Geography

Geography obviously plays a role in resource-management strategies, although not necessarily negatively— in the case of Rome, and in spite of the extent of the empire's territories, it was only at the end a significant factor that interfered with imperial rule and the management of empire, in contrast to the early Islamic Caliphate.

Yet while bearing in mind the possible negative impacts, these are not an inevi­table consequence of geographical extent. The discussion about the advantages and disadvantages inhering in large territorial empires is old—indeed, fourth-century bce Greek writers commented on the damaging centrifugal effects to which they were subject, in this case referring to the Achaemenid Persian Empire. But admin­istrative mechanisms, reinforced by a range of ideological supports such as kinship, oaths of loyalty based on notions of honor and respect, as well as vested interests in terms of military and economic power, can all combine to moderate geographical factors—as the history of the Achaemenid Empire itself shows, until the conquests of Alexander in the later fourth century. A well-maintained logistical infrastruc­ture was a key element in this—the empire's main urban centers were connected by a network of so-called royal roads along with a system of posting stations where official travelers could change horses and receive rations for men and animals. This road system served both to move administrators and officials as well as troops and supplies, linked to a network of garrisons, and built in part on a foundation inherited from the Neo-Assyrian Empire.²² In a very different context, the Incas were able to use a more fractured landscape to their advantage, extending along the spine of the Andes to incrementally absorb under their suzerainty the smaller proto-state-like confederacies to the north and the south, and using distance as a means of binding liminal zones to the center in what seems in many respects more like a confederacy than a unified state (from an Old World perspective, Shang China seems to offer some useful possible comparisons). Yet the construction of a logistical infrastructure of roads and relay stations, along with the use of llamas as transport animals, meant that distance in the Inca Empire was both a tool of polit­ical dominance (divide and conquer, incorporate, and bestow advantages) as well as a threat to political control: marginal groups could by the same token exploit dis­tance to build up local resistance to central power.^[402] It is worth noting that in both cases, massive ritual sacrifice and the symbolic as well as actual destruction of the political as well as cultic center of a competitor polity served as means of reinforcing subservience and cooperation.

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Briant 2009.

And finally, technological aspects play a key role. The geography of the steppe repeatedly regenerated empire-like polities, polities which rarely lasted long but which contributed in crucial ways to connecting east and west. Steppe empires, most particularly that of the Mongols, short-lived though it was in respect of its original unity, were undoubtedly made possible by the combination of geography with the techniques and technologies associated with mounted nomadism, with the Eurasian steppe functioning as a corridor and the horse as the means of moving through that corridor, permitting a succession of paramount nomad groups to draw on the resources of the surrounding sedentary societies, to generate a pro­tectorate over the international commerce which flourished across it, to connect regions of Eurasia far more efficiently than had been the case hitherto, and thus also to transmit ideas and techniques.

Geography is thus a key factor in determining access to and the distribution of resources, especially where important strategic sources of wealth lie at a distance from the imperial center, thus requiring special measures to maintain control. Egypt was a major source of grain for Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, as well as for its armies, and it had always been placed under special administration to ensure imperial control. The loss of Egypt to the Persians (albeit temporarily) in the early seventh century, and its permanent loss to the Arabs in the early 640s were serious challenges both to the imperial city itself, the outsize pop­ulation of which depended on this source of supply, as well as to the government’s finances and military supplies. The possibility of losing such resources to conquest or to local resistance was not simply a major source of concern; it also entailed a substantial investment in maintaining control, an investment that could cause major budgetary problems for any ruler or government.

Here the dialectic between “core” and “peripheral” regions is important in any consideration of the political economy of an imperial system, especially if it seems that areas that are central in respect of economic production may not necessarily be core areas politically, still less from the military point of view. The economic re­lationship between conquering core and subjugated periphery may be radically affected by conquest itself, particularly where the conquered regions are already involved in networks of trade, or possess a well-established administrative and fiscal structure, so that the original core in fact becomes marginalized—as with the Mongol conquest of China in the thirteenth century, for example. Indeed, in re­spect of nomadic “empires” it seems generally to have been the case that successful expansion and subjugation/incorporation of conquered peoples promoted the transfer of power away from the original center to a set of “core peripheries”: most spectacularly with the fragmentation of the Mongol Empire in the course of the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries ce into its several “core” regions—the Golden Horde in Muscovy/Russia, the Ilkhanate in Iraq and Iran, China, and the “original” core on the eastern steppe. But the same phenomenon can be seen in the case of the Huns and later the Avars and Khazars on the central and western Eurasian steppe. And a not dissimilar process worked toward the fragmentation of the early Islamic caliphates of the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties, with an original political-military core in the Hejaz losing ground across the first generations after the conquest to Syria (Damascus), in turn giving way to Baghdad in Iraq: the first shift a consequence of the enormous success of the conquest and the prominence of Byzantium as the key enemy, the second a result of civil war and the dynamism of Irano-Islamic culture and power-politics. Yet in all these cases it is important to note that the cultic centers associated with the original conquests (in the Tian Shan or other cultic locations on the steppe, in the first examples, or at Mecca, in the latter) remained key players in the ideological politics of the various imperial successor states.

Clearly, many of these constraints do not apply where the technology of commu­nication and transport is sufficiently advanced to neutralize them. For land-based polities, this really means the advent of the railway and the telegraph in the mid­nineteenth century, although the development of more sophisticated horse-drawn carriages from the sixteenth century in Europe had a small incremental beneficial impact as the infrastructure of roads and highways was improved, particularly in Britain and France from the middle of the eighteenth century (introduction of paved turnpike highways, for example). For oceanic empires, however, the armed ocean sailing ship combined with the application of gunpowder artillery meant a dramatic increase in the potential to exploit technologically less complex cultures, as well as in the ability to exert force at a long distance and at a proportionately far lower cost in order to compete effectively with its competitors. This again represents a major qualitative difference between the two types of imperial systems, because it also gave the oceanic colonial powers much greater flexibility both militarily and in respect of fiscal management. Technological advance both stimulated and was in its turn promoted by colonial expansion, most clearly demonstrated with the advent of the agrarian and industrial revolutions of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.