Unit 3 Land Based Empires

Russian Empire

Russian Empire

At the same time that western Europeans were building their empires in the Americas, the Russian Empire, which subsequently became the worlds largest state, was taking shape. That state soon conquered a number of neighboring Russian-speaking cities and incorporated them into its expanding territory

Moscow

By 1450, a small Russian state centered on the city of Moscow was emerging from two centuries of Mongol rule. Located on the remote, cold, and heavily forested eastern fringe of Christiendom, it was perhaps an unlikely candidate for constructing one of the greatest empires in the modern era

Characteristics of early Russian Peoples

Grasslands south and east of the Russian heartland, where pastoral peoples, like the Mongols before them, frequently raided their agriculture Russian neighbors and sold many to slavery. To the east, across the vast expanse of Siberia, Russian motives were quite different, for the scattered peoples of its endless forests and tundra posed no threat to Russia. Numbering only some 220,000 in the 17th century and speaking more than 100 languages, they were hunting, gathering, and herding.

How did Russia build its Empire

Over the next three centuries, Russia extended domination over the vast tundra, forests, and grasslands of the northern Asia that lay south and east of Moscow, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Russians also expanded westward, bringing numerous Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Baltic Peoples to the Russian Empire. Empire building was an extended process involving the Russian state and its officials as well as avariety of private interests - merchants, hunters, peasents, churchmen, exiles, criminals, and adventures

How did Russians incorporate people into their state

Everywhere Russian authorities demanded an oath of allegience by which native peoples swore “eternal submission to the grand tsar”, the monarch of the Russian Empire

Yasak

They also demanded yasak or “tribute”, paid in cash or in kind

Siberia

In Siberia, this meant enormous quantities of furs, especially the exteremly valuable sable, which Siberian peoples were compelled to produce

Epidemics

As in the Americas, devestating epidemics accompanied conquest, particularly in the more remote regions of Siberia, where local people had little immunity to smallpox or measles

Conversion

Also accompanied by the conquest was an intermittent pressure to convert to Christianity. Tax breaks, exemptions from paying tribute, and the promise of land or cash provided incentives for conversion while the destruction of many mosques and forced resettlement of Muslims added pressures. Yet the Russian state did not pursue conversion with the single-minded intensity that Spanish authorities exercised in Latin America particularly if missionary activity threatened political and social stability

Catherine the Great & Toleration

The empress Catherine the Great, for example, established reigious tolerance for Muslims in the late 18th century, and created a state angency to oversee Muslim affairs.

Russian migrations

The most profounding transforming feature of the Russian Empire was the influx of Russian settlers, whose numbers by the end of the 18th century had overwhelmed native peoples, giving their lands a distincitive Russian character

Russian integration of Siberian people

By 1720, 700,000 Russians lived in Siberia, thus reducing the native Siberians to 30% of the total population, a propertion that droped to 14% in the 19th century

Slavic Languages

Among the growing number of non-Russians in the empire, Slavic-speaking Ukrainians and Belorussians predominated, while the vast territorites of Siberia and the steppes housed numerous seperate peoples, but with quite small populations

Russian rivals

Unlike its expansion to the east Russian’s westward movement occured in the context of military rivalries with the major powers of the region-Ottoman Empire, Poland, Sweden, Lithuania, Prussia, and Austria

Russia Relative to Europe

This contact with Europe also fostered on awarness of Russia’s backwardness relative to Europe

Peter the Great

Prompted an extensive program of westernization particulary under the leadership of Peter the Great (r. 1689-1725). His efforts included vast administrative changes, the enlargment and modernization of Russian military forces, a new educational system for sons of nobelmen, and dozens of manufacturing enterprises.

Westernization

Russian nobles were instructed to dress in European style and to shave their sacred and much-revered beards. One of Peter’s successors Catherine the Great (r. 1762-1796) followed up with further efforts to Europeanize Russian culture and intellectual life, to Europeanize Russian cultural and intellectual life, viewing herself as part of the European Enlightenment

Changed under Peter the Great

Thus Russians were the first of many peoples that measure themselves against the West and to Mount major “catch up” efforts

“Window on the West”/St.Petersburg

The newly created capital city of St. Petersburg was to be Russian’s “Window on the West” and was a port.

Asian Russia

But this European-oriented and Christian state had also become an Asian power, bumping up against China, India, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire. It was on the front lines of the encounter between Christiendom and the world of Islam

Identity Issues in Russia

This straddling of Asia and Europe was the source of a long-standing identity problem that has troubled educated Russians for 300 years

Comparison of Russian Empires to Western European Empire building

The Russians had created an empire, similar to those of Western Europe in terms of conquest, settlement, exploitation, religipus conversion, and feelings of superiority. Nonetheless, the Russians had accquired their empires under different circumstances than did the Western Europeans, The Russians, on the other hand, absorbed adjacent territories, and they did so at the same time modern Russia was taking shape

End of Ming Exploration

In the 15th century, China declined an opportunity to construct a maritime empire in the Indian Ocean, as Zheng He’s massive fleet was withdrawn after 1433 and left to wither away

Qing Dynasty

(1644-1912) or Manchu Dynasty. Strangly enough, the Qing Dynasty was itslef of foreign and nomadic origin, hailing from Manchuria, north of the Great Wall

Manchuria

The Qing dynasty was itslef of foreign and nomadic origin, hailing from Manchuria, north of the Great Wall

Manchurian attitudes towards integration with Chinese

The violent Manshu takeover of China, part of the General Crisis of the 17th century, was facilitated by a widespread famine and peasant rebellions associated with the Little Ice Age. However having conquered China, the Qing rulers sought to maintain their ethnic distinctiveness by forbidding intermarriage between themselves and the Chinese. Nonetheless, their ruling elites also mastered the Chinese language and Confucian teachings and used Chinese bureaucratic techniques to govern the empire

Interaction & conquest of nomadic peoples

For many centuries, the Chinese had interacted with the nomadic peoples who inhabited the dry and lightly populated regions now known as Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet. Trade, tribute, and warefare ensured that these ecologically and culturally different worlds were well known to the Chinese.

Treaty of Nerchinsk

The eastward movement of the Russian Empire likewise appeared potentially threatening, but after increasing tensions and a number of skirmishes and battles, this danger was resolved diplomatically rather than military, in the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689), which marked the boundary between Russia and China

“unification”

The Chinese, however, have seldom thought of themselves as an imperial power. Rather, they spoke of the “unification of peoples of central Eurasia within a Chinese state”

Qing Expansion

Nonetheless, historians have seen many similarities between Qing expansion and other cases of early modern empire building, while noting some clear differences as well. Clearly the Qing dynasty takeover of central Euasia was a conquest

Qing Advantages

Making use of China’s more powerful military technology and greater resources. Furthermore, the area was ruled seperatly from the rest if China through a new office called the Court of Colonial Affairs

Qing Limitations

Like other colonial powers, the Qing made active use of local notables - Mongol aristrocrats, Muslim officials, Buddhist leaders - as they attempted to govern in region as inexpensivley as possible. Sometimes these native officials abused their authority, demanding extra taxes or labor service from local people thus earning their hostility. In places, those officials imitated the Chinese by wearing peocock feathers, decorating their hats with gold buttons, or adopting a Manshu hairstyle that was much resented by many Chinese who were forced to wear it

Limits placed on the Chinese

In parts of Mongolia, Qing authorities sharply restricted the entry of Chinese merchsants and other immigrants in an effort to preserve that area as a source of recruitment for the Chinese military

Impact of Qing on China & Region

It greatly expanded the territory pf China and added a small but important minority of non-Chinese people to the empire’s vast population. The borders of contemporary China are essentially those created during the Qing Dynasty

Changes in Central Asia between 1450-1750

Qing conquests, together with the expansion of the Russian Empire, utterly transformed Central Asia. For cemturies, that region had been the cosmopolitan crossroads of Eurasia, hosting the Silk Road trading network, welcoming all the major world religions, and generating an enduring encounter between the nomads of the steppes and the farmers of settled agricultural regions. Now under Russian or Qing rule, it became the backward and impoverish region known to 19th-20th century observers. Land-based commerce across Eursasia increasingly took a backseat to oceanic trade. Indebted Mongolian nobles lost their lands to Christian merchants, while nomads, no longer able to herd their animals freely, fled to urban areas, where many were reduced to begging. The incorporation of inner Eurasia into the Russian and Qing empires “eliminated permanantly as a major actor on the historical stage the nomadic pastoralists, who had been the strongest alternativw to settled agricultural society since the second millenium”

Mughal Empire

Was a product of Central Asian warriors who were Muslims in religion and Turkic in culture and who claimed descent from Chinngis Khan and Timur. Their conquest in the 16th century provided India with a rare period of relative political unity (1526-1707), as Mughal emperors exercised a fragile control over a diverse and fragmented subcontinent that had long been divided into a bewildering variety of small states, princioplitio, tribes, castes, sects, and etho-linguistic groups

Akbar

(r. 1556-1605) Mughal India’s most famous emperor

Mughal religion vs India’s biggest religion

The ruling dynasty and perhaps 20% of the population was Muslim; most of the rest practiced some form of Hinduism

How did Akbar attempt to ease Hindu/Muslim relations

Conquered the warrior-based and Hindu Rajputs of northwestern India. Married several of their princesses but did not require them to convert to Islam. Incorperated a number of Hindus into the political-military elite of the empire and supported building temples as well as mosques, palaces, and forts

Sati

The practice in which a widow followed her husband to death by throwing herself onto his funeral pyre

Hindu women & changes under Akbar

Akbar acted to soften some Hindu restrictions on women, encouraging the remarriage of widows and discouraging child marriages and sati. A few elite women were also able to exercise political power

Nur Jahan

The twentieth and favorite wife of Akbar’s succesor, Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605-1627). She had political power, she was widely reguarded as the power behind the throne of her alcohol-and opium- addicted husband, giving audiences to visiting dignitaries, consulting with ministers, and even having a coin issued in her name

Policy of Toleration

Akbar imposed a policy of toleration, deliberatly restraining the more militantly Islamic ulma (religious scholars) and removing the special tax on non-Muslims

Jizya

Special tax on non-Muslims

House of Worship

Akbar contructed a special House of Worship where he presided over intellectual discussion with representatives of many religions - Muslim, Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Jewish, Jain, and Zoroatrianism

Hybrid Indian-Turkic culture

Akbar and his immediate succesors downplayed a distinclty Islamic identity for the Mughal Empire in favor of a cosmopolitan and hybrid Indian-Persian-Turkic culture

Negative view of women in Indian Islam

In Srihindi’s view, it was primarily women who had introduced these deiations “Because of their stupidity”. Women shouldn’t pray to stones or idols & shouldn’t participate in holidays

Aurangzeb

(r. 1658-1707) Who reversed Akbar’s policy of toleration and sought to impose Islamic supremacy

Changes under Aurangzeb

While Akbar had discouraged sati, Aurangzeb forbade it outwright. Music and dance were now permanently banned at court, and previously tolerated vices, such as gambling, drinking, prostitution, and narcotics were actively surpressed. Dancing girls were ordered to get married or leave the empire all together. Hindu temples were destroyed and the jizya tax was reinstated

Effects of Aurangzeb reign

Aurangzeb’s religious policies, combined with intolerable demand for taxes to support his many ears of expansion, antagonized Hindus and prompted various movements of opposition to the Mughals

Ottoman Empire

Like the Mughal State, the Ottoman Empire was also the creation of Turkic warrior groups, whose aggresive was sometimes legitimitized in Islamic terms as Jihad

Jihad

Religiously sanctioned warfare against infidels

Growth in the Ottoman Empire

Beginning arounf 1300 from a base area in Northwestern Anatolia, these ottoman turks over the next three centuries swept over much of the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeaster Europe to create the Islamic world’s most significant empire

Ottoman Sultan

Its sultan combined the roles of Turkic warrior prince, a Muslim caliph, and a conquering Emperor, bearing the “strong sword of Islam” and serving as chief defender of the faith

Change in women status under Ottomans

Women went from relative independence and open association with men and political influence in society to being secluded and often veiled; Slave women from the caucacs mountains and the Sudan grew more numerous; official imperial cencuses did not count women; and orthodox Muslims sought to restrict women’s religious gatherings

“Sultanate of Women”

From around 1550-1650, women of the royal courts had such an influence in political matters that critics refered to the “Sultanate of Women”

Ottoman Realm

The Ottoman represented the growing prominence of the turkic people

Ottoman vs Safavid

(1534-1639) Conflict between the Ottoman Empire, espousing the Sunni version of Islam, and the Persian Safavid Empire, holding fast to the Shia form of Islam, expressed a deep division within the Islamic World

1453

The climax of this Turkic assault on the Christian world of the Byzantium occurred in the 1453 conquest of Constantinople when the city fell to Muslim invaders

Balkans

In the empire’s Southeastern European domains, know as the Balkans, the Ottoman encounter with the Christian peoples unfolded quite differently than it had in Anatolia

Conversion in the Balkans

In the Balkans, Muslims ruled over a large Christian population, but the scarcity of Turkish settlers and the willingness of the Ottoman authorities to accomodate the regions Christian churchs led to far fewer conversions. By the early 16th century only 19% of the area’s people were Muslim and 81% Christian

Devshirme

Ottoman practice that forced Christian boys to serve the Ottoman government. Required to learn Turkish, usually converted to Islam

Janissary

An elite infantry unit and standing army

Ottoman encounters with European states

Spawned administration and cooperation as well as fear

Ottoman Empire & France

The French government on occasion found it usful to ally with the Ottoman Empire against a common enemy of Habsburg Austria, while European merchants willingly violated a papel ban on selling firearms to Turks