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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.

* * *

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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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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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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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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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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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).

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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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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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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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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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While some of the graduates entered government service, others

plunged into revolutionary activities. By the first decade of the

twentieth century revolutionary time had finally caught up with

the Eurasian empires, and they were no longer able to adjust their

clocks.

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