The Transformation of the World (79 page)

1. a voluntary shift to a sedentary way of life

2. exchange with complementary societies or trading by means of well-developed forms of transport (such as the camel)

3. voluntary or unresisting subordination to sedentary societies, in a relation of growing dependence 4. domination of sedentary societies and development of long-term asymmetrical relations with them

The fourth of these strategies reached its peak of success in the Middle Ages, when peasant societies from Spain to China fell under the control of nomadic horsemen. Similarly, the great dynasties that ruled Asia in the early modern period had a nonfarming, though not necessarily nomadic, origin in Central Asia; the Manchurian Qing rulers of China (1644–1911) were the most notable, but also the last, example of this type of empire building, which in their case took more than a century to complete.
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In various parts of Eurasia, however, nomadic societies remained strong enough to plunder their sedentary neighbors
and to reduce them to tributary dependence; even Russia continued until quite late in the seventeenth century to pay astronomic sums to the Crimean Tatars. Thus, for very long stretches of time, the most diverse frontier processes were part of the historical reality of Eurasia, and the need to ward off threats from nomads was a significant factor in the formation of centralized states along either Russian or Sino-Manchurian lines.

Frontiers of this kind run like a thread through particular histories of power and exchange relations. Since farmers and nomads each had access to resources that the other needed, cooperation was much more characteristic than outright confrontation. Even if a middle ground of cultural hybridity, crossovers, and multiple loyalties failed to materialize in a lot of cases, the frontier nevertheless joined people as often as it divided them. This remained so until the eighteenth century.

It has long been a commonplace of world-historical interpretation that the Mongol conquests of the early thirteenth century opened up an unparalleled space of interaction and communication; some go so far as to speak of a “medieval world system.” Subsequently, it is usually argued, the states and civilizations of Asia withdrew again into themselves—Ming China (1368–1644), sheltering behind its Great Wall, is given as an example—and put an end to Eurasia's medieval “ecumenism.” The latest research suggests, however, that open channels and a multiplicity of cross-frontier relations persisted until the threshold of the nineteenth century, and that for this period too, it makes sense to speak of Eurasia as a continuous entity. A crude dichotomy of Europe versus Asia is only an ideological construct of the early nineteenth century.

Imperial Peripheries

One peculiarity of frontiers in Eurasia is that they were molded by empires. Unlike in America and sub-Saharan Africa, the centralized and hierarchically structured empire was here the dominant polity. Roughly speaking, it took one of two forms: either a steppe empire supported by nomadic horsemen and parasitic on a sedentary world of farmers; or an empire whose principal resources came directly from taxation of its own peasantry.
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Transitional forms were also a possibility. The Ottoman Empire, for example, came into being as a loose military entity, structurally similar to the Mongol Empire, but over time mutated into an empire of the second type. With the general consolidation of this type—also (less happily) known as the “gunpowder empire”—the empires of Eurasia drew closer to one another, until in many places they had contiguous borders. In particular, the growth of the Qing Empire, unstoppable until the 1760s, and then the beginning of the real expansion of the Tsarist Empire meant that inter-imperial “borderlands” (in Herbert Bolton's sense of the term) often took shape out of open frontiers. In the early modern period, therefore, the nomads of Central Asia were already encircled by empires. They themselves (especially Mongols, Kazakhs, and Afghans) were sometimes capable of great
military efforts, but they never built a new empire in the manner of a Genghis Khan or a Timur.

An event of world-historical importance was the final extension of the Chinese Empire toward Central Asia. It was, of all things, the non-Chinese conquering dynasty of the Manchurian Qing that succeeded between 1680 and 1760 in partly subjugating (Inner Mongolia) and partly reducing to dependence (Outer Mongolia) the Mongol tribes, and in integrating the Islamic oasis societies of East Turkestan (today's Xinjiang) into the Chinese imperial system. Thus, at the end of the eighteenth century, the heartlands of the old dynamic of redoubtable herdsmen were divided among the empires. This would remain the situation until the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the founding of the Central Asian states.

The imperial molding of the frontiers means that the frontier theme blends into the related one of empire building. What interests us for the moment is the fate of the nomads in the nineteenth century, and the great importance of the empires allows the question of the frontier to be posed in this framework.

In its expansion after 1680, the Qing Empire encountered a number of peoples—in southern China, on the newly conquered island of Taiwan, and in Mongolia—who, not being ethnically Chinese (“non-Han”), were classified as needing to be ruled over and civilized.
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Once conquered, these peoples were subject to a finely graded system of imperial rule or control. They did not form semiautonomous tributary states, like Korea or Siam, but lived as colonized populations within the empire. From the mid-eighteenth century on, this was also true for the Tibetans, governable only indirectly from the distance of Beijing—geographically almost on a different planet. In the Chinese case, the primacy of politics was maintained; movements of settlers outside state control occurred only toward the inhospitable mountainous heartlands of the interior. In the non-Han periphery, which was regarded primarily as a buffer against the Tsarist Empire in the north, the Ottoman Empire in the west, and the emergent British Empire in India, the central authorities had no interest in a dangerous destabilization of the existing social order. The ideal solution was therefore a kind of indirect rule, although the Sino-Manchurian military still had to be present in sufficient number to ensure loyalty to the empire. Until late in the nineteenth century, the Qing state did all in its power to hinder the flow of Han Chinese settlers to Xinjiang, Mongolia, and especially the well-protected dynastic homeland of Manchuria that might one day serve as a place of refuge for an unlucky imperial house.

Nevertheless, Chinese traders could not be prevented from spreading to all these regions and often reducing the commercially inexperienced Mongols to ruinous levels of debt dependence. The settler movement became demographically significant in the early twentieth century, mostly concentrated in nearby Manchuria. But in the 1930s there were loud complaints about the neglect of the inner periphery, especially the Mongolian provinces, as a source of power for the
nation; millions of Han Chinese eventually expanded into the periphery after 1949, under Communist rule. Thus, it was only in the twentieth century that a Chinese development frontier opened up and led to the predictable loss of land by the original population—without the emergence, however, of American-style reservations. The Muslim inhabitants of Xinjiang were able to preserve an especially high degree of cultural and political autonomy, enjoying the advantages more than the disadvantages of an inter-imperial borderland until the consolidation of Communist power after the middle of the century.
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Despite its growing relative weakness, the Qing Empire maintained its land borders surprisingly well until 1911 (with the exception of southern Manchuria).
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It did not lose nearly as many regions as the Ottoman Empire, nor were the ones it did surrender nearly as important economically or demographically. The gradual retreat of Ottoman power from the Balkans repeatedly made existing borders and frontier guards obsolete, allowing new Balkan states to replace them largely under the direction and with the guarantees of the European Great Powers. Internal resettlement, such as that which took place in the Qing Empire and on a larger scale in the Tsarist Empire, did not happen in areas under Ottoman domination. No traditional models were applicable there, since in the early modern period Ottoman armies had pushed into regions with a stable peasantry, such as the Balkans and Egypt, where no virgin land was available for Turkish settlers to open up. Besides, Anatolian peasants were much less familiar than their Chinese or Russian counterparts with the techniques needed for agricultural development. The ecology set limits as well, since the Ottoman Empire contained scarcely any large areas that could be brought back into cultivation through a fresh input of labor. Yet there were some forms of frontier expansion. As the Ottoman state came under pressure from Southeast European national movements and Tsarist armies, and as it lost control of North Africa between Egypt and Algeria, its attention was directed to the remaining tribal regions in Eastern Anatolia.

In the early nineteenth century, the population there consisted mainly of Kurds and their khans. Even at the height of its power, the Ottoman state had feared the Kurds and contented itself with a loose form of sovereignty over them, and so the shift in policy after 1831 was the result of a new self-image that the Ottoman elite was beginning to develop. Seeing itself as the modern reform-minded administration of an empire that ought to have more and more elements of a nation-state, the government in Istanbul thought it necessary to eliminate semiautonomous domains and to absorb marginal areas such as Kurdistan, situated on the border with Iran, into an increasingly homogeneous polity. In order to achieve this, the government of the early Tanzimat period resorted to military force. A series of campaigns in the 1830s broke up the principal Kurdish khanates, and by 1845 Kurdistan was treated for the first time as a region under direct rule. However, no constructive policy followed the military success. Kurdistan became an occupation zone: devastated and partly depopulated, its remaining
inhabitants bitterly anti-Turkish. This put great strain on the central budget, without stimulating economic growth in a way that increased tax revenue. Members of Kurdish tribes could not be turned into loyal Ottoman citizens by force. While the Balkan boundary contracted ever farther south, the eastern periphery of the empire was becoming more and more expensive to secure militarily; nor could there be any talk of linking Kurdistan to wider markets.
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The expansion did not go hand in hand with settler colonization, except at best through the resettlement of Muslim refugees from the Balkans and the Caucasus, thousands of whom were directed toward Syria and Transjordan.

If there was a fully articulated frontier in nineteenth-century Eurasia, the places to look for it are the South and East of the Tsarist Empire.
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The Russian state came into being as a frontline state, a concentration of forces against the Golden Horde of the Mongols. Scarcely was the “Mongol yoke” shaken off when the economic and cultural superiority of Western Europe made itself painfully felt. Peter the Great finally set out to raise the country from its second-rank position, but it was only under Catherine the Great that it became an imperial power of the first order, capable of routing the mighty khanate of the Crimean Tatars and gaining access to the Black Sea. Russia established military superiority over the Ottoman Empire and would never again lose it, although the Turks fought back on a number of occasions. After 1780 began the conquest of the Caucasus; it proved a long haul and was completed only in 1865, but the climax came in the 1830s in the drive to crush the newly unified Chechens.
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By the end of Catherine's reign, representatives of the Russian state had established relations with a wide range of peoples and states in eastern Eurasia—from Siberian ethnic groups (who had previously had contact only with trappers or explorers) to various Tatar groups and the Kazakh hordes to the emperor of Georgia.
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As for other empires, it had links not only with the Ottomans but also with China (a long-standing border treaty had already been signed in 1689 in Nerchinsk), Iran (which until the war with Russia of 1826–28 had been addicted to expansionism, laying waste to large parts of Georgia in 1795 and carrying off tens of thousands of its inhabitants), and of course with Great Britain (with which it entered a coalition in 1798 against revolutionary France).

Despite these foundations, the real building of the multinational Tsarist Empire and its expansion to the other end of the Asian continent took place in the nineteenth century. The exact time frame for this drive, without parallel in Eurasia, may be said to stretch from the (partly only nominal) incorporation of Georgia in 1801 to the Russian defeat in the war with Japan in 1905.

Although Frederick Jackson Turner himself warned in his later writings against the oversimplistic idea of a single, uninterrupted pioneer front moving ever westward across North America, conditions in the New World were incomparably easier to grasp than those on the multiform frontiers of Russian-influenced Eurasia. The great variety there was a result of the geography and ecology, the social and political forms of many different ethnic groups, the
character of Tsarist policy, and the local decisions of Russian commanders. It is possible to speak of a frontier
policy
at least from the moment in 1655 when the tsar concluded a border treaty with the Kalmyks—not one of subjugation but more or less an agreement between equals.
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So, early on, the Russian state adopted a policy instrument that the United States would from the beginning use in its relations with Indian peoples. Contractual agreements, even when un-equal, presuppose that both sides are able to exercise a minimum of freedom of movement and negotiating skill. They are therefore typical not of fully fledged colonialism but at best of its preliminary stages. Treaties such as the one of 1655 originally served to pacify militarily stronger neighbors across the frontier, but subsequent Tsarist policy developed a wide range of options, from appeasement to genocide.
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Behind them there was never a uniformly conceived policy of imperial expansion and internal colonial rule. Each of the frontiers should therefore be treated separately, as is usually the case in historical research today.
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