Particularly influential for this study is the model of an "empire of difference," developed by scholars including the Russianist Jane Burbank, the Africanist Frederick Cooper, and the Ottomanist Karen Barkey. Such empires rule from the center but allow the diverse languages, ethnicities, and religions of their subject peoples to remain in place as anchors of social stability. Such an analytical framework is not new, of course. In 1532 none other than Niccolo Machiavelli outlined three choices available to a conquering state to govern states that "have been accustomed to live in freedom under their own laws." Conquerors could "destroy" the vanquished; they could "go and live therein" by sending in administrators trained from the center; or they could "allow them to continue to live under their own laws, taking a tribute from them and creating within them a new government of a few which will keep the state friendly to you."
The Russian, Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, and Chinese empires, all of which arose in the wake of the Mongol empire, demonstrate such an approach. Vast, continental, and highly diverse in ethnicities, confessions, and languages, these Eurasian empires calculated central control against the advantages of maintaining stable communities. They synthetically drew on the Chinggisid heritage of the Mongol empire (founded by Chinggis or Genghis Khan) and other cultural influences (in Russia, Byzantium; in the Ottoman empire, Byzantium and Islamic thought; in China, Confucianism and Buddhism; in Mughal India, indigenous Hindu practice) to construct ruling ideologies and governing strategies. Thomas Allsen reminds us that such an early modern empire was a "huge catchment basin channeling, accumulating, and storing the innovations of diverse peoples and cultures," while Alfred Rieber identifies common strategies of governance and ideology across "Eurasian borderlands" from Hungary to China. Connected by trade, warfare, and conquest, early modern empires shared military technologies, bureaucratic record-keeping skills, languages, communications networks, and ideologies and approaches to governance through "difference."
The Russian empire evolved in a part of Eurasia that acquainted it with multiple examples of politics of difference and empire. The territory that the Russian empire came to occupy traversed a geological and historical triad of east-west swaths of lands and cultures connecting Europe and Asia and north to south. Southernmost, stretching from the Mediterranean and Black Sea to the Middle East and points east, was a band of relatively commercialized societies, with large and densely populated cities and thick trade networks. Their needs—for food, luxury goods, and particularly for slave labor—were met by age-old maritime and overland trade routes, most notably the Silk Road that traversed the steppe as an east-west highway (with north-south offshoots) transferring people, goods, and ideas. Steppe prairieland constituted the middle of these three swaths of territory, north of the "civilized" urban world and linking it to the third swath, northern forests full of valuable resources such as slaves and furs. Riverine routes north-south linked forest, steppe, and urban emporia as long ago as Homer's time, when amber from the Baltic Sea made its way to the Mediterranean and Black Sea.
The lands that Russia came to control enter the picture among the Eurasian empires with the construction of trade networks from the Baltic to the Black and Caspian Seas in the ninth century, resulting in the emergence of a grand principality that called itself "Rus'," centered at Kyiv. It rose politically into the eleventh century on the great Dnieper River trade route to Byzantium and, in a fashion typical for medieval states, dissolved into multiple principalities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as trade routes shifted. Those principalities heir to Kyiv gravitated to trade opportunities in the west, the Baltic coast, and the upper Volga, which is where the princes of Moscow rose as a regional power in the fifteenth century. To some extent the Russian empire's rise marks a new stage in Eurasian empire building. Historically, empires had flourished in the Mediterranean, Middle East, Eurasia, and Far East, but they were difficult to maintain over time. Rome, the Mongols, and various Chinese dynasties historically were great successes in expanse and longevity, while more typical ofEurasia, particularly in the steppe, were constantly changing coalitions asserting control in segments of steppe or in smaller regions. From the fifteenth century onward, large continental empires became able to establish more enduring power and to control the steppe, because of improvements in communications, bureaucracy, and military. From the fifteenth to eighteenth century settled agrarian empires gradually took over the steppe—the Ottoman, Habsburg, Safavid, Mughal, Russian, and Qing empires—and Russia's role in that historical turning point is our story here.
Assertive central control established empire; what kept it together were flexible policies of governance, policies that ran along a continuum from coercion to co-optation to ideology, with a large middle embracing many forms of mobilization by rulers and accommodation by subjects. Charles Tilly calls this triad "coercion, capital and commitment." The various pieces of this continuum, which will provide a structuring principle for our work, had to be kept in balance. Coercion was essential and constant; it was used liberally to win control (brutal conquest, suppression of opposition) and to maintain it (hostage taking, corporal and capital punishment, constant threat). But early modern empires lacked the manpower to control by coercion alone, so they deployed other strategies to assert legitimacy and govern.
Central to creating imperial legitimacy was the bravado of declaring that one held it. Empires "broadcast" their power, asserting control far more categorically than their on-the-ground power could achieve. Imperial centers set forth a supranational ideology, usually associated with the dominant religion of the rulers and their closest elite, trying to inspire what Tilly calls "commitment." As Karen Barkey elaborated regarding the Ottoman empire and Geoffrey Hosking noted in the
Russian case, such a supranational ideology does not exclusively identify itself with the hierarchs and institutions of the dominant religion, or does so at its peril. It honors those leaders and constructs its rituals and symbolic vocabulary from the dominant faith, but it keeps ideological control in its own hands. It often leavens its identification of the rulers as religious with other qualities as well, perhaps depicting the dynasty as heroic and charismatic, extolling the rulers' ability to protect the realm from enemies and its subjects from injustice. Providing good justice and mercy—in courts and in alms giving—were central attributes of imperial rulers in the Eurasian tradition, and we will explore all these elements of legitimizing ideology and practice in Russia.
Beyond ideology, a crucial element of maintaining imperial power is the delicate balancing of cohesion and control, what Tilly calls "capital." The state creates institutions to organize the market, collect taxes, control population, staff the army and bureaucracy, and otherwise collect resources that it then disburses among the dominant classes to reward and enlist. It creates cohesion among the elite by offering tax, land, and other privileges. It constructs institutions such as judiciary and bureaucracy that serve the populace as well as control them. Subject populations can choose to "accommodate," in Alfred Rieber's phrase, by joining the imperial military or civil service or even culturally assimilating. But the imperial center also avoids too much cohesion, in the form of too much integration of communities on the local level. As true in the Russian empire as it was for the Ottoman case that Barkey explored, imperial rulers operationalize this middle ground of co-optation by maintaining direct, vertical chains of connection to individual communities; they keep those communities and their elites relatively isolated from each other. In what Barkey calls a "hub and spoke" pattern and Jane Burbank calls an "imperial regime of rights," imperial rulers make separate "deals" (the phrase is Brian Boeck's) for packages of duties and rights with constituent groups.