The idea to devote the thematic program of the journal in 2008 to the problem of “gardening empire” emerged from discussions during the seminar held in August 2007 in Kazan, Russia. The seminar was organized by the Ab Imperio editorial team and historians from Mainz University, Germany. An international group of scholars representing historical studies of empire from the Russian Federation, former Soviet Union countries, Europe and the US attended the event. Most participants were specialists in the history of Eastern Europe and the Russian empire, while the role of the seminar’s discussant was taken up by Ann Laura Stoler, an expert on colonialism and Western overseas empires. It was the discussant who drew the attention of the participants to the significant difference between the research agendas of the studies of Eastern European empires (at least as presented at the seminar) on the one hand, and colonial empires, on the other. This critical commentary triggered a fruitful discussion of “exceptionalism,” both as a mode of self-description of imperial regimes and as a persistent modus operandi of historical understanding of empires. Since the age of classical antiquity until today empires or composite polities have been founded on some idea of their own uniqueness and exceptional historical path. This conception was dialectically transformed into a strategic vision of imperial universalism that prioritized imperial loyalties over regional, ethnic, confessional, and social identities and relegated the latter to the domain of the local and particular. While this perception of exceptionalism can be found in many different schools of historiographic thought about empire, it is in the history of Russia that it is often expressed most visibly due to historical context. The relative absence in Russian studies of such phenomena (traditional for the studies of colonial empires) as marginalization, power operation in the domain of the intimate, and “carnal knowledge” surprised the seminar participants. This situation naturally invites a conclusion about the exceptional nature of Russian imperial experience and exceptionalism as a mode of history writing about empire. A series of questions emerged from the encounter between different academic traditions in studies of empire. Should historians aspire for a meta-interpretative framework that would account for peculiarities of that imperial experience from the view point of an external observer? Or, alternatively, should they reproduce and creatively re-work the trope of exceptionalism provided to us by languages of self-description or historiography (looking at exceptionalism as a norm and the way in which imperial political and social spaces function)?
It appears obvious that those practices explored by post-colonial studies – manipulation of power, drawing of boundaries between categories of citizens, sanitary projects of “cleansing” societies from “infected” or “polluted” elements – are all characteristics of modern colonialism. A lack or presence of these lines of inquiry in the research agenda is taken to be a proof of the archaic or modernizing imperium. At the same time, the question can be reversed: is the conclusion about the archaic nature of the Russian Imperium an outcome of peculiar historical experiences, or is it a result of historiographic inertia and uncritical reading of the reification of imperial archaism in the languages of self-description and political contestation?
The “Theory and Methodology” section in the current issue addresses these questions. In particular, Nicholas Breyfogle demonstrates that contemporary historiography exhibits the coexistence of different interpretative paradigms: from “modernizing” to those that reproduce the “archaism” and “exceptionalism” of Russian imperial experience. Is this historiographic polyphony a reflection of multiple layers and vectors of the real historical time in empire? (In this case, a proper research agenda is always determined by the choice of a particular set of individual imperial situations and contexts.) Can this be taken as the ultimate reflection of imperial exceptionalism?
An empire that Ann Stoler missed in the papers of colleagues dealing with Eastern Europe may be called the “gardening empire” – an analog to the “gardening state” of Zygmunt Bauman. This notion presupposes the existence of the interventionist state whose power is based on modern scientific knowledge pertaining to nature, society, and politics. This knowledge entails practices of governance for “cultivation,” rationalization and categorization of the governed societies. The interview with Zygmunt Bauman published in the same section of the journal sheds light on the origin of this concept, derived from Ernest Gellner’s view of “garden culture” as a metaphor for understanding the transformative and active role of culture in a modern society. Bauman suggests a distinction between “gardening” and “gamekeeping.” The former projects an order onto social reality, while the latter maintains the existent state of social relations. In relation to the phenomenon of empire, these metaphors suggest a distinction between the archaic imperium that can be understood as a gamekeeper state, and the modernizing empire with its politics of population, which resembles the gardening state. However, as it becomes clear from reading Bauman, the discourse of modernization unequivocally casts empire as the Other that precedes the modern gardening state. The imperial historical experience is different both from the landscape of the naturally grown forest and that of the well-ordered garden. It is not accidental that Bauman also suggests the model of “the state of nations” as meeting modern challenges in multicultural space: in his analysis, the nation is closely associated with rationalization and modernization.
A different response to the question of imperial exceptionalism may be found in the article by Jeremy Adelman, “The Age of Imperial Revolutions.” The author reconsiders the view of the causal links between the wave of national-liberation movements and the collapse of empire. Adelman enunciates a different view of the rebellion against the metropole as a result of the politics of the modernization of empire. He demonstrates that the very frame of national liberation struggle was set forth by the political and ideological context of the empire, and that this context was reproduced in the political and social imaginations inside the realm of the transatlantic system during the revolutionary epoch. A different aspect of imperial encounter with the modern is the focus of Seymour Becker’s article, where he uncovers the history of political reforms in the reign of Alexander I. Becker demonstrates that the reformers may have varied in ideological outlooks, but they all held in common a belief in the capacity of empire for rationalization and improvement. Empire as a problem of governance emerged for the first time for those Russian reformers who accepted the idea of popular sovereignty. A concomitant result of this conception of government was the importance of cultural unity and the internal homogeneity of the populus. Preceding the modern politics of population, the ideological innovations produced by Russian reformers were inspired by the contradiction between the “gamekeeper state” that was supposed to guard the traditional orderly system of imperial variety, and the “gardening empire” that aspired to bring the new rational order into the garden of imperial plurality on the basis of scientific knowledge and the eradication of exceptions. Imperial exceptionalism was conceived by the reformers of the first half of the nineteenth century as a pitiful but redemptive deviation. These reformers, like the author of the article himself, share the view of the transformative nature of European absolute monarchies, both imperial and non-imperial.
Other materials in the issue partake in the discussion of the perception and phenomenology of imperial exceptionalism in the normative setting of modernity and modern social knowledge. Of particular interest for this discussion are the materials of the presidential panel of the 39th annual convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (New Orleans, November 17, 2007). Mark Beissinger’s proposal to think about the persistence of empire in Russian history was equally matched by the participants in the panel who avoided the discourse of the inherent peculiarity of empire and exceptional frameworks of interpretation that are needed to account for the mystical endurance of empire in the culturally and politically post-imperial era. All of the panelists’ contributions avoided imperial metaphysics. Instead they turned their attention to such aspects of thinking and research of empire in the contemporary world as “imperial reputation,” modern cultural codes and media for transmission of imperial experience in mass culture, imperial rhetoric and reproducible value judgments about empire, and empire as a context-setting category. The latter approach turns the question of imperial exceptionalism into a research venue, as this exceptionalism appears to be one of the languages of representation and governance of empire and therefore should be subjected to scholarly analysis. Moreover, the identification of certain situations, contexts, and strategies as “imperial” emerges only as a result of contestation, conflict, and displacement between different normative and monological languages of self-description. It is in these instances of conflicts of interpretation when a scholar grasps the entire complexity of the competing and uneven languages of description of groupness, power, and space. This indeed opens a broad venue for the application of a postcolonial framework of analysis and evocation of “gamekeeper state” and “gardening empire,” since the very discourse of exceptionalism and practices of inclusion and exclusion from the imperial community becomes the languages of identification and rationalization of the imperial situation.

Editors of Ab Imperio:
I. Gerasimov
S. Glebov
A. Kaplunovski
M. Mogilner
A. Semyonov