Centers and Elites

There are fundamental constraints imposed upon imperial systems, generated in particular through the relations of surplus distribution between center and elites. Imperial systems have at their disposal a range of culturally determined and conjuncturally inflected options for managing their resources and for constructing their relationship with conquered or incorporated elites.

Given the context set by pre-industrial levels of technology, imperial centers had to solve the problem of maintaining conquered peoples, both elites and the mass of the producing population, in subjection, and had at the same time to assure a surplus adequate to the maintenance of their apparatus of domination—military and fiscal as well as judicial and ideological, depending on the context. By the same token, imperial centers had also to negotiate the structural contradiction between their interests and those of other factions of the ruling elites (both those belonging to the conquerors or imperialists, on the one hand, as well as those of conquered elites, on the other), particularly in respect of control over the appropriation of sur­plus and over its distribution. There have been many different variations on this theme as different imperial systems, different dominant or courtly elites and rulers, sought both to maintain their own authority over conquered regions and to in­corporate, subordinate, or otherwise neutralize the elites as well as the ordinary populations of newly won regions.

But this model seems too simplistic, especially in view of the fact that empirical research into a number of historical empires shows that, even where fiscal levies were high, the mutual interrelationship of conquered and conquering elites and the ways in which the imperial center developed vested interests in the conquered re­gions make for a more complex interplay of the various elements from which an imperial system is composed. In the case of Achaemenid Persia, for example, in­vestment in irrigation that was certainly beneficial—in terms of tax revenue—to the court was undertaken by local elites, in return for fiscal relief or concessions; indeed, the royal archives from Persepolis provide much information on several aspects of state economic management and investment in the provinces, such as the transfer of state-managed labor from all the provinces of the empire, court invest­ment in a range of artisanal activities and production centers, the transfer ofworkers from one site to another, as well as complex accounting systems for central storage facilities and the redistribution of provisions and supplies through a sophisticated bureaucracy. In short, such evidence demonstrates the complex intertwining of the court or “state” with the “private” interests of the royal household and especially with those of local elites.

A different example is offered by the successor to the Persian Empire, the Seleucid Empire which arose on the fragmented eastern and middle eastern provinces of Alexander’s short-lived empire. Here, because the Seleucid kings were distant from their original Greek homeland, they always represented a minority ethnic group that, while it could bring in both Greek settlers as well as mercenary soldiers and settlers, was never able to form a particularly numerous ethnic base of support, and in fact it was really only in the northern parts of Syria that a real process of Hellenization took place.

Elite support, whether regarding a court-centered imperial elite or a provincial ruling elite or elites, was thus constantly under negotiation, offering an alterna­tive model of the exercise of imperial power, in which the center was the focus of royal or imperial authority and the exercise of military control, and in which the provinces functioned more or less autonomously except where the return of tax and tribute to the court was concerned. An ideological identity of royal authority and the vested interests of provincial elites served to cement the relationship, while where the center was able to balance the vested interests of the different factions and play one element off against another to maintain such an equilibrium, central au­thority and access to resources could be preserved—and in virtually every imperial system such an effort can be observed in the historical record.

Center-e lite relations, and the nature of the negotiations that had to be maintained to balance the interests of metropolis and provinces or more distant ter­ritories, were also inflected by imperial competition—the implicit challenge set up by a rival imperial system with a common border has generally reinforced efforts on the part of an imperial center to emphasize ideological difference and to strengthen the ties between the provinces and the imperial capital or the ruler.

The relationship between the imperial center and those who actually appropriate surplus on their behalf is, in consequence, always contradictory and potentially an­tagonistic. The former must attempt to appropriate surplus itself, or ensure that it receives an adequate portion of such surplus, to be certain of its survival; the latter is interested in conserving and enhancing its social and economic position, even where it was a “state” or “service” elite with little in the way of landed resources, de­pendent wholly or largely on the state, as in the case of the Ottoman and Mughal elites, for a period at least, as well as others.

Empires generate new elites, or force the transformation of established elites. A key question to be asked about the dynamics of any empire is whether or not the imperial center, or the elites bound up with the perceived interests of a given imperial formation, can act independently of the interests of dominant socioeco­nomic classes in the home territory or in the provinces. Associated with this is the question of the extent to which empires choose to ignore—or can survive if they do so—traditional structures of kinship and lineage, in attempting to ensure their long-term survival and the creation or maintenance of conditions conducive to their political-institutional reproduction. The Sasanian Persian example already alluded to (third-seventh centuries ce) is interesting (see also later discussion), for here the kings eventually succeeded in freeing themselves to an extent from the great magnate families of whom they were primi inter pares, establishing a loyal middling provincial elite, yet in a period of political-military crisis the abandon­ment of the imperial family by its self-identifying peer magnate clans spelled dis­aster for the empire's ability to resist the Arab invasions. For the most part, while it is clear that under given, short-term conditions, it is perfectly possible for state elites or rulers to act against the majority vested interests of the leading social groups within a state, this strategy has little longer-term success.

The methods adopted by different empires for dealing with these issues have varied widely. Creating a more or less socially deracinated body of state servitors, whose existence depends entirely upon the ruler, who are not permitted to repro­duce themselves as a class, who are rotated through office and function and who are thus not permitted to establish any hereditary claim to office or social position other than through state service, represents one path. In different ways and with different degrees of success, both the Ottoman and Mughal empires attempted to achieve this through the incorporation of converted slave soldiers and administrators at the highest as well as lower levels of bureaucratic and military authority; the Chinese Song state did the same, but without the strongly servile element; and to a degree its predecessors and successors moved in this direction in the establishment of their central administrative fiscal bureaucracies. Indeed, the history of successive Chinese empires offers almost the full range of permutations on this theme. The Zhou dynasty (eleventh-eighth centuries bce) depended on a network of loyalties between center and local dynasts for its ability to command resources and military manpower; the various states which followed its collapse tried a range of alterna­tive strategies to maintain central authority—the removal of local princely elites and their replacement by centrally appointed officials, for example (the central plains Chu state), or by a combination of this with peasant population transfers and land settlements to create a solid tax basis. The Qin Empire, which succeeded in defeating all its rivals in the second half of the third century bce, was followed by the longer-lasting Han Empire (202 bce-220 ce), over the course of which there evolved a system of imperial administration based on a meritocratic bureaucracy (including the promotion to positions of political and administrative authority of the sons of middling provincial landowners), combined with delegation of power to provincial dynasts, a highly centralized legal system, and a focus on the emperor's power as the source of all political legitimacy and power. Leaving aside the reasons for ultimate Han failure, these features, in different proportions, remained key elements in Chinese imperial governance thereafter, with the meritocratic form of “mandarin” government reaching its height during the Song (960-1279 ce).^[419] The Mamluks, whose “empire” included both Egypt and parts of greater Syria until the sixteenth century, depended to a large extent on imported slaves to staff the cen­tral government and its provincial military governors, a system that contributed to the wider stability of the empire, yet also led to systemic in-fighting at court be­tween contestants for the sultanate. As a result of the particular circumstances of the seventh-ninth centuries, Byzantine emperors were enabled to achieve similar ends, binding individuals selected for imperial service from a range of indigenous and foreign backgrounds to the person of the emperor, the imperial system of rank and precedence, and circumventing to a degree both kinship and hereditary wealth. And as already noted, in the course of some significant reforms introduced by the Persian Shahanshah Khusru I in the mid-sixth century, a new stratum of middling rural notables was created out of the lower landowning nobility, some of whom were given court titles and financial rewards, others of whom formed a military component, both intended to help the state in the appropriation of fiscal resources as well as providing a military force independent of the great magnate families upon whom the kings had hitherto had to depend.

Yet in the last analysis, all these systems were subverted by the individuals from whom they were constituted, and kinship was especially corrosive of central con­trol. Even where it did not play a significant role in the establishment of a state or empire, it always resurfaces as a key factor in inflecting how state elites are recruited and how they reproduce themselves, and how the center relates to its provincial elite, whether indigenous and co-opted into the imperial system, or imposed and evolved over time into a potentially independent rival for resources and political authority. In the Ottoman case, for example, the ruler's power was founded in the first place upon conquests and wealth won for him by social groups still retaining many of the key traits of clan and tribal structure, however much they were being transformed, socially differentiated, and hierarchized or ranked through warfare and the formation of retinues; and even as the deracinated service elite was being expanded to drive out older lineage-based elites, it was itself building associations which contained the germs of regional identities and new kin-based loyalties. Many empires faced problems of both regional and lineage identities, such as tribal or clan solidarities that dramatically vitiated attempts by a central authority, even when supported by elements of a permanent civil or military bureaucracy, to maintain themselves over more than a few generations.

Both the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates faced such difficulties, for the conflicts of interest between center, tribal military support fragmented by inherited ideolog­ical rivalries, underprivileged converts to Islam, and the remnants of traditional bureaucratic elites among the conquered urban populations, all further inflected by deep-seated religious ideological factionalism, combined to produce a situation in which the ruling Arab family and its clan support proved unable to mobilize the resources to fend off serious and ideologically well-motivated attack. In contrast, the Sasanian Empire which dominated Persia and neighboring lands from the third to the seventh century ce, whose Iranian element proved so powerful an influence in the development of Islamic culture and political structures, provides a good ex­ample of a remarkably successful dynasty. The power of the royal family depended very largely on the ideological commitment of a powerful group of regional clan or dynastic chiefs (the Parthian-Sasanian “aristocracy,” from whom the royal house was itself drawn) to the legitimacy of the dominant dynasty (which claimed also a certain politico-religious authority sanctioned both by a claim to ancient lineage and military leadership). As long as the results of Sasanid rule were not in contra­diction to their own interests, viewed from the perspective of aristocratic dynastic and lineage politics, the elite supported the kings. This was not just a question of kinship and provincial elites in the abstract, of course—access to local agricultural or commercial wealth played a key role, as is evident in the Chinese case, among others, where one of the major problems for Chinese imperial rule was the fact that distance combined with locally generated agrarian or commercial wealth to promote a high degree of local economic autonomy. Even where provincial elites were at origin generated from the imperial capital and through its bureaucracy, this proved a corrosive element in the fabric of imperial control over resources.

Traditional agrarian empires must not necessarily fall or collapse because of in­ternal tensions between the various elements of which they are comprised, how­ever, particularly where there is factionalism and antagonism between elements of the dominant elites. For example, in spite of its fiscal problems and its defeats at the hands of European powers from the eighteenth century onward especially, the Ottoman state did in fact survive, providing a context for the evolution of social and economic relationships for over 300 years after the beginnings of the so-called decline. It can thus be argued that the empire survived because it did not come into fundamental conflict with the structural changes within Ottoman state and society, and even enabled their further development: this was thus a process which in turn contributed directly to the survival of the state, both in respect of the relative in­ternal stability of its relations of production, and the political distribution of power in respect of local and central access to resources. A degree of equilibrium was thus achieved between the various factions within the ruling elites (which comprised both the Ottoman elite and notables and others, whose origins lay in the conquered populations), who had effective possession of landed incomes or other sources of wealth. This view involves abandoning a liberal Eurocentric notion of the “strong” state which survives only if its interests coincide with those of the majority of its subjects, or only if it cruelly represses those “progressive” elements which seek its overthrow. Central state power in the Ottoman world did weaken from the early seventeenth century in a variety of ways, so that the existence of semi-autonomous border lords in the nineteenth century give the impression of a state in name only. Yet the position of such local warlords was made possible, and could only be maintained within the context of, the Ottoman state.

In general terms, it seems that where a state center is unable to impose a strict oversight or control over provincial elites, or where it loses such power, then elite behavior represents, more often than not, a compromise between central authority and obedience, on the one hand, and, on the other, local vested interests, in a bal­anced bundle of powers and rights. Provincial elites of what we might term mature empires tend to act in ways which—in their perception at least—either support or do not actively challenge the status quo, although the outcomes of their actions do not necessarily produce the hoped-for results. And depending on how they iden­tify those interests, they will oppose or support or remain neutral in respect of the efforts of the central imperial authority to retain its own control over resources. As in both the rule of the Ottoman dynasty and that of the Qing in China up to the early twentieth century, the combination of a well-entrenched ideology of imperial rule with a balance between central and provincial elite vested interests, and the need to defend a status quo within which established elites can flourish, is a powerful recipe for imperial longevity, even where actual military and coercive power, whether to defend against external aggression or in respect of internal security, might be very substantially weakened.

One of the most important points about this is that the very existence of state structures, with all their fiscal and institutional demands and effects, in turn both limits certain types of political and power relations while at the same time facilitating either the evolution of new forms, or alternatively attributing older structures with new possibilities for their further development—and all this in turn must necessarily react back upon the ways in which the state itself can maintain it­self and evolve. Even in the most politically centralized imperial systems, “public” politics is always underwritten and shadowed by less public sets of relationships— of kinship, patronage, local regulatory semi-official or customary “law,” systems of notarial management of resources, and so forth. Indeed, an imperial adminis­tration provides a framework for the development of certain social and economic relationships, through its need to establish and then maintain a regular and pre­dictable structure for extracting revenues and resources, thus also enabling or facilitating the evolution of new practices and relationships. This is clear in the way in which the East Roman/Byzantine state transferred the focus of its attention in fiscal matters away from urban centers to village communities during the course of the seventh and eighth centuries, thereby radically altering the ways in which social relationships between landlords and tenants, on the one hand, and between peasant producers, the state, and towns, on the other, functioned.^[420] States also created spaces in which new developments could take place—the role of tax-farmers, for example, both as extractors of revenue and as potential stimulants to changed patterns of investment or consumption of wealth, to changed structures of money use on the part of both producers and state administrations, and so on. In some cases, the ex­istence of a central fiscal administration may have given hitherto unimportant local leaders—village headmen, small-scale local landlords—a more significant role in the process of fiscal extraction and accumulation, leading to shifts in the political order of power at the local level and ultimately reacting back on the state itself. The reforms of the Sasanian king Khusru I in the mid-sixth century ce to which we have already alluded, through which a whole class of formerly socially and politi­cally insignificant lesser gentry—the dehqans—was given a new status, military and administrative role, and thus political importance, is a case in point. The role of village elites and rank attributions can have a significant influence on the ways the state was or was not able to intervene in landlord-tenant relations, for example, just as the existence of centralized state apparatuses and their demands for revenue in turn affected the ways in which these local relationships worked, shaping the social space within which they could evolve.^[421] The point is that empires, by virtue of their very existence, are not simply impositions upon subject territories and societies; they can be seen also as promoting the evolution of new and sometimes alternative sets of economic and political relationships which must not necessarily threaten di­rectly the state's own institutional survival.

While many of these points apply also to early modern and colonial imperial sys­tems, there are some significant differences. First, distant colonial elites, whether from the core territory or indigenous and acting on its behalf, develop their own localized vested interests and ideological perspectives—not a novel phenomenon, as we have seen, but distance and information lag could make such issues more problematic. As colonial economies and societies became more established, so they generally came to be more difficult to manage effectively from the home country, the more so since they had direct control or influence over the commercial and productive activities that generated revenues for themselves and the home elite or crown. They evolved sometimes differently nuanced versions of the home elite cul­ture, on occasion even rejecting elements of the latter either because of issues of social identity and pride and/or because this offered a means to assert themselves politically against the home government or elite. Many examples spring to mind, whether in the New England colonies of Britain in the 1750s onward or in Australia in the later nineteenth century (although such elements also appeared much earlier). In the case of the British colonists in both North America and Australasia, independence from London was aspired to because of what were seen in the colo­nies as restrictive attitudes to territorial expansion, on the one hand, and oppressive fiscal policies, on the other. Similar tensions can be seen in the French Caribbean colonies, already noted, and very clearly in the colonial cultures that evolved in the Spanish provinces of South and Central America. Such issues hardly need to be detailed here, since they have been well studied. But this issue was compounded by imperial competition, since it was more often than not the provincial and colonial elites who suffered economically, and sometimes physically, from warfare between rival empires. They thus found themselves in a difficult position, needing imperial military and naval support when threatened, yet often resenting the effects of con­flict on their own economic interests. The fracturing of the ideological hegemony of the home country or state was one possible consequence, most dramatically apparent in the American Revolution of 1776-1783, but equally apparent in the various wars of independence waged in Central and South America, paradoxically often achieved through the use of former British naval and military personnel, as in the case of the first navies of both Argentina and Chile. This is not to say that the patterns were the same. On the contrary, in the British West Indies the planter elite rapidly came to dominate, managing the colonies through a bureaucracy staffed by estate owners and farmers who received their offices through a bidding process dominated by the interests of absentee landowners and a class of rich freeholders. The latter had their privileges guaranteed by government so long as they ensured the annual agreed returns to London, a situation which left royal governors in a rel­atively weak position. This contrasts with the situation in New Spain, at least until the later eighteenth century, since the Spanish elite of officers, estate owners, and bureaucrats remained bound to the kingdom of Spain and to the Catholic Church, and while local interests certainly acted to limit the effect of crown authority, the colonies continued to be administered relatively effectively from Spain itself. It was the impact of imperial competition in both Europe and more widely that disrupted and then destroyed this pattern.

A second point relates to the qualitatively different nature of the generation of surplus in the developed colonial empires. For here the mechanisms of capitalist economics differentiated the colonial elites who invested in and controlled the pro­duction of cotton, sugar, tobacco, and related raw materials from their pre-modern counterparts. Where the latter could profit on a massive scale as individuals from the seizure and exploitation of lands and revenue—as in the case of the Roman con­quest of many of its eastern provinces in the course of the first century bce—this was a quantitative increase in wealth. In the case of the former, the operations of a globalizing capitalist market offered a qualitative increase in potential, ultimately leading to the movement of capitals around the world, and an increasing speciali­zation of markets of production. An internationalized division of labor evolved: al­ready pioneered in the development of sugar and tobacco production in the Caribbean (at first with indigenous or indentured labor, but soon and much more efficiently with slave labor imported across the Atlantic), or with the production of spices such as nutmeg, and later of rubber in the East Indies under Dutch colo­nial rule, the multifaceted local industrial production of the colonies was directed toward specialist production demands in England with, for example, the develop­ment of monocultural agrarian production—cotton, tea, and other raw materials— to support industrial processes and production in England: cotton from India went to England, while finished goods from the mills of Lancashire dominated the markets of Europe. The profits thus generated affected both the indigenous societies in which colonial systems of exploitation had taken root, and impacted on the con­figuration of the home culture—from the later eighteenth century the speeding up of the process of proletarianization of rural populations, the transformation of social class relations in Britain, the parallel rise of an industrial elite, the limiting of older aristocratic systems of power and patronage, and the move toward more representative forms of democracy were all part of the picture. And as urbanization and industrialization grew apace in Britain, so the demand for raw materials and increasing specialization of production in the colonies exacerbated the dependency of the latter on distant markets and rendered the centers of production extremely vulnerable economically. Colonial elites, especially indigenous elites, thus became further differentiated from their metropolitan peers in respect of the sources of their wealth and power, generating both heightened social class tensions within the colonies and at the same time making the economic position of the colonial elites more vulnerable.