COST A36, Tributary Empires Compared 

Report of the Athens conference, June 19-21 2006

Experience of Empire – Responses from the provinces

The third meeting of COST A36, “Experience of Empire – Responses from the provinces”, held at Athens from the 19th to the 21st of June, was opened by the local organizers (Björn Forsén and Giovanni Salmeri) with a paper discussing three important points with regard to the organization of provincial government (especially in the Roman Empire) and to the responses of local people to the centre. 

At first attention was attracted to the distinction between the systems of administration and command within Empires, brought forward by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire (2000), which may be of some help for a better understanding of the forms of relation between centre and provinces in pre-modern Empires. The conception of Roman provincial administration as something rigid, with precise rules of universal application, was then criticized. Finally, the contribution of provincial societies to the culture of the centre was emphasised.
Continuing on the same line, Greg Woolf in the first inaugural lecture of the meeting, “Writing Roman Histories in and of the provinces”, looked at the relationship between provincial understandings of what had happened to them with wider understanding of Empire. He concentrated on the geographical and historical production dealing with provinces, whose fragments have arrived to us mainly through Strabo’ s Geography. In particular the presentation of Spain by Asclepiades of Myrleia as transmitted by Strabo was taken into consideration, and moving from its analysis it was also shown that ‘localism’ does not always imply a negative answer to Empire.

In the second inaugural lecture, “Provincial elites, central authorities: problems in fiscal and military management in the Byzantine state”, John Haldon tried to identify the structural constraints which determined how a specific state formation evolved, i. e. the means through which their social elites maintained control over resources, whether human or material. Discussing the middle Byzantine state, he underlined that conflicts or tensions over the distribution of resources both within dominant elites, and between them and other elements in society, provide us with at least one dynamic element through which institutional and organisational change occurred, to the advantage of one group or another. In this sense special attention was paid to the taxation system as a way of appropriating resources by the state or those acting on its behalf.

After the introductory one, the second session of the meeting was devoted to Crete and to its provincial character starting from the Roman period. Angelos Chaniotis’ paper, “What difference did Rome make? The Cretans in the Roman Empire”, first of all stressed the unifying effect that the arrival of Rome in the first century BC had on Crete: the institution of the province, even if it meant the settlement of new population groups, meant also the end of the political fragmentation of the island. Moreover, Chaniotis presented Crete in the first three centuries AD as an entirely integrated province in the imperial structure and as a cosmopolitan region, notwithstanding the survival of some old traditions. Maria Georgopoulou’s paper, “Crete between the Byzantine and Venetian Empires”, dealt with the Venetian rule of the island which started after the Fourth Crusade of 1204. Attention was drawn to the fact that the administrative and architectural – especially in the case of the piazza San Marco as it was re-created in Candia –  organization of each Cretan city resembled that of Venice. At any rate, Georgopoulou stressed that Crete became involved in the culture of the Venetian empire while keeping many of its Byzantine and individual traits. The final paper of the session was “Centre-periphery relations: the case of Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Crete” by Antonios Anastasopoulos. The author discussed, especially for the eighteenth century, the character of provincial rule in Crete under the Ottomans and the nature of the relation between the island and the imperial centre. As determining elements of the complex situation were identified both the fact that Crete was incorporated very late in the Ottoman Empire, after it was conquered between 1645 and 1669 from Venice, and that it was an island, distant from the centre, and therefore requesting special forms of administration.

The following session dealing with Anatolia also comprised three papers. In the first, “Provincial challenges to the imperial centre: from Persian to Roman rule”, Vincent Gabrielsen took at first into consideration the ‘territorial’ character of the Persian Empire and the role of the provinces inside it. He also underlined the similarity of the ‘provincial challenges’ both in the Persian and Seleucid Empire.  Finally he stressed the difference between this type of ‘territorial’ Empires and the ‘province-less’ Athenian Empire, whose power was based on fear. In the second paper of the session, “Maintaining order and exercising justice in the Roman provinces of Asia Minor”, Cédric Brélaz tried to determine the impact of Roman imperial power on local communities of the Anatolian peninsula during the first three centuries AD in two particular spheres: the maintaining of order, and the exercising of justice. At the end of his enquiry, the Brélaz was able to describe local communities within the Roman provinces of Anatolia not as simple administrative units entirely depending on central power and on imperial rules, but as self-governing political entities, whose reunion formed a network constituting the imperial state. In the third paper of the session, “Local elites and government intervention in the province of Anadolu”, Suraiya Faroqhi faced a very ample subject showing a deep historiographical insight. Among other things she stressed that even at the high time of Ottoman ‘early modern’ centralization in the middle and later sixteenth century, the administrators sent out by the centre were not in a position to run the districts and sub-provinces that made up the great bulk of Anadolu all by themselves. Following this, Faroqhi acknowledged the existence of local elites in the province and reconstructed the processes of their formation, showing also great attention to their persistence. At any rate, it did not seem to the authoress that positions of financial responsibility were accorded to these local elites.

The session on Greece comprised two papers. In the first one Björn Forsén examined “The effects of Empires on Demography” in Roman and Ottoman Greece. He emphasised, for both historical periods and with special attention to the comparative aspect, how the restructuring of provinces often involved movement of people at a large scale. There was forced movement of people in connection with compulsory urbanization, politico-administrative foundations (e.g. Augustan colonization) or ample relocations of population. There was also voluntary movement, due to tax incentives, the opening of new trade-routes or any other changes brought about by imperial rule. The second paper of the session, “Grievance administration in Ottoman Rumelia, 18th century”, by Michael Ursinus, read on behalf of the absent author by Metin Kunt, dealt with a very important, and until now unique, set of documents, that is the complaints filed with the governor-general of Rumelia between 1781 and 1783. This “Record Book of Complaints” was described as containing the orders given by the governor as a consequence of petitions and grievances submitted by members of the population on a variety of matters, and as reflecting, with often even more acuteness than in the corresponding registers from the central administration, the various problems and the mixed composition of the local population.

Of great interest, and characterised by a very lively debate, was the session regarding the Indian subcontinent. Jeevan Deol, in his paper “Local identities, imperial claims: economies of tribute and identity in Mughal and British Punjab”, tried to explore the circulation of identities between the Mughal imperial centre and the imperial province of Punjab in NW India from the middle of the seventeenth century onward. In particular considering the example of the rise of the Sikhs of the Punjab, he showed how emergent local rulers utilised imperial constructions of identity and difference to legitimise themselves and how, appropriating those constructions into consciously archaising notions of universal rulership, they were able to challenge the imperial Mughal sovereignity. At the same time, on the imperial side the appropriation of new local identities succeeded in reshaping the image of the person of the emperor himself, incorporating and reflecting back sub-imperial identities. In the second paper of the session, “Toward a state-in-society perspective: the rule structure in Gujarat in the 18th and early 19th centuries”, Farhat Hasan started from his previous (2004) definition of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries Mughal Empire as ‘a partially differentiated state’, which was marked by a weak separation from social forces, and was sustained as much by political relations with the local power-holders as with the intermediate social groups and the plebeian elements. Proceeding to eighteenth century Gujarat, which saw the emergence of the Marathas, Hasan identified a growing participation of intermediate society in the system of rule. In short, the social forces came to influence the state more and more. As for the nineteenth century, the author underlined the emergence of the English Company as a leading political force in Gujarat, and more in general presented the British rule in the area as relying on the dominant groups in local society, and tending to reinforce the prevailing relations of power. The last paper of the session was “Imperial ideology in south India: Vijayanagara and after” by Narayana Rao. The author focused on the ideology of kingship that Krishnadevaraya, the emperor of Vijayanagara, adopted during the sixteenth century and the change in this ideology that occurred during Nayaka kingdom in the following century. In particular Krishnadevaraya encouraged poets who helped creating a Kshatriya image for him. As such he embodied an aspect of the god Vishnu, but could not identify himself with Vishnu. On the contrary the Nayaka kings of the seventeenth century preferred to be seen as gods themselves and considered all their subjects, including Brahmins, as servants of the god-king.

The last session “The constitution of power, government and fiscality in imperial societies” was opened by Michael Sommer with the paper “Empire, frontier and ‘third space’. The Near East under Roman rule”. The author – putting aside previous interpretations of the Roman rule in the Near East underlining aspects of continuity or discontinuity with the past or stressing the local ‘resistance’ against imperial overlordship from the West – thought as more rewarding to consider carefully which implications imperial rule had for the people living in the area. For this reasons he examined the forms of interaction in places such as Antioch, the middle Euphrates and Palmyra. On the base of this analysis the Roman Near East appeared to Sommer as a kind of middle ground, which cannot be evaluated in terms of binary categories and is characterised by the fusion of cultural elements drawn from all cultures present in the region. To define it, the notion of ‘third space’, taken from the field of post-colonial studies, was adopted. In the second paper of the session, “The provincial status of Sicily from the Roman Empire to the Kingdom of the two Sicilies”, Giovanni Salmeri tried to show how the provincial experience of Sicily under the Romans, through the mediation of Cicero’s Verrines, influenced the perception of the island’s role in the context of the Spanish Empire. The meeting was closed by Peter Bang’s paper “Empire, province and power – Local élites, government and tribute in the Roman, Mughal and Ottoman worlds”. The author first of all provided a thorough summary of the papers previously presented, and then concentrated on the various interpretations of segmentation of power – both from the ideological and political point of view –, which is a general characteristic of pre-industrial empires. Bang carried out his task through the analysis of some quotations (also from Machiavelli’s Principe) and of some specific cases in the Roman, Ottoman and Mughal states. A part from underlining the similarities among the three, based on the segmentation of power, he also showed the differences depending on the varying forms of military organization. A very balanced conclusion for the Athenian meeting!