“Include and Rule”: The Non-Titular Ethnic Elites in Eurasian Empires, 1500–1850s
“Include and Rule”: The Non-Titular Ethnic Elites in Eurasian Empires, 1500–1850s

Summary/Abstract: Eurasian empires were multireligious, multilingual, and multiethnic. This fact, obvious to researchers of West Asian and South Asian empires, has also attracted much attention from historians of the Russian and Chinese empires since the 1990s, especially after the “imperial turn” in Russian history and the rise of the “New Qing History.” Studies on the multidimensional and hybrid characteristics of individual empires have proliferated. However, comparative studies of Eurasian empires have largely been limited to themes related to modernity and nationalism. There have been attempts to narrate the history of major empires, both Eurasian and Western, featuring the “politics of difference” that empires employed to incorporate and differentiate people, but their focus has been on the historical trajectories of entire empires rather than on the specific roles of different religious and ethnic groups. The recent Brill series “Rulers & Elites,” especially the volume Prince, Pen, and Sword, is a remarkable attempt at a comparative study of premodern states. However, its main focus is kingship, and its analysis of elites is not closely related to the politics of difference. This essay examines one of the features shared by Eurasian empires and the one that also set them apart from the European ones: “the outside factor” or the fact that they were, with a few exceptions, conquered by outsiders with backgrounds originating from Central Eurasian steppes, who in turn relied on other outsiders - an elite drawn from the recently subdued neighboring peoples - to govern their empires.

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