Unnamed Identity Systems at the Margins of Empire

The categories of nationalism, race, and ethnicity enjoy an outsize stature in historians’ discussions of identity. However, they also exclude much of the human experience of identity. Nationalism and race in particular are concepts with highly limited cultural and chronological range, rooted in European empire-building projects. Thus, even if we adopt a broadly applicable understanding of the third category, ethnicity, we limit our discussion of identity groups in many non-modern and non-Western contexts to that single notion. Ethnicity becomes a catch-all for systems of social ordering that are neither nationalist nor race-based, thereby flattening out the diversity of such systems.

This paper asks what kinds of phenomena our narrow categorization scheme obscures, and what we can learn from communities on the margins of empire about alternative forms of identity. It first surveys a selection of the many societies that have nurtured identity systems more complex and homogeneous than ethnicity, yet distinct from nationalism and race. These include not only familiar European examples like Christendom and dynastic realms (both crucial pieces of Benedict Anderson’s famous history of nationalism), but less well known phenomena like the Mongol ulus, the Altishahri identity of Chinese Turkestan, “local patriotisms” in South Asia, and the loyalty systems of Timurid Central Asia.

The second part of the paper asks what the three common categories of nationalism, race, and ethnicity have in common, and whether it is appropriate to consider them part of an over-arching category that we might call “identity systems.” If such a schema is useful, is there value in naming additional identity systems? And if the big three categories are destined to persist, are there ways to ease their grip on the analysis of societies to which they are alien?