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.' 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 elites 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.