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Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2012.07.15

Eric H. Cline, Mark W. Graham,Ancient Empires: from Mesopotamiato the Rise of Islam. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2011. Pp. xviii, 368. ISBN 9780521717809. $50.00 (pb).

Peter Fibiger Bang, C. A. Bayly (ed.),Tributary Empires in GlobalHistory. Cambridge Imperial and Post-colonial Studies. Basingstoke;New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. xiii, 294. ISBN9780230308411. $29.95 (pb).

Reviewed by Rolf Strootman, University of Utrecht ([email protected])

Preview of Ancient Empires

[The Table of Contents for Tributary Empires is listed below.]

Premodern tributary empires big, expansionist, tribute-taking polities characterized

by cultural, religious and political diversity have been among the most conspicuous

and succesful states (if "states" they were) in world history. In the past decades,

historians have been reconsidering the nature of imperial rule, and the significance of

empires for global developments. From new perceptions of empires as networks of

social and economic relations and as essentially negotiated enterprises, historians haveconceived new ways of thinking about inter alia the post-Classical Ottoman Empire or

the Spanish Empire in the Americas.1 Some authors have tried to write the global

history of empire.2 Several edited volumes have been produced approaching empires

from a comparative perspective, some of them concerned with the Ancient World.3

But Ancient History, with the exception of some historians of the Roman Empire, is

only slowly catching up with these developments, as many scholars continue to treat

the despotic absolutism of imperial rulers like the Achaemenid Great King or the

Hellenistic basileus as if it were an historical given.

InAncient Empires: From Mesopotamia to the Rise of Islam, Eric Cline and Mark

Graham define "empire" with M. W. Doyle as a system of interaction between twopolitical entities, a dominant center and a subordinate periphery a definition that is

workable although it does not do full justice to the complexity and diversity of

imperial systems, and is perhaps more appropriate to the European overseas empires

of the modern age. Their main question is, how did ancient empires, or their ruling

groups, manage to hold their position of dominance? They then proceed to give a

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(Bayly and De Donno, both discussing perceptions of the Roman Empire in the

context of nineteenth-century British imperialism). The titles of the contributions are

listed at the end of this review.

The ancient world is represented almost exclusively by the Roman Empire. There is

no Assyrian, Persian, Seleukid, Parthian, or Sasanid Empire. But the emphasis on the

historiography of empire (Part I of the book, containing three chapters), theoretical

perspectives (Part II, five chapters), and comparative approaches (Part III, five

chapters) means that for the student of ancient empires there is also a lot to gain from

reading the non-ancient sections. The military land empires of later ages like the ones

created by the Timurid, Mughal or Ottoman dynasties faced essentially similar

geo-political constraints on logistics and communication to, say, the Seleukids or

Sasanians, and upheld basically the same universalistic ideologies presenting empire

as a peaceful, united world meant to integrate the heterogeneous cultures and polities

that had forcefully been brought under the umbrella of imperial hegemony.

The introduction by the editors emphasizes the latter aspect. The authors explain thebook's remarkable cover illustration a photograph from 2005 showing the leaders of

the eastern churches performing funeral rites for Pope John Paul II in Rome by

showing how the imperial symbolism and ritual of the monotheistic Roman world

empire live on in the universalistic aspirations of the Roman Catholic Church. The

ecumenical church also serves to illustrate the paradigm of empire as essentially a

network of power relations. Empire, the editors claim, is a composite, hierarchical

ordered system characterized by the central paradox of, on the one hand, the creation

of (seemingly) strong state capacities and, on the other hand, the existence within the

imperial system of local and regional forms of autonomy that both facilitate the

mechanisms andlimit the reach of imperial control. Working from Michael Mann's

understanding of states as open-ended systems "constituted of multiple overlappingand intersecting sociospatial networks of power",4 the volume "seeks to explore from

a number of complementary perspectives the tension in our understanding of the

extensive empires of the agrarian past between widespread notions of unrivalled

imperial might and frequent weakness in government" (p. 4). Empire is neither a

centralized state nor a federation, as W. G. Runciman defines the subject in his helpful

contribution on "Empire as a topic in comparative sociology".

Imperial strategies to deal with diversity, logistical constraints, and recurring crises

can vary widely and develop through time even in one and the same empire. Ancient

historians can benefit from such insights. For instance for a field as obsessed with the

continuity of previous (Achaemenid and pharaonic) imperial practices and ideologiesas the present-day study of the Hellenistic Near East, where the respective competing

empires of Seleukids and Ptolemies are increasingly studied in isolation, it may be

refreshing to consider that the later Ottoman Empire may have had less in common

with its own premodern antecedents than with contemporaneous Austria-Hungary or

Tsarist Russia, as the result of interaction, competition and adaptation to global


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developments that affected all three of them. The responses to global crisis in the

Ottoman, Habsburg, and Tsarist empires are discussed by Karen Barkey and Rudi

Batzell in their contribution on "Comparisons across empires", showing how the

divergent adaptations to the economic and political emergencies that occurred in

Eurasia in the mid-seventeenth century prompted in these empires processes of

transformation that would eventually result in the modernization policies of the

nineteenth century.

One of the most successful pieces was contributed by one of the editors, Peter Fibiger

Bang. In "Lords of all the World: The state, heterogeneous power and hegemony in

the Roman and Mughal empires", the author compares universalistic ideology in the

Roman and Mughal Empires, showing how, besides being traditional and competition-

driven, the claim to universal empire served the practical purposes of connecting the

heterogeneous cultures, religions and polities that make up an empire. In line with the

main problem formulated in the introduction, it is argued that because premodern

agrarian empires claimed unity but were never in a position to really homogenize their

realms, they accentuated the paradox, emphasizing universality to make sense ofdiversity. While the only advanced organization at the disposal of ancient empires was

the army, government was usually "left in the hands of people and groups

commanding great influence in local societies" (p. 185). The hyperbole of universal

empire provided a framework that enabled imperial powers to negotiate, compromise

and strike alliances with diverse polities and elites (p. 173).

Comparison is also at the heart of the papers by Walter Scheidel and Chris Wickham.

In "Fiscal regimes and the 'First Great Divergence' between eastern and western

Eurasia", Scheidel addresses the question how the political development of China and

the former Roman world diverged after c. 600 CE. After having gone through a

converging development of increasing state centralization and intensifying fiscalregimes, western Eurasia experienced political fragmentation while (northern) China

eventually continued on a route of unity and relative stability, whereby the state

survived even if power came into the hands of different dynasties, usually conquest

elites from the nomad fringes of the empire. Drawing on the work of Chris Wickham,

Scheidel argues that in the west post-Ancient successor states failed to continue to

pacify local elites and thus were faced with decreasing revenues while in eastern

Eurasia after the collapse of the Han Empire, new dynasties restored an intensive

fiscal regime and were able to maintain a strong standing army that was directly

answerable to the ruler -- the crucial difference being that in the west the invading

conquest elites that became the new administrators and military forces were given

land allotments or guaranteed stipends from land worked by others, while in the east

the foreign invaders who came to constitute the main military power continued to

receive government salaries derived from generalized taxation (p. 200). One question

remains however: can we really speak of the preservation of one and the same state in

China, or is what we see there the establishment of a sequence of successive empires

in more or less the same geographical region (but often with different centers of


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gravity), sometimes separated by an interval of political fragmentation precisely as

happened in the Middle East from the establishment of the Neo-Assyrian Empire until

the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918? The fact that in the Roman Empire the

state existed independently from the dynasty may be a singular phenomenon in world

history, caused by the empire's background as a city state and a republic.

The paper by Chris Wickham sets up a comparison between the Late Rome Empire

and the early Arab Caliphates of the Umayyads and Abbasids. Wickham argues that

one basic difference between the Roman and the Umayyad empires was the fact that

in the latter participation in centralized "state" power was disconnected from

landownership: in the early Islamic world, "landowning did not bring rights to wider

political power" (p. 209). Under the subsequent Abbasid dynasty, regional landowning

elites and rulers gained more independence from the central power of the Caliph,

precisely because they were cut off from political power. "The Romans were more

successful here, because they gave more power to landowning elites, integrating

them more organically into the structures of imperial government, thus making

provincial breakaway more risky and messy" (p. 212).

There is more, of course, mostly concerning non-Ancient empires. Volumes like this

can be help to integrate the discipline Ancient History better in the historical social

sciences in general. Although many contributors do their best to achieve a relevance

that transcends the specific properties of their respective historical expertise, the book

would have benefitted from a stronger focus on a specific subject such as city-empire

relations, the court, the military apparatus, universalistic ideology, or taxation.5 Still,

there is enough to think about for Ancient Historians; for them I recommend

especially the papers by Runciman, Fibiger Bang, Scheidel, Wickham, Blake, and

Barkey and Batzell.

Table of Contents

1. P. Fibiger Bang and C. A. Bayly, Towards a global and comparative history.

2. C. A. Bayly, Religion, liberalism and empires: British historians and their Indian

critics in the nineteenth century.

3. F. De Donno, Orientalism and classicism: The British-Roman empire of Lord Bryce

and his Italian critics.

4. B. Tezcan, The new order and the fate of the old: The historiographical construction

of an Ottoman Ancien Regime in the nineteenth century.

5. W. G. Runciman, Empire as a topic in comparative sociology.6. M. Tymowski, Early imperial formations in Africa and the segmentation of power.

7. A. Wink, Post-nomadic empires: From the Mongols to the Mughals.

8. D. Ludden, The process of empire: Frontiers and borderlands.

9. G. Salmeri, The emblematic province: Sicily from the Roman Empire to the

Kingdom of the Two Sicilies

10. P. F. Fibiger Bang, Lords of all the World: The state, heterogeneous power and


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hegemony in the Roman and Mughal empires.

11. W. Scheidel, Fiscal regimes and the "First Great Divergence" between eastern and

western Eurasia.

12. C. Wickham, Tributary empires: Late Rome and the Arab Caliphate.

13. S. P. Blake, Returning the household to the patrimonial-bureaucratic empire:

Gender, succession, and ritual in the Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman empires.

14. K. Barkey and R. Batzell, Comparisons across empires: The critical social

structures of the Ottoman, Russian and Habsburgs during the seventeenth century.

Notes:

1. See i.a. K. Barkey,Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative

Perspective (Cambridge 2008); S. Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World

Around It(London and New York 2004); D. J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North

America (New Haven 1992); H. Kamen,Empire: How Spain Became a World Power,

1492-1763 (New York 2003).2. J. Darwin,After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000

(London 2007); H. Mnkler,Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient

Rome to the United States (Berlin 2008); J. Burbank and F. Cooper,Empires in World

History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton and Oxford 2010).

3. See e.g. S. E. Alcock et al. eds.,Empires: Perspectives From Archaeology and

History (Cambridge 2001); W. Scheidel ed.,Rome and China: Comparative

Perspectives on Ancient World Empires (Oxford 2009); I. Morris and W. Scheidel

eds., The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium

(Oxford 2009).

4. M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power. Volume 1: A History of Power From the

Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge 1986) 1.5. For (imperial) courts in a comparative perspective see now T. Artan, J. Duindam,

M. Kunt eds.,Royal Courts in Dynastic States and Empires: A Global Perspective

(Leiden and Boston 2011).

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