Пожалуй, сегодня сложно говорить о политической истории империи, которая бы создавалась автономно от историографии национальных государств. В свою очередь, политическая история национальных государств естественным образом включает сюжеты, связанные с формированием национальных движений и национального самосознания в рамках империй. Тем не менее, проблемы взаимозависимости и/или взаимоотталкивания политических историй нации и империи, использования общего категориального аппарата и другие вполне реальные для современного историографического процесса проблемы слабо отрефлексированы историками, работающими в этих бурно развивающихся областях исторической науки.
Редакция AI предложила авторам исторической рубрики, статьи которой демонстрируют всю широту современного понимания предмета и объекта политической истории империи и нации, поразмышлять над вопросами, которые возникают по прочтении рубрики в целом, вне зависимости от тематики и хронологического периода, рассматриваемого в каждой отдельной статье. Эти вопросы касаются методологических и идеологических презумпций политической истории империи и нации, их соотношения друг с другом и с другими течениями в исторической науке (изучение процессов модернизации, культурных практик современных обществ и проч.).
Размышления Терри Мартина “Советский Союз как империя: спасая сомнительную аналитическую категорию” задают важную точку отсчета для нашего разговора. Используя опыт критического осмысления понятия “нация”, возникшего и функционирующего в сфере практики, Мартин пытается снять проблему особого характера имперской истории на том основании, что “империя” есть такая же субъективная категория, как и “нация” (вариант “воображаемого сообщества”). Рассмотренные в этой перспективе попытки некоторых участников “круглого стола” объективизировать понятие империи и отстоять его “отдельность” иллюстрируют то смысловое напряжение, которое характерно для современных поисков некой новой модели политической истории империи и нации. Заключительное эссе Ника Барона “‘Империя’ и ‘нация’ как категории пространственной политики и исторического исследования: методологические заметки для AI” развивает идеи Мартина в направлении полного отрицания оппозиции “история империи”/“история нации”. Используя методологические подходы, связанные с социологическими идеями Мишеля Фуко, Барон анализирует возможность изучения российской и советской истории отталкиваясь не столько от “субъективных” понятий “империи” и “нации”, сколько от общих для западного модернизирующего(ся) государства практик насилия, репрессий и перемещения людей. Эти практики, как представляется автору, практически одинаковы как для империй, так и для национальных государств. В конечном счете, Барон ратует за переход к более функциональным и нейтральным категориям анализа, при этом демонстрируя всю сложность и неоднозначность современной исторической саморефлексии – как с точки зрения истории “империи” или истории “нации”, так и с некой третьей “синтетической” позиции.

Terry Martin (Harvard University, USA) “The Soviet Union as Empire: Salvaging a Dubious Analytical Category”

Thanks to my colleagues David Brandenberger, Roman Szporluk, and Serhy Yekelchyk for perceptive comments.
Can we use existing theories of empire, or create new ones, that will help us write a new political history of the emergence, life, and death of the Soviet Union? Such is the question facing our roundtable. If by theories of empire, we mean the use of empire as an objective category of analysis – with empire defined by certain measurable characteristics (size, authoritarianism, multinationality, inequality, domination) that allow one to assign states at any given moment in time to the category of empire or not, or to place them on a continuum of empireness – then I would most definitely answer in the negative. Indeed, for historians to label the Soviet Union as “the Soviet empire” is already to beg an important question. For as Mark Beissinger and Ronald Suny have pointed out, the vast majority of western scholars only began to label the Soviet Union an empire after it had collapsed.^[1] And they did so, often unreflectively, largely because it was a state that had collapsed along national lines. This tautology – empires collapse along national lines; the Soviet Union collapsed along national lines; therefore, the Soviet Union was an empire; and this explains why it collapsed along national lines - is hardly a promising starting point for theoretical analysis. Of course, there were specialists who did label the Soviet Union an empire before 1988 – Richard Pipes, Helene Carrere d’Encausse, Robert Conquest, Alexandre Bennigsen, among others^[2] – but these were overwhelmingly scholars who had an overt political desire to see the Soviet Union collapse along national lines (which of course does not pre-judge the quality of their analysis).^[3] Moreover, all of them used the label “empire” unreflectively, with no effort either to define the term or to employ it comparatively.^[4] Yet such authors did correctly stress the multinationality of the Soviet state and did see this as a real threat to its long-term, and even short-term, existence. This fact leads to a question the editors of AI specifically asked me to address: “why, despite all the conceptual attractiveness of the ‘revisionism’ which was associated with social history, it was scholars associated with the opposite totalitarian paradigm who stayed attuned to the fact of the multinational composition of the Soviet empire and the need to study the Soviet Union not just as a modernizing ‘national state’.” (A. Semyonov, e-mail to the author). While it is absolutely true that revisionist historians, with the notable exception of Ron Suny, ignored nationality to an extraordinary degree, I would disagree that a/the totalitarian paradigm was particularly distinguished in singling out nationality as an issue; or b/that the modernization paradigm was the reason that the revisionists ignored nationality. The revisionists, Moshe Lewin aside, were not particularly enamored of modernization theory, since they emerged out of the American scholarly milieu of the 1970s in which modernization theory was increasingly criticized on theoretical grounds (for reifying ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’) and ethical ones (as an apologia for the transfer of American capitalism to the third world). I do not know why revisionists neglected nationality so overwhelmingly, but assume it was probably because they were borrowing the social history approach of western European historians, and this movement began in the 1960s with labor history and class analysis, moved rapidly in the 1970s to embrace women’s history and gender analysis, and only in the 1980s – particularly after the publication of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism – did ethnicity and nationalism become a major theme in social history (as opposed to political history and the social sciences). To this, one could add the pragmatic factor that revisionist historians were committed to archival and library research in the Soviet Union, and Soviet authorities did not readily give permission to work on the national question (or, indeed, to work outside Leningrad and Moscow).
With respect to modernization approaches, one must distinguish between early and late versions. It is absolutely true that the early modernization theory of the 1950s and early 1960s did assume a relatively unproblematic development of a civic “national state”. Richard Pipes’ 1954 book The Formation of the Soviet Union was written in explicit opposition to this trend.^[5] However, it is also true that early totalitarianism theory was in many ways a variant of modernization theory. Was Merle Fainsod a member of the totalitarian or modernization schools? He was clearly both. To quote Gail Lapidus writing in 1984: “The totalitarian model, with its focus on the capacity of a monolithic state to bring about a well-nigh atomization of society, left little room for explorations of the potential bases of social solidarity, including ethnicity. To be sure, the nationality problem was not completely neglected, but its absence from the classic textbooks of the period [the 1950s and 1960s] is striking.”^[6] The definitive textbook – Merle Fainsod’s How Russia is Ruled – devoted no chapter to the nationalities question and its fifty-page concluding discussion on “problems and prospects” and “Khrushchevism in retrospect” ignored the nationalities question entirely.^[7]
However modernization approaches eventually did accommodate the problem of separatist nationalism. Already in 1953, Karl Deutsch’s Nationalism and Social Communication demonstrated how modernization could produce separatist nationalism and, in 1964, Ernest Gellner first published his elegant elaboration of Deutsch’s theory.^[8] By the 1970s, modernization no longer assumed an unproblematic triumph of civic nationalism, and mainstream Sovietology increasingly addressed the nationalities question to the extent that, writing in 1984, Gail Lapidus had to apologize for writing yet another article on the nationalities question: “the nationality problem … has become a central preoccupation, if not a virtual obsession, in Western analyses of the Soviet system.”^[9] Lapidus could cite numerous works of mainstream social science – Grey Hodnett, Gregory Gleason, John H. Miller, Gertrude Schroeder, Donna Bahry, Barbara Anderson, Brian Silver, Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone - as well as the works of such “totalitarian” historians as Pipes, d’Encausse, and Bennigsen.^[10] She notes that the latter, unlike the former, were indeed predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union but, with the notable exception of Pipes, they were basing their prediction on the supposedly mortal threat coming from the Soviet Union’s growing Islamic population (Bennigsen and Broxup. The Islamic Threat to the Soviet State). As the Gorbachev years demonstrated definitively, the Islamic peoples were, in fact, by far the least serious national threat to the Soviet Union.
What generalizations can we make about Sovietology and the nationalities question. Few, I think. If one were to engage in the highly dubious project of combing the pre-1985 literature for the work of scholars that both focused attention on the nationalities question and did so in a way that retrospectively helps us to understand the collapse of the Soviet Union, I suppose a short list would have to include (among others) Richard Pipes, Ronald Grigor Suny, Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone, Gerhard Simon, John Armstrong, and Roman Szporluk. Only Suny and Pipes fit the simplistic revisionist-totalitarian dichotomy. Rakowska-Harmstone and Simon (who stated clearly in 1986 that the nationalist threat was coming from the west not the east) were both working in a revised modernization paradigm with particular attention being paid to the influence of Soviet nationalities policy.^[11] And John Armstrong and Roman Szporluk (whose work most insistently pointed to the key role of the western republics and, above all, the almost entirely neglected but ultimately crucial Russian national question) are original scholars, who both made independent contributions to the theory of nationalism separate from their work on the Soviet Union.^[12] It hardly seems productive to try and place such scholars on a revisionist-totalitarian continuum.
In the last decade, there has indeed been an explosion of interest in empire among historians and, to a much lesser extent, social scientists.^[13] Three factors seem to be driving this phenomenon: first, the collapse of the Soviet Union (and Yugoslavia); second, the mass migration of former colonial subjects to the former European metropole and to America; third, the anti-globalization movement and the increasingly successful labeling of the contemporary United States as an empire.^[14] When we look at the definitions of empire in the scholarly literature, we find the usual definitional anarchy that accompanies highly politicized and emotive terms, but also a certain recognizable core set of concepts.^[15] Of the following seven definitions, the first three are from comparativist social scientists, and the last four from Russia specialists whose definitions are meant to include the Soviet Union:^[16]

1. “An empire is a large composite polity linked to a central power by indirect rule. The central power exercises some military and fiscal control in each major segment of its imperial domain, but tolerates the two major elements of indirect rule: 1/ retention or establishment of particular, distinct compacts for the government of each segment; and 2/ exercise of power through intermediaries who enjoy considerable autonomy within their own domains in return for the delivery of compliance, tribute and military collaboration with the center.”^[17] (Charles Tilly)

2. “An empire is a very large state. Yet to apply the term to any very large state would occasionally defy common usage … it is not mere size we are talking about but the connotation of a second characteristic as well – domination … Empires are commonly thought of as having been brought into existence by conquest, and with good reason, for the term ‘empire’ carries the implication that an identifiable ethnic or communal group, and/or a core territorial unit … exert dominion over other ethnic, territorial, or communal groups.”^[18] (S. E. Finer)

3. “Empire is a system of interaction between two political entities, one of which, the dominant metropole, exerts political control over the internal and external policy – the effective sovereignty – of the other, the subordinate periphery.”^[19] (Michael Doyle)

4. “I define empire as a hierarchically organized political system with a hublike structure – a rimless wheel – within which a core elite and state dominate peripheral elites and societies by serving as intermediaries for their significant interactions and by channeling resource flows from the periphery to the core and back to the periphery.”^[20] (Alexander Motyl)

5. “Empire denotes a dominant society’s control of the effective sovereignty of two or more subordinate societies that are substantially concentrated in particular regions or homelands within the empire … empires differ from nation-states by virtue of the non-integration of their constituent societies into a single political community; they differ from alliances and from great-power hegemony over small states by virtue of the metropolitan center’s domination of the peripheral societies’ internal affairs as well as their external relations.”^[21] (Bruce Parrott)

6. “Empire is, first and foremost, a very great power that has left its mark on the international relations of an era. I also mean a polity that rules over wide territories and many peoples, since the management of space and multiethnicity is one of the great perennial dilemmas of empire. For me, an empire is by definition not a democracy, in other words not a polity ruled with the explicit consent of its peoples … the most interesting and important empires have been those linked to some great religion and high culture, thereby leaving a major impact on the history of world civilisation.”^[22] (Dominic Lieven)

7. “Empire is a composite state structure in which the metropole is distinct in some way from the periphery and the relationship between the two is conceived or perceived by metropolitan or peripheral actors as one of justifiable or unjustifiable inequity, subordination, and/or exploitation.”^[23] (Ronald Grigor Suny)

Frequently cited elements, then, include a distinction between a core or metropole and a periphery or “societies” (often a rather blurry distinction), domination of the former over the latter, and sometimes, a large, powerful and undemocratic state.
Why not use such a definition to structure the comparative study of the Soviet Union as a multiethnic state? Let me first be absolutely clear that I am not arguing that a given individual scholar should not create his own objective definition of empire and use it for comparative study.^[24] I have no doubt that in order to answer some particular questions, this choice would be justified. What we are discussing is whether it is a good idea for historians of the multinational Soviet Union in general to go in this direction (especially since there are strong indications that it already has begun to). I think that it is not a good idea, and I will provide both a pragmatic and a theoretical objection. Pragmatically, definitions of empire have to be stretched to the breaking point to include the Soviet Union.^[25] Of the seven definitions listed above, only Dominic Lieven’s definition fits the Soviet Union unproblematically, and that is because he omits entirely the highly dubious metropole/periphery distinction. For, as we all know, the Soviet Union was a highly centralized, unitary state. Peripheral subjects (understood here as non-Russians) were not subjected to legal discrimination, nor indeed to different laws; they were not discriminated against economically due to their “peripheral” status; they were ruled like “core” subjects. They were indeed dominated, but so too were majority Russian regions. In other words, the core/periphery distinction does not work well in a unitary state like the Soviet Union. The only consistent distinctions in rule over Russian and non-Russian regions were those tied to the Soviet nationality policy of supporting, with highly varying and mostly declining intensity, the existence of national territories, elites, languages and identities (all, needless to say, with a highly Sovietized “content”). But this is hardly what we typically mean by empire, nor was it characteristic of any of the polities – Ottoman, Habsburg, British, French, Spanish, Roman, Chinese – to which the Soviet Union is typically compared.^[26]
To escape this problem, some analysts, in particular Motyl, speak not of a core society, but rather a “core elite and state”, dominating other peripheral societies, which in the Soviet case could then include Russian society (or societies) as well. But this move seems unconvincing and even disingenuous. Neither Motyl nor any others using the empire paradigm compare the Soviet Union to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria or Indonesia under military rule, to limit the list to only very large states, though in all four of these cases a core elite and state dominated many different peoples and “societies”. This is surely because in our ordinary usage of the term empire – and it is always dangerous for scholarly usage to depart too far from ordinary language usage as the ordinary language meaning almost inevitably seeps into both the reader’s interpretation and the scholar’s usage^[27] – we (we contemporary Americans, but I think we contemporary Russians as well) mean a nationally-defined metropole’s domination of other nations (see Finer’s definition above). In the Soviet case, an imperial Russian state’s domination of Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, and so forth. As I and others have shown, from the mid-1930s forward, Soviet propaganda did indeed increasingly identify the Soviet state with its Russian core, and Russians gradually did become over-represented in the state’s most powerful institutions.^[28] So the understanding of the Soviet Union as a Russian state and Russian elite dominating non-Russian (and indeed some Russian) “societies” is at least a plausible interpretation (though one subject to a host of serious qualifications), but it is only an interpretation. Many multiethnic states have been, to a lesser or greater degree, dominated by a “core” ethnicity: Punjabis in Pakistan, Northerners in Nigeria, Javans in Indonesia, Serbs in Yugoslavia, English in the United Kingdom, Castilians in Spain, English-speakers in Canada. Are they all objectively empires? Or should we move beyond the purely objectivist understanding of empire.
It would be appropriate, at this point, to subject my skepticism of the utility of the objectivist approach to empire to a hard, empirical test. Fortunately, Dominic Lieven’s marvelous recent book, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals, provides exactly such a difficult test. Lieven is one of our very best Russian historians. He is an experienced and talented practitioner of comparative historical methodology.^[29] As already noted, his definition of empire unambiguously fits the Soviet case. And the first eight chapters of his book use the comparative method splendidly to enlighten our understanding of the Tsarist empire. The book falters, however, only when we reach the ninth chapter devoted to the Soviet Union. Lieven is an imperial Russian historian and I am a Soviet historian, so I could only reasonably ask of his comparative methodology that it should provide some suggestive ideas and potential lines of inquiry. But it fails do so, I suspect, because the comparison with the Roman, Chinese, British, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires is simply too much of a stretch. Lieven’s comparative project only becomes stimulating when he departs from his imperial comparisons to drop this stimulating aside on the Soviet collapse: “India and Indonesia are vast multi-ethnic countries which so far have survived the nationalist challenges which many believe made the collapse of the Soviet Union certain. In comparison to Indonesia and India, however, the Soviet Union did bear the historical stigma of empire.”^[30] This is exactly the right question: why, in 1991, did the stigma of empire attach to the Soviet Union and not (yet?) Indonesia and India? And it likewise points us to exactly the stimulating comparisons to other contemporary multi-ethnic states that the “Soviet Union as empire” paradigm threatens to choke off.^[31]
Why did the Soviet Union bear the stigma of empire in 1991? This question points to my theoretical objection to the use of empire as an objective analytical category, an objection that I am borrowing from Rogers Brubaker and Mark Beissinger. In discussing the category of nation (and later of “identity” as well), Brubaker warns us to constantly keep in mind that nation is both a category of practice and simultaneously a category of analysis, that is that the category of nation is used both by historical and contemporary actors, and by scholarly analysts of those actors.^[32] As a category of practice, nations are almost invariably understood by actors as real groups or communities, often real groups that have existed from time immemorial (the so-called primordialist understanding of nations). Like virtually every other contemporary student of nationalism, Brubaker rejects primordialism in favor of a subjectivist, constructivist view of nations (nations have not always existed and, to the extent that they do exist, they are the consequence of subjective beliefs of individuals, not objective categories like language, religion, or race – although, of course, some categories such as language have been historically crucial in generating subjective categorizations). However, Brubaker also notes that even full-fledged constructivists, who mock and debunk nationalism, nevertheless accept the premise – embodied in the nation as a category of practice – that once nations have been constructed, they are real groups or communities; in other words, they accept the reification of nations. Brubaker radically rejects any reification of nations and proposes instead the analytical category of “nationhood” or “nation-ness”, understood as the subjective perception of individuals that they belong to a real national group or community, a perception that fluctuates wildly, sometimes disappearing entirely and sometimes, as in the Soviet Union from 1988 to 1991, flaring up and becoming an overwhelming political force. Brubaker proposes that it is this subjective perception of nationhood – and the historic, socioeconomic, cultural/ideological, and geopolitical forces that govern it - that should be adopted as the scholarly category of analysis.
Mark Beissinger has fruitfully applied Brubaker’s analysis to the category of empire, noting the particular analytical backwardness in this field of study, where scholars are still desperately seeking to create an objective definition of empire, a project long since abandoned in the field of nationalism studies in favor of subjective definitions (a nation is a group of people who subjectively believe they are a nation, an “imagined community”). Beissinger both rejects such objectivism (an empire is a state labeled by its inhabitants as an empire) and, following Brubaker, also rejects any reification of the category of empire: “the real issue that needs to be explained is how a polity once almost universally construed as a state came to be universally condemned as an empire. The critical question that those interested in understanding the disintegration of the Soviet state need to answer is not whether the Soviet breakup was inevitable, but rather how it came to be widely viewed as inevitable by a population that, only a short while before, could barely imagine such an outcome.”^[33] In other words, our focus should be on the subjective perception of empire, and the historic, socioeconomic, cultural/ideological, and geopolitical forces that govern its emergence, its waxing and its waning. This is how I used empire in my above essay, and the attentive reader will have noted that, alone among the seven definitions cited earlier, this is how Ronald Suny also proposed that empire be defined.^[34]
How, in pragmatic terms, would such an analysis proceed? First, I would imagine, one would do an “ordinary language” analysis of empire as a category of practice.^[35] How was “empire” (and related categories like colony, metropole, periphery, imperialism, colonialism) used and understood in the Soviet Union, and outside its borders, in the relevant world-historical period of 1917 to 1991. Fortunately, for an earlier time period, we have a splendid example of this approach in Anthony Pagden’s recent Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500 – c. 1800.^[36] Second, one would use all of the social history sources now available – political police reports, letters, diaries, samizdat and so forth^[37] – to trace the fluctuating subjective perception of empire (and, again, other relevant categories) in the Soviet Union across time, space, and relevant population categories. Finally, one would try to isolate the historic, socioeconomic, cultural/ideological, and geopolitical forces that influenced the evolution of these perceptions and eventually did lead the Soviet Union to be perceived as an empire, inevitably doomed to collapse along national lines.
I have made some tentative suggestions concerning this development in my above essay and in my book; Beissinger has provided an impressive analysis of the perestroika era; perhaps Roman Szporluk’s essays over the past three decades have addressed the issue most perceptively.^[38] A huge amount of empirical work remains to be done, especially concerning the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods. The only point that I would like to reiterate here is that the subjective perception of empire as an illegitimate state form was not an unexpected development for the Soviet Union, as it was for the Habsburg empire, but rather lay at the heart of what I’ve called the Soviet Union’s unwritten national constitution, and therefore ought to be at the heart of our analysis as well. Lenin and Stalin were responding to the threat of separatist nationalism, in particular to the collapse of the Habsburg empire. They recognized that the new Soviet state, because it had inherited and re-conquered the multiethnic territory of the Tsarist empire, was threatened with what Lieven has nicely termed “the historical stigma of empire” (in a way that the formerly colonial territories of India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Nigeria were not).^[39] India and Indonesia had the benefit of the doubt; they would have to prove to their subjects and the world that they were empires; the Soviet Union would have to prove the opposite. Hence, Lenin and Stalin adopted the innovative strategy of the explicitly anti-imperial state or Affirmative Action Empire, at a time when many states could still proudly call themselves empires. Perhaps no other state did more, in fact, to cultivate and propagandize the stigma of empire as an illegitimate state form. That they succeeded only too well is yet another of the many ironies of Soviet history.
In summary, the subjective approach to empire opens up the field of Soviet history to a variety of fruitful comparisons emerging out of Lieven’s apt question: why did the Soviet Union and not India or Indonesia (or Nigeria, Pakistan, Turkey, Spain, the United Kingdom, Sudan, the European Union) bear the stigma of empire in 1991?^[40] Instead of comparing the Soviet Union to Sargon’s Assyria, this approach would necessitate comparing the Soviet Union to other contemporary (and some nineteenth century) multiethnic states and polities that faced the threat of separatist nationalism, both those that were labeled as empires and the overwhelming majority that were not. Since the subjective perception of empire is so intimately linked to the subjective feeling of nationhood, this approach would also necessitate a very close integration of nationalism and empire studies for, as I have reiterated throughout this essay, the subjective perception of empire as an illegitimate state form is a product of the age of nationalism. Indeed, empire is only one of many swear words (though a particularly potent one) that separatist nationalists can hurl at the multiethnic state and it would be fetishistic to confine one’s analysis to this category alone. Finally, the proposed version of the empire paradigm would also necessitate a synthesis of the methodologies associated with traditional comparative social science and the ideological and discursive analysis more often associated with the “cultural turn”.^[41] Defining empire and nationhood as categories of subjective perception, rather than reified communities or state forms, does not at all mean a resigned retreat into postmodernism and discourse analysis.^[42] Rather, it calls for a rigorous empirical and comparative study of those “objective” factors that, in a given world-historical environment, govern the subjective perceptions of empire, nation and other potent categories of practice.^[43] This would seem a sufficiently promising agenda to justify salvaging empire as a category of analysis.
Harvard University
July 2002

1. Требуют ли имперские политические практики для своего осмысления иных категорий и понятий по сравнению с политическими практиками национального государства?

Charles Steinwedel (Northeastern Illinois University, USA)
The political practices of empires and national states most often are quite similar, and we can use the same categories to understand the practices of both. Empires and national states both seek means of identifying their citizens or subjects and defining them as part of the empire or nation and to exclude those who are not. They both participated in the development of political practices since the French Revolution including the documentation of identity, the control of movement for at least certain portions of their populations, the collection of taxes, conscription, etc. For these reasons, it is more fruitful to examine how various kinds of states differed in their use of these practices rather than beginning with the assumption that their practices fundamentally differed.
That said, some political practices of empires and national states do differ. One of the more important distinctions regards the legal relationships among different portions of an empire. Federal states such as the United States of America are composed of different territories, but their relationships and those of their population with central authority are the same and based on a specific constitutional arrangements uniform to all. Such is not the case in empires. In the Russian Empire, for instance, particular territories such as the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Finland had distinctive compacts with the center and different titles to go along with them. Imperial Russia also had different relationships with different territories in other respects. Central Asians were not conscripted into the imperial army in the manner that people from other territories were, and different territories and groups had levels of representation in the State Duma that were legally-defined as different. Empires often used intermediaries, typically noblemen or other non-Russian elites in conquered or annexed territories of the Russian Empire, to govern territories rather than the establishment of direct, individual interaction with the state bureaucracy.

Сергей Скобелев (Новосибирский университет, Россия)
Считаю, что требуют, хотя бы по той простой причине, что империя обычно подразумевает наличие полиэтнического и поликонфессионального состава населения, по отношению к которому политика неизбежно предполагает дифференцированный подход (в отличие от в основном однородного населения национального государства). Кроме того, в политической практике империи используются особые идеологические обоснования, обычно не характерные для национального государства.

Theodore R. Weeks (Southern Illinois University, USA)
Certainly, an Empire has a different legitimacy and follows by necessity different policies, uses different images and ceremonies, and sees the world a different way. It seems to me that the biggest problem in the research on Empires is to assume (often in a subconscious, uncritical way) that Empires “think” like nation-states (so, for example, that the Russian Empire is primarily interested in repressing and assimilating national minorities – which I think was an entirely secondary matter for it, though growing in importance in the Russian Empire’s final decades).

Пекка Кауппала (Институт Ренвалла, университет Хельсинки, Финляндия)
Иные категории и понятия вряд ли нужны. Конечно, проблемы интеграции и дезинтеграции гетерогенного “общественного материала” являются центральными для имперских политических практик, однако они же типичны и для национальных государств (хотя и не являются для них основными, чаще всего – лишь второстепенными). Более того, в период создания национальных государств эти проблемы обычно выходили на первый план. Так, “имперская” проблема интеграции различных этносов и наций на этапе создания национального государства структурно замещается проблемой интеграции различных племён и типов. В настоящее время эта проблема особенно интересно раскрывается на примере единственного постколониального национального государства в Африке – Сомали. Все сорок лет его национальной независимости можно рассматривать в категориях интеграции и дезинтеграции, причём в конце концов силы дезинтеграции возобладали.

2. Должно ли отличаться изучение политической истории империи от политической истории национального государства?

Steinwedel
The histories of empires and of national states are best examined together. On a purely practical level, they both existed at the same time and often occupied adjacent geographical spaces. Their political histories are very much interwoven. The two forms so often defined themselves against one another that separating them would seem artificial. Appeals for national self-determination, for instance, made much of the notion that empires were “prison-houses of nations.” Understanding appeals for national self-determination requires an understanding of alternatives to the national state and how they were governed. Moreover, so many of the nations now extant in Europe and Eurasia emerged from empires and bear or at least bore the stamp of their origins.

Weeks
Again, absolutely. To be sure, the categories “Empire” and “nation-state” are very crude ones that we shouldn’t accept as absolutes. France, after all, has “national minorities” in the Bretons, Basques, Catalans. But I do think the political history of Empires follows different paths, uses different methods, and (perhaps most importantly) legitimizes itself differently from nation-states. So we should acknowledge these differences in our research and conceptualizing of empires.

Скобелев
Считаю, что принципиальных отличий в этой сфере быть не может, поскольку в случае изучения каждой империи и каждого отдельного национального государства мы должны применять разные подходы. Речь может идти лишь об “индивидуальном” подходе, поскольку не существует и не существовало двух совершенно одинаковых империй или двух идентичных национальных государств. Реально изучать политическую историю империи технически сложнее, поскольку она обычно многообразнее и объемнее, чем история национального государства. Методология изучения должна быть общей, а методы и подходы могут быть разными.

Кауппала
Методологически – нет, но на практическом уровне – да. При изучении истории империи всегда следует уделять особенное внимание региональным процессам и особенностям. Именно они, по определению, являются типичными для империи как гетерогенной системы. К сожалению, на практике в мировой историографии возобладала противоположная тенденция. Именно империи изучали и зачастую продолжают изучать с “центральной” точки зрения.

3. Есть ли отличия между колониальной политикой и колониализмом/экспансионизмом империи и национального государства (в идеологическом обосновании, характере и пределах интеграционной политики, степени экономической мотивации)?

Steinwedel
The primary differences regard the ideological bases of expansion and the nature and extent of political integration. Empires typically claim some sort of universal idea as their basis. The Russia Empire before 1917 claimed to be the leader and protector of Orthodox Christians, for instance, the Roman Empire presented itself as the center of a universal culture and rule of law, etc. To be sure, people outside the empire may have no desire to become part of the empire. If they wanted to, they could, however, through conversion or the acceptance of subjecthood. National-states typically do not have such aspirations. In the first years of the French Revolution, for instance, the revolutionaries conceived of their revolution as universal. As the French army brought the revolution to other countries such as Germany and Spain, however, it soon became clear that local populations did not uniformly see the French case as such. In the case of self-consciously, ethnically national states, there is no aspiration to universality. Not even the most ardent French nationalist, for instance, would want to see all the world become French. He or she may want France to be the most admired and most powerful country in Europe or the world. But a nationalist’s emphasis is on preserving the nation, deciding who should be included and who excluded, and maintaining the boundaries of citizenship. The exclusivity of the nation-state is key to understanding its attraction and prestige to those who are citizens of it.
Policies regarding integration also differ. National states have, in the words of anthropologist Katherine Verdery, stronger “myths of homogeneity” than empires. Historically, there is much greater emphasis on the homogeneity of populations in a national state than in an empire. National states may offer more to their citizens, the ability to participate in elections, be equal under the law, social welfare policies, etc., than empires do to their subjects. Yet national states require more of citizens too – military service from all, for instance, the command of a particular language or the performance of certain cultural practices. The difference between a member of a nation and a non-member is more stark. Those not allowed to be members of the nation are more likely to be expelled, ignored, or even eliminated in some manner. Empires generally tolerate ethnic and cultural differences to a greater extent than nation states. To be sure, the subject of an empire who does not fit the dominant religious or cultural group may feel pressure to do so or be denied certain material opportunities because of it. But empires are less likely to attempt to transform the cultures and ways of life of their residents in order to make all who live in the empire the same.

Cкобелев
Такие отличия имелись, но лишь в части идеологического обоснования и не во все исторические периоды. Классические империи Европы эпохи средневековья и нового времени (Византийская империя, империя Карла Великого, Священная Римская империя германской нации, Российская империя) идеологическое обоснование права своего существования и распространения власти собственной империи на новые территории и народы декларировали как продолжение имперской традиции великого Рима, объявляя себя ее наследницами. Идеологическая составляющая имперской политики для них была чрезвычайно важной. Современные им национальные государства такой идеологии не имели, но реально в своей практике для обеспечения, в первую очередь, экономических преимуществ, действовали точно такими же, в основном, силовыми методами (например, английское, французское, шведское, прусское королевства и другие). В связи с отсутствием понятных и принимаемых всеми соседями идеологических оснований имперского характера, национальные государства вынуждены были обычно компенсировать этот недостаток за счет интенсификации своей экономики, политики, развития культуры и т. д. Данное обстоятельство сыграло не последнюю роль в том, что многие из таких государств существенно переигрывали в указанных сферах современные им империи.
В настоящее время, видимо, не существует идеологий, присущих отдельно империям или национальным государствам, поскольку в мире остаются лишь две идеологии, способные реально функционировать как имперские, и две империи, одна из которых – США – перехватила, навязала или пытается настойчиво навязывать свою идеологию множеству национальных государств и остающейся пока империей России, а другая – Китай – копит силы для рывка, который, в случае его осуществления, наверняка будет иметь своим обоснованием идеологию, основанную на нынешней коммунистической. Таким образом, история большинства империй свидетельствует, что идеологические обоснования их существования всегда играли первостепенную роль, хотя сами идеологические мотивы менялись с течением времени, иногда весьма резко. Национальные же государства, как правило, не обладали идеологией, которую бы полностью или в основном принимали другие народы и конфессиональные группы. Если такие государства и приобретали другие территории и население, то делалось это лишь по праву силы.
В сфере же каких-либо мотиваций экономического характера различий в политике империй или национальных государств, по большому счету, не имелось и не имеется в настоящее время. Любое государственное образование заинтересовано в расширении власти государя или правительства, зоны своего экономического влияния, в обеспечении безопасности путей сообщения, беспрепятственного поступления природных ресурсов в интересах собственной экономики и т. д. и действует по принципам, наиболее приемлемым в данных конкретных условиях, в итоге неизбежно стремясь превратиться в империю. С учетом последнего обстоятельства, характер и пределы самой интеграционной политики империи и национального государства также трудно различить принципиально. Кроме того, они были еще и индивидуальными для каждого государства.

Кауппала
Если подходить к вопросу более тонко, можно отметить несколько отличий. Для империи идеологически обосновать колониальную политику намного легче, чем для национального государства. Поскольку империя сама по себе является гетерогенным и недемократическим государством, её структура может быть легко дополнена (авторитарным путём) новой компонентой, усиливающей её гетерогенность. Наоборот, национальному государству это сделать сложнее, поскольку колониальные приобретения не несут в себе ничего национального. В этом смысле можно также отметить, что приобретение колоний всегда искажает национальный характер национального государства и в большей или меньшей степени подталкивает его к перерождению в империю.
Из этого следует также, что колониализм национального государства имеет тенденцию к ещё более брутальным практикам. Поскольку с национальной точки зрения невозможно обосновать необходимость приобретения колоний и, тем более – их интеграции, национальным государствам обычно нужно найти в качестве обоснования какую-либо идею, унизительную для народов колоний. Именно для дифференциации народов колоний и “главной” нации нужно каким-то образом превратить их в “людей второго сорта”. Правда, следует отметить, что иногда религиозная идентичность империи может приводить к тем же результатам (что видно особенно ярко на примере габсбургско-испанского колониализма). Национальные государства, наоборот, только в исключительных случаях имеют тенденцию к религиозно-фанатичному по сути характеру управления в колониях и обычно склонны к более прагматическим, “земным” основаниям своего господства.
Экономические мотивации важны в обоих случаях, но, как это часто бывает в истории, их обычно камуфлируют более возвышенными идеями.

Dana Sherry (University of California, Davis, USA)
Questions such as these that imply a set of assumptions about the essence of the nation and of the empire to which every state is an exception, at least to a certain degree. The differences between, say, Russian and French practices in their peripheries could be attributed to the fact that one was an empire and the other a nation state, but they could also be convincingly explained by a multitude of other factors.
However, leaving aside questions of whether a polity is a nation or an empire in fact, it does seem fair to claim that proponents of empire and proponents of the nation-state tend to advocate different policies in their colonies. On this normative level, the differences between how the proponents of each stance view how a nation and how an empire should conduct policy are more clear than they are practice, though the specific arguments change from one state to another and from one generation to another.

Weeks
Well, there is a complication with this question as state. Great Britain certainly thought of itself as a nation-state, but it was also an Empire. So I’m not sure that the strict distinction between “Empire” and nation-state makes a lot of sense. Rather, I would welcome comparative studies of different Empires and different periods of World History – that, I think, is the real научно-исследовательская задача будущего.

4. С точки зрения истории отдельных национальных групп, в какой степени СССР первых десятилетий оказался продолжателем политических традиций Российской империи, а в чем противоречил им? Можно ли переносить на советский период актуальные для дореволюционного периода противопоставления "архаической" империи модерным национальным движениям?

Weeks
From my point of view (and I don’t do Soviet history in any serious way), the USSR represents a radical break with tsarist nationalities policies in a variety of ways. There’s the obvious end of discrimination against Jews, Poles, Muslims (though of course that ended under the Provisional Government). But it seems to me (perhaps ironically) that the USSR pursued at the same time both an aggressively “pro-national” policy (as Yuri Slezkin and Terry Martin have shown) and at the same time (especially after the 1930s) being far more “russifying” than the Russian Empire ever was, both in theory and in practice.
I don’t really see the USSR as “archaic” – maybe a failed, muddled “modernism”, but modern all the same.

Скобелев
Фактически, СССР в 1922 г. стал перерождением Российской империи, что предполагает сохранение и использование прежних политических традиций. Но это была уже империя современного типа, официально обосновывавшая право своего существования с помощью новой идеологии. Поэтому неизбежны были и существенные изменения в политической практике. На примере истории коренных народов Сибири, которую я изучаю, можно видеть как традиции, так и новации в организации управления, несомненно, всегда носившего имперский характер. Основная характеристика этой системы управления – наличие элементов самоуправления. И если в дореволюционный период самоуправление имело вид национально-конфессиональной автономии (разных уровней для отдельных народов и этнических групп), то в советское и настоящее время такая автономия стала национально-территориальной (также разноуровневой). В данном отношении народы Сибири оказались полностью уравнены в своем статусе с остальными народами СССР, часть из которых в дореволюционный период имела более высокий уровень самоуправления. Однако при этом в реальной автономии, особенно на первых порах, они даже потеряли, поскольку в органах управления уже не исключалось присутствие представителей других национальностей, чего до революции не было.
Каких-либо оформившихся национальных движений среди коренных народов Сибири в дореволюционный период не имелось, поэтому о противостоянии их империи говорить не приходится. Для этого не имелось экономических и политических оснований. В дореволюционной Сибири уровень налогообложения коренных жителей был заметно ниже, чем у русских людей (по этому поводу можно привести поговорку-проклятье, бытовавшую в разных вариантах сразу у нескольких народов, общая суть которой выражается фразой “чтоб тебе жить, как русскому”), а в повседневной жизни они управлялись выходцами из своей же национальной среды. Недостаточно высокий уровень образованности не позволял коренным народам иметь “критическую массу” собственной интеллигенции, способную сформулировать цель и задачи национального движения и организовать его (иногда говорят о распространении бурханизма среди алтайцев в начале XX в. как примере национального движения, однако реально это явление было скорее выражением внутренней борьбы в среде коренного населения в связи со стремлением некоторых родов занять первенствующее положение). Такие движения реально появились лишь в 1917 г. и просуществовали очень недолго, собственно, только в переходный период, когда о противопоставлении себя империи как таковой речи быть и не могло. В те годы вся территория бывшей Российской империи была в поиске и движении, что не могло не затронуть и народы Сибири, которые зачастую даже не по своей воле включались в них. В 1920-1930-е годы представителями коренных народов если и выдвигались какие-либо проекты государственного устройства (например, проект создания на территории Южной Сибири Тюркской республики), то осуществление их предполагалось исключительно в рамках РСФСР или СССР.

Steinwedel
As the question suggests, the Russian Empire had multiple political traditions, some more “archaic” than others, and a wide variety of national groups, some more “modern” than others. This fact makes a brief answer to the question difficult. The Soviet Union continued some political traditions present in its predecessor. Before 1917 there were a number of political actors who sought to discover and promote some principle – religious, civic or class-based – that could serve as a principle of inclusion and exclusion in an empire composed of different nationalities. This effort grew difficult to sustain as the emperor began to identify himself and the monarchy increasingly with Russian nationality in particular, yet supranational principles retained power. The Bolsheviks’ embrace of the class was one particular result of this search for a supranational principle.
The empire’s administration also had begun to see nationality as a characteristic of all the emperor’s subjects and started to classify people accordingly before 1917. Moreover, other continuities between the imperial and Soviet period may be cited. Many of the ethnographers active in charting early Soviet thinking on nationality had been active and at times influential before 1917. Moreover, political actors after 1917 in some cases had experience with pre-revolutionary nationality policy. Lenin’s father, for instance, was active in a school district in which Nikolai Il’minskii’s bilingual approach to education was influential. The Tatar nationalist Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, active in the Commissariat of Nationalities until his removal by Stalin in 1923, had served as a Director of Non-Russian education in the Ufa zemstvo, which sought to enlighten both Russian speakers and non-Russian speakers in their own reading rooms and adult education programs.
Nonetheless, the Soviet approach to nationalities represented a real departure from pre-revolutionary precedents. The Soviet state consciously and systematically developed and applied concepts of nationality in a way that the tsarist state never did. The institution of nationality in the form of autonomous and union republics or on the personal level in the form of passports, may have drawn on earlier practices of connecting people with land and ascribing nationality but Soviet policies were major innovations.
Bolshevik ideology and the international situation prevailing at the end of the First World War had much to do with the differences between the tsar’s empire and the Soviet Union. Some of what one scholar has called the Bolshevik’s “chronic ethnophilia” results from their own ideology. The Bolsheviks viewed history in a Marxist fashion. History had certain stages leading to a “higher” socialist future. The development of nations was one important feature of that development. The international context of Bolshevik policies also needs to be considered. Toward the end of the First World War and in discussing the peace, US President Woodrow Wilson and others made national self-determination one of the most important considerations. The Bolsheviks made policy regarding nationalities in a context where nation had become a particularly potent force.

Кауппала
Первые десятилетия в истории СССР ни в коем случае нельзя рассматривать как единый период. Внутри него выделяется безусловно два, а при более углублённом анализе – и три различных периода. Между системами НЭПа и сталинизма пролегает чёткая и ясная граница, и переход от одной из этих систем к другой следует рассматривать как перелом даже более глубокий, чем революции 1917 года. Соответственно, различны и национальные политики этих двух систем. Кроме того, к третьему периоду нужно отнести время революции и военного коммунизма, которые, правда, для нас не представляют особенного интереса, т.к. формирование национальной политики в то время находилось лишь в зачаточном состоянии - хотя, конечно, подлежат анализу и изучению несколько самостоятельных попыток со стороны отдельных национальных групп.
О периоде НЭПа нужно сказать, что в это время в стране только в незначительной степени продолжались традиции Российской империи и, напротив, производились энергичные попытки создать новую концепцию в противовес этим традициям. Сформированная тогда система была почти уникальной по той смелости, с которой многонациональная империя пробовала “оседлать” современный национализм своих меньшинств и использовать его в собственных целях. Такие тенденции крайне редко обнаруживались в Российской империи на всём протяжении её истории, хотя, например, создание Финляндской автономии в соответствии с идеями М. Сперанского и Александра I в 1809 году может быть отнесено к этой категории.
Сталинская система, наоборот, оказалась во многом продолжателем традиций Российской империи, хотя её радикализм на вербальном уровне (идеологические лозунги) стал ещё сильнее по отношению к периоду НЭПа.
Противопоставления “архаической” империи модерным национальным движениям можно и нужно переносить на советский период. Радикальная риторика не способна “снять” и заменить собой реальные противоречия. СССР в его любой форме был вынужден создавать новые реалии на основе старых традиций – как “архаической” империи, так и модерных национальных движений.

5. Где проходит граница между политическими, социальными, экономическими и культурными процессами в условиях становления массового общества? Есть ли специфика в условиях протекания этих процессов в "империи"/многонациональной политии или национальном государстве? До каких пределов возможно расширение понятия "политическое пространство" в этом контексте?

Sherry
The boundary between political, social, economic, and cultural processes is very much in the eye – and the discipline – of the beholder. Our training and experience shapes our vision to a great extent, and the balance we find between different processes in our work reflects that fact. Given the elasticity of such categories (particularly in today’s scholarship), we can extend the concept of political space as far as we want. The challenge is to make a compelling justification for the expansion.

Скобелев
Такую границу установить практически невозможно, поскольку все названные процессы тесно между собой связаны и часто вытекают один из другого. Считаю, что в основе всего в настоящее время лежат экономические процессы, которые и определяют все остальные, даже культурные. Реальное политическое пространство на большей части территории планеты в настоящее время формируется и контролируется крупнейшей империей современного типа – США, которая использует все получаемые в результате этого преимущества в первую очередь в интересах своей экономики. Современное массовое общество – это и есть великий Pax Americana, поэтому происходящие в нем процессы суть процессы внутри этой империи. В настоящее время лишь немногие народы способны противостоять глобализации (читай – американизации) — те, кто имеют сильную и растущую экономику, сопоставимую с американской. Но можно ли говорить о наличии, например, в Китае, массового общества, чтобы проводить сравнения, задаваемые сформулированным редакцией вопросом?

Weeks
Увы! One could write volumes on this – and argue for years. I would simply say that Empires are not really modern. Their structure and legitimacy are pre-modern, and attempts to “modernize” them have so far failed.
But I would be interested in studies arguing the opposite and attempting with social, political, and economic historical methods to show how Empires could possibly be “modernized.” In any case, I do think it’s vital for those of us working on “nationality” and “Empire” to go beyond the “merely political” (or “merely economic”) and try to look at daily life, intersections of gender/politics/professionalization/national pride (etc.) and bring this together (or attempt it, anyway!) in our work.

Nick Baron (University of Manchester, UK) “Empire” and “Nation” as Categories of Spatial Politics and Historical Study: Methodological Notes for the Ab Imperio Roundtable

The editors of Ab Imperio have proposed for discussion a series of important and provocative questions, both theoretical and empirical, regarding categories of “empire” and “nation”, and associated conceptual definitions, approaches and research methods, in historical study.
The first, and to my mind, most fundamental question posed by the editors, asks whether scholars are “in need of a different type of categories and approaches for analyzing the political practices of empire in contrast for those of nation state?”
As always, as soon as we try to compare two phenomena we are faced with definitional problems and dangers of circular reasoning. It must be remembered – I shall elaborate on this point below and reiterate it throughout my essay – that “empire” and “nation” themselves aren’t “real things” but ideas, concepts. Some concepts are so intrinsic to our construction of the world and so deeply embedded in social discourse that, as Karl Popper reminded us, “very often we are unaware of the fact that we are operating with hypotheses or theories,” and “we mistake our theoretical models for concrete things.^[44] The extent to which some of these ideas are “objectified” or become “social facts” at particular historical moments is another matter which itself demands to be addressed both theoretically (if sufficient people believe they have a common identity and constitute a nation, do they? and can we then attribute causal force to this object, the “Nation”? – this forces us to question the status and role of “identity”, “discourse” or “hegemonic ideology” as analytical categories) and empirically (by surveying public opinion, by discourse analysis, by research into socialization processes or state legislation on citizenship and social welfare, etc.) - but it should still be borne in mind that, ultimately, even these “social facts” derive from and remain rooted in the abstract and in “myth”.^[45]
For this reason, we need from the start explicitly to conceptualize our “ideal type” of “empire” or “nation”.^[46] These models enable us then to derive operational hypotheses, or (to be less brutally scientific) sets of assumptions and leading questions, which guide our selection, organization and interpretation of the primary materials.^[47] Of course, it doesn’t really matter how we define our “ideal types”, so long as they are of instrumental value in our research and so long as we make these models explicit. As such, criticism that any model or concept is intrinsically wrong misses the point, since, in the words of anthropologist Evans-Pritchard, “a theory may have heuristic value without actually being sound”.^[48] Or, as Sovietologist Alex Inkeles put it, “there is no such thing as a right or wrong sociological model. There are richer and poorer ones”.^[49] Indeed, abstract models are necessarily false when empirically tested: they can never be anything but sources of “fertile error”.^[50]
This approach, of course, is relativistic, but relativism, as the historian and philosopher R. G. Collingwood understood better than many of his own commentators, “is not an argument for historical scepticism. It is only the discovery of a second dimension of historical thought, the history of history.”^[51] The fact that history-writing is so intimately linked to its contemporary context, that it is so “subjective” and dependent upon the imagination of the historian, does not invalidate its cognitive potential.^[52] Indeed, to believe that history and its concepts could in any way be “objective” is not only self-deluding (as one writer has phrased it, “one does not doff an idiosyncrasy as easily as one dons a white coat”) but also dangerous, since it gives “scientific” status and credibility to ideas (not least, those of “empire” and “nation”) which are contingent and best treated with scepticism.^[53] Popular or political discourse might choose to speak of the “British Empire” or “British nation” (or, for that matter, of “liberal democracy” or “the market”) as if these phenomena existed a priori as real objects; scholars will not (especially if they are Scottish or play with stocks and shares).
I’ve undertaken this methodological detour to bolster my argument that the question as posed above itself needs to be “problematised”. A punchier answer would have been: it all depends how you define “empire” and “nation”. However, it might be more interesting to construe the question from another angle. Empirically to compare the political practices of two model systems, it may be more revealing to employ “categories and approaches” derived from a third concept. We might, for example, usefully approach the question from the point of view of “governmentality”.^[54] In this case, we are very likely to find that systems that we would otherwise consider as very different employ similar strategies of domination and some systems we are used to grouping under the same typology in fact uphold very different “regimes of truth”. Or we may find continuities in histories of one system where traditionally scholars, fixated on regime “type”, saw “transition” or “transformation”. This, in turn, may prompt us to reconsider the way in which we describe and conceptualise these systems in the first place.
The editors’ second question permits me to pick up on these reflections, as it asks “what are the discursive challenges in studies of political history of empires?” My answer, again, will be irritatingly evasive: it depends, of course, on what is meant by “discursive”. Scholars will always operate within one or more discourses, which constrain and delimit what they can say, but are at the same time necessary preconditions for saying anything comprehensible to the normative community. One problem, which I’ve touched on already, is the relationship between scholarly discourse and popular or political discourses, which manifest greater resistance to integrating new discursive terms or to “renegotiating” discursive relations (embodying, it could be argued, relations of power).^[55] There is also the question of distinguishing between the discourse(s) in which the researcher is implicated and the discourse(s) that might be the object of study, or which might construct the object of study. If we study “empire”, for example, do we study what scholars now conceive of as constituting “empire”? Do we study what is popularly thought of as “empire”? Do we study what contemporaries in the period we are study