Dilemmas of Empire 1850–1918. Power, Territory, Identity

Abstract

In the period 1850-1918 two types of empire existed. The first is the one familiar to modern students of imperialism. The West European maritime empires had their origins in the sixteenth century and by 1900 were the world's leading industrial and financial powers. Britain was the model empire of this type, with the French and Dutch as lesser variations on the same theme. By 1914, Germany and the USA, though in important ways different from the classic West European maritime empires, could nevertheless be considered as falling within this category of polity.But another type of empire also existed, whose genealogy was far older and indeed stretched back into antiquity. These were huge, multi-ethnic polities, governed by (in principle) centralized bureaucracies and absolute monarchs, and ruling overwhelmingly agrarian societies. In South America and India, empires of this sort had already been destroyed by European invaders. By 1900 two other empires of this type, the Ottomans and the Ching, seemed doomed to follow the same path to extinction. 1 The Russian Empire was a hybrid, sharing characteristics of both these types of empire. Russia was a European great power and had unequivocally enjoyed this status since the mid-eighteenth century. By 1914 she was the second largest empire in the world. Her power and her territorial expansion were based to a great extent on her successful absorption of European techniques, technologies and ideas. Christian Russia was certainly closer in culture to Christian Europe than to the worlds of Islam and Confucianism. Since the eighteenth century, her élites had been westernized and belonged unequivocally to Europe. The victims of Russian expansion -generally Muslim or animist and often nomadic -were very similar in these respects to the societies overrun by European power since 1500. And yet, in many ways Russia belonged to the second type of empire too. Her huge continental plain, her centralized and absolutist bureaucratic monarchy, her economic backwardness, and a popular culture which differed considerably from that of Catholic and Protestant Europe all marked her off sharply from the maritime empires and their German and American peers. For Russia's own rulers probably the single most pressing question in this period was whether their state would join the first, 'modern' group of empires or find itself relegated to the second category of 'moribund' ones.

Subjects, citizens and others: the handling of ethnic differences in the British and the Habsburg Empires (late nineteenth and early twentieth century)

“…In spite of the methodological difficulties attached to comparing maritime and land-based empires such endeavours have repeatedly been suggested and asked for (McGranahan and Stoler, 2007;Miller, 1997;Ruthner, 2001 11. Lieven (1999), 165. A similar line of thought is followed by Cooper (2004) who compares the ratio between 'incorporation and differentiation' within empires (p. 269).…”

‘But in Asia we too are Europeans’: Russia’s multifaceted engagement with the standard of civilisation

“…Russia's rulers felt vulnerable in their relations with the West, and the defeat in the Crimean War exacerbated the feeling of inferiority. 25 Neumann ascribed Russia's difficulties in remaining an equal partner for European states to its inability to meet the nineteenth-century standards of internal governance. Such inability made it difficult for Russia to be recognised as a great power.…”

The Ethnic Roots of Class Universalism: Rethinking the “Russian” Revolutionary Elite

“…Most identified with the monarchy, which did have a hold on the popular imagination (Lieven 1998, p. 256;Wortman 2000Wortman , 2003, but Russian nationalism was fractured and incomplete, impeded by the fact that Russia was, first and foremost, an empire, which contributed to a weakened sense of the Russian core (Rogger 1962;Hosking 1997;Szporluk 1997, pp. 65-66;Lieven 1999Lieven , 2000Miller 2004).…”