6 Orientalism and Empirethe significance of exploring a culture at its edges or margins in order
to gain insight into its values, preoccupations, and even fears.
The comment of Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper about the
British in India applies to the imperial borderland experience as well:
“A large colonial bureaucracy occupied itself, especially from the
186 0s, with classifying people and their attributes, with censuses, sur-
veys, and ethnographies, with recording transactions, marking space,
establishing routines, and standardizing practices.”^14 In this study
Iadopt from Said his attention to the significance of Europe’s interest
in the sacred antiquity of the East as a contrast to the degenerate
present. If the Orient was a problem in the present, as the North
Caucasus certainly was to an expanding Russia in the nineteenth cen-
tury, then it “needed first to be known, then invaded and possessed,
then re-created by scholars, soldiers, and judges who disinterred for-
gotten languages, histories, races, and cultures in order to posit
them– beyond the modern Oriental’s ken – as the true classical
Orient that could be used to judge and rule the modern Orient.”^15
The colonizing power justifies its presence through its supposed role
as the restorer of a pristine and Romanticized past. British scholars
and officials took their purpose to be the recovery of India’s “magnif-
icent” past, long since mired in the familiar process of Eastern stagna-
tion and deterioration.^16 France’s “Kabyle myth,” or the French
colonial notion of a Latin Africa of indigenous Berbers free from the
influence of the conquering Arabs and their faith, offers the closest
comparative example from this history of European mythmaking.^17
russia as empire
The conceptual debt of imperial empire-builders to worlds of
Western colonialism such as that of Algérie française will be clear
from the discussions that follow on Shamil, Islam, customary law,
ethnicity, and other topics. Russia’s general recognition of the diver-
sity and especially the “Oriental” character of its borderland regions
in the nineteenth century introduced new concerns and a new impe-
rial purpose, especially in the wake of Russia’s own eighteenth-
century clarification of its “Western” location on the modern map of
the globe.^18 On the other hand, the Russian context of empire was, of
course, quite different from that of the Western powers. Historians in
particular point out that Said’s very preoccupation with a series of
epistemological dilemmas is a method by definition likely to obscure
the particular historical context of each colonial relationship.^19 Russia
did not possess distant “colonies” but contiguous borderlands, and
its enduring ancien régime social order and its “emperor of all the