COST A 36: Tributary Empires Compared

War, Armies and Empires

Working Group Meeting

Rethymno, Greece, 2-4 November 2007
Institute for Mediterranean Studies, Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas
(in collaboration with the University of Crete)

Abstracts

Antonis Anastasopoulos, ‘Being a Janissary in Ottoman Crete’
In the first part of the paper, I provide an overview of the janissaries as an imperial army which first appeared in the late fourteenth century as the Sultan’s slave guard and with time developed into an important political, social and economic factor throughout the Ottoman Empire. By 1826, the year when the corps was violently suppressed, the central authority had come to view janissaries as a nuisance that held the Empire back and therefore had to be done away with.
In the second part of the paper I discuss janissaries in Crete. By the time Crete was conquered by the Ottoman army (1645-1669), the janissaries had to a certain extent lost their distinctive, Istanbul character. In the course of the war we observe janissaries as soldiers. After the conquest was completed, local Cretan converts to Islam were admitted to the janissaries and other corps associated with them, as the conquering army units made the transition from a battle force to a quasi-civilian social element in a society which was recovering from war.
In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, janissaries and those associated with them spread in the towns and the countryside of Crete and became a significant factor in local life, both as a group – which was nevertheless not at all homogeneous from a socio-economic point of view – and individually.
At the end of the eighteenth century certain janissaries had become so powerful that they defied, as it seems, the authority of state-appointed governors on the island. This led to occasional state campaigns against them, with those carried out during the reign of Mahmud II in the 1810s, a little before the suppression of the corps, being the best known among them.
The aim of the paper is to examine the janissaries as part of Cretan society, and to discuss the difficulties in distinguish the ‘military’ from the ‘civilian’ population.

Ronald Asch, ‘Warfare, State Building and Noble Elites in Early Modern Europe’
Let me take as a starting point a statement by the Prussian historian Otto Hintze which he made in his lecture on Staatsverfassung und Heeresverfassung in 1906 about a hundred years ago:  “Alle Staatsverfassung is ursprünglich Kriegsverfassung – all constitutional structures depend originally on the structure of the army and the military forces.” The pressure warfare exerted on monarchies and republics alike forced them to mobilise new resources and could in times of crises after a defeat for example, even precipitate a deep change in the prevailing political system as for example in Denmark after 1660 or in Sweden after 1720: even the French Revolution can be seen as the belated result of the setback France suffered in the Seven Years War and was caused to some extent by the impact the enormous amount of debts accumulated in this war and during the American War of Independence had on state and society. On the other hand the much tighter controls European states exercised over their subjects from the late 17th century onwards was often a result of efforts to raise more taxes for war and to recruit soldiers more systematically. France and Prussia would be good examples for such developments or the Habsburg monarchy after 1748 and even more so after 1763-
However we should be wary to see the road which led to the creation of regularly financed standing armies controlled by administrative bodies staffed by civilians as a highway of unlimited military and administrative progress. Early modern bureaucracies were often dominated by patronage networks and prone to succumb to the practice of selling favours, in which every favourable administrative decision was seen as an act which required some counter favour or gift from those who benefited from such a decision. One may call this corruption or not but it certainly did not increase efficiency. In many ways the standing armies of the eighteenth century were more expensive – at least in peace time - and less flexible than the mercenary armies of the past.

Subjecting warfare to elaborate bureaucratic controls had clearly some drawbacks. When troops occupied a foreign territory or province they became more dependent on local administrative institutions; without the cooperation of local officials the sophisticated system of logistic support and war finance on which they relied could not be maintained. This meant that some sort of compromise with local authorities had to be negotiated, unless one decided to lay waste a province entirely by destroying all towns, villages and buildings and expelling the population as the French had done in the Palatinate during the war of the Palatine succession in 1689/90, but such a procedure became quite unusual in the 18th century and warfare therefore in many ways more humane than in the past as far as civilians were concerned. But it also meant it became more difficult to wage a war in which the total destruction of the enemy army was the objective not some limited military superiority which could be used to achieve a favourable peace settlement. This was all very well as long as one’s opponents played the same game, once one was confronted by an enemy who pursued far more radical aims, the bureaucratically organised ancien regime armies were at a clear disadvantage as the French revolutionary wars were to show.

It was perhaps no accident that many wars in the 18th century ended in a sort of stalemate, apart from the colonial wars which were fought with different methods, the armies of the eighteenth century had perhaps become too cumbersome to achieve decisive victories. They could and were used efficiently for defensive purposes but were less efficient for a war of conquest unless the enemy was particularly badly organised and ill prepared as Austria had been in 1740 when attacked by Prussia.

Let me make a final concluding remark. Eighteenth century states had finally achieved a monopoly of military force, which had eluded their 16th and early 17th century predecessors but they had managed to create a well policed society in which crime may still have been a problem but where feuds and routine acts of arbitrary violence by local warlords and nobles had largely disappeared. Nevertheless these peaceful societies financed and sustained enormous armies which were greater and more formidable than ever. However a price had to be paid for this achievement. These armies reflected the social structure of the states they served, und Staatsverfassung  Heeresverfassung the social and political constitution on the one hand and the structure of the armed forces were more than ever interdependent in the late 18th century. This did not facilitate military reforms. They became almost impossible to implement when they attacked powerful vested interests be it those of the court nobility, of average noble landowners or of rich social upstarts who sought military commissions to speed up the process which turned them into members of the noble elite as in France before the Revolution. It was the French Revolution which created a new type of army which could be used for large scale wars of conquest not just in colonies but in Europe itself to a far greater extent than in the past, but then this army was no longer predominantly commanded by officers from old established noble families.

Yingcong Dai, ‘Military Finance of the Qing Empire’
Founded by the Manchus, a semi-nomadic people from Manchuria, the Qing (or Ch’ing) dynasty of China (1644-1911) distinguished itself in a number of ways from its predecessors in forging its military culture, of which one salient component was its complex and creative system to finance its two armies, the Banners and the Green Standard Army. Created before the conquest of China, the Banner forces were only stationed in the capital, Manchuria, and certain major cities and strategic points after the conquest. Deemed as the first-tier military forces, they were mainly used in far-flung and major frontier wars, and were much more favorably treated by the state. The Green Standard Army was founded during the Manchu conquest of China to mitigate the fact that the Banners were insufficient in size in relation to conquering and guarding the vast country. The Green Standard Army was stationed all over the country, shouldering the task of policing local areas. Both systems combined, the Qing had a gigantic military force of 750,000-800,000 men at some points during the eighteenth century. It was a tremendous enterprise to raise and equip these numerous military personnel, and to keep them shipshape.

During the first half of the dynasty, the Manchus could not put down their swords after China was pacified, but had to engage in a series of frontier wars. The frequent wartime mobilization honed its military strength, stimulated changes, and allowed for modifications and new additions to its existing mechanism of financing its military. Not until the late eighteenth century was the Qing state able to finalize its entire set of policies regarding military financial affairs. As the Qing empire entered its downturn starting from the beginning of the nineteenth century in the aftermath of a sizeable domestic rebellion, the White Lotus Rebellion (1796-1805), its experience in maintaining its military power and conducting wars during the nineteenth century was drastically different from the earlier periods. Thus, this paper examines only the Qing dynasty’s institutions of and policies in financing its military in the first half of the dynasty, i.e., 1644-1800. This period falls into the “late imperial period” as is usually agreed by Qing historians, whereas the period after 1800 is regarded as the “modern era”, during which the Western powers’ penetration into China and the deepened crises from within altered the overall political landscape in the country, even though it was still under the Qing until 1911. The first part of the paper discusses the income of the military personnel, including both the Banners and the Green Standard Army, in both peacetime and wartime. The second part looks at the logistical system of the Qing military. The third part briefly explores the strength and drawbacks of the Qing military financial system. In spite of the fact that the Qing state tried its best to allocate adequate funds from the state fiscal resources to support its two armies, there were many loopholes in its military financial structure, giving tremendous opportunities for abuse, which ultimately caused fiscal strains for the state.

Jeroen Duindam, ‘Introduction’
My improvised introduction opens our meeting by recapitulating some results from previous workshops, connecting them to the theme of war. Most definitions of empire include a huge territory and a diversity of subjected peoples. These aspects point to the role of conquest and warfare, frequently in the form nomadic pastoralists conquering sedentary cultivators. How did conquerors deal with subjected peoples? Consolidation could mean rule by a military upper caste, the dominance of a conquest clan or ethnicity; it could also entail the inclusion of more groups into the military effort and hence to their inclusion in the imperial culture. Military service could lead to social advancement, inclusion and full citizenship. Middle ways between the extreme strategies of exclusion and inclusion seem to be dominant. Almost universally, however, rulers prided themselves on their prowess, and used martial images to underpin their status. Almost anywhere elite status tended to be connected to military status. Empires thus are closely connected in many ways to warfare. Yet, allegedly, revolutionary changes in warfare following the introduction of infantry armies and gunpowder led to a strengthening of state structures in Europe. The ‘new’ states, embroiled in permanent internecine wars, in the long run challenged the empires -- even those empires that had successfully adopted gunpowder weapons. This notion, challenged from many sides today, will undoubtedly be discussed in the following sessions.

Hakan Erdem, ‘Peasants into Soldiers and What Else? Military Recruitment in the Early Nineteenth Century Ottoman Empire’
On June 15th 1826, right in the middle of the war with the Greeks, the central standing army of the Ottoman Empire, the Janissaries “rebelled” for the last time. They were speedily “suppressed” and the Sultan promulgated an order to launch another standing army, the so-called Victorious Soldiers of Muhammad on June the 17th.  Ostensibly, the two could not operate on more diverse principles. The Janissaries were paid, lifetime professionals, the new soldiers were to be conscripted primarily from the Muslim peasant masses of the empire (even though a tolerably standardized method of recruitment had to wait until the draft law of 1846). The old Ottoman legal fiction that there was a separation between the subjects and the military class (askeri) was finally but totally abandoned. Now, the subjects were to be soldiers and to continue to pay the taxes at the same time.
  But who exactly were these new soldiers? Who made a desirable soldier and who did not? By looking at the mechanisms of exclusion as well as those of inclusion, this paper contends that while it is true that the army was to be a conscript or citizen army it was the state that decided what type of subjects or citizens was desirable. In this sense, religion had an important part to play. In fact, religious orthodoxy which was a pliable tool in the hands of the reformers of the empire was put at use to create good, obedient soldiers as well as desirable subjects.
Mercenaries, professional or semi-professional groups under military contractors, tribal people who fought under their own chiefs, in short, the tribal Arabs (urban), Kurds, Albanians, Bosnians were either deliberately excluded or themselves resisted conscription vehemently with the result that the regular army of the late Ottoman Empire came to be composed of sunni, peasant, non-tribal Turks.

Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Ottoman Victory Celebrations’
At first glance our topic may seem perfectly straightforward: the Ottomans have often been viewed as organized for war with unique efficiency, and prolonged periods of peace as dangerous for the ruling elite and more specifically the military. Ottoman chronicles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also have emphasized warfare as the activity most becoming to a successful ruler. As Ottoman sultans down to the later seventeenth century won any number of victories, we might expect that both primary sources and secondary literature have a great deal to say on the matter. But as I discovered to my surprise, this is far from being true; and most of the sources located to date deal with rather specific situations and not with ‘ordinary’ victories. Time-wise, our investigation concentrates upon a period beginning with the later years of Süleyman (r. 1520-66) and ending with the peace of Karlowitz/Karlofça in 1699.
As we are still far away from a complete listing of all triumphant entries ever celebrated by sultans and viziers, to say nothing of the primary sources documenting them, any conclusions at this point are premature. However the relative rarity of relevant accounts and the briefness of most Ottoman  reports -- apart from that authored by Evliya Çelebi – do suggest that even after a major victory, the Ottoman court regarded the ruler’s or a specially favored vizier’s ceremonial entry as necessary only in special circumstances.
Perhaps it is not by chance that the victory processions organized by and for Murad IV have been relatively well covered (r. 1623-40). After a series of bloody conflicts during the reigns of his predecessors Mustafa I (1617-18 and 1622-23) as well as Osman II (1618-22), to say nothing of his own turbulent early years, Sultan Murad apparently aimed at impressing the ruling group, the soldiery and also the population at large by his fierceness and martial successes, although he did not live long enough to mount a major campaign against the infidels. From the account of Evliya, his former page and confidant it seems that this omission needed to be compensated for at least in terms of narrative if the young sultan’s glory was to survive unstained. This consideration may explain why Evliya attributed to his hero an otherwise un-documented campaign against Malta.
The accounts of European observers also merit closer observation than is possible within a short paper. As for the three reports unearthed so far they all emphasize anomalous situations: grisly victory celebrations in times of official peace, festivities broken off after there proved to be no victory, or else the sultan’s solemn entry after a disastrous war. Possibly this pattern is fortuitous and due merely to the scantiness of the available observations. But perhaps foreigners really were inclined to report cases when ‘something went wrong’ in more detail than when everything proceeded according to plan. Given the politically and religiously based antagonism evident in the accounts of Stephan Gerlach and Paul Rycaut, though not in that of Aubry de la Motraye such a hypothesis probably contains at least a grain of truth. But only more detailed research will allow us to be sure.

Azar Gat, ‘Armies, Rescources and the Logistics of Empires’
Tribal societies and petty-states were capable of massive mobilization of manpower for war. Their small size and the proximity of military activity to home meant that military service was brief and seasonal, and could be harmonized with people’s civilian activities, most notably with the rhythm of agricultural production. Brief campaigning close to home and after harvest made logistics equally simple.
  However, the larger the state, the less practical mass militia armies became, in the first place because of long distances. The mass of the population could not engage in warfare in far away theatres of war, because this would have meant an impossibly prolonged absence from their sources of livelihood. Logistics became equally complex. One method to deal with these inherent limitations was to call up only part of the country’s manpower for active, longer militia service in time of war. All the same, in large states and empires even advanced conscript-militia systems (such as those of mid-republican Rome and Han and Tang China) ultimately proved to be problematic. Empires needed standing armies, to quell revolts and for frontier service in their vast territories. At least for providing the permanent element of the empire’s war establishment, regularly rotated short-term recruits constituted an inefficient and wasteful system.
  Empires thus opted for various mixes of professional, semi-professional, and militia troops, with most of them possessing a three-tier army. The first tier consisted of a relatively small nucleus of fully professional troops, mainly comprising a central army/imperial guard. An iron rule throughout history - already noted by Adam Smith - prescribed that no more than one percent of a state’s population could be sustained economically on a regular basis as fully professional troops. The cost of the armed forces in any case comprised the largest element of the state’s expenditure, often the majority. To provide more troops, empires resorted to the principle of military colonists for sustaining garrison and frontier troops by their own farm work. These second tier troops involved some compromise in terms of military effectiveness in comparison to the fully-professional. The third tier of the army consisted of levied forces assembled for large-scale campaigns and during emergencies and constituting the mass of the army. Of these, native national conscripts from the empire's core ethnicity tended to be of at least some military value, whereas levied conscripts from subject peoples in multi-ethnic empires normally proved to be of very little value.
  Finally there was the category of foreign mercenaries, professionals recruited from outside the empire, from an international market for troops or from the marches of hegemonic powers. With the passage of time, empires increasingly tended to incorporate them as a significant element of their standing forces. Coming from unruly and insecure tribal societies or highly antagonistic petty-state environments, these foreign troops were far more conditioned to warfare than the long pacified populations of empires. However, both exploiting and precipitating times of trouble, anarchy, and mayhem, independent foreign barbarian troops and their leaders often became instrumental in opening the gates of the empire, or they seized power themselves.
(The presentation is derived from my book: War in Human Civilization, published by Oxford last year and dealing extensively with all aspects of empires.)

Ian Haynes, ‘Tapping the Human Resource: Myth and Method in the Recruitment of Imperial Rome's Armies’
Systematic study of the recruitment of Rome's armies first began over a century ago.  A broad consensus has emerged with the regards to the patterns that marked the recruitment of the Empire's legionary soldiers, but the patterns that characterised that of non-citizen auxiliary forces requires reappraisal.  These forces, which comprised over half the strength of Rome's frontier armies, are of especial interest because they reflect significant variations in the manner in which the empire harvested its human resource. 
The generally accepted model argues that once an auxiliary unit had been raised from amongst a tribe, people or the population of an urban territory, it received drafts of reinforcements from local sources.  This meant that the ethnic character of the original formation soon broke down.  Two exceptions were generally allowed, that of Eastern archer regiments and that of the Batavian regiments, raised on the lower Rhine. In the latter case, much was made of the privileged relationship the Batavian's enjoyed with Rome until they revolted against Rome. Britons were also sometimes treated as a special case, thought the arguments for this were more controversial.
In this paper I reassess the generally accepted model, arguing that the evidence for local recruitment can only be sustained in a few parts of the Empire.  I also demonstrate that the 'exceptional' cases have been misunderstood and that that misunderstanding itself tells us much of false perceptions about Empire, ethnicity and the armies of Rome.

Pavlina Karanastassi, ‘Roman Emperors as Leaders of the Army: Iconography and Signification’
The power of the Imperium Romanum was the outcome of the might of the roman army. This is indicated by the numerous monuments related to the “militaristic” aspect of the Empire, such as official monuments (trophies, triumphal arches etc.), but also private ones, as are the funerary stones of roman soldiers, military insigna and military diplomas.
In all these monuments the Emperor’s presence is very important, either by name or through his representation as leader of the army, mainly shown either on horseback or in armor.
The emperor’s image changes in time, however, as is shown by the comparison of Augustus’ statue of Primaporta, to a statue of Hadrian of Hierapetra/Crete at the archaeological Museum of Istanbul, where the Emperor  appears treading upon a defeeted nation.
In the speaker’s opinion, this statue, as well as four others similar statues originating from Crete, which, in imperial roman times had been united to the Cyrenaica to form the common province of Crete et Cyrenae, must be related to the revolt of the Jews of the mediterranean diaspora in the Cyrenaica and Egypt during the final years of government of emperor Trajan (115-117 A.D.), the consequences of which, however, were to be faced by his successor Hadrian, as soon as he came into power after August 117 A.D.

Lars Bo Kaspersen, ‘Warfare and Empires - Towards a General Theory of Imperial Warfare?’
This paper is an explorative paper concentrating on the relationship between empire and warfare. The first working hypothesis is that the primary unit of analysis in social life is the survival unit. A survival unit is defined by its ability to maintain autonomy and sovereignty. The autonomy is dependent on its ability to prevent encroachment from others. This requires means of defense, a mode of governance, and an economic mode of production. How the means of defense is intertwined with the modes of governance and production determines the character of the survival unit. The second working hypothesis is that the empire is a particular form of survival unit defined by a particular relationship between the mode of defense, mode of governance and the mode of production. The third working hypothesis concerns the character of the defense which is focused around the pre-emptive strike.

Metin Kunt, ‘Asian Statecraft, “Turko-Persia” and the Ottoman Empire’
My purpose is to reconsider the “Turko-Persia” model proposed by Robert Canfield (Turko-Persia in Historical Perspective, Cambridge University Pres, 1991; pb 2002) especially in the context of  Ottoman polity and society.  The origins of the model in fact go back to a 1985 workshop of anthropologists with an historical sensitivity and historians open to social science on Central Asia as a cultural unit where the term “Turko-Persia” was agreed on for the model developed.  One can detect its antecedents in the great work of Marshall Hodgson The Venture of Islam, published in 1974. In this masterly synthesis Hodgson provided a much-needed corrective to the Arab-centric view of Islamic history which had been the dominant approach in academic circles by emphasizing the seminal role of Persian statecraft and culture in the development of Islamic civilization as well as the military and state-building contributions of Turks and others from Inner Asia.

On such an intellectual background was Canfield’s model built. Simply put, the model posits that from the 10th century on Islamic states had “Turkish rulers and soldiery, their administrative cadres and literati were Persian” (Turko-Persia, p. 18). Academic fields respond to new formulations slowly; “Turko-Persia” cannot be said to have penetrated the Islamicist world thoroughly; yet the book’s durability is evidenced by its paperback reprint.  Scholars of the world of Islam neglect the concept at their own peril.
Models are indispensible in understanding the past. However, by their very nature, in their exclusions and inclusions models tend to exaggerate both the homogeneity of their contents and their distinctiveness from what is left out. The “Turko-Persia” of Canfield and his colleagues is a synthesis of Iran and Turan of Shahname fame and is applied as the main analytical framework to all major Muslim polities from the Ghaznavi and Selchuki of the eleventh century through the central and western Mongol khanates (the Golden Horde, Chagatay, and Ilkhani); Timur’s (Tamerlane) new post-Mongol synthesis and on to the great empires, the Mughals, Safavis and Ottomans.  What unites all these polities in “Turko-Persia” is that they are all in the Islamic world.  At a different level of generalization one could perhaps have reverted to Canfield’s original formulation of Central Asia and considered Asia beyond Islam: after all, as many Inner Asians entered East Asia or, in Owen Lattimore’s term, “China proper”—as opposed to “China improper—as did South and West Asia.  The consideration here is whether the statecraft and culture based on an amalgam of Inner Asian rulers and soldiery with sedentary bureaucrats and mandarins should be taken up as a general Asian phenomenon or if the role of Islam common to “Turko-Persia” so powerful that it necessitates a clear distinction from non-Islamic empires, Romanov Russia, say, and Yüan and Manchu China. This issue is of such importance that I merely pose it without attempting an answer.

More specifically I wish consider the degree of ”Turko-Persianness” within the model, especially in the case of Ottoman statecraft.  If one aspect of Muslim sultanates was Turkish or Turkicizing soldiery and Persian or Persianizing bureaucracy, another essential element was the distinction of the ruling group from the populace it governed.  “Turko-Persia” as a model is more applicable to polities such as Safavi and Mughal empires than in areas of a considerable degree of Turkishness among its subjects such as the Ottoman empire.  Not neglecting the question of whether Ottomans had more Turks in their populace than did the Safavis, my point is that the Ottomans had to create the “Turko” element of the model from non-Turks, external slaves and internal forced recruits.

Demetrios Kyritses, ‘Peasant and Soldier in the Byzantine Countryside. The Evolution of a Relationship’
The Byzantine Roman Empire was intermediary in time between the late antique Roman Empire, of which it is the direct continuation, and the Ottoman Empire, which replaced it through a process of conquest, but with which it shares features of institutional and cultural continuity. It is a tributary empire, but with several “feudal” elements in its organization. Byzantium shares with the other two empires the fundamental distinction between “civilian” and “military” subjects, but this should not be seen as a feature of continuity, but may conceal widely varying social realities.
This presentation will focus on two main questions, distinct, but linked to each other, and therefore treated in a parallel way. The first is whether at any point the military came to be seen as an order in Byzantine society. The second is the social standing of soldiers within their immediate surroundings, particularly soldiers who lived in the countryside and whose support was linked in various ways to the land, excluding, that is, salaried troops and foreign mercenaries.
The first question is answered rather in the negative. Until the 11th C. soldiers were distinguished essentially through their enrolment in the special military registers, without special privileges. They could come from the ranks of the peasantry, and they could revert to it, under certain circumstances. From the 12th C. onwards soldiers, at least the more heavily armed ones, started enjoying fiscal immunity, which ranked them in the ‘privileged’ part of society, those who normally would not have pecuniary obligations towards the state. This status was directly linked to the obligation of service and, despite social pressure, never became hereditary.
  As for the relationship between soldiers and simple peasants, we may distinguish two phases: that of the landowning soldier of the 7th-11th century, and that of the privileged, dues-collecting soldier of the following period. For the first period it is noteworthy that Byzantium lacks the negative characterizations of soldiers that we encounter in Late Antiquity and the early Middle ages in the West. But the notion of soldier-peasants, who shared the fate of the free peasant communities and disappeared under the pressure of great landowners may be less accurate than traditionally postulated. On the other hand, the wealthier and more socially distinguished soldiers of the later period (12th-15th C.) may have been quite integrated in rural society. Again, the question of recruitment should be considered, since it appears that the peasantry was the only probable source of manpower. Regional variations are also taken into account.

William (Vijay) Pinch, ‘Devotion to War: Religion and the Mughal Expansion, ca. 1560-1650’
Rajputs were crucial to Mughal imperial expansion between 1560 and 1680.  The military and administrative dimensions of Mughal-Rajput power are fairly well understood, as are the religious repercussions of that power – especially during the latter part of the seventeenth century when key temples built by Rajput generals under Mughal sponsorship two generations earlier were coming under attack by the emperor Augangzeb.  But when mainstream historians in the western academy, whether in India, Europe, or the US, think of the Rajput incorporation in the sixteenth century, they think of politics, revenue, and armies (“secular” power) first and religion (“sacred” power) second.  Religious transformations are not accorded high status in the hierarchy of interpretations for Mughal imperial state formation (or for structural change in South Asia generally).  In my view, this methodological posture leads to a partial understanding of the Mughal empire.  In sum, it reflects and is reflected in three historiographical factors:  1) popular (modern) assumptions about a radical disconnect between Hinduism (of the Rajputs) and Islam (of the Mughals), 2) a not-unrelated and entirely reasonable reluctance on the part of historians to fan the flames of communalist historiography by looking to religion as a pivotal arena of Mughal imperialism, and 3) the generally materialist posture of historical work on state formation generally (until about 1995), including most (but by no means all) work on Mughal state formation, which is the result of the deep institutionalization of both Marxian and Weberian frameworks in modern social science.

Of course, there are important exceptions to these blanket historiographical assertions, especially in point three of the above paragraph.  However, insofar as there has been  attention to  religious developments in Mughal historiography, it is with respect to the charismatic spiritual eclecticism at the pinnacle of empire, around Akbar -- especially as immortalized by Abu’l Fazl -- which facilitated the incorporation of an ethnically diverse array of military elites under the Mughal banner.  Here, however, the religious eclecticism of the Mughal emperor stands in marked contrast to the presumed homogeneity of Rajput religion writ large, as Hinduism.  In fact, as I will argue in this paper, 1) though the institutionalization of temple- and monastery-based Rajput devotionalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a major factor in the subsequent evolution of modern Hinduism, Rajput religion as a whole was marked by considerable internal diversity, especially in the sixteenth century, and 2) that religious diversity shaped the character of the Mughal imperial expansion – including, importantly, how it was perceived from below – in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  I argue, then, that religion was a key factor in Mughal imperial expansion, but in a way that runs contrary to the view of both Hinduism and Islam as unitary religious formations, arrived at some fully formed state by the early sixteenth century.

Douglas E. Streusand, ‘Firearms Were Not Enough: Ottoman and Mughal Imperial Consolidation’
The gunpowder empires thesis asserts that the ability to take stone fortresses with siege artillery made the establishment of large, centralized, durable empires possible in the Islamic world in the early modern era.  William H. McNeill connects imperial consolidation directly to the ability to deploy siege artillery at any given place.  The Ottoman ability to move guns by river thus made the consolidation of the Ottoman empire more solid than that of the Mughal empire, since Mughals had to drag guns long distances overland. The gunpowder thesis is thus elegant and powerful; it is also narrow and simplistic. It has two major weaknesses: it does not accurately describe the patterns of Ottoman and Mughal expansion and it does not address the actual process of imperial consolidation.
  Although the narrative of Ottoman expansion is replete with sieges, most of the major ones were part of Ottoman wars against their major rivals, not against smaller principalities whose survival depended on fortified strong points.  Ottoman expansion in the east certainly did not depend on successful sieges. The Ottoman had success with firearms earlier and more frequently in the field, from Varna to Mohacs, than in sieges.  Mughal military superiority was also greater in the field than in sieges, which explains the paucity of major field engagements after the early decades of Mughal history. Their enemies consistently chose to defend fortresses rather than challenge the Mughals in the field. Sieges clearly did pose enormous difficulties for the Mughals, but as much because their duration meant that they required transportation of huge quantities of food and fodder as because of the difficulty of moving guns.

Although the ability to coerce underlies politics and government in general, the mere ability to apply decisively superior force over a broad area does not imply imperial consolidation. Consolidation implies that the use of coercive force is no longer routine, that the collection of taxes, administration of justice, and conduct of commerce do not regularly require the use of military power. The power of the Indian Civil Service demonstrated the consolidation of British rule in India.  Conquest only begins the process of consolidation. The ability to conquer does not imply the ability to establish a durable and orderly polity. Successful empires do not rely on the continuous application of coercion. Consolidation thus required the ability to offer conquered populations enough incentives to ensure cooperation, and eventually loyalty. The Ottomans and Mughals achieved this requirement despite confessional differences between the ruling dynasties and most of their subjects. In different language, the conquering dynasties had to establish mechanisms to transform the revenue of the conquered territories into military power and absorb, or at least neutralize, its potential military manpower; the two dynasties did so. 
  This achievement had at last three dimensions: the articulation of imperial sovereignty so as to win acceptance from diverse populations, the establishment of financial institutions and practices which gave the conquerors control of local tax revenue without alienating the population—reasonable, predictable, and fair taxation—and protected the population from oppression, and the creation of military institutions which integrated the manpower of the conquered territories into the imperial system.

Dick Whittaker, ‘The Roman Army as Cultural Agents of Empire’
  Current debates about the army and culture focus on two aspects: the first, whether the Roman army was a “total institution” (Goffman’s expression), separate from civil society, and the second, what (if anything) is meant by Romanization. I argue that there is no consistent evidence for the isolation of the army and veterans, and that therefore we should expect it to have made a cultural impact in many parts of the empire. Furthermore, since the Roman army was essentially an army of frontiers (unlike the Mughal, but in some respects like the Ottoman empire), its cultural influence extended beyond the limits of occupation. The effect was to create a frontier society, sometimes remote from the interior of the province but extending beyond the society of the cantonment. I explore some of the modalities of the cultural communications, such as women, settlements, economic and political spin off, and cultural activities such as religion, literacy and art. Although Romanization has been rejected by archaeologists as a poor tool to analyse the multiplicity of Roman provincial cultures, I repeat, what I have argued elsewhere, that the argument should not turn on the differences in material culture, but on the common factors in societies, particularly urbanization and citizenship  – most of which stemmed from the army. In general, I follow the Locard exchange principle that “every contact leaves traces”.

David Woods, ‘Byzantine Military Recruitment in the Seventh Century: What Crisis?’
The Byzantine Empire was reduced to perhaps a fifth of its former size during the seventh century. So how did it respond to this crisis in terms of its military recruitment? Curiously, the emperors seem to have continued to recruit their armies in much the same fashion as previously. In the face of an immediate threat, they resorted to hiring large numbers of foreign mercenaries, but even when they did not face an immediate threat, they seem to have preferred to continue to raise extra troops by resettling foreign groups within their borders and demanding military service from them in return for their lands rather than to implement a more severe or widespread form of conscription. While it is clear that there was some form of conscription, it is not clear how often or widespread were the attempts to enforce it. Fortunately, the emperors probably did not need to raise all their recruits in this way, since many sons probably followed their fathers into the army, although it is not entirely clear whether this was a legal requirement still by the seventh century. In the absence of firm information to the contrary, one is tempted to assume that, however the system of conscription continued to operate, it did not become obviously more burdensome – or dare one say it, effective – than it had previously. The question, therefore, is why the Byzantine emperors did not step up their efforts in this matter.
One possibility is that they did not feel that they needed to. The first point to note here is that the Byzantine empire actually remained at peace with the Arab empire for most of the seventh century. Hence it did not suffer unrelenting pressure to rethink its methods. The second point to note is that the Byzantine forces had proven quite sufficient to hold the main border between the two empires at the Taurus Mountains from as early as c.640 and, most importantly, that none of the subsequent Byzantine failures or losses had been due to the fact that the Byzantine army had been outnumbered in the field. There had always been some other perfectly plausible explanation, the actions of commanders who were disobedient at best, if not openly rebellious. Here one needs to stress that the common modern perception that the Arabs were able to penetrate deep into the interior of Asia Minor almost at will from c.640 onwards rests on a faulty understanding of some complex sources.
In summary, therefore, the Byzantine emperors of the seventh century would not have blamed their reverses, or those of their predecessors, so much upon their lack of troops as upon the disloyalty or incompetence of their senior commanders. As a result, they did not feel any need to rethink their methods of recruitment, whether in terms of quality or quantity.

Adam Ziolkowski, ‘Legion or Phalanx. A History of a Controversy from Polybios to Folard’
The superiority of the Roman legion over the Macedonian phalanx is one of great symbols, if not of our civilisation, then certainly of our historiography. From Polybios, who in the middle of the 2nd century BC coined this symbol in his famous analysis of the two formations, to our days historians quote it as an embodiment of the political and military superiority of the imperial Republic over Hellenistic states. The trouble is, though, that the phalanx so mercilessly criticised in Polybios’ model diverges in a most disquieting manner from the one that is depicted in descriptions of concrete battles, including those for which our source is Polybios himself. The present author argues that these discrepancies can be explained in only one way: by rejecting Polybios’ report as a fanciful model created by a man who, in spite of his halo of expertness and reliability, in reality knew very little about the matter at hand.
Does it mean that the phalanx was not as clumsy a formation as depicted by Polybios, both in itself and in relation to the legion? A possible answer to this question is hidden in sources on Western European military theory and practice in the 15th-18th century. The art of war was one of the aspects of our civilisation most influenced by ancient literature as “discovered” by Renaissance ideologists. What is strange, while the theoreticians kept repeating Polybios’ criticism of the phalanx, on the battle-fileds, ie. in practice, pikemen, twin brothers of the Macedonian phalangites, steadily grew in importance as troops with the greatest striking power and very good tactical mobility (a trait which the theoreticians denied - on Polybios’ authority - to the phalangites). Military treatises and battle reports from the 16th and 17th century make it possible to reconstruct the phalanx in action and provide a strong case for rejecting Polybios’ critique. The peak achievement of the Renaissance-Early Modern reflection on ancient warfare - the works by Jean-Charles Folard, the greatest military theoretician of modern times - decisively vindicate the phalanx as a battle formation and expose fundamental unreliability and fancifulness of Polybios’ model.