Rossiiskaia imperiia v sravnitel’noi perspektive (The Russian Empire in Comparative Perspective), edited by Aleksei Miller, presents itself as a broad, international collaborative effort among historians anxious not only to study the specific traits of the Russian Еmpire, but also to use Russian imperial studies as a starting point for reflection on the validity of a comparative perspective applied to studies of empire. This collective work is the result of a conference entitled “History of Empires: Comparative Methods in Study and Teaching,” organized in Moscow in June 2003 by the Open Society Institute in collaboration with the Faculty of History of Central European University.
It is important to situate the book in the context of the conference because, as one may realize after reading the chapter by Aleksandr Semyonov, devoted to a presentation of the conference itself, some of the articles in the book constitute detailed elaborations of positions within the larger debates that took place there, and the methodological conclusions the chapters seem to reach are nuanced by positions taken by their authors at the conference. This is especially true of the pieces by Alfred Rieber and Dominic Lieven, who offer general theories of empire that may appear too abstract at times. Semyonov’s chapter also complements the book project itself, as several of the conference contributors have not been included in the edited work.
The book is interesting in its scope and its variety of methodological approaches. While some chapters address the main topic more explicitly than others, on the whole it is more suggestive of methodological directions than it is a systematically clear and convincing presentation of a theoretical and methodological program. Individual authors present their findings and their methods, but despite Rieber’s evocation of a “general strategy for the study of empires,” it appears that the book does not clearly fulfill this aim. It is, however, a very valuable guide to the study of empires, in the sense that it helps the reader to reflect critically on the many and eclectic problems suggested by imperial formations seen in comparative perspective. The book presents rich (although not necessarily new) empirical material, and attempts to shift the focus of study from the problem of the demise of empires to that of their formation and sustainability. The roles of geopolitics, the elites, the economy, imperial governance, and society are considered. As Rieber and Semyonov stress separately, empires should be studied more (and should help us to question the current assumptions of dominant national historiographies), in part because historically they have endured longer than nation-states.
The book covers the early modern period to World War I, with some incursions in the period immediately following that of the dynastic patrimonial empires; it explicitly avoids tackling the issue of the Soviet Union as an imperial formation, as this would complicate the debate rather than clarify it. The structure of the book is thematic and is divided in six parts: an introductory part, followed by sections on the comparison of continental empires, elites, the economy, and imperial space, and concluding with an essay by the Africanist Appolon Davidson on “The Legacy of the Imperial Past,” whose focus on post-imperial issues of racism and colonialism in the modern world distinguishes it from the other contributions.
Despite the sometimes seemingly unrelated diversity of approaches, two main methodological directions appear. One is an emphasis on a structural, typological, and deterministic approach, while the other takes a pluralistic, regionalist view of empire. The articles based more squarely on the second perspective appear more convincing in the end and the pluralistic, nuanced reading of empires that they propose is the important contribution made by this volume.
A synthesis between the two approaches is seldom reached, except perhaps in the case of Andreas Kappeler’s chapter on “The Formation of the Russian Empire from the 15th to the early 18th Centuries: The Heritage of Rus’, Byzantium, and the Horde.” Kappeler makes the point that the pluralistic aspect of the Russian Empire is derived from its late medieval and early modern origins and that it appears therefore to a large extent determined by these. He states that at the beginning of the 18th century, “the Russian Empire was by its structure a composite state, typical of Europe in the early modern period.” However, origins cannot fully explain the course of empire because “the paradox is that the successor to an Orthodox empire was an Islamic Asian power (the Ottoman Empire), and the successor to a steppic Islamic empire was an Orthodox, Central European power.” He nevertheless insists that the historical legacy of the Golden Horde was more important in shaping the Russian Empire than the political and religious ideology of the Third Rome.
Interesting contrasts can be made between different contributions in the book, though these remain more often than not implicit. One example is that of the different factors leading to attempts at greater homogeneity within the empire and the ensuing consequences. The contrasted cases are found in Kappeler’s article and in Selçuk Somel’s article on “The Ottoman Empire: Local Elites and the Mechanisms of their Integration, 1699-1914.” In both cases, a process of homogenization of empire is identified, the first one due to the influence of absolutism in the 18th century, contributing to the consolidation of empire, while the second one occurs in the era of the development of nationalism in the late 19th century and goes counter to the pluralistic nature of the empire and its peripheral elites, thereby encouraging its demise. Conclusions are not drawn but suggestive avenues of comparison appear.
Lieven’s chapter also serves to illustrate the relative heuristic value of typological categories and geographic determinism as applied to empires. In his article, “An Empire on the Periphery of Europe: A Comparison of Russia and the West,” the author compares European empires situated at the western and eastern peripheries of Europe. The British and Russian empires were peripheral empires, which explains the exceptional scale of their expansion. He also uses the well-known opposition between maritime and continental empires when comparing these two, only to draw the limits of these categories and showing that as a result of expansion, the British Empire had to address issues related to continental frontiers in Canada and India while the Russian empire found several of its key cities on vulnerable coastlines. The author, who is himself a brilliant geopolitical analyst, cautions us against an “excessive deference to geopolitical determinism.” Other contrasted categories he employs, such as a liberal, commercial British Empire opposed to a dynastic, military Russian Empire, would merit a similar critical reappraisal. Lieven seems in the end to lean toward a complex, pluralistic approach to empires rather than toward one that proposes ideal types; this impression is confirmed by his statements reproduced in Semyonov’s article.
In “Comparing Continental Empires,” Rieber develops a comparative approach based on ideas of historical and cultural contacts between neighboring and contemporaneous empires, inspired by Marc Bloch, and extends it to five “continental Eurasian empires,” namely the Russian, Habsburg, Ottoman, Iranian, and Chinese. Although interesting and suggestive, his chapter may serve to illustrate the limits of a very broad typological comparison, as the level of generality reached sometimes leads only to further questions rather than to any satisfactory conclusions. For example, when the author contrasts maritime empires with continental Eurasian empires to argue that while the former could tolerate different forms of government in their midst, due to the geographic distance between the metropolis and the colonial periphery, the presence of a constitutional regime in the continental Eurasian type would have meant its introduction to the rest of the empire, this model does not fully explain the episode of Congress Poland (1815-1831) within the Russian Empire.
Analyses that privilege a plural and complex perception of empire within its own frontiers are particularly interesting. Miller’s chapter on “Empire and Nation in the Imagination of Russian Nationalism: Remarks on the Basis of an Article by A. N. Pypin” demonstrates that the sense of being whole that characterized empire went hand in hand with a mental hierarchization of space. Miller shows that different regions of the empire were considered differently at the symbolic level and that not all belonged to an intimate Russian core. Anatolii Remnev’s article on “Russia and Siberia in the Changing Space of the Empire from the 19th to the Beginning of the 20th Centuries” stresses the long-evolving conceptualization of Siberia as a Russian land, reaching a point where it becomes an inseparable part of the Russian Empire. Jane Burbank, in an article on the local courts of the Russian Empire, stresses the phenomenon of legal pluralism: “This principle of the plurality of standards in legislation reflected the real existing diversity of social norms and legal practices in the different parts or social strata of the empire.” These works call to attention, in particular, the interest of a comparative approach within the frontiers of a single empire, which shows the variations among the imperial regions. They propose a reflection on center and periphery taken in a subjective sense, as linked to a sense of identity as opposed to a geopolitical conception.
This collective book contains a plethora of ideas and should interest historians of empire and nationalism, political scientists, and historical sociologists. It is regrettable that the book does not include studies on international relations and the diplomatic history of empires, as these would have helped to illuminate the phenomena of the balance of power and therefore the sustainability of empires (an explicit focus of the book), and might have offered a level of comparison that would have been more historically informed than the broad typological approach. Nonetheless, taken together these studies are an interesting and significant contribution to the field of imperial studies.