From Frontier Principality to Empire: The Qing and Ottoman Formations in Early Modern History

According to a long persistent viewpoint in the literature on world history, some empires (i.e. northern European commercial empires) were winners in their path to modernity. Some, however, were perceived as victims of the so-called “belated modernity”. This paper examines two empires of the early modern period that have been traditionally placed in the latter category, the Qing and Ottoman Empires. These empires present surprising analogies in their early histories of state-formation as well as in their general structure. As was the case with empires of Inner Asian origin, they emerged from a frontier zone contiguous to a major political entity. Both expanded to become huge agrarian empires that needed to sustain a growing population. Above all, both the Ottomans and Manchus were foreign conquerors who ruled a multiethnic empire. They held similar aspirations and faced similar challenges in ruling their population. An Ottoman-Qing comparison will help to generate new concepts and paradigms that do not depend on the European experience but are specific to the history of conquest dynasties that originated from a frontier environment. Far from being the “carcasses” of the modern world, these empires developed their own strategies to rule the vast mass of land that they gradually conquered. This paper focuses on the two important issues that imperial states had to deal with one way or another: The questions of regional administration and ethnicity. I show that the Qing and Ottoman empires were more incorporative of social elements and more willing to negotiate with them than their counterparts in Europe. I argue that this was due to the perseverance of a frontier mentality at least until the late eighteenth century, and the availability to the rulers of these empires of a variety of different political traditions and vocabulary that enabled them more flexibility.