One cannot tell a book by its cover but this slim volume lives up to the promise of its sober and stately appearance.
As the editors acknowledge, this collection of essays belongs to the sub-genre of “beyond-the-nation-state” literature. In the West, such writings have been the purview of optimists, typically European Union specialists, who look to a “new (harmonious) world order.” In the East, they have been the preserve of pessimists, sometimes Russianists, who believe that everywhere beyond the nation state lurks the hoary phantom of empire. For the optimists, empire has struck out, in the American baseball sense of that term. For the pessimists, empire has struck back.^[1]
Judging by the spate of recent publications, the pessimists would seem to have the upper hand. The stalling of the European project and the misadventures of American foreign policy confirm that the irenic “beyond-the-nation-state” hypothesis is untenable. Instead, empire is back. Ab Imperio may be the sigh of the Zeitgeist but Ad Imperium is the battle cry of the Geisteswissenschaften.^[2] The sixteen thousand Amazon books with “empire” in the title that Karen Barkey evoked in 2005 appear to have declined a year later to a mere (!) 14,726 but empire studies are still coming at us with the intensity and proportions of an academic tsunami.^[3] Contemporary political developments as well as this tidal wave of academic research have problematized the notion of empire as inherently complex and infinitely variegated. Astutely, the editors of this volume have therefore focussed on issues of governance rather than on problems of definition. As Benedict Anderson has pointed out in this journal, states that might be thought of as empires have differed so much that they cannot be put under one label.^[4] This volume reminds us that all empires, however they differ otherwise, have shared the task of governing heterogeneous populations and widespread areas; and recounts how some of them have gone about this task.
The ten essays in this volume are divided among those that offer a broad panorama and those that examine the internal workings of imperial rule. To use a well-worn image, some of the authors are “parachute jumpers” and others are “truffle hunters.” The “parachute jumpers” are Norman Stone, Sergei Podbolotov and Murat Yasar in the chapter entitled, “The Russians and the Turks: Imperialism and Nationalism in the Era of Empires”; Dominic Lieven, “Empire on Europe’s Periphery: Russian and Western Comparisons”; and Alfred J. Rieber, “The Comparative Ecology of Complex Frontiers.” These pieces are sweeping, often breathtaking in scope. The “truffle hunters” are Paul Werth, “Schism Once Removed: Sects, State Authority, and Meanings of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia”; Selim Deringil on “Redefining Identities in the Late Ottoman Empire: Policies of Conversion and Apostasy”; and Ilya Vinkovetsky, “The Russian-American Company as a Colonial Contractor for the Russian Empire.” Their articles are impressive and illuminating in their grasp of both the mechanics and internal logic of empire. In between these two types of contribution lie Maciej Janowski’s “Justifying Political Power in 19th Century Europe: The Habsburg Empire and Beyond,” and Sebastian Balfour’s “The Spanish Empire and its End: A Comparative View in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe.” Valuable in their own right, the comparative dimension is weaker here than one might have expected. Finally, two of the best chapters in the book set out to counter conventional historiography. The first is Alexei Miller’s “The Empire and the Nation in the Imagination of Russian Nationalism,” which argues, pace Geoffrey Hosking and the disciples of the late Ernest Gellner, that Russians did indeed distinguish between nation and empire. The second is Philipp Ther’s, “Imperial instead of National History: Positioning Modern German History on the Map of European Empires”, a masterly piece that demonstrates how German nationalism can be understood as imperial in the sense of reflecting a multinational reality.
The empire at the heart of “Imperial Rule” is Russia. Only two of the chapters, those by Miller and by Vinkovetsky, focus exclusively on Russia. The chapters by Janowski, Deringil, Ther and Balfour mention Russia in passing, if at all. Nevertheless, Russia dominates the whole collection whether she is being compared to Britain (Lieven), the Ottomans (Stone, Podbolotov, Yasar), the Habsburgs (Janowski), the Hohenzollerns (Ther) or the great Eurasian empires (Rieber). One is led to wonder whether the foci and even the outcomes of the comparisons would have been different if another anchor point of comparison had been chosen. For example, France was much more of an “empire,” by any stretch of the term, under the democratic and parliamentary Third Republic than it was under the authoritarian and plebiscitary Second Empire. What does that tell us of the relation between the type of internal rйgime and imperial authority? The British empire was a crazy patchwork of crown colonies, protectorates, dominions and nominally sovereign princely states. How does this sort of ramshackle set-up, indirect rule or “decentralized despotism” in Mahmood Mamdani’s caustic term, stand up to the centripetal imperial model implicit in discussions of empire from Rome to Russia?^[5] If the locus of comparison is the Habsburg Empire then, of course, the question of nationalities comes to the fore, as it does not if one takes China as a starting point. Finally, any comparison that might begin with Imperial Germany would underscore the question of a nexus between empire and aggression, an issue that is at the heart of the historiography of both the First and the Second World Wars?^[6] Here as elsewhere, the answers one gets depend on the questions one asks, a truism worth reiterating when it comes to the comparative history of empires.
The foremost merit of the book under review is to focus on what the editors felicitously call “imperial rule.” Not only does this construct save the contributors from drowning in the afore-mentioned debates on the nature of empire, but it is a happier choice than recent alternative formulations. A term such as “imperial presence” is weak, and the otherwise promising designation “Imperium” has been corrupted, at least in some intellectual circles, by exclusive reference to the Russian empire or Soviet Union or Russian Federation, which are characteristically not differentiated from each other.^[7] In fact, “imperial rule” is so heuristically fertile a construct that one regrets the editors of this volume did not impose it more systematically upon the work as a whole. Each author could have been called upon to make explicit his (the authors are all male) understanding of the relevance of this construct to the specific case he is examining. Of course, such coherence and symmetry would have required an iron editorial hand and authorial discipline of – dare I say? – imperial proportions.
Another merit of Imperial Rule is that the book remains unclouded by the obfuscations of fashion. Laura Engelstein may be correct that research on empire (she is specifically writing about the Russian empire) “has moved from social to cultural problems”; culture meaning here representation, discourse, practices and mentalities.^[8] And this orientation has produced pathbreaking results. One need only think of Richard Wortman’s richly creative work which is necessarily founded upon a conception of the imperial.^[9] However, the culturalist and postmodernist orientation in studies on empire has also produced innovative and possibly even stimulating but essentially opaque scholarship, epitomized in Hardt and Negri’s Empire.^[10] Ultimately, this literature may well obscure more than it enlightens.^[11] Imperial Rule, in contrast, is free of all such pathologies. Without exception, the contributions are historically sophisticated and intellectually challenging but blessedly free of jargon, faddishness or authorial self-indulgence.
The question that arises in reading Imperial Rule, as well as other new studies, is whether they are promoting a rehabilitation of empire. There is no single answer because the question itself can be interpreted in various ways. Imperial Rule does not rehabilitate empire as does, say, Niall Ferguson’s dazzling apologia in the tradition of “empire by invitation,” “benevolent hegemon,” and celebration of Pax Romana, Britannica, Americana etc.^[12] To be sure, one may detect in the volume under review, perhaps most noticeably among the Ottomanist contributors, an occasional whiff of nostalgia, such as one finds in many other publications on empire. However, if one can speak at all about rehabilitation of empire in this volume, it is rather in the spirit of William McNeill, where empires appear as one historical form of political organization among others and one that has served humanity longer, sometimes better sometimes worse, than its rivals or successors.^[13]
Scholars may be implicitly rehabilitating the notion of empire in historiographic terms through the proliferation of studies they devote to this subject. However, empire has not been politically rehabilitated. In political and popular discourse there are republics of virtue and a heavenly kingdom but there is only an evil empire.^[14] In a quirk of postmodernist irony, the only entity left today that still calls itself an empire is Japan, a state that in its postwar ethos is almost the antithesis of what empires are supposed to be. Empires that allow themselves to be called such are therefore now a thing of the past. Imperial rule, however, remains and this fine book gives us an inkling of its myriad possibilities.