Two Influential Variants on the Politics of Difference

We use the concept of the politics of difference more broadly and more neutrally than multiculturalists who agitate for recognition of distinct communities and their presumed values.

Rome: The Politics of Citizenship

During its long existence, the Roman Empire tended toward homogenization, based on a distinctive culture that developed as Rome expanded. The idea that ul­timate power rested with the people of Rome and that the capacity to make and change laws devolved from the citizenry dated to the early Republic. In a political innovation with enormous implications for future politics, Rome gradually ex­tended its citizenship beyond the limits of the city of Rome, first to nearby and de­manding peoples, but ultimately (in 212 ce) to all free adult males in the empire. This inclusionary strategy defined at least potentially a vast number of people who shared a single legal status and who could imagine a personal bond with state power and with other citizens of the empire.^[918]

The rights associated with Roman citizenship—as well as Rome's protection of commerce—were attractive to ambitious people in conquered areas. The impe­rial capital and the point toward which material and cultural resources gravitated remained Rome, but elites from many parts of the empire could, in Greg Woolf's phrase, “become Roman” in many aspects of their lifeways.^[919] A widely diffused imperial culture—knowing Latin and Greek, participating in imperial rituals, enjoying the comforts and pleasures of Roman technology, arts, and learning— enhanced likeness among Romans.

The other side of this coin was exclusion. Slaves and women were left outside citizenship. With geographical outsiders—conquered tribes, for example—things were more complicated. Romans' strong notion of the superiority of their culture went along with a belief that all peoples, if properly educated, could ultimately be­come civilized in the Roman way.

The divide between cultured insiders and inferior outsiders took on new meanings as the empire shifted its religious practices. During Rome's first sev­eral centuries, the Romans, as polytheists, could tolerate numerous local cults and sometimes absorb, transform, and add on deities as they expanded their empire. But monotheism presented the expanding empire with a problem. How to absorb people, like Jews, who believed their single god to be the only one? Conflicts be­tween Jews and Roman authorities led to revolts, the destruction of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, and the extension of the Jewish diaspora.

Christianity was an even greater challenge, since Christians' universalistic claims and their penchant for aggressive organization mirrored Rome's own qualities. But in time, emperors themselves became Christians, and in the fourth century ce, Christianity became Rome's state religion. Christianity added spiritual and material elan to Rome's vision of its unique and superior civilization, but as the Roman way became more homogenizing, it narrowed the grounds for inclusion in the polity.

The Mongol Way

The Mongol empires of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries took a contrasting approach—to religion, to culture, to law, and to sovereignty. For Mongol rulers, sustained difference was both normal and useful.

The Mongols, like other successful nomadic groups, practiced the political arts of tribal formation and confederation. Mongols were exogamous—they mar­ried outside a clan—and they could “adopt” outsiders as family members or as loyal subordinates to a leader. Adept at the organization of long-distance herding, Eurasian nomads formed confederations of tribes, with personal linkages between each unit's leader and his superior, sometimes enhanced through marriage and concubinage. Over centuries, Eurasian nomads had developed political and tech­nological tools that allowed them to control long-distance trade over vast areas, and to exploit, challenge, and learn from city-states and empires on the edges of the steppe. Ghenghis Khan made his way to power in a political context where loyalty trumped commonality.^[921]

From early times, the steppe empires of Inner Asia were not built around a fixed capital, or a central cultural or religious conception, but founded on a superior person, the Great Khan. In the thirteenth century, when the Mongols rapidly— and violently—created the largest land empire in history, Ghenghis Khan and his descendants incorporated client rulers with their followers into a patrimonial power structure. The Mongols benefited from not only their military superiority but also their ability to rule dispersed and disparate populations.^[922]

Mongols, like many steppe peoples, were originally shamanists—b elievers in multiple spirits and gods who could be accessed by those with special powers. Mongol khans spared religious authorities when they sacked and destroyed enemy cities, exempted religious institutions from taxation, and invited spiritual leaders of different faiths to their courts.

Mongol khans' eclecticism and acceptance of religious difference, combined with their interest in commercial contacts and exchange, opened up cultural pathways and crossroads that had a profound effect on art, science, and medi­cine across Eurasia. Mongol khans offered favorable contracts to merchants who carried on long-distance trade. Mix, but not necessarily match, was the Mongol ap­proach to culture. Artists, cooks, and scholars as well as merchants traveled along silk and other routes, transferring knowledge, statecraft, cuisine, and art in both directions.^[924]

The Mongol way did not produce, as Rome had done, a singular, recognizably “Mongol” elite culture. Early on their way to empire, Mongols adopted regulatory practices used by other empires to facilitate the collection of taxes and tribute. To conquer China, Mongols secured the advice and assistance of both Chinese and Tibetan collaborators; once victorious, Khubilai Khan exploited the potent Chinese imperial tradition and had himself proclaimed emperor in 1272. The Mantle of Heaven was not cast down, but assumed by the new Mongol leader.

Legal pluralism came easily to Mongol khans who did not consider it necessary or useful to intervene in the mechanisms of social control developed by peoples they conquered, at least in matters of little significance to imperial authority. What counted was sovereignty at the highest level: the khan or emperor was the ultimate lawgiver, the final judicial authority, the protector of all religions and all peoples under his rule and care. The Mongols' combination of devolved legal authority in some matters, the location of ultimate law in the overall leader, and the recognition of other powers' legitimacy left its mark on later empires.^[925]