Why Empires, Why Difference?

Empires govern different people differently. In these terms, empire could be a passing phase: if an expansionist state erases differences among the territories and peoples it incorporates—via some combination of extermination, accultura­tion, and assimilation—it becomes simply a big state, distinguished from political structures in which distinction is recognized, preserved, or even cultivated.

One might argue that homogeneity and heterogeneity are both Active descrip­tions and that all polities embody both tendencies to some degree. “Nation” and “empire” can be overlapping categories, reflecting tendencies toward heterogeneity and homogeneity within a complex polity.¹ But fictions can have effects. They can kill, and they can provide the basis for political organization. Recent waves of ethnic

¹ Malesevic 2017; Berger and Miller 2015.

Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires and the Politics of Difference In: The Oxford World History of Empire.

Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0011. cleansing—in the Balkans in the 1990s, in Rwanda in 1994—were carried out to make a state homogeneous, composed of a single people. Such ruthless drives for national purity run up against the intermixing and mobility that are intrinsic to human behavior. Over the sweep of history, the heterogeneity of imperial polities comes closer to reality than the projected sameness of the nation-state.

Making a polity homogeneous requires focusing diverse people's imaginations and practices on commonality and equivalence—producing the “horizontal” community that Benedict Anderson described in 1983.^[905] Some of the national polities of twentieth-century Europe were the product of a deliberate “unmixing of people,” in the phrase of British statesman Lord Curzon: expulsions, purges, and exterminations on the territories of the Habsburg Empire after World War I, new waves of ethnic cleansing after World War II, and again in the Balkans in the 1990s.^[906] But neither ethnic cleansing nor common participation in state institutions—“civic nationalism,” as some term it—has consistently made state conform to nation.

Imagining the state in national terms was and remains one kind of political vi­sion, among other more complex and inclusive ones. Empire is not the only form of political organization that recognizes and reproduces difference. Federation and confederation, in theory and at times in practice, recognize and share power out among different collectivities within an overarching political structure.^[907] Confederations may give rise to empires—the Mongol empires sprang from Eurasian tribal confederations and alliances. Or empires may induce the formation of confederations, whose components share a history of life under imperial rule.

The power of empires to set the context for both imagination and possibility is evident precisely where the nation-state was supposed to have been the model: in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and its interactions with the rest of the world. Inside Europe, people with national or supra-national goals (such as pan­Slavism) imagined various kinds of political associations, but had to confront the power of the dominant empires—polities that did not limit their resources to one category of population or one space.^[908] Looking beyond Europe, Wang Hui argues that the “binary” of empire and nation-state itself emerged as European elites tried to write themselves into a “universal world history,” in which the nexus of Asia- empire-despotism-backwardness would give way to progress configured by ec­onomic and political structures of European design. The imposition of colonial domination on much of the world compelled other powers to confront this form of imperial power. Consequently, both colonial empire and resistance to it provided a Eurocentric story of outmoded empires giving way inevitably to nation-states with a strong hold on politics and scholarship.^[909]

Setting aside this modernist conceit in favor of a long-term and more global his­tory of empires forces us to come to grips with the variety of practiced and imagined political forms.

The association of popular sovereignty with a uniform polity also demands rethinking. The proposition that sovereignty derives or should derive from the people seems to imply a radical dichotomy between those who are members of the polity and those who are excluded from it. Such an argument could justify subor­dinating colonized people within a “democratic” empire or denying political voice to certain categories of people within a national state.^[911] But the location of popular sovereignty was contested from the moment the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was proclaimed in Paris in 1789: should sovereignty belong only to a French nation in Europe or to different categories of people in French colonies in the Caribbean as well? When France, for pragmatic as well as principled reasons, abolished slavery in Saint Domingue and made slaves into citizens in 1793, these actions seemed to signal an imperial version of the new republic. Napoleon’s res­toration of slavery in 1802 undermined this inclusive strategy. When slavery was abolished for good in French colonies in 1848, ex-slaves became citizens, but this did not establish a unitary people. As France acquired overseas territories during the nineteenth century, conquered peoples were granted the lower status of subjects.

Such distinction making was regularly contested - by subordinated people who could frame their arguments in terms of the dominant ideology or challenge that ideology directly, and by elites who took republican principles or the threat of co­lonial rebellion seriously.^[912] When an imperial government needed more than sub­servience from much of its subject population-soldiers in wartime for instance-the need for inclusive gestures became stronger.^[913] Questions of inclusion, equality, and recognition of cultural difference were thus part of a long debate within the French empire-and the British as well-and the question did not disappear when colonies became independent.

Within the long history of empires, the politics of difference took many forms. The spectrum of empires' practices runs from treating difference as an ordinary fact of human life to genocide.^[915] Not only did empires come up with distinctive styles of rule, but even a single empire ordinarily applied an array of strategies to different elements of the polity. Empires could shift their tactics over both time and space, profiting from the flexibility of differentiated rule.

Imperial rulers, nevertheless, were not free to choose their strategies at will. They acted within the constraints imposed by internalized assumptions and habits and in response to subjects who pushed back against their rulers, even if such interactions were rarely symmetrical. Empires usually existed in relation to and competition with each other. Empires could try to make nations on other empires' territories. It was tempting for imperial rulers to encourage groups to secede from their rivals' composite structures, if not to incorporate them, at least to diminish or fragment an enemy.

If quests for homogeneity produced and continue to produce episodes of ex­treme violence, building and maintaining empires was also often violent and re­pressive. When entire categories of people were treated as inferiors, as people who could be exploited, moved about, or humiliated and destroyed at will, the politics of “difference” could become the politics of “race.” Francisco Bethencourt^[916] uses the term “racisms” in the plural and makes the point that each racism had its origins in a political project. Prejudice, stereotyping, and category-making exist in many kinds of society—from villages to national republics—but in specific contexts, elites can transform distinctions into ideologies of systematic subordination, exploita­tion, or exclusion.

What enables “racism” is the definition of difference in terms of descent—often connected to concerns for “purity of blood”—and the linkage of such distinctions to discrimination, oppression, and exploitation.^[917] Descent is not simply a matter of genetics. Some societies or segments of them emphasize descent in the male line only. An Ottoman sultan was a pure son of the dynasty regardless of the fact that his mother, in most cases, was a captive from a non-Ottoman, non-Muslim, non-Turkish-speaking region. Someone considered black in the antebellum United States might be considered mulatto in the Caribbean and white in Brazil. The var­iation among racisms over the course of history is wide; the variation of politics of difference even wider.

Both quests for homogeneity and practices of unequal incorporation can pro­duce racisms. In empires, there are countervailing tendencies, connected to the task of maintaining the scope—and hence the diversity—of the imperial polity. This re­liance on difference gives rise to arguments among elites. Some, convinced of their superiority and entitlements, want to exploit without constraint a portion of the incorporated population; others see a longer and more stable future in combining coercion with co-optation and giving at least the elites of subordinated societies something to gain from accommodation to imperial rule. Leaders of subordi­nated collectivities have at times sought to turn rulers' incorporative claims into demands for a fuller role in the empire's political and economic life. Distinction, even racialized, can become a claim for a place—and at times for rights—in empires where difference is a recognized and ordinary condition of social life.

Because empires reproduce distinction, they put or leave in place collectivities that could secede from or take over the imperial polity. Both those who support control and co-optation and those who seek to overthrow an imperial regime can draw on and amplify people's sense of communal privilege or their resentment of the alleged advantages enjoyed by others. Empires' tendency to expand, split, and recombine has produced not only armed conflict, but also struggles to redefine or alter the categories of difference. Categories of distinction are not mere tools of the historian; they can be­come the foundation for claims and counterclaims, with the livelihood and dignity of many people at stake.