from trade and tribute to smuggling, raiding
and warfare; 4) a high level of population movement including
migration, colonization and deportation; 5) ambiguous loyalties on
the part of the peoples of the frontier zones toward their
sovereign overlords combined with strong cultural and often
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political ties to their religious, or ethno-linguistic
counterparts across the boundary line; 6) inconsistent frontier
policies on the part of the central imperial administration
oscillating between offense and defense, bargaining and repression
in order to maintain security and stability in the frontier
zones.99
Along the Eurasian frontiers there have been five "flash
points" or complex frontier zones where three or more imperial
powers have competed with one another for influence or outright
control. Their geographic location may be sketched in roughly as
follows: the western Balkans (triplex confinium) where the leading
contestants for over three centuries were the Habsburg Empire, the
Venetian Republic and the Ottoman Empire; the Pontic steppe where
the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Russia and the Ottoman Empire
competed in the early modern period and left a legacy that
burdened their successors in the first half of the twentieth
century; the Caucasian knot where the Ottoman, Iranian and Russian
empires clashed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the
Inner Asian where Mongol (Dzhungar), Russian and Chinese empires -
99 ? Alfred J. Rieber, "Triplex Confinium in Comparative Context," in Drago Roksandic and Natasa Stefanec (eds.) Constructing Border Societies on the Triplex Confinium, (Budapest, 2000), 13-28.
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and their successors - competed and the Far Eastern which from the
late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century involved the Russian,
Chinese and Japanese. The competition underwent a number of
permutations, particularly with the intervention of latecomers,
the British at key points along the southern perimeter of the
Russian frontiers and the rise of the flank empires of Germany and
Japan in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.100
In addition to the military and diplomatic competition of
consolidated state powers, these complex frontier zones were the
arenas of periodic conflicts among the indigenous populations.
Consequently, there arose a particular kind of frontier culture
among the local population as a response to the shifting
boundaries, the mix of ethno-linguistic and religious traditions
and the sheer necessity of survival. For example, in the western
Balkans the quintessential frontier peoples were the Uskoks, in
the Pontic steppe the Cossacks who played a similar role in the
Caucasus along with certain north Caucasus tribes, and in the Far
100 ? For the British see the useful surveys by David Gillard, The Struggle for Asia, 1828-1914. A Study of British and Russian Imperialism, (London, 1977) and S.A.M. Adshead, Central Asia in World History, (London, 1993); for the Japanese, Stefan Tanaka, Japan's Orient in Rendering the Past into History, (Berkeley, 1993); for the Germans, Fritz Epstein, Germany and the East. Selected Essays, (Bloomington, 1973) and Woodruff O. Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism, (Oxford 1986).
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East Mongol and Manchu bannermen. These complex frontier societies
were characterized by a high level of cross-cultural interaction
and borrowing as well as ambiguous political loyalties.101 The
intensity, duration and participants, both imperial states and
indigenous peoples, in these perennial zones of conflicts have
varied over time. Yet they retained their explosive potential well
into the twentieth century and in some cases to the present time.
Recent literature has demonstrated that the imperial
management of frontiers was not a one way process. The imperial
governments were obliged to bargain, to modify their policies or
even to abandon them in the face of resistance by the indigenous
peoples. Relations between the imperial center and the borderlands
was just as often a matter of negotiation as it was of dictation.
101 ? Wendy Bracewell, The Uskoks of Senj: Piracy, Banditry and Holy War on the Sixteenth Century Adriatic, (Ithaca, 1992); Karl Kaser, Freier Bauer und Soldat. Die Militarisierung der agrarischen Gesellschaft in der kroatisch-slawonischen Militargrenze, 1535-1881, (Vienna, 1997); Zenon Kohut, Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy: Imperial Absorption in the Hetmanate, 1760s-1830s, (Cambridge, Mass. 1988); Thomas M. Barrett, At the Edge of Empire. The Terek Cossacks and the North Caucasus Frontier, 1700-1860, (Boulder, 1999); Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier; Fletcher, "Ch'ing Inner Asia," and “The Heyday of the Ch'ing Order," in Cambridge History of China, 10; 35-106 and 351-408; Morris Rossabi, China and Inner Asia: From 1368 to the Present Day, (London, 1975).
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The impact of the frontier on the social and cultural as well as
the political attitudes and decisions of the imperial center is
only now beginning to be explored systematically. Much of Chinese
history, for example, is being reconceptualized in terms of the
impact of the "conquest dynasties" of Inner Asia (Khitans,
Tanguts, Jurchens, Mongols and Manchus) as well as the persistent
problem of managing the frontiers occupied by non-Han peoples
stretching from Yunnan and Tibet through Xingiang and Mongolia to
Manchuria.102
In the case of Iran all the ruling dynasties from the Seljuks
to the end of the Qajar Empire had their origins in tribal
confederacies on the periphery of the country except for the
Safavids which had nevertheless a strong Turcomen component.
As one leading authority has put it: "Tribal groups have occupied
Iran's border regions for centuries because the peripheries of
state power were where the tribal formation flourished and tribal
102 ? Mote, Imperial China, is constructed around this theme; but see also Evelyn S. Rawski, The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions, (Berkeley, 1998) which criticizes the thesis of "sinicization" as the dominant form of control over a multicultural empire, and Crossley, A Translucent Mirror, who argues for a shift from a "transformational" ideology to the construction of a discrete identity for Manchus, Mongols, Chinese (Han), Tibetan and Uighur (Muslim), peoples that modern historians have adopted as natural ethnic units.
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groups endured."103 Western scholars interpret differently the
relationship between tribes and the state. Some place emphasis on
the evolution from tribal societies to state formations while
others focus on the coexistence and interaction of tribes and the
state.104 But both agree that the frontier problem was central to
an understanding of the history of the country.
In Iran messianic Sufi sects provided a common ideological
bond for the opposition of tribes in the frontier zones to a
centralized state. But once the tribal leaders had taken power
they also provided a great potential and at times an active force
in integrating and legitimizing the new state power. This was the
pattern with the Turkish type of warrior dynast who assumed the
mantle of protectors of Islam without claiming a religious role
for themselves. But even they routinely replaced their messianic
followers in the armed forces with new armies (although they used
tribesmen as auxiliary troops), and recruited experienced
administrators to help them rule. The Safavid shahs were rather
exceptional. To be sure once in power they turned against their
103 ? Lois Beck, "Tribes and the State in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Iran," in Philip S. Khoury and Joseph Kostiner, Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East, (London, 1991), 201.104 ? Philip S. Khoury and Joseph Kostiner, "Introduction," in ibid. 3.
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own Qizilbashi (Turcomen) soldiers and replaced them with a
Georgian slave army. They also recruited experienced Persian
(Farsi) administrators to staff government institutions. But, as
we have seen, they represented themselves as quasi-divine figures,
persecuted the Sufi sects and relied upon the Shi'a ulama to help
reduce the turbulent tribal societies on the periphery. In order
to prevent the tribes from building a new political base, the
Safavids also resorted to deportation of potentially troublesome
confederations near the political center to the periphery of the
empire.105
As a sub-type of Islamic frontier the Ottoman Empire faced a
highly diverse set of frontiers which in their complexity can only
be compared with the Russian. Both faced imperial rivals in three
complex frontier zones. Both bordered on several very distinctive
civilizations, representing many branches of the Christian and
Muslim faiths. The roots of the Ottoman Empire, like those of many
Iranian dynasties, grew in a frontier environment, in their case
between the Seljuk and Byzantine Empires in the fourteenth
century. The Turkomen tribes that migrated to this region from
105 ? Ira Lapidus, "Tribes and State Formation in Islamic History," in ibid. 25-47 and Thomas J. Barfield, "Tribe and State Relations: The Inner Asian Perspective," ibid. 177.
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Central Asia united two traditions, the nomadic warrior or gazi
and the Islamic. The first was centered on raiding, migration and
territorial expansion according to the principle "take the wealth
of they neighbor." The second, adopted by their early leaders,
provided them with a spiritual zeal and ideological legitimization
of conquest together with the foundations for a new set of stable
cultural and political institutions. As in Iran these two
principles produced a basic tension within the Ottoman frontier
policies that became more pronounced as the expansion of the
empire slowed and then virtually ceased.106
After 1699 when the Treaty of Karlowitz ended a long war with
the Habsburgs, the Ottoman frontier policy shifted away from the
ever-expanding frontier justified by jihad, to a more defensive
posture resting on frontier fortresses, mediation, and fixed
106 ? The seminal work on the frontier origins of the Ottoman state can be found in the reprinted collected articles of Paul Wittek, La formation de l'Empire ottoman, (London 1982) and a critical historiography of the question in Colin Heywood, "The Frontier in Ottoman History: Old Ideas and New Myths," in Daniel Power and Naomi Standen, Frontiers in Question. Eurasian Borderlands, 700-1700, (London, 1999), 228-50. See also Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds. The Construction of the Ottoman State, (Berkeley, 1995), 47-59. Kafadar argues that the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 "spelled the definitive end of the frontier areas (the ucat) as assembly plants of new political enterprises and of the Ottoman polity as a frontier principality." Ibid. 152.
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boundaries. The consequences for the stability of the empire were
mixed. An abandonment of the traditional political legitimacy
sparked internal rebellions by artisans, soldiers and ulama, like
that of 1703 that briefly drove the sultan from Istanbul.
Throughout the eighteenth century the local elites on the
periphery of the empire increasingly challenged the appointees of
the center, the governors and their servitors. These emerging
provincial aristocracies, together with the old tribal elites,
controlled the main source of recruits for the militia that the
government came more and more to rely upon for the defense of the
frontiers. The militia were compose of non-Turkish but Muslim
minorities - Kurds, Tatars, Georgians, Circassians and Albanians -
from the frontier zones where competition for their services were
shared by the Russian and to a lesser extent the Habsburg empires.
The price for increased reliance on militia was a decline in
discipline, an increase in plundering by armed, often rebellious
subjects on the frontier.107
The changing demographic and social structure of the Turkish
and Christian populations of the Balkans further weakened the
107 ? Virginia H. Aksan, "Locating the Ottomans Among Early Modern Empires", Journal of Early Modern History, 3 (1999), 121, 130-31.
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Ottoman hold on the region. After the sixteenth century the
central government was no longer able to resort to its traditional
policy of surgun, the compulsory deportation of Turks from
Anatolia to the frontier provinces which had played such an
important role in the Turkization of parts of southeastern
Europe.108 For example, no Turks were settled in the depopulated
areas of the Hungarian plain after the long wars at the beginning
of the seventeenth century. For reasons specific to the
reproductive cultures of the Muslim and Christian populations, the
former steadily lost ground to the latter. The Christian
populations developed various protective forms like the extended
family (zadruga) and other socio-economic associations that
provided them with a resilient structure. In the nineteenth
century became under the guidance of secular-oriented
intellectuals they were the mainstay of broadly based
insurrections and national independence movements.109
The Ottoman Empire was more successful on its Islamic
frontiers. It proved more effective than its Iranian rival in
subordinating the tribal elements to the interests of the state.
108 ? Halil Inalcik, “Ottoman Methods of Conquest,” Studia Islamica, 2 (1954), 122-29.109 ? Traian Stojanovich, "Factors in the Decline of Ottoman Society in the Balkans," Slavic Review, 4 (December 1962), 630-32.
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From the late fourteenth to early fifteenth centuries, in eastern
Anatolia, the Ottomans were used their slave infantry and
artillery in order to repress a series of revolts by Turkish
nomadic tribes led by Sufi opponents of the centralizing state.
Thereafter the main concentrations of tribal societies were held
at a distance from the center of power in the North Arabian
desert, Upper Egypt and the southern regions of North Africa.110
In the period of reforms in the mid-nineteenth century
(Tanzimat) the Ottoman government moved by stages to bring the
borderlands into the new system. First they multiplied the
activities of the state bureaucracy at the local level,
constructed schools and hospitals. Then they shifted from dealing
with collectivities to individuals in the land codes and census.
Finally, they encouraged the transformation from a subsistence and
barter economy to the marketing of crops. The reforms were more
readily accepted on the Arab periphery than in the Balkans.111
In the Southern Caucasus Ottoman frontier policy was always
more successful along the Black Sea Coast than in the highlands of
110 ? To be sure these areas subsequently spawned the great religious movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Lapidus, "Tribes and State Formation," 39.111 ?Eugene L. Rogan, Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire, Transjordan, 1850-1921, (Cambridge, 1999) especially 12-20.
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Armenia and Kurdistan. The Circassians and Georgians were drawn
into the maritime commercial life dominated by the Turks and
supplied highly valued slaves to the armies and harems of the
sultan. But once the Turks attempted to drive the Iranians out of
the highlands they suffered at the hands of the mountain tribes
from the same kind of guerilla resistance to their conquest that
was to slow the Russians advance in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.112
The Russian Empire's management of its frontiers revolved
around problems that were similar to if not identical with those
facing the Ottoman Turks. The major difference that distinguished
the Russian frontiers from that of other Eurasian Empires was the
dual role of the state and people, between an expansion that was
planned and systematic and one that was spontaneous and difficult
for the center to control. Among the problems shared with the
Ottomans, the two most pressing were the wide range of cultures
and peoples surrounding the ethno-territory core lands (Russian
and Turkish) and the porous or permeable nature of the frontier
zones. The impulses behind the dynamic expansion of Russia's
frontiers was the need to enlarge its resource base and the flight
112 ? Carl Max Kortepeter, Ottoman Imperialism During the Reformation: Europe and the Caucasus, (New York, 1972).
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of the population either escaping from state obligations and
persecution or seeking greater economic opportunities and wealth.
The state sought to bring under its control the outlets to the sea
of the major rivers constituting the internal communications
system - the Western Dvina, Dniepr and Volga. It also promoted or
supported the extension of frontiers to the south and east in
order to gain control of rich agricultural land and the sources of
wealth from furs, fish, salt and metals, mainly coal and gold. To
the east and south the Russians encountered a wide variety of
tribal societies at different stages of development from Siberian
hunters and gatherers to pastoral nomads like the Nogai and
Kalmyks and semi-nomads like the Crimean Tatars. To the west the
frontiers adjoined those more similar to European states.
Into the eighteenth century the boundary lines of the Russian
Empire were ill defined even where the state had constructed
fortified lines and easily crossed or penetrated. The vast
distances, absence of well defined natural or "national" (ethno-
linguistic) demarkation lines, sparse population and the cultural
predispositions of the nomads and semi-nomads all contributed to
the extensive cross-border movements. In the early periods up to
the eighteenth century, from the Russian side these movements took
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the form of runaway serfs, flight of religious sectarians,
freebooters, gangs (vatgi) of fishermen or hunters, smugglers.
From the other side, mainly the steppe, herdsmen with their flocks
and raiders seeking slaves or plunder.
As the Russian advance encountered areas contested by other
empires it found itself engaged at several points in tripartite,
complex frontier rivalries such as those in the Pontic steppe with
the Ottoman Empire and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the South
Caucasus with the Ottoman and Persian Empires, Inner Asia with the
Mongolian (Dzhungar) and Chinese Empires (and later in the
nineteenth century in the Far East with the Chinese and Japanese
Empires. The people of the frontier zones that separated the rival
empires were themselves polyethnic and divided giving rise to what
Owen Lattimore called "the tendency to equivocal loyalty", to go
with the winning side at moments of crisis.113 The potential for
large-scale wars arising from these encounters was a matter of
serious concern on the part of the imperial elites.
Given the extensive and persistent problems associated with
permeable, polyethnic frontiers, imperial elites adopted a variety
113 ? Owen Lattimore, "The New Political Geography of Inner Asia," in idem, Studies in Frontier History, (London, 1962), 166-67.
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of strategies not always either consistent or coordinated, but
which contributed to prolonging the life of the empire. One recent
interpretation goes so far as to maintain that the longevity of
the empire can be attributed to the very lack of system in
governing the periphery and the application of different methods
of rule according to local conditions.114
With a different emphasis Michael Khodarkovsky argues that
Russia's frontier policy was "a deliberate process with varying
motives and polices, to be sure, but consistent in its objectives
of expansion and colonization of the new regions and peoples."115
His analysis of the variety of strategies employed against the
tribal-nomadic societies of the steppe may be summarized roughly
under seven points: 1) divide and conquer or, in the Chinese
version turn the barbarian against the barbarian, including the
manipulation of exiles for purposes of blackmail and the extension
of protection of one faction against another; 2) the creation of
client-patron relationships as with the Don Cossacks, Kazakhs and
khanates of Central Asia by signing of treaties or taking oaths of
allegiance with ambivalent meanings open to manipulation by
114 ? P.I. Savel'ev, Imperskii stroi Rossii v regional'nom izmerenii (XIX-nachalo XX veka), (Moscow, 1997).115 ? Khodarkovsky, Russias's Steppe Frontier, 2.
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Moscow; 3) the use of Cossacks as an advanced frontier force, also
a risky business given their uncertain loyalties; 4) actively
promoting an advancing line of settlements along two tracks,
first, the construction of forts and fortified lines and second
colonization and turning of pasture to plough lands; 5) conversion
to Christianity inconsistently applied and ranging from extreme
violence in the period of Elizabeth Petrovna to the toleration of
Catherine II; 6) the employment of frontier administrators drawn
from local elites who had been converted and russified; 7) the
administrative and legal incorporation of frontier lands into the
imperial system accompanied by shifting representations of the
"other" reflecting the intellectual currents of the time.116
116 ? Ibid. passim. For detailed descriptions of the fortified lines the magisterial work of D.I. Bagalei, Materialy dlia istorii kolonizatsii i byta stepnoi okrainy Moskovskogo gosudarstva, 2 vols. (Kharkov, 1886-90) and the most recent English language treatment, Carol Belkin Stevens, Soldiers on the Steppe: Army Reform and Social Change in Early Modern Russia, (DeKalb, 1995), 19-36; for the extension of these frontier policies during the nineteenth century in the North Caucasus, Barrett, At the Edge of Empire and Nicholas B. Breyfogle, “Heretics and Colonizers: Religious Dissent and Russian Colonization of Transcaucasus, 1830-1890,” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1998); for the application of the concept of citizenship (grazhdanstvo) Dov B. Yaroshevskii, "Empire and Citizenship" in Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini, The Russian Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1750-1917, and Austin Lee Jersild, "From Savagery to Citizenship: Muslims and Mountaineers in the Russian Empire", ibid.
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As the Russian Empire gradually evolved from a frontier
society to a multi-cultural state with fixed boundaries and
imperial borderlands on its periphery its policies also shifted.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century the government's
efforts were increasingly focused on point seven, that is the
assimilation of the borderlands. The main instrument of this
policy was russification. But it was never applied systematically
or consistently and often with contradictory results. In areas
like the Caucasus and Central Asia, for example, Russian language
was resented as cultural imperialism but also welcomed as a means
for transmitting western ideas that subverted the ideas and
institutions of an authoritarian empire. Moreover, russification
engendered greater resistance than compliance and in the most
extreme cases like Finland and Armenia, alienated some of the
staunchest supporters of the imperial idea in the borderlands.117
It was not surprising then that the most widespread, violent and
overtly political events of the revolution of 1905 occurred in the
borderlands.118 Yet, even after the February revolution in 1917
117 ? Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863-1914, (Deklab, 1996); Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking Toward Ararat. Armenia in Modern History, (Bloomington, 1993) 44-7.118 ? Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905. Russia in Disarray, (Stanford, 1988), 152; Edward Thaden (ed.), Russification in the
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almost all the borderlands (Poland being the main exception) were
still willing to accept autonomy within a federated, multi-
cultural if no longer imperial state.
For three centuries the Habsburg military frontier with the
Ottoman Empire (Militargrenze) served the dual purpose of
maintaining a flexible response to the threat of invasion by the
Turks and providing the state with reliable troops for controlling
the Croatian and Hungarian borderlands. The military border had
its origins in the destructive Fifteen Years War (1593-1606) that
led to depopulation and massive disruption of commerce and
agriculture along the Habsburg-Ottoman frontier.119 Uprooted
peasants and urban artisans abandoned their peaceful pursuits,
many crossing from the Ottoman to the Habsburg side of the
frontier, in order to become pirates like the famous Uskoks of
Senj, hajduks (fugitives and outlaws) or armed frontiersmen who
Baltic Provinces, (Princeton, 1981), 213-15, 259-67, 358-60; Charters Wynn, Workers, Strikes and Pogroms. The Donbas-Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia, 1870-1905, (Princeton, 1993), 211-26; S.F. Jones, "Marxism and Peasant Revolt in the Russian Empire: The Case of the Gurian Republic, " Slavonic and East European Review, 67 (July 1989), 403-434119 ? The western part of the military border was a complex frontier zone which gradually became know by its Croatian term "krajina." See Drago Roksandic, "Stojan Jankovic in the Morean War, or Uskoks, Slaves and Subjects," in idem. Constructing Border Societies on the Triplex Confinium, (Budapest, 2000), 240-43.
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were recruited from time to time by the Habsburg authorities as
unpaid soldiers (called "peasant soldiers" by Karl Kaser) and
granted parcels of land carved out of the estates of noblemen.120
Created by Emperor Ferdinand, the military border zone was funded
and supplied by the Inner Austrian administration at Graz
completely separate from the authority of the feudal estates of
Croatia and Hungary.
In the long wars with the Ottoman Empire the Habsburgs had
long promoted a policy of periodically colonizing the depopulated
areas along the borders of Royal Hungary with Orthodox Slavs.
After the end of the Fifteen Years War Turkish raids continued to
devastate Hungary carrying away, it was estimated, 10,000 subjects
a year and swelling the number of hajduks to 100,000.121 This led
to the migration of 300,000 Serb and Croat settlers into the
region of the Banat and lower Transdanubia followed at the end of
the seventeenth century by a second wave of 30,000 Serbs most of
whom were enrolled as frontier guards by the Habsburg central
administration.122 The importance of the population of the
120 ? Bracewell, The Uskoks of Senj and Kaser, Freier Bauer und Soldat. 121 ? Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy, 50.122 ? Tamas Farago, "Spontaneous Population Movements in the Hungarian Kingdom during the Early Eighteenth Century with Special Attention to the Croatian and Serbian Immigration," in Roksandic,
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military border to the Habsburgs can be measured by Vienna's
policy of religious toleration of the Orthodox throughout the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries despite its active promotion
elsewhere of the counter-reformation and unification of the
churches under Rome.123
Throughout the eighteenth century the military border
continued to serve as a source of trained, unpaid troops loyal to
the dynasty. By 1770 it stretched over a thousand miles from the
Adriatic to the Carpathians, populated by German, Serb, Vlach and
Szekler military colonists (Grenzer) armed and equipped by Vienna.
Joseph II took a keen interests in the welfare of the colonists
although his cameralist policies failed to solve the basic dilemma
facing all military colonies: whether they would remain a self-
supporting militia, effective only as light troops or become a
regular army maintained at state expense. Nevertheless, the
Habsburgs relied heavily on the Grenzer to repress internal
rebellions like that of Rakoczi in Hungary and to fight its
foreign wars. In return the dynasty continued, though not always
Constructing Border Societies, 199.123 ? Drago Roksandic, "Relgious Tolerance and Division in the Krajina: The Croatian Serbs of the Habsburg Military Border," in Christianity and Islam in Southeastern Europe. Occasional Papers of the Woodrow Wilson Center, No. 47 (1990).
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consistently, to protect the colonists from Catholic proselytizing
and to resist the pressure of the Croat and Hungarian nobility to
end their extra-territorial rights. Although their fighting
effectiveness declined in the Napoleonic period, the Grenzer were
the only combat ready troops in the Empire available to put down
the Italian revolts and Hungarian in the first half of the
nineteenth century.124
The Habsburg management of its military border was, however,
shot through with contradictions that deepened as nationalist
revolts broke out across the Ottoman frontier. Even as early as
the mid-eighteenth century the Orthodox Church of the Grenzers as
brought under pressure by the ultra-Catholic policies of Maria
Theresa. The situation improved under Joseph II but then rapidly
deteriorated under his successors at the same time that the first
Serbian revolts in neighboring Ottoman territories won the
sympathy of their ethnic and religious counterparts in the
military border. The Serbian Grenzer regiments were increasingly
exposed to nationalist ideas despite Habsburg efforts to seal the
border, and the number of desertions increased. Similarly, the
Romanian regiments n the Banat and Transylvania resented religious
124 ? Gunther E. Rothenberg, The Military Border in Croatia, 1740-1881, (Chicago, 1966), 42-46, 116-17, 122, 136-37, 163-64.
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discrimination; revolts broke out as early as 1764 and again in
1784. In 1848 the Grenzer regiments split showing evidence of both
strong nationalist sentiments and dynastic loyalty. Their
ambivalence toward the imperial authorities aroused great concern
in Vienna. After the suppression of the revolutions, the Szekler
and Romanian regiments were disbanded. The fear that the South
Slav regiments would support nationalist uprisings together with
pressure from the newly created Hungarian Kingdom in 1867
persuaded Franz Joseph to abolish the military border in 1871.125
***
Throughout their history the ruling elites of Eurasian
empires used imperial ideologies, bureaucracies and
frontier/borderlands policies in order to stabilize and enlarge
their power. Over the centuries these instruments proved
remarkably flexible in responding to both domestic and foreign
threats. To portray their modern history in terms of a steady
decline would be to neglect the reforming impulse that
periodically restored the vitality of imperial ideas and
institutions. Yet by the late nineteenth and early twentieth
125 ? Gunther Rothenberg, "The Habsburg Military Border System: Some Reconsiderations," in Bela Kiraly and Gunther E. Rothenberg (eds.), War and Society in East Central Europe, (New York, 1979), I, 380-87.
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centuries the empires were simultaneously passing through another
period of crisis which this time proved fatal. Deep structural
faults had opened up before the crushing weight of World War I
destroyed the Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian Empires and indirectly
contributed to the end of the Qajar and Qing. The dynastic role of
national movements has been given great prominence in this
process. But factors intrinsic to the imperial enterprise itself
should not be forgotten or neglected.
The paradox of Eurasian Empires lies in the fact that the
flexibility and adaptability that helps to explain their longevity
produced the very elements of disunity and dissension that
contributed to their dissolution. The ruling elites that nourished
the imperial cultures, staffed the imperial bureaucracies and
defended the imperial frontiers fell victim to the policies that
had maintained them in power for so long. All of the Eurasian
empires sought to respond to the economic and political pressures
of the western, overseas empires. Their rulers experimented with
constitutional government, albeit sometimes reluctantly. Their
bureaucracies sought to introduce western norms in the major
institutions of the state and society. And they all sought to
negotiate new relationships between the imperial center and the
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borderlands. But these efforts ended up by splitting the ruling
elites and often separating the rulers from traditionally loyal
and reliable supporters without satisfying the increasingly
political conscious mass of the population. It would be a gross
oversimplification to characterize the division as one between
traditionalists and modernizers or westernizer versus
autochthonous. The picture was more complex, which made the splits
more difficult to repair. Not only did the imperial elites pursue
irreconcilable goals, but they ended up with unintended
consequences.
The continental, Eurasian empires with their contiguous,
territorial geographies could not, like the overseas empires,
establish different forms of government for the hegemonic,
metropolitan center and the colonial periphery. To have introduced
genuine constitutional government in one part of a Eurasian empire
would have required its establishment in all its part. Once that
was done, as was clear from the examples of the Habsburg Empire
after 1867, the Ottoman after 1878, the Russian after 1905, the
Iranian after 1908 and the Chinese after 1911 a profound
contraction opened up between the “absolute” power of the ruler
and the constitutional power of the representative government,
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between the unitary character of the state and the demands for a
greater degree of etho-territorial autonomy in the borderlands.
Yet experience had taught there was an ever-present danger;
autonomy would increase economic penetration by more developed
foreign powers and weaken political control by the metropolitan
center over its vulnerable borderlands.
By introducing reforms the imperial bureaucrats created local
and empire wide institutions that then demanded a larger share of
power without being able to provide coherent and consistent
leadership. Instead the representative institutions reproduced
religious and ethnic diversity within the multi-cultural empires.
Meanwhile, the increased desacralization of the ruler threatened
to deprive the state of its main cohesive force without providing
a viable substitute. Attempts to “nationalize” the empire by
enhancing the cultural hegemony of the dominant ethnic group or to
play the anti-foreign card could only result in further inciting
internal divisions. Moreover, western-style, secular education
that was necessary to staff the new institutions ended up
creating, as it did in all the Eurasian empires, an increasingly
number of graduates whose life prospects could never match the
values and expectations instilled in them by their schooling.
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