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Spaces of Empire (1500–1650)

THE SPACE OF EMPIRE IS RESTLESS and contested at its perimeter. Sometimes the soldiers at the edge of empire despair at its extent. It cannot go on forever, but it pulls them ever outward. Marguerite Yourcenar, the French writer who conjured up the world of Rome from her aerie on the Maine coast, imagines the Roman emperor Trajan weeping on the shore of the Persian Gulf: “for the first time the immensity of the world overwhelmed him.… The supreme commander who had borne the Roman eagles to hitherto unexplored shores knew now that he would never embark upon that sea so long in his thoughts: India, Bactria, the whole of that vague East which had intoxicated him from afar, would continue to be for him only names and dreams.”1 Expanding empires have an extensive boundary region or contact area: an open borderland—so the Chinese frontier poets, the soldier literati, write—stretching “until the end of the sky.” This is land beyond the Great Wall, which was constructed in antiquity and then restored under the Ming (1368–1644) as a defensive rampart. But the expansionist dynasties, the earlier Tang and the later Qing, leave the Wall behind to decay, to stand “lopsided as if high costs exhausted the old dragon’s heart. In the very end what was it constructed for, by what people?”2 The German soldiers invading Russia from 1915 to 1917, then again in the summer and fall of 1941, advance rapidly across a charred and primitive landscape, but the land stretches on and on and sometimes they confide their uneasiness to their diaries.

Two Spatial Imaginaries

Political communities suggest to their citizens, their adversaries, and their observers a characteristic geography; they evoke broad-brush visions of territory or what can be called recurring spatial imaginaries. For units larger than the independent cities of antiquity or the Renaissance, two major alternatives can be contrasted: the space of empires and the space of less extensive and usually more cohesive territories—termed here the space of states. The space of empire is characterized by chronic unrest at the periphery and the often uneven grip of central authority within. Empires have tolerated enclaves of local autonomy and relatively loose frameworks for adherence of tributary communities. Some claimants to empire, such as the Russian tsars and Ottomans, developed ideas of a coherent territory only relatively late and thought primarily in terms of tribal overlordship.3 The space of states aspires to frontiers stabilized by treaty—often as well by the so-called natural barriers of rivers and mountains—and to a more direct, uniform, and pervasive administration at home.
Granted, the distinction between the space of empires and the space of states is never absolute, nor are the types of polity always distinct. The empire, after all, is a type of state, and some rulers whom historians describe as governing “mere” states had imperial pretensions, claimed multiethnic territories, and adopted imperial images and claims. Henry VIII and his advisers saw Britain in these ambitious terms; so did Sweden’s Gustavus Adolphus, who depicted himself in imperial laurels, held German and Finnish territory, humbled the Danes, contained Muscovy, and was Protestant champion.4 The title of the Japanese ruler, tenno, is translated as “emperor,” but until Japan took up Western-style imperialism in the late nineteenth century, the tenno was monarch of a recognizable national state, as was the German kaiser after 1870.
The United States, officially forswearing the title of empire, continually expanded into regions populated by indigenous peoples, and in so doing created a de facto imperial frontier. British and French colonial authorities had recognized Native American communities as polities with whom treaties should be struck, even as it tucked them into its expanding territory. With independence came the recognition by former colonists that in terms of size their new nation would be an empire that would be as extensive as Macedon’s or Rome’s or, in Jefferson’s words, an “empire of liberty.”5 During the course of the nineteenth century, Washington increasingly treated the western territories as a colonial domain where early treaties could be revised at will and whose reserves of land might be taken, purchased, or leased from other powers with prior claims—all this before trans-Pacific annexations took place at the end of the nineteenth century. With expansion came the traditional rhetoric of empire. American apologists talked about a great underlying value or purpose—enforcing peace and law, transmitting a unifying and supposedly superior culture, including often Protestant religions and public health, later a mission couched in terms of spreading democracy and economic progress. Its ruling groups thought and continue to think in terms of a regional or global vocation.
Other territorial understandings existed, both just as ancient but increasingly vulnerable in the modern era. One was the space of the city-state, the other the space identified with so-called nomads or tribes. The sovereign or independent city-state—whether the Greek polis, the later medieval Italian republic, or Central European principality (both sometimes confederated into Leagues, Lombard, or Hanseatic), or even the South Asian sultanate—remained a focused theater of civic participation with a symbolically fraught municipal center or urbs, and a small agricultural hinterland. Even when cities could not retain autonomy, their concentrated spaces served as representations of wider domains. Princes reconstructed their walls and gates, fortifications and street grids, parks and arches, to display their broader authority within a confined arena.6 And with skillful leadership and favorable geography, many succeeded in preserving their independence into the early modern era—in a Switzerland hard to conquer, as coastal enclaves in the Adriatic, or along Arabian seas and the Indian Ocean. So, too, religious authorities, whether electoral archbishops in the Holy Roman Empire, or the pope, or Buddhist monasteries in East Asia, often claimed their own temporal and territorial rights.
Nomad space was occupied by tribal confederations that often sustained their communal life by their pronounced ecological characteristics: in some cases a highland environment, in others steppe and grassland, and in some places coastal wetlands and forests. The polities based there maintained a strong sense of entitlement to the areas in which they lived or migrated with the seasons. Often they preserved a sense of religious communion with its natural landmarks, but they did not necessarily claim exclusive control of its space unless reacting to encroaching empires. Borderlands where empires contended but had not yet established unchallenged territorial control allowed indigenous peoples the chance to negotiate their tribal survival.. Indian leaders could seize a political role by opportune alliances with the imperial claimants, especially if they controlled a desirable economic resource such as the fur trade in the North American Great Lakes region. Indeed warring tribal confederations might mobilize rival European claimants against their own enemies, a tactic, however, that could end with their own subordination. Where possible, the native peoples tried to negotiate with multiple European authorities, for “an accommodation that relied solely on a single European power was an almost … certain path to extinction.”7 Thus as sheltering borderlands where sovereignty remained ambiguous were succeeded by clearly demarcated territories, tribal communities faced ethnic cleansing and quasi genocidal perils. The Algonquian and Iroquois confederations in the “middle ground” of the Great Lakes where French and British claims collided preserved a politically influential role until the advancing United States staked its own claims in the early nineteenth century. The Seminole and Creeks in the Florida region found an international role until the Spanish ceded to the United States.8 Between the 1680s and 1757 the Zhungar people of western China, led by the ambitious political leader Galdan, lost their political autonomy, their male cadres, their communal existence to the expanding Qing empire and its allies in firming up an agreed on border.9
Where old or new imperial rulers could not really penetrate local power structures, nomadic remnants could persist in the great interior landmasses even after they were finally regulated and confined by the expanding empires and nations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Persian state was in no position to suppress tribal organization and identity until the Pahlavi dynasty after 1926, but tribal leaders became mediators of state power even while they were spokesmen for their own polity.10 The Europeans who moved into Africa late in the nineteenth century sometimes sought to preserve political intermediaries even as they might ruthlessly exploit tribal labor. In Central Asia and Africa, some maintained their quasi autonomy into the twentieth century and indeed still do so.
Empires and states, however, increasingly dominated the patterns of territorial organization, and their territorial attributes need to be analyzed in turn. For each group the nature of the frontier remained a critical property. Precarious, and often provisional, expanding or eventually shrinking, frontiers dominated the political contests within empires. They had to be continually negotiated, drawn and redrawn. The formidable antiliberal German theorist of power and law Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) connected the epoch of European imperial expansion in the sixteenth century with the first effort at “global boundary thinking” (globales Liniendenken). “Immediately after the discovery of the new world the struggle begins for the appropriation of this new world’s land and seas. The partitioning and allocation of the earth increasingly becomes a common affair for the people and powers who exist alongside each other on the very earth they are dividing.”11 But Schmitt was theorizing a common European imperial effort that allegedly led its ambitious participants to negotiate a pluralist international order among themselves as they appropriated non-European land. He did not look within each empire and, it hardly needs mention, ignored the conquered peoples, who made no appearance in his treatise. From the perspective of the expanding empire, the expanding frontier appeared less of a sanctified border than a geographic respite of convenience, a provisional resting point for yet another thrust outward.
During their eras of expansion, conquerors and colonizers exploited characteristic geographic features, long recognized by scholars. They left the old walls behind, as the Chinese warrior poets recognized, and advanced over great grassy plains or deserts or wide seas and on far shores to penetrate up the long rivers into the interior. Marc Bloch noted how Norse warriors used the Seine and other French rivers to establish their states, as they exploited communication by the sea to seize Sicily as well.12 But geography (interacting with the circumstances of succession) also imposed institutional constraints after conquest. Large land empires might have to be divided, as was the case for Rome and even more quickly for the vast conglomerates conquered by Alexander in the fourth century B.C.E., Charlemagne’s Central Europe more than a millennium later, and the realms from the Black Sea and Fertile Crescent to the Pacific accumulated by Chinggis Khan before 1270.
Stabilizing empire is difficult; it is no accident that “rise and fall” or “decline and fall” furnish the narrative tropes. Even without division, administering the far perimeters of empire led to characteristic territorial expedients that often escaped control from the center. One pattern comprised the semiautonomous military domains, the Marks or Marches or voivods of Central and southeastern Europe, or even, as it turned out by 1931, by the Japanese military occupiers of Manchuria. Another paradigm was the cloned settlement replicating, but without full independence, the local and regional governments of the home country, such as British settler colonies, or the U.S. “territories” in the annexed interior of North America. The local elites, especially the “creoles” of the mother country’s ethnic stock or even subjects of mixed race, will rarely accept a subordinate status for long. Programs for full incorporation—for example, Caracalla’s extension of Roman citizenship in 212 to all freemen in the empire, or long afterward the Americans’ blueprint for elevating western U.S. territories into statehood—were needed.
So long as an empire was successful, that is “rising,” its space tended to be dynamic. To dig in at the frontier intimated decline. The Turkish historian Suraiya Faroqui reports that the Ottomans during their heyday in southeastern Europe negotiated linear borders really as temporarily acceptable halting points. “Ottoman land borders were imagined, in early modern Europe, to be broad, porous, and impermanent,” Palmira Brummett similarly observes.13 In the sixteenth century, efforts to negotiate boundaries with Venetian or Polish-Lithuanian territories yielded no definitive results. Only by 1681 did a Polish-Ottoman border commission start to establish a demarcated boundary. It is not that empires do not have walls; indeed they do, but the walls tend to emerge as structures of defensive consolidation when the energy of expansion flags, or when prudence prevails over ambition as the peoples encountered in the intermediate trading zone become threatening, whether as ethnic immigrants or hostile soldiers.
Frontiers at the edge of an expanding empire were thus zonal, not linear—more regions of cultural and ethnic osmosis than firm barriers.14 One segment or another of the imperial perimeter, whether at the edge of its landmass or overseas, was usually contested and the site of rebellion and resistance. Enthusiasts at home believed the fighting invigorated the commonwealth and helped maintain civic health. Opening new territory supposedly provided a “safety valve” to relieve domestic tensions. Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the openness of the American frontier, which as of the 1890 census could no longer be represented as a continuous line of settlement, had nurtured democracy. For the generation of 1890 in Europe, America, and Japan that carried colonialism (along with such related projects as Alpinism, big-game hunting, organizing Boy Scouts, and the revived Olympic games) to a climax of annexationist and manly enthusiasms, the project of empire would also integrate a potentially revolutionary proletariat into a national consensus even as it prevented liberalism and prosperity from degenerating into mere civic indolence. The peace within empire—Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, or Pax Americana—allegedly existed symbiotically with the continuing and invigorating tension at the militarized frontier.15
The zonal frontier often cited as one distinguishing property of empire—the frontier as a “march” or as a strip of ethnic exchange—usually was found only in the farther reaches of its territory, such as the Russian steppe, the American great plains, the Ottomans’ Danubian marches or Mesopotamian perimeter, the northern forests or arid western highlands of the Qing realm, or the new lands claimed by European powers across the seas. Earlier historians stressed their brutal and violent properties; recent researchers like to emphasize the cultural and commercial mixing that took place. American historians have paid a great deal of attention to the zones of contact in North and South America from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries.16 In an understandable effort to stress the agency of indigenous peoples, historians now deploy the catchword negotiation; it recurs over and over again, as if every accommodation was reached after a peaceful parley.17 Many of these negotiations, of course, were deals that could not be refused, or, if refused, triggered violent coercion before settlements (or surrenders) were reached.
Turbulent imperial frontiers existed on the margins of European settlement in the Americas, the Caribbean, and Australia, but also at the margins of Qing and Muscovite expansion (whi...