Crossley ImaginalBondEmpire 2016

The Imaginal Bond of “Empire” and “Civilization” in Eurasian History
Author(s): Pamela Kyle Crossley

Source: Verge: Studies in Global Asias , Vol. 2, No. 2, Asian Empires & Imperialism (Fall
2016), pp. 84-114
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/vergstudglobasia.2.2.0084
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Essays

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Pamela Kyle Crossley
The Imaginal Bond of “Empire” and

“Civilization” in Eurasian History
We have become accustomed to a paradigm of “civilization” and

“empire” as mutually reinforcing. Empires distribute the fundamentals of
civilization, and after the demise of empire, civilization endures. In such
reasoning, the “West” was the legacy of the Roman Empire; the Islamic
world was the legacy of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates; and the
“Confucian world,” as Huntington and a few others had it, was the legacy
of the Han Empire. Today this is hard to find credible. There is an ecol-
ogy of presence for empires before the early modern period that would
appear to have precluded these empires from maintaining the consistent
intimacy with their populations necessary to actually instill grand and
transformative ideas or cultural practices. Except for military force, most
aspects of what we call “empires” before the beginnings of mass education
and mass media in the seventeenth century were porous and ephemeral.
Language change we now understand as a complex issue of divergent uses
at the elite and popular levels and not as imposed by imperial demands
(Winford 2003). Low literacy rates and the persistence of folk religion,
among other factors, must have mitigated persistently against cultural
change imposed from an imperial center (Scheidel 2013). The coherence
claimed by any ancient or medieval empire was largely generated by lo-
cal and regional elites—in their own time or later—using emblems of
imperial affiliation to secure their own status and enhance local stability;
after their own times, the conceit of vast, centrally emanating power was
retrospectively conjured by new elites seeking to legitimate themselves.
In this essay, I use the handy (too handy) terms classical empires—
primarily Rome and Han, because they were regarded afterward as typical
of the large civilization-imposing empire; confessional empires (and this
84

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will be used very loosely), prevailing between about 300 and 1400 ce;
and monarchical empires—some of which I will call “neo-confessional,” as
in the case of the Ottomans and Timurids—becoming prominent after
about 1400. I draw these crude and intrusive lines knowing that cultural
historians increasingly see continuities over the centuries that invalidate
them. Nevertheless, for specific purposes of this essay, these clumsy tags
help to delineate the layers of a progressively imbricated myth of the
links of civilization with empire. Many readers will also find that they
are embedded in an argument that because of limitations of space may
stray here and there into overstatement; I am serious about the argu-
ment, which does not mean that every simplification will be immune to
variant readings or challenge.
6 Empires, Civilization, and Progress

Edward Gibbon (1737–94)1 did not use the word “civilization” often. In
the case of Rome, Gibbon understood “civilized” to denote the results
of the process by which imperial tutelage brought the provinces more
into conformity with the culture of the Italian peninsula: “Their partial
distinctions were obliterated and they insensibly coalesced into one great
nation, united by language, manners and civil institutions, and equal
to the weight of a powerful empire” (Gibbon 1782). A rising empire was
cultural dissemination by its nature. But a stable empire was a moribund
one. Third-century Roman civic ethics gave way to corruption, cowardice,
sloth, and disloyalty, all of which could be remedied best by an influx of
vigorous peoples from the north, still seeking the moral salubrities of
civilization that, in their native condition, they lacked. Initiative ulti-
mately returns to the localities (or at least to the cities), where iteration
and elaboration of the imperial cultural legacy underwrites “progress”—
toward rule of law, economic prosperity, and humane values. With other
contrasts, Gibbon reinforced the association of empire and civilization:
the Persians—who had been civilized in the past but sank into corrup-
tion, as would the Romans—and the Umayyad caliphate, which in its
dramatic early military victories planted the ground from which the Is-
lamic world sprouted, at least in part as an inevitable response to the
vacuum of civilization caused by recession of the Roman and Sassanian
empires (Roberts 2014).
Seeing widespread standardized culture as a production of the Ro-
man Empire made Gibbon a bit different from his predecessor and pro-
fessed inspiration Charles-Louis de Secondat, Montesquieu (1689–1755).
In Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur et de la décadence des Ro-
mains, Montesquieu had approved of the Roman values of self-discipline,
The Imaginal Bond of “Empire” and “Civilization” 85

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courage, and loyalty where he found them but had based his understanding
of the sources of the empire’s existence on the ability of the leaders, and
particularly the emperors after the first century ce, to summon an image
of a vast moral order that balanced the abstractions of legal justice, rever-
ence for institutions, and respect of the preeminence of the aristocracy
against the central government’s accumulation of financial and military
power (Secondat 1734). This was his gouvernment ambigu (Secondat 1734);
the loss of this rhetorical finesse, this control over image, was as much
a cause of the Roman decline as were reductions in revenue and losses
of military capacity.2
Both Gibbon and Montesquieu wrote for audiences living under states
on the threshold of large-scale overseas conquest, and both used the Ro-
mans as foils to advise the conquerors of their own time—sometimes to
advise them against conquest.3 Their approximate contemporary, Zhao
Yi 趙翼 (1727–1814),4 writing during the Qing Empire, was also offering
himself as an unappointed advisor to the conquerors of his day, who were
busy in Mongolia and Turkestan. When he mused upon the demises of
empires based in China from Han (203 bce–220 ce) to Ming (1368–1644),
like most traditional scholars in China, he found moral issues funda-
mental because the ethical condition of the ruler determined the fate
of the empire. But he departed from some earlier thinkers—notably
Wang Fuzhi 王夫之 (1619–92),5 who lived through the demise of the
Ming and conquest by the Qing in the seventeenth century—who at-
tributed the essence of empire to the ability to demarcate and expand a
zone of “civilization” (wenhua 文化). In contrast, for Zhao (and this was
a necessity, because he wrote under the rule of ostensibly “foreign” and
politically sensitive Manchus), imperial vitality was a matter of proper
economic management and wise military ventures as much as a matter
of the defining and defending civilization. He did not come very close to
Montesquieu’s suggestion that empire was largely a production of image,
gesture, and ritual, but he was far removed from the positions of Gib-
bon and Wang that imperial vitality depended on cultural coherence and
moral stability. In English-language writing on “empire” and in Chinese-
language writing on something cognate to “empire” through at least the
late twentieth century,6 views such as those of Gibbon and Wang Fuzhi
associating empire with cultural transformation and the trajectories of
civilization prevailed over views such as those of Montesquieu and Zhao
Yi that large-scale political orders are at base delicate managerial regimes
integrating economic and military power, on one hand, with conjurings
of heritage and morality, on the other.7
Studies of local deviation from imperial prescription and persistence
86 Pamela Kyle Crossley

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of folk traditions, as well as the tensions between contemporary identity
concepts and those imposed by future historians, are too rich to sustain
the former simplifications (Keay and Terrenato 2001; Lewis 2009; Pitts
and Versluys 2014; Shelach-Lavi 2015). Nevertheless, the assumption that
empires have something to do with inculcating culture still controls our
discourse. To the extent that we incorporate a role for illusion in these
matters, we consider it—as did Montesquieu—as contemporaneously
generated by the rulers or the state that answered to them. This essay is
not a consideration of the mirages emanating from imperial performance
and representation, shaping public perception of authority, dominion,
and identity in its own time; these were suggested by Montesquieu and
are a fundamental part of our modern studies of “empire” (e.g., Cher
niavsky 1969; Necipoglu 1991; Kafadar 1995; Wortman 2000; Crossley 1999;
Kołodziejczyk 2012). The question here is the importance of retrospective
attribution of cultural and moral transformations to past empires on the
basis of conditions in their own time, but in response to the ideological
and strategic requirements of later regimes.
6 Looking for the Matrical “Empires”

As a rhetorical matter, we make Julius and his adopted heir, Augustus
Caesar, the emblems of the transition to empire, remembering that in
later centuries caesar in various forms (kaisar, kayser, czar/tsar, geser) would
equate with what we might otherwise call an emperor (Crossley 1999,
221–44; Bang and Kolodziejczyk 2012, 1–41). Yet, in his lifetime, Julius
Caesar was not an emperor or anything like it, and when he attempted to
seize powers that we would now call imperial, he was murdered through a
conspiracy of senators. He was one moment in the long history of social
tension, ambitions for wealth, factional infighting, and regional compe-
tition that wore the republic away from the inside, while a succession of
ambitious men tried various kinds of oligarchy, dictatorship, and military
coups to concentrate more and more power in the hands of, ultimately, a
single man. By 27 bce, Augustus (then Octavian) rose above a threshold in
that process and became emperor (imperator) in name, but until the third
century, the rulership was still meandering toward our understanding of
“emperor”—increasingly elevated in ritual and rhetoric, increasingly overt
in the assertion of personal power over aristocrats, soldiers, senators,
and commoners. Forceful suppression of large-scale conflict, what the
Romans as well as we now refer to as “Pax Romana,” was sustained in the
empire for roughly two centuries. But ultimately the regime’s authority
weakened in its provinces, and its borders were violated and obliterated
by formerly subject or at least subdued peoples, all of them assimilated to

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some Roman institutions, all of them eager to seize the imperial mantle
of caesar for themselves.
The Roman transition to empire does not very well fulfill the criteria
of our modern construction of conscious, overt, strongly ideological state
transformation—something along the lines of Tony Judt’s (2015, 247)
comment that “for an empire to be born, a republic must die”—but the
transition from Zhou to Qin, completed in China in 221 bce, very nearly
does. It featured the concentration of power in the hands of a single
ruler, building his regime by systematically undermining the power of the
regional aristocrats who, for two millennia at the least, had ruled their
distinct regions of what is now northern China. Moreover, the process
was accompanied by the widening influence of the Legalist school of
political thought, which overtly legitimated the destruction of the tra-
ditional elites and the imposition of an ostensibly impartial and inflex-
ible legal code to assure uniform administration, dispute resolution, and
punishment. The new ruler was the huangdi 皇帝, not the king (wang 王)
of earlier times. The Han dynasts who seized power from Qin in 203 bce
retained the basic institutions and territory, though they adapted them
to achieve greater stability by accommodating the interests of the ex-
tended imperial family (with princes enfeoffed on their own lands) and
participation of regional elites. Eventually, their own regime saw an in-
crease in the interlocking developments of internal fracture and for-
eign invasion—after which its authority weakened in its provinces, and
its borders were violated or obliterated by formerly subject or at least
subdued peoples, all of them assimilated to some Han institutions, all
of them eager to seize the imperial mantle of huangdi for themselves.
We often assume the coincidence of the refinement of the authority
of an emperor with a well-defined territory under his authority. But it
may have been sufficient for the emperor to be recognized by the ruling
classes near the capital or in irregular clusters farther away, and for them
to radiate some symbolic representation of that refracted authority to
their inferiors. In the Roman case, it is this idea of refracted authority that
is implicit in the term imperium. It meant discretion to act as an agent of
the state by mobilizing troops or meting out death to misbehavers and
was usually part of the description of a government office. One might
assume that in the Chinese case, Legalist prescriptions for elimination
of aristocratic authority would mean imposition of direct imperial rule,
at least at the level of the early administrative districts. The institutions
designed to do this in Qin—county magistrates; standardization of law,
weights, measures, roads; centralization of tax collection, military manage-
ment, and projects such as expanding the Great Wall, as examples—are

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very well known. In the subsequent Han period, magistrates had some-
thing corresponding to imperium, which was their delegated authority to
direct troops and to judge crimes, sentence the convicted to death, and
oversee execution of the sentence. In both the Roman and Han cases, the
central government used the right of appeal as a means of monitoring
local judicial activity and spotting abuses that were otherwise obscured
in the hazy area between stipulations and real practice. The geographical
extent of each empire could be understood as the limits to which this
refracted authority could in theory be extended—not the reach of an
ascribed imperial culture. Each of these regimes subscribed to the fiction
of uninterrupted spatial designation and dominion, sometimes drawing
an edge of that dominion by erecting a stela implying not only a point
of customs duty but a solid rim of sovereignty on one side of the monu-
ment. But the degree to which power was exercised by the state within
these spaces is not determined by any legal code or imperial edict. It was
determined by the ecology of presence.
This was partly a matter of the relative magnitudes of state on one
side and society on the other. I am not providing here a definition of the
state, but I would point out that I am not suggesting that a state consists
of nothing but power negotiation between classes, even if I am suggesting
that as the proximate origination point of the illusion of ancient imperial
cultural hegemony (an issue very distinct from the “state” in my view).
That is, I am not intending to contribute here to issues associated with
Michael Mann (who has consciously eschewed Eurasia) or James Scott
(e.g., Mann 2010; Scott 2010). There seems good reason to describe both
Rome and Han as more specific than their predecessor regimes had been
in designating government officials as distinct from society. We see this
manifestly when looking down the tube of historical documentation—
regulations, edicts, salary schedules, the occasional surviving list of tax-
payers or statement of actual expenditures—but regardless of the degree
of detail we can bring to a description of any ancient office, our ability to
actually place these actors on the ground in any specific numbers is weak
or missing (Niaz 2014). We can use the similarities of Rome and Han to
estimate rough relative magnitudes of state presence. Likely because of
their temperate-zone placement and their roots in Eurasia’s Iron Age,
they were comparable in size, population, state income and expenditure,
and military power.8 Han reached its greatest expansion in the early first
century bce and Rome in the first century ce, with Han claiming about 6
million square kilometers and Rome about 5 million. At the point of great-
est expansion, by present convention, we heuristically attribute a popu-
lation of about 60 million people to each empire. Each had a capital city

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with a population assumed to have been more than a million people. Their
estimated daily caloric intake was about the same (2,100–2,200 calories),
their revenue was about the same, and their estimated expenditures were
about the same (Scheidel 2015, 150–80). Given the material similarities
in the claimed space and population under the control of Rome and Han,
the commonly accepted estimates of their civil state sizes are in bizarre
contrast. In Roman studies, Keith Hopkins offered the famous estimate
of one civil official per 350,000–400,000 people. That suggests about 150
civil officials for the entire empire. The Roman system was notoriously
top heavy in compensation and documentation, leaving a question of how
many undocumented lowly officials were involved in administration; the
amounts spent each year by Rome on its officials could hardly have been
absorbed by only a few hundred officials. There is something wrong with
this figure, which Hopkins himself noted (Hopkins 1980; 2002). First, the
total population of the empire cannot be confidently fixed. In Hopkins’s
view, it could have been 30 million or it could have been 120 million, which
means that even on the “four hundred thousand” axiom, civil officials
could have totaled seventy-five or three hundred. But a comparison to
the accepted figures for Han suggests another problem.
There is every reason to regard Han as the largest and most well-defined
civil government of its era; for centuries after, in China itself, there was
probably not another government to equal it in this regard. Specialists
have found certain kinds of documentary justification for estimates of
120,000–150,000 officials in annual service, of which we might consider
the following examples: a passage in the imperial history (Hou Han shu
後漢書) for the year 5 bce that states that from the prime minister down
to the lowly “transcribers,” there were 120,285 men; Michael Loewe’s
magnification of numbers from a set of documents detailing the admin-
istration of Donghai Commandary in what is now Shandong province,
suggesting a total of 150,000 civil officials (Loewe 1967; Bielenstein 1980);9
or a reference, found in chapter (卷) 67, to “more than 30,000” students
entering the imperial academy (太學) in a single year.10 The obvious pos-
sibility of scribal error aside, there are problems of contextualization;
there is no cumulative series of statistics on Han officials. The Hou Han
shu total for 5 bce is an orphan number, stuck into a passage detailing
salary ranks; the source supplies no categorically similar figures from any
other year for comparison. Loewe’s numbers apply to one of the earliest
and most densely populated of the Han commandaries; in a period in
which the number of commandaries was falling and their configurations
in size and population were tending toward irregularity, there is no obliga-
tion to regard the figures as representative. With regard to the imperial

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academy, other passages in the imperial history make clear that, except
for the Wang Mang period, the academy normally hosted a few hundred
to a few thousand men (Wang 1949, 152). The Hou Han shu suggests that
this “more than 30,000” in the first century was an extraordinary occa-
sion (the appointment of a new director, in fact) and uses the term “of
various kinds” to describe the group, who are being “transferred”; there
is nothing to indicate that all or most of the students were headed for
the civil service or were not already serving.
The most obvious explanation for the discrepancy of state size esti-
mates between Rome and Han is also the most significant. My standard
here of full-time civil officials selected and paid by the central government
as a way of limning state against society is heuristic; there is not a great
deal in Han or Roman documentation that allows an estimate of this
kind to be made, and I presume that is because such a description does
not apply well to the actual conditions of Han or Roman civil officialdom.
Han may have recorded every part-time or even expectant appointee
as an official, whereas Rome may have left undocumented a very large
number of occasionally employed local literate men. The practices, I would
suggest, were so widely variant because in each empire, there was a hazy,
patchily attested reserve of qualified local men who could be drawn on as
needed, whether for routine tasks such as moving the mail or collecting
customs duties or for special road, river, or irrigation projects; for popu-
lar relief in the event of famine or flood; or for recording the number of
taxpayers (which in writing about Chinese history is sometimes referred
to as a “census”).11 These large and to us only awkwardly classifiable semi
professional regional populations constituted a littoral state, embedded
in local elites, and invocable for service by a successful empire.
The resources sustaining this littoral state (and supporting the small
successor states of these empires) were local and private and predated the
imposition of imperial control; the localities were not dependent on the
empire, but the illusion of imperial cultural sponsorship was dependent
on the localities. There was tribute to be paid, but before the empires, local
magnates had demanded tribute anyway; diversion of some portion of
the proceeds to the capital could not have been of great interest to those
supplying the products and cash at the point of collection. When we look
back at these empires, we see, saliently, documents on the institutions
of emperorship, law, the military, regulating offices such as the Roman
Senate or the Han censors (Qin and earlier Han yushi 御史), and local
administration through sorts of governorships and magistracies. These
documents constitute the refracting lens through which the images of
past “empires” is, in our reading, generated. On the ground, Rome and

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Han as cultural or moral entities were, in all likelihood, notional outside
of the capital or the cities that were the base of provincial government.12
As a matter of numbers, I would guess that one in a couple of thousand
people in the Roman or Han empire had a chance of encountering a civil
official—a much, much greater chance for those living in the capital and
a vastly smaller chance for those living any distance from it.
It is certainly credible that Han may have had a full-time professional
civil bureaucracy two or even ten (not hundreds or thousands of) times
the size of Rome’s. By the later Han period, the number of commandaries
had fallen to thirteen for the domestic territories and a few more planted
in Korea, Vietnam, and the transitions to Central Asia. Below the level
of the commandaries were a few more than eighteen hundred counties
of several varieties, each of which had a civil magistrate and a military
intendant. There were also numerous inspectors traveling between the
commandaries, the counties, and the capital, but overall, it is difficult to
come up with a total of civil officials outside the capital that would have
come anywhere close to fifteen thousand. I assume that both in the Roman
and Han cases, there were many more officials within the capital than
without, and if we assume twice as many in the capital as in the provinces,
we would have a total of thirty thousand to forty-five thousand active full-
time officials selected and paid by the central government. That has the
virtue of being within range of comparison to later empires based in China,
particularly the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1636–1912), which made do
with about twenty thousand to forty thousand active full-time civil of-
ficials,13 despite being much larger and much more populous than Han.
Whatever dissimilarities Rome and Han had in the size and shape of
their civil bureaucracies, their military infrastructures were overwhelm-
ingly the vaster portion of their expenditure. In both empires, full-time
soldiers and part-time auxiliaries could be activated for specific campaigns.
Roman-and Han-period histories report armies larger than two hundred
thousand soldiers—in the Han case, sometimes several times larger—for
particular battles, which does not obligate any historian to believe that all
or most of the soldiers involved were part of a permanent standing force.
Based on its legions and their support troops, in the time of Octavian,
Rome’s standing armies could have reached a size of somewhere between
eight hundred thousand and 1 million men. This is virtually the same as
estimates of the standing Han forces a century or so later. In both cases
their distribution was, not surprisingly, relative to population and gen-
erally inverse to distribution of the civil officials (who were heavily con-
centrated in the capital). We can make a crude guess that at a minimum,
one in sixty (or to make it simple, let us say one in a hundred) persons in

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the empire experienced the military either as a physical establishment or
through enrollment of an associate or family member. The evident rea-
son that the military magnitudes and structures of Rome and Han were
so tightly aligned to their territories and populations—and so divorced
from the sizes and structures of their civil governments—was that the
military presence was in fact the essence of empire. It responded to the
overriding strategic necessity for continued intake of resources, and its
spatial configuration was governed by the requirements of population. It
built and maintained the physical edifices and road systems that suggested
imperial power. Its uniforms symbolized the imperial presence, and its
weapons inflicted upon the population the punishments that ostensibly
followed violation of imperial law. Local populations not being subjected
to conquest or coercion had only an abstract awareness of the regime’s
claim to dominion, and perhaps none. But they knew the meaning of an
army, its uniforms, and its weapons. In comparison to the tiny candle
of civil and cultural presence of these empires, their military presence
is a blazing sun.
Even schoolchildren today will readily acknowledge that Rome and
Han were mighty military powers, so this may seem a meaningless ob-
servation. But those same schoolchildren will also add that in each case,
military force was combined with a transformative civilizing presence,
bringing writing, the rule of law, and the ideals of justice to peoples
who had not previously enjoyed them. Yet neither of these regimes had
sufficient presence in most of the communities it claimed to dominate
to have had much impact apart from the intermittent coercions made
possible by the presence of a local garrison. Their legal codes, though
looking rather uncompromising in our present understanding of them,
are known to have been enforced or not enforced in response to a great
variety of local circumstances—not least the ability to physically enforce
an imperial or magisterial edict. What we call the Roman and Han empires
were suspended on trade networks that in many cases predated them
and punctuated by military installations vividly branded as imperial.14
Rome and Han were, at root, corporations of conquest and commercial
inducement.
The question of colonies is difficult to negotiate. Rome as a repub-
lic conquered the landed rim around the Mediterranean and as an em-
pire maintained and extended its hold. Han expanded the pre-imperial
Zhou territories to encompass the water rim comprising the network of
rivers originating on the shoulders of the Tibetan Plateau. Both in Ro-
man and in Han history, the sequence of military conquest of distinctly
external territory followed by establishment of an occupying military

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government and subsequent settlement of farmers and merchants is
clear. Rome undertook such ventures in central and western Europe,
in Britain, in North Africa, and in Syria and Palestine. Han undertook
similar ventures in what is now south China, northwest China, Hainan
Island, and parts of what are now Korea and Vietnam. But colonization
rapidly become dependent on the agenda of either existing elites in the
new territories or the wishes of elites based in the imperial territories to
expand their wealth or political leverage to the frontiers. In some cases,
continued occupation was not viable because neither local nor migrating
elites saw it in their interest to govern or develop the new territories. In
others, the willingness of local elites to subscribe to the imperial frame-
work created a foundation for indirect rule, federation or vassalage. In
still others, imperial elites migrated to conquered territories as land
owners and governors.15 The longevity of any colony appears to have been
determined by two factors: the willingness of the central government to
expend its resources to support as much military force as needed at any
particular time and the willingness of colonial elites (whether native or
immigrated) to participate in the ostensibly imperial networks of wealth,
information, and social exchange. This is a description of Rome and Han
as ephemeral webs, only as stable as their ability to maintain and occa-
sionally expand a military infrastructure and to cling to the affiliations of
local elites. When the old networks of which they were composed were no
longer sufficient to provide elites the information and wealth they could
get from new networks, the empires were gone.
These early empires were generated and regenerated through the sub-
scription of local elites to the legitimating cues transmitted by very scarce
civilian officials and the occasional military spectacle. At the local level,
communities were in turn based on preexisting lineage structures and
possibly on cultic affiliations, and were linked to other communities by
trade networks of long history (Bang 2011, 1–14, 239–89). These empires
were regimes of affiliation, in which very widely spaced elites were knit
together by rewards from the capital; by reasonably consistent confor-
mity to an acknowledged set of rules or regulations; by effectiveness in
gathering, accounting for, and transporting local tribute; by trade and tax
policies advantageous to regional wealth; and by a willingness to inspire
awe in the local population by the strategic application of terror. Symbols
of empire were displayed and venerated by the local agents of empire for
one primary reason: the strengthening of their own hand in dealing with
the local communities. A written medium (sooner or later acknowledged
as “classical”), a style of official dress, and infrequent public displays were
the minor manifestations of imperial affiliation that elites affected as

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part of a program for enhancing and stabilizing their standing. At the
root of the illusion of cultural presence and dominion was the ability of
the elites—whether in the capital or in the provinces—to employ the
imperial army and social hub of the capital for their own advantage; from
this engine was emitted the vaporous shapes of cultural and political
preeminence of the capital.
The care with which the emperors and their close affiliates cultivated
a veneer of deference to elite and aristocratic institutions is striking. In
the Roman case, this largely took the form of Octavian and his succes-
sors ostentatiously honoring the traditions of Senate governance, while
struggling to disembowel the power structures that had once allowed the
aristocratic Senate to actually govern Rome. In the Han case, this meant
adapting a wide variety of Legalist institutions to the management of
its territories, while using the morally charged rhetoric of the political
school—in retrospect called “Confucian” in English—that had resisted
for centuries the accumulation of power in the hands of a single ruler. In
such early examples are seen an enduring characteristic of the phenomena
we often lump under “empire”: sufficient control over legal writ, public
rhetoric, and historical narrative to coerce credulity in contemporary
elites. We very often see this as a demand by the emperorship on un-
willing elites. If we are limiting ourselves to discussion of relationships
between the emperors and elites within a few miles of the capital, the
coercive powers of the emperors could indeed have been considerable.
But over the huge expanse of the territories claimed by Rome or Han, the
coherence of the empire rested primarily on the interest of local elites in
using imperial emblems to enhance their own local prestige and to keep
themselves connected to networks of exchange that functioned under
the protection of the imperial armies. It was these elites who generated
cultural change in these empires, even to a degree of language change
that we once imagined was catalyzed by imperial prestige or massive
population movement. Hegemony of the emperors outside the capital
was among the earliest illusions that we bundle under our modern notion
of “empire.” It was local landowners, aristocrats, shipowners, factory and
mine owners, and dominant merchants (not always different people) who
were masters of the empires’ fates, not the emperors in their capitals.
6 Coloring inside the Lines:

The Age of Confessional Empires
The trade and military presences of the empires were contact, and contact
is leavening to a culture. Though I am arguing that attributing cultural
change in the classical period to imperial control or initiative is unwise,

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there is no doubt that cultural change happened. The Romance languages
of Europe really were produced by the influence of Latin, and the Chinese
languages and writing system really did become rooted in the regions
where Han dominion was asserted. Latin and Han-period standard Chi-
nese were not, however, language killers; unlike modern global English,
or putonghua 普通话 in China, they did not overwhelm local vernaculars
but contributed to their production. If the impact of the empires on local
cultures was as gauzy as I am claiming, the retrospective image of these
empires as overwhelming civilizing systems must be explained. I would
suggest that the means by which local elites generated a contemporary
illusory imperial hegemony in their own time resembled the means by
which hegemonic legacies for these empires were generated afterward. The
Roman and Han reputations as civilizations may owe their beginnings to
subsequent imperial dynasts, among them the Amal lineage of the Goths
(circa 350–550) and the Merovingian lineage of the Franks (circa 450–700)
in western Europe, the Sima lineage of the Eastern Jin (circa 260–320)
and the Yuwen lineage of the Särbi founders of the Northern Wei (circa
390–540) in China. In each case, the aspiring rulers and the aristocrats
around them invoked the previous empire not only as the source of their
own legitimacy but as a universalizing mechanism for legitimacy across
time and space (e.g., Holcombe 1994; Innes 1997; Graves-Brown, Jones,
and Gamble 2013). It is probably not irrelevant that in both Europe and
China, the new regimes were smallish and alien presences; the Visigoths
in Rome and the Särbi in Luoyang had use for vivid and imposing myths
of a literally classical empire from which they could claim inheritance
(Kang 1995; Heather 2000; Christensen 2002).
These pretensions were occasionally represented through claimed
connections to previous ruling dynasties, but much more often they were
made by claiming continuity with the morals and institutions of the van-
ished empire. “Roman law” as venerated in the later Roman Empire of the
Franks was an inheritance of a legal code not from Rome but from the civil
codes of the fifth-and sixth-century emperors in Byzantium—Theodosius
and Justinian—and echoed in the West by the so-called Lex Visigothorum
(Stein 1999, 60–73). Its terms, processes, concepts of property, and basic
notions of civil identities could well have been continuities of the laws
of imperial Rome (this is suggested by their debts to the fourth-century
Valerian code), but what matters here is the legitimation of the later code
by reification of an imperial legacy. There was a cognate process relating
to Han imperial law. The written code did not survive the fall of the em-
pire in 220 ce (Wilbur 1943; Hulsewé 1955). But its terms, institutional
delineations, principles of property and land rights, and prescriptions for

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obligations within families were believed to be reproduced in the legal
codes of the small empires controlling parts of the former Han domain
between about 200 and 600 ce and ultimately in the legal code (which
survives) of the Tang Empire that ruled a unified China from circa 600
to 900. It is in these centuries that both the Roman and Han empires
as civilizations began to take on solidity in the eyes of rulers and ambi-
tious aristocrats—and of the councilors, secretaries, and historians who
served them.
An interesting feature of this era is the establishing of a time dimen-
sion that has persisted in notions of legitimacy to the present. That is, a
foundation era (I will call it classical) is not only given its own historical
narrative but also allowed to survive in a parallel dimension, providing
political and social legitimacy as well as moral and aesthetic education to
a nominal “present.” This was vividly represented in imperial ritual from
the fourth century on (particularly as it related to imperial audience)
but also in elite dress and language use, monumental arts, cartography,
calendrical practices, monetary denominations, historiography, and gen-
eral education (Mango 1980, 192–93, 219). What elites had read in the
Roman or Han eras was classical in the present; the language they had
used was universal; what they had worn was formal; what was believed
to have been their law was authoritative. Their territories could be drawn
in cartographic dimensions and claimed again by their self-appointed
heirs. The military legacies of Rome and Han were distinct in some ways
from their putative cultural traditions, because for subsequent rulers,
the substance of “empire” still lay in the ability to intermittently apply
overwhelming force against both soldiers and civilians. Roman military
ranks became the basis of aristocratic designations in Europe and Brit-
ain. Some Han military ranks had a similar history among the Turkic
and Tungusic peoples, who created their own regimes inside or on the
periphery of former Han domains. For subsequent infantries, some Ro-
man and Han terms have been perpetuated through their succeeding
empires to the present day.
But in the succeeding era, there were new dimensions of universalizing
moral missions for rulers and independent platforms for endorsement
of the rulership. For convenience, I will call it the age of the confessional
empires (a term I am using here in allusion to Hodgson 1974, 137–4 2),
when not all empires were strictly confessional but all tended toward
similar structures distinguishing the legitimacy of the ruler from the
standing of his compromising peers—whether religious hierarchs, tribal
leaders, aristocrats, or military elites. Rulers now sought justification
for their conquests and tended to find it in the ostensible revival of fully

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fledged civilizations attributed to the vanished empires. The new Roman
mission—enhanced by the alliance with Christianity—became part of the
legitimation narrative of the empires of the Bulgars, the Muscovites, the
Carolingians, and the Hapsburgs. The Han mission assumed particularly
elaborate form, as the Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing all wrote the histories
of their immediate predecessors and, in the introduction, usually invoked
the heritage of Han and its championing of the teachings of Confucius as
part of the legitimating narrative for themselves (e.g., Crossley 1987, 765).
Byzantium was central in a way earlier Rome had never been. In the
East, the later Roman court encountered a model of confessional rulership
that, starting from Hindu and Buddhist models and continuing through
early Iran, had permeated central Eurasia. Intentionally or unintention-
ally,16 Constantine (sometimes refracted in the narrative as his mother
Helena) imitated this model by building huge structures of worship on the
sites of Christian miracles, starting with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
in Jerusalem. He granted Christian clerics—many of them already deeply
committed to Central Asian models of monasticism—the privilege of tax
exemption that was consistent with the Central Eurasian tradition of
darkhan for clerics, military heroes, and aristocrats. The great innovation
of the empire in the East was to distribute the sacred mission of the ruler
to the entire state. Now it was not the emperor who was pontifex but the
leader of the Christian church and doctrines taking shape under imperial
sponsorship. The church hierarchs, in turn, legitimated the emperor, in
the way that Ašoka was claimed to have been legitimated by the Bud-
dhist saṅgha. Iranian, Indian, Roman, and Greek practices—monarchical
presentation, architecture, monasticism and scholasticism, dual court
systems both secular and religious, and militarized aristocracy among
them—produced a new imperial style of continental conquest in the
service of a spiritual mission to convert humanity to the true religion.
The reasons for the explosion of dyarchic confessional regimes across
Eurasia between the fourth and eleventh centuries are complex, but of
interest here is the ability of these states to significantly change their
ecology of presence. That the Sassanian (before Islam, a Zoroastrian con-
fessional empire) and Byzantine empires escalated their official pieties in
competition with each other is clear enough, and the model they set was
rapidly adopted by the rising Islamic state. But it is worth considering
a more fundamental logistical imperative: with rising populations, im-
proved transportation, and increased urbanization across the continent,
united domains the size of Rome and Han could have been managed only
with improved state presence and greater state influence over local com-
munities. None had the bureaucratic infrastructure, the literacy rates, or

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the revenue to significantly increase their civil presence, but clerics were
a good substitute (so good that we now call civil functionaries by their
name). In addition to garrison commanders, governors, and magistrates,
Byzantine dominion was upheld by its priests and their cooptation of
traditional religious practices that had helped bind communities together.
The Byzantine administrative model was the inspiration for the sepa-
rate political order and its diverging Latin religious hierarchy at Rome
after the mid-sixth century. It was also visible in the design of the Abbasid
caliphate, which seized power from the Umayyads in 750. At Baghdad,
the khalīfah was the highest religious authority and the head of state in
one, but secular power—sulṭān, which meant what imperium had meant
in earlier Rome—was recognized as distinct in function and, ultimately,
both in office and person; by the time of the emergence of the Seljuk
regime in the late tenth century, sultan would be a term for the secular
ruler legitimated by a caliph whether proximate or distant. Though the
Islamic world of the time had no clerics as a class, its tendency to convert
congregations (millah) into administrative units provided the Abbasids
and their secessionist/successor regimes the same benefits as clerics in
terms of government on the ground. Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam in
all their sectarian richness still brought with them standardized written
languages with pedagogical texts and schooling methods, communica-
tion networks among monastic or congregational centers, and—with the
proselytizing mission—straight paths into the spiritual and cultic life of
local communities, which earlier “empires” had left largely untouched
by design.
Ideologically impelled regimes tending toward dyarchic legitima-
tion/protection roles could be produced from the fundamental effects
of logistical demands on a continent with rising populations and more
elaborate systems of information exchange, but specific institutions could
clearly also be spread by contact. An empire like the Tang in China, not
a confessional regime in the Byzantine sense, was affected over time by
the general influences producing dyarchic empires across the continent.
Tang was in close contact with Tibet—an empire with a confessionalist
and dyarchic orientation from the time of King Songtsen Gyompo (died
not later than 649)—and knew also the Abbasid caliphate, which led an
alliance that defeated Tang at the Talas River in 751. Like its predecessor
Sui (581–618), Tang adopted the Chinese institution of emperorship but
modified it to satisfy expectations of the Tang imperial lineage for influ-
ence, producing a mid-and late-Tang dyarchic relationship between throne
and military aristocracy. This was interwoven with a political struggle in
early Tang that largely revolved around the question of whether a strong

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emperorship based primarily on Chinese imperial tradition or a signifi-
cant element of Central Asian corporate rule based on the interventions
of the aristocracy would prevail. Temporary resolutions in favor of the
Chinese emperorship were punctuated by dissent from elites among the
aristocracy, the military, and, occasionally, landowners.
Moreover, Tang had its own ideological resources legitimating its
rulers. From the earliest Tang period, the emperor had been a patron
of mahāyāna Buddhist clergy, who legitimated him as an Ašoka-style
conqueror (čakvravartin) bringing enlightenment to humanity.17 In the
mid-eighth century, not long after the Tang loss to the Abbasids, the court
was challenged by Turkic and Sogdian elites at court and in the army;
when the rebels were defeated, the process of ideological realignment
began, culminating in dissolution of the Buddhist monasteries in the
mid-ninth century. The result was not a robustly centralized rulership on
the early Han model but a compromised rulership and effective control
by regional elites. The court became a sponsor of archly self-conscious
Confucianism (at the time, daoxue 道學) and began to style itself as the
champion of Confucian rectitude in eastern Eurasia; its system of written
examinations for selection of officials cemented the ideological mission
to the bureaucracy and disseminated it to local communities, a parallel
to the function of ideology and a clerical class on the western side of the
continent.
In the Byzantine model particularly, the imaginal metamorphosis
from the conquests of old Rome for wealth and territory to the new
universal, divine mission to bring humanity under the rule of God was
critical. What Rome could not establish in its own time it gained through
the Byzantine and, later Frankish, incarnations of “Rome”—the empire
existed not only for conquest but for the education and, ultimately, the
salvation of humanity. It was not armies alone but written languages,
churches, temples or mosques, schools, liturgies, vestments, histories,
and doctrines that nurtured conquest. These devices not only permitted
a less superficial—if not particularly deep—penetration of local life and
a modest assault on local self-sufficiency but also created an additional
facility for imperial manipulation of local elites. Aristocrats champion-
ing Mithraism in Anatolia or Bön in Tibet or Wodenism in Germany or
Zoroastrianism in Iran could be marginalized and induced to submit to
the imperially sponsored doctrine. Their wealth could be partly diverted
into religious institutions as a show of their good faith. This model of
universal, ideologically partnered empire—not merely emperorship—was
compelling enough that competing regimes adopted it of necessity. The
remaining Umayyads in Spain and North Africa needed a caliphate of

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their own to resist the universal authority of the Abbasids in Baghdad.
The Khazars legitimated themselves with Judaism, the Bulgars after a
struggle became warriors on behalf of Orthodox Christianity, and the
Göktürk Empire attempted to raise its traditional shamanism to the level
of an imperially coded legitimating ideology. And though the late-period
Tang court had turned away from Buddhism to Confucianism, the courts
of Korea, Tibet, Vietnam, and Japan continued to use Buddhist hierarchs
to endorse their rulerships.
Though the advantages of these new tools to these empires seem
obvious, military conquest and occupation remained their fundamen-
tal business. Eastern Rome, Sassanian Iran, and the Bulgar khaghanate
struggled continually for territories at their mutual interfaces, while
Abbasid, Göktürk, Tibet, and Tang traded hard-won expanses of Central
Asia. And at the heart of the enterprises of conquest and occupation still
stood the elites who constituted the empires and decided their fates. Mili-
tarized aristocracies were an ancient phenomenon all over Eurasia, but the
rise of massive infantries in Rome and Han times had partly attenuated
the aristocratic grip on military action. With the introduction of larger
horses, better steel, and chain mail—all of which originated in Central
Asia and spread outward to the better-populated temperate peripheries
of Europe and East Asia—the aristocracy slightly enlarged its military
participation. But as always, the investment of aristocrats, landowners,
and large merchants in imperial militarism was premised on their abil-
ity to profitably supply the resources and claim a portion of the reward.
The huge scale of conquest attracted large numbers of mercenaries,
often from geographically marginal territories. Normans, Varangians,
and Turks were most prominent among the populations drawn into the
struggles, and the importance of religious conversion in ratifying their
roles in the conquest states intensified the association of divine mission
with profitable military employment. By the twelfth century, the effects
of the cultural battles fundamental to the internal centralization and
external expansion of the confessional empires was evident. Religious
agents were ubiquitous in the cities and countryside. Familiarity with
liturgical languages in addition to local vernaculars was high in the re-
ligious networks, and very basic literacy was rising. Communities were
often understood as religious congregations, and their hierarchies were
either endorsed or partly controlled by provincial religious authorities.
Travel and transportation systems mapped well over both religious and
market centers. Late in the period, “crusades” tamed areas where popular
religion or recalcitrant aristocrats challenged the extension of confes-
sional authority.

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When the confessional empires faded or broke apart in internecine
struggle, their presences were often perceived as lingering in new codes
of cultural affiliation. Now, war could be conducted in the name of faith,
instead of exclusively in the name of the emperor, his dynasty, or his no-
tional earthly domain. And like the mimetics of imperiality that followed
the demise of Rome and Han, the fuel of the illusion was the interests of
the landed gentry, new or old aristocracies, political elites, and merchants.
In some places—most vividly in Song (970–1279) China—military expan-
sion was accompanied by the emergence of a robust centrally controlled
bureaucracy, strong enough to modestly contain the traditional role of
the aristocracy and landowners in local administration yet as dependent
on a civilizational justification for domestic expropriation and frontier
wars as its contemporary regimes in Eurasia. For these rising orders, the
constructed legacies of Rome, Han, and the Umayyad caliphate were the
sources of neoclassical institutions of law, scholasticism, and the arts.
But these institutional legacies were now bonded with the much later
cargo of language, religion, and civic virtues supplied by the centuries
of dyarchic mutual legitimation between hierarchical religion (or, in the
case of Song China, moral philosophy) and military force.
6 Monarchism and Heritage

Though there is much for which historians do not forgive the Mongols,
the destruction of or fatal challenges to the confessional empires is the
transgression most relevant to the present discussion. The Mongols were
not in any way secularists, but most of the time they directed their in-
terpretations of divinely derived legitimacy—the idea that Blue Heaven,
or Tengri, consistently supported the Chinggisid lineage against its en-
emies, whether foreign or domestic—to the cultic elites associated with
Chinggis-related sacrifices and in indirect forms to cooperative elites in
subject territories. From Chinggis’s time on, the Mongol rulers tended to
deflect appeals from representatives of institutionalized religions hoping
to gain the sponsorship of the Mongol rulers. When politically expedient,
they may have adopted an indulgent stance toward regionally influential
religious organizations, or they assumed the pose (in individual cases, it
might have been more than that) of patron. But confessionalist dyarchism
was dying as the Mongols rose, and where it lingered, it was killed off by
individual Mongol regimes.18
This was demonstrated nowhere, perhaps, as well as in battles over
Syria and Palestine. Though the Mongols of the Kipchak Horde were
nominally Sunni Muslims and the Il-khans in Baghdad were by the late
thirteenth century inclining, if without passion, toward Islam of one

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sect or another, their enmity toward each other split the Muslim world
several different ways. The Il-khans bore the stain of having destroyed
the Abbasid caliph as well as his caliphate. When, even after their defeat
at ‘Ayn Jalût in 1260, they continued for half a century their attempts to
seize parts of Mamluk Syria, Muslim scholars—most famously Taqî ad-
Dîn Aḥmad ibn Taymiyyah—declared that war against the Muslim regime
in Baghdad was justified and in fact obligatory (Elverskog 2011, 143–44).
The mere fact that the Il-khan rulers were Mongols was not sufficient to
earn ibn Taymiyyah’s condemnation; the Il-khans were indicted while the
Mongols of the Golden Horde were not referred to in the fatawa. It was
the religious pluralism of the Il-khans that ibn Taymiyyah rejected, their
tendency to place their rulership above religious sanction and to tolerate
Nestorian Christians, Jews, and all sects of Islam (except the Ismailis),
while keeping their Mongol occupying force subject to the laws attributed
to Chinggis. The Il-khans, like their close allies the Mongol Yuan rulers
of China, were monarchists—not the dyarchists who had dominated
medieval Eurasia. Their empires had no pretensions to do much more
than enforce a regime of extraction. Those willing to surrender tribute and
make no trouble for the occupiers were generally left in peace—including
the peace to pursue the religion of their choice.
With the exception of the Kipchak Horde and a few minor regimes, the
Mongol empires were gone by 1400, and the process of their repudiation
by their successors had begun. But some Mongol conquest institutions
persisted. This could take the form, as among the Timurids, of accord-
ing preeminence to the Chinggisid lineage or association with it; or of
retention and sponsorship of the mathematical, astronomical, and car-
tographic academies of the Mongol period, as in Iran, China, and, later,
Uzbekistan and India; or of retention of the Mongol reconfiguration of
political geography, as in China and Iran (and Russia, if the privileging of
the Nevskii family is regarded as a feature of Mongol rule); or of retention
of Mongol military terminology and practice, as in China, Iran, and Russia.
But perhaps the most important legacy of the Mongol period was that
the largest continental empires of the early modern period—Romanov
Russia, Qing, Ottoman, and Mughal—continued to work on the Mongol
principle of tiny governments and massive outsourcing of civil functions
to aristocrats, large landowners, and, occasionally, very wealthy merchants
(Skrynnikov 1986; Lincoln 2007; Dai 2009). In the case of the Ottomans,
this was not a direct inheritance from the Mongols but more likely a par-
allel response to the exigencies of small conquering populations ruling
over dense agricultural economies. One result was the tenuous position
of the rulers in relation to their own lineage, to bureaucratic factions,

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and to military, landowning, and commercial elites. The monarchical
rulerships of the early modern period were constantly challenged and
constantly focused on centralizing administration, containing the privi-
lege of compromising forces in the aristocracy or the clergy, and finding
increasingly grand justifications for magnification of the ruler’s power.
In such an environment, for empires such as the Qing and Ottoman—
and Romanov Russia in its own way—the need to incarnate classical or
morally universal civilizations was stronger than ever (Hingley 1996;
Tezscan 2011). These rulerships drew their mandates not from religious
hierarchs in their own time but from the ascribed scope and character
of their predecessor regimes, and over the centuries, they provided the
greatest elaborations to the myth of civilizational dependence on em-
pire. Among other overland empires, similar pressures—increased by
rivalry—produced similar adherence to civilizational vectors of empire,
while European imperialism in the domains of the old empires produced
new myths of civilizational succession. As a result, apologists for the
European and, later, American empires produced both the “civilizing
mission” rhetoric that is well known and the curatorial ethos underlying
modern anthropology and connoisseurship.
The early modern empires had tools that had never been available
to the classical or confessional empires. The scholastic traditions of the
confessional age became the foundation of imperial control over academic
rhetoric and historical narrative. Historiographies retained their strong
religious inflection, implying divine missions for conquerors and conquest
empires, a style that required self-sanctification even in empires, such as
the Qing, with no overtly theological orientation, or in neoconfessionalist
emperorships (where the monarch claimed unilateral leadership of the
rite and universal dominion over subjects outside the traditional confes-
sional community), such as the Ottoman, Timurid, or Russian empires.19
More important, printing and a concomitant rise in functional literacy
disseminated imperial historical narrative in vernacular languages over a
far vaster portion of the population than had been possible before. Con-
sequently, all the empires consciously promoted printing (though in the
Islamic world, there was some resistance to using it for religious texts),20
and the pace of development was loosely correlated with the imperial de-
mand for historical justification regarding their righteous struggles against
rival empires. The growing size of infantries and development of military
education provided another venue for inculcation of distinct cultural ori-
entations and the importance of the imperial mission in protecting and
advancing their particular civilizations. And it was not irrelevant that in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, diplomatic contacts, economic

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rivalries, and wars for expansion heightened the perceptions of identity
and distinction among religious and linguistic groups, warping them
around the military infrastructures and imperial rituals of the day. The
early modern empires could employ representation technologies that
allowed them to effect the most profound alterations in their ecologies
of presence and the most vivid amalgamations of empire and civilization
for both domestic and international audiences.
The continental empires of Russia, Ottoman, and Qing each put a high
priority on the pluralistic representation of the monarchy, a style I have
described elsewhere as “simultaneous” and distinguished from syncretic
or cosmopolitan projects of rule (Cherniavsky 1969; Burke 1992; Kafadar
1995; Crossley 1999; Garthwaite 2006; Newman 2008; Kołodziejczyk 2012).
As distinct cultural zones were absorbed in conquest, the local elites were
bonded to the rulership through codification and incorporation of their
histories—their orthographies would be prominently displayed, their
emblems of rule would become part of imperial ritual, their religions
would be invoked as divine resources of the emperors and their conquests,
and their histories would be narrated under the sponsorship of the court.
Effectiveness in binding the elites to the imperial lineage depended on
sustaining discrete and recognizable personae within the rulership, not
in blurring or creatively mixing elements familiar to one or another seg-
ment of the population. In ritual, imperial writ, and architecture, the
emperors became incarnations of the ancient rulers of civilizations to
which the identities of elites in the present could be cemented. The height
of these simultaneous styles in the eighteenth century coincided with
the climax of the struggles of these rulerships to neutralize the politi-
cal standing of these same elites, apace with the glorification of their
ascribed heritages.
The contemporary importance of symbolic solidarity with elites whose
power the rulers intended to erode was illegible to—and useless to—later
nationalists who saw the empires as having an entirely different mean-
ing. From the early twentieth century, historians looked back to find that
the Qing were considered “Confucian,” and their Manchu, Mongolian,
and various Buddhist personae were dismissed. The Romanovs became
“Russian,” their German, Cossack, Byzantine, and various Central Asian
personae forgotten. The Ottomans became “Turks,” overshadowing their
claim to the Roman–Byzantine emperorship and universalist rule over
Christians in Greece and the Balkans. For the nationalist, successor re-
publics, the myth that the great empires had bequeathed to them defining
(and monolithic) civilizational endorsement was an essential tool in their
own internal and external representations.

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Over the past two thousand years and a little more, ecologies of state
presence have changed as radically as the natural environment. In the
classical period, “empires” had minimal or no civil presence in most of
the space they claimed outside their capitals. In the confessional era, they
found a way to connect to local communities through management of
a vast religious and small civil network but remained superficial as civil
presences. In the early modern era, they acquired access to individual in-
doctrination through the beginnings of popular education, mass military
conscription, and the printing of gazetteers and newspapers. At that point,
the argument for civilizing empire and the media through which the argu-
ment was promulgated were identical phenomena. The intensification of
the imaginal bond between civilization and empire in the early modern
and modern periods was connected to—and reinforced by—additional
factors. I have suggested here that the true coherence of the trade and
cultural exchange networks on which the emblems of empire had always
been suspended was generated by local elites and their perceptions of the
degree to which imperial affiliation was beneficial to the stability and
enhancement of their wealth. The strategies of imperial representation
were in all eras based on a need to accommodate regional and local elite
interests, while at the same time struggling to increase central power and
contain interference from aristocrats and local magnates (the imperial
dynamics that impressed Montesquieu and Zhao Yi). Early modern rulers
acquired new struggles against external rivals competing at their borders
for resources and the favor of local elites; claiming legitimation for the
imperial lineage and the extended imperial court by virtue of unique con-
nections to imperial predecessors was a critical advantage (particularly
in an age when inculcating the public in such ideas was newly possible).
Finally, national republics found value in adding their own layer to these
myths of retrospective legitimation, as they sought criteria for political en-
franchisement within and justified expansion without. In the early twen-
tieth century, the narrative that empires had, as Gibbon had described it,
caused disparate local cultures to “insensibly coalesce into one great na-
tion” was irresistible, the probabilities of actual history notwithstanding.
Pamela Kyle Crossley is the Collis Professor of History at Dartmouth

College. She is author of The Wobbling Pivot: China since 1800, an Interpre-
tive History (2010), What Is Global History? (2008), A Translucent Mirror:
History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (1999), The Manchus (1997),
and Orphan Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing
World (1990). She is also coauthor of The Earth and Its Peoples (5th ed.,
2012) and Global Society (3rd ed., 2012).

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6 Notes
For useful reading suggestions over many years, I want to thank Gene
Garthwaite, Yü Ying-shih, Charles Wood, Susan Reynolds, David O.
Morgan, Peter Bang, Christopher Bayly, and Dominic Lieven and, for
comments on this draft, Naomi Standen and Carl Estabrook. The Verge:
Studies in Global Asias referees have also been invaluable, and I am very
grateful for their suggestions. All remaining errors of fact or interpreta-
tion are my own.
1. My characterizations of Gibbon’s ideas are drawn, when not other-
wise indicated, from Gibbon (1782).
2. This is a reference to De l’esprit des lois, in which Montesquieu made
the point by indicating the antiaristocratic missions of the short-lived Qin
and Sui empires in China, whose history he had absorbed from a redac-
tion by Jean-Baptiste du Halde. See Secondat (1748, livre VIII, chapitre
VI, “De la corruption du principe de la monarchie”).
3. For example, see Trevor-Roper (2010) and Krause (2001).
4. Zhao Yi’s most famous historical work is “Notes on the Twenty-Two
Histories” (Zhao 1795)—that is, the imperial histories of twenty-two
dynasties. See also Tu (1943) and Man-cheong (2004, 71–74).
5. Wang’s insistence that the past has no inherent qualities of its own
but that present circumstances appear to reveal features of the past to
modern observers has suggested to some scholars that he is comparable
to early modern European hermeneuticists. See Wright (2000), Teng
(1968), and Black (1989).
6. From Han through Qing, imperially generated documents occa-
sionally referred to the regime as “the Great 大 [Han, Tang, Ming, Qing,
etc.]”; government or the imperial court were indicated by “our court”
(wo chao 我朝 or benchao 本朝) and the emperor as huangdi 皇帝. The
word guo 國—sometimes following the dynastic designation—was used
in documents of the imperial period to mean variously “nation,” “lineage,”
“tribe,” “people,” “state,” or “country.” An early discussion was Levenson
(1952); more recently, see Gang (2006).
7. On Victorian elaboration of the Roman imperial heritage, see Hing-
ley (1996).
8. For general discussion of the similarities, see the work of Walter
Scheidel cited throughout this essay as well as the introduction to Nylan
and Vankeerberghen (2015).
9. The imperial history (Hou Han shu [Tables of officials of the hundred
ranks] 百官公卿表上, part 1, chapter 39), referring to the year 5 bce,
comments 吏員自佐史至丞相十二萬二百八十五人.
10. Other studies of Chinese local administration for Qin and Han

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offer similar estimates but often use different methods of deriving them.
See particularly Yen (1961; 1963) and Chang (2006).
11. For the problems of defining literacy in Han society, as well as
determining the degrees of literacy (if any) needed for various kinds of
government service, see Nylan (2000) and Giele (2006). I am indebted
to my reviewer for the latter suggestion.
12. With respect to the Roman Empire, there is a very well-developed
body of scholarship and interpretation based on this theme. See Barrett
(1997, 51–66) and Mattingley (2013).
13. While we have detailed information on the payment of officials for
many eras, guessing the general total at any point in time is a sport, most
often conducted in verbal presentation and debate. Estimates normally
range from fifteen thousand to forty thousand full-time centrally ap-
pointed and paid civil officials for the Qing, with the most likely number
being around thirty thousand.
14. See also the discussion supporting the comment in Terranato (2008,
239) that “in short, when we look at the culture of the Roman Empire
beyond the common data-sets and assumptions, it is hard to describe
the process as one of straightforward diffusion of the same universal
structure from a centre.”
15. This process has been made partly visible by the innovative research
of Chang (2007, 59–68), in which the magnified role of aristocrats and
gentry in the armies and in the new colonial administration in Hexi is
illuminated.
16. See also Bang (2012, 60–75) on the tendency of universalizing rul-
ers (in the Seleucid case) to seek legitimation through submitted elites,
producing a variegated imperial presentation in the Greek-speaking world
owing a certain amount to acknowledgment of the traditions of Iran and
of northern India.
17. In his own time, Ašoka expressed himself in terms of solidarity
with the Buddhist community, rather than as their instrument, or as a
monarch devoted—in his political person—to any individual religion.
See Thapar (1966, 70–75). For uses of the čakvravartin ideal in Mongol
and Manchu political orders, see Crossley (1999).
18. Modern historians often credit Gibbon with the description of the
religious policies of the Mongols as “tolerant,” evidently on the strength of
this passage: “The Catholic inquisitors of Europe, who defended nonsense
by cruelty, might have been confounded by the example of a Barbarian,
who anticipated the lessons of philosophy, and established by his laws a
system of pure theism and perfect toleration” (LXIV, para. 3). See also Kha-
zanov (1993), Deweese (1994, 90–102), Atwood (2004), and Jackson (2005).

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19. For an examination of a similarly described process in additional
Muslim empires of the period, see Dale (2011, 77–106).
20. On printing in the Islamic world, see Roper (1999), Boogert (2005),
Gencer (2010, 178), and Redman (2010).
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The Imaginal Bond of “Empire” and “Civilization” in Eurasian History

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