Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Russia as empire and periphery
Before the middle of the nineteenth century almost all empires had been
federations of aristocratic elites. The political weight of the usually illiterate
peasant masses was very limited. The eighteenth-century British Empire in
Ireland illustrates this point and its implications for empire’s security. British
elites believed that their rule was illegitimate in the eyes of the Irish Catholic
masses, but they were confident that by expropriating the native land-owning
class and denying positions in government or the professions to Catholics,
they had made successful revolt impossible by depriving it of possible leaders,
unless Ireland was invaded by large French armies. In the eighteenth century
this calculation proved correct but nineteenth-century developments made it
redundant. Above all this was because of the growth of mass literacy and a
Catholic middle class, of democratic and nationalist ideology, and of a vibrant
Catholic civil society whose members were also politicised by the existence of
an increasingly democratic political system.
12
From the middle of the nineteenth century not just the British in Ireland but,
to varying degrees, all European empires were beginning to experience what
one might define asthe dilemma ofmodern empire. One aspectof this dilemma
was the growing consensus that the future belonged to polities of a continental
scale, with resources to match. Even in the first half of the nineteenth century,
Herzen and de Tocqueville had predicted that for this reason the next century
would belong to Russia and the United States. By the second half of the
nineteenth century such predictions were commonplace, partly being inspired
by the success of modern technology and communications in opening up
continental heartlands to colonisation and development. Continental scale,
however, almost inevitably entailed multiethnicity. In an era when democratic
and nationalist ideologies were gaining ever-greater strength and legitimacy,
how were such polities to be legitimised and made effective? At the very least,
socioeconomic modernisation meant that the traditional policy of alliance
with peripheral aristocracies would not suffice to hold an empire together.
Moreover, as government itself intervened more deeply in society to respond
to the demands of modernity, new and sensitive issues emerged, especially as
regards questions of language, state employment and education.
13
The implications of this dilemma took a century or more to come to full
fruition. Empire in Europe, including British rule in most of Ireland, did
12 On eighteenth-century British calculations see S. J. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power:
The Making of Protestant Ireland 1 660–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp.
249–50. On the evolution of a nationalist civil society in nineteenth-century Ireland see
W. Kissane, Explaining Irish Democracy (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2002).
13 Lieven, Empire,pp.50–1.
19