and in the realities of geography, distance, and sparse demography. Furthermore,
research on the Russian empire was energized by the collapse of the Soviet Union,
producing valuable studies of the constituent communities of the empire by
scholars in Europe, America, and post-Soviet republics. Some of the useful tacks
in new work on the Russian empire include resisting a teleology that assumes that
empire moves into nation, resisting normative disapproval of empire, and placing
the Russian empire in its Eurasian context. Without at all suggesting that a more
complex“consensus-based”politics diluted the tsar’s undivided sovereignty, this
research forces us to look pragmatically at the forces through which the autocratic
center governed the realm.
Particularly influential for this study is the model of an“empire of difference,”
developed by scholars including the Russianist Jane Burbank, the Africanist Fred-
erick Cooper, and the Ottomanist Karen Barkey. Such empires rule from the center
but allow the diverse languages, ethnicities, and religions of their subject peoples to
remain in place as anchors of social stability. Such an analytical framework is not
new, of course. In 1532 none other than Niccolò Machiavelli outlined three
choices available to a conquering state to govern states that“have been accustomed
to live in freedom under their own laws.”Conquerors could“destroy”the van-
quished; they could“go and live therein”by sending in administrators trained from
the center; or they could“allow them to continue to live under their own laws,
taking a tribute from them and creating within them a new government of a few
which will keep the state friendly to you.”
The Russian, Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, and Chinese empires, all of which
arose in the wake of the Mongol empire, demonstrate such an approach. Vast,
continental, and highly diverse in ethnicities, confessions, and languages, these
Eurasian empires calculated central control against the advantages of maintaining
stable communities. They synthetically drew on the Chinggisid heritage of the
Mongol empire (founded by Chinggis or Genghis Khan) and other cultural
influences (in Russia, Byzantium; in the Ottoman empire, Byzantium and Islamic
thought; in China, Confucianism and Buddhism; in Mughal India, indigenous
Hindu practice) to construct ruling ideologies and governing strategies. Thomas
Allsen reminds us that such an early modern empire was a“huge catchment basin
channeling, accumulating, and storing the innovations of diverse peoples and
cultures,”while Alfred Rieber identifies common strategies of governance and
ideology across“Eurasian borderlands”from Hungary to China. Connected by
trade, warfare, and conquest, early modern empires shared military technologies,
bureaucratic record-keeping skills, languages, communications networks, and
ideologies and approaches to governance through“difference.”
The Russian empire evolved in a part of Eurasia that acquainted it with multiple
examples of politics of difference and empire. The territory that the Russian empire
came to occupy traversed a geological and historical triad of east–west swaths of
lands and cultures connecting Europe and Asia and north to south. Southernmost,
stretching from the Mediterranean and Black Sea to the Middle East and points
east, was a band of relatively commercialized societies, with large and densely
populated cities and thick trade networks. Their needs—for food, luxury goods,
2 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801