Making, Maintaining, and Confronting Difference

Difference among peoples was a reality that any empire had to face. Some empires, as we have seen, used difference as a building block of imperial control. But dif­ference was also, at various points, a political creation.

Empire and Monotheism

Monotheism, in Christian and Muslim variants, inflected the politics of difference of early empires around the Mediterranean and later in other parts of the world. The idea of one empire, one God, and one emperor was a powerful one. It potentially de­fined an all-or-nothing distinction between insider and outsider, raising the stakes on adhesion and loyalty. Both crusades and jihad linked their respective claims of religious universality to political projects and imperial expansion.

But the other face of imperial monotheism was schism, the argument that the current emperor was not the proper guardian of the true faith. Struggles over who qualified to be God's representative on earth and over which religious practices and institutions should be enforced challenged imperial authority in many empires. Political Christianity was a Roman legacy that both inspired and inhibited the reconstruction of empire in western Europe. The Holy Roman Empire was one outcome, but the ambitions of popes, bloody conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, struggles between rulers and religious hierarchs, wars of conquest, conversion, and rebellion were also part of the Christian heritage.^[926]

Islamic empires were also riven by schism—notably between Sunnis and Shi'ites—from the time of Mohammed’s immediate successors onward. The compelling synthesis of a single God and a single Islamic community raised the stakes for political elites in any conflict.

Bethencourt^[928] sees the period from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries as a time when, in western Europe, the universalistic claims of the Christian religion became more sharply articulated as assertions of “purity of blood.” The consolida­tion of Catholic monarchy in Iberia and the culmination of the conflict with the remnants of the Islamic polity in Grenada—finally defeated in 1492—put reli­gious distinction at the heart of an effort at domination. In the year of the “recon­quest” of Muslim Spain, the monarchy expelled all Jews who refused to convert to Catholicism. The Inquisition persecuted even those who converted, on the grounds that their fidelity was inherently suspect. Consolidation of power, religious intoler­ance, and distinctions based on descent were tied together.^[929]

Catholic orthodoxy, civilization, and monarchal power defined a complex struc­ture that spanned land and sea. One could become Spanish, through conversion and behavior—a possibility that set the terms for long debates over the attributes of different peoples, their propensity for becoming civilized, and the ethics of subordi­nation in an empire that was both incorporative and exploitative.^[930]

The extension of empire in the name of a single true religion could have unin­tended consequences.

The Normality of Difference

Imperial ambition and monotheistic religion did not necessarily lead to a sharp dis­tinction between the included and the excluded. Let us take the Russian Empire as our case in point.^[932]

Russia made its way into empire by extending political control out from a once in­significant town (Moscow) whose princes were for over two centuries subordinates of a Mongol khanate, the Golden Horde.^[933] From the Mongols, the Muscovite princes learned, under duress, imperial statecraft, but they also relied on their clan's glorious origin in Kiev where the rulers had converted to Eastern Christianity. The choice for a Byzantine variant of monotheism mitigated the challenges posed by Catholicism to imperial powers in western Europe. Eastern Christianity was multi-lingual and accommodationist where political power was concerned.

Difference functioned at many levels in the empire. The most fundamental di­vide was between rulers and the ruled—between people who in some way made or applied the rules, and the mass of people who were supposed to obey. But even the empowered elites around the autocrat did not constitute a “nationally” consolidated leadership. The empire relied from its earliest days upon co-opting local authorities of multiple ethnic origins into imperial service; some of the highest-ranking families in the realm were originally Tatars or Poles. Even in the beginning of the twentieth century, half of the titled members of the State Council came from non­Russian families.^[934] This pattern of drawing people from different places, cultures, and “peoples” into governance continued into Soviet times, under the aegis of the Communist Party.

One consequence of this kind of rule was the absence of categorical divisions of an ethnic or racial sort between governors and governed. On the other hand, the inhabitants of the empire were thought of in collectivizing ways; each subject was assumed to have an ethnicity, a religion, a civil status or rank, possibly a regional or functional identification. Russian rulers assumed that peoples had “their” collective customs and rules prior to Russian annexation and after.^[935]

Rights, like obligations, were assigned to people through their status as members of collective bodies. Marriage, buying property, changing one's place or residence, bequeathing land and goods were regulated according to the estate, confession, eth­nicity, or territorial location of the individuals concerned.

Rulers could change the rules, and put the accent (hard or soft) on different people at different times. Poles, with their Catholicism, their former empire, their relative prosperity, and, especially, their rebellions, could be singled out for special treat- ment.^[936] In 1864, a year after an uprising led by Polish nobles, peasants in formerly Polish territories received extensive land rights and freedom from all obligations to their lords, while thousands of noble estates were confiscated. Playing on different registers and shifting them was the clue to this kind of politics of difference.^[937]

The striking difference between the attitudes toward “others” deployed in empires that took difference as a fact of life—and glorified and exploited heterogeneity— and the racism and other degradations found in empires based on the principles of likeness was related, at least in part, to the location of sovereignty.^[938] Russia's regime of differentiated rights worked as long as no one was a citizen; it was threatened when some of its elites campaigned for equality and political representation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This problem arose for the Habsburgs around the same time: an empire that had staked its legitimacy on a complex web of connections to the throne and developmental projects for its multiple ethnic groups was destabilized when, under a constitutional regime, liberals demanded more uniformity while national minorities clamored for their special language and other rights.^[939]

The politics of difference could take many forms, particularly in long-lasting empires as they adapted to new circumstances.

Even the Ming dynasty, situated chronologically between the Yuan and the Qing, did not adhere to a strict insider/outsider divide. The Ming rulers could play the card of return to true Chinese civilization after an interlude of Mongol rule, but as David Robinson^[941] shows, Ming rulers—much as they denigrated the Mongols (the nomads' “stench of mutton,” etc.)—developed multiple strategies for working with as well as against Mongol communities within the empire's frontiers. To some groups, the Ming offered relations of alliance and clientage; others were forcibly relocated, still others sedentarized. For Mongols during the Ming period, the pos­sibility of accommodation posed a dilemma: integration into imperial institutions meant surveillance through the Ming's sophisticated registration system, but did remaining outside offer more than a vain hope for reconstituting their former dominance?

For a conquering empire, in China or elsewhere, the degree to which populations should be integrated into governing institutions or be allowed or forced to keep their distinctiveness was a matter of both short- and long-term consequence. In the early centuries of the expansion of Islamic empires, the non-integration of much of the overrun population not only made a rapidly moving conquest more feasible, but left a rationale for differential taxation, allowing the growing em­pire to appropriate some of the surplus of existing economic structures. As John Haldon^[942] points out, the Islamic caliphates had trouble directing this surplus to an imperial center; fragmentation and local recovery quickly followed upon expansion.

Differential taxation and administration directed at whole communities were not the only ways of exploiting difference as a strategy of rule. The caliphates, especially the Abbasid, drew on clients who detached themselves from their own communities and converted to Islam and on slaves, often from the warrior-nomads of Central Asia. Dependence on their imperial masters made both kinds of outsiders useful adjuncts in ruling and exploiting diverse populations.^[943]

Colonialism and Diversity

When European empire-builders pushed into new territories in Asia, the Americas, and Africa, they encountered already differentiated societies whose structures had been shaped by earlier imperial histories. The newcomers could exploit divisions in the societies they encountered, as in the case of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs (see Smith and Sergheraert, Chapter 24 in Volume 2) or in the takeover of large parts of Africa in the late nineteenth century, using only small European armies. They confronted not only small-scale communities, but polities that were empires in their own right, whose power constrained the newcomers and whose commer­cial networks offered opportunities.^[944]

Administering new imperial territories, each with its own cultural diversity, re­quired effective approaches to governing at a distance. Would Europeans use differ­ence as a managerial asset, as the Russians were doing in their Eurasian spaces, or would differences among the colonized be eclipsed by the colonizers' assertion of superiority? Could the Christianizing missions of the Iberian empires from the six­teenth century onward or the “civilizing missions” of colonial empires of the nine­teenth and twentieth centuries impose a European culture around the world?^[945]

Or did colonial regimes' exploitation of difference exacerbate ethnic distinctions? Some scholars have argued that Europeans created distinctions—that African ethnicity or “communal” differences in South Asia are to a significant extent a European product, resulting both from strategies of divide and rule and a European predilection to distinction-making.^[946]

The answers to these questions show that the politics of difference in colonial situations took up many strategies, most of them difficult to carry out. Civilizing missions were never pursued by European powers with enough vigor to re­place diversified indigenous cultures with a generic Western one. Similarly, the idea that racial or class oppression produced commonality among the oppressed is largely a myth. Even as racist a regime as that of apartheid South Africa could provide enough incentives to get some colonized people to cooperate—as “chiefs” supposedly embodying traditional authority, as policemen, as translators. South Africa, explicitly organized around difference, was able to exploit the cleavages it helped to create, as well as some it inherited from the process of conquest itself.

Indigenous communities on the eve of European conquest were the products of histories that had included conquest, incorporation, and both differentiation and acculturation in earlier complex polities; colonial rule added new distinctions and at times reified old ones.^[947] The British, for example, ruled much of northern Nigeria through an indigenous, Islamic power elite that itself had conquered previous polities in the early nineteenth century and had built up a hierarchical system in which slaves were used both in positions of authority and as subordinate laborers.^[948] In parts of southeastern Nigeria, on the other hand, “chiefs” were largely a British invention. One does not need to choose between naturalizing ethnicity or caste in Africa and Asia as timeless “autochthony” or reducing them to colonial instrumentality.

When colonial regimes chose to use indigenous intermediaries, the social rela­tions those intermediaries drew on were themselves transformed. An individual’s ac­cess to patronage and ability to escape forced labor or conscription might depend on connections to elites. At the same time, intermediaries were not entirely the creatures of the colonizing power, for they had to have some room to maneuver in order to be useful. Their legitimacy might depend on their being able to buffer “their” people from the worst excesses of the conquerors, or—more likely—they could acquire re­sources through their positions and set themselves apart from their communities.^[949]

If colonial governments organized administration around the categories of tribe or caste, these notions could become a new reality, shaping access to resources, pro­viding a foundation for shared sentiments or common action, and, once politics opened up, giving politicians a basis on which to mobilize support. Under colonial rule, flexible ethnic boundaries might harden and increased communications and movement to cities could, instead of adding to a melting pot, contribute to turning linguistic similarity—earlier cut across by the cleavages of kinship and regional politics—into a basis for collective action, creating “superethnicity,” a wider form of affiliation. These enlarged collectivities could in turn come into conflict with one another during struggles against colonial rule and afterward between independent states and their regional or ethnic rivals.