Empires of Mobilities

Mobile pastoral lifeways have been regarded as constituting a critical weakness of nomadic empires, hindering governance and hampering economic growth. This paper, and the associated panel, argues the opposite – that the mobilities entwined in the social and economic practices of nomadic groups provided resilient elasticity to the institutions and structures of empires. Just as the so-called ‘mobilities turn’ in sociology has drawn our attention to the importance of the flows of goods, people, and information in solidifying social and economic systems, so may we further emphasize how the mobilities of whole communities, entire surpluses, and administrative infrastructure promote social, economic, and political coalescence in nomadic empires. Mass mobility of subsistence sources and raw materials in a primarily pastoral economy engender broader networks of staple and wealth distribution, as well as intricate matrices of inter-community socioeconomic interdependence. Periodic instances of propinquity in the circuits of nomadic communities also provide essential moments of social reification, as well as economic interaction, between numerous groups and across large territories. If we accept the notion of space as constructed through relations, then empires may be envisioned less as contiguous integrated territories and more as a complex network of integration for the extraction of resources and the assertion of authority. This propels our discussion of empires into realms of social rather than spatial centrality and cohesion, one which is more apt for investigations of nomadic regimes. Through a brief survey of the world’s first known nomadic empire – the Xiongnu of Inner Asia – this paper outlines the notion of nomadic regimes as empires of mobilities – i.e. entailing not merely ‘mobile’ spatial constructs but, more precisely, multiple mobilities that comprise institutions of governance, performance, surplus, distribution, and exchange in continual motion rather than permanently fixed to singular territorial nodes.