Empires and bureaucracy in world history: from late antiquity to the twentieth century 1107166039, 9781107166035

Table of contents :
Introduction. Empires, bureaucracy and the paradox of power / Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons --
Empires and Bureaucracy in World-Historical Perspectie. China as a contrasting case: bureaucracy and empire in Song China / Patricia Ebrey --
Conflict and cooperation between Arab rulers and Persian administrators in the formative period of Islamdom, c.600-950 CE / István T. Kristó-Nagy --
Bureaucracy without alphabetic writing: governing the Inca empire, c.1438-1532 / Chris Given-Wilson --
The Ottoman empire (1299-1923): the bureaucratization of patrimonial authority / Karen Barkey --
From Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages. 'The late Roman empire was before all things a bureaucratic state.' / Michael Whitby --
Bureaucracies, elites and clans: the case of Byzantium, c.600-1100 / John Haldon --
Charlemagne and Carolingian military administration / Bernard S. Bachrach --
Bureaucracy, the English state and the crisis of the Angevin empire, 1199-1205 / John Gillingham --
The parchment imperialists: texts, scribes, and the medieval western Empire, c.1250-c.1440 / Len Scales --
Before Humpty Dumpty: the first English empire and the brittleness of bureaucracy, 1259-1453 / Peter Crooks --
From the Age of European Expansion to the End of Empires. Magistrates to administrators, composite monarchy to fiscal-military empire: empire and bureaucracy in the Spanish monarchy, c.1492-1825 / Christopher Storrs --
Britain's overseas empire before 1780: overwhelmingly successful and bureaucratically challenged / Jack P. Greene --
'Les enfants du siècle': an empire of young professionals and the creation of bureaucratic, imperial ethos in Napoleonic Europe / Michael Broers --
Bureaucracy, power and violence in colonial India: the role of Indian subalterns / Deana Heath --
From chief to technocrat: labour and colonial authority in post-world ward Africa / Frederick Cooper --
The unintended consequences of bureaucratic 'modernization' in post-World War II British Africa / Timothy H. Parsons --
Afterward. Empires and bureaucracy: means of appropriation and media of communication / Sam Whimster.

Citation preview

Empires and Bureaucracy in World History

How did empires rule different peoples across vast expanses of space and time? And how did small numbers of imperial bureaucrats govern large numbers of subordinated peoples? Empires and Bureaucracy in World History seeks answers to these fundamental problems in imperial studies by exploring the power and limits of bureaucracy. The book is pioneering in bringing together historians of antiquity and the Middle Ages with scholars of post-medieval European empires, while a genuinely world-historical perspective is provided by chapters on China, the Incas and the Ottomans. The editors identify a paradox in how bureaucracy operated on the scale of empires and so help explain why some empires endured for centuries, while, in the contemporary world, empires fail almost before they begin. By adopting a cross-chronological and world-historical approach, the book challenges the abiding association of bureaucratic rationality with ‘modernity’ and the so-called ‘Rise of the West’. peter crooks is Lecturer in Medieval History at Trinity College Dublin. He is editor of Government, War and Society in Medieval Ireland (2008) and (with David Green and W. Mark Ormrod) The Plantagenet Empire, 1259–1453 (2016). He is also principal editor of ‘CIRCLE’ (https://chancery .tcd.ie/), a reconstruction of the Irish chancery rolls destroyed in the 1922 fire at the Public Record Office, Dublin. timothy h. parsons holds a joint appointment as Professor of African History in the History Department and the African and African American Studies Program at Washington University in St Louis. His publications include The Second British Empire: In the Crucible of the Twentieth Century (2014), The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall (2010), Race, Resistance and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa (2004), The 1964 Army Mutinies and the Making of Modern East Africa (2003), and The African Rank-and-File: Social Implications of Colonial Service in the King’s African Rifles, 1902–1964 (1999).

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Empires and Bureaucracy in World History From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century Edited by

Peter Crooks Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin

and

Timothy H. Parsons Washington University in St Louis

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University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107166035 © Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons 2016 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2016 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data Crooks, Peter. | Parsons, Timothy. Empires and bureaucracy in world history : from Late Antiquity to the twentieth century / edited by Peter Crooks (Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin) & Timothy H. Parsons (Washington University in St Louis). Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2016. LCCN 2016014773 | ISBN 9781107166035 (hardback) | ISBN 9781316617281 (paperback) LCSH: Imperialism – History. | Bureaucracy – History. | BISAC: HISTORY / World. LCC JC359 .E433 2016 |DDC 325/.3209–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016014773 ISBN 978-1-107-16603-5 Hardback ISBN 978-1-316-61728-1 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of Figures List of Maps List of Tables List of Contributors Preface List of Abbreviations

page viii ix x xi xiii xvii

Part I Introduction

1

1 Empires, Bureaucracy and the Paradox of Power peter crooks and timothy h. parsons

3

Part II Empires and Bureaucracy in World-Historical Perspective

29

2 China as a Contrasting Case: Bureaucracy and Empire in Song China patricia ebrey

31

3 Conflict and Cooperation between Arab Rulers and Persian Administrators in the Formative Period of Islamdom, c.600–c.950 ce istva´ n t. kristo´ -nagy 4 Bureaucracy without Alphabetic Writing: Governing the Inca Empire, c.1438–1532 chris given-wilson 5 The Ottoman Empire (1299–1923): The Bureaucratization of Patrimonial Authority karen barkey

54

81

102

v

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vi

Contents

From Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages

127

6 ‘The Late Roman Empire Was before All Things a Bureaucratic State.’ michael whitby

129

7 Bureaucracies, Elites and Clans: The Case of Byzantium, c.600–1100 john haldon

147

8 Charlemagne and Carolingian Military Administration bernard s. bachrach

170

9 Bureaucracy, the English State and the Crisis of the Angevin Empire, 1199–1205 john gillingham

197

10 The Parchment Imperialists: Texts, Scribes and the Medieval Western Empire, c.1250–c.1440 len scales

221

11 Before Humpty Dumpty: The First English Empire and the Brittleness of Bureaucracy, 1259–1453 peter crooks

250

Part III

Part IV

From the Age of European Expansion to the End of Empires

12 Magistrates to Administrators, Composite Monarchy to Fiscal-Military Empire: Empire and Bureaucracy in the Spanish Monarchy, c.1492–1825 christopher storrs 13 Britain’s Overseas Empire before 1780: Overwhelmingly Successful and Bureaucratically Challenged jack p. greene 14 ‘Les Enfants du Siècle’: An Empire of Young Professionals and the Creation of a Bureaucratic, Imperial Ethos in Napoleonic Europe michael broers 15 Bureaucracy, Power and Violence in Colonial India: The Role of Indian Subalterns deana heath

289

291

318

344

364

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Contents

vii

16 From Chief to Technocrat: Labour and Colonial Authority in Post–World War ii Africa frederick cooper

391

17 The Unintended Consequences of Bureaucratic ‘Modernization’ in Post–World War ii British Africa timothy h. parsons

412

Part V Afterword

435

18 Empires and Bureaucracy: Means of Appropriation and Media of Communication sam whimster

437

Index

457

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Figures

4.1

7.1 9.1 11.1 11.2–3

11.4–5

The quipu illustrated in Guaman Poma’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615). Reproduced by permission of the Royal Library, Copenhagen, GKS 2232 4º, p. 337, drawing 132, ‘Storehouses of the Inka’. page 89 Schematic of Byzantine administrative arrangements, c.700–1050. 158 Rulers of the Angevin empire and their predecessors 200 Rulers of England and its dominions, 1199–1460 251 English ‘deputed’ great seal for use in Ireland (1395), obverse and reverse, from the reign of Richard II. Reproduced by permission of Dublin City Archives. Photo Alastair Smeaton. 267 Illustrations of Welsh archer and Irish axeman from Liber A (E 36/274, fos. 32 and 435, TNA), late 13th cent. Reproduced by permission of The National Archives. 272

viii

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Maps

2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 5.1 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 8.1 9.1 10.1 11.1 12.1 12.2

China during the Northern Song (960–1126) China during the Southern Song (1127–1279) The world on the eve of the Islamic conquests, c.600 The Umayyad caliphate, c.750/132 The Muslim world, c.900/287 Expansion of the Inca empire, c.1438–1525 The expansion of the Ottoman empire, c.1300–1566 The East Roman empire in 565 The Byzantine empire at the beginning of the reign of Leo III (717) The Byzantine empire, c.750 The Byzantine empire, c.1030 The Carolingian empire, c.800 The Angevin empire in the late twelfth century The Reich in the time of Charles IV, c.1378 England and the Plantagenet dominions in the later Middle Ages Spanish Americas, c.1780 Independent South America

page 38 39 57 58 59 83 104 148 154 155 156 179 201 224 260 292 316

ix

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Tables

2.1 10.1 13.1 18.1

China’s major dynasties Rulers of the empire (1211–1439) The expansion of the Civil List Classification of empires: means of appropriation, media of communication

page 33 225 329 450

x

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Contributors

bernard s. bachrach is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of Minnesota. karen barkey is Professor of Sociology and History at Columbia University. michael broers is Professor of Western History at the University of Oxford. frederick cooper is Professor of History at New York University. peter crooks is Lecturer in Medieval History at Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin. patricia ebrey is Professor of History at the University of Washington in Seattle. john gillingham is Emeritus Professor of History at the London School of Economics. chris given-wilson is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of St Andrews. jack p. greene is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, Johns Hopkins University. john haldon is Shelby Cullom Davis ’30 Professor of European History and Professor of Byzantine History and Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. deana heath is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Liverpool. istva´n t. kristo´-nagy is Lecturer in Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. timothy h. parsons is Professor in the Department of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St Louis. len scales is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Durham. xi

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List of Contributors

christopher storrs is Reader in History at the University of Dundee. sam whimster is Editor of Max Weber Studies, Emeritus Professor of Sociology in the Global Policy Institute at London Metropolitan University and Honorary Professor at the University of New South Wales. michael whitby is Pro-Vice Chancellor and Head of the College of Arts and Law at the University of Birmingham.

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Preface

On 30 June 1922, an explosion and fire destroyed the records treasury of the Public Record Office of Ireland (PROI), situated at the western end of the Four Courts complex that lies on the north quays of the River Liffey in Dublin. Established by an act of the Westminster parliament in 1867, the PROI was a state-of-the-art archival facility for the preservation of the public records and state papers of English government in Ireland.1 Its holdings stretched back some seven hundred years to the early decades of the thirteenth century, when Ireland first became a dominion of the English crown. Following the signing and ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, control of the PROI was transferred to the provisional government of the southern twenty-six counties of Ireland on 1 April 1922. A fortnight later, on 14 April 1922, ‘irregular’ forces opposed to the treaty occupied the Four Courts, including the PROI buildings. After temporizing for more than two months, the Irish National Army began to bombard the Four Courts in the early morning of 28 June, employing eighteen-pounder guns borrowed from British forces. Ireland had slipped into a bitter civil war. The exact sequence of events that led to the catastrophic explosion remains contested. What is clear is that – despite the pleas of a few learned scholars with impeccable Irish nationalist credentials – neither pro- nor anti-treaty forces demonstrated much concern in practice for the safeguard of the accumulated records of English (later British) colonial rule in Ireland. The anti-treaty forces had heavily mined the records treasury. A double blast on 30 June 1922 caused a near-total archival cataclysm. The intense blaze that raged afterwards destroyed even those records stored in protective metal casings. As a report of the deputy keeper of the public records in Ireland later lamented: ‘The fire left little but tangled iron work, blocks of masonry, mason rubbish and the charred fragments and ashes of what had once been Public Records.’2 Empires and Bureaucracy in World History finds its oblique beginnings in this post-colonial Irish bonfire. Colonial archives currently ride high in the public 1 2

Public Records (Ireland) Act of 1867 (30 & 31 Vict., c. 70). Fifty-Fifth Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records in Ireland (Dublin, 1931), p. 17.

xiii

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Preface

consciousness. Indeed, the whole topic of empires and archives – their intended function, their unintended consequences, their appropriation, their destruction, their migration, their survival – is one that could usefully be explored in longrange historical perspective, perhaps from the destruction of the library at Alexandria to the ‘migrated’ Kenyan archives, until recently secreted at Hanslope Park. The present volume arises from a distinct but related concern with colonial archives, namely to salvage and reconstruct some portion of what was lost in the flames of 1922. In 2008, the Medieval History Research Centre at Trinity College Dublin established the ‘Irish Chancery Project’ with funding provided by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences under the thematic strand: ‘The Making of Modern Ireland: Paths to Modernity’. The aim of the Irish Chancery Project was to reconstruct the records of the medieval Irish chancery – the secretariat of the kings of England in Ireland. All the original parchment chancery rolls had been consumed in the Four Courts blaze. A principal outcome of that research is CIRCLE: A Calendar of Irish Chancery Letters, c.1244–1509.3 Reconstructing records is, however, only a preliminary stage in any historical inquiry. More challenging is the interrogation of those records – the work of reconstructing the past. To this end, the Irish Chancery Project sought to place its research on medieval record-keeping in the broadest possible context. The establishment of English-style law and administration in Ireland in the thirteenth century – so important in the later historical development of the island – was an early phase in the export of English governing structures and official attitudes overseas. This itself was but a chapter in a longer, but curiously unwritten, story about the relationship between bureaucracy and empires – the theme explored in the essays that make up the present volume. It is a pleasure to acknowledge here the contribution of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences and its successor institution, the Irish Research Council, in funding the project that gave rise to this volume at a time of acute fiscal crisis in Ireland. I am also immensely grateful to the scholars who attended the colloquium on ‘Empires and Bureaucracy’ at Trinity College Dublin in June 2011 and who engaged so fully in the spirit of collaborative comparison that I hoped the occasion would engender. The pairing of the key words ‘empires’ and ‘bureaucracy’ proved to be felicitous. It enabled a diverse group of specialists on empires from ancient Rome to twentieth-century Africa to engage in meaningful conversations. Their findings revealed the historical relationship between empires and 3

Publicly accessible at the following address: https://chancery.tcd.ie/. The Irish Chancery Project and its findings are described in more detail in Peter Crooks, ‘Reconstructing the past: the case of the medieval Irish chancery rolls’, in N. M. Dawson and Felix Larkin (eds.), Lawyers, the law and history: Irish Legal History Society discourses and other papers, 2006–2011 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), pp. 281–309.

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Preface

xv

bureaucracy to be far more varied, complex and significant than I had realized when embarking on this project. The collection as a whole challenges conventional state-focussed narratives of modernization and bureaucratization. In doing so, it nicely subverts the original, rather étatiste, presumption of the thematic strand ‘Paths to Modernity’, under which the project received its funding. This is, I hope, a useful demonstration of the value of open-ended research in the humanities, which the Irish Research Council has done much to promote. The Advisory Board of the Irish Chancery Project provided encouragement and sage advice throughout the course of the project. I am especially grateful to the chairperson of the board, Chris Given-Wilson (St Andrews), from whom I cajoled the chapter that appears here on the Incas, as well as my fellow travellers in medieval Irish history: Robin Frame (Durham), Elizabeth Matthew (Reading) and Brendan Smith (Bristol). In Ireland, several colleagues provided advice and practical support during the project and at the time of the Dublin colloquium, especially David Dickson, David Ditchburn, Seán Duffy, Áine Foley, Jane Ohlmeyer and Katharine Simms from Trinity College Dublin, and Nicholas Canny from the National University of Ireland, Galway. Much of the editorial work was undertaken during two happy years at the University of East Anglia, where I enjoyed the company of a most magnificent muddle of medievalists: Julie Barrau, Stephen Church, Hugh Doherty, Tom Licence, Gesine Oppitz-Trotman, Carole Rawcliffe and the inimitable Nick Vincent. Above all, I am grateful to my co-editor Tim Parsons, who cannot have known what he was getting into when he responded positively to an email I sent him as a stranger from the unknown (by which I mean the Middle Ages) in October 2010. He has since become a valued colleague and a close friend. Our editorial meetings have taken us from Dublin to Washington DC, St Louis and – as surprising for myself as for anyone who knows me – Goodison Park (thrice). Tim and I would like to thank our contributors warmly for engaging so constructively with our importunate demands at every stage of the writing and editing process. They were a pleasure to work with and have helped shape this into what is, we hope, a genuinely collaborative exercise in historical comparison. We are especially grateful to Karen Barkey and Deana Heath, who did not attend the Dublin colloquium but kindly agreed to contribute chapters to the book. We would also like to record our appreciation for Dane Kennedy of George Washington University, who organized a seminar at the Elliott School of International Affairs, Washington DC, in March 2012, at which we presented the preliminary findings from the collection and received valuable feedback. Mike Rowe and Margaret Procter of the University of Liverpool, who attended the Dublin colloquium in 2011, provided us with an occasion to deliver a more refined version of

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Preface

our arguments at a colloquium held at Liverpool in October 2013. The ideas developed on those occasions form part of Chapter 1. A special vote of thanks is due to Michael Watson of Cambridge University Press for his interest in the volume, for his patience and for his expertise in steering it through the press. Finally, the book would not exist without the unflagging support of Ann and Helen (sine quibus non) and those micro-motivators, Emily and Olivia (nil satis nisi optimum).

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Abbreviations

Admin. Ire.

AfD AHR Albrow, Bureaucracy Alcock et al., Empires

ANP AOF AOM

AS

bce Bang & Bayly, Tributary empires Bang & Kołodziejczyk, Universal empire

H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles (eds.), The administration of Ireland, 1172–1377 (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1963) Archiv für Diplomatik American Historical Review M. Albrow, Bureaucracy (London: Pall Mall Press, 1970) Susan E. Alcock, Terence N. D’Altroy, Kathleen D. Morrison and Carla M. Sinopoli (eds.), Empires: perspectives from archaeology and history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Archives nationales (Paris) C// (Commission de la France d’Outre-Mer) Afrique Occidentale Française (French West Africa) Archives d’Outre-Mer (Aix-en-Provence, France) AP (Affaires Politiques) IGT (Inspection Générale du Travail) 19PA (Delavignette Papers) K (Travail) Archives du Sénégal, Dakar 2G (Rapports) 7G (Affaires politiques) 18G (Affaires administratives) Before Common Era P. F. Bang and C. A. Bayly (eds.), Tributary empires in global history (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) Peter Fibiger Bang and Dariusz Kołodziejczyk (eds.), Universal empire: a comparative approach to imperial culture and representation in Eurasian history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)

xvii

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xviii

List of Abbreviations

Barkey, Empire of difference Barkey & von Hagen, After empire Burbank & Cooper, Empires BIHR BJRL BL Add. MSS c. CAH CCR ce CHC CHI Clanchy, Memory CNRS CO CO summer conference Cooper, Colonialism

Cooper, Decolonization

CPR Crooks, ‘State of the union’ CS CSSH d. DA

Karen Barkey, Empire of difference: the Ottomans in comparative perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen (eds.), After empire: multiethnic societies and nation-building (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997) Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in world history: power and the politics of difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010) Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research Bulletin of the John Rylands Library British Library (London) Additional Manuscripts circa The Cambridge ancient history (14 vols. in 19, 1970–2004) Calendar of the close rolls . . ., 1272–[1509] (47 vols., London: PRO, 1892–1963) Common Era The Cambridge history of China (15 vols., 1978–2015) The new Cambridge history of Islam (6 vols., 2010) M. T. Clanchy, From memory to written record: England 1066–1307, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique (Paris) Colonial Office Colonial Office summer conference on African administration, 1st–8th sessions (1947–57) Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in question: theory, knowledge, history (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African society: the labor question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Calendar of the patent rolls . . ., 1232–[1509] (53 vols., London: PRO, 1911–) Peter Crooks, ‘State of the union: perspectives on English imperialism in the late Middle Ages’, P&P 212 (2011), 1–40 Camden Society Comparative Studies in Society and History died Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters

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List of Abbreviations Davies, Domination

Davies, Empire

DKR Doyle, Empires EHD, vol. iv

EHR EI2

EI3

EIr Eisenstadt, Empires Elliott, Empires

Elliott, SEWW EME FCO Fianu & Guth, Écrit

Foedera Foucault, ‘Governmentality’

xix

R. R. Davies, Domination and conquest: the experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, 1100–1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) R. R. Davies, The first English empire: power and identities in the British Isles, 1093–1343 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) The Annual Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986) A. R. Myers (ed.), English historical documents, 1327–1485 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1969; repr. 1996) English Historical Review P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (12 vols., Leiden: Brill, 1960–2008) Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas and Everett Rowson (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2007), www.brillonline.com E. Yarshater (gen. ed.), Encyclopaedia Iranica (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns Inc., 1985–) S. N. Eisenstadt, The political systems of empires (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1963) J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic world: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006) J. H. Elliott, Spain, Europe and the wider world, 1500–1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009) Early Medieval Europe Foreign and Commonwealth Office Kouky Fianu and DeLloyd J. Guth (eds.), Écrit et pouvoir dans les chancelleries médiévales: espace français, espace anglais (Louvain-la-Neuve: Fidem, 1997) T. Rymer, Foedera, conventiones, litterae . . ., ed. A. Clarke and J. Caley (London, 1816) Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in Graham Burchell, Colin Godon and Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality: with two lectures by and an interview with Michel Foucault (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 102

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xx

List of Abbreviations

Fr. G. Gk. Garnsey & Saller, Empire Goldstone & Haldon, ‘Ancient states’ Greene, ‘Negotiated authorities’

HAHR HMSO HJ Howe, Empire HR HZ ICS IGT Irigoin & Grafe, ‘Bargaining’ IT JICH Jones, LRE

JRS JWH KNA Koebner, Imperialism

L. Lieven, Empire Lugard, Dual mandate

French German Greek Peter Garnsey and Richard Saller, The Roman empire: economy, society and culture (London: Duckworth, 1987) Jack A. Goldstone and John F. Haldon, ‘Ancient states, empires, and exploitation: problems and perspectives’, in Morris & Scheidel, Dynamics, pp. 3–29 Jack P. Greene, ‘Negotiated authorities: the problem of governance in the extended polities of the early modern Atlantic world’, in Jack P. Greene, Negotiated authorities: essays in colonial political and constitutional history (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994) Hispanic American Historical Review His/Her Majesty’s Stationery Office Historical Journal Stephen Howe, Empire: a very short introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) Historical Research Historische Zeitschrift Indian Civil Service Inspection Générale du Travail (head office of IT) Alejandra Irigoin and Regina Grafe, ‘Bargaining for absolutism: a Spanish path to nation-state and empire building’, HAHR 88:2 (2008), 173–209 Inspection du Travail Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History A. H. M. Jones, The later Roman empire, 284–602: a social, economic and administrative survey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1964) Journal of Roman Studies Journal of World History Kenya National Archives Richard Koebner and Helmut Dan Schmidt, Imperialism: the story and significance of a political word, 1840–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964) Latin Dominic Lieven, Empire: the Russian empire and its rivals (London: John Murray, 2000) Frederick Lugard, The dual mandate in British tropical Africa (London: Archon Books, 1965 [first published London, 1922])

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List of Abbreviations MGH MIöG Morris & Scheidel, Dynamics MWG NAI NCMH OHBE

PBA pl. Potter, IPA P&P PRO PROME

r. RA RC Reuter, MPMM

Reynolds, ‘Empires’ RHS Rot. chart. Rot. lib. Rot. litt. claus., 1204–24 Rot. litt. pat. Rot. norm. RS SAHR sing.

xxi

Monumenta Germaniae Historica Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel (eds.), The dynamics of ancient empires: state power from Assyria to Byzantium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe National Archives of India The New Cambridge Medieval History, 8 vols. (1995–2004) Wm. Roger Louis (gen. ed.), The Oxford history of the British empire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–9) Proceedings of the British Academy plural David C. Potter, India’s political administrators: from ICS to IAS (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996) Past and Present Public Record Office Chris Given-Wilson (ed.), The parliament rolls of medieval England, available online at www.sd-editions.com /PROME reigned/ruled Rapport annuel (‘annual report’) Record Commission Timothy Reuter, Medieval polities and modern mentalities, ed. Janet L. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Susan Reynolds, ‘Empires: a problem of comparative history’, HR 79:204 (2006), 151–65 Royal Historical Society Rotuli chartarum in turri Londinensi asservati, 1199–1216, ed. T. D. Hardy (London: RC, 1837) Rotuli de liberate ac de misis et praestitis, ed. T. D. Hardy (London: RC, 1844) Rotuli litterarum clausarum in turri Londinensi asservati, 1204–24, ed. T. D. Hardy, 2 vols. (London: RC, 1833–44) Rotuli litterarum patentium in turri Londinensi asservati, ed. T. D. Hardy (London: RC, 1835) Rotuli normanniae, ed. T. D. Hardy (London: RC, 1835) Rolls Series Spanish American Historical Review singular

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xxii

List of Abbreviations

Scales & Zimmer, Power Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer (eds.), Power and the nation in European history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) Sp. Spanish Spangenberg, BB Bradford Spangenberg, British bureaucracy in India: status, policy and the I.C.S. in the late 19th century (Delhi: Manohar, 1976) TNA The National Archives of the United Kingdom CO (Colonial Office) FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) WO (War Office) TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Weber, E&S Mas Weber, Economy and society: an outline of interpretative sociology, ed. and trans. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) Weber, FMW H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (ed. and trans.), From Max Weber: essays in sociology, new edn (London: Routledge, 1991) Weber, Theory Max Weber, The theory of social and economic organization, ed. and trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (1st edn, London: Hodge, 1947; 2nd edn, New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1965) WO War Office Wong & Sayer, Yoke-Sum Wong and Derek Sayer (eds.), Twenty years of British state the Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. i: essays on the British state (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008)

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Part I Introduction

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1

Empires, Bureaucracy and the Paradox of Power Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons

Discernable across the flux of history is a persistent trend: the proclivity of human groups to establish large-scale and durable political formations that rule over subject populations of different ethnicities, religions and cultures – in short, to build empires. On this narrow point, scholars appear to have achieved consensus.1 But having gained power, usually through violent conquest, how did empires rule over different peoples across vast expanses of space and time? Or to recalibrate the question with the particular concerns of the present volume in mind: how did relatively small numbers of imperial bureaucrats govern large numbers of subordinated peoples? Dane Kennedy has aptly described this as ‘one of the most persistent conundrums to arise from the study of Western Imperialism’.2 Indeed, we can amplify his observation: this administrative sleight of hand is a conundrum of world history. It is also a matter with an urgent contemporary resonance. The past decade has witnessed a surge of work on the subject of empire inspired by what might be termed the ‘imperial turn’ in contemporary world affairs. Much of this literature swirls around a deceptively simple question: ‘what is an empire?’ Any satisfactory answer must take account of political structures and forms of governance – of how real empires actually ran. This book represents a collaborative effort to advance our understanding of these issues by exploring the power and limits of bureaucracy in historical empires across a broad canvas, from ancient Rome to the dismantling of European empires after World War ii. 1

2

John Darwin describes empire as the ‘default setting’ for large-scale political formations until the past two centuries (After Tamerlane: the global history of empire since 1405 (London: Allen Lane, 2007), p. 23), a phrase echoed in Ashley Jackson, The British empire: a very short introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 11; and Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Projecting power: empires, colonies, and world history’, in Douglas Northrop (ed.), A companion to world history (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 263. See also Lieven, Empire, p. xvi (‘[empires] are one of the commonest forms of state in history’); Howe, Empire, p. 1 (‘a great deal of the world’s history is the history of empires’); Goldstone & Haldon, ‘Ancient states’, p. 19 (‘[the] typical formation by which large territorial states were ruled for most of human history’); Burbank & Cooper, Empires, p. 8 (‘[empires] played a long and critical role in human history’). Dane Kennedy, ‘Imperial history and post-colonial theory’, JICH 24:3 (1996), 357.

3

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4

Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons

Such chronological and geographical scope, not to mention the range of disciplinary backgrounds and theoretical dispositions represented among our authors, is unusual in a book of this sort. It is quite deliberate. We explicitly reject the notion that an unbridgeable chasm separates historicist and generalist positions, ‘splitters’ and ‘lumpers’.3 Our methodological point of departure is that a diachronic approach to the history of empires is mutually enriching for all the sub-disciplines involved, and that it is possible to engage in long-range comparison while attending closely to geographical specificity, human agency and change over time. The objective is not to provide a ‘comparative history’ but rather what Frederick Cooper has called, in another context, a ‘history that compares’ – that is, a history that compares while retaining a high level of sensitivity to the specifics of time and place and refrains from invoking a totalizing explanatory framework that elides the varied experiences of the past.4 We begin by considering the contested nature of the keywords at the heart of the book – ‘empire’ and ‘bureaucracy’ – and examine how they can be put to work together in pursuit of meaningful comparisons across time and between cultures without ‘sweeping the particular under the global’.5 To clarify the problem of conceptualization, we make a basic distinction between concepts as analytical categories and concepts as historical ideas.6 Our working concept of empire as a category of analysis is as follows: an extended and durable polity in which a core society exercises formal and authoritarian power over subordinated peoples of outlying territories gained or maintained by coercion. Bureaucracies played a role (albeit more often in aspiration than result) in providing empires with a means of articulating social power and marshalling resources in regions remote from the imperial core. In pursuit of these ends, imperial bureaucracies were authoritarian, extractive and backed by violence. 3

4 5 6

For a recent argument for the importance of long-range historical analysis, see Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The history manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); David Armitage, ‘Horizons of history: space, time, and the future of the past’, History Australia 12:1 (2015), 207–25. Frederick Cooper, ‘Race, ideology, and the perils of comparative history’, AHR 101:4 (1996), 1122–38 (quotation at 1135). Ibid. What we refer to, for the sake of clarity, as ‘historical ideas’ would in German scholarship fall under the banner of the ‘history of concepts’ (G. Begriffsgeschichte), a discipline associated especially with Reinhart Koselleck. A distinct approach to ‘historical concepts’ is that of the socalled Cambridge school of political thought, led by J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner, on which see Kari Palonen, ‘The history of concepts as a style of political theorizing: Quentin Skinner’s and Reinhart Koselleck’s subversion of normal political theory’, European Journal of Political Theory 1:1 (2002), 91–106; Melvin Richter, The history of political and social concepts: a critical introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). For an application of these approaches to the concepts ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’, see Helge Jordheim and Iver B. Neumann, ‘Empire, imperialism and conceptual history’, Journal of International Relations and Development 14:2 (2011), 153–85.

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Empires, Bureaucracy and the Paradox of Power

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But, for all that, their capacity to rule directly was often limited by the tiny numbers of bureaucratic personnel, by the problem of communications and, most of all, by the difficulty of ruling ‘different’ peoples who do not want to be ruled, the troublesome subjects that Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) described as a ‘seething, whining, weakly hive, impotent to help itself, but strong in its power to cripple, thwart, and annoy the sunken-eyed man who, by official irony, was said to be “in charge” of it’.7 It is Kipling’s acknowledgement of the ‘official irony’ of his invented bureaucrat’s position that gives this passage its particular valence. The imperial bureaucrat is the local representative of the might of empire, yet he appears ludicrously ineffectual because his real latitude for the exercise of power is so restricted. Here the mask of imperial power is let slip, bringing us face to face with an inherent paradox or contradiction in how bureaucracy operates on the scale of empires, as opposed to states. While the development of a bureaucratic apparatus, however minimal, was required to consolidate formal control over territorial acquisitions, it also acted in certain circumstances to undercut imperial power. Common to all the empires discussed in this volume was the challenge of maintaining a treacherously unstable equilibrium between integration and fragmentation, between assimilation and differentiation. The balance was liable to be upset precisely because empires are dynamic not static: they change in response to internal tensions and external pressures of various kinds – political, military, religious, cultural, economic. ‘More bureaucracy’ is often the solution of the bureaucrat faced by change. In point of fact, these chapters show how the expansion of bureaucracy can destabilize imperial power because the attempt to rule directly alienates the very elites without whose compliance imperial rule would have been impossible in the first place. I America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish. We wish for others only what we wish for ourselves – safety from violence, the rewards of liberty, and the hope for a better life. – George W. Bush (2002) Unlike the old empires, we don’t make these sacrifices for territory or for –Barack Obama (2011)8 resources. We do it because it’s right. 7 8

The phrase occurs in Kipling’s short story ‘The education of Otis Yeere’ (first published 1888, later collected in Wee Willie Winkie and other stories). Graduation speech at West Point delivered by President George W. Bush, 1 June 2002 (http:// georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html); remarks by President Barack Obama and the First Lady on the end of the war in Iraq, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, 14 Dec. 2011 (www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/12/14/remarks-presidentand-first-lady-end-war-iraq).

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6

Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons

Empires are very much a hot topic at present in the ‘public sphere’. Much of the interest was prompted by a debate that was visible even before September 11, 2001, but which grew exponentially after that date, concerning the merits and existence of an ‘American empire’.9 In large part, the literature on America-asempire can be characterized as a twenty-first-century form of pamphleteering by hand-wringing policy wonks and chest-pounding public intellectuals from all sides of the political spectrum. Its interest is primarily as a specimen of contemporary Anglo-American ideology rather than as a substantive contribution to the study of empire. But amid the noise and haste, learned and instructive interventions have set the present conjuncture in its historical and comparative context.10 For the wider community of scholars, the importance of the debate on an ‘imperial America’ is that the rising tide of interest in empire has raised all boats. Especially notable is the appetite for collaborative comparison.11 The most adventurous works responding to this trend amount to surveys of world history through the analytical frame of ‘empire’. This represents a significant reorientation of existing explanatory frameworks. As more than one scholar has commented, placing the emphasis on empire has the virtue of diverting attention from the ‘rise of the nation-state’, a reading of the past which, even at its most sophisticated, tends to teleology.12 The novelty of the present collection is the conceptual coupling of ‘empire’ with ‘bureaucracy’. The value of the pairing lies in a two-part claim: first that bureaucracy is basic to the subject matter of imperial history, and second that it 9

10

11

12

Stephen Howe, ‘The slow death and strange rebirths of imperial history’, JICH 29 (2001), 131–40. Already in the 1990s, the then-recent collapse of the Soviet Union excited interest in the ‘end of empires’: Barkey & von Hagen, After empire; Alexander Motyl, Imperial ends: the decay, collapse, and revival of empires (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). For works that are especially successful in setting America in the context of the comparative history of empire, see Charles S. Maier, Among empires: American ascendancy and its predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Dane Kennedy, ‘Essay and reflection: on the American empire from a British imperial perspective’, International History Review 29:1 (2007), 83–108; Alejandro Colás, ‘Open doors and closed frontiers: the limits of American empire’, European Journal of International Relations 14:4 (2008), 619–43; Paul A. Kramer, ‘Power and connection: imperial histories of the United States in the world’, AHR 116:5 (2011), 1348–91; Julian Go, Patterns of empire: the British and American empires, 1688 to the present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Important examples include Alcock et al., Empires; Fredéric Hurlet (ed.), Les empires, antiquité et moyen âge: analyse comparée (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008); Walter Scheidel (ed.), Rome and China: comparative perspectives on ancient world empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Dina Rizk Khoury and Dane Kennedy, ‘Comparing empires: the Ottoman domains and the British Raj in the long nineteenth century’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27:2 (2007), 233–44; Bang & Bayly, Tributary empires. For a review article, see Phiroze Vasunia, ‘The comparative study of empires’, JRS 101 (2011), 222–37. A. G. Hopkins, ‘Back to the future: from national history to imperial history’, P&P 164 (1999), 198–243, esp. 201–7; Frederick Cooper, ‘Empire multiplied: a review essay’, CSSH 46:2 (2004), 247–72, at 247; Frederick Cooper, ‘States, empires, and political imagination’, in Cooper, Colonialism, pp. 153–203.

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Empires, Bureaucracy and the Paradox of Power

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is especially useful to the comparativist. Bureaucracy was an essential component of imperial rule. However informal or absent-minded an empire may be in its beginnings, and this itself is often the subject of controversy, there will arrive what has been termed the ‘hour of the bureaucrats’.13 Empires typically began with military conquests, but a conquest must entrench itself with an institutionalized system of ruling the vanquished population, other than assimilation, if it is to result in an empire. Once established, imperial bureaucracies sought to coordinate, even if they could not entirely control, the means of coercion, the means of persuasion and the means of production – the three constituent elements of social power identified by W. G. Runciman.14 The second part of our claim concerns utility. For the comparativist, the virtue of the coupling of bureaucracy with empire is that it provides a common point of reference transcending time and place when identifying continuities in how different peoples have been ruled differently.15 By bringing the analysis of bureaucracy to an imperial scale, the volume helps us perceive a fundamental distinction in the nature of rule in empires and states, specifically a key difference in the nature of the problems with which the bureaucracies of empires and states respectively had to contend. Here the spatial context of power is important, notably the predicament of imperial functionaries and intermediaries stretched and pulled between the vagaries of politics at the imperial core and the realities of ruling on the periphery. But the difference was more than simply one of scale. It was also one of function. Whereas state bureaucracies draw legitimacy from the uniformity of their rule, imperial bureaucracies were frequently predicated on the ‘rule of difference’ and required a legitimizing ideology of rule premised on the inferiority of the governed.16 The emphasis in this volume is on the formal institutions of imperial governance. Much of the most influential scholarship on empire since the 1950s has explored the informal aspects of imperial rule, sparking interpretations as widely divergent as Robinson and Gallagher’s ‘imperialism of free 13

14

15 16

The term is that of Jürgen Osterhammel, Colonialism: a theoretical overview (Princeton: M. Wiener, 1997), p. 25. Osterhammel’s analysis only concerns colonial empires after 1500, but this phrase seems germane to earlier empires also. See W. G. Runciman, A treatise on social theory, vol. ii: substantive social theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 12, for coercive power, ideological power and economic power, and their respective ‘means’. Cf. the four ‘sources’ (ideological, military, economic and political) of social power described in the conceptual introduction of Michael Mann, The sources of social power, vol. i: A history of power from the beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 22–7. ‘The concept of empire presumes that different peoples within the polity will be governed differently’ (Burbank & Cooper, Empires, p. 8). For a seminal discussion, see Edward W. Said, Culture and imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993), esp. the description of ‘the imperium as a protracted, almost metaphysical obligation to rule subordinate, inferior, or less advanced peoples’ (quotation at p. 10).

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8

Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons

trade’,17 Foucault-inspired ‘postcolonial discourse theory’18 and the transcendent and de-territorialized ‘empire’ of Hardt and Negri.19 These interpretations share common ground in their concern to show that the full reach of imperial power extends far beyond formal institutions. Informal empire was often more sustainable and effective, and was certainly cheaper, than formal empire. But the focus on bureaucracy assists us in locating the vulnerabilities and contradictions in the very nature of imperial rule, rather than seeking them at the penumbra. It compels us to reconsider formal empire and then account for its weaknesses. Renewed emphasis on formal empire might well be interpreted as a return to fundamentals. It would, however, be unfortunate if this were understood as sounding a retreat to top-down imperial history. Constitutional, diplomatic and administrative history once provided the dominant mode in the historiography of empires, as of individual nation-states. This approach was already falling from favour by the mid-twentieth century with the rise of social, and later cultural, history. Viewed in this light, the historiography of imperial institutions resembles an aged Cinderella, memories of whose illustrious presence at the ball linger on, though in her dotage she is unglamorous and overlooked. Our application of the term ‘bureaucracy’ is intended to provide more than a facelift. The primary objection to the older historiography is not that it was dry as dust (though it often was), but rather that it was narrow in its range of interests. Too often metropolitan imperial history has been ‘armchair’ imperial history. Bureaucracy carries with it a broader range of application than conventional history of administration. The term encourages us to think beyond administrative technicalities to how bureaucracy operated as part of the social systems and political cultures of empires.20 This requires us to raise our eyes beyond the metropolitan administration and to explore the articulation of power on the peripheries, the ‘lived experience’ of imperial bureaucratic rule, the identity of bureaucrats, the role of bureaucracy in shaping historical memory and creating a shared imperial space, and the social and ideological impact of bureaucracy on subject peoples. 17 18

19

20

John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The imperialism of free trade’, Economic History Review 6:1 (1953), 1–15. By way of introduction to a vast literature, see Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: an historical introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); and for a positive assessment of what postcolonial theory offers conventional imperial historiography, see Dane Kennedy, ‘Imperial history and post-colonial theory’. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). For an insightful discussion of Hardt and Negri, see Alejandro Colás, Empire (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), ch. 5. For discussions of bureaucracy as part of broad social and political processes, see Eugene Kamenka, Bureaucracy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); David Beetham, Bureaucracy, 2nd edn (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996), esp. ch. 2.

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II

Scope and Content of the Collection This book takes as its subject the operations of bureaucracy – however minimal or intensive – in historical empires. Individual chapters examine different component parts of the bureaucratic engine, but across the collection, the chapters suggest how the imperial machine functions (or, as often as not, malfunctions) as an interlinked system of rule. We do not seek to isolate ‘bureaucratic empires’ as a particular category deemed suitable for comparison on the basis of an a priori assessment of similitude.21 Nor do we pretend to be comprehensive in our coverage of empires since Late Antiquity – something that no single volume could reasonably hope to achieve.22 Instead we aim for representative coverage while being purposefully eclectic in our choice of examples and in our embrace of plural methodological and theoretical positions. The studies presented here are not restricted by historical era, by geography or by economic structure – the most common denominators of empires in the existing scholarly literature. Instead the volume considers within a single analytical frame ancient and modern empires, Western and non-Western empires, land empires and seaborne empires, tributary empires and commercial empires. Parts III and IV of the book, which are ordered chronologically, explore the bureaucracies of Western empires. Running through these chapters are two strands. The first explores empire-building within mainland Europe and the projection of European power overseas. Among the empires that receive attention here are Rome and its twin descendants in the Middle Ages – the Byzantine empire in the East and the Holy Roman Empire in the West, the Spanish and Napoleonic empires in the ‘age of expansion’, and the French overseas empires in the era of the ‘new imperialism’ (c.1880 onwards). A second strand of essays, woven through Parts III and IV, examines the British empire and its precursors, with contributions on the Angevin empire (1154–1204) and England’s overseas empire in the late Middle Ages (1259–1453), colonial North America, the British Raj, and decolonization in British Africa after World War ii. The chapters in Part II place the dynamics of Western empires in world-historical perspective by providing examples of nonWestern and non-literate imperial bureaucracies: Song China, the Incas, the early Arabic caliphates and the Ottomans. 21 22

‘Historical bureaucratic empires’ are the focus of the analysis in Eisenstadt, Empires. Among the more obvious omissions are (in the ancient world) the Assyrian, Babylonian, Achaemenid, Athenian and Egyptian empires, for which see Morris & Scheidel, Dynamics; Eric H. Cline and Mark W. Graham (eds.), Ancient empires: from Mesopotamia to the rise of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and from period c.1000 ce to the twentieth century, the Malian, Safavid, Mughal, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Soviet and Japanese empires.

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10

Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons

While the volume makes a virtue of bringing together subjects that are normally kept apart, we do not make light of the formidable obstacles presented by the comparative history of empires. Two interrelated difficulties are worth highlighting. The first concerns evidence. The archives and records that provide the fodder for much historical research are themselves the physical residue of the historical bureaucracies that are the object of this enquiry. Archival evidence is biased in at least three ways. The records privilege the viewpoint of the conquerors over the conquered; they survive in greater abundance for more recent eras; and they are dramatically skewed towards the temperate West.23 The quantity of surviving evidence affects our assumptions about past societies more than we often acknowledge. Societies with fewer written records (whether medieval Western or more recent non-Western societies) are far more likely to be depicted by empire-builders or subsequent historians as ‘backward’ and uncivilized – as pre-‘modern’. Mass survival of documents is seductive in an equally problematical way: it encourages us to confide in the normative power of the ‘state’.24 A second difficulty arises from qualitative assessments about the sophistication of one imperial bureaucracy as against another. We should not assume that historical bureaucracies sought to maximize control in the manner attributed to the modern territorial state; it follows that it is not necessarily a sign of ‘failure’ if imperial bureaucracies did not achieve the same level of penetration into their respective societies.25 The imperial bureaucracies surveyed in this volume varied widely in terms of size, complexity and ‘rationality’ across the two millennia explored by the book.26 The contrasts are most starkly visible between empires: witness the extremes of the rational bureaucracy of the Song (with more than 30,000 officials and perhaps some 200,000 more clerical staff) as against the administration of the medieval German Reich, whose officials can be measured in dozens not hundreds, or the more familiar contrast between the bureaucratized transatlantic empire overseen by the Spanish 23

24

25 26

Archives in non-temperate climates are doubly disadvantaged. Without proper preservation policies, paper will become dust in a tropical climate within one or two centuries; but it is precisely in such climate zones that disparities in contemporary economic development make it difficult to implement the policies necessary for preservation (Lost memory: libraries and archives destroyed in the twentieth century, UNESCO Memory of the World Programme (Paris, 1996), p. 31). Deliberate ‘weeding’ of old documents might also be the policy of bureaucrats in need of space: see Richard Britnell, ‘Pragmatic literacy beyond Christendom’, in Britnell (ed.), Pragmatic literacy, east and west, 1200–1330 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1997), esp. pp. 186–8, for a comparative discussion of archival conservation and ‘weeding’ in the Latin Christendom, Song China, Kamakura Japan and the cAbbāsid caliphate. On this point, see the discussion by Gillingham (Chapter 9, pp. 197–9) and Crooks (Chapter 11, pp. 256, 270, 276) of the ‘precociously bureaucratic’ medieval English ‘state’; and also Heath (Chapter 15, pp. 365–9) and Cooper (Chapter 16, pp. 392–3) on the ‘modern’ colonial state. A point brought out by Given-Wilson (Chapter 4, p. 96) and Scales (Chapter 10, pp. 247–9). On rationalities, see David d’Avray, Rationalities in history: an essay in weberian comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

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monarchy and the ‘bureaucratically challenged’ empire of the British in North America. Without due caution, long-range historical comparison becomes a parlour game. The later Roman empire was staffed by a civil service of perhaps 34,000,27 precisely the same size as the modern-day civil service of the European Commission, which is itself dwarfed (contrary to popular myths about a Brussels festooned in red tape) by the bloated national bureaucracies of the constituent states of the European Union.28 This is a nice coincidence, but an absolute comparison between late Rome and the European Commission tells us little of significance, just as direct comparisons between Rome’s military power and that of present-day America are virtually meaningless. It is relative comparison that is significant.29 By recent standards, later Roman bureaucracy was modest. But the fact remains that, as Michael Whitby shows in Chapter 6, late Roman bureaucracy bulked large relative to that of the ‘undergoverned’ or ‘proto-bureaucratic’ early empire, and indeed compared to many later empires surveyed in this volume.30 Likewise, while debates may rage among Sinologists about the efficiency or otherwise of Chinese government, it is hard to gainsay Patricia Ebrey’s observation that ‘when the Chinese bureaucracy is viewed in comparative terms . . . it was remarkably well-organized and effective’.31 Historical phenomena cannot be properly assessed when abstracted from the peculiar circumstances of time and place. Indeed, as Bruce Berman has remarked: ‘it is precisely [the] peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of a society that may be the most important thing shaping its historical development and contemporary significance.’32 By the same token, imperial societies cannot be fully understood unless specialists are willing to extend their gaze beyond the borders of their own particular empire. 27

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Christopher Kelly, ‘Emperors, government and bureaucracy’, in Averil Cameron and Peter Garnsey (eds.), CAH, vol. xiii: The late empire, A.D. 337–425 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 163, n. 132. See also Whitby (Chapter 6, p. 130). The figure of 34,000 is for the Commission of the enlarged EU representing 28 countries. The civil service of the United Kingdom in 2011 was 498,433 (Office for National Statistics, Civil Service Statistics, 2011: www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_237745.pdf); that of France more than 2 million, with 40,000 serving the city of Paris alone. For a comparison between the European civil service and the public administrations of the constituent national governments of the EU, see the remarks of the vice president of the European Commission, Maroš Šefčovič, ‘A European civil service fit for the 21st century’ (Speech 12/249, European Policy Group, Brussels, 10 May 2012): http://ec.europa.eu/civil_service/index_en.htm. As argued by Kennedy, ‘On the American empire from a British imperial perspective’, 108. Garnsey & Saller, Empire, p. 20 (quotation). Although note Whitby’s important qualification concerning ‘uncosted’ administrative contributions (for example, of the cities) in the Roman republic and early empire (Chapter 6, pp. 139–40); and for the corollary of this, that in the late Roman empire (fifth and early sixth centuries ce) centrally appointed officials tended to be local aristocrats, see Chris Wickham, ‘Tributary empires: late Rome and the Arab caliphate’, in Bang & Bayly, Tributary empires, pp. 205–13, at 210. See Ebrey (Chapter 2, p. 47). Bruce J. Berman, ‘ “A palimpsest of contradictions”: ethnicity, class, and politics in Africa’, in International Journal of African Historical Studies 37:1 (2004), 13–31, at 17.

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Empire and Bureaucracy as Keywords The organizing concepts around which all the chapters in this volume revolve are keywords in the sense intended by Raymond Williams: words that are as slippery in meaning as they are indispensable because of their general significance in contemporary culture and society. Historical, scholarly and popular usages encrust around such words, endowing them with discrepant meanings that render them sluggish when deployed in specialist analysis. But keywords are too useful to be dispensed with because (to paraphrase Williams) the problem of their meanings is inextricably bound up with the problem that the words themselves are used to discuss.33 To invent new terms or brandish previously discarded alternatives clouds as much as it clarifies. An alternative is to heed the advice of Susan Reynolds, who has exhorted scholars to distinguish carefully between words, concepts and phenomena – that is, the words we employ, the concepts or ideas that lie behind those words, and the historical phenomena to which those words and concepts are taken to apply.34 A first step is to distinguish ‘our’ words – that is, the terms of analysis we use together with their associated concepts – from the words and concepts that appear in the historical record. For convenience, we describe this as a difference between analytical categories and historical ideas. While the analytical category and historical idea are often related, they are not commensurate with each other, and making the distinction clear helps us avoid a number of conceptual pitfalls.35 This procedure is crucial precisely because the classical idea of a concept with a fixed definition is a will-o’-the-wisp.36 In the case of empire, there is no consensus in the current scholarly literature as to what single feature links all those entities that described themselves, or have been described, as empires; 33 34

35

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Raymond Williams, Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), esp. p. 15. Reynolds, ‘Empires’, 151. Her approach is set out more fully in Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and vassals: the medieval evidence reinterpreted (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 12–13. This approach gains theoretical ballast from the distinction made between etics and emics (or external or internal perspectives) in other disciplines that engage in cross-cultural analysis, notably linguistics and anthropology. The two approaches are complementary, and neither can claim precedence over the other. For discussion, see J. W. Berry, ‘Emics and etics: a symbiotic conception’, Culture and Psychology 5:2 (1999), 165–71; Thomas N. Headland, Kenneth L. Pike and Marvin Harris, Emics and etics: the insider/outsider debate (London: Sage Publications, 1990). Gregory L. Murphy, The big book of concepts (Cambridge, MA; London: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2002): Murphy’s discussion shows that at a very basic level, human conceptual knowledge, ‘a phenomenologically simple cognitive process . . . turns out to be maddeningly complex’ (quotation at p. 2). By way of introduction, John Wilson, Thinking with concepts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), remains useful.

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nor is there consensus as to the necessary and sufficient conditions that should make up a definition. In extended usage, empire has become a metaphor for extremes of power, normally carrying a negative connotation. Still more problematic is the fact that the word is taken to imply universality. Empire does not, however, translate universally. This is clear from the briefest glance at the nomenclature of the large non-Western polities surveyed in Part II of this book: the Arabs’ Dār al-Islām (‘the abode of Islam’), the Incas’ Tahuantinsuyu (‘land of four parts’), the Chinese tianxia (‘all under heaven’) the Ottoman’s ‘domains of the House of Osman’.37 These terms are not in any sense direct equivalents of the historical idea of empire in the Western tradition, whose genealogy can be traced back to the Latin imperium, originally denoting the power of command vested in a Roman magistrate. It was only gradually, by the close of the principate of Augustus in the first century ce, that imperium came by extension to signify a territorial empire composed of the lands under the control of the Roman people.38 Once it had emerged, the territorial conception of empire proved enduring, following distinct paths of evolution both in the East (where it passed from Byzantium to the Ottomans and the Russians) and in the West, surviving the collapse of Western provinces in the fifth century ce, to be revived with the coronation of Charlemagne (d. 814) as emperor on Christmas Day 800.39 What became known as the Holy Roman Empire was only destroyed a millennium later in 1806 by Napoleon I, who in turn appropriated the ideology and iconography of empire.40 But to classify as empires only those polities that were content to describe themselves as such would be reductive, and not only because ‘empire denial’ is so common41 but more importantly because we would be left with an absurdly Eurocentric category restricted to the past two millennia. The usage would even be restrictive within continental Europe. Latin Christendom knew only one emperor, so while the Plantagenet kings of England were content to bask in the reflected glory of past 37

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See pp. 32, 60, 81, 114. For further discussion of nomenclature in non-European ‘empires’, see John Gilissen, La notion d’empire dans l’histoire universelle (Éditions de la librairie encyclopédique, 1973), pp. 787–9. There are studies of non-Western empires in Maurice Duverger, Le concept d’empire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1980); and for a series of Eurasian case studies, see Bang & Kołodziejczyk, Universal empire. J. S. Richardson, ‘Imperium romanum: empire and the language of power’, JRS 81 (1991), 1–9; J. S. Richardson, The language of empire: Rome and the idea of empire from the third century BC to the second century AD (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp. ch. 6. See Bachrach (Chapter 8, p. 170); and also Dimiter Angelov and Judith Herrin, ‘The Christian imperial tradition – Greek and Latin’, in Bang & Kołodziejczyk, Universal empire, ch. 6. Richard Koebner, Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961); Anthony Padgen, Lords of all the world: ideologies of empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500–c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); James Muldoon, Empire and order: the concept of empire, 800–1800 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999). As Michael Mann observes in ‘American empires: past and present’, Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 45:1 (2008), 7–50, at 8.

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empires, they did not formally style themselves as emperors.42 Likewise, the name upon which the Spanish Habsburgs settled for the assemblage of lands over which they ruled was not the Spanish ‘empire’ but the monarquia española – the Spanish monarchy.43 Rome itself, during one of the most vigorous phases of its imperial expansion under the republic, was the archetypal case of an ‘unlabelled empire’ – a political system (whether inside or outside the Western tradition) that does not call itself an empire but which falls into the analytical category of ‘empire’. Faced with these complexities, some historians sidestep the issue of definitions altogether and apply the ‘quack test’ espoused by Felipe FernándezArmesto (consciously or unconsciously echoing Niall Ferguson): ‘if it looks like an empire, walks like an empire and quacks like an empire, you don’t need to define it as such.’44 A related approach is to adopt what Kathleen D. Morrison wryly dubbed the ‘“pornography definition” of empires – I can’t say what they are, but I know one when I see one’.45 An alternative is definitional abstinence. As Dominic Lieven has averred: ‘Empire is a fine subject, peopled by leopards and other creatures of the wild. To reduce all this to definitions and formulas is to turn the leopard into a pussycat, and even then into an incomplete but misshapen pussycat with three legs and no tail.’46 Lieven’s approach holds some attraction for historians, who are instinctively chary of homogenizing disparate historical experiences. The danger is that in the effort to avoid producing a three-legged feline, we find ourselves, like Alice in Wonderland, pondering a grin without a cat – a political formation that identified itself as an empire or which drew on the imperial idea but which does not really belong in the analytical category of empire because it has stopped short of, or passed through, ‘empire-dom’ in the course of its political development. Rather than ducking the issue of definitions, we propose to reformulate the underlying methodological problem. Concepts are intellectual constructs, tools intended to assist the analysis of phenomena. Treating concepts as things in themselves creates an illusion of absolute categories, which in turn leads to fruitless debates over classification. Outside the modelling of the social 42 44

45 46

See Crooks (Chapter 11, p. 255). 43 Elliott, Empires, p. 119; and Storrs (Chapter 12, p. 293). Felipe Fernández-Armesto, ‘Imperial measures’, Times Literary Supplement, 24 June 2010. Ferguson applied the ‘quack test’ in a public debate with Robert Kagan held at the American Enterprise Institute on 17 July 2003: ‘If it quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. If it quacks like an empire, it probably is an empire’ (www.aei.org/article/foreign-and-defense-policy/is-theunited-states-an-empire-article-1/). Kathleen D. Morrison, ‘Sources, approaches, definitions’, in Alcock et al., Empires, p. 3. Lieven, Empire, p. 417. Likewise Eric Hobsbawm concluded that indefinability poses relatively little practical difficulty when it comes to making comparisons: ‘Like Walter Bagehot’s “nation” ’, Hobsbawm declared, ‘our “empire” is recognizable even when we can’t define it . . . I don’t think these definitional obscurities need get in our way when we actually discuss our subject’ (Hobsbawm, ‘The end of empires’, in Barkey & Von Hagen (eds.), After empire, p. 12).

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sciences, historical empires only ever existed as particular forms of rule which for convenience we place into an analytical category. The task is not to define the word ‘empire’ prescriptively so as to declare alternative usages out of bounds but rather to make some basic distinctions that clarify how the concept is to be understood for present academic purposes – in other words, to define the category of cases that are to be compared. We have defined the analytical category of empire as ‘an extended and durable polity in which a core society exercises formal and authoritarian power over subordinated peoples of outlying territories gained or maintained by coercion’. Empire, in this usage, is a ‘family resemblance concept’ embracing a disparate class of cases across many centuries, both modern and premodern, both Western and non-Western.47 Our definition contains two core elements: an expansive, often unbounded, political structure and formal asymmetrical power relations between the dominant social group and its subject peoples. This distinguishes empire from the concept of the state as a territorially bounded polity in which peoples are ruled more or less uniformly.48 It is also distinct from ‘hegemony’, a word with the potential to cause confusion because all too often it serves as a fig leaf for empires in denial. Even when hegemony is used as a real concept, it has the potential to produce semantic chaos. At least three distinct meanings are in current use: ideological preponderance (as in Gramscian hegemony), informal influence (as in the British informal empire or, latterly, American ‘soft power’) and primacy over other theoretically equal powers (a usage found principally in international relations and political science).49 All three are distinct from our analytical category of empire. Bureaucracy is the younger of our keywords. Originally coined in 1765 (Fr. bureaucratie) to refer to a malady afflicting French government, the word quickly established itself as a term of disparagement for overbearing and 47

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An idea in the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein: although members of a family may not all have one feature that is exactly alike, their relations give rise to a general likeness which is recognizable (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen: Philosophical investigations, ed. and trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, 4th edn (Chichester: Blackwell, 2009), §§66–7). On family resemblances, see Michael Forster, ‘Wittgenstein on family resemblance concepts’, in Arif Ahmed (ed.), Wittgenstein’s philosophical investigations: a critical guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For a useful definition of the ‘state’ in the ancient world, see esp. Haldon (Chapter 7, p. 150 n. 4). For the various wider uses of ‘hegemony’, see Thomas R. Bates, ‘Gramsci and the theory of hegemony’, Journal of the History of Ideas 36:2 (1975), 351–66; Geraldo Zahran and Leonardo Ramos, ‘From hegemony to soft power: implications of a conceptual change’, in Inderjeet Parmar and Michael Cox (eds.), Soft power and US foreign policy: theoretical, historical and contemporary perspectives (Routledge: Abingdon and New York, 2010), ch. 2, pp. 12–31; Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Three hegemonies’, in Patrick O’Brien and A. Clesse (eds.), Two hegemonies: Britain 1846–1914 and the United States 1941–2001 (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2002), p. 357. For a specialist application of the term ‘Napoleonic hegemony’ in the historiography of the Grand Empire of Napoleon I, see Broers (Chapter 14, p. 346 n. 6).

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inefficient officialdom.50 It was received into English in the early nineteenth century with the precise meaning of ‘office tyranny’, and during the nineteenth century English writers tended to reserve the term to deprecate the ‘bureaucracy-ridden’ states of continental Europe.51 In this respect, the career of ‘bureaucracy’ as an attack word has much in common with ‘imperialism’, which first appeared in English in denunciation of the second French empire of Napoleon III (1852–70).52 And like ‘imperialism’ (which Sir Keith Hancock famously declared to be ‘no word for scholars’), ‘bureaucracy’ has occasionally been deemed to be so polyvalent and laden with negative associations that it is unfit for scholarly use.53 ‘Bureaucracy’ gained acceptance as a word for scholars through the sociology of Max Weber (1864–1920), whose work casts a long shadow on all subsequent studies.54 In his major and unfinished work of synthesis Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (‘Economy and society’), Weber sought to provide the tools for a comparative analysis of social power, notably a series of idealtypes – ‘ideal’ in the sense of existing as an idea or archetype. As Sam Whimster discusses in Chapter 18, the elements of the ideal type were intensified to throw into relief the salient features of real historical examples, which Weber maintained never occur in a pure form.55 The most famous of these ideal types was bureaucracy, which Weber set within a tripartite classification of ‘legitimate domination’ composed of traditional, charismatic and legal-rational

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Martin Krygier, ‘State and bureaucracy in Europe: the growth of a concept’, in Kamenka and Krygier, Bureaucracy: the career of a concept, p. 22. See also the comments of Haldon (Chapter 7, p. 147). One of the earliest occurrences in English recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1818 and has a colonial connation: ‘Mr. Commisioner [sic], like his elder brothers, characteristically represented the bureaucratie, or office tyranny, by which Ireland has been so long governed’ (Lady Morgan, Florence Macarthy: an Irish tale, 4 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1918), vol. ii, part 1, p. 35). John Stuart Mill referred to the ‘bureaucracy-ridden nations of the Continent’ (Mill, Considerations on representative government (London, 1861), p. 85). Koebner, Imperialism, pp. 1–2. Subsequently the idea of ‘imperialism’ generated a large theoretical literature from the classic formulations of Lenin (Marxist) and John A. Hobson (liberal) onwards: see discussion in P. J. Cain and Mark Harrison (eds.), Imperialism: critical concepts in historical studies (London: Routledge, 2001); Patrick Wolfe, ‘History and imperialism: a century of theory, from Marx to postcolonialism’, AHR 102:2 (1997), 388–420. W. K. Hancock, Survey of British Commonwealth affairs, vol. ii (London, 1940), pp. 1–2. Cf. Martin Albrow, who recommends jettisoning the term ‘bureaucracy’ while continuing to conduct research on the underlying subject matter (Albrow, Bureaucracy, p. 125). A more optimistic assessment of the potential of the term is provided in Beetham, Bureaucracy. Notably on structural functionalism, especially the work of Talcott Parsons (1902–79) and two of his students: Robert K. Merton (1910–2003) and the systems theorist Niklas Luhman (1927–98). On the role of Parsons as translator of Weber, see Keith Tribe, ‘Talcott Parsons als Übersetzer der “Soziologischen Grundbegriffe” Max Webers’, in Klaus Lichtblau (ed.), Max Webers ‘Grundbegriffe’. Kategorien der kultur- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschung (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2006), pp. 337–66. See Whimster (Chapter 18, pp. 437–41).

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authority.56 Bureaucracy in its pure ideal-typical form was a ‘structure of domination’ characteristic of legal-rational forms of authority, closely associated with ‘modernity’, and distinct from patrimonial administration, which Weber depicted as personal, traditional and normally premodern. Bureaucracy’s success was attributable to its technical superiority to all other forms of organization. It was a precision instrument for achieving goals, the pinnacle of formal or ‘means-end’ rationality (G. Zweckrationalität).57 Despite Weber’s canonical position and subsequent influence, his ideal type never monopolized the conceptual history of bureaucracy. At almost precisely the same moment as Weber’s image of bureaucracy as a ‘frictionless machine’ was published, Franz Kafka (1883–1924) conjured up in fiction a counterimage of a dystopian bureaucracy in his final and unfinished novel Das Schloß (‘The castle’). Kafka’s bureaucracy is the very essence of irrational obsequiousness and inefficiency, dysfunctional precisely because of its insistence on hierarchies and its unwillingness to countenance the possibility of error – an idea possibly significant in studying the fall of empires because a slow bureaucracy cannot adapt swiftly to exogenous forces.58 Yet another usage takes us back to the original sense of bureaucracy as a form of rule (Gk. kratos) – that is, rule by the bureau – as opposed to bureaucracy as an instrument of rule. The distinction between bureaucrats as ‘decision-making personnel’ and not just ‘decision-implementing personnel’ is especially likely to become blurred in polities of the scale of empires, where communications are frequently slow or uncertain.59 Imperial bureaucrats, in other words, were often agents in their own right; they were not simply cogs in the machine of imperial administration. These various images of bureaucracy may appear to be discrepant, but each has a number of features that together form the analytical category of ‘bureaucracy’ with which the contributors in this book engage. Bureaucracy here refers to routine administrative activity delegated to office holders (who are often, but not always, professional career administrators), conducted on the basis of 56

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MWG, i/22–4: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte. Nachlass (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), pp. 157–234; Weber, E&S, vol. i, ch. 3; and ibid., vol. ii, ch. 11; the latter discussion appears also in Weber, FMW, ch. 8. Weber, E&S, vol. ii, p. 973: ‘The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production. Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and person costs – these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration.’ For further discussion of the ideal type, see also Whimster (Chapter 18, pp. 437–8). Randy Hodson, Andrew W. Martin, Steven H. Lopez and Vincent J. Roscigno, ‘Rules don’t apply: Kafka’s insights on bureaucracy’, Organization 20:2 (2013), 256–78. The distinction between ‘decision-making’ and ‘decision-implementing’ personnel forms part of the organizational schema of S. E. Finer’s three-volume work on the history of government: see esp. the conceptual prologue in Finer, The history of government from the earliest times, vol. i: ancient monarchies and empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 35–7.

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records (though not always written records), with some differentiation and specialization of offices that are organized hierarchically and are reliant on systems of communications. IV

Imperial Bureaucracies: Power and Vulnerability It was Talleyrand, the foreign minister of Napoleon I, who remarked in the course of a lecture on empire that ‘The art of putting men in their place is perhaps foremost in the science of government.’60 Imperial bureaucracy was more alchemy than science. It was the art of transforming conquered populations into obedient subjects – of keeping people in their place (figuratively, but also sometimes quite literally through the regimentation and control of space) when they did not want to be ruled. A substantial literature on the ‘colonial state’ has emphasized the transformative power of colonial projects. The case studies presented in this volume suggest that the norm was a more tangled imperial administrative structure and hit-and-miss bureaucratic process. Moving rather schematically outwards from the centre, the chapters suggest a general tendency towards a small and ramshackle organization at the imperial core; uncertain connections between metropole and colonies resulting in ‘negotiation’ rather than top-down imperative control; bureaucrats on the peripheries unable to penetrate too far without undermining their own authority; indigenous peoples displaying some capacity to turn bureaucracy to their own advantage; and, finally, the assimilation or acculturation of the conquerors giving rise to fears of ‘contagion’ spreading from the peripheries back to the imperial core. Cumulatively, these points bring out the paradoxical vulnerability and limitations of imperial bureaucracies. At the most general level, the chapters call into question the assumptions underpinning certain grand narratives of historical development. One point that many historians and sociologists imbibed from weberian sociology is that bureaucracy, in its fully fledged form, is the handmaiden of ‘modernity’ and the destiny of the modern (and, by implication, Western) state.61 Max Weber himself was a vigorous proponent of Germany’s expansionist ambitions, and bubbling under the surface of his work are assumptions that are Eurocentric and 60

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F. L’art de mettre des hommes à leur place est le premier, peut-être, dans la science du gouvernement (Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Essai sur les avantages à retirer des colonies nouvelles dans les circonstances présentes (Paris, 1840), pp. 330–1). On this aspect of Weber’s work, see Andreas Anter, Max Weber’s theory of the modern state: origins, structure and significance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), esp. pp. 78–9; Ken Morrison, Marx, Durkheim, Weber: formations of modern social thought, 2nd edn (London: Sage Publications, 2006), esp. p. 375.

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grounded in the era of the ‘new imperialism’.62 His concern to trace the patterns of historical development that gave rise to the modern state imbued his work with ‘a sometimes infelicitous evolutionary flavour’.63 In the hands of neoweberians, the development of bureaucracy and Western rationality has been elaborated into a linear narrative of the state’s ‘origins’ and ‘rise’, reaching its apotheosis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.64 Critics of state power have inadvertently returned the compliment to the power of the state by invoking Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’ to account for a ‘colonial modernity’ that was supposedly ushered in by Western imperial projects.65 This abiding linkage between bureaucracy, ‘modernity’ and the state is an association that this collection seeks to complicate and subvert by reconsidering the relationship between empire-building and state-formation. First, our case studies of imperial bureaucracies (plural) as opposed to bureaucracy (singular) suggest that any narrative of institutional developments should be lumpy, not linear. The wider realm of the Plantagenet kings of England in the late Middle Ages was, for instance, arguably more intensively supervised by the crown and its ministers than the early modern British empire in North America or, for that matter, the archaic chartered companies that ‘modern’ nation-states of Europe revived as a means of governing on the cheap in the era of the new imperialism.66 This is not to deny the extraordinary, almost exponential, increase in the number of officials employed by nation-states from the late nineteenth century, or the capacity of the state to reach into the very pockets of its citizens with little resistance.67 But these 62

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‘Weber sought world equality for Germany as a respectable colonial empire’ (Wolfgang Mommsen, Max Weber and German politics, 1890–1920, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 68–90, 137–41, quotation at 138). As observed by C. A. Bayly and P. F. Bang, ‘Introduction: comparing pre-modern empires’, Medieval History Journal 6:2 (2003), 169–87 (quotation at 184). For Weber’s own attempt to ‘scotch the idea that he was offering an evolutionary account of stages of bureaucratization’, see Whimster (Chapter 18, p. 441). Taken together, two of the better-known attempts to apply Weber’s sociology to the study of empires form a ‘stages of development’ narrative: Kautsky’s ‘aristocratic empires’ (which are traditional) give way to Eisenstadt’s ‘historical bureaucratic empires’: Eisenstadt, Empires; John H. Kautsky, The politics of aristocratic empires (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). The most sophisticated work in this vein is Michael Mann, The sources of social power, vol. ii: the rise of classes and nation-states, 1760–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. chs. 11–14, ‘The rise of the modern state, parts I–IV’. Randall Collins describes how ‘Mann’s account of the rise of the modern state is congruent with Weber’s theory of the rise of bureaucracy’, in Collins, ‘Mann’s transformation of the classic sociological traditions’, in John A. Hall and Ralph Schroeder, An anatomy of power: the social theory of Michael Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), at p. 27. For the literature on the medieval origins of the modern state, see Crooks (Chapter 11, p. 256 n. 25, p. 258 n. 41, p. 259 n. 42). See Heath (Chapter 15, pp. 366–9) and Cooper (Chapter 16, pp. 392–3). For Foucault’s 1978 lecture on this topic, see Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, esp. p. 103, where the modernization perspective is expressed clearly. See Crooks (Chapter 11, pp. 254–5). Mann, Sources of social power, vol. ii, ch. 13, ‘The rise of the modern state: III. Bureaucratization’, pp. 444–509.

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developments were not transposed onto imperial possessions in a systematic way. Even in the ‘age of bureaucracy’, which coincided with the spate of annexations that occurred in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, European empires were often a-modern, or de-modernizing, in their governing practices.68 The bureaucratization of empire in Africa had scarcely begun at the close of World War ii; as late as 1950 in French West Africa, the administration’s ability to record basic statistical information about its subject population (registers of births and deaths) was startlingly restricted, embracing only those resident within 10 kilometres of a recording centre.69 That such limitations in colonial knowledge could exist in a ‘modern’ empire makes it seem all the more remarkable that the quipucamayocs of Tahuantinsuyu (the specialist cadre of Inca bureaucrats) could achieve such high levels of information retrieval in respect of demographics and commodities using their mnemonic system of knots (quipus).70 Clearly a linear narrative of everincreasing bureaucratic complexity on a grand march towards modernity will not do. A second long-range observation is that territorially bounded ‘states’ did not burst out into empires when they passed a certain threshold of institutional cohesion and development – the point Kimberley Kagan has dubbed portentously the ‘imperial moment’.71 The trajectory of political development was normally much more complicated than a simple state-to-empire transformation. The bureaucratic apparatuses of metropolitan states and their dependencies were often heavily imbricated, developing in interaction with each other, so that drawing too sharp a distinction between the two distorts historical reality. At the imperial core, the bureaucracy dedicated specifically to the empire was frequently incoherent when it was not in fact inchoate. Official descriptions of administrative functions are a poor guide to administrative practice because they were so often written by bureaucrats eager to inflate their own power and prestige. They provide, at best, a normative statement of how the system ought to work. The Notitia dignitatum, which enumerates the major offices in the later Roman empire, appears to describe a well-ordered and hierarchical system, but it scarcely captures the messy realities of administration or the capacities of those at the centre of the empire to project their will onto the provinces.72 In the case of 68 69 71

72

Wolfgang J. Mommsen, The age of bureaucracy: perspectives on the sociology of Max Weber (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974). See Cooper (Chapter 16, p. 411) and Parsons (Chapter 17, p. 412). 70 See Cooper (Chapter 16, p. 408). See Given-Wilson (Chapter 4, pp. 87–91). Kimberly Kagan (ed.), The imperial moment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), esp. pp. 10–11, seeks to identify and explain the moment of transition at which state behaviour changed and ‘states’ became ‘empires’. Sam Barnish, A. D. Lee and Michael Whitby, ‘Government and administration’, in Averil Cameron, Bryan Ward-Perkins and Michael Whitby (eds.), CAH, vol. xiv: Late Antiquity and successors, A.D. 425–600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 166. See also the schematic of Byzantine administration discussed by Haldon (Chapter 7, pp. 157–8). For an analysis of intellectual models of administration put forward by scribeadministrators of the Islamicate empire, see Kristó-Nagy (Chapter 3, pp. 76–8).

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Britain, the bureaucracy charged with overseeing the empire remained small and cross-cutting into the twentieth century. In 1903, the Colonial Office had a staff of 113, and its role was supervisory rather than directive, administrative authority being vested in the governor ‘on the spot’.73 The supervision of other parts of the empire was divided among several departments including the Dominions Office (which became a separate office in 1925), the Foreign Office, the Admiralty (responsible for St Helena) and the India Office. Rather than the core acting as an incubator for empire, it was sometimes the process of empire-building itself that stimulated bureaucratic growth.74 It follows from this that the institutions of the core society were not exported to the peripheries in any sort of straightforward way. Imperial rule was a palimpsest. Overlapping patterns of indigenous and imported bureaucratic practice resulted in a confusing tangle as conquerors adapted themselves recursively to local conditions or relied on knowledge and expertise of existing bureaucrats. The co-option and repurposing of existing administrative systems are most obvious in the case of nomadic or ‘kinetic’ empires that conquered sedentary societies – the Arab conquest of large tracks of territory from the Sāsānian and eastern Roman empires in the seventh century, or the Mongol conquest of the southern Song which resulted in the Yuan dyansty (1271–1368).75 But continental Europe was itself a palimpsest of imperial formations every bit as much as it was a melting pot of nation-states. Napoleon’s obsession with regenerating the imperial space of Charlemagne was perhaps only surpassed by Charlemagne himself and his concern (or, at least, that of his medieval spin doctors) with the renewal (L. renovatio imperii) of the Roman empire in the West.76 A general tendency was for bureaucratization to kick in as empires moved from tributary extraction to control of labour and direct taxation, which required more detailed knowledge of subject populations.77 Increases in profitability 73

74

75

76

77

The idea that colonies might be administered directly from London was considered a ‘rank heresy’: see Ronald Hyam, ‘Bureaucracy and trusteeship in the colonial empire’, in Ronald Hyam, Understanding the British empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 213 (quotation). See Gillingham (Chapter 9, p. 199) for the argument that the Angevin empire can be cited in favour of the idea of empires as ‘nurseries of bureaucracy’. See also Crooks (Chapter 11, pp. 258–9). For the Islamic conquests, see Kristó-Nagy (Chapter 3, pp. 63–5); and on the Song–Yuan transition, see esp. John W. Dardess, ‘Did the Mongols matter? Territory, power, and the intelligentsia in China from the northern Song to the early Ming’, in Paul Jakov Smith and Richard Von Glahn (eds.), The Song–Yuan–Ming transition in Chinese history (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2003), ch. 3. On ‘kinetic empires’, see Pekka Hämäläinen, ‘What’s in a concept? The kinetic empire of the Comanches’, History and Theory 52 (2013), 81–90. See Bachrach (Chapter 8, pp. 170–1); Jean Tulard, ‘L’empire napoléonien’, in Duverger (ed.), Le concept d’empire, ch. 11; and Michael Broers, ‘Napoleon, Charlemagne, and Lotharingia: acculturation and the boundaries of Napoleonic Europe’, HJ 44:1 (2001), 135–54. On colonial knowledge, see Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: the British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

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resulted in a desire by metropolitan governments to tap wealth directly or shift costs to the peripheries through more bureaucratic oversight. As a result, the colonial state might become a testing ground for a more rigorous and penetrative bureaucratic rule that would have been quite unacceptable to the domestic population of the metropolitan nation-state.78 The results were neither expected nor intended. As Len Scales comments perceptively: ‘The proliferation or perpetuation of bureaucracy is no more a necessary symptom of an empire’s health than limited institutions reliably indicate its impending collapse.’79 In the case of both colonial North America and the possessions of the Spanish monarchy in South and Central America, the intrusiveness of the core ultimately broke down the ‘ties that bound’ the settler or creole populations to the monarchies, dispelling what Jack P. Greene calls ‘metropolitan charisma’.80 Likewise European empires in twentieth-century Africa unravelled during the phase of bureaucratic expansion after World War ii. Systems of communications might themselves form part of that metropolitan charisma.81 The Roman network of roads and bridges, estimated to have spanned some 100,000 kilometres, was lauded by a poet in the second century ce: ‘By cutting through mountains you have made land travel feasible; you have filled the deserts with way-stations, and you have civilized everything with your lifestyle and organization.’82 In fact, the roads were constructed in the first instance to facilitate troop movements and secondarily the transmission of information – in other words, to overcome a problem with which all empires have to contend: the tyranny of distance.83 Land empires have sought to control space through the development of physical infrastructures (roads and bridges) and courier systems. Using the cursus publicus, a Roman courier might expect to cover 80 kilometres in a day overland riding in relays.84 All roads in the ancient world may have led to Rome, but in the Andes the 40,000 kilometres of 78

79 80 81

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83 84

C. A. Bayly, Imperial meridian: the British empire and the world, 1780–1830 (London; New York: Longman, 1989); Elizabeth Kolsky, ‘Codification and the rule of colonial difference: criminal procedure in British India’, Law and History Review 23:3 (2005), 631–83; Jon E. Wilson, The domination of strangers: modern governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010 ), esp. p. 4: ‘Many characteristics of “British” political modernity emerged in colonial India before they occurred in Britain itself.’ See Scales (Chapter 10, p. 248). See Greene (Chapter 13, pp. 337–43); and see also Storrs (Chapter 12, pp. 315–17). For the figure of the Roman emperor minted on coinage as a ‘resonant symbol of emperor-wide scope, which by itself provided the empire with a measure of the “symbolic glue” that it had lacked under the Republic’, see Carlos F. Noreña, Imperial ideals in the Roman west: representation, circulation, power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 324 Richard J. A. Talbert, ‘Roads not featured: a Roman failure to communicate?’, in Susan E. Alcock, John Bodel and Richard J. A. Talbert (eds.), Highways, byways, and road systems in the pre-modern world (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 239. Neville Morley, The Roman empire: roots of imperialism (London: Pluto Press, 2010), p. 82. C. W. J. Eliot, ‘New evidence for the speed of the Roman imperial post’, The Phoenix 9 (1955), 76–80.

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Inca roads and bridges converged at Cusco.85 As Chris Given-Wilson describes, the fleet-footed chasquis of the Incas could carry messages in relay at a rate of more than 200 kilometres per day – four times faster than the Spaniards could complete the same journey on horseback.86 The cAbbāsid dynasty achieved even more impressive speeds with the barid (postal system): in one instance, the journey from Baghdad to Mecca (c.1,650 kilometres) was recorded as being covered in four days (410 kilometres per day).87 The problem of controlling far-flung subject peoples was not, however, wholly resolved by the communications revolution brought about by the telegraph and telephone, nor indeed, latterly, by instant satellite communication.88 Improvement in communications and the regimentation of knowledge disrupted local channels of affective communication and impaired the ability of the rulers to ‘listen in’ on native society.89 Meanwhile, higher levels of superintendence from the metropole brought under critical scrutiny the corrupt or kleptocratic tendencies of the empire’s own officials, when those were the very practices that provided local imperial bureaucrats and settler elites with a stake in the perpetuation of imperial rule in the first place. Finally, the communications and media revolutions occurred concurrently with (and, indeed, may have been a causal factor in) the hardening of collective solidarities and identities.90 The result was that the rule of subject peoples became more difficult, and empires become more unstable, even as the capacity to implement direct bureaucratic rule increased. Even with investment in communications, few empires (if any) had the human or economic resources to communicate with their subjects directly. Power was, therefore, delegated to or mediated through local power brokers, whether settlers or natives or even imperial bureaucrats themselves. The idea of a ‘negotiated empire’ is not a phenomenon attributable simply to the weakness of government in premodern eras.91 The great majority of the empires 85 86 87

88 89

90

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Catherine Julien, ‘The Chinchaysuyu road and the definition of an Inca imperial landscape’, in Alcock et al. (eds.), Highways, byways and road systems, ch. 7. See Given-Wilson (Chapter 4, p. 94). Adam J. Silverstein, Postal systems in the pre-modern Islamic world (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 191–2, although the necessary dependence on literary sources for this evidence makes the reliability of the figures uncertain. For further discussion of media and the ‘bias of communication’, see Whimster (Chapter 18, pp. 448–50). The phrase is that of C. A. Bayly in his seminal study: Empire and information: intelligence gathering and social communication in India, 1870–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. p. 3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, revised edn (London: Verso, 1994); and for the impact of a literate culture for a conquered population: Jack Goody, The logic of writing and the organization of society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 126, discussed by Given-Wilson (Chapter 4, p. 101 n. 55). Greene, ‘Negotiated authorities’, pp. 1–24; Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy (eds.), Negotiated empires: centers and peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York and London: Routledge, 2002).

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represented in this collection had to employ local interpreters, tax collectors, policemen and soldiers to govern cheaply and effectively. As John Lonsdale remarked of British rule in twentieth-century Africa: ‘power could not be exercised without giving some of it away.’92 In the early 1900s, there were at least a thousand Indian subordinate officials for each Indian Civil Service officer in the British Raj, and districts were so large that administrators might only visit a village once in five years.93 A strict dichotomy between indirect and direct rule is, therefore, somewhat misleading. It is better to imagine a continuum of institutionalized forms of negotiation. The continuum is discernable in the case of China under the Song, when the civil service was far larger and more ‘rational’ than any contemporaneous bureaucracy in the West. Even so, the functionaries of the Song could not penetrate far into a society of 100 million persons, while in its southern territories the Song shared power with some 350 local chiefdoms.94 Such ‘bridle and halter’ agreements were a commonplace part of the pragmatics of imperial rule. Frederick Lugard (1858–1945) dubbed the system as it pertained in the British dominions ‘indirect rule’, depicting local intermediaries as vessels of legitimate ‘traditional’ authority, even though they were essentially imperial creations occupying the lowest rung of the imperial administration.95 Long before such expediencies became an officially enunciated maxim, effective and longlasting administration depended on the ability of empire-builders to recruit allies from subject populations, whether they be the ‘cooked’ chiefdoms of the southern Chinese frontier, the curacas of Tahuantinsuyu, or the tribal ‘chiefs’ of the British empire. Even the Grand Empire of Napoleon I, which was exceptional in its attempt to impose an ‘unbreakable model’ of French administrative and legal practice throughout its conquered territories and satellite kingdoms, had to compromise at the lower echelons of the administration.96 Of course, the idea of negotiated authority can easily be carried too far. Systems of cooperative administration obscured the implicit violence that served as the undergirding of imperial bureaucracy.97 One party to the ‘negotiation’ was frequently able to hold the other at the end of a spear or a bayonet – an asymmetry in power relations brought out clearly in the 92

93 95

96 97

John Lonsdale, ‘The European scramble and conquest in African history’, in Roland Oliver and G. N. Sanderson (eds.), The Cambridge history of Africa, vol. vi: from 1870 to 1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 751. 94 See Heath (Chapter 15, p. 376). See Ebrey (Chapter 2, p. 48). Lugard, Dual mandate. For work on ‘indirect rule’, see Robin Jeffrey, ‘The politics of “indirect rule”: types of relationship among rulers, ministers and residents in a “native state” ’, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 13 (1975), 261–81; Colin Newbury, ‘Patrons, clients, and empire: the subordination of indigenous hierarchies in Asia and Africa’, JWH 11:2 (2000), 227–63. See Broers (Chapter 14, p. 349). For salutary comments to this effect concerning the Spanish monarchy, see Carlos Marichal, ‘Rethinking negotiation and coercion in an imperial state’, HAHR 88:2 (2008), 211–18.

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memorials that Caesar Augustus had erected to his own memory across the Roman empire at his death in 14 ce: ‘When foreign peoples could safely be pardoned, I preferred to preserve rather than to exterminate them.’98 The chillingly conditional nature of the clemency offered by Augustus brings to the fore the utility of the threat of violence in imperial rule. Violence was inherent to empire because most empires began with military conquest and were consolidated with terror and repression. In Charles Maier’s aphorism: ‘The lifeblood of empires was blood.’99 Explicit manifestations of violence became less frequent, however, once imperial rule became routinized, and imperial regimes that had to employ spectacular punitive violence on a regular basis were actually betraying their vulnerability. The implicit threat that overt resistance or defiance of imperial authority would be met with lethal force allowed a small number of bureaucrats and their local proxies to assert their authority over vastly larger subject populations. ‘Every conquered people needs a revolt’, Napoleon commented in 1806 to his brother Joseph (1768–1844), because the revolt could be answered with an exemplary punishment, massacre and licenced sexual violence that would cow the population and pave the way for the introduction of administrative reform.100 Once the reforms had been introduced, the gendarmerie brigades, formidably staffed with French veterans of the wars, served as a strong arm to enforce the rule of thinly spread civilian bureaucrats.101 Police brutality was likewise (as Deana Heath shows in Chapter 15) a quotidian aspect of British rule in the Raj. The fact that policing was delegated to local intermediaries allowed English magistrates to attribute the practice of torture to local conditions, which in turn ‘served to perpetuate a mode of violence that the colonial regime was allegedly pledged to eradicate’.102 Violent repression, and imperial rule in general, had a strong gendered dimension. Excepting the employment of female social welfare experts in the post–World War ii French and British empires, imperial bureaucrats were almost always men. This male dominance within imperial bureaucracies should not obscure the fact that women played an integral role in most systems of imperial rule. As conquest gave way to bureaucracy, administrators formed intimate relations with subject women to forge alliances and better understand local cultures.103 The eighteenth-century employees of the English East India Company often learned Indian languages by taking mistresses, whom they 98 100

101 103

99 Res gestae divi Augusti, 3.2. Maier, Among empires, p. 20. Quoted in Philip G. Dwyer, ‘Violence and the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars: massacre, conquest and the imperial enterprise’, Journal of Genocide Research 15:2 (2013), 117–31, at 122. See Broers (Chapter 14, p. 350). 102 See Heath (Chapter 15, p. 390). On the ancient world, see esp. Walter Scheidel, ‘Sex and empire: a Darwinian perspective’, in Morris & Scheidel, Dynamics, ch. 7.

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referred to colloquially as ‘sleeping dictionaries’.104 Some company employees married these women, but this became increasingly uncommon by the nineteenth century, when missionary criticism and pseudo-scientific racism rendered intimate cross-cultural relationships socially unacceptable. At the very least, these sorts of bonds dangerously blurred the distinction between ruler and subject. Consequently, some imperial regimes tried to limit the risks of cultural and political contagion by employing married bureaucrats. As Michael Broers describes in Chapter 14, wives often played a central, albeit informal, role in governing subject populations, advancing their husbands’ careers and limiting the contacts of male bureaucrats with female ‘natives’.105 Once the Suez Canal reduced transit times from Britain, respectable young women travelled to India each autumn on the ‘the fishing fleet’ to find husbands amongst the ranks of the Indian Civil Service and Indian Army officer corps. Protecting these metropolitan women from allegedly dangerous subject men consequently made gender a central buttress of the boundary that defined subjecthood. In reality, imperial bureaucrats still had intimate relations with subject women. In the French empire, it remained common practice for a young civil officer to learn local languages and cultures by taking a mistress. The British Colonial Office, by contrast, formally outlawed concubinage in 1909 on the grounds that ‘it is not possible for any member of the administration to countenance such practices without lowering himself in the eyes of the natives, and diminishing his authority to an extent which will seriously impair his capacity for useful work.’106 This official warning that sex with subject women risked ‘disgrace and official ruin’ did not put an end to the practice in the British empire. Looking back on his career as an administrative officer in colonial Kenya, Terence Gavaghan (d. 2011) acknowledged that his immediate superiors encouraged him to learn Swahili by taking a mistress, and he wistfully recalled learning about sex from African women.107 In earlier eras, rulers tried to limit the bureaucratic complications of sexual intimacy by employing eunuchs and celibate clerics as administrators, but Gavaghan’s testimony demonstrates that official expectations of administrative chastity were unrealistic in the contemporary era. These patterns of cultural exchange blurred the boundaries between ruler and ruled. ‘Through conquering we have been conquered’, lamented Pliny the Elder (d. 79 ce), expressing a fear common among empire-builders that the cultural mores of their more numerous alien subjects would come to envelop 104

105 106 107

Though, as Ronald Hyam notes, ‘the linguistic competence of the British in India was never much improved, and all mixed-blood Eurasians became English-speaking’ (Hyam, Empire and sexuality: the British experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 115). See Broers (Chapter 14, pp. 359–62). Hyam, Empire and sexuality, p. 157; and Ronald Hyam, ‘Concubinage and the colonial service: Silberrad and the Crewe circular, 1909’, Understanding the British empire, ch. 15. Terence Gavaghan, Of lions and dung beetles (Devon: Arthur Stockwell, 1999), pp. 35, 81.

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the conquerors themselves.108 István Kristó-Nagy describes in Chapter 3 the process of mutual assimilation and cultural synthesis between the Arab conquerors and their subjects that resulted in the new Islamic empire.109 From acculturation of conquerors on the periphery, it was but a short step to ‘contamination’ of the metropole itself. The eighteenth-century ‘nabobs’ (employees of the East India Company) shocked domestic sensibilities when they returned to Britain with an appetite for Indian hookahs, food, clothing, entertainments and women.110 But there was more to these concerns than xenophobia. Unencumbered by the ethical and legal constraints of metropolitan society, imperial administrators could give free rein to ambitions and appetites that might have appeared unseemly, corrupt or even criminal at home. Critics worried that these imperial vices might contaminate the metropole and threaten the established social and political order of Britain itself. Edmund Burke (1729–97) expressed the fear most clearly when he brought impeachment proceedings against the former governor-general of Bengal, Warren Hastings (1732–1818): ‘[Company servants] not only bring with them the wealth which they have, but they bring with them into our country the vices by which it was acquired.’111 The political theorist Hannah Arendt drew a similar conclusion more than a century later in noting that Britain remained a liberal democracy during the new imperial era by keeping politically ambitious men such as Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902) and the other new empire-builders carefully sealed off in the periphery.112 VI

The Goldilocks Paradox Taken collectively, the chapters in this volume raise fundamental questions about temporality and imperial lifespans. Some recent work on empire has sought to shift attention from the theme of ‘decline and fall’ to an explanation for the endurance and adaptability of certain empires.113 In Song China, as in 108

109 110 111 112 113

Pliny, Natural history, 24.5.5. Pliny was paraphrasing Horace (d. 8 bce), quoted in KristóNagy (Chapter 3, p. 64). Cicero and Seneca expressed similar sentiments (Benjamin Isaac, The invention of racism in classical antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 225). See Kristó-Nagy (Chapter 3, p. 55). Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: empire and identity in eighteenth-century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). P. J. Marshall, The impeachment of Warren Hastings (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 191 (quotation). Hannah Arendt, The origins of totalitarianism, 2nd edn (New York: Meridian Books, 1960), p. 155. Goldstone & Haldon, ‘Ancient states’, esp. p. 8; Barkey, Empire of difference. See also comments by Barkey (Chapter 5, pp. 105, 107), Whitby (Chapter 6, pp. 141–6), Haldon (Chapter 7, pp. 149–50, 167–9), Scales (Chapter 10, pp. 240–7) and Storrs (Chapter 12, p. 295).

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Late Rome and its Byzantine successor state, well-established bureaucracies served, to some extent, as a cohesive force binding the empire together. Bureaucracy might also provide what John Haldon calls ‘resistance’, that is, flexibility in times of stress that enabled the political structure to withstand crisis.114 Significantly, however, assimilation and incorporation had proceeded far enough in these cases that the empires in question were evolving into big societies or territorial states.115 In other instances, imperial bureaucracy showed itself to be brittle, with the most recent European empires boasting some of the poorest records of exercising power in a sustainable way. As Eric Hobsbawm once observed, the period between the scramble for Africa and decolonization occurred within the lifetime of a single individual: Winston Churchill (1874–1965).116 In this sense, the distinction between the mechanical and dystopian images of bureaucracy found in Weber and Kafka represents a false antithesis. The point is not that imperial bureaucracies were more kafkaesque than weberian, but rather that the attempt to rule directly, to override local power structures, was destabilizing and created tensions that pushed the course of political development in one of two directions: either towards the absorption of subject peoples and territories into an enlarged core or alternatively towards fragmentation and colonial independence. The paradox or contradiction of imperial rule may thus be voiced in the form of a Goldilocks argument: ‘You can’t have an empire without a bureaucracy, but too much bureaucracy and you won’t keep your empire for very long.’ This ‘Goldilocks paradox’ provides a heuristic for comparison because the degree of bureaucratization required for an empire to maintain a balance between integration and fragmentation, between assimilation and differentiation, was variable according to time, place and culture. When added to other factors, such as the strength of indigenous solidarities and the impact of exogenous political forces, the Goldilocks paradox helps explain why some empires endured for centuries, while, in the contemporary world, empires seem set to fail almost before they begin.117

114 115 116 117

See Haldon (Chapter 7, p. 149). See comments by Ebrey (Chapter 2, pp. 31–3, 37), Whitby (Chapter 6, p. 146) and Haldon (Chapter 7, pp. 150–3, 169). Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Looking forward: history and the future’, in Hobsbawm, On history (London: Abaus, 1998), p. 65. For a wide-ranging discussion of this theme, see W. G. Runciman, ‘Empire as a topic in comparative sociology’, in Bang & Bayly, Tributary empires, ch. 5.

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Part II Empires and Bureaucracy in World-Historical Perspective

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2

China as a Contrasting Case: Bureaucracy and Empire in Song China Patricia Ebrey

I

Dynasty and ‘Empire’ in Chinese History Max Weber, in his writing on China, referred to a unitary Chinese empire, one that lasted more than two thousand years. This reflected the common nineteenth-century European view of Asia as static and unchanging.1 Contemporary understandings of Chinese history are quite different. Changes in dynasties were not simply changes in the family that supplied the ruler. The transition between the major dynasties – especially the five that lasted two hundred years or more (Han, Tang, Song, Ming and Qing) – were generally marked by major disruptions in the power structure. Although new dynasties drew from the governmental practices of the past, the states they created were fundamentally different in many ways. It is historically more accurate to see a succession of states/empires in China than a single one which was interrupted from time to time. Sometimes there were two relatively powerful states at the same time occupying different parts of China. In modern scholarship, the term ‘empire’ is often reserved for political units that distinguish a central or metropolitan region from subordinate or peripheral units, often recently conquered ones. This still allows for considerable variation in political organization, from highly intrusive takeovers of the conquered territory’s government to much looser forms of political control, such as those exercised by tributary empires, which collect revenue from vassal states but allow them to retain their own rulers and laws. Moreover, in general usage, particularly large countries have often been referred to as empires. As Susan Reynolds notes: ‘emperor and empire came to be used generally for any Asian 1

See Max Weber, The religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (New York: Macmillan, 1964). For China scholars’ analyses of Weber’s treatment of China, see Otto B. Van der Sprenkel, ‘Max Weber on China’, History and Theory 3:3 (1964), 348–70; Gary G. Hamilton, ‘Patriarchalism in imperial China and Western Europe: a revision of Weber’s sociology of domination’, History and Theory 13:3 (1984), 393–425; and Andrew Eisenberg, ‘Weberian patrimonialism and imperial Chinese history’, Theory and Society 27:1 (1998), 83–102.

31

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rulers who seemed so rich and powerful and maybe, above all, so dangerous that they deserved the grander title.’2 The term ‘empire’ is also widely used for the larger and stronger ancient states, such as the Persian empire and the Assyrian empire.3 These various understandings of ‘empire’ do not correspond well to Chinese distinctions. Although, in modern times, terms were created to translate ‘empire’ (diguo) and ‘imperialism’ (diguo zhuyi: literally, ‘empire-ism’), they are negative terms associated with nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial empires. What in English is called the Tang empire is referred to in Chinese as the Tang dynasty (Tang chao) or Tang state (Tang guo). During the dynasty, the common way to refer to the country was as ‘the great Tang state’ (da Tang guo). Much smaller polities, ones we might characterize as tribes or chiefdoms, would also be called guo. The term we translate as ‘emperor’ has a different history. Huangdi was invented in 221 bce to indicate a ruler on a grander level than king (wang). From that time on, whether or not a ruler in fact controlled much territory, he usually took the title huangdi, showing that he aspired to subjugate all of his rivals and incorporate their territory into his realm. But the Chinese language does not distinguish between a country headed by a king and one headed by a huangdi: both are called guo. Alternatively, one could refer to the emperor as ‘Son of Heaven’, a term that in Zhou times (1045–256 bce) had referred to the Zhou king, who was seen as uniquely able to communicate with the deity Heaven on behalf of his people. The Son of Heaven, in ancient texts, is not just the head of a state (guo), but of tianxia (‘all under heaven’). Those subordinate to him varied in degree of closeness, however, in concentric circles, with both inner and outer barbarians, the inner more civilized (or ‘cooked’), the outer ones less so (‘raw’).4 The last dynasty, the Qing (1644–1911), whose ruling house was Manchu, fits the ‘ruling different people differently’ model of empire rather well, because it distinguished three populations. The most privileged were the Manchus and their earliest allies, including Mongols and Chinese who served in the ‘banner’ military units. The northeast was kept as a banner preserve, but many bannermen had settled in the capital Beijing or in garrisons scattered around the country. The eighteen provinces acquired by conquest of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) were administered directly by the central government, largely on the basis of earlier Ming administrative practice. Other territories acquired over the course of the dynasty where non-Chinese predominated

2 4

3 Reynolds, ‘Empires’, 156. See, for instance, Alcock et al., Empires. The distinction between ‘raw’ and ‘cooked’ is ancient, dating to before Han times. See Frank Dikötter, The discourse of race in modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 8–10.On the circles of inner and outer barbarians, see Heather Peters, ‘Tattooed faces and stilt houses: who were the ancient Yue?’, Sino-Platonic Papers 17 (1990), 1–27.

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Table 2.1 China’s major dynasties

Name

Dates

Population size (in millions)

Relative physical size

Han Tang Song Ming Qing

202 bce–220 ce 618–907 960–1276 1368–1644 1644–1912

58 50 100 180 450

2nd 3rd 5th 4th 1st

Main northern rival(s) Xiongnu Turks, Uighurs Khitans, Tanguts, Mongols Mongols

(Mongolia, Tibet and Xinjiang, in particular), were governed less directly, and with some accommodation of their own traditions.5 Before the Qing period, China’s major dynasties do not fit the ‘ruling different people differently’ model of empire so neatly because they did not draw a distinction between a conquering group and other subjects. They can still be considered empires in the sense of geographically large states. Moreover, they were, to one degree or another, tributary empires exercising loose authority over neighbouring polities that accepted titles and presented tribute.6 For reference, some of the basic facts about the five longest unified dynasties are given in Table 2.1. In 221 bce, the aptly named ‘Warring States’ period was brought to an end by the state of Qin, when it conquered the last of its rivals. The systems of bureaucratic governance that the short-lived Qin put in place were maintained by the much longer-lived Han dynasty. The Qin–Han period was one of great expansion. Qin had sent an army all the way to modern Guangzhou, and the Han pushed into areas that are now Korea and Vietnam as well as Central Asia. Territory in Korea and Vietnam was administered in the same way as much more central prefectures, but looser forms were used in Central Asia, very far from the Han capitals. For a century, independent states held the far south and the Yunnan region, but Han armies eventually forced them to submit. There are many parallels between the Roman empire and the Qin–Han empire, beginning with their respective origins in a territorial state that gradually defeated all other state-level rivals. Both empires created more than 5

6

On the Qing as an empire, see Laura Hostetler, Qing colonial enterprise: ethnography and cartography in early modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Lynn A. Struve (ed.), The Qing formation in world-historical time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004); Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen F. Siu and Donald S. Sutton (eds.), Empire at the margins: culture, ethnicity, and frontier in early modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). On the history of China’s tributary relations, see John K. Fairbank (ed.), The Chinese world order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), esp. chapters by Lien-sheng Yang and Wang Gungwu.

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a thousand districts, registered the population for taxes and conscription, codified laws, controlled minting of coins, and settled peripheral groups along the frontiers for military purposes.7 The decay and eventual ends of both empires also paralleled each other, as in both places universal religions spread and ‘barbarians’ gained hold of political power.8 As Walter Scheidel argues, the trajectories of Rome and China did not diverge in a major way until the late sixth century when the Sui government succeeded in conquering most of the states that had emerged after the Han empire unravelled.9 Although China was divided into separate states in the Warring States period, and again after the break-up of the Han and Tang dynasties, division was never held up as the ideal political order. A true monarch would rule ‘all under heaven’. Indeed, states that held much of China Proper (the area south of the Great Wall) were repeatedly formed after periods of division. These successful and long-lasting dynasties all made extensive use of bureaucratic statecraft to control distant territory. They also tried to enrol neighbouring polities (including very small ones) as vassal states, at least on a nominal basis. From the Qin–Han period on, the major military threat to Chinese dynasties came from the north, from the grasslands unsuited to Chinese-style crop agriculture but well suited to pasturing animals. The argument has been made that the formation of the huge state by Qin and Han fostered the emergence of an imperial confederation by the Xiongnu.10 The Xiongnu, and later nomadic empires such as the Turks and the Uighurs, were often willing to participate in the Chinese diplomatic order by sending envoys and exchanging gifts – but on their own terms, to their own advantage. After Han times, non-Chinese ruled several large states with at least some territory in China Proper – the Northern Dynasties (Xianbei), the Liao (Khitan), Jin (Jurchen), Yuan (Mongol) and Qing (Manchu). Only Yuan and Qing held all of China Proper; the others coexisted with Chinese states in south and central China. The situations along the southern and southwestern frontiers were quite different. Already in Zhou times, there are many references to various non-Chinese

7 8

9 10

For the changing administrative structure of the later Roman empire, see Whitby (Chapter 6, pp. 136–41). For some recent comparative studies, see Fritz-Heiner Mutschler and Achim Mittag (eds.), Conceiving the empire: China and Rome compared (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Walter Scheidel (ed.), Rome and China: comparative perspectives on ancient world empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Michael Loewe, ‘China’s early empires: the authority and means of government’, in Johann P. Arnason and Kurt Raaflaub (eds.), The Roman empire in context: historical and comparative perspectives (New York: Wiley, 2011), pp. 270–89. Walter Scheidel, ‘From the “great convergence” to the “first great divergence”: Roman and Qin–Han state formation and its aftermath’, in Scheidel (ed.), Rome and China, pp. 11–23. Thomas J. Barfield, The perilous frontier: nomadic empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989). See also Nicola Di Cosmo, ‘State formation and periodization in inner Asian history’, JWH 10:1 (1999), 1–40.

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peoples in the south.11 Sometimes a general term, such as Man, is used to refer to ‘southern barbarians’. A great many other terms are also used in different periods, some of which probably reflect the name a group used for themselves. During Zhou times, many non-Han polities were defeated by the state of Chu and absorbed into it. It is likely that as Chu became stronger, other peoples living along its frontier adopted stronger forms of organization as a way to ward off Chu encroachment, in the way that the expansion of the Roman empire seems to have led to the emergence of tribes along its frontiers.12 The other side of the history of the south is the southward migration of Han Chinese, mostly on their own in search of land to farm, but also sometimes with government support. Migrants chose the river valleys, best suited to their forms of agriculture. This often forced the indigenous people who practiced ‘slashand-burn’ shifting cultivation to move up into the hills or farther south.13 Officials out of favour at court were also sent to the south as a form of exile. In their poems and letters, they conveyed their misery: not only were they far from family and friends, but also they were exposed to the diseases of the tropics and the rude behaviour of the less than fully civilized local population.14 Most Chinese living in south China today – at least if they have a common Chinese surname – assume that they descended from Chinese who migrated south in historical times.15 The Chinese state and its officials tried to ‘civilize’ the south, opening schools, promoting Confucian virtues and family practices, and suppressing unacceptable religious practices, such as human sacrifice.16 The indigenous population was encouraged to acculturate, and it can probably 11

12

13

14 15

16

On the ethnic groups and small polities in the south in early times, see Herold J. Wiens, Han Chinese expansion in south China (Brooklyn, NY: Shoe String Press, 1967); Charles Holcombe, The genesis of East Asia, 221 B.C.–A.D. 907 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), pp. 18–29; Edward H. Schafer, The vermilion bird: T’ang images of the south (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 48–78; Peters, ‘Tattooed faces and stilt houses’. There is also a large literature on minorities in modern China, many of them assumed to be descended from these earlier groups: see, for instance, Stevan Harrell (ed.), Cultural encounters on China’s ethnic frontiers (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995). See P. S. Wells, ‘The barbarians speak: how the conquered peoples shaped Roman Europe’, in Craige B. Champion (ed.), Roman imperialism: readings and sources (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 243–58. See Hans Bielenstein, ‘The Chinese colonization of Fukien until the end of T’ang’, in Søren Egerod and Else Glahn (eds.), Studia Serica Bernhard Karlgren dedicate: sinological studies dedicated to Bernhard Karlgren on his seventieth birthday, October fifth (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1959), pp. 98–122; James Lee, ‘Migration and expansion in Chinese history’, in W. H. McNeill and R. Adams (eds.), Human migration: patterns and policies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 25–47. See Schafer, Vermilion bird, pp. 18–44. See Patricia Ebrey, ‘Surnames and Han Chinese identity’, in Melissa Brown (ed.), Negotiating ethnicities in China and Taiwan (Berkeley: Institute for East Asian Studies, University of California, 1996), pp. 11–36. Hisayuki Miyakawa, ‘The Confucianization of south China’, in Arthur F. Wright (ed.), The Confucian persuasion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), pp. 21–46.

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be assumed that as the Han Chinese population increased and the Chinese state became more intrusive, many of the native people adopted Chinese ways; in time, their descendants saw themselves as Han Chinese. Others, though, moved to the hills and more remote areas, ‘fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects’ in James C. Scott’s terms.17 In many instances, non-Han tribal forces had the upper hand and made slaves of captured Han migrants, putting them to work as farmers.18 Slave raiding went the other way as well. The geographic size of the major Chinese dynasties did not slowly and steadily expand. Expansion did not pay for itself. Chinese armies were not funded through loot, which kept the Mongols’ armies on the move, and newly conquered lands were not treated as sources of slaves, as they were when the Roman empire was expanding most rapidly. During Han times, in part because of the need for defence against the Xiongnu, the government took control of territories far from its capital, including in northern Korea, northern Vietnam, and well into Central Asia. The next major dynasty, the Tang, was somewhat smaller than the Han. It did not regain the territory in Korea, despite several attempts, nor did it gain control of the southwest, where the non-Chinese state of Nanzhao had formed in modern Yunnan province.19 The Tang was followed by an even smaller empire, the Song, which did not regain Vietnam and lost sixteen prefectures in the north that Tang had held because the Khitan Liao dynasty established itself there and Song proved unable to dislodge them. The Mongols, of course, conquered a huge chunk of Eurasia. The Khanate of the Great Khan was geographically much larger than any Chinese dynasty. The Mongols’ Yuan dynasty did not, however, last nearly as long as the five major dynasties. The subsequent Ming dynasty did not gain all the territory the Mongols had held (the Mongols retained both Inner Mongolia and Outer Mongolia), but it did push into the southwest, extending control into large parts of Guangxi and Yunnan provinces. Military force was used to gain suzerainty over territories where Han Chinese were a small minority, and uprisings of non-Han were brutally suppressed.20 It should also be noted that geographical expansion could occur in periods of disunity. The Warring States period was one of considerable expansion of territory as

17 18 19 20

James C. Scott, The art of not being governed: an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. ix. Joseph P. McDermott, ‘At the circumference: land tenure in Sung K’ueichou’, Sodai no Siji to Shakai 3 (1988), 1–46, esp. 11. Charles Backus, The Nan-Chao kingdom and T’ang China’s southwestern frontier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). On Ming expansion and administration in these regions, see Leo K. Shin, The making of the Chinese state: ethnicity and expansion of the Ming borderlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and John E. Herman, Amid the clouds and mist: China’s colonization of Guizhou, 1200–1700 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007).

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China as a Contrasting Case: Bureaucracy and Empire in Song China

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states on the periphery pushed steadily into adjacent areas, as was the Northern and Southern Dynasties between the Han and Tang periods. II

Bureaucracy and Empire in Song China When thinking about this long span of Chinese history comparatively in terms of empire and bureaucracy, several features of the Chinese case are noteworthy. First, China as an extra-large territorial state was made possible through the adoption of bureaucratic methods of governance, in particular sending officials from the centre to manage distant places according to clear rules. On the other hand, China as a tributary empire, with client states, was held together much more by ritual, negotiation and calculation of costs and benefits on both sides. Second, ‘ruling different people differently’ was not the Chinese ideal. If at all feasible, it was considered better to extend direct control and treat the newly acquired territory in the same way the original territory was treated: enforcing the same laws, collecting taxes on the same basis, appointing officials from the centre and so on, as the Han dynasty had done in northern Korea and Vietnam. As Michael Loewe writes of the Han dynasty: ‘it sought to govern newly acquired territories in the same way as in the commanderies of the interior, with no provision for retaining the communities’ existing laws, but rather a strong demand for uniformity of treatment and the usual obligations of state.’21 Third, the educated class (those who could read and write Chinese) tended to see the ‘natural community’ not as their prefecture- or province-sized home region, however attached to it they were, but rather the entire region controlled by the greatest of the dynasties, particular the Han and Tang dynasties. In European history, the reverse was often the case: although the Habsburgs ruled for several centuries, local identities remained very strong.22 To flesh out these points, let me narrow my focus to a single dynasty: the Song (960–1276), which in turn is divided into the Northern Song (960–1126), when the capital was Kaifeng, and the Southern Song (1127–1276) when the north was lost and the capital relocated to Hangzhou (Maps 2.1, 2.2).23 The Song falls into the middle of the Chinese sequence of long unified dynasties, but that does not make it average in other regards. The Song was a period of institutional, economic and cultural advance, but it was also a period of division and military embarrassment. Compared to the previous dynasty, the Tang, it was not particularly ‘imperial’. It held much less territory in the north 21 22 23

Loewe, ‘China’s early empires’, 287. See Reynolds, ‘Empires’, 161; and Storrs (Chapter 12, pp. 293, 297–8). See Maps 2.1 and 2.2.

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Patricia Ebrey

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Map 2.1 China during the Northern Song (960–1126)

and northwest because other states had emerged along the Tang frontiers. In fact, Song can be considered a failure as an empire in the more restricted sense because it paid tribute to another state as a result of a peace agreement reached in 1005 which required Song to pay 300,000 units of silver and silk each year to the Khitan state of Liao. In 1125, the Jurchen, having just conquered Liao, proceeded to invade north China. The Song was able to rally in the south, but north China was fully incorporated into the Jin state,

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China as a Contrasting Case: Bureaucracy and Empire in Song China 250

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Map 2.2 China during the Southern Song (1127–1279)

making it a part of an empire extending into Manchuria. The Southern Song soon agreed to pay tribute to Jin on much the same terms that the Northern Song had paid tribute to Liao. The Khitans and Jurchens made no attempt to administer the Song and so need to be distinguished from the Mongols, who in 1276 fully conquered the Song and administered it through officials they appointed.

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There is now a large body of scholarship in English on the Song dynasty and its northern neighbours, Liao and Jin. Since the 1950s, scholars have provided an upbeat view of the Song, its government, culture and economy.24 The two volumes of the Cambridge History of China on this period provide detailed political and military history.25 The picture they present tends to be less rosy because the authors include many analyses of Song difficulties and miscalculations. Here I examine both Song success in bureaucratic management and its mixed record along its borders. III

Bureaucratic Methods Gaining control of a country as large as the Song was a complex task, accomplished in stages.26 At the same time that the self-proclaimed emperor was struggling to gain military supremacy, he needed to recruit and supervise officials, gain the cooperation of the elite, avoid angering the general populace, find sources of revenue and so on. In terms of organizational structure, the Song adopted elements of statecraft that had proved useful under earlier dynasties, including the short-lived states of the tenth century. Some of these involved techniques the central government could employ to try to ensure that officials sent out to the counties and commanderies did what they were told to do and worked for the interests of the central government, not their own interests or the interests of the local elite. Most methods adopted can be traced back in spirit to the Legalist statecraft first employed by the state of Qin during the Warring States period.27 These included the following: 24

25

26

27

See, for instance, the writings of E. A. Kracke Jr., Civil service in Sung China, 960–1067 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953); James T. C. Liu, ‘An early Sung reformer: Fan Chung-yen’, in John K. Fairbank (ed.), Chinese thought and institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); and Ou-yang Hsiu: an eleventh-century neo-Confucianist (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967); Robert M. Hartwell, ‘A revolution in the Chinese iron and coal industries during the Northern Sung, 960–1127’, Journal of Asian Studies 21:2 (1961–2), 153–62. Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett (eds.), CHC, vol. vi: Alien regimes and border states, 907–1368 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Denis Twitchett and Paul Jakov Smith (eds.), CHC, vol. v, part 1: The Sung dynasty and its precursors, 907–1279 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). On extending control of territory in the Song, see Ruth Mostern, ‘Dividing the realm in order to govern’: The spatial organization of the Song state (960–1276 ce) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011). Most histories of Chinese thought include substantial discussions of the early Legalist masters. See, for instance, Herlee Creel, Chinese thought from Confucius to Mao Tse-tung (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 135–58; A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: philosophical argument in ancient China (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989), pp. 267–92. See also Robin D. S. Yates, ‘State control of bureaucrats under the Qin: techniques and procedures’, Early China 20 (1995), 331–65.

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(1) Country-wide uniformity in the most basic elements of government. The goal was one legal system, tax system, school system, currency system and so on. (2) Division of the country into around 1,400 counties, the counties grouped into about 350 prefectures, and the prefectures into 11 circuits. Previous administrative geography was often retained, but not invariably, and the Song continually established, revised or abolished these administrative districts. (3) Compilation of registers of the inhabitants of each county and also of all the land, for the purposes of assessing taxes and labour service. (4) A huge flow of documents, handled by couriers. There were many issues that an official was supposed to report to the higher levels of government before attempting to handle, such as unrest and trouble with neighbouring societies. Judicial executions, for instance, had to be confirmed from above. (5) Salaries for officials, graded by rank, ideally high enough that they did not need to use their office as a source of income. (6) Rotations in office. Assignments in the provinces were normally limited to three or four years, after which the official made a trip back to the capital before getting his next assignment. This meant that ingratiating yourself with the local elite did not have as great a payback as satisfying superiors in the central government. It also meant that officials acquired a countrywide perspective as they all did quite a bit of travelling and met with educated men from many areas.28 (7) Rules against serving in one’s home prefecture or in an agency where a close relative held a post. (8) Regular evaluations of officials by their superiors. Officials periodically had their records reviewed and could be demoted or dismissed for irregularities, corruption, failure to collect enough taxes, antagonizing the local populace and so on. Rewards were more rapid promotion and promotion to more important posts. These more Legalistic methods of tight central control were balanced by what can be considered more Confucian means to win the loyalty and cooperation of the bureaucracy (which slowly increased during the Northern Song from about 10,000 to more than 30,000 officials and many times that number of clerical and other lower-ranking functionaries).29 Particularly worth noting here are the civil service examination system and the rituals of bureaucratic 28 29

On the travelling that Song officials did, see Cong Ellen Zhang, Transformative journeys: travel and culture in Song China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011). For the number of officials, see Winston W. Lo, An introduction to the civil service of Sung China, with an emphasis on its personnel administration (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), p. 28. For estimates on the numbers of clerical staff, see James Liu, ‘The Sung

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hierarchy.30 Taking the written examinations, offered every third year, was not the only route to office; the sons and grandsons of higher officials could still request entry-level posts through the ‘protection’ privilege. But entering through the examinations carried more prestige. The Song had not invented the examinations, which were already used in Tang times, but the Song appointed a larger portion of its officials from among examination graduates and improved the objectivity of the examination process by such methods as replacing the candidate’s name with a number and recopying the exam papers so that the graders would not be able to recognize the applicant from his handwriting. The number of men who attempted the examinations steadily climbed. As a consequence, the average successful candidate was a little more than thirty years old and had failed the examinations a few times before finally succeeding. Preparation for the examinations involved years of study of the Confucian classics and other books such as the histories. Candidates thus would be fully familiar with Confucian ideas of duty, loyalty and concern for the less fortunate. Perhaps just as important, men who had been selected on the basis of what they believed was their personal merit had a stake in the governmental system. Since there was not much in the way of nobility in Song China, those with ambition to go down in history aspired to rise through promotion within the bureaucracy, hoping that one day they would hold a key position at court. The system of assigning officials posts also underwent significant development in directions that can be considered more rational, such as balancing the consideration given to seniority with written evidence of competence in the form of their superior’s ratings of their achievements in many specific capacities.31 Ritual also played a role in emotionally attaching officials to the government and its hierarchies. Offices were graded into eighteen ranks (or salary grades), with most officials beginning near the bottom (examination graduates starting a little higher than those who entered because of their father’s or grandfather’s office). Normally one had to pass up one level at a time. These ranks were made visible in the colour coding of official dress (purple for the highest, scarlet for the next few grades and green-black for the lowest ones). Much finer

30

31

views on the control of government clerks’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 10:2–3 (1967), 317–44. A much larger number of functionaries (130,285) is recorded for 5 bce in the Han period, but this number includes clerks and other local staff: see Hans Bielenstein, The bureaucracy of Han times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 156. On the examination system in Song times, see John W. Chaffee, The thorny gates of learning in Sung China: A social history of examinations (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Thomas Hong-chi Lee, Government education and examinations in Sung China (Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1985). Lo, Introduction to the civil service of Sung China, pp. 79–199.

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distinctions were made when an official was working in the capital and participated in regular rituals there. These ranged from the most elaborate productions of the sacrifices to heaven at the suburban altar held every three years, to periodic assemblies that all officials in the capital attended, and to such simple rituals as the grand councillor leading the officials to offer incense at the shrine to a former emperor on his death day anniversary. On those occasions, officials stood in order of office – that is, even within one of the salary grades, there was a protocol list, putting each office in sequence.32 Taken together, the civil service system and the rituals of official life helped create a basic acceptance of the institutional hierarchy on the part of the educated class, both those in the government and those outside it. The basic civility of the bureaucracy probably owes much to these practices. Factionalism at court repeatedly turned nasty and there was a lot of namecalling, but officials did not come to blows.33 No one in Song times ever assassinated a grand councillor or political rival. Officials could decline posts, and in office they could often find ways to passively resist implementing policies they did not approve, but they did not foment insurrections or stage coups. One of the greatest challenges for the bureaucracy was administering counties and prefectures. Newly dispatched officials had to take responsibility for government in a place they knew little about. They could be loyal to the emperor and by extension to the central government but still not be very effective at managing their broad responsibilities to provide justice, collect taxes and promote prosperity and social harmony in the county or prefecture in their charge.34 Even if the court had systems in place to monitor and motivate officials, those assigned to posts in the prefectures and counties still had to come up with effective solutions to many problems while far from the capital. How did local officials manage? Several features of Song statecraft and Song book culture made the challenge somewhat more manageable. First of all, there were rules and directives in abundance.35 The central government kept a close watch on tax revenues and issued orders to each local official on what share the locality could retain for its own expenses and what share it should submit to the capital or to border areas with high military expenses.36 Administrative rulings 32 33 34 35

36

Kracke, Civil service, pp. 229–35; Patricia Ebrey, ‘Taking out the grand carriage: imperial spectacle and the visual culture of Northern Song Kaifeng’, Asia Major 12:1 (1999), 33–65. On factionalism in the Northern Song, see Ari Levine, Divided by a common language: factional conflict in late Northern Song China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008). On the provincial administrative system, see Winston W. Lo, ‘Circuits and circuit intendants in the territorial administration of Sung China’, Monumenta Serica 29 (1974), 39–107. On the abundance of specifications, see Brian E. McKnight, ‘Patterns of law and patterns of thought: notes on the specifications (shih) of Sung China’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 102:2 (1982), 323–31. Mostern, Dividing the realm, pp. 35–56.

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were from time to time published and distributed to officials, as were new decrees. There were also samples of documents to fill in, such as the following example from a book of legal specifications dating from 1195–1200. It was to be used by prefects reporting on the arrival of convict labourers to work in army labour battalions.37 Have received for control: . . . . . . . . . For registration on the army rolls, . . . . . . . . . (so many) men tattooed on the face. Convict’s name . . . . . . . . .; number of years . . . . . . . . . (Note: this means the number of years since registration); name of jurisdiction . . . . . . . . .; sort of person . . . . . . . . . (indicate which army, and then write that the origin of the person was as a volunteer or someone penally registered for service; the nature of the convict’s current offense) (Give a brief description, for example, if the convict were convicted of stealing, write ‘with force’ or ‘a thief’; write whether the convict was the principal or an accomplice, whether or not he was armed, and whether or not the criminal act was actually consummated. For homicides, merely note whether the crime was of the principal categories of homicide or was classified as a miscellaneous offense, whether the convict was the principal or an accomplice, and whether in fact anyone was killed. The formats for reporting on the types of penal registration called arranged or detailed control, and condemnation to slavery are similar.) In accordance with the sentence of . . . . . . . . . (Note: This means the light rod, heavy rod, penal servitude, or exile), the prisoner has been sentenced to penal registration in the prison citadel commands or other provincial army commands of . . . . . . . . . (suchand-such a prefecture) or in . . . . . . . . . (such-and-such a jurisdiction) for heavy labor in the army.

The inexperienced local official did not need to know every rule and every form by the time he arrived because the local underlings would be familiar with them. Whereas the two or three top officials in a county came in from outside and probably had never been to the place before, they were assisted by a couple of hundred clerks who stayed on as officials came and went. Officials were regularly told to keep a close watch on the clerks, but relying on them was probably the only practical way to handle many issues that came up.38 The clerical staff was an integral part of the government, and if their numbers were all included, the size of the bureaucracy would be much larger. Since there was a huge difference in the social standing of regular officials and clerical staff, much less is known about the attitudes and practices of those in this lower level (and virtually nothing was written by them). New officials could also turn to other forms of written material. For those who wanted to keep up to date on new rulings or changes in the leadership at 37

38

Brian E. McKnight, Law and order in Sung China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 409. The material in parentheses is in smaller type in the original Chinese text, showing that it is not part of the form, but rather commentary on how to fill it out. On clerks and other lower-level staff at the county level, see Brian E. McKnight, Village and bureaucracy in Southern Sung China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).

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court, there was an official gazette.39 At a more basic level, there were histories and reference books in abundance.40 Many officials would have begun reading the histories while studying for the policy questions on the civil service examinations. The first of these – Sima Qian’s Historical Records, completed in about 100 bce – was enormously important. Besides being a political narrative, it included treatises on subjects of significance to officials, such as government organs, law, taxation and natural disasters. It also included biographies which helped shape informal understandings of what being an official entailed, including dictatorial or negligent grand councillors, corrupt versus upright officials at all levels and harsh versus kind local officials. By the early Song, histories written on the model of Sima Qian’s masterpiece were available for all the dynasties since his time, and many had been printed in the tenth or early eleventh century, making them more widely available. Besides the histories, other books gave information about many of the tasks of government. Several were written in Tang times, some covering only the Tang (Tang code, 635; Tang liudian, 738; Tang huiyao, tenth century), others much longer time periods (notably Du You’s Tung dian of 801). These treatises, histories, legal codes and institutional reference books gave those both at court and in the provinces a way to think about problems as they arose – how had earlier officials dealt with famine, child emperors, a shortage of coins, generals who did not follow orders and so much else. The underlying outlook of these books could be described as pragmatic Confucianism, rather than Legalism. Some years ago, Étienne Balázs noted that the histories were written with the needs of administrators in mind. While he was trying to explain deficiencies in the historiographical tradition, one can turn his observation around and note how useful reading the histories was for those serving in office.41 Besides these more general histories and compendiums, there were handbooks aimed directly at county magistrates. The earliest of these books to survive, the ‘Admonitions for Local Administrators’ (Zuoyi zizhen) written in the late Northern Song, gives advice on a wide range of situations a county magistrate might encounter. For instance, it advises trying to prevent collusion and fraud in the classification of households by wealth (needed for appropriate assignment of labour duties) in this way:

39

40 41

On the official gazette, see Hilde De Weerdt, ‘Byways in the imperial Chinese information order: the dissemination and commercial publication of state documents’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 66:1 (2006), 145–88; and ‘Court gazettes and “short reports”: Official views and unofficial readings of court news’, Hanxue yanjiu 漢學研究 [Chinese Studies] 27:2 (2009), 167–200. Susan Cherniak, ‘Book culture and textual transmission in Sung China’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 54 (1994), 5–125. Étienne Balázs, ‘History as a guide to bureaucratic practice’, in Arthur F. Wright (ed.), Chinese civilization and bureaucracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 129–49.

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In making the five-grade registers, the Canton Scribes, the Elders, and the Household Chiefs should work in three separate places, so that they do not see one another. They should each be given stamped tax vouchers. For each household they should write out lists of family worth. Later their results should be put together and compared. If there are major items that are not the same, this is evidence of fraud.42

Another handbook helped prefects cope with their responsibility for investigations of homicides. It explained how to conduct a post mortem examination of the body and judge the cause of death, pointing out what to look for in a case of hanging, drowning, falls or deadly brawls. For instance, when a body was found hanging, to verify that the death could have been a suicide the official needed to view the site in person, judge where the dead person would have stood and determine the length of the rope and how it was tied.43 All things considered, the Song government had many of the traits of a rational-bureaucratic organization, and the direction of change was largely towards standardization and routinization.44 Song territorial administration involved both careful attention to the making of personnel assignments and a long schedule of reports local officials had to submit at regular intervals. Rules proliferated to handle such matters as the sequence in which assignments should be made and the steps officials could take to apply for positions. Song also made advances in the use of checks and balances, especially in the oversight of prefectural officials, and in the development of offices devoted to discovering bad officials or bad policies (the Censorate and the Bureau of Policy Criticism).45 Succession to the throne was remarkably peaceful, another indication that governmental practices were increasingly being determined by rules.46 At the lowest levels, rules that aimed to standardize and routinize proliferated. There were rules, for instance, on issuing weapons to night patrols, inspecting conditions in jails every five days, annual reports by judicial intendants on deaths in prisons and punishment of jail functionaries when the death rate of prisoners was excessive. Rules also existed on the length and width of the light and heavy rods used for judicial beatings and on the size, location and wording of tattoos to be placed on convicts sentenced to penal labour.47 42 43 44

45 46

47

McKnight, Village and bureaucracy, p. 70. The washing away of wrongs: Sung Tz’u, trans. Brian E. McKnight (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1981), pp. 55–8. For some comparisons of the Song bureaucracy to other historical bureaucracies, such as that of the Byzantine empire, see Lo, Introduction to the civil service of Sung China, pp. 15–32; and on the eastern Roman or Byzantine empire, see also Haldon (Chapter 7, p. 169). See Kracke, Civil service, pp. 28–53. Patricia Ebrey, ‘Succession to high office: the Chinese case’, in David R. Olson and Michael Cole (eds.), Culture, technology and history: implications of the anthropological work of Jack Goody (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006), pp. 49–71. McKnight, Law and order in Sung China, pp. 296–304, 341–2, 349–51, 393–4.

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Max Weber downplayed the bureaucratic side of Chinese governments, classing them as patrimonial-bureaucratic, in part on the grounds that the ruler could make arbitrary decisions not based on ‘functionally appropriate grounds’ and on the small size of the bureaucracy compared to the population it administered.48 Both of these observations are basically accurate. In Song times with a population of 80 to 100 million subjects, the 30,000 or so civil officials and the possibly 200,000 or more functionaries and soldiers who worked with them were not numerous enough to penetrate as deeply into society as modern governments do. At the very top of the government, bureaucratic methods did not prevail. China was in no sense a constitutional monarchy. The emperor had full authority to appoint and dismiss the leading officials and reject their policy proposals. Occasionally the high officials tried to oppose en bloc something the ruler wanted to do that they believed he should not do; once in Song times, they deposed a ruler who seemed to have gone mad, but in that case they sought authority from the emperor’s mother.49 Most of the time, going against the emperor’s clearly stated wishes was not even considered. Because decisions at the top were made in less bureaucratic and more personal ways, infighting and factionalism took a heavy toll on government and was especially harmful at moments of crisis, when no leader emerged who could unite the government behind a course of action. Many other imperfections of the Chinese governmental system could be mentioned, and scholars who do research on institutional history tend to focus on them because of the abundance of sources that criticize policies and actions. When the Chinese bureaucracy is viewed in comparative terms, however, it must be admitted that it was remarkably well-organized and effective. A relatively high level of law and order was maintained over very large areas for centuries at a time. IV

Empire-Building The Song’s impressive accomplishments in the practice of government were coupled with the least impressive record of empire-building of the five major 48 49

Van der Sprenkel, ‘Max Weber on China’, 354–8. On the most striking case of officials protesting against an emperor’s decision, see Carney T. Fisher, ‘The ritual dispute of Sung Ying-Tsung’, Papers on Far Eastern History 36 (1987), 109–38; and Xiao-bin Ji, Politics and conservatism in Northern Song China (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2005). For the deposing of Guangzong in 1194, see Richard L. Davis, ‘The reigns of Kuang-tsung (1189–94) and Ning-tsung (1194–1224)’, in Twitchett and Smith (eds.), CHC, vol. v, part 1, pp. 756–838.

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dynasties. It was a period of ‘China among equals’.50 What can explain the Song government’s inability to dominate East Asia the way its predecessors the Han and Tang dynasties had done? It was wealthier and did not stint on funding the military. The government regularly devoted at least half its fiscal resources to maintaining professional armies of 600,000 to one million men.51 The traditional explanation of Song’s military shortcomings is that the early Song emperors, determined to curb the power of the military, had shifted power too far in the direction of civilian control over the military. Probably we should also recognize that its neighbours were stronger. Along the southern frontier, the Song government was able to dominate its relationships with the small polities or chiefdoms settled there. It employed a variety of approaches, ranging from military conquest followed by direct rule to ‘bridle and halter’ arrangements that left local chiefs in place but gave them Chinese titles, honours, and financial incentives to cooperate, treating them, in a sense, as vassal states.52 The 350 or so bridle and halter chiefdoms were not required to follow Song law and handled crime in their own ways. Groups that submitted were considered ‘cooked’ natives, rather than the wilder ‘raw’ ones. Because many of these small polities were in backwater areas, difficult to reach, it was generally thought that trying to rule them directly was not worth the effort. But in particular cases, the Song government made repeated efforts to convert areas into regular tax-paying counties and prefectures. As Richard von Glahn has observed: ‘Song frontier expansion took the form not of a wholesale takeover of large, contiguous territories, but rather of a gradual process of accretion through the annexation of many individual tribal domains over a long time.’53 Friction between Han Chinese settlers and the indigenous people along the southern frontiers was not uncommon. The local magnates among the Han settlers often formed their own militias. Clashes between these militias and the tribesmen could result in long-standing feuds, with retaliation and counterretaliation. Prefects could often deal with local disturbances or banditry on their own, using prefectural troops, but a variety of situations could lead them to request regular soldiers to deliver an overwhelming blow to the unruly element. 50 51

52 53

Morris Rossabi (ed.), China among equals: The Middle Kingdom and its neighbors, 10th–14th centuries (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1983). For some comparisons of the size of Song armies to those of other historical empires, see Lo, Introduction to the civil service of Sung China, p. 7. On the military history of the Song, see Peter Lorge, War, politics and society in early modern China, 900–1795 (London: Routledge, 2005). On bridle and halter arrangements, see Lien-sheng Yang, ‘Historical notes on the Chinese world order’, in Fairbank (ed.), Chinese world order, pp. 31–3. Richard von Glahn, The country of streams and grottoes: expansion, settlement, and the civilizing of the Sichuan frontier in Song times (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987), p. 131.

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Usually if troops from the regular army were dispatched to the locality, they quickly suppressed the local non-Han forces. Tribal lineages sometimes voluntarily asked to submit their territories, often because of conflict with other local ethnic groups. To the Chinese at court, these requests could be taken as evidence of Song’s moral power.54 Once an area was pacified, the government often encouraged further Han immigration to stabilize it. This could of course provoke new friction. In 1075, Viet forces attacked Song garrisons along the border in retaliation against Song intensified expansion.55 Sending armies from central China to the southern border was costly, however, because people not from the region were vulnerable to diseases endemic there, such as malaria, decimating the armies.56 Sometimes chiefs who had submitted later changed their minds. In 1115, the fiscal intendant of a region in southern Sichuan first tried negotiations to deal with an uprising of recently incorporated tribesmen, but when that failed, he called for 20,000 regular army troops to be sent from Shaanxi. Within a month, Zhao’s army had destroyed sixty-five villages and twenty forts, killed more than 7,000 natives and captured about 600 people. Even after such military victories, newly established counties and prefectures often were later abandoned when it was found that they were too remote or impoverished to be worth the cost of civil administration.57 Officials at court frequently disagreed sharply on the best border policy. Those in favour of more aggressive stances drew attention to the number of households and land added to the tax base of the country with each annexation. Those against pointed out that new prefectures and counties usually did not generate as much revenue as they cost and thus were a fiscal burden.58 The states along the northern border were militarily much stronger than those on the southern and western borders and able to pose more serious threats to Song. After the collapse of the Tang dynasty, many contenders sought to unify China and rule ‘all under heaven’. Among them were the Khitans, a people originally from Mongolia/Manchuria, who formed the state of Liao. In 947, the Liao ruler led his army all the way into Kaifeng and took up residence in the imperial palace. After three months, when the temperatures began to get too 54

55 56 57 58

For instance, von Glahn, Country of streams and grottoes, pp. 92–3. See also James A. Anderson, The rebel den of Nùng Trí Cao: eleventh-century rebellion and response along the Sino-Vietnamese frontier (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), pp. 16–17. Anderson, Rebel den, pp. 119–51. On understandings of the diseases of the far south, see Schafer, Vermilion bird, pp. 130–4. Mostern, Dividing the realm, pp. 213–18. For a case of disagreement, see Paul Jakov Smith, ‘Irredentism as political capital: the new policies and the annexation of Tibetan domains in Hehuang (the Qinghai-Gansu highlands) under Shenzong and his sons, 1068–1126)’, in Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Maggie Bickford (eds.), Emperor Huizong and late Northern Song China: the politics of culture and the culture of politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Asia Center, 2006), pp. 78–130.

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warm for him, he departed, taking as much treasure – human and material – as he could transport.59 In time, Liao set up a dual structure, ruling the Khitans and other tribes that had joined them in the steppe manner, but using Tang practice to rule territories settled primarily by Han Chinese. The Song was founded a few decades after the Liao and successfully absorbed almost all of the states that had emerged across China, but it proved unable to drive the Khitan out of the ‘sixteen prefectures’ along the northern border that Tang had held. Because of the loss of this prime horse-raiding territory, the Northern Song was able to maintain herds only a fraction as large as the Tang had. Despite large purchases of horses from Tibetan traders in the northwest Qingtang region, in 1061 only a fifth of the 60,000 Song cavalrymen could be provided with mounts.60 Song and Liao were in diplomatic contact from 974 on, exchanging embassies to offer felicitations at New Year and on imperial birthdays.61 But neither had yet conceded the borders, and intermittently they attacked each other. In 1004, the Liao launched a major campaign into China. The third Song emperor, Zhenzong, personally led the imperial armies to meet the Khitan. He put on a show of resistance and then opened negotiations to try to forestall military action. Unwilling to give in to Khitan demands for territory or a princess to marry the Liao heir, the Chinese negotiators came up with the idea of offering the Khitans money to go away. The payment offered – 200,000 bolts of silk and 100,000 ounces of silver – seemed immense to the Khitans, especially after they understood it was to be given annually. Although there were other confrontations between Song and Liao over the course of the next century, the basic framework created by the Treaty of Shanyuan set the tone for their relationship.62 It also became the basis for a subsequent treaty with the smaller Tangut state of Xia in the northwest (see Maps 2.1 and 2.2). These treaties remained controversial, and what can be termed the pro-war and pro-peace advocates often clashed at court. Court debates on the best 59 60

61

62

Denis Twitchett and Klaus-Peter Tietze, ‘The Liao’, in Franke and Twitchett (eds.), CHC, vol. vi, pp. 73–4. Paul J. Smith, Taxing heaven’s storehouse: Bureaucratic entrepreneurship and the Sichuan tea and horse trade, 1074–1224 (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1991), pp. 16–17, gives 760,000 horses as a high figure for the early Tang, and 200,000 for the Song in 1008, after which numbers dropped, amounting to only 153,000 in 1069. On Song–Liao relations, see Jing-shen Tao, Two sons of heaven: Studies in Sung–Liao relations (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988); David C. Wright, From war to diplomatic parity in eleventh-century China: Sung’s foreign relations with Kitan Liao (Leiden: Brill, 2005). Wright, From war to diplomatic parity, pp. 145–52; Nap-yin Lau and Huang K’uan-chung, ‘Founding and consolidation of the Sung dynasty under T’ai-tsu (960–976), T’ai-tsung (976–997), and Chen-tsung (997–1022)’, in Twitchett and Smith (eds.), CHC, vol. v, part 1, pp. 262–70; Twitchett and Tietze, ‘The Liao’, in Franke and Twitchett (eds.), CHC, vol. vi, pp. 104–10; Lorge, War, politics and society, pp. 33–5.

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approach to take in specific cases could be acrimonious, given the cost of war; the dangers of defeat; and the differing interests, knowledge and ambitions of the key players, including generals. By the end of Zhenzong’s reign in 1022, the military was consuming three-quarters of the tax revenues. By contrast, even counting the expenses of the exchange of embassies, the cost of maintaining peaceful relations with the Liao would not have consumed more than 2 or 3 per cent of the state’s annual revenues.63 The accommodationist stance can perhaps be seen as a sign that bureaucratic attitudes penetrated to the top of the decision-making structure: those who had to cope with balancing budgets looked at war in a cost-conscious way. After more than a century of peace, pro-war advocates gained the support of Emperor Huizong. In the years leading up to 1122, the emperor and his advisers decided that an internal rebellion within Liao by the Jurchens offered an opportunity too good to be missed. Song signed a treaty with the Jurchen, unilaterally abandoning its treaty with the Liao. The decision proved disastrous, and Song ended up instead with huge losses of territory when the Jurchen, after vanquishing Liao, turned on Song. One setback followed another. Song had thought the primarily Han Chinese population of the Sixteen Prefectures would join Song when their armies arrived, but that help never materialized. Jin let Song have a few of the prefectures they had wanted for so long, including the major city of Yanjing, but they first looted the city so thoroughly that possession of it proved very costly to Song. Song bankrupted itself trying to move emergency rations north to feed long lines of starving refugees.64 A great many reasons have been offered for Song’s catastrophic loss of north China to the Jurchen. Intelligence failures were common. Just as Song overestimated the longing of the Han Chinese subjects of Liao to become subjects of Song, it underestimated Jin strength. Generals in the field did not coordinate well with one another. Factionalism at court also deserves some of the blame. After the Jurchen army withdrew from Kaifeng after extorting a huge ransom, the Song court did not immediately set about preparing for the possibility that they might return but rather engaged in a bitter factional struggle about who should be held accountable, not seeking anything like a national unity coalition. After the Jurchens returned and won all of north China, the shrunken Song dynasty established its capital in Hangzhou, well south of the Yangzi River. Irredentist sentiment was if anything stronger than in the Northern Song

63

64

See Robert M. Hartwell, ‘The imperial treasuries: finance and power in Song China’, Bulletin of Sung–Yuan Studies 20 (1988), pp. 18–89, esp. pp. 66, 71. Total Song revenues in the eleventh century were generally at least 100 million units (strings of cash or ounces of silver, etc.). The Song alliance with Jin and its many bad consequences are discussed in Patricia Ebrey, Emperor Huizong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

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because a much larger part of China Proper had been lost, including the heartland of ancient China. The strength of irredentist sentiment in Song times is evidence that the most articulate members of the Song educated class saw the ‘natural community’ not as their prefecture or province-sized home region but as the entire region controlled by the greatest of the dynasties, particularly the Han and Tang dynasties. Those wanting to send the armies north saw recovering lost lands as a sacred duty. Moreover, even the pro-peace advocates fully acknowledged that they were making a compromise, choosing the lesser of two evils, and did not propose an alternative vision of a natural community that covered only the south. V

Conclusion Written rules and the prestige of serving the government were keys to China’s success at ruling huge numbers of subjects over vast expanses of space. Men who had devoted years to securing a position in the government did their best to avoid failing at their jobs. Rules such as never assigning officials to their home prefectures and frequent transfers helped ensure that local administrators would see conforming to the demands from above as a high priority. Even after a dynasty collapsed and the country was fragmented, widely available reference books made it possible for administrative routines to be recreated. Even illiterate warlords could find men who knew how the government had worked in earlier times and could put in place tried and true systems of taxation and justice. China does, nevertheless, often seem like the outlier. From the Song period on, when the population under direct government control reached 100 million, through the Qing period, when it reached perhaps 400 million, China was by far the largest country/empire in terms of population. China’s core (directly governed) territory was also physically very large. As a consequence, a distinction between the metropolitan centre and the frontier seems too simple in the Chinese case. In Chinese studies, the practice is to recognize eight to ten macroregions, each with its own core and periphery as well as its own economic cycles.65 Even if one thinks of the peripheries of the entire state, there was a huge difference between the northern frontier, which was central to national defence, and the much less militarized southern and southwestern frontiers, where bridle and halter polities could necessitate dispatching troops, but the military crises never threatened the dynasty. 65

Robert M. Hartwell, ‘Demographic, political, and social transformations of China, 750–1550’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42:2 (1982), 365–442.

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China as a Contrasting Case: Bureaucracy and Empire in Song China

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Bureaucracy and empire were connected in complicated ways in China. Stability and prosperity in the core area do not seem to have depended on deeper and deeper penetration into peripheral lands. There is no sign that the standard of living was higher in the more imperial Tang and Yuan dynasties than it was during the Song dynasty. The more imperial Liao, Jin and Yuan governments – all of which had non-Han rulers and treated different subjects differently in a systematic way as a matter of principle – ruled in less bureaucratic ways than the Song. Yet it was unquestionably bureaucratic methods that made possible the extension of direct rule hundreds of kilometres from the capital. At the cultural level, there was tension between emotional identification with an empire that ruled ‘all under heaven’ and a more bureaucratic recognition that the fiscal burdens of maintaining distant lands could be onerous and that compromises of many sorts might be expedient. Different dynasties came to different accommodations, in no small part because the polities along their borders changed considerably over time. Why did Chinese empire-building not provoke more resistance? It would be wrong to dismiss the uprisings and rebellions that from time to time broke out in China – both on the frontiers and in the core regions. But a remarkable proportion of the time the Chinese state was able to suppress them. The south was separate from the north under a single state for two lengthy periods (317–589 and 1127–1276), but no ‘Southland’ ideology emerged. The south used the same script and honoured the same classics as the north, and Buddhism gained similar hold both places. After the Tang disintegrated, nine separate states were formed in the south, each controlling territory about the size of a province. But the leaders of these states did not claim that a balance of power among rival states was preferable to unity. The Song did not have to conquer them one after the other; after Song had gained control of the Yangzi region, the states further south quickly submitted. The submission of the southern states to the power in the north undoubtedly reflected an assessment of relative military strength, but also an assumption that unity would bring benefits to power holders in the south as well as the north. States that at one time or another broke away from a Chinese empire (in Korea, Vietnam and Yunnan) saw themselves as ethnically different, but in the south those with power saw themselves as Han Chinese.

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3

Conflict and Cooperation between Arab Rulers and Persian Administrators in the Formative Period of Islamdom, c.600–c.950 ce István T. Kristó-Nagy

‫ﻭ ُﺣﻜﻲ ﺃ ّﻥ ُﺳ ْﻔﻴﺎﻥ ﻟَ ّﻤﺎ ﺃ َﻣﺮ ﺑﺘﻘﻄﻴﻊ ﺍﺑﻦ ﺍﻟﻤﻘ َّﻔﻊ ﻭﻃﺮﺣﻪ ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﺘ ُّﻨﻮﺭ ﻗﺎﻝ ﻟﻪ ﻭﺍﻟﻠﻪ ﺇ ّﻧﻚ ﻟﺘﻘﺘُﻠﻨﻲ ﻓﺘﻘﺘﻞ ﺑﻘﺘﻠﻲ ﺃﻟﻒ‬ .‫ﻧﻔﺲ ﻭﻟﻮ ُﻗﺘﻞ ﻣﺌﺔ ِﻣ ْﺜﻠﻚ ﻣﺎ ﻭ َﻓﻮﺍ ﺑﻮﺍﺣﺪ‬ (It was reported that when Sufyān ordered Ibn al-Muqaffac be dismembered and thrown into the oven, the latter said to him: ‘By God, you kill me and by killing me you kill a thousand souls, but had a hundred like you been killed, they would not be worth one.’)

These words appear in ‘The book of the viziers and secretaries’ by al-Ğahšiyārī (d. 942/331), an official living at a time when the sun was setting on the splendour of the cAbbāsid empire.1 He colourfully depicted the glorious or disastrous stratagems of famous and infamous bureaucrats and lords. Sufyān was a member of the Arab aristocracy and governor of Basra. Yet he is mostly remembered as the murderer of Ibn al-Muqaffac, a secretary whose father, a Persian nobleman, worked as a tax officer for the Arab governor of Iraq until he was accused of official corruption, possibly after the fall of the governor who hired him. He was tortured and his hand remained shrivelled (muqaffac), giving rise to the name by which his son was known – Ibn al-Muqaffac (‘the son of the shrivelled’). Ibn al-Muqaffac’s father took care of his son’s education so that he learnt Arabic to perfection and fused that with a profound knowledge of Persian administrative skills, courtly culture and literary traditions. Although he worked for different governors of the Umayyads, he survived their fall in 750/132 to become an advisor/administrator to a branch of the cAbbāsid family, uncles of the first caliph of the dynasty. Unfortunately for him, his patrons 1

al-Ğahšiyārī, Kitāb al-Wuzarā’ wa-’l-kuttāb, ed. M. al-Saqqā, I. al-Ibyārī and cA. Ḥ. Šalabī (Cairo: Maṭbacat Muṣṭafā al-Bā bī al-Ḥalabī wa-Awlādihi, 1938/1357), p. 11012–14. The language of technical terms which appear in the text or in parentheses is Arabic, transliterated following the conventions of the journal Arabica (with minor modifications). Some topographical names are given in their common English form. Dates concerning the Islamic(ate) world are given according to the Julian calendar, followed by the Hiğrī lunar calendar, which counts from Muḥammad’s emigration from Mecca to Medina in 622 ce.

54

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Conflict & Cooperation between Arab Rulers & Persian Administrators 55

became rivals of the second caliph of the dynasty, al-Manṣūr, and Ibn alMuqaffac was killed (by 758/140 at the latest) with the consent of the caliph by an old enemy who – according to one version of the story – chopped off his members one by one and put them in an oven while he was still alive and watching them burning.2 Ibn al-Muqaffac’s precipitous career and horrendous death offer a striking example of the extent to which the Arab conquerors depended on the expertise of the administrators of the vanquished empires, but it also illustrates the risks inherent in rising to the higher levels of administrative service. This chapter presents an example of empire-building in which a confederation of ‘tribally’ organized conquerors had to collaborate with the administrators maintaining the heritage of the vanquished empires.3 One of the lasting legacies of the Islamic conquest was that by conquering both much of the territory of the eastern Roman (Byzantine) empire and the entire Sāsānian (Persian) empire, it achieved a civilizational unification, which had previously been blocked by the presence of two contending empires that were unable to subdue each other.4 The long-lasting civilizational success of the Islamic conquest was a result of the formation of a new cultural synthesis, that of the Islamicate civilization, which was the outcome of the gradual mutual assimilation of the conquerors and vanquished.5 The political theories produced by the ‘bureaucrats’ or administratorintellectuals of the new Islamicate empire demonstrate the continuity between Islamdom and previous civilizations. The manner in which these authors described – or, rather, prescribed – the ideal functioning of the state served both their patrons’ interests and their own. Nonetheless, many of these authors were genuinely interested in the reasons for the prosperity or decline of their 2 3

4 5

See I. T. Kristó-Nagy, La pensée d’Ibn al-Muqaffaʽ: un ‘agent double’ dans le monde persan et arabe (Versailles: Éditions de Paris, 2013). The ‘tribal’ societies of the Middle East and Central Asia were often politically highly organized nomadic groups whose principle of organization was (real or fictitious) kinship. In general, ‘tribes’ were more extended than ‘families’ and ‘clans’. For a general outline of tribal organization see P. Crone, Pre-industrial societies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 6, 41. For a thorough analysis, see two closely related papers: P. Crone, ‘The tribe and the state’, in J. A. Hall (ed.), The state: critical concepts (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 446–73; and P. Crone, ‘Tribes and states in the Middle East’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 3 (1993), 353–76, both reprinted in P. Crone, From Arabian tribes to Islamic empire: army and society in the Near East c.600–850 (Farnham: Ashgate Variorum, 2008). See also F. M. Donner, The early Islamic conquests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 11–49 (‘State and society in pre-Islamic Arabia’). For the effect of these conquests on the Byzantine empire, see Haldon (Chapter 7, pp. 152–3). I use two neologisms, ‘Islamdom’ and ‘Islamicate’ introduced by M. G. S. Hodgson, The venture of Islam, 3 vols. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974), vol. i, pp. 57–60. By coining the term ‘Islamicate’, Hodgson sought to distinguish between those ideas and acts which belong to Islam as a religion, and those belonging to people living in ‘Islamdom’, that is, societies dominated by Muslims but which cannot be justly called Islamic.

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István T. Kristó-Nagy

societies. Consequently, their models help us comprehend the actual realities of their times as well as their negotiations for status with other elites. I

The Construction of the Islamicate ‘Empire’ At the time of the rise of Islam in the first half of the seventh century ce, nearly all the inhabited lands of Eurasia and parts of Africa formed an Oikoumene, a complex whose peoples were directly or indirectly interrelated.6 The western part of this Oikoumene was dominated by two empires: the eastern Roman empire, which was a synthesis of former Mediterranean cultures, and the Sāsānian empire (224 bce–650 ce), which played a similar role in the ‘Middle East’ (Map 3.1). As the border of the Mediterranean and Middle East was rather fluid, its definition and continuous redefinition resulted in a great deal of bloodshed. The two empires challenged each other continuously, but neither one was able to conquer the other. Then in the mid-seventh century, at a moment when both empires were exhausted from the total war between them (as well as other factors), the Arab tribes, having been united by Muḥammad and his successors, simultaneously conquered the entire Sāsānian empire and about half of the former Roman territories (in the Levant and southern Mediterranean up to the southern parts of modern France). In Europe, this first expansion of Islamdom was halted by Byzantium in the east and by the Franks in the west in the first century after the Hiğra (early eighth century ce). The Islamic conquest washed away, or pushed radically westwards, the frontier between the antagonistic Roman and Sāsānian empires. It reestablished and expanded the political unity of the ‘Nile-to-Oxus region’,7 which had formerly been achieved by the Achaemenid (Persian) empire (550–330 bce) but collapsed after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 bce. The Islamic conquest went further and achieved a relative religious and civilizational cohesion,8 lasting even after the dismantling of the new empire (Maps 3.2, 3.3). Did this vast newly conquered territory constitute an ‘empire’? Following the working definition of Stephen Howe – for whom an empire is ‘a large, composite, multi-ethnic or multinational political unit, usually created by conquest, and divided between a dominant centre and subordinate, sometimes 6 7 8

For the definition and usage of the term, see Hodgson, Venture of Islam, vol. i, pp. 50, 109–10. For this geographical term, see ibid., vol. i, pp. 60–2. ‘Relative’ because, in spite of its hegemony, Islam was never the only religion of the region nor was it ever homogeneous in itself.

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István T. Kristó-Nagy

far distant, peripheries’9 – we can certainly agree that the Islamic conquests led to the formation of an empire. We should, however, hasten to qualify this statement by pointing out the fundamental conceptual differences between the analytical categories of modern historians and the ideas of the authors of early Islamdom. The word ‘empire’ itself was not used by the Arabs. Reflecting the concept of ğihād (holy war to spread Islam, which provided the ideology of the conquest), they designated the conquered lands officially as the Dār al-Islām (‘the abode of Islam’) in contrast with the lands not yet conquered constituting the Dār al-ḥarb (‘the abode of war’). The actual borders of the Dār al-Islām were not fixed. On the contrary, the Muslim community (umma) was expected to fulfil the religious obligation of subduing the infidels and conquering the entire world. The modern concept of the ‘state’ as an impersonal, institutional and territorial power is different from the political terminology of the Arabs and their Arabicized subjects in early Islamdom, who used such terms as mulk (linked with the idea of possession, capacity and rule) or sulṭān (meaning force and power). Mulk and sulṭān designated the personal power of the ruler. For this reason, the meaning of sulṭān also indicated the person of the ruler as well as his power.10 Ḫilāfa (‘caliphate’) meant the caliphal position, not the territories united under the caliph’s rule. Dawla did not stand for the territories either, but for the group of people whose turn it was to rule them. Originally, this latter term stood for a ‘turn, mutation, change or vicissitude, of time, or fortune’,11 but in post-classical works it also had the meaning of dynasty or state.12 Amr is the Arabic equivalent of the Latin imperium: both words are linked to the idea of command. The term amr (or its derivative imāra) was not used to describe a territory either, but to indicate the power of a commander (amīr). Thus the Arabic term amīr and the Latin term imperator (emperor) both mean ‘commander’, and the term used for the supreme leader of the Muslim community after the death of Muḥammad was amīr almuslimīn (‘the commander of the Muslims’). The Latin imperium also designated power vested in a person, and only by extension the territory over which he had this power.13 9 10 11 12

13

Howe, Empire, p. 30. See J. H. Kramers and C. E. Bosworth, ‘Sulṭān (a)’, EI2, vol. ix, p. 849. E. W. Lane, Arabic English lexicon, 1 vol. in 8 (book ii never published) (London: Williams & Norgate, 1863–), book I, p. 938. Lane, Arabic English lexicon, book i, p. 939; and F. Rosenthal, ‘Dawla’, EI2, vol. ii, pp. 177–8. The first author to use the term dawla with these different meanings, to my knowledge, was Ibn al-Muqaffac (see Kristó-Nagy, La pensée, p. 102). For an excellent analysis (including bibliographical references) of the terms mulk, dawla, Dār al-Islām and Dār al-ḥarb, see R. Simon, Ibn Khaldūn: history as science and the patrimonial empire, trans. K. Pogátsa (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2002), pp. 136–7, 158–61. For the meaning of imperium as ‘the religious power to act especially in military and judicial matters’, see Whitby (Chapter 6, p. 131). Neither the Greeks nor the Romans elaborated an abstract (and territorial) concept of ‘state’, writing instead about peoples (G. Woolf, ‘Inventing empire in ancient Rome’, in Alcock et al., Empires, pp. 313–14).

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Conflict & Cooperation between Arab Rulers & Persian Administrators 61

According to the principles laid down by Muḥammad, the Islamic ‘state’ was the Muslim community, the umma.14 Consequently, the main function of the state apparatus should have been to serve the umma, on the one hand by collecting the obligatory alms from the Muslims and the much higher amount of tax due from conquered lands and religious communities that were placed in subjection and, on the other hand, by distributing these revenues and using them for pious purposes, such as financing the ğihād, helping the poor, building mosques and so on. But the government and administration of the state itself needed to be funded. In theory, again, the income used to recompense the ruler and to pay the costs of the administration, including the maintenance of the court, was distinguished from revenues collected for the umma. All the administrative divisions and supervising offices were, however, under the authority of the ruler whose only supervisor was God. The distinction between his offices and the community’s offices was blurred in practice.15 The state apparatus did not belong to the community, the umma, but to the dynasty, the dawla. Although in theory the caliphs should have ensured universal justice and prosperity on earth by maintaining the laws decreed by God through his prophet and submitting the entire world to Islam,16 they were only able to do so in the works of their many eulogists. Other than ensuring external and internal stability, in reality the state did not care systematically about the welfare of its subjects. Given the limits of premodern agriculture, it would have been impossible. Yet the very size of the cities of Islamdom shows that within the limits of premodern technology, agriculture was thriving. The management of this agriculture required intelligent government and sometimes even investment from the ruling elites; but the taxes extracted from the countryside provided enough revenue to ensure the welfare of the state’s personnel – the rulers, the military and the bureaucrats. These primary beneficiaries of the system used part of their wealth to finance the life of those whose services they enjoyed, including poets and prose writers (such as historians and philosophers); musicians; singing slave girls; and all kinds of slave boys, architects and calligraphers. Philosophers were generally paid if they also had some ‘practical’ expertise, such as in medicine, astrology, theology, law 14

15 16

See R. B. Sergeant, ‘The Sunnah Jāmi‘ah, pacts with the Yathrib Jews, and the Taḥrīm of Yathrib: analysis and translation of the documents comprised in the so-called “Constitution of Medina” ’, Bulletin of the School of African and Oriental Studies 41:1 (1978), 1–42. The Qur’ān does not speak about any political ‘state’ of the Muslims, but about their community: see, for example, the Qur’ān, iii/110. For an analysis of the concept of the umma, see F. M. Denny, ‘Community and society’, in J. D. McAuliffe (gen. ed.), Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, 6 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2001–6), vol. i, pp. 367–86. On all these issues, see N. J. Coulson, C. Cahen and B. Lewis, ‘Bayt al-Māl’, EI2, vol. i, pp. 1141–9. See P. Crone, Medieval Islamic political thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), published in the United States under the title God’s rule: government and Islam: six centuries of medieval political thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

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or statecraft. Prose writers, calligraphers and often poets, too, were usually bureaucrats, though the propaganda value of poetry was so high that poets could make a living just from their panegyrics. The governmental and administrative systems of the Umayyads followed by the cAbbāsids and the successor states can be seen, using Max Weber’s terminology, as ‘patrimonial’ power structures, based on the households of their respective rulers; but we have to bear in mind that their rule was rarely absolute. It depended on the personal character of the ruler and on his (or, extremely rarely, her) circumstances.17 At the top of the state, some of the patriarchal and tribal elements always remained, as the rules of succession within the ruling dynasty were rather flexible. Solving the problem of succession was one of the keys to success for a dynasty. While the ruler often had to struggle for supremacy within his own dynasty, the power of the entire dynasty was less tangible on lands that were difficult to reach for its military. Such lands were not necessarily geographically remote: mountainous, desert or swampy regions were hard to control even when proximate to the dynastic centre. It is also important to stress that the dynasties were not always in control of the state structure built around them. One of the most striking examples of this is the tragic destiny of ‘the caliph of one day’, Ibn al-Muctazz (d. 908/296), the excellent poet, critic and prose writer, who, being an cAbbāsid prince, accepted elevation to the caliphal throne by a group of plotting officers, judges and secretaries on the condition that they should avoid bloodshed. Then a resisting vizier was killed, and Ibn al-Muctazz was proclaimed caliph but was strangled on the very same day.18 The Islamicate empire was not a monolithic pyramid of power. In contrast with the societies of India or pre-Islamic Iran, its society was not made up of rigid castes, and social mobility was relatively high. It is better thought of as a cone of power built up from a network of smaller cones. At its apex was the household of the ruler standing on the top of other cones, such as the households of the governors and other powerful dignitaries sitting on the cones of the ordinary households. In this system, if a ruling dynasty or a governor fell, his 17

18

On the role of women in Islamdom, see G. R. G. Hambly (ed.), Women in the medieval Islamic world: power, patronage, and piety (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998). On patrimonialism, see Whimster (Chapter 18, pp. 439–40). B. Lewis, ‘Ibn al-Muʿtazz, Abu ’l-ʿAbbās ʿAbd Allāh’, in EI2, vol. iii, pp. 892–3. On Ibn alMuctazz’ Kitāb al-Badīc, see S. A. Bonebakker, ‘Ibn al-Muctazz and Kitāb al-Badīc’, in J. Ashtiany, T. M. Johnstone, J. D. Latham, R. B. Sergeant and G. Rex Smith (eds.), The Cambridge history of Arabic literature, vol. ii: cAbbāsid belles-lettres (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 388–411. Members of the Ottoman dynasty were even more fatally captives of their system until 1595/1003 when ‘public outrage at Mehmed III’s execution of his nineteen brothers brought to an end the practice of automatic fratricide on accession to the throne’ (C. Imber, The Ottoman empire, 1300–1650: the structure of power (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 114).

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Conflict & Cooperation between Arab Rulers & Persian Administrators 63

dependents often followed him. During the long centuries of their evolution, the Islamicate states, which we can describe as power structures or networks, became more institutionalized and durable as they developed systems for the education of their military and administration as well as strategies for the smooth transition of the supreme power from one member of the ruling dynasty to another. II

The Historical Evolution of the Islamicate Empire and of its Elites The explosive expansion of Islamdom resulted in a continuous structural transformation of the Islamicate empire. The conquest by the Arab tribes led to the formation of one of the largest territorial empires in the history of humankind. Although the tribal element in Islamdom did not completely vanish, the organization of the polity became increasingly centralized, with a general tendency towards a structured administration, institutionalized education of the elites and the consolidation of a dynastical rule. Already at the election of the first caliph following the death of Muḥammad (632/11), the tribal principle prevailed over the communal one in that Abū Bakr (r. 632–34/11–13) was one of Muḥammad’s fathers-in-law. His most impetuous supporter and successor, cUmar (r. 634–44/13–23), who was also a father-inlaw of Muḥammad, argued against the leadership of any of the Medinese supporters of Muḥammad (the Anṣār).19 He quoted Muḥammad as saying that the leaders of the community would belong to the Qurayš, that is, the tribe of the prophet (as well as of Abū Bakr and cUmar). The third caliph c Uṯmān (r. 644–55/23–35) was a son-in-law of Muḥammad and belonged to the Umayyad family (r. 661–750/41–132), which established the first ruling dynasty (and the practice of dynastic rule) in Islamdom after the short rule of c Alī (r. 656–60/35–40), a cousin of the prophet, who was also his son-of-law. The Umayyads were overthrown by the cAbbāsids (r. 750–1258/132–656), whose ancestor al-cAbbās was an uncle of the prophet. The empire’s centre shifted from the Hedjaz to the much richer Syria, which already had a significant Arab population and connected Arabia’s long-standing trade routes to the Mediterranean and Byzantium. Syria, therefore, became the capital of the Umayyads, while the empire’s agrarian and commercial heart was Iraq. Following the victory of the cAbbāsids in 750/132, Iraq also became the political centre of the empire. Baghdad was founded by the second 19

See D. Sourdel, ‘Gouvernement et administration dans l’Orient islamique jusqu’au milieu du XIe siècle’, in D. Sourdel and J. Bosch Vilá (eds.), Regierung und Verwaltung des Vorderen Orients in islamischer Zeit, teil 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1988), p. 6.

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c

Abbāsid caliph al-Manṣūr in 762/145 as the capital of the new dynasty ruling over the Islamicate empire. He chose a location where the Tigris and the Euphrates come close together, near to the ancient Sāsānian capital, Ctesiphon.20 One of the causes behind the revolution which brought the cAbbāsids to power was the accelerating fusion of the peoples and cultures in lands under Muslim rule. The dominance of the Arab Muslim conquerors was strong at first, but never absolute in the multi-ethnic polity that they had hammered together. In spite of the interest of the Arab elites in preserving their prerogatives, the subject peoples that formed the huge majority of the population increasingly converted to Islam,21 refashioning it according to their own concepts and traditions. The importance of non-Arab warriors, administrators and religious scholars grew quickly despite the lower status originally attaching to non-Arab converts to Islam, who were mawālī (sing. mawlā) – that is, ‘clients’ of their Arab ‘patrons’ ‘at the hand of whom’ they converted.22 The empire became less and less Arabic and more and more Islamized, while Islam itself was in continuous formation, its different streams expressing the huge diversity of sociocultural visions within the new empire. With their conversion to Islam and their integration into the elite of the new civilization, non-Arabs progressively fitted their ideas into the Islamic framework and contributed to its very construction. Concepts and structures of the societies conquered by the Muslims came to be accepted as standard ideas and norms for the Muslims of later generations. This pattern is a familiar one. As Horace wrote (Epist. 2.1.156): ‘Captive Greece captured her rough conqueror, And brought the arts to rustic Latium’ (Graecia capta ferum uictorem cepit et artis | intulit agresti Latio). Conquests which had an enduring success were often characterized by blending and compromise between the cultures of the conquerors and the vanquished. The civilization of China, for instance, absorbed waves of nomadic conquerors. Similarly, Iranians and other subject 20 21

22

See A. A. Duri, ‘Bag̲ h̲ dād’, EI2, vol. i, p. 895. We have only indirect means of estimating the dynamic of the conversion process, but it seems to have been escalating under the cAbbāsid dynasty. On the question of conversion, see R. W. Bulliet, ‘Conversion to Islam’, in D. O. Morgan and A. Reid (eds.), CHI, vol. iii: The eastern Islamic world eleventh to eighteenth centuries, pp. 529–38; and M. García Arenal, ‘Conversion to Islam: from the “age of conversions” to the millet system’, in M. Fierro (ed.), CHI, vol. ii: the Western Islamic world, eleventh to eighteenth centuries, pp. 586–606. In the Roman sense of the word cliens: see P. Crone, Roman, provincial and Islamic law: the origins of the Islamic patronate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Concerning the evolution of the status of the mawālī, see P. Crone, Slaves on horses: the evolution of the Islamic polity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 49–57. The results of her research on this topic are synthesized in A. J. Wensinck and P. Crone, ‘Mawlā’, EI2, vol. vi, pp. 874– 89. See also M. Bernards and J. Nawas (eds.), Patronate and patronage in early and classical Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

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peoples of the Islamicate empire realized that the Qur’ān had a universalist and egalitarian message which allowed them to emancipate themselves by accepting and ‘conquering’ the religion of their conquerors: Islam.23 The integration of the vanquished was possible because of the assimilation of the conquerors. Only a minority of the latter occupied such uncultivable lands which supported a barely pastoralist nomadic lifestyle. It is not by chance that it was such groups that gave the Syrian army of the Umayyads its strength. In Iraq, according to a system established by the third caliph cUmar (r. 634–44/13–23), most of the descendants of the conquering Arabs were settled in new garrison towns such as Kufa and Basra. They were not given land which they would have cultivated themselves – this was left to the subject population – but they were listed in the military register, the so-called dīwān24 (a Persian word) and were entitled to a stipend coming from the taxes paid by the vanquished. This stipend was not awarded for one’s actual military services but rather for the merits of one’s father’s service in the conquest of the given provinces. The conquerors and their progeny, therefore, received much more than other Arabs who arrived after the conquest or mawālī who had joined the conquering army. This resulted in social tensions between their respective descendants and facilitated the Syrian domination over Iraq. This system prevented the Arabs from being absorbed by the mass of the vanquished in the countryside, but it did not maintain their military spirit. Rather, the presence of a well-paid military and pseudo-military Arab elite attracted all kinds of people offering their services, from tradesmen and craftsmen to prostitutes and prosateurs; and the urbanized Arabs themselves merged with this civilian population living at the expense of the surrounding agricultural lands. As the descendants of the conquerors became rulers and urban elites, they adopted cultural patterns of the vanquished. The fusion between the Arabs and the vanquished peoples was not only cultural but also ethnic, and it occurred most quickly at the uppermost levels of the elite. In general, the higher the position of an Arab family rose, the larger its progeny could grow because of the possibility of having four wives and an unlimited number of concubines. Because Muslim women were not supposed to be taken as concubines, most of the children of an Arab lord were from nonMuslim and usually non-Arab women. Thus, generation by generation, Arab aristocrats, including the rulers, became less and less Arab regarding their origins. Their identity and culture became a mixture of their Arab and nonArab heritage, as it was their Arab nobility that gave them the right to behave like the preceding rulers and aristocrats whose lands and women their fathers 23 24

The Qur’ān, 49:13. A. A. Duri, H. L. Gottschalk, G. S. Colin, A. K. S Lambton and A. S. Bazmee Ansari, ‘Dīwān’, EI2, vol. ii, pp. 325–37.

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had seized.25 Since their prominence within the empire and even within the Arab elite was sanctified by Islam, it was a crucial element of their identity as well, in spite of the fact that they usually held in high esteem many ante- and often anti-Islamic elements of the Arab and non-Arab heritage that strengthened their status. This melting and merging of peoples and ideas resulted in a new cultural synthesis that combined local ‘little traditions’26 everywhere with the new ‘great tradition’ – itself in continuous formation. The Islamic great tradition drew on several elements: biblical and parabiblical material, the law of the Roman provinces at the border of Arabia and of Sāsānian Iran,27 Hellenistic science and late antique imperial political thought mixed with Arab tribal elements.28 The cAbbāsid’ era saw the elaboration of Islamicate society, its political framework and its elites. The leadership of such a complex society required specialization. Different qualities and qualifications were needed to deal with the army and the police, with accounting and the chancellery and with civil and religious law. Enduring empires are not easily ruled by a succession of holy men. Thus the caliphs (ḫulafā’; sing. ḫalīfa) – that is, the deputies of God or successors of his messenger, Muḥammad29 – gradually lost authority. They lost most of their religious/legal authority to the ‘savants’, that is, the religiousjurist scholars (culamā’; sing. cālim); their administrative authority to the viziers (wuzarā’; sing. wazīr)30 and the secretaries (kātib; sing. kuttāb);31 and their military authority to the commanders (umarā’; sing. amīr).32 In the main, the culamā’ represented the civil, trading and artisanal urban elites. Whereas the military and the bureaucrats were paid by the governments that they served (hence neither the soldiers nor the secretaries were ever truly 25

26 27 28 29

30 31 32

See I. T. Kristó-Nagy, ‘Marriage after rape: the ambiguous relationship between Arab lords and Iranian intellectuals as reflected in Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s oeuvre’, in M. Larkin and J. Sharlet (eds.), Arabic literary culture: tradition, reception, and performance (Harrassowitz Verlag, forthcoming). See Ch. Stewart, ‘Great and little traditions’, in A. Barnard and J. Spencer (eds.), Encyclopedia of social and cultural anthropology (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 267–9. On the fundamental importance of this provincial law that originated in the local traditions fused with Hellenistic and Roman influences, see Crone, Roman, provincial and Islamic law. See Crone, Medieval Islamic political thought. See P. Crone and M. Hinds, God’s caliph: religious authority in the first centuries of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); R. Hoyland, ‘New documentary texts and the early Islamic state’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 69:3 (2006), 404–6, 410; and F. M. Donner, Muhammad and the believers: at the origins of Islam (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2010), pp. 209–11. See M. Q. Zaman, A.-M. Eddé, A. Carmona, A. K. S. Lambton and H. İnalcik, ‘Wazīr (a.)’, EI2, vol. xi, pp. 185–97. See R. Sellheim, D. Sourdel, B. Fragner and R. Islam, ‘Kātib’, EI2, vol. iv, pp. 754–60; and A. Tafażżolī and H. Rajabzadeh, ‘DABĪR’, EIr, vol. vi, fasc. 5, pp. 534–9. On the evolution of the term, see A. A. Duri, ‘Amīr’, EI2, vol. i, pp. 438–9; and W. Floor, ‘Amīr al-umarāʾ’, EI3.

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free but lived in personal dependence on their lords), the principle of the most respected culamā’ was not to work for the secular authorities and their machinery. Their strength was clearly demonstrated when the seventh cAbbāsid caliph al-Ma’mūn officially proclaimed the theological doctrine of the ‘createdness of the Qur’ān’ in 827/212. Despite setting up an inquisition (miḥna) in 833/218, he and his two successors were unable to constrain the culamā’ to accept unanimously this unpopular doctrine, and finally the tenth caliph of the dynasty al-Mutawakkil abandoned it in 849/234.33 The Islamicate empire developed a tremendous system of bureaucracy based on the traditions (and personnel) of the Roman/Byzantine and Sāsānian empires, and their predecessors. Under the cAbbāsids, the heads of the imperial administration accumulated prodigious wealth and power. The first ‘dynasty’ of viziers serving the cAbbāsids was descended from Ḫālid b. Barmak, whose ancestors were the guardians of a Buddhist temple in Balkh. Ḫālid served as one of the chief advisers/administrators of the founder of Baghdad, alManṣūr.34 His family’s fortunes changed when the fifth cAbbāsid caliph Hārūn al-Rašīd (a grandson of al-Manṣūr) decided to destroy the son and grandsons of Ḫālid in 803/187.35 Nevertheless, the power of viziers remained important, reaching a peak during the reign of the fifteenth caliph of the dynasty al-Muqtadir and his successors (908–36/296–324).36 This period was depicted as a rather dark experience in the history of Islamdom by the philosopher and historian Miskawayh, who was himself a bureaucrat. The ruthless fights between their different factions rivalling each other and leaders of the military contributed to the irreversible decline of the dynasty’s power and to the breakup of the empire.37 33 34

35

36

37

This episode of Islamic history has received considerable scholarly attention. One of the most recent studies is Ch. Melchert, Ahmad ibn Hanbal (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006), pp. 8–16. Al-Manṣūr was Arab also only on his father’s side. His mother was a Berber slave girl. See H. Kennedy, ‘al-Manṣūr, Abū Ḏj̲ aʿfar ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad b. ʿAlī’, EI2, vol. vi, pp. 427–8. See W. Barthold and D. Sourdel, ‘al-Barāmika or Āl Barmak’, EI2, vol. i, p. 1033–6; T. El-Hibri, Reinterpreting Islamic historiography: Hārūn al-Rashīd and the narrative of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 8, 31–53; Hugh N. Kennedy, The prophet and the age of the caliphates: the Islamic near east from the sixth to the eleventh century, 2nd edn (Harlow: Pearson, 2004), pp. 140–3; and A. Hámori, ‘Exemplum, anecdote, and the gentle heart in a text by al-Jahshiyārī’, Asiatische Studien: Zeitschrift der Schweizerischen Asiengesellschaft/Etudes asiatiques: revue de la Société Suisse–Asie 50 (1996), 363–70. See Maaike van Berkel, ‘The bureaucracy’, in Maaike van Berkel, Nadia El Cheikh, Hugh Kennedy and Letizia Osti (eds.), Crisis and continuity at the Abbasid court: formal and informal politics in the caliphate of al-Muqtadir (295–320/908–32) (Leiden: Brill, 2013). See R. P. Mottahedeh, ‘Bureaucracy and the patrimonial state in early Islamic Iran and Iraq’, alAbḥāṯ 29 (1981), 25–36. For a more detailed description, see Kennedy, The prophet, pp. 185–97, summarized in the corresponding section of Zaman, Eddé, Carmona, Lambton and İnalcik, ‘Wazīr (a.)’, p. 186. The most exhaustive study of the institution of the vizier during the ‘golden age’ of the cAbbāsid dynasty is D. Sourdel, Le vizirat ʻabbāside de 749 à 936 (132 à 324 de

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Effective rule over the shrunken empire was officially placed in the hands of mighty military overlords when in 936/324 the twentieth cAbbāsid caliph alRāḍī officially appointed Muḥammad b. Rā’iq as the ‘commander of the commanders’ (amīr al-umarā’). This title was conferred then to an Iranian (Daylamite) Šīcite dynasty of military leaders, the Buwayhids (or Būyids) who entered Baghdad in 945/334 but continued to acknowledge the nominal authority of the caliphs.38 The military, the bureaucrats and the culamā’ were to share and negotiate power in Islamdom. They together governed, exploited and despised the peasants. Hence, in spite of all of their differences, the three dominant groups of Islamicate society depended on one another. The military and administrative elites formed an uneasy but ineluctable alliance built on necessity but characterized by mutual dislike. The military of the Islamicate empire was originally constituted of free Arab tribesmen, and it evolved later towards a full-time professional army composed mainly of slave boys of tribal origins. The so-called mamlūk or ġulām soldiers, whose legal status was that of (usually manumitted) slaves, were of various origins, including most importantly steppe peoples producing outstanding mounted archers, but also Berbers, Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans.39 This new military elite proved to be so successful that in the classical period of Islamdom, its members reigned as sultans over Egypt (1250–1517/648–922) and Syria (658–922/1260–1516) and were also prominent elsewhere.40 The bureaucrats represented the imperial traditions of the vanquished ethnicities to which they mostly belonged. They were outsiders to the military, who liked to be served by the bureaucrats in coercing the subject population to pay the taxes from which they received their stipends, but they did not like the

38 39

40

l’Hégire), 2 vols. (Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1959–60). For another important overview, see Sourdel, ‘Gouvernement et administration’, esp. pp. 42–56, which deals with the central and provincial administration of the cAbbāsids. See Zaman et al., ‘Wazīr (a.)’, p. 186. See the subsection on ‘The Caliphate’, in D. Sourdel, C. E. Bosworth, P. Hardy and H. İnalcık (eds.), ‘GHulām’, EI2, vol. ii, 1965, 1079–91 (at 1079–81). On the emergence of the use of mamlūk soldiers in Islamdom starting by the beginning of the third/ninth century, see Crone, Slaves on horses, pp. 74–81; and P. Crone, ‘The early Islamic world’, in K. Raaflaub and N. Rosenstein (eds.), War and society in the ancient and medieval worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 309–22 (at 314–5, 319–22 and 325–6), reprinted in P. Crone, From Arabian tribes, which deals not only with the military but offers one of the most lucid concise overviews of the historical evolution of Islamdom in general until the decline of the cAbbāsids. According to Gh. Jayyusi-Lehn, these Turkic soldiers were generally recruited mercenaries, not captured and bought slaves (Jayyusi-Lehn, ‘Turkic nomads: the élite of ninthcentury Muslim armies’, in M. Gervers and W. Schlepp (eds.), Continuity and change in Central and Inner Asia: papers presented at the Central and Inner Asian Seminar, University of Toronto, 24–25 March 2000 and 4–5 May 2001 (Toronto: Asian Institute, University of Toronto, 2002), pp. 11–20). On the Mamlūks, see D. Ayalon, ‘Mamlūk’, EI2, vol. vi, pp. 314–21; and on their sultanate, see P. M. Holt, ‘Mamlūks’, EI2, vol. vi, pp. 321–31.

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Conflict & Cooperation between Arab Rulers & Persian Administrators 69

bureaucrats restricting them in exploiting the subject peoples. Nevertheless, the military had to find a modus vivendi with the bureaucrats because it was the latter who knew how to communicate and channel power so that the subject populations could be milked in a sustainable way. The military also needed the political and spiritual support of the culamā’, who in their turn preferred any firm rule to anarchy because the latter presented a lethal danger for the urban elites, and it could destroy the networks of trade, artisanal production and social hierarchy within the cities and the dominance of the city over the countryside.41 Willingly or unwillingly, many of the culamā’ ended up serving the authorities, most importantly being appointed to the position of judge (qāḍī).42 Each of these three dominant groups of Islamicate society were in constant reformulation, as was their relationship to one another. The obligatory use of religious/legal parlance in the continual negotiations between the governments (represented by the kuttāb and culamā’ they employed) and the governed (represented by their culamā’) resulted in the Islamization of the administration, that is, the mingling between Islamic norms and imperial administrative heritage. It also originated a drift towards a coalescence between those kuttāb who were well versed in the šarīca and those culamā’ who were employed by the government. A less forced cohesion developed between mystics and groups of the military because the spirit of the teachings and rituals of some ṣūfī confraternities were especially appealing to warriors. These tendencies reached their height later but were already apparent in the cAbbāsid era. III

Empire and Bureaucracy For the conquering Arabs to subdue and manage vast territories, they had to construct an efficient military structure (including clear chains of command and a reliable system of supply) and to superimpose their organization upon the local tax and legal structures of the conquered lands. Nevertheless, to 41

42

As al-Fārābī states simply, ‘the relation of the village to the city is one of service’ (R. Walzer (ed. and trans.), Al-Farabi on the perfect state: Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī’s Mabādi’ ārā’ ahl-al-madīna al-fāḍila (Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1985), section v, ch. 15, 2, pp. 22816 (text) and 229, 231 (transn)). Ibn Ḫaldūn’s Muqaddima also has a chapter entitled, ‘Agriculture is a way of making a living for weak people and Bedouins in search of subsistence’ (É. M. Quatremère (ed.), Muqaddimat Ibn Khaldūn: Prolégomènes d’Ebn-Khaldoun, 3 vols. (Paris: Benjamin Duprat, 1858, repr. Beirut: Maktabat Lubnān, 1970), vol. ii, pp. 29613–78; F. Rosenthal (trans.), Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah: an introduction to history, 2nd edn, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), vol. ii, ch. 5, 8, pp. 335–6). See E. Tyan, Gy. Káldy-Nagy, ‘Ḳāḍī’, EI2, vol. iv, pp. 373–5. See also J. H. Kramers and R. C. Repp, ‘S̲ H̲ ayk̲ h̲ al-Islām’, EI2, vol. ix, pp. 399–402.

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administer the complex societies and economies of these lands, including the task of systematic and sustainable tax collection, the conquerors required the advice and services of the bureaucrats of the vanquished empires who possessed a developed scriptural, archival and budgetary expertise. In the case of the Islamic conquest, as time passed, the mutual integration of the systems of the conquerors and the vanquished became more and more complete. The result was the Islamic(ate) civilization whose variants reflect different local, social and economic patterns. The earliest post-conquest Egyptian papyri, which are datable to the seventh century, ‘testify to a well-developed documentary practice indicating the existence of an Arabic scribal tradition distinctive from the pre-Islamic Egyptian tradition’.43 This might be explained by the administrative experience of the pre-Islamic dynasties of the Yemen and of the Ġassānids (c.490–636) and Laḫmids (c.300–c.600) on the southern edges of the Roman and the Sāsānian empires. Arabs were also involved in trade, and, according to the Islamic tradition, Muḥammad’s scribes in the Hedjaz wrote down many of the verses of the Qur’ān.44 One of these scribes was allegedly the young Mucāwiya who was, according to tradition, one of the eighteen literate members of the entire Qurayš tribe.45 Mucāwiya belonged to the Umayyad family leading Mecca before the rise of Islam and his father, Abū Sufyān b. Ḥarb, was one of the most feared enemies of Muḥammad. Nevertheless, Mucāwiya became the Muslim governor of Syria, fought with cAlī and ruled as a generally recognized caliph (661–80/41–60) after the death of the latter. He is considered the founder of the Umayyad dynasty, although his uncle, cUṯmān, the third caliph, was already from the same family. In spite of the existence of this Arab scribal tradition, the general tendency in Islamdom was that the officials of the bureaucracy were from the settled population, while the officers of the military belonged to the actual dominant element of nomad, desert, mountaineer or steppe tribes of the dynasties’ army. The administrative systems of the Islamicate states consisted of parallel hierarchies of innumerable bureaux that complemented and supervised one another. This overlapping machinery promised a form of control, but the complexity of the bureaucratic system did not always result in efficiency. The level of corruption of these systems can be grasped by the establishment of special governmental offices (dīwāns) such as the ‘dīwān al-marāfiḳ (lit. 43

44 45

P. M. Sijpestejn, ‘The Arab conquest of Egypt and the beginning of the Muslim rule’, in R. S. Bagnall, Egypt in the Byzantine world, 300–700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 446. See A. Jones, ‘Orality and writing in Arabia’, in J. D. McAuliffe (gen. ed.), Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, vol. iii, pp. 587–93. See also Sellheim et al., ‘Kātib’, pp. 754–5. See R. S. Humpreys, Mu‘awiya ibn abi Sufyan: from Arabia to empire (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006), pp. 6, 7.

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aids; bribes, that is, which were paid by governors, obviously from riches accumulated by dubious means)’;46 and the dīwān al-muṣādarāt or dīwān almuṣādarīn,47 that is, the bureau of ‘the mulcting of an official of his (usually) ill-gotten gains or spoils of office’.48 Sophistication often did not mean the absence of brutality, rather the sophistication of brutality.49 Governorship or other high military and administrative positions were already among the most lucrative and the most dangerous jobs available during the Umayyad’s rule. Being killed under torture was a frequent end to such vertiginous careers.50 Many or most of the famous kuttāb and wuzarā’ were also killed. Stories of their life and death were recorded by historians who themselves belonged to the same social group, such as al-Ğahšiyārī (with whom this chapter opened), or Miskawayh. The last Umayyad ruler, Marwān b. Muḥammad, was defeated and killed by the cAbbāsids in 750/132. His secretary, cAbd al-Ḥamīd b. Yaḥyā al-Kātib (b. c.688/69), who introduced the genre of epistles in Arabic literature, was seized and killed in the same year, despite the attempt of his younger confrère, Ibn al-Muqaffac, to save him, risking his own life.51 As we have seen, Ibn al-Muqaffac’s bright career ended in a grisly death. Abū Ayyūb al-Mūriyānī, al-Manṣūr’s own kātib or wazīr for fifteen years, reputedly plotted against Ibn al-Muqaffac, desiring the latter’s death for fear that he could take his place. Abū Ayyūb himself finished his life in jail a year after he had fallen from grace, and al-Manṣūr had his wealth confiscated and his relatives executed in 770/153.52 Another of al-Manṣūr’s advisers was Ḫālid b. Barmak, one of whose grandsons, the legendary Ğacfar (who features in the tales of the Thousand and One Nights), married the sister of his milk-brother53 and intimate companion, the caliph Hārūn al-Rašīd, who – after returning from pilgrimage – had him murdered in 803/187. His brother al-Faḍl was also imprisoned and died in jail, and all the family’s fortune was confiscated. Particularly hideous, even by contemporary standards, was the rule and demise of the vizier Ibn al-Furāt and 46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53

Duri et al., ‘Dīwān’, p. 325. C. E. Bosworth and F. Müge Göçek, ‘Muṣādara’, EI2, vol. vii, pp. 652–3. Ibid., p. 652. See also M. van Berkel, ‘Embezzlement and reimbursement: disciplining officials in ‘Abbāsid Baghdad (8th–10th centuries A.D.)’, International Journal of Public Administration 34:11 (2011), 712–19; and M. van Berkel, ‘The vizier and the harem stewardess: mediation in a discharge case at the court of caliph al-Muqtadir’, in John Nawas (ed.), ‘Abbasid studies II: occasional papers of the School of ‘Abbasid Studies: Leuven, 28 June–1 July 2004 (Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters en Departement Oosterse Studies, 2010), pp. 303–18. The contrasting coexistence of sophistication and brutality (including obscenity) that characterizes the Islamicate humour obviously reflects social realities. See Crone, Slaves on horses, pp. 44–5, 102, 105–6, 107, 135, 147, 150, 153, 160, 233, 234, 235. See Kristó-Nagy, La pensée, p. 247. See C. E. Bosworth, ‘al-Mūriyānī, Abū Ayyūb Sulaymān b. Mak̲ h̲ lad’, EI2, vol. vi, p. 628. See El-Hibri, Reinterpreting Islamic historiography, p. 8.

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his son al-Muḥassin, who managed to be even more brutal than their rivals at the time when bureaucratic power was at its peak, until they themselves were executed in 924/312.54 The higher the office, the more precipitous was the danger. Those administrators who rose to the summit of the bureaucratic hierarchy often possessed extraordinary expertise and were just as talented in managing their careers. Some of these officials were true artists of survival and succeeded in saving their skin and status even at dynastical changes. Ibn al-Muqaffac survived the fall of the Umayyads and switched to the service of the cAbbāsids, before being killed during their internal struggle. He even dared to write about the possibility of a courtier liberating himself from the service of a ruler whose goal is not the welfare of his flock.55 Rulers often beheaded (quite literally) the administration of a province, or even the chief administrators of their entire empire, to prevent governors and viziers becoming dangerously independent. It was also a lucrative business, since the confiscated wealth of those officials and their dependents who were dismissed, imprisoned, tortured and killed was often a great asset to the ruler’s treasury. So cutting off the head of the bureaucracy was not uncommon; but rulers knew very well that cutting off the feet of the administration would have been injurious for the fisc. The specific knowledge and connections of the locally rooted officials were indispensable to the maintenance of order, including the collections of taxes. This was an important card in the continuous game of sharing power and resources between the provincial elites and those of the centre. As was frequently the case with experts of all kinds in premodern times,56 administrative expertise was often acquired within a family, and the existence of administrative dynasties was common at all levels, although talented and ambitious outsiders could also achieve successful careers. Owing to the great similarities in the character of administrative and legal systems across Islamdom, qualified ‘men of the pen’ were employable by different dynasties in different locations. In studying this bureaucracy, we are faced with the contrast between the richness of the literary sources describing it, including a huge number of 54

55

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See van Berkel, ‘The vizier and the harem stewardess’; Kennedy, The prophet, pp. 191–2. For the history of all the prominent members of the family, see D. Sourdel, ‘Ibn al-Furāt’, EI2, vol. iii, pp. 767–8. See his Kitāb al-Ādāb al-kabīr (under the title al-Adab al-kabīr) in M. Kurd cAlī (ed.), Rasā’il al-bulaġā’, 3rd edn (Cairo: Lağnat al-taʼlīf wa-’l-tarğama wa-’l-našr, 1946; reprinted in 1954), p. 565–10 (available in French translation in J. Tardy, ‘Traduction d’al-Adab al-Kabīr d’Ibn alMuqaffac’, Annales islamologiques 27 (1993), 193, §§38–9). On the title of the Kitāb al-Ādāb al-kabīr, see I. T. Kristó-Nagy, ‘On the authenticity of Al-Adab al-ṣaġīr attributed to Ibn alMuqaffac and problems concerning some of his titles’, Acta Orientalia Scientiarum Hungariae 62:2 (2009), 213–16. Crone, Pre-industrial societies, pp. 82–3.

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manuals for bureaucrats, and the scarcity of extant documentary evidence.57 Official documents intended to authenticate and preserve contracts and contracted rights seldom survived the vicissitudes of time, unless copied as examples into the abundant literary sources, such as the ‘administrative literature’58 of the secretaries (kuttāb)59 and the legal literature of the religious-jurist scholars (culamā’). These sources expressed and enhanced the cohesion of these different privileged social groups – their caṣabiyya, to borrow a key organizing concept from the work of the historian-philosopher Ibn Ḫaldūn (d. 1406/808). Documents made by corporate entities other than the state, which are copious in the West, are rare in Islamdom because of the relative scarcity of such formal, contracted and documented corporate entities and ‘legal persons’. It is also worth noting that according to the šarīca, written documents were legally worthless without oral support.60 This role did not apply, however, in the case of the highest level of the juridical institutions, at the so-called maẓālim courts, where the decisions were made by the caliph or his representatives.61 Literary sources attest that in the cAbbāsid era bureaucracy proliferated, and an immense amount of written documentation was produced, archived and used as evidence.62 This bureaucratic proliferation was further encouraged by a technological shift away from papyrus or parchment towards the use of paper, which was a much cheaper medium. It seems clear that the main beneficiaries of the growth of the size and importance of the bureaucracy were the bureaucrats themselves, whose authority grew as their work became increasingly specialized so that only they could produce and read their documents. The bureaucratic tasks were divided in two main categories: accounting and secretarial (chancery) work. The first group took care of the taxation and the payroll; the second was responsible for ‘public relations’ (within the empire and with external powers).63 The labour of the accountants was generally recognized 57

58

59 60 61 62 63

See B. Soravia, ‘Les manuels à l’usage des fonctionnaires d’administration (adab al-kātib) dans l’Islam classique’, Arabica 52:3 (2005), 417–20, 432–6. While the bulk of the existing documents has not been thoroughly studied yet, work on them has begun: see Hoyland, ‘New documentary texts’, 410, n. 73. See C. E. Bosworth, ‘Administrative literature’, in J. Ashtiany, T. M. Johnstone, J. D. Latham, R. B. Serjeant and G. Rex Smith (eds.), The Cambridge history of Arabic literature, vol. ii, cAbbāsid belles-lettres (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 164. See the conclusion (432–6) of B. Soravia, ‘Les manuels’. See Coulson et al., ‘Bayt al-Māl’, pp. 1142–3. See van Berkel, ‘Embezzlement and reimbursement’, pp. 715–6. See van Berkel, ‘Embezzlement and reimbursement’; and van Berkel, ‘Archives and chanceries, pre-1500, in Arabic’, EI3. On the rivalry of these two groups vying for prestige and salaries, see C. E. Bosworth, ‘A maqāma on secretaryship: al-Qalqashandī’s al-Kawākib al-durriyya fī’l-manāqib alBadriyya’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 27 (1964), 291–8, republished in C. E. Bosworth, Medieval Arabic culture and administration (London: Variorum Reprints 1982); G. J. van Gelder, ‘Man of letters v. man of figures. The seventh night from al-Tawḥīdī’s

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as fundamental, but it was still less well esteemed and remunerated than the work of the true artists of prose (and sometimes of poetry), the masters of drafting and of handwriting of official correspondences.64 From them rose most men of letters in Islamdom. The very word kātib, which is the active participle of the word ‘write’, means scribe/secretary and writer. The kuttāb not only safeguarded and revived the administrative traditions of the previous empires but also their high culture including their literature65 that they transposed into Arabic and continued to produce in every language of Islamdom that gained official status after the decomposition of the cAbbāsid empire. We find pieces of information about administrators, their work and destiny in virtually all genres of Islamicate literature including historiographies and biographies, as their authors were in most cases from the bureaucratic ‘class’ of society. It is, in fact, quite difficult to delineate the different genres of Islamicate prose literature. Administrative literature is a reflection of scribal self-awareness. Its roots go back to the origins of writing. Islamicate administrative literature66 stemmed from the legacy of late antique Greek, Iranian and Indian literatures. The importance of secretaries of non-Arab origin in the creation of Arab prose literature is illustrated by the fact that we find at the foundation of this literature the translation into Arabic of a famous Greek novel in letters, the (fictitious) correspondence between Aristotle and Alexander the Great. The author of this translation was probably Sālim Abū-’l-cAlā’ (alone or with others), a Christian Syriac secretary of the Umayyad caliph Hišām b. cAbd alMalik (r. 724–43/105–25).67 The husband of Sālim’s sister (or daughter), cAbd al-Ḥamīd, the first celebrated author in Arabic prose, was ‘a third-generation Muslim of non-Arab, probably Persian, extraction’.68 Ibn al-Muqaffac was c Abd al-Ḥamīd’s younger friend. He was certainly Persian and was a late and dubious convert to Islam. The secretaries (kuttāb) and their presumptuous manners, their high esteem for the Sāsānian heritage and their hostile attitude to Islam are targeted by

64 65

66 67

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al-Imtā‘ wa-’l-mu’ānasa’, in H. L. J. Vanstiphout, K. Jongeling, F. Leemhuis and G. J. Reinink (eds.), Scripta signa vocis: studies about script, scriptures, scribes and languages in the Near East, presented to J. H. Hopers by his pupils, colleagues and friends (Groningen: Egbert Forsten 1986), pp. 53–63; and M. van Berkel, ‘Accountants and men of letters: status and position of civil servants in early tenth century Baghdad’ (PhD, University of Amsterdam, 2003), pp. 131–41. Regarding the different levels of the salaries paid to the administrators, see van Berkel, ‘Accountants and men of letters’, pp. 108–14, 140–1. See F. Gabrieli, ‘Adab (a.)’, EI2, vol. i, pp. 175–6; Dj. Khaleghi-Motlagh, ‘ADAB i. Adab in Iran’, EIr, vol. i, fasc. 4, pp. 432–49; and Ch. Pellat, ‘ADAB ii. Adab in Arabic Literature’, in ibid., vol. i, fasc. 4, pp. 439–44. For a masterful summary of this tradition, see Bosworth, ‘Administrative literature’, pp. 155–67. See M. Maróth (ed.), The correspondence between Aristotle and Alexander the Great: an anonymous Greek novel in letters in Arabic translation (Piliscsaba: The Avicenna Institute of Middle Eastern Studies, 2006), pp. 8, 80, 97. W. al-Qāḍī, ‘ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd b. Yaḥyā al-Kātib’, EI3.

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vitriolic irony in a pitiless lampoon attributed to al-Ğāḥiẓ (d. 868/255), ‘The blame of the secretaries’ morals’, which captures the splendid misery of the kuttāb in the following sarcastic sentences: [A] clerk cannot demand back pay, or even leave his master if his master is slow to pay him. A clerk has the situation of a slave; and among slaves, they occupy the rank of idiots. In spite of all this, they attain the pinnacle of boasting, the summit of vanity, swimming on an ocean swelled with pride and self-conceit!69

Another acerbic satire is ‘The morals of two viziers’ by al-Tawḥīdī (d. c.1023/414).70 The historiographical work of his contemporary Miskawayh, entitled ‘The experiences of the peoples’, offers invaluable insight into the life of the secretaries and viziers.71 These authors were among the most of important litterateurs of the cAbbāsid period. They were all of non-Arab origin and spent at least a period of their working lives as secretaries. At the highest scale, scribes and ministers passed above the level of bureaucracy, acting as personal advisers to their lords or rulers, who sometimes even delegated to them the role of decision-making. Yet because the ruler was not seen as an elected, supervised and recallable deputy of its subjects but as an elected and supervised deputy of God, the state and its bureaucracy remained dependent on the ruler. Just as the state was his household, the ‘public servants’ of the state were his personal familiars. The most august roles of the ‘men of the pen’ – including the kuttāb and the culamā’ – were to advise the ruler and to mediate between him and the subjects, not to depose him. The principle of disobeying a ruler who disobeys God existed,72 but the idea of revolt was not in the mainstream of Islamicate thought.73 69

70 71

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(Pseudo?) al-Ğāḥiẓ, ‘Ḏamm aḫlāq al-kuttāb’, in J. Finkel (ed.), Three essays of Abu cOthman cAmr Ibn Bahr al-Jahiz (Cairo: al-Maṭbaca al-Salafiyya wa-Maktabatuhā, 1926; reprinted in 1962 (1382)), pp. 40–51 at p. 427–10, quoted here from the English translation in R. P. Mottahedeh, ‘Bureaucracy and the patrimonial state in early Islamic Iran and Iraq’, al-Abḥāṯ 29 (1981), 26. For a complete French translation, see Ch. Pellat, ‘Une charge contre les secrétaires d’État attribuée à Ğāḥiẓ’, Hespéris 43 (1956), 29–47 (34, §11), a section of which is also translated into English in Ch. Pellat, The life and works of Jāḥiẓ: translation of selected texts, trans. D. M. Hawke (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 273–5 (pp. 273–4). On the burden of service as described in Ibn al-Muqaffac’s works, see Kristó-Nagy, ‘Who shall educate whom? The official and the sincere views of Ibn al-Muqaffac about intellectual hierarchy’, in N. Koulayan and M. Sayah (eds.), Synoptikos: mélanges offerts à Dominique Urvoy (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail, 2011), pp. 289–90; and Kristó-Nagy, La pensée, pp. 201–7. M. b. T. al-Ṭanğī (ed.), al-Tawḥīdī, Aḫlāq al-wazīrayn (Damascus: al-Mağmac al-cIlmī al-cArabī, 1965; republished in Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1992). See The Tajârib al-umam or History of Ibn Miskawayh (Abu ‘Ali Aḥmad b. Muḥammad) ob. A.H. 421 . . ., 3 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1909–17); and The concluding portion of the experiences of the nations by Miskawayh, ed. and trans. H. F. Amedroz and D. S. Margoliouth, 7 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1920–1). See I. M. Lapidus, ‘The separation of state and religion in the development of early Islamic society’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 6:4 (1975), 373, 376–7. For an overview of the relationship between the state and the culamā’, see M. Lapidus, ‘State and religion in Islamic societies’, P&P 151 (1996), 3–27. On the quietism of the mainstream culamā’, see ibid., 15–16, 24.

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The Intellectual Heritage of the Vanquished: Imperial Theories by Imperial Officials Political practices and theories current in the late antique world were assimilated to Islamdom. For instance, Augustine’s City of God against the Pagans74 shows similarity to the Muslim concept of the ‘abode of Islam’ contrasted with the ‘abode of war’. By the time of the rise of Islam, the conceptual and ideological association between universalistic religious mission and empirebuilding was already well established. Sāsānian legacy was also highly influential in Islamdom. According to a maxim of Sāsānian political wisdom literature whose variants were often quoted in Islamicate texts, ‘Power (mulk or sulṭān) and religion (dīn) are twins/brothers.’75 In the governmental practice of the Sāsānian empire, religion was relatively auxiliary, an ideological support to power. This reality was, however, often blurred in theory because of the pretentions both of the priests who sought to upgrade their role and of the rulers who preferred to attire their power in the halo of their religious authority. Although the Arab conquest would have been impossible without the element of religious cohesion that the leaders of the Islamic community forged among the Arab tribes, the men of religion, the culamā’, did not come to enjoy any more authority in the court of the Islamicate empires than their predecessors had held in the time of the Sāsānians. Another Sāsānian theory attributed to Tansar/Tōsar, the high priest of the founder of the dynasty Ardašīr (r. 224–41) and to this king himself, described the ideal structure of the state in a way which can be fairly well modelled with a pyramid, though this image was not used by the authors of the era. According to this model, the top of the pyramid was the ruler, and its four sides were the four caste-like estates of Iranian society: the clergy, the military, the scribeadministrators (including also physicians, poets and astronomers) and the producers (including artisans, peasants, breeders as well as traders).76

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See a short analysis by P. Brown, The rise of Western Christendom, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 91–2. A variant of this saying can be found in The letter of Tansar, trans. M. Boyce (Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1968), pp. 33–4. See also Shaul Shaked, ‘From Iran to Islam: notes on some themes in transmission, 1. “Religion and sovereignty are twins” in Ibn alMuqaffac’s theory of government. 2. The four sages’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 4 (1984), 31–67 (repr. Shaked, From Zoroastrian Iran to Islam: studies in religious history and intercultural contacts (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 1995), ch. 6). Letter of Tansar, pp. 37–8. For further sources and the status of the secretaries, see A. Tafażżolī and H. Rajabzadeh, ‘DABĪR’. On the Sāsānian class system, see M. Shaki, ‘CLASS SYSTEM iii. In the Parthian and Sasanian periods’, EIr, vol. v, fasc. 6, pp. 652–8.

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It is questionable, of course, how rigid the Sāsānian system was in reality and how it changed during its history,77 but it is certain that the society of the new Islamicate empire was much more permeable. Nevertheless, it still corresponded to another Sāsānian model according to which the state was built on those who provided its subsistence, the peasants, and on those who provide its safety, the soldiers. The role of the ruler and his administration was to maintain justice between the peasants and the soldiers, because without constraint the peasants would not give anything to the soldiers and without discipline the soldiers would take everything from the peasants.78 (This triangular schema was also presented in a circular way demonstrating the interdependence of the elements of the system.79) This model did not deal with the priesthood. This might reflect the desire of some Sāsānian rulers to curtail the clerics’ authority and give preference to ‘secular’ administrators, whose authority derived only from serving of the earthly ruler, not from serving the heavenly Lord. This model was more suitable for most of the polities in Islamdom, since institutionalized priesthood appeared only in the Šīcite empire of the Ṣafawids after their state was centralized from the first quarter of the seventeenth century. One of the most influential authors to introduce Sāsānian ideas into Islamicate political thought was the Persian mawlā secretary Ibn al-Muqaffac. He stated that a government based on religion was stronger than one based only on ḥazm, firmness, because religion gave the subjects what they needed and obliged them to do what they had to and this satisfied them and helped them accept their situation.80 Ibn al-Muqaffac strenuously warned against a system81 that would later lead to the decline of agriculture across Islamdom, when the 77 78

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80

81

See Shaki, ‘CLASS SYSTEM iii. In the Parthian and Sasanian Periods’. See the Kārnāmağ Ānūširwān in The Tajârib al-Umam or History of Ibn Miskawayh (reproduced in facsimile from the MS at Constantinople in the Âyâ Ṣûfiyya Library), 3 vols. published (Leiden: E. J. Brill, London: Luzac & Co., 1909–17), vol. i, pp. 2036–55. For a French translation, see M. Grignaschi, ‘Quelques spécimens de la littérature sassanide conservés dans les bibliothèques d’Istanbul’, Journal asiatique 254 (1966), 26–7, as well as a text conserved under the title of ‘The book of the crown on the life of Anūšīrwān by Ibn alMuqaffac’, Kitāb al-Tāğ fī sīrat-Anūšīrwān li-’bn al-Muqaffac, in M. Grignaschi, ‘Quelques spécimens’, 1041–3 and 10514–18 (for his French translation, see 129–30 and 131). See J. London, ‘The “circle of justice” ’, History of Political Thought 32:3 (2011), 425–47; and J. London, Autocracy and the foreigner: the political thought of Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ (forthcoming), devoted to the analysis of Ibn al-Muqaffac’s invocations of this model of the just world. See also Kristó-Nagy (written as Kristo), ‘Who shall educate whom?’ pp. 285–8; and Kristó-Nagy, La pensée, pp. 173 and 225–7. Kurd cAlī, Rasā’il al-bulaġā’, p. 495–12 and Tardy, ‘Traduction’, 188, §17. See also M. Mahassine, ‘Deux genres d’autorité vus à travers les œuvres d’Ibn al-Muqaffa‘: l’autorité fondée sur la religion et l’autorité fondée sur la fermeté’, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 14:1 (1991), 89–120, as well as I. T. Kristó-Nagy, ‘Reason, religion and power in Ibn al-Muqaffac’, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 62:3 (2009), 285–301. Pellat, Ibn al-Muqaffac, §23, and also §§51–3.

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state was unable to fulfil its role as defined by the Sāsānian concept – according to which the ruler and his administrators were to maintain the justice between the soldiers and the peasants – and instead of correctly managing the collection of the taxes from the peasants and distributing to the soldiers their pay, it allowed the officers to take their income immediately from the peasants. This system still let the state control the soldiers who did not become the owners of the lands, which were designated to them for a confined period, but it ruined the peasants. According to the Sāsānian model, the structure of the state was hierarchical, with the ruler at the top of all hierarchies – military, religious, administrative and legal alike. Ideally, this unique status of the ruler elevated him over society and put him above all conflicts and all competition within his state, making him impartial, just and responsible only to God.82 The question whether the ruler should be the ‘living law’ or whether his role is to keep the given laws alive by enforcing them is still disputed between Muslim sects. The case of the eminent philosopher al-Fārābī (d. 950/339) illustrates the debate. According to him, the philosopher-prophet-kings are lawgivers, and the ruler who succeeds (yaḫlifu) them has to observe the laws given by their predecessors and deduce new laws from them in cases that have remained unregulated.83 In Ibn al-Muqaffac’s imperial theory, the state’s hierarchy is presented as sheer and rigid. The rule of the ruler is absolute, yet not without limits. His decisions and actions are bound by the rules of religion and prepared and effected by his advisers/administrators. Thus, in an indirect way, the leading of society is the responsibility of the administrators who guide the decisionmakers mastering over the producers and the military. V

Conclusion Under the cAbbāsids, classical Islamicate civilization progressed immensely, but the power of the dynasty withered and the unity of their empire disintegrated. Over such an immense territory, centralized administration would have been unreasonably expensive and ineffective – in fact, impossible.84 After the Islamic conquest, the local administration of the provinces was organized 82 83 84

See A. Al-Azmeh, ‘Monotheistic kingship’, in A. Al-Azmeh and J. M. Bak (eds.), Monotheistic kingship: the medieval variants (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004), pp. 9–29. See Walzer (ed. and trans.), Al-Farabi on the perfect state, section v, ch. 15, §13, pp. 2506–16 and 2521–4 (text), 251 and 253 (transn). According to M. Q. Zaman, ‘the state – any pre-modern state, for that matter – had insufficient infrastructural means to effectively implement any policies for long’ (Zaman, Religion and politics under the early cAbbāsids: the emergence of the proto-Sunnī elite (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1997), p. 210).

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Conflict & Cooperation between Arab Rulers & Persian Administrators 79

around the conquering army garrisons which stayed in them, providing new local elites who enjoyed considerable autonomy. These provincial elites claimed the right to the tax revenues yielded by the agricultural surplus of the lands they or their ancestors conquered. The contrary interest of the central government and elites was a chronic source of tension, which was one of the main reasons for the fall of the Umayyads. The effective efforts of the cAbbāsid government in bringing the tax revenues to the new centre Baghdad (replaced as the capital of the empire by Sāmarrā’ between 836/221 and 892/279) resulted in the counteraction of the alienated provincial elites who took advantage of the periodically occurring crises in the heart of the empire to make their provinces independent.85 The fragmentation of the empire went in parallel with the fading of the caliphal power. A more or less strong ‘federation’ of Buwayhid umarā’ ruled from 945 to 1055 (334–447) over the former central territories of the empire, Iraq and Western Iran, which remained nominally under the control of the c Abbāsid caliphs. In the former provinces, the administrative, fiscal and political disintegration of the empire gave way to the construction of smaller Muslim polities. Nevertheless, the relative degree of achieved civilizational, religious and commercial unity survived. We might even term the process of the dismembering of the empire as a transformation of the Islamicate empire to an Islamicate commonwealth, in spite of the fact that the politico-militaryadministrative units, from the size of empires to that of city-states, which formed to the detriment of the empire of the cAbbāsids, often waged war against one another.86 The authors of Late Antiquity and early Islamdom discerned that the welfare of their societies depended on an equilibrium between the elites moderating each other in the exploitation of the peasantry. The state was prosperous so long as the soldiers were able to provide its defence (against their own kind), the administrators its organization, and the urban elites its trade, and so long as predatory military, bureaucrats and courtiers did not ruin agriculture. The same authors were also right in emphasizing the rulers’ influence and responsibility. Their role was indeed crucial owing to the steep hierarchy of power. The steeper the hierarchy, the greater the concentration of power at the top, and the importance of the ultimate capstone of the edifice – the ruler – increased accordingly. What the imperial theorists of the period did not explain is that this steep hierarchy was itself one of the reasons for the fragility of the system because the incompetence or death of a ruler 85

86

See Chris Wickham, ‘Tributary empires: late Rome and the Arab caliphate’, in Bang & Bayly, Tributary empires, pp. 209–12. See also H. Kennedy, ‘Central government and provincial élites in the early ‘Abbāsid caliphate’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 44:1 (1981), 26–38. See the excellent description of this evolution in Kennedy, The prophet, pp. 198–209.

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often resulted in crisis. The absence of this idea from treatises authored by imperial administrators is hardly surprising given that the involvement of the masses in decision-making would have been impossible in large premodern polities – it remains a difficult question even today – and that the administrators belonged to the privileged of society, employed not by the masses but by the rulers.

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4

Bureaucracy without Alphabetic Writing: Governing the Inca Empire, c.1438–1532 Chris Given-Wilson

Among the key inventions of premodern Old World societies were the wheel, the arch and an alphabetic system of writing. All three were unknown to the Incas. It might be thought that the lack of an alphabetic writing system would prove a significant handicap to them in governing their vast empire, but any such assumption depends upon a number of factors. What, for example, were the alternatives available to them? And how far did the needs or aspirations of their imperial administration extend – or, to put it another way, how intensively did the Incas wish or attempt to govern their empire? It is easy to assume that imperial regimes aimed for the maximum achievable degree of control over the peoples whom they conquered, leading (so the argument goes) to the maximum achievable extraction of tribute and exploitation of labour and other resources. Doubtless some empires did, but the balance turned on the fact that any such aim was likely to require a higher level of investment not only in bureaucracy but also in military repression and peripheral security. The Incas, as will be seen, were prepared to settle for rather less than this, and the bureaucratic tools which they used reflected this. I

Tahuantinsuyu Before discussing these bureaucratic tools, something needs to be said about the empire which the Incas ruled. Known to its people as Tahuantinsuyu – literally, the ‘land of four parts’ – the Inca empire (not untypically) underwent a rapid phase of initial expansion but never achieved territorial stability before collapsing in the 1530s following the arrival of Francisco Pizarro (d. 1541) and a few hundred Spanish conquistadors. In the 1430s, a century before Pizarro’s arrival, the Incas were just one of a multitude of small ethnic groups competing for power and resources in the Central Andes. The catalyst for expansion was apparently a routine war between them and their neighbours, the Chancas, from which the Sapa Inca or ‘emperor’, 81

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Pachacuti (c.1438–71), emerged victorious.1 Building upon this success, within fifty years he and his son Topa Inca (c.1471–93) had brought under their control the most extensive empire hitherto created in the Americas (Map. 4.1). It stretched for 4,000 kilometres along the spine of the Andes, from modern Ecuador in the north to the present capital of Chile, Santiago, in the south. Centred on the city of Cusco – which was, said Pizarro’s secretary, Pedro Sancho, ‘so large and beautiful that it would be worthy of admiration even in Spain’ – Tahuantinsuyu contained around 11 million people belonging to some 80 ethnic groups varying enormously in size and coherence, each with its own dialect, deities and traditions. The Incas themselves, the ruling elite, comprised only about 1 per cent of this population.2 The pace of expansion was difficult to maintain, however: Topa Inca’s son Huayna Capac (r. c.1493–1526), despite spending much of his reign campaigning in Ecuador, added little before his death to what he had inherited, following which a brutal war of succession between two of his sons, Huascar and Atahuallpa, put paid to any further expansion before the arrival of the Spaniards in 1532. Certain features of Inca society are worth emphasizing by comparison with contemporary Europe. There is, for example, very little evidence of a market economy or of the emergence of a merchant or trading class.3 Money in the form of coinage did not exist, although valuables such as shells, beads, textiles and above all coca leaves do seem to have gained some currency as localized media of exchange. Local systems of barter were largely restricted to exchanging the produce of different ecozones – a necessary process in such a vertical landscape – but the regional and imperial economy revolved around a state-controlled system of tribute and redistribution, and the physical infrastructure of Tahuantinsuyu reflected this. An extensive road system linked a series of massive storehouses which acted as collection points for the tribute of the conquered peoples.4 1

2

3

4

Brian S. Bauer, The development of the Inca state (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), has argued that pottery finds suggest some Inca expansion in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but this clearly did not extend very far beyond Cusco. Garcilaso de la Vega El Inca, Royal commentaries of the Incas, ed. and trans. Harold V. Livermore, 2 vols. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966), vol. i, pp. 103–230, attributed substantial conquests to the first seven Incas (those preceding Viracocha, Pachacuti’s father), but his testimony on this subject is now widely regarded as unreliable. Pedro Sancho, An account of the conquest of Peru, ed. P. A. Mearns (New York: Cortes Society, 1917), p. 153. Population figures for Tahuantinsuyu are based in part upon the Inca census used by Pizarro at the general distribution of encomiendas in 1535. For a brief history of Inca expansion and population, see Terence N. D’Altroy, The Incas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 62–85 (and see now the second edition, 2014). Maria Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, History of the Inca realm, trans. Harry B. Iceland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 159, does, however, argue that there may have been groups of traders operating in the coastal regions to facilitate the exchange of goods between highland and coastal areas. For the physical infrastructure of the empire, see p. 94.

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Pat ia

COLOMBIA

Pasto Guáitara River

Angasmayo River

Quito

ECUADOR Guayaquil Am

Cuenca

a zon

ali

Tumbes

a Uc

ón añ Ma r

BRAZIL PERU

A

Cajamarca Chan Chan

y

N

ta San

Ma

ed dr

e

os Di

D U

S ur i Ap

Jauja

m

a mba rub

E Chancay Lima

ac

Machu Picchu

Cuzco

Ica

Vilcanota River

Nazca

Lake Titicaca

Arequipa

La Paz

Tiahuanaco

BOLIVIA

Potosí

P A C I F I C O C E A N

Licancábur 19,426 ft

CHILE

Expansion of the Inca empire, c.1438–1525 1400

ARGENTINA

1438–63

Pachacuti

1463–71

Pachacuti and Topa Inca*

1471–93

Topa Inca

1493–1525

Huayna Capac

* Around 1463, Pachacuti placed his son Topa Inca in charge of military operations Roads Archaeological site

Aconcagua

Santiago

22,834 ft

Imperial capital 0

250

500

750

1000 km

Constitución 0

100

200

300

400

Mau le

500 miles

Map 4.1 Expansion of the Inca empire, c.1438–1525

As far as can be gathered, there was virtually no concept of privately held property in Tahuantinsuyu and no evidence of land being bought, sold, leased, bequeathed or individually disputed. Wealth – which meant land, flocks of animals such as llamas and other camelids and mineral resources – was held

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and inherited collectively by kinship groups descended from a common ancestor.5 One advantage of communal property ownership was that it reduced the likelihood of a conflict of interests between the government in Cusco and those whom it sent out to oversee the rule of the provinces, since they were not tempted to use their office to establish a local power base. Kinship groups were known as ayllus or, at the highest level of society, panacas. When an ayllu or a federation of ayllus was conquered by the Incas, its inhabitants were obliged to dedicate a proportion of the produce from what had formerly been their lands, flocks and other resources to the maintenance of the Inca state and its deities. The lands thus set aside were known as the lands of the State and the lands of the Sun (or of Religion, the Sun being the chief Inca deity). The produce from these was either used to support local rulers and priests and their staff or taken to the great tribute centres along the royal highways, whence it might be either redistributed or used to provision the Inca armies that constantly traversed the country. The proportion thus relinquished by each ayllu seems to have varied greatly, and it was far from uncommon for the Incas to initiate substantial new agricultural projects throughout Tahuantinsuyu (sometimes referred to as state farms), which would clearly have increased the productivity of the land; nevertheless, the net result would almost certainly have been to reduce the aggregate of the resources available to each ayllu. Many aspects of everyday life were closely regulated. Work was determined more by custom and age than by aptitude or choice.6 Conquered peoples were obliged to provide specified numbers of adult males to work on state projects such as roads, bridges, storehouses and sun-temples or to serve in the Inca army, usually for about four months a year – a system known as the mit’a.7 They also had to send a certain number of young women, chosen for their beauty, to Cusco, where they either became the wives or the concubines of the Sapa Inca and his relatives or were placed in acllahuasi, houses or ‘convents’ of virgins dedicated to weaving, the brewing of chicha and other religious duties. Marriage, too, was strictly controlled: one of the tasks entrusted to local chiefs, or curacas (often referred to by the Spaniards as caciques), was to assemble all the young men and women of marriageable age once a year and pair them off. Even dress was regulated: each group had its traditional clothing and headdresses, and individuals were strictly enjoined to conform to them, for differentiation and for ease of identification. Cloth had multiple functions in Andean 5

6 7

Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, History of the Inca realm, p. 182, argues that ‘wealth’ was conceived of differently in Andean society, more in terms of the potentiality of possessions to create it, and the right of access to them, than of their material value. There were clearly exceptions to this because certain ethnic groups are known to have developed specialisms such as metalwork, pottery, weaving or stonemasonry. For the Inca army, see D’Altroy, Incas, pp. 214–21.

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society, as valued gift, preferred sacrificial offering, bride-wealth and burial accoutrement as well as signifier of status or enforced citizenship.8 Conquered subjects of the Incas were also liable to be forcibly removed from their ancestral lands and relocated to other parts of the empire. This was known as the mitimaes system, and it was enforced on an extraordinary scale. According to the Jesuit priest Bernabé Cobo (d. 1657): The first thing that these kings did when they won a province was to take out of it six or seven thousand families . . . and send them to other parts of the quiet and peaceful provinces . . . and in exchange for them they put the same number of other people . . . These individuals who were settled in new lands were called mitimaes.9

It is reliably reckoned that between a quarter and a third of the total population of the empire was relocated in this way, principally for security reasons – that is, to break up centres of resistance, in effect to divide and rule – but also for economic reasons. Certain groups of mitimaes, for example, are known to have been moved hundreds or thousands of miles to work on state projects such as the great series of terraces at Pisac in the Yucay valley, or the enormous state farm at Cochabamba in Bolivia.10 Yet this was not a heartless policy: families were usually moved to ecozones similar to those in which they had been reared and were provided with land, seeds and tools on their arrival. Even so, this uprooting of millions of people was not a policy which admitted of resistance. It might be thought that social manipulation on this scale must of necessity be accompanied by the extensive use of coercive violence, and there is, to be sure, plenty of evidence – especially from the later and more reliably remembered years of the empire, from Huayna Capac onwards – of widespread rebellions suppressed by large armies, permanent garrisons and a grimly inventive repertoire of exemplary and collective punishments. On the other hand, there is also a consistent emphasis in the chronicle sources on the fact that many of the groups incorporated into Tahuantinsuyu willingly accepted Inca rule through peaceful submission, treaty or alliance. Even a witness such as Pedro de Cieza de León, 8

9 10

John V. Murra, ‘Cloth and its function in the Inka state’, in Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider (eds.), Cloth and human experience (Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1989), pp. 275–302. For the view that ‘dress fulfilled a role similar to that of writing in other imperial administrations’, see R. Tom Zuidema, ‘Guaman Poma and the art of empire: towards an iconography of Inca royal dress’, in K. J. Andrien and Rolena Adorno (eds.), Transatlantic encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the sixteenth century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 151–275, at 273. Bernabé Cobo, History of the Inca Empire [1653], ed. and trans. Roland Hamilton (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), p. 189. D’Altroy, Incas, p. 248; for Cochabamba, to which some 14,000 families were moved under Huayna Capac, see Nathan Wachtel, ‘The Mitimas of the Cochabamba valley: the colonization policy of Huayna Capac’, in George A. Collier, Renato I. Rosaldo and John D. Worth (eds.), The Inca and Aztec states, 1400–1800: anthropology and history (New York: Academic Press, 1982), pp. 199–235.

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who based his chronicle upon conversations with the conquered peoples as much as with the Inca lords, was quite insistent about this: [The Incas] always tried to do things by fair means and not by foul at the beginning: afterward, certain of the Incas meted out severe punishments in many places, but they all tell that first they used great benevolence and friendliness to win these people over to their service . . . They entered many lands without war, and the soldiers who accompanied the Inca were ordered to do no damage or harm . . . They knew how to provide for everything so well that when one of the Incas entered a province in friendship, in a little while it seemed a different place and the natives obeyed him, agreeing that his representatives should dwell there, and also the mitimaes . . . They never deprived the native chieftains [curacas] of their rule. They were all ordered to worship the Sun as God, but they were not prohibited from observing their own religions and customs. However, they were ordered to be ruled by the laws and customs which prevailed in Cusco, and all were to speak the general language [Quechua].11

Some of those who accepted overlordship doubtless reckoned, once the Inca juggernaut started rolling, that resistance was futile; others allied with the Incas as a way of dominating local rivals; in return, they received privileges and additional resources. Curacas who cooperated were kept in power and given Inca wives and other inducements, although their children were usually taken to Cusco to be held hostage for their continued acquiescence. Curacas who resisted were frequently killed. Local deities, or huacas, were tolerated (although portable icons were also frequently removed to Cusco as hostages), unless they were perceived to be inimical to the Incas, in which case they would be destroyed. Yet, whether or not it was done willingly, there is probably a good deal of truth in the chroniclers’ picture of the peaceful incorporation of many subject groups into Tahuantinsuyu. The earliest substantial narrative sources for Andean history are the chronicles of Pedro de Cieza de León (d. 1554) and Juan de Betanzos (d. 1576), both composed in the late 1540s.12 They were written from very different perspectives. Betanzos married an Inca princess, and his account preserves what is in effect the official, Cusco-centric version of Inca history, tempered in this case by his wife’s connections to the panaca of Pachacuti, which supported Atahuallpa in the civil war of 1527–32. Cieza, on the other hand, wrote history from the margins, by travelling around Tahuantinsuyu for three years (1547–50) collecting local memories and views of Inca rule from the provinces, although he too clearly had access 11

12

The Incas of Pedro de Cieza de León, ed. and trans. Harriet de Onis and Victor Wolfgang von Hagen (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959), pp. 158–60. The probanza which the Capac Ayllu submitted to the Spanish soon after the conquest distinguished between groups conquered by war and groups conquered by ‘agreement’ (John H. Rowe, ‘Probanza de los Incas nietos de conquistadores’, Historica 9 (1985), 193–245). English translations are to be found in The Incas of Pedro de Cieza de León; and Juan de Betanzos, Narrative of the Incas, ed. and trans. Roland Hamilton and Dana Buchanan (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996).

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to sources in Cusco. What is clear is that they wrote independently of each other. Later chroniclers such as Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa and Bernabé Cobo were less independent but included plenty of additional detail.13 Naturally, these early chroniclers do not present unbiased portraits of the Incas; part of their aim was to justify the Spanish conquest, and although some of them (especially Cieza) made a serious attempt to understand Andean culture, they tend to portray indigenous rulers as autocratic and their people as barbaric, childlike and of course heathen. Yet neither were indigenous authors unbiased. The massive early seventeenthcentury Commentarios Reales de los Incas of the mestizo author Garcilaso de la Vega (d. 1616), the first part of which is a comprehensive attempt to portray the civilizing influence of the Incas upon the Andes, is now regarded as one of the least reliable sources for the history of Tahuantinsuyu. Much of what he wrote is contradicted by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, a chronicler of full Andean parentage with little love for the Incas and even less for the Spaniards; his Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno is famed chiefly for the hundreds of pictures which he drew to accompany his text – which, on account of their close attention to detail, are used to illustrate almost all modern books about the Incas.14 Yet while they may have taken different political or factional standpoints (some of them, for example, supporting Atahuallpa, others Huascar, in the civil war of 1526–32), the overall picture which the early chroniclers paint of Tahuantinsuyu, its customs, its institutions and its peoples, is remarkably convergent and, broadly speaking, tends to be corroborated rather than contradicted by archaeological and anthropological evidence or the official documentation generated by the Spaniards in the decades following the conquest. Apart from anything else, this suggests that despite their lack of alphabetic writing, the Incas must have had quite effective ways of preserving their history. II

Bureaucracy and the Quipu What, then, were the mnemonic and bureaucratic tools available to the Incas? The most important and most famous was the quipu.15 A quipu consists of 13

14

15

For English editions, see Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, The history of the Incas [1572], ed. and trans. Brian S. Bauer, Vania Smith and Jean-Jacques Decoster (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007); Bernabé Cobo, Inca religion and customs [1653], ed. and trans. Roland Hamilton (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); Cobo, History of the Inca empire. Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal commentaries; Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, The First New Chronicle and good government, ed. and trans. David Frye (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2006). The manuscript of Poma’s chronicle, now in the Danish Royal Library at Copenhagen, can be viewed at www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/info/en/frontpage.htm. For more detailed information on quipus, see the Harvard khipu database project at http://khip ukamayuq.fas.harvard.edu/References.html.

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a number of strings or cords, made from either wool or cotton, tied at various points into knots, all hanging from a main or master cord (or perhaps a piece of wood). The main series of pendant cords might also have subsidiary cords, although it was rare for any pendant cord to have more than one or two subsidiary cords. Quipus were used to record, transmit and check information. The way that this was done was, first, by varying the length, width and number of the pendant cords, and by adjusting the order in which they were attached to the main cord. Second, they employed different coloured cords to indicate different commodities, types of people, sequences of events and so forth.16 Third, the size, type and number of knots tied into the cords helped differentiate data (Figure 4.1). It is just over a century now since Leland Locke demonstrated how Inca record-keepers constructed knots to represent the decimal system which was the basis of their accounting practice. This was, essentially, by tying knots with between one and nine loops to indicate the first nine numerals, then adding variants or elaborations to these to indicate tens, hundreds or thousands. Positional zero was marked by the absence of any knot.17 The principal use to which the quipu was put was the recording of statistical information. The items most commonly counted by the Incas were, first, commodities, especially the tribute payable each few months or each year, by the inhabitants of Tahuantinsuyu, and, second, people. Tribute levels were established in Cusco by the Sapa Inca and his advisers, based upon reports brought in on quipus. Garcilaso described this process thus: When the Inca had conquered a province and had its inhabitants counted . . . he had a record made on his knots and beads of the pasture lands, high and low hills, ploughlands, estates, mines of metals, saltworks, springs, lakes and rivers, cotton fields, and wild fruit trees, and flocks of both kinds, including those that produced wool and those that did not. All these things and many others he had counted, measured and recorded under separate headings, firstly the totals for the whole province, and then those for each village and each inhabitant. They measured the length and the breadth of the arable land, the cultivable area, and the pastureland. When all the details were known, a full report was made of the whole province.18

16

17

18

Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal commentaries, vol. i, p. 330, said that some colours were standardized, ‘such as yellow for gold, white for silver, and red for warriors’, but this was certainly not always the case. See the explanation and diagram in D’Altroy, Incas, pp. 15–19. For more detailed theories of the mathematical properties of quipus, see Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton (eds.), Narrative threads: accounting and recounting in Andean Khipu (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); and Marcia Ascher and Robert Ascher, Code of the Quipu: a study in media, mathematics and culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981). Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal commentaries, vol. i, pp. 269–70.

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Figure 4.1 The quipu illustrated in Guaman Poma’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615)

Working from this information (which was verified through consultation with the local curacas), two identical quipus would be drawn up recording the agreed level of tribute. One was taken back by the curaca to his province as a record of what his people owed; the other was kept in Cusco or sent to the

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storehouse where the goods were to be deposited, thus enabling an audit once they were delivered.19 Thus, for example, there might be a yellow string with knots indicating that so many thousand sacks of maize were due, a white string with knots denoting so many hundred llamas, and other coloured strings with knots denoting specified quantities of other commodities. Population levels in the provinces were recorded with similar care by the Incas: births and deaths were counted locally on a monthly basis, enabling regional chiefs or governors and their accountants to return census figures to the Sapa Inca each year. The quipu recorded not just the total number of people in a province but also broke this figure down, via subsidiary cords, into male or female, young or old, married or widowed and locally born or mitimaes. Specifying the number of adult males of working age or the number of elderly widows, for example, made it possible for the administration in Cusco to determine the amount of labour tribute which could be demanded in the following year from each ayllu or province or the additional commodities or mitimaes that might be required in that region to avoid hunger, deprivation or undeproduction.20 The use of the quipu for accounting purposes throughout Tahuantinsuyu is widely attested and generally understood. It seems to have been an extremely effective way of keeping numerical records. The Spanish chroniclers were, to a man, profuse in their praise of the accuracy with which the Incas accumulated statistical information. According to Cieza de León: Those who were the accountants and understood the meaning of these knots could reckon by them expenditures or other things that had taken place many years before . . . By these knots they kept the account of the tribute to be paid by the natives of that district in silver, gold, clothing, flocks, down to wood and other more insignificant things, and by these same quipus at the end of a year, or ten, or twenty years, they gave a report to the one whose duty it was to check the account so exact that not even a pair of sandals was missing.

On one occasion when the chronicler expressed some skepticism at claims of the precision of their quipus, a curaca from Jauja called Huacara-pora showed him how they worked, and Cieza de León ‘was amazed thereby’.21 Indeed, so impressed were the new masters of colonial Peru that they quickly came to rely on the raw knowledge contained in the quipus for their own estimates of 19 20 21

See the example cited in Betanzos, Narrative of the Incas, pp. 90–1, following the submission of the Soras and Lucanas. Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal commentaries, vol. i, p. 100; Betanzos, Narrative of the Incas, pp. 109–10; D’Altroy, Incas, p. 235. The Incas of Pedro de Cieza de León, p. 174; for comment, see Gary Urton and C. J. Brezine, ‘Information control in the palace of Puruchuco: an accounting hierarchy in a Khipu archive from coastal Peru’, in Richard L. Burger, Craig Morris and Ramiro Matos Mendieta (eds.), Variations in the expression of Inka power (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2007), pp. 357–84.

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population levels (for example, when awarding themselves encomiendas, that is, grants of the labour of indigenous workers) or for determining levels of tribute which, at least in theory, were not supposed to exceed those formerly demanded by the Incas.22 When it came to adapting the quipu to the recording of other kinds of information, the results were more variable. Garcilaso claimed that quipus could be used to keep a record of judicial decisions: different coloured cords were used to indicate different types of crime, while subsidiary cords attached to each of them specified the type of punishment decreed. One measure of their reliability is that the Spaniards allowed the judicial information recorded on quipus to be read out as evidence in court, as a result of which a number of quipu transcriptions were written down.23 Betanzos even reproduced several pages of laws derived from quipus; he did, however, go on to say that because of the Incas’ lack of writing, many of their other laws had been forgotten.24 A number of chroniclers also claimed that quipus were used to record history, and in support of this it must be said that the Incas certainly seem to have had effective ways of remembering the deeds of past rulers, although they do not seem to have chosen to place these within a unified chronological structure.25 This is in some ways surprising, since chronology should in theory have been quite easily tracked on quipus, but it doubtless reflected their sense of priorities. Yet, according to Garcilaso, the role of the quipu in preserving these histories was strictly mnemonic: ‘continuous spoken or written prose’, he said, ‘cannot be expressed by knots, since these can give only numbers and not words’.26 Like the beads on a rosary, their function was to serve as reminders to those whose task it was to memorize the Sapa Inca’s deeds and to pass them down from one generation to the next. The history of Tahuantinsuyu which was told to men such as Juan de Betanzos thus relied primarily upon the memories of professional bards, so to speak, and only secondarily upon the quipus which they used to jog those memories, which would probably have meant nothing, or at least very little, to anyone apart from the quipucamayoc who compiled and kept each one. Songs, stories, paintings and dramatic re-enactments were also used, in conjunction with quipus, to preserve the memory of historical events.27 22

23 24 25 26 27

Galen Brokaw, A history of the khipu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 23–4, 265. For a local example, see Sue Grosboll, ‘And he said in the time of the Ynga, they paid tribute and served the Ynga’, in Michael A. Malpas (ed.), Provincial Inca: archaeological and ethnohistorical assessment of the impact of the Inca state (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), pp. 44–76. Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal commentaries, vol. i, p. 98; D’Altroy, Incas, pp. 18–19. Betanzos, Narrative of the Incas, pp. 97–112. The Incas of Pedro de Cieza de León, p. 187; Cobo, History of the Inca empire, p. 254. Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal commentaries, vol. i, pp. 331–2. Responsibility for remembering the deeds of a Sapa Inca lay with his panaca, or descent group, and what interested them was not the chronology of his reign but his deeds, especially his military deeds. Most Inca history took the form of what we would call heroic biography: for an

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Quipucamayoc, literally translated, meant ‘keeper of the knots’; in effect, the term refers to the Inca bureaucratic cadre. Bernabé Cobo claimed that only quipucamayocs could read quipus, and that they could only read their own quipus: in other words, quipus had no transferable code or universal language; the information on each one was decipherable only by its keeper.28 As a generalization, this is misleading, for there were different types of quipus and different levels of quipu literacy. At both local and regional levels, sets of matching quipus have been found, presumably for checking against each other, indicating that there was indeed a shared code for deciphering them among a trained class of bureaucrats. However, when it came to the preservation of historical and other narrative material, Cobo’s claim that each quipu’s story was known only to its quipucamayoc was probably correct, since their cords and knots were, as already noted, not so much a lingua franca as a sequence of prompts.29 There must have been thousands of quipucamayocs in Tahuantinsuyu: Garcilaso said that no community, however small, had less than four; although one would have sufficed, ‘the Incas preferred to have plenty in each village and for each sort of calculation, so as to avoid faults that might occur if there were few.’30 Doubtless there was also a well-established hierarchy among them, from the central officials based in Cusco, to the regional governors and their staff, down to the local officials whose task it was to keep track of each ayllu’s births, deaths and tribute quotas on a monthly basis. At the local level, the office was often hereditary, with knowledge being passed down from father to son. At the highest level, quipucamayocs might be very well born indeed. Topa Inca made his nephew Yamque Yupanque chief purveyor of all the livestock throughout Tahuantinsuyu, all of which, according to Betanzos, he recorded on his quipus.31 Elsewhere, we are told that the chiefs of conquered tribes were obliged to send their sons and other young men to Cusco for schooling in the Inca way of doing things, which included training in quipu literacy.32 As well as recording, transmitting and auditing data, quipus were also stored in archives for future reference. Writing around 1590, the chronicler Martin de Murua described the office of one group of quipucamayocs thus: Thus the accountants have great heaps [montones] of these strings, in the form of registries, just as scribes have in their offices, and there they maintain their archives,

28 30 31 32

extended discussion, see Catherine Julien, Reading Inca history (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000). 29 Cobo, History of the Inca empire, p. 254. Brokaw, History of the khipu, pp. 21, 99. Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal commentaries, vol. i, pp. 127, 331. Betanzos, Narrative of the Incas, p. 161. Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal commentaries, vol. i, p. 226; Cobo, History of the Inca empire, p. 191.

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and in that way, should anyone want to know something, they have to do no more than to go to a quipucamayoc of these records and ask him how much this thing was, or which Inca made this law, or who conquered such and such a province, or who were his captains, or in which years it was dry and which fertile, or when were there pestilence and wars, or when did certain Indians rebel, or when did a certain volcano erupt, or when did a certain river flood and destroy the fields? Then the accountant would take up his cords and explain them [daba razon de ello] without making a single mistake.33

Interestingly, Murua’s examples seem to place considerable emphasis on chronology, which may, to the Incas, have seemed of greater importance in administration than in history. The young men sent to Cusco for training in quipu literacy were also schooled in Quechua, in Inca history and in Inca religion. All these were clearly of importance in ensuring the smooth running of the empire. The use of Quechua as the lingua franca of imperial administration was enforced throughout Tahuantinsuyu, although how far down the social scale it penetrated is not clear: Garcilaso said that within thirty years of the Spanish conquest, it had been all but forgotten in many places.34 Knowledge of Inca religion would have been needed to maintain the annual cycle of rituals and festivals to the Sun and other Inca gods, which was required of all conquered provinces.35 Shrines and the sacrifices due to them were carefully recorded: in the Cusco valley alone, roughly 350 shrines were dotted along forty-two processional routes which radiated out from the city centre, the so-called ceque lines. Detailed information about each of these shrines and the sacrifices appropriate to each one was taken down and found its way into some of the Spanish chronicles.36 The Incas also had quite a sophisticated understanding of both solar and lunar cycles, and Guaman Poma made it clear in one of his drawings that astrological knowledge could be preserved on quipus.37 The strict enforcement of an annual calendar was of central importance, not just as a way of regulating labour, tribute and all forms of service but also to ensure the prompt and full performance of rituals and sacrifices to the Inca deities. Like many imperial rulers, and like the Spanish Christians who supplanted them, the Incas conquered in the name of 33

34 35

36 37

Quoted in Urton and Brezine, ‘Information control in the palace of Puruchuco’, pp. 358, 364 (from book 2, ch. 11 of Murua’s chronicle). Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal commentaries, vol. i, pp. 50, 267, 274–5, confirms that information from censuses, tribute and labour was systematically stored for future reference, and at Puruchuco the chamber used by the quipucamayocs has been identified. The Incas of Pedro de Cieza de León, pp. 169–70; Cobo, History of the Inca empire, p. 181; Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal commentaries, vol. i, pp. 394, 406–7. Huayna Capac is said to have ordered all the keepers of ‘shrines and idols’ to give him an account of their resources and their rituals, which were then ‘taken down’, presumably on quipus (Betanzos, Narrative of the Incas, p. 167). D’Altroy, Incas, pp. 155–67; Cobo, Inca religion and customs, pp. 51–84. The Incas of Pedro de Cieza de León, p. 181; Cobo, Inca religion and customs, pp. 251–2; Guaman Poma de Ayala, The First New Chronicle, p. 278.

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an ideology, the worship of their chief deity, the Sun, and his child on earth, the Sapa Inca. One further point to be made about Inca administration relates to speed of communication, no small consideration in an empire spanning 4,000 kilometres from north to south. One of the features of Tahuantinsuyu which most impressed the Spaniards was the Inca road network, which extended to some 40,000 kilometres in total, much of it through the most difficult sort of terrain, and included vertiginous flights of steps, tunnels through the sides of mountains and a series of spectacular suspension bridges made of woven grass. Lodges, or tambos, were built at intervals averaging a dozen or so miles along all the major roads, at which a permanent corps of runners known as chasquis was maintained, two to each tambo. Sometimes they ran with quipus, passing them to one another rolled up like batons; at other times they relayed messages by word of mouth, repeating them again and again as a precaution against garbling.38 In either case, the result was enormously impressive: Cobo said that it took ten or twelve days for a relay of chasquis to take a message from Cusco to Quito and bring back a reply, a return journey of 2,500 miles through the high sierra. The Spaniards, he said, took four times as long to cover the same distance on horseback.39 III

Inca Bureaucracy and Inca Government What can be said more generally about the contribution of Inca bureaucracy to the successful rule of Tahuantinsuyu? There seems little reason to think that a lack of alphabetic writing prevented the Incas from gathering the data they needed. One or two comparisons are perhaps instructive: it is easy to imagine that almost all the arithmetical information recorded in Domesday Book (1086), often seen as one of the great bureaucratic achievements of the medieval English monarchy, could just as effectively have been set down and preserved on quipus. What, in all probability, could not have been recorded on quipus are the thousands of personal names included in Domesday Book – although, given the absence of private property holding or individual economic enterprise in the Andes, this is unlikely to have been seen as a problem. The same might be said of the recording of population levels: the Incas’ numerical data on births and deaths was probably in advance of that of the medieval English monarchy. In England, it was only from the mid-sixteenth 38 39

The Incas of Pedro de Cieza de León, pp. 139–40; for Inca roads, tambos and chasquis, see John Hyslop, The Inka road system (Orlando: Academic Press, 1984). Cobo, History of the Inca empire, pp. 229–30.

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century that parish registers began to be kept, which could lead to remarkable ignorance on behalf of the royal administration (such as believing in 1371 that there were 45,000 parishes in England, whereas in fact there were only 9,000; it is hard to believe that the Incas would have been guilty of such an error).40 Once again, however, it was not names that were recorded (as in parish registers), only numbers. All in all, it seems difficult to argue that the process of recording statistical data in Tahuantinsuyu would have benefitted greatly from the invention of an alphabetic system of writing. In other areas, such as law, it would doubtless have made more of a difference, leading perhaps to a form of government in which the checks and balances of power, recorded in precedents, contracts and so forth, began to create out of custom a body of written law, the basis of a ‘constitution’. A more book-centred form of religion (such as Christianity and Islam) might also have developed, leading to a more powerful and autonomous ‘church’, although the likelihood is that had Inca religious practice developed in that direction, it would have become more inflexible and less tolerant because it was (literally) more prescriptive. Although obviously speculative, such suggestions are broadly in line with the experience of societies which did have alphabetic writing systems. Writing has had a tendency to act as a conservative force in religion.41 In summary, although an alphabetic writing system would undoubtedly have permitted more complex transactions in both the public and private spheres, and although it would almost certainly have had a deep impact in other areas of society, as far as information gathering is concerned quipus and quipucamayocs fulfilled admirably the tasks which the Incas demanded of them; so, at any rate, their conquerors believed. One reason for this is that the Incas continued to refine the bureaucratic tools they inherited to meet the needs of an ever-expanding empire. They certainly did not invent the quipu. The Huari, who had dominated the Ayacucho region to the north of Cusco nearly a millennium earlier (c.500–750), had quipus, although the evidence suggests that theirs were considerably less sophisticated than those developed by the Incas, relying mainly on colours rather than the knots (and hence the decimal counting system) employed by the Incas.42 That quipus, like other bureaucratic tools, should develop in response to the tasks demanded of them is not surprising, and the tasks which the Incas demanded of them were also, of course, indicative of what they considered to be important in 40 41

42

W. M. Ormrod, ‘An experiment in taxation: the English parish subsidy of 1371’, Speculum 63:1 (1988), 58–82, at 59–64. For a wide-ranging discussion of the impact of writing on developments in law, religion and commercial activity in a number of very different societies, see Jack Goody, The logic of writing and the organization of society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); there is further emphasis upon the conservative impact of writing on religions in Jack Goody, The power of the written tradition (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 2000), pp. 15, 106. Brokaw, History of the khipu, pp. 17–19.

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the governance of their empire, of the functions that they expected a bureaucracy to perform. Three functions in particular were paramount: first, the punctual and full payment of tribute and performance of mit’a labour service; second, accurate counting of heads and of households, a process complicated by the constant movement of mitimaes throughout the empire; third, the maintenance of effective communications in the form of roads, bridges and messengers, for military as much as for administrative purposes. To what extent these goals were achieved in Chile or Argentina, or in the Amazon basin to the east of the Andes, is difficult to know. Highland Peru, Bolivia and southern Ecuador were certainly more intensely governed than the more distant regions of Tahuantinsuyu (for example, no evidence indicates that the decimal system was used in Chile), but such contrasts between core and periphery are common currency in discussions of imperial history. It may be that, had the Incas had alphabetic writing, they would have had the means at their disposal to run a more efficient or even a more intrusive bureaucracy; but it might just as easily be posited that had they wished to do more, they would have developed the means to do so. Theirs was not an intensely taxed and colonized empire but rather a federation based upon tribute and allegiance.43 What was crucial to their rule was the role of the curacas. Cobo said that the Incas appointed a governor (toqrikok) to rule each province, but that below him the curacas were usually allowed to remain in office. The size of a province varied enormously,44 but it is clear that the day-to-day organization of labour and tribute and the administration of justice was entrusted to the curacas, with the toqrikoks acting as overseers, inspectors and what the Spaniards aptly termed ‘correctors’ (corregidores, usually translated as magistrates). The work of the toqrikoks was in turn monitored by superior inspectors dispatched annually from Cusco who were known (confusingly) as toqoyrikoks and were usually members of the royal family.45 That all this made the task of the curacas doubly difficult is self-evident. Squeezed between the demands of the toqrikok and his masters in Cusco, and the expectations of their own people, they sometimes found it difficult to get the balance right. On occasions, when tribes rebelled, their first act was to kill their own curaca. The Incas, for their part, kept a close watch on curacas; although in practice hereditary succession to the post was usually allowed, the Sapa Inca’s permission had to be sought and continuation in office depended on his continuing favour.46 43 44

45 46

See the discussion in D’Altroy, Incas, pp. 7–8. According to D’Altroy, Incas, p. 232: ‘The Incas thought of a province as an enumerated population which was typically based on the societies that were native to a region . . . A province nominally contained 20,000 or 30,000 households.’ Betanzos, Narrative of the Incas, pp. 110–11; D’Altroy, Incas, p. 235. Cobo, History of the Inca empire, pp. 198–202; Grosboll, ‘And he said in the time of the Ynga’, p. 52.

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Yet this was far from being a one-way relationship. The Incas’ economic system, as already noted, was based upon the twin processes of tribute and redistribution. The sources are full of accounts of how the Sapa Incas and their officials, on their itinerations of Tahuantinsuyu, regularly paused at the major administrative centres which punctuated the royal highways to hold great ceremonial assemblies which served as demonstrations both of communal allegiance to the ruler and of gratitude and gift giving by the ruler to his subjects – in other words, rituals of reciprocity. Betanzos’s description of one of Huayna Capac’s tours of ‘inspection’ is a good example. Setting out from Cusco bearing ‘things with him to give as gifts to the caciques [curacas] of the towns and provinces that he saw’, he sent messengers ahead of him to ensure that his subjects would line the road to greet him. Each time he entered a province, he made a point of wearing the local dress and hairstyle so that ‘he looked like a native of the province.’ Arriving at the main town of the region, he would seat himself on the great elevated throne (usnu) in the central plaza and allow the local curacas to sacrifice llamas and other things in his honour, after which he would dance and dine with them. This was followed by the gift-giving ceremony: ‘he gave them what he had brought and did them favours.’ The curacas were ordered to tell him how many widows, orphans and paupers they had on their lands, and provisions were brought out from the storehouses to be given to them. It was the curacas themselves, however, who were the main beneficiaries of the Sapa Inca’s generosity: ‘to some he gave women, to others, livestock, to others, tumblers of gold and silver, and to others, valuable garments like the ones he wore as well as other things which they liked.’ Then, moving on, he repeated this ceremony in the next town.47 Reciprocity was and still is a powerful principle in Andean society: generosity by lords was ‘culturally mandatory’, the brooch which held society together.48 The architecture of Inca cities reflected this: sparsely populated with permanent residents, they consisted of acre upon acre of storehouses and temporary barracks clustered around a vast central plaza in the centre of which stood the raised platform supporting the usnu from which the Sapa Inca or his representative conducted these elaborate rituals of mutual exchange.49 The sources surviving from the first century after the conquest also describe Inca rule as being based on consensus and mutual support. Cieza de León said that in the course of his itinerations, the Sapa Inca ‘willingly listened to those who came to him with complaints, righting wrongs and punishing those who 47 48 49

Betanzos, Narrative of the Incas, pp. 168–9. John V. Murra, The economic organization of the Inka state (Greenwich: JAI Press, 1980 [1st published, 1956]), p. 117; Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, History of the Inca realm, pp. 36–47. The most detailed investigation of an Inca city is in Craig Morris and Donald E. Thompson, Huanuco Pampa: an Inca city and its hinterland (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985). See also John Hyslop, Inka settlement planning (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

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had committed an injustice’.50 If this sounds a little idealized, it is worth remembering that such passages were written by the conquering Spanish, who had least reason to present the Incas in this light. Although the image of Tahuantinsuyu as the Utopian ‘welfare state’ described by Garcilaso has long been discredited, a good deal of evidence remains to the effect that Inca rulers gave to cooperative local communities almost as much as they took, that mutual support systems were in place to ensure that no one starved or was left without the means of subsistence, and that the attachment to government by consensus was deeply rooted. Fundamental to the acceptance of Inca rule was that much of what they did was a continuation and amplification of what was already in place. The relocation of mitimaes, for example, although practiced by the Incas on a much more extensive scale than before, grew out of the Andean custom of seasonal migration between ecozones, which, like transhumance, was often necessary for survival. The toleration of local religions (some of which, such as Pachacamac on the north coast, were even incorporated into the Inca pantheon), the continuance of local ruling families, the employment of local men as quipucamayocs, as well as the practice of reciprocity on an extended scale, all reveal a sensitivity to local traditions and expectations which must have helped soften the impact of conquest and subjection. Nevertheless, this impact was certainly felt: as the Inca empire expanded across the century from 1438 to 1532, so did the incidence of resistance, and with it a perceptible shift towards a more masterful form of rule. Evidence for this is patchy and its effect upon local society far from clear, but a number of trends have been identified. First was a tendency for the categorization of peoples according to the decimal system to range across or subdivide ayllus and thus to override traditional structures of social organization. Second, local exchange networks were to some extent subordinated to the ever-increasing demands of the redistributive state, with a growing number of goods siphoned off as tribute. Third, reciprocity was increasingly used to serve the requirements of this state (that is, an abundance of goods with which to attract and reward allies) rather than to strengthen the bonds of local society; as a result (as well as for other reasons), the power of curacas was certainly modified and probably declined. Fourth, the number of grants of property either to curacas (to retain their cooperation) or to groups of high-ranking Inca lords – especially to the panacas, the descent groups of former Sapa Incas – gradually increased; although these grants did not entail private property rights in the sense that the term would have been understood in sixteenth-century Europe, these were nevertheless lands which were separated from the state economic system, indicating a shift in that direction. Fifth, there emerged a new class of semiprivate servants or retainers, 50

The Incas of Pedro de Cieza de León, p. 168.

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the yanaconas, many of whom worked on these privately held estates and were thus similarly removed from the obligation to provide mit’a labour service. None of this meant that the age-old communal structures of economic and social organization in the Andes were collapsing, and it is impossible to know how far or in precisely what direction these changes might have gone if the Spaniards had not arrived; but it was almost certainly the case that the Inca state began with time to have a greater and probably less welcome impact upon its subject population.51 On the other hand, this certainly did not mean that the deeply rooted bonds of Andean society were destroyed; in some respects, they still survive. IV

Conclusion Inca bureaucracy did in some ways cut across local traditions (for example, in the imposition of the decimal system), but the Incas’ deep roots in Andean culture meant that their mode of governance was characterized just as much by sensitivity to local difference, reliance upon consensual procedures and respect for tradition. Although limited in its range of functions – for example, it displayed a notable inability to record or preserve data about individuals – the evidence suggests that those functions which it did undertake were performed exceptionally well. Given the ‘natural’ ties of a reciprocal and redistributive society, it may well be the case that a more comprehensive (and hence probably more intrusive) bureaucracy was unnecessary and might well have proved counterproductive. One apparent consequence of a relatively noninterventionist bureaucracy was, however, that the Incas seem never to have developed the range of governing institutions commonly associated with imperial rule. Remarkably little is heard of conciliar, legislative or consultative bodies either in Cusco or elsewhere in Tahuantinsuyu. Ideological reasons may have played their part in this: the Sapa Inca’s status as a god made it difficult for him to be seen to be taking advice from mere mortals; instead, he reached decisions (ostensibly, at any rate) through the consultation of oracles and the performance of sacrifices.52 In practice, of course, he must constantly have taken advice, but he generally did so informally: the government of Tahuantinsuyu was thus weakly institutionalized. 51

52

The seminal discussion of these changes is in Murra, Economic organization of the Inka state, esp. ch. 8 (From corvée to retainership), pp. 153–86; see also Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, History of the Inca realm, pp. 36–47, 221–7; Sally F. Moore, Power and property in Inca Peru (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973). Peter Gose, ‘Oracles, divine kingship, and political representation in the Inka state’, Ethnohistory 43:1 (1996), 1–32.

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This is not to say that weak institutions necessarily led to weak rule. The bonds of Andean society and the mutual benefits which they conferred are likely to have proved just as powerful in creating a cohesive polity as the superimposed institutions created in some other empires. It may, however, have made it more difficult to respond to sudden threats or crises. In particular, the concentration of power in the person of the Sapa Inca meant that were he to be removed, a power vacuum was likely to ensue. Up to a point, this was a scenario to which the Incas were accustomed. The death of a Sapa Inca seems almost invariably to have led to civil war, a fratricidal succession struggle out of which a victor eventually emerged to succeed him.53 This process had a certain logic. The Incas (like the Ottomans) wanted to test their new leader’s military ability, but doing so could be costly. Appallingly destructive and divisive, these internecine trials of strength were also accompanied by widespread rebellions in the provinces, the suppression of which usually provided the new Sapa Inca with his first major task. Yet while previous Sapa Incas had managed to reimpose their authority over Tahuantinsuyu, none of them before 1532 had had to face the additional complication of an external threat to their rule. Whether or not Pizarro was fully aware of the situation into which he stumbled, it seems safe to say that – as in Mexico a dozen years earlier, when Hernán Cortés (d. 1547) made the capture of the Aztec ruler Moctezuma II (r. 1502–20) his priority – he did exactly the right thing. By late 1532, Atahuallpa had managed to capture and imprison his rival and half-brother Huascar and seemed set to become the new Sapa Inca, but when, on 16 November, Pizarro captured Atahuallpa, subsequently holding him in prison for eight months before garrotting him, Tahuantinsuyu was left headless and disoriented, with little in the form of institutional government to fall back on. It is common to ascribe the collapse of empires to one or more of three factors: revolt in the provinces, factionalism at the centre or external conquest. In the case of the Incas, all three were germane. The alacrity with which many of their subjects sided with the Spaniards, initially seeing them as liberators, is ample testimony to the brutality which the Incas had for generations meted out to those who resisted their demands. On the other hand, it is important to remember that a good number of provinces remained loyal to the Incas during the 1530s, especially once they began to realize that their new masters were even worse than their old, making little attempt to integrate local customs or values into their system of rule.54 The Spaniards emphasized 53 54

D’Altroy, Incas, pp. 106–8. The Spaniards did, however, make use of mit’a labour quotas and so on for their own purposes, and visitas regularly asked local groups what the Incas had demanded from them by way of tribute: see discussion by Storrs (Chapter 12, p. 304). The classic work on the wars of the 1530s and 1540s, both between Spaniards and Andeans and between different groups of Spaniards, remains W. H. Prescott, History of the conquest of Peru (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1935 [1st published 1847]); see also John Hemming, The conquest of the Incas (London: Barnes and Noble, 1970).

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uniformity, in law and religion especially; few of them showed much interest in understanding or recording information about their crown’s new subjects. Had the indigenous peoples of the Andes had the ability to preserve such knowledge through a more comprehensive writing system than the quipu afforded, it would not only have facilitated the task of modern historians, it might also have helped them resist the cultural as well as the military conquest which their society suffered at the hands of one of Europe’s great powers. That, however, is another story.55

55

See the comments of Goody, Logic of writing, p. 126: ‘An administrative system without writing differs radically from one that employs literates. Moreover this difference is more than a matter of social organization in any limiting sense of that phrase – it affects cultures and their ability to resist the establishment of hegemonies, a potentiality which has in turn a formidable political dimension . . . [T]he written cultures of China, Japan, India and the Middle East have buffered those societies against not always the military but to some extent the cultural conquest by European powers, limiting the hegemonic effects of such contact. By contrast the cultures of the indigenous societies of Africa and America have been affected in much more devastating ways by the advent of European colonialism. For this, the absence of a written tradition, also related to differences in the economy, was at least partially responsible.’

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5

The Ottoman Empire (1299–1923): The Bureaucratization of Patrimonial Authority Karen Barkey

At its height in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman empire linked three continents: Asia, Europe and Africa.1 The empire stretched from the southern borders of the Holy Roman Empire through Hungary and the Balkans to Yemen and Eritrea in the south, controlling much of North Africa and western Asia, and encompassing an array of cultures, languages, peoples, climates and social and political structures. This combination of a vast territory, a diversity of incorporated populations and longevity makes the Ottoman empire a perfect case through which to explore the connection between empire and bureaucracy. The Ottomans demonstrate how premodern empires could have strong bureaucratic features, while retaining a degree of institutional flexibility that enabled imperial, patrimonial and bureaucratic forms of rule to interact with one another. This chapter explores the bureaucratic as well as the patrimonial and nonbureaucratic aspects of rule in the Ottoman empire, especially at the height of the Süleymanic era (1520–66) when a bureaucracy – characterized by routinized office holding, trained office holders and rules and regulations for maintaining office – had taken root at the core regions of the empire. The Ottoman empire was, however, a particularly mixed case because of the complex layering of direct and indirect rule which resulted in variations in the degree of the patrimonial-bureaucratic mix between the core and periphery of the empire. The Ottomans benefitted from both the bureaucratic and patrimonial features of their rule, which sometimes tugged against each other, but also cooperated to routinize Ottoman rule. I

Conceptualizing Ottoman Imperial Rule The Ottoman state grew out of a small principality at the edges of Anatolia in the aftermath of the decline and parcellization of the Seljuk empire in the later 1

In this chapter, the language of technical terms given in parentheses is Ottoman-Turkish. I am grateful to Sam Rubin and Eliot Sackler for their assistance in the preparation of this essay.

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twelfth century ce. Beginning with Osman Gazi (d. 1326), the descendants of the House of Osman both fought and engaged in economic and political relations with their contemporaries across the frontiers. When it suited them, they allied with other frontier lords (beğs), Christian princes and Turcoman tribes. Even if these alliances were forged as equals, soon enough the Ottomans began to be considered, in religion and in law, as first among them. Osman’s son Orhan (r. 1326–62) took the title sultan, typically reserved for the Seljuk rulers, and he struck his own coins. His grandson Bayezid (r. 1389–1402) was the first Ottoman ruler whom outside sources refer to as imperator.2 Conventional Ottoman historiography concentrates on the period between the conquest of Constantinople (1453) and the end of the Süleymanic period in the later 1560s as the epoch of expansion to the largest frontiers sustainable within geopolitical constraints (Map 5.1). By the time of the conquest of 1453, the Ottomans had incorporated much of the territories of the Anatolian Turcoman principalities and had locked in the western Anatolian territories as well as southeastern Europe; the lands of the previous kingdoms of Serbia, Bulgaria and Bosnia; and the remnants of the Byzantine empire on the European coast. After the conquest, Mehmed II (r. 1444–6; 1451–81) added the territories of the Morea (1460) and Trebizond (1461), spent his time consolidating the territories of central Anatolia and the Mediterranean, and turned the Black Sea into an Ottoman lake. His successor Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512) was drawn into the east, with the rise of the Safavid dynasty, which would occupy the Ottomans on their eastern frontiers for centuries to come. The reign of Selim I (1512–20) was short, yet he reshaped the map of the Ottoman empire with a series of important military campaigns, acquiring territories in the Middle East. Selim I fought against the Safavids and the Mamluks, incorporating the latter, and in the process acquiring Egypt and Syria, as well as Mecca and Medina. Acquiring the holy places of Islam led to the transfer of the caliphate to the Ottoman empire.3 Süleyman I ‘the Magnificent’ (r. 1520–66) started his reign with the conquest of Belgrade (1521) and won the Battle of Mohács in 1526 providing the possibility for the acquisition of a part of Hungary in 1541. Though Süleyman made inroads into European territory, with the taking of Hungary and the battles of Rhodes (1522) he also inaugurated a long-term struggle between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans that would continue for centuries. It was also during the reign of Süleyman that the rising Russian empire confronted the Ottomans, with Muscovite forces landing in Kazan and then occupying Astrakan in 1556. 2

3

Halil İnalcık, The Ottoman empire: the classical age, 1300–1600 (repr. New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1989), p. 56. For the various facets of Ottoman self-image, see Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, ‘Khan, caliph, tsar and imperator: the multiple identities of the Ottoman sultan’, in Bang & Kołodziejczyk, Universal empire, ch. 7. For the earlier history of the Arab caliphates, see Kristó-Nagy (Chapter 3).

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From this moment, when the Ottomans had reached contested frontiers – with the Habsburgs to the west, the Russians to the north and northeast and the Safavids to the east – the geopolitical task of imperial expansion shifted to one of maintenance within more established borders. The rapid growth of the empire necessitated differentiation in the types of rule: more direct in the Balkans and Anatolia, more indirect in the peripheries that were often organized as tributary states. The farther from the centre, the more negotiated and flexible were the arrangements. The Ottomans organized an institutionally flexible polity, negotiated between the contradictory, but also complementary, visions and organizational forms of urban and rural; nomad and settled; Islamic and non-Muslim; Sunni Muslims, Shiites and Sufi sects; scribes and poets; artisans and merchants; peasants and peddlers; bandits and bureaucrats. Even though the empire lasted from the beginning of the fourteenth century until 1923, few scholars have acknowledged or explained its longevity. Instead, conventional accounts have argued for a long decline, starting at the end of the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent, as if everything after the glory of Süleyman was a form of failure. The later history of the empire has been viewed through a negative lens of centuries of incapacitation and loss, rather than interesting and resourceful adaptation and reformulation of rule.4 Some of the blame for this decline has been attributed to the vagaries of a patrimonial household directed by useless and ruthless sultans who were unable to take their role seriously.5 Before we rethink these aspects of Ottoman rule, we should examine ‘empire’ more closely as an instance in which bureaucracy develops. ‘Empire’ is the political authority that a central power establishes over peripheral states and societies, though precisely how the centre and periphery are connected – the modes of authority and control – varies from empire to empire.6 My particular definition of empire is adapted well to a particular group of premodern, traditional political formations with contiguous territories: a large composite and differentiated polity linked to a central power by a variety of direct and indirect relations, where the centre exercises political control through hierarchical and quasi-monopolistic relations over groups ethnically different from itself. It is also useful to rethink the concepts of ‘patrimonialism’ and ‘bureaucracy’ in relation to each other. Given Weber’s clear distinction between 4 5

6

On this decline thesis, see Karen Barkey, Bandits and bureaucrats: the Ottoman route to centralization (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Barkey, Empire of difference. Bernard Lewis, The emergence of modern Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1961); Lieven, Empire; David Landes, The wealth and poverty of nations: why some are so rich and some so poor (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998). Doyle, Empires; Eisenstadt, Empires; Charles Tilly, ‘How empires end’, in Barkey & von Hagen, After empire; Alexander J. Motyl, Imperial ends: the decay, collapse, and revival of empires (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

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patrimonialism and bureaucracy, it would seem unlikely that the two ideal types could coexist. Patrimonial rule was centred on the household, based on the personal loyalty and dependence of the members to the ruler.7 Bureaucracy is characterized by hierarchical organization, clearly demarcated lines of authority, rational and objective written rules and regulations, trained and impartial bureaucratic officials, and meritocratic career advancement. But, of course, Weber developed these concepts as ideal types, and historical studies have shown that these two forms of organization did coexist.8 Indeed, some scholars have seen patrimonial features as essential to the resolution of tensions between authority and power within bureaucracies – a complication that Weber’s ideal type of bureaucracy does not consider.9 Patrimonialism is a capacious concept, which fits many different situations, and it was part of the functioning of the Ottoman, the Mughal and the Safavid empires of the Eurasian region.10 These empires certainly developed bureaucracies, since they were able to control government officials in faraway provinces, organize military campaigns, collect taxes from their populations, and organize the peoples they ruled into different categories, statuses and classes. Each case, however, had its own particularities, with an amalgam of strategies and tools to make organized control possible. This demonstrates that premodern imperial bureaucracies could have some of the features of weberian bureaucracies, but not all. In the case of the Ottomans, the overarching theme can be characterized as the bureaucratization of patrimonial authority. 7

8 9

10

According to Kiser and Sacks, the core features of patrimonialism are ‘administration based on personal ties to or dependence on rulers (kin, slaves, patronage), privatization of offices (sale of offices and tax farming), and extreme forms of decentralization (local notables, feudalism and prebendalism)’: Edgar Kiser and Audrey Sacks, ‘African patrimonialism in historical perspective: assessing decentralized and privatized tax administration’, in Julia Adams and Mounira M. Charrad (eds.), Patrimonial power in the modern world, special issue of Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 636:1 (2011), 129–49. On Weber and ideal types, see also Crooks and Parsons (Chapter 1, pp. 16–17); and Whimster (Chapter 16, pp. 437–41). Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, ‘Authority and power in bureaucratic and patrimonial administration: a revisionist interpretation of Weber on bureaucracy’, World Politics 31:2 (1979), 195–227. See Stephen F. Dale, The Muslim empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). There is also an interesting debate in the literature on comparative empires about to what extent patrimonialism and solid institutional foundations can coexist in empires, with the Mughal case being probably the most enigmatic. In the Ottoman empire, the fact that the existence of a bureaucracy was well established has led to less debate around this issue. See C. A. Bayly and Peter Bang, ‘Introduction: comparing pre-modern empires’, Medieval History Journal 6:2 (2003), 169–87; I. Metin Kunt, ‘Sultan, dynasty and state in the Ottoman empire: political institutions in the sixteenth century’, The Medieval History Journal 6 (2003), 217–30; Dina Rizk Khoury and Dane Kennedy, ‘Comparing empires: the Ottoman domains and the British Raj in the long nineteenth century’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27 (2007), 233–44; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘A tale of three empires: Mughals, Ottomans, and Habsburgs in a comparative context’, Common Knowledge 12 (2006), 66–92.

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II

Ottoman Bureaucracy: Its Reach and Significance In his classic book, Halil İnalcık, the foremost historian of the Ottoman empire, asserted that ‘the thousands of registers and literally millions of documents still preserved in Turkish archives are proof that the Ottoman empire was a bureaucratic state.’11 Was this voluminous amount of parchment, produced by bureaucrats of various function and rank, both a cause and a result of the empire’s astonishing longevity and its ability to successfully and efficiently administer its lands? The Ottoman bureaucracy is defined here as the men who were paid to manage the affairs of the government: specifically the members of the scribal service and financial officers (kalemiye), along with the ubiquitous secretaries who accompanied every bureau in the empire. While the kalemiye represented the bureaucracy in a narrow sense, more generally the administration of the empire in its core regions – the provinces in Anatolia and the Balkans, known respectively as Anadolu and Rumeli – possessed many features that were bureaucratic. Most of the economic institutions (customs, construction, mining and other enterprises) and military organizations (Janissaries, arsenals and fortresses), as well as the religio-economic associations such as the religious endowments (vakifs), all had numerous staff, secretaries and officials to handle accounts, records and regular organizational tasks. It is not until the reign of Süleyman in the sixteenth century that the kalemiye and the government as a whole may properly be called a bureaucracy. As the Ottoman armies pushed west into Hungary and Austria and south and east to the Indian Ocean, the influx of new territories brought about increases in the bureaucracy’s size, influence and degrees of specialization and professionalization. So while the origins of the Ottoman bureaucracy lay in the patrimonial house of the sultan and while its general contours reflect this fact, the administration developed characteristics of an impersonal, predictable and rationalized organization as it expanded. This process of bureaucratization did not come about immediately or easily. It took time, and people continued to rely on patrimonial relations to advance in rank while adopting bureaucratic styles. The transition mostly took place during Süleyman’s reign, although, once established, bureaucracy continued to coexist with elements of patrimonialism for centuries. Practically, the goals of maintaining order, the provision of services, the collection of revenues and preservation of dynastic rule called for extensive routinization and coordination, as well as a system of checks and balances. In fact, the theoretical achievement of the sultan’s absolute authority 11

İnalcık, Ottoman empire, p. 102.

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and his delegation was the prevention of arbitrary power. Cornell Fleischer describes the relationship concisely: ‘The Palace class of servitors to which the Kanunname gave order was in fact the patrimonial household made government, enlarged, rationalized, bureaucratized, and refined’12 – in other words, the bureaucratization of patrimonial authority. Looking at the core regions of the empire, we quickly get a sense of the bureaucratic features of Ottoman rule that had formed by the end of the sixteenth century. In these regions, administrators and judges were appointed from the capital on a rotating basis, rules of office were codified and passed down, training was formalized, career lines and hierarchies were present, and universalistic principles as well as an ‘ethos’ of office – being an Ottoman bureaucrat – were all in evidence. Elements of the system – which had roots in the traditions of Near Eastern and Islamic governance as well as Byzantine land practices – were already discernable in the fourteenth century when the house of Osman was still an Anatolian principality.13 The practical tasks of the bureaucracy and its general shape were largely determined by the two primary preoccupations of Ottoman statecraft: the sultan’s overriding responsibility to bring justice to his subjects and the collection of revenue to pay the armies and fill the imperial coffers. The second task, clearly bureaucratic, can be associated with what James C. Scott has called ‘legibility’, that is, the ability of those in power to ‘read’ their society, to organize and create categories that will facilitate the process of organization and resource collection.14 These two elements were deeply intertwined. According to Islamic and Turkic theories of state, the primary duty of the sultan to his subjects (reaya: literally, ‘flock’) was the provision of justice, especially against the harassment of the local ruling authorities or of illegal taxation. The resulting concept of ‘circle of justice’ (Adalet Dairesi) perceived the people’s freedom from oppression as a linch-pin in the economic, military and spiritual prosperity of the realm.15 12

13

14 15

Cornell Fleisher, Bureaucrat and intellectual in the Ottoman empire: the historian Mustafa Ali, 1546–1600 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 196; and Fleisher, ‘Between the lines: realities of scribal life in the sixteenth century’, in Colin Heywood and Colin Imber (eds.), Studies in Ottoman history in honor of Professor V. L. Ménage (Istanbul: ISIS Press, 1994), pp. 45–62. İnalcık, Ottoman empire; İnalcık, ‘Land problems in Turkish history’, Muslim World 4 (1955), 221–8; and İnalcık, ‘Osmanlilarda raiyyet rusumu’, Belleten (1959), 575–610; Speros Vryonis, ‘The Byzantine legacy and Ottoman forms’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 23–4 (1969–70), 253–308; Speros Vryonis, The decline of medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the process of Islamization from the eleventh through the fifteenth century, new edn (New York: Greekworks, 2011); Barkey, Bandits and bureaucrats; and Barkey, Empire of difference. For the earlier Islamic systems of governance, see Kristó-Nagy (Chapter 3). James C. Scott, Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). İnalcık, Ottoman empire; Cornell Fleischer, ‘Royal authority, dynastic cyclism, and “Ibn Khaldunism” in sixteenth century Ottoman letters’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 18 (1983), 198–220.

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The code of laws that gave this theory force as well as defined the division of powers and status in the empire was known as kanun.16 Kanun – the sultan’s (or ‘secular’) law, as opposed to the religious law of şeriat – harked back to older Turkic traditions in which a conqueror established his own code, the impartial application of which was seen as essential for proper rule. These legislative powers, issued by decree (ferman), were vested solely in the sultan and reveal the workings of ‘the chief officials of the government and Palace, together with their power, promotions, ranks, salaries and pensions, protocols and punishments’.17 In theory, these decrees could not violate şeriat and were utilized in situations not directly covered by the latter, for example, in the routinization of taxes and elements of criminal justice. The first collection of these sultanic decrees (kanunname) was compiled by Mehmed II (r. 1451–81) to create a formal law code. The kanunname of the Conqueror, the first of which was promulgated shortly after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, became the founding text, in a sense, of official Ottoman law (kanuni osmani). Each district (sancak) had its own kanunname that codified the laws and taxes for that region. These laws, as explained further later, often preserved many local customs and brought them in line with Ottoman law. With responsibilities and rights clearly defined and a ministerial obligation to follow the letter of the law, the kanun, theoretically, served to curb the arbitrary power or abuse of the provincial ruling class. The maintenance of justice, with an eye to effective revenue collection, was central to kanun.18 The members of the kalemiye, especially the chancellor (nişancı), were experts and the foremost authorities on the sultan’s law, and provincial judges (kadı) were responsible for ruling according to both the şeriat and kanun. While kanun could be abrogated, and frequently was as circumstances arose, a reliance on precedence was understood by Ottoman bureaucrats to constitute proper governance. On the other hand, patrimonial features of the empire had also always been prevalent and were useful to the governance of this vast empire. Perhaps the most basic principles established by the kanun were that the sultan owned all of the empire’s land and had absolute authority over the subjects who lived on it. This established the patrimonial authority of the sultan, yet it allowed for an effectively bureaucratic system of prebends, the timar system, to be put into place in the core of the empire. The Ottoman’s ability to conquer as well as administer its lands relied critically upon cavalrymen (sipahi) from the Balkans and Anatolia. Given the limitations of converting revenues into cash payments, the sipahi were granted permission by the sultan to collect the revenues from a particular village or group of villages in return for annual military service. 16 17 18

The Arabic is derived from the Greek, canon (Gk. κανών): see ‘Ḳānūn’, EI2. İnalcık, Ottoman empire, p. 73. Halil İnalcık, ‘Suleiman the lawgiver and Ottoman law’, Archivum Ottomanicum 1 (1969), 105–38.

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The sipahi acted as lords over their allotted holdings, collecting their due while also carrying out administrative functions, such as policing and monitoring economic activity. The standard plot awarded for service was a tımar.19 Beginning in the sixteenth century, there were around 35,000 tımar, equivalent to half of the empire’s total revenue.20 On average, the basic administrative unit in the empire, the district (sancak), was made up of around 100 tımars and larger holdings with a population of roughly 100,000 people.21 The sancaks were administered by district governors (sancak beyis), who fell under the direction of a provincial governor (beylerbeyi) who governed over the entire province (viyalet). In these core (tımarlı) regions, the sipahi rotated every four years or after they had accomplished great successes at war and could become eligible for more land. In theory, rotation forestalled any threat that entrenchment would pose to the palace’s authority or to the safety of the local peasantry. The tımar system was legally made possible by the kanun’s declaration that all landownership rights belonged to the sultan. The combinations of these usufructuary rights coming from patrimonial aspects of rule and rotation of office holders which became established as a bureaucratic principle led to robust control over the provinces until the end of the seventeenth century.22 The timar system relied upon careful record-keeping and, therefore, required the services of a salaried group of scribes, the kalemiye to maintain its force. The official register (defter) served as the primary tool of the tımar system. These registers, updated completely every twenty years and supplemented with marginalia in between, recorded the taxable populations and the resources of newly acquired territories through surveys (tahrir). The practice began in earnest in the rule of Mehmed II, although the earliest known defter comes from Albania in 1431. Even so, the process retained its general shape, even its terminology, well into the seventeenth century.23 These surveys took note of the population, land use, climate and property values of a sancak: that is, everything related to the taxation of the region. Additionally, bureaucrats recorded the local laws, which, once evaluated by the sultan, were written as a kanunname that served as a preface. These registers are astonishing for their wealth of detail and understanding of the local conditions. For instance, in the kanuname of the initial register from the northern Aegean island of Limnos, dating from 1490, a scribe explains the best way to assess a husbandry tax: 19

20 22 23

For more distinguished service, sipahi were granted zeamat, larger plots. The highest administrators in the empire were granted has as salary. The Ottoman name for provincial administration, dirlik (literally ‘livelihood’), demonstrates the connections between them (I. Metin Kunt, The sultan’s servants: the transformation of the Ottoman provincial government 1550–1650 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 9). Halil İnalcık, ‘Tīmār’, EI2. 21 I. Metin Kunt, Sultan’s servants, pp. 14–16. Karen Barkey, Bandits and bureaucrats; and Barkey, ‘In different times: scheduling and social control in the Ottoman empire, 1550–1650’, CSSH 38:3 (1996), 460–83. İnalcık, ‘Ottoman methods of conquest’, 109–12.

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And as regards the sheep dues [adet-i ağnam]: Because the climate of the island is temperate and it is not excessively cold, they [the peasants] are apparently not accustomed to separating their rams from their ewes. For this reason their lambs are not particular to one season. Were they to be counted along with the sheep it would cause the peasants some distress; because they were desirous of and agreed to pay one akçe per head of sheep, their lambs were not counted with them. It was recorded that only their sheep be counted and that one akçe be paid per head of sheep.24

In this way, the peasants of Limnos were able to appeal successfully the implementation of the typical Ottoman sheep tax. Moreover, the tax collector was convinced that the law for the region needed to be aligned more closely to the local conditions to prevent ‘distress’, and thus a potential breakdown of law and order. One might also imagine that the new tax led to more successful collection. Such attention to detail, in the name of both justice and revenue collection, is an Ottoman characteristic witnessed throughout the defter.25 Frequently many forms of forced labour were abolished and less burdensome tax systems implemented. By the 1540s, however, most of the core provinces had transitioned to Ottoman codes at their own petition.26 In many cases, power structures that preceded Ottoman rule were incorporated into the tımar system, paving the way for the Islamicization of Balkan elites. Once incorporated as a district (sancak), judges (kadıs), governors (beys) and treasurers (defterdars) were appointed by the central administration. The kadı and the beğ balanced each other’s power: although every civil and criminal case had to be brought before the kadı, decisions could only be enforced by the beğ. To be an Ottoman bureaucrat was to be a member of the ruling elite, the askeri. The askeri were broken down by function into three ‘branches’: the scribal service (kalemiye), the military-administrative (seyfiye) and the religious-judicial (ilmiye). In the provinces, the seyfiye and the ilmiye served complementary but separate functions, the former as governors (beğs) and the latter as judges (kadıs). Each had distinct training and career paths that ultimately could cross, in some instances, at the highest level of the government. These elites held privileged status in Ottoman society: as Ottomans (Osmanlı)27 they were bound generally by an exemption 24 25

26 27

Quoted from Heath W. Lowry, The nature of the early Ottoman state (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), p. 102. Omer Lutfi Barkan, XV ve XVI asirlarda Osmanli imparatorlugunda zirai ekonominin hukuki ve mali esaslar [The legal and financial principles of the agricultural economy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the Ottoman empire], vol. i: Kanunlar (Istanbul: Burhanneddin Matbaasi, 1943); Amy Singer, ‘Tapu tahrir defterleri and kadi sicilleri: a happy marriage of sources’, Tarih 1 (1990), 95–125; Bistra A. Cvetkova, ‘Early Ottoman tahrir defters as a source for studies of the history of Bulgaria and the Balkans’, Archivum Ottomanicum 8 (1983), 133–213; Metin M. Coşgel, ‘Ottoman tax registers (tahrir defterleri)’, Historical Methods 37 (2004), 87–100. İnalcık, ‘Suleiman the lawgiver and Ottoman law’. Despite the European usage of ‘Turk’ to describe the Ottomans broadly, until the early twentieth century, within the empire ‘Turk’ had connotations of the uncouth, backwards peasantry, as opposed to the sophisticated and civilized Ottomans.

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from taxation; a shared culture; mostly Muslim religion; and official language (Osmanlıca), an elaborate amalgamation of Arabic, Persian and Turkish. This was also the lingua franca of the empire – the language of the communications, the administration and commerce. Yet many other languages and local dialects were also spoken and facilitated interactions of an administrative and commercial nature in various regions. The askeri were clearly differentiated from the sultan’s subjects (reaya), the producers and merchants who provided the tax base. Close to the centre, the household was organized so that power and privilege were determined by proximity to the sultan in the palace, either in his service or as a part of the family, and those in his retinue constituted a fourth, less defined ‘branch’ of government.28 The servants of the sultan were legally his slaves (kul), many of whom were ‘recruited’ through an institutionalized levy of Christian boys selected from distant Ottoman provinces and converted to Islam (devşirme).29 Slaves were very much part of the patrimonial household and used the personal ties and relations they acquired to manoeuver their place in the system. They frequently served at the highest levels of government and married into the sultan’s house. In their training, the kul would graduate to various stations in the palace hierarchy: the most distinguished would take on roles directly serving the sultan in the inner court (Enderun). Eventually they might take on positions of prominence in the outer court (Birun), then as administrators and governors in the provinces or on the imperial council (divan-ı humayun), the highest deliberative body in the empire. By rotating the most talented and prominent members of his ‘house’ into high posts throughout the core of the empire, the sultan maintained a measure of central authority which acted as a check on the power of local elites. The core of the divan, which functioned both as a high court and cabinet, consisted of four high officials who each represented a particular branch in the government. The grand vezir, the sultan’s closest adviser and deputy, stood at the head of this administrative apparatus and was charged with all political affairs, especially in matters of war. Next to him were the two chief justices (kadıasker), one for the provinces in Anatolia (Anadolu), the other for those in the Balkans (Rumeli).30 Finally, there was a head treasurer (başdefterdar), who possessed the last word on the empire’s finances, as well as a chancellor (nişancı). The nişancı and his staff were responsible for ensuring that all orders and letters, including laws that arose from the imperial council, were in accordance with precedent and state regulation. All official documents required the nişancı to affix the royal seal (tuğra or nişan, nişancı is literally ‘the affixer of the seal’). It was the nişancı and the grand vezir who frequently derived and 28 29 30

See İnalcık, Ottoman empire. Precedence for the kul system existed in Muslim and Near Eastern polities, where non-Muslims boys were converted to Islam to build a personal guard loyal only to the sultan. ‘The Roman lands’ or where the Byzantines formally ruled, that is, the Balkans.

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issued kanun. He was also in charge of administering the allotment of tımar, zeamat and has plots as well as carrying out land surveys (tahrir). Furthermore, in the divan a chief secretary (re’isüllkitab) was responsible for scribes in the service of the divan, who carried out official correspondence, assigned landholdings and received petitions. The size of the divan increased over time.31 Within this general framework, the kalemiye initially made up a small and undifferentiated office. Documents from the 1530s list a total of around 110 clerks and apprentices under the chancery, treasury and in the divan; the rest of the central administration (the ilmiye and serfiye) contained 25,000 men, excluding the provincial cavalry.32 The men who worked within the kalemiye were initially drawn from the ilmiye class of religious scholars, literate men trained in the scribal arts. By dint of this literary role, the scribes in the kalemiye, especially from the sixteenth century on, frequently served as custodians of this culture by composing poetry as well as historical, legal and political works.33 Responsibilities varied depending upon whether one worked for the chancery (katiban-i divan-i hümayun) or the treasury (maliye), as did the specialization of skill. Working under the direction of both the nişancı and the başdefterdar were functionaries in different bureaux, ranging from the management of tax farms and the imperial kitchen to keeping records of provincial petitions and land surveys. Each bureau had a chief (hace) and young men would enter the service as apprentices within established hierarchies. With the right mix of patronage connections (intisab) and ability, the rise through the ranks could be meteoric: for men in the finance or chancery sections this typically meant becoming a bureau chief (hace), but occasionally, and increasingly so from the mid-sixteenth century, higher offices such as chief scribe, head treasurer or even grand vezir were attainable from a strictly bureaucratic background.34 Initial recruitment to the kalemiye came from the ranks of the askeri, either the descendants or patronage networks of ilmiye, kul or bureaucratic families. While there is no doubt that most of the administrative developments and bureaucratic routinization described here were ushered in by the mid-sixteenth century in the era of Süleyman, it is important to understand that patrimonial institutions did not have to disappear to become more bureaucratic. As Cornell Fleisher has noted, the narratives of those employed in the scribal service 31 32

33 34

Halil İnalcık provides a chart of this system in İnalcık, Ottoman empire, p. 82; see also Kunt, Sultan’s servants, p. 34. Colin Imber, The Ottoman empire, 1300–1650 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 169; Carter V. Findley, Bureaucratic reform in the Ottoman empire: the Sublime Porte, 1789–1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 53. Fleischer, Bureaucrat and intellectual. Joel Schinder, ‘Career line formation in the Ottoman bureaucracy, 1648–1750: a new perspective’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 16:2/3 (1973), 217–37; Norman Itzkowitz, ‘Eighteenth century Ottoman realities’, Studia Islamica 16 (1962), 73–94.

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demonstrate an intriguing picture of the complex web of personal and economic relationships through which Süleyman’s government functioned and brings into relief the degree to which such relationships were recognized as normal, even “legal,” despite the apparent dictates of the logic of the bureaucratized (or, more properly at this point, bureaucratizing) structure within which they developed.35 Fleisher actually argues that professional categories and membership in those categories were more clearly articulated after the reign of Süleyman. Following Süleyman’s conquests in the middle of the sixteenth century, the kalemiye underwent a major expansion. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the total size of the kalemiye remained just under 1,000 men (heavily weighted to the treasury bureaux) – a tenfold increase from previous decades.36 The finance and chancery sections developed distinct career lines, rules of office and expectations on the part of bureaucrats. As a result, it was no longer necessary to have the training of the ilmiye, but only to undergo schooling as a scribe. This development chagrined those bureaucrats brought up in the medrese, who saw the expanding bureaucracy, particularly the influx of reaya into the ranks of the ruling elite, as a sign of the decline of the age.37 Despite the changes, the legitimacy and duties of the bureaucracy were still based more upon the traditions of the office and kanun, rather than the personal whims of the ruler. Of course, in a larger sense, the Ottoman empire did function on a patrimonial basis. The polity we term the Ottoman ‘empire’ was known to the Ottomans themselves as the ‘domains of the house of Osman’. Fundamentally, being in charge of the palace meant being in charge of a household. In principle, promotions and privileges were granted solely by the sultan: only he had the power to legislate, and ‘Ottoman budgets’ were, in fact, the purse of the sultan’s house.38 When the sultan went on campaign, the majority of the court would follow, their hierarchies intact. The broader askeri class, as servants of the sultan, were brought into his household and given privileges that such status conferred. Of course, as the empire expanded so too did the imperial household, along with its expense.39 The replication of the imperial household can be observed at every point of the system: the houses of the highest Ottoman officials mimicked that of the sultan, although they varied in degree. Nor were there clear 35 36 37

38 39

Fleischer, ‘Between the lines’, 41. Schinder, ‘Career line formation in the Ottoman bureaucracy’, 236. The ‘Nasihatname literature’ written by bureaucrats and focused on advice to the sultans, staunchly defended the separation of the rulers from the ruled, especially in the postSüleymanic era. See Fleischer, Bureaucrat and intellectual; Halil İnalcık, ‘Military and fiscal transformation, 1600–1700’, Archivum Ottomanicum 6 (1980), 283–337. See Kunt, ‘Sultan, dynasty and state in the Ottoman empire’, for a forceful argument for the Ottoman empire as patrimony. Imber, Ottoman empire, p. 168.

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distinctions between ‘public’ office and ‘personal’ gain. Each bureau was allotted an amount of cash per diem by the palace for salaries, although the highest functionaries were granted land from which to earn their income.40 It was not uncommon for a bureaucrat to use his position to obtain remuneration outside of his office.41 Corruption – in the sense of departure from specified rules of conduct – was a problem especially as the empire and bureaucracy expanded together.42 Yet woven into this patrimonial structure was a system that relied heavily upon bureaucrats to carry out the daily decisions and operations of the Ottoman empire. These men operated according to function and within particular hierarchies; were frequently promoted by merit over personal favour; relied heavily on precedence for their actions; and worked, in principle, against the exercise of arbitrary power. The value placed upon their role as representatives of the state is evident in the tracts that criticize later sultans for exercising arbitrary power and, therefore, from deviating from the laws originally set down by Mehmed the Conqueror in his foundational kanunname.43 To put this in a different way, the Ottoman bureaucracy harboured characteristics of a weberian rational-bureaucratic system. Contrary to the standard narrative of Ottoman decline, there is compelling evidence that the Ottoman bureaucracy did not stagnate. Instead it went through periods of experimentation and change as various crises arose, especially in the period following the mid-sixteenth century which, in conventional Ottoman historiography, is seen as the beginning of a steady decline.44 The provincial kadı court records, too, reveal subjects’ continued access to justice not simply on an arbitrary and personal case-by-case basis but by appeal to formalized laws and procedures. Complaints filed by subjects in far-flung provinces against corrupt administrators and governors were resolved by either local kadıs or even by the sultan. Issues of illegal or extortive taxes or complaints against oppression by local rulers could make their way to the divan, receive a hearing and be resolved.45 While these kinds of rulings on behalf of the less powerful point to effective bureaucratic mechanisms, even more telling is the audacity of the complaints themselves, which signify, at least 40 42

43 44 45

41 Fleischer, ‘Between the lines’. Ibid. Evident from adaletnames (that is, instruments of justice, generally declared by the sultan, redressing the malpractices of a provincial authority), for which see İnalcık, Ottoman empire, p. 103; İnalcık, ‘Adaletname’, EI2. See Halil İnalcık, ‘Comments on “sultanism”: Max Weber’s typification of the Ottoman polity’, Princeton Papers in Near Eastern Studies 1 (1992), 49–72, n. 93. Rhoads Murphey, ‘Continuity and discontinuity in Ottoman administrative practice during the late seventeenth century’, Poetics Today 14:2 (1993), 419–43. Haim Gerber, State society and law in Islam: Ottoman law in comparative perspective (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994); İnalcık, Ottoman empire; Linda Darling, Revenue-raising and legitimacy: tax collection and finance administration in the Ottoman empire, 1560–1660 (Leiden: Brill, 1996).

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for some, a lack of fear of reprisal. This is especially evident in the manner nonMuslims used the Muslim courts to bring their cases against Muslims and relied on the court for fair adjudication.46 That the cases non-Muslims brought to court were not simply those between themselves and Muslim subjects also demonstrates the reach and reliability of the system. There are many instances, for example, where familial conflicts were brought to court, as when the Jewish merchant brought his brother to court over the expenses related to his commercial trip to the city of Izmir, or when Mariam bt. Antun al-Ashshi came to the Muslim court for help in evicting her mother from the house she owned.47 The administration of a judicial system on this scale relied not only upon the systematization of law for the reaya and the askeri but also upon a vast array of secretaries and bureaucrats, working under various provincial and imperial bureaux. While corruption did exist within the bureaucratic ranks, the routinization of function, salary and rank, merit-based promotions and frequent rotation of office all contributed to an imperial administrative complex that, though taking the patrimonial house as its foundational unit and model, tended towards some rationality and efficiency of administration over the core of the empire.48 These developments set the stage for years of stability, as the empire would, with little exception, maintain its general boundaries until the nineteenth century. The tension between the patrimonial and the bureaucratic was resolved partly by increasing bureaucratization but also by a calculus of incorporation and slow systematization of state–society relations. III

Direct and Indirect Rule The patrimonial-bureaucratic form became essential as the central system extended its direct control. In the core regions of the empire, uniformity of practice was furthered, but at the periphery, removed from the immediate grasp of government, the patrimonial household understood the necessity for negotiation and compromise. Yet it is clear that an attempt at incorporation and control always entailed increased bureaucratization, so even though systems of 46

47 48

See Karen Barkey, ‘Aspects of legal pluralism in the Ottoman empire’, in Lauren Benton and Richard Ross (eds.), Legal pluralism and empires, 1500–1850 (New York: New York University Press, 2013), ch. 4. Najwa al-Qattan, ‘Dhimmis in the Muslim court: legal autonomy and religious discrimination’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 31:3 (1999), 429–44. See Metin Coşgel, ‘The economics of Ottoman taxation’, Department of Economics working paper series, University of Connecticut (2004), for an interesting discussion of the potential rationale behind the complexities of the Ottoman tax system, informed by institutional economics.

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rule with strong patrimonial features endured, the goal of the Ottoman ruling establishment was to consolidate bureaucratic forms of control and taxation. This remained a key tension in Ottoman rule, throughout the centuries, but intensified under the urgency of the Tanzimat Reforms (1839–76). The exercise of power and social control over diverse territories, local political and social organizations and religious and ethnic communities emerged from a combination of direct and indirect rule. Direct rule was predicated on established rules and regulations, systematized record-keeping and tax collection and the creation of stable and trained personnel. By contrast, indirect rule remained dependent on particular deals and bargains that rulers were able to strike with various local tribal chieftains, community leaders and elites.49 This distinction between direct and indirect rule applied to the governance both of lands and of peoples: that is, it was exemplified both in the territorial divisions in the empire and also in the organization of non-Muslim communities through the millet system. In both territorial and communal administrative practices, the goal of incorporating even with indirect rule and then establishing more formal rules and regulations was maintained throughout the history of the empire. Most histories of the Ottoman empire emphasize a simple division of rule between the core provinces (tımarlı) and the outer provinces (salyaneli), which separated direct rule from indirect rule.50 The core provinces were ruled directly through the tımar system, the main land tenure institution. The outer provinces – either farther away or not fully conquered – became the salyaneli provinces, which followed the different arrangements of ‘indirect rule’: officials, especially governors, were to secure a fixed revenue flow to the centre, but in other respects local administration remained relatively untouched. In between these two, the map of variation was quite intricate, representing a mix between whom and what the Ottomans found on the ground and their most basic needs of revenue management. In the words of a leading nineteenthcentury Ottoman scholar Ahmet Cevdet Paşa (1822–95): The lands of the exalted state [of the Ottomans] do not resemble the lands of any other state. In its every corner, you can find unique conditions. No province resembles another province; nor does any given part of a province resemble another part of the same province. Therefore it is impossible for a method of administration that might be conceived by the state to be applied equally and uniformly everywhere.51 49

50 51

The contrast between direct and indirect rule in the Ottoman empire was not that different from the European colonial empires, but the Ottomans were less stringent about the two forms of rule mixing. In the Ottoman context, direct rule was applied to areas close to the centre, while indirect rule remained the format of choice for the far-flung peripheries. For the numbers and the basic administrative structures of these provinces, see İnalcık, Ottoman empire; Kunt, Sultan’s servants; Imber, Ottoman empire. Quoted in Resat Kasaba, ‘Dreams of empire, dreams of nations’, in Joseph W. Esherick, Hasan Kayalı and Eric Van Young (eds.), Empire to nation: historical perspectives on the making of the modern world (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), p. 203.

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Especially at the frontiers, administrative units called hükümet sancak became customary as semi-hereditary or fully hereditary arrangements. The more insecure and contested a border region, the greater the advantage local power holders did have at establishing advantageous, long-lasting provincial arrangements for themselves.52 Scholars who have explored the coexistence of patrimonial and bureaucratic features in empire worked from the assumption that everything close to the patrimonial ruler developed according to household norms of patronage and proximity; but farther away from the patrimonial household was an intermediary zone of rule.53 In the Ottoman case, the process seems to have been more layered, where being close to the centre also indicated bureaucratic forms of rule, and being in the peripheries signalled a variety of intermediate ad hoc combinations of negotiated rule. The officials at the core related to the populations they governed in impersonal and controlled ways on a regular basis. Michael Meeker sees this pattern of direct rule in the core regions of the empire as quite bureaucratic.54 In outer provinces, which became the salyaneli provinces, local administration remained relatively untouched, but changes occurred that moved provinces from one form of rule to another, based on the local-state arrangements, but also on where the region was located. In short, as the empire expanded, frontiers became closer territories, bringing about expected changes in rule.55 The outer provinces were far from bureaucratic in many ways. One main aspect of this was the prevalence of tax farming in the periphery, a form that would become widespread in the eighteenth century. Tax farming based on patron-client relations, often extending tax collection into chains of patronage, and clientelism cannot be considered to be formally bureaucratic. Tax farmers gained and lost contracts at the whims of governors or other officials and lacked any kind of rules and regulations or established formal standards. Weber’s argument that tax farming was the result of inefficiency and the ‘moral unreliability in the official personnel’56 is partly derived from the distinction he made between patrimonial and bureaucratic systems of rule. Tax farming fell into the 52 53

54 55 56

Gabor Agoston, ‘A flexible empire: authority and its limits on the Ottoman frontiers’, International Journal of Turkish Studies 9:1/2 (1993), 15–31. Cf. Stephen P. Blake, who asserts that ‘The extension of control beyond the household domain called forth extrapatrimonial officials who administered, for the most part, the collection of taxes and the settlement of a limited number of disputes. Such officials, neither dependents nor bureaucrats, worked in an organization intermediate between the household apparatus of the patrimonial kingdom and the highly bureaucratized system of the modern state’ (Blake, ‘The patrimonial-bureaucratic empire of the Mughals’, Journal of Asian Studies 39:1 (1979), 77–94, quotation at 79). Michael E. Meeker, A nation of empire: the Ottoman legacy of Turkish modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 117. Gabor Agoston, ‘Flexible empire’, 15–31. Max Weber, General economic history (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1961), pp. 58–9.

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former rather than the latter.57 Most salyaneli provinces were organized around tax farming as the main revenue collection method. The governor general of the region who was involved in tax farming was to draw his salary from the collected amount and send the rest to the central treasury. For example, in the distant Arab provinces – Egypt, Yemen, Abyssinia, Lahsa, Southern (Basra) and Northern (Baghdad) Iraq, northern Libya, Tunis and northern Algeria – which had been assigned governors and governors general, revenue collection was locally farmed out to tax farmers, thereby providing salaries for the officials, revenue to maintain a local army, as well as a surplus to send to the central treasury.58 Bureaucratization followed the incorporation and assimilation, as well as the increased status, of conquered regions. This was true in the core territories of Rumeli and Anatolia as well as the periphery. In general, the co-optation of elites followed a two-tiered process that first incorporated local elites and nobilities within indirect rule, and only later assimilated them as genuine Ottoman provincial officials. The more entrenched the nobility in the area, the more difficult it was for them to accept Ottoman rule. The differences between the Balkans and the Anatolian peninsula were therefore partly unexpected, since Anatolian Turkish families were much less willing to accept Ottoman rule than were Christian elites in the Balkans.59 This was the result of how entrenched these Anatolian Turkish dynasties had become in their territories, the strength of their own particular households and patrimonial structures, and their unwillingness to give up their privileges for incorporation and bureaucratization.60 Since the Ottomans took over many administrative practices from the Byzantines and the Seljuks, the transition to Ottoman rule and the bureaucratization of practices became easier to install. For example, the Ottomans retained the Byzantine pronoia land system, a version and an articulation of the 57

58 59 60

Weber, E&S; Weber, The religion of India: the sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism, trans. H. H. Gerth and D. Martindale (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958). Margaret Levi echoes this with the view that rulers chose tax faming when they could not actually construct an efficient bureaucratic system of taxation. In her argument, instituting a tax farming system meant that the rulers had decided that tax farming would be less costly and more efficient than a regular bureaucratic structure (Margaret Levi, Of rule and revenue (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 71–9). İnalcık, Ottoman empire, p. 107; Agoston, ‘Flexible empire’, 17. Irene Beldiceanu-Steinherr, ‘Loi sur la transmission du tımar (1536)’, Turcica 11 (1979), 89–90. Halil İnalcık, ‘Ottoman methods of conquest’, Studia Islamica 2 (1954), 103–29; Halil İnalcık, ‘The question of the emergence of the Ottoman state’, International Journal of Turkish Studies 2 (1980), 71–9. Dennis P. Hupchick gives the example for the conquered Bulgarian lands in Hupchick, ‘Orthodoxy and Bulgarian ethnic awareness under Ottoman rule, 1396–1762’, Nationalities Papers 21 (1993), 77. See also Halil İnalcık, ‘Duşandan Osmanlı imparatorluğuna: XV. asırda Rumeli’de Hiristyan sipahiler ve menşeleri [From Dusan to the Ottoman empire: the origins of the Christian cavalrymen of Rumelia in the fifteenth century]’, Fuad Köprülü Armağanı/Melanges Fuad Köprülü (Istanbul, 1953), 207–48.

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Seljuk practice (ıkta), making the launch of tımar smoother. Consequently, it seems that Ottomans simply incorporated Serbian and Greek pronoia holders as Christian cavalrymen, calling them tımar holders.61 This soon-to-be Islamicized nobility was now part of the provincial military and administrative structure of the empire, having gained a status equivalent to that of the conquering elite. Tax collection systems and legal institutions were left intact to facilitate the process of incorporation. Christian secretaries in the service of the sultan in the provinces further eased the communication problems, bringing together a people, inscribing their practices and using their language in an administrative arrangement that was foreign, yet also open to others. It is not surprising, therefore, that the tax system of Ottoman Anatolia and the Balkans was complex and mixed, and that scholars found elements of Islamic, Mongol, Byzantine, Armenian and Slavic tax systems in the records.62 In the other regions of the empire, especially outside the western orientation to the Balkans and western Europe, Ottoman rule was mediated by various regional power holders, and locals did not experience the Ottoman system as intensely as did those in the core.63 The eastern frontier was not only much farther away from the political centre of the empire, but it was also much less tidy and well demarcated. Selim I (r. 1512–20) was credited with having altered the geographic scale of the empire and driven the Ottomans eastward. The more Ottomans engaged in war on multiple fronts, and the more significant their territorial gains, the greater the need for accommodation and flexible provincial and frontier arrangements. This was especially true of the Süleymanic era. But there was also the added component that the Ottomans were assuming their new role as the leaders of the Islamic world. The conquest of Iraq was settled with great care; when they conquered Baghdad in 1534, the Ottomans were fully committed to the best accommodation possible to demonstrate the benefits of association with the Ottoman empire. While the Safavid governors had collected heavy taxes, the Ottomans abolished these taxes, providing the population with important financial and subsistence relief.64 The province of Iraq was a typical example of how indirect rule produced a buffer zone with the Safavids. Geographically divided into more urban and settled and rural and tribal areas, indirect rule meant different things for different parts of Iraq. In the urban areas, the Mamluks, the urban local power holders of the region, maintained Ottoman suzerainty minimally, keeping their own army (even though a garrison of Janissaries was always there) and 61 62 63 64

Vryonis, ‘Byzantine legacy’, 273–4. İnalcık, ‘Osmanlılarda raiyyet rüsumu’, 575–610; Omer Lutfi Barkan, XV ve XVI asırlarda Osmanlı; Vryonis, ‘Byzantine legacy’, 276. Resat Kasaba, ‘Dreams of empire’, in Esherick et al. (eds.), Empire to nation, pp. 198–225. Rhoads Murphey, ‘Süleyman’s eastern policy’, in Halil İnalcık and Cemal Kafadar (eds.), Süleymân the second and his time (Istanbul: Georgias Press and Isis Press, 1993), pp. 228–48.

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erratically paying taxes to the Ottomans. In the manner that the Mamluks maintained an urban infrastructure, an army, finances and the rule of law in the main cities of Iraq, this indirect rule of the Ottomans came with a local bureaucratic order. Yet, in the rural areas where the tribes were powerful, indirect rule was twice removed and the intra-tribal arrangements made for local control.65 In other zones most affected by the Safavid–Ottoman struggle, the Ottoman government granted Kurdish tribal leaders the position of governor (sancak beyi) and awarded their domains as family properties (ocaklık or yurtluk), arrangements premised on the fact that lands and tribes would be passed on to the descendants of the leaders. Tribes were converted into administrative categories of hükümet lands exempt from taxes but subject to the main stipulation that the Kurdish tribal leaders join the army when appointed by their governor general.66 The hükümet sancaks of the empire were the most autonomous of the possible arrangements that the Ottomans contracted in eastern Anatolia. Here there was no trace of tımar arrangements or even standard bookkeeping with an eye to revenue management. Instead, there was intense negotiating, trading of incentives and threats of military intervention. The net effect of frontier contestation and distance away from the centre was the carving of significantly looser arrangements whereby local chieftains felt the weight of Ottoman control only lightly and felt independent and empowered to maintain the rivalry between states. In such areas of indirect control, negotiated settlements between the Ottoman state and local chieftains gave way to very low levels of bureaucratization if there was any at all. Later in the eighteenth century, these areas found it difficult to meet the Tanzimat requirements and achieved relatively low levels of standardization of rule.67 While the categories used for land administration implied different forms of rule and levels of bureaucratization, the organization of non-Muslim communities was a process of indirect rule based on specific arrangements between non-Muslim community leaders and the sultan. The millet system, a loose administrative set of central-local arrangements was a script for multireligious rule, though it was neither fully codified nor comparable across 65

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Dina Rizk Khoury, State and provincial society in the Ottoman empire: Mosul, 1540–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Hanna Batatu, The old social classes and the revolutionary movements of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Halil İnalcık, ‘An overview of Ottoman history’, in Kemal Çiçek et al. (eds.), The great Ottoman–Turkish civilization (Ankara: Yeni Turkiye, 2001), pp. 61–63. The best piece on this topic is Agoston, ‘Flexible empire’. See also Mehmet Öz, ‘Ottoman provincial administration in eastern and southeastern Anatolia: the case of Bitlis in the sixteenth century’, in Kemal H. Karpat and Robert Zens (eds.), Ottoman borderlands: issues, personalities, and political changes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), pp. 143–55. Hasan Kayali, Arabs and young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism and Islamism in the Ottoman empire, 1908–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

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communities.68 The millet was another example of the complicated layered relationship between patrimonial and bureaucratic notions of rule. It was initiated as a series of deals between the sultan’s household and the nonMuslim community leaders, providing internal autonomy to groups on religious and communal matters, respecting their own internal organizational dynamics. Therefore, on the one hand, the compact was the result of patrimonial relations, but on the other hand, the internal administrative structure of each community was moulded to enhance the existing organizational forms but also to make them as standardized and reliable as possible. The characteristics of such a system of rule emerged from the Ottoman desire to rule diversity, to ensure the loyalty of an increasingly larger Christian community with important economic skills, and the political goals of setting a wedge between the Orthodox and Catholic worlds of Europe.69 The intention then was for the state to get a handle on the diversity within its realm and to increase legibility and order, enabling the administration to run smoothly and taxes to flow unhindered.70 Over time, three non-Muslim millets, Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Jewish, would be organized around their dominant religious institutions, with the understanding that religious institutions would define and delimit their collective life. Even though relations with the metropolitans had been ongoing, the aftermath of the conquest of Constantinople (1453) was the most plausible moment for the emergence of new arrangements that grew into three large-scale identity vessels that organized diversity in the empire. As such, these were separate from one another, contained within their institutional forms, and internally administered by religious and/or lay leaders who acted as intermediaries between the state and the religious community. The Orthodox millet was recognized in 1454, and the Armenian in 1461; the Jewish millet remained without a declared definite status though it was unofficially recognized around the same time as the other two.71 Sultans, and Mehmed II in particular, forged the early arrangements that were periodically renewed by diverse communities. These arrangements did not even entail much innovation since they folded into their practice the existing authority structures of each community and thereby provided them with significant legal autonomy and authority. 68

69 70 71

For the classic treatment of the ‘millet’, see H. A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic society and the West: a study of the import of Western civilization on Moslem culture in the Near East, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1957). Charles A. Frazee, Catholics and sultans: the church and the Ottoman empire, 1453–1923 (London: Cambridge University Press). Scott, Seeing like a state. Halil İnalcık, ‘The policy of Mehmed II toward the Greek population of Istanbul and the Byzantine buildings of the city’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 23–4 (1969–70), 247, and ‘Foundations of Ottoman–Jewish cooperation’, in Avigdor Levy (ed.), Jews, Turks, Ottomans: a shared history, fifteenth through the twentieth century (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002).

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That this intermediary organization resembled many other Ottoman institutions supports the point that Ottomans assimilated the Greek Orthodox church into a familiar pattern, and that they were keen to formulate stable relations that would ensure the administration of peoples and the assimilation of revenues. Even though the patriarchate had autonomy in cultural and religious matters, it was folded into the Ottoman system as a financial institution. Since 1474, the position of the patriarch had been tied to a monetary gift (the pishkes), which established parallels with other Ottoman financial institutions. Ottomans then thought of the patriarch as a state official, in ways parallel to the steward (kethüda) of the craft guild. Kethüdas, patriarchs and metropolitans were all elected officials, and the state showed similar concerns regarding the elections of each of these officials. The tax collectors of the Christian population, metropolitans were compared to tax collectors on state lands.72 Once the office of the patriarchate was tied to revenue, it was fully constituted as an Ottoman fiscal unit (mukataa), as is made clear in the request the Patriarch Jeremias I (d. 1546) made in 1544: I took on the engagement to give yearly to the Imperial Treasury as a mukataa the sum of 4,000 pieces of gold on the condition of being the Patriarch of Istanbul-the-wellprotected and the domains and the regions that dependent domains and the countries of Moldavia and Wallachia. Accordingly, I was given an imperial berat.73

To administer such revenues, the Ottomans organized a special office at the department of imperial finances ‘for the collection of the revenues connected with appointment of the religious heads of the Christian communities in the empire’, led by a head secretary (hoca) under the finance minister but also designated as under the direct control of the grand vezir’s office.74 That is, not only did the Ottomans create a special office, but it was significant enough to be placed under the jurisdiction of the grand vezir. The records in the register were collected regarding the Orthodox patriarchate of Istanbul; the patriarchates of Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, Ohrid and Pec; and the Armenian Patriarch of Istanbul. As the relationship between the Ottoman political centre and the Greek Orthodox Church developed, a division of labour ensued that allowed the 72 73

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Halil İnalcık, ‘The status of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch under the Ottomans’, in Halil İnalcık, Essays in Ottoman history (Eren: Istanbul, 1998), pp. 420–3. Quoted in Paraskevas Konortas, ‘Considérations ottomanes au sujet du statut du Patriarcat Orthodoxe de Constantinople (15e–16e siècles): quelques hypothèses’, Sixième congrés International des Etudes du Sud-est Européennes (1989), 213–26, at 221. Halil İnalcık, ‘Ottoman archival materials on millets’, in Benjamín Braude and Bernard Lewis (eds.), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman empire: the functioning of a plural society (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982), pp. 437–49. Most of the following information on the sources comes from the work of Halil İnalcık.

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Ottoman state to set a boundary and the Orthodox Church to regulate it.75 The fiscal arrangement between the state and the patriarch modified the internal relations within the Orthodox communities, forcing every layer of the hierarchy to collect resources from the people to make up for the amount invested in the state. One could question then whether the patriarch was really a religious and cultural leader or a mere administrator with his financial interest at heart.76 The Orthodox Church came to be seen as an instrument of the Ottoman state and in return, the Ottoman rulers made use of the church as an instrument of administration. IV

Epilogue: The Tanzimat Era No discussion of Ottoman bureaucracy would be complete without addressing the Tanzimat, the nineteenth-century period of reforms in Ottoman government, military, education and law, which represents the last and most significant moment of imperial bureaucratization. They are also important since, by then, Europeans saw the Ottomans as in decline. Yet the Tanzimat established a tremendous amount of change in a short period of time, shifting the empire towards a more ‘modern’ bureaucratic form, away from the patrimonial mix, and in tune with the models of modernity that were out in the international arena. That was a feat all by itself. Beginning with Selim III (r. 1789–1807), the Ottoman sultans attempted to reassert their power over unruly elements in the centre and control more tightly the provinces. The necessity for these measures evolved out of the financial and military duress increasingly imposed by Western European societies and the Russian empire. While consecutive Ottoman defeats and territorial losses gave rise to the ‘eastern question’ in Europe, for the Ottomans these same defeats invigorated efforts to reform what were seen as decaying or backward institutions. Although the Tanzimat focused initially on improving the military, the Ottoman bureaucracy also became a significant target.77 For models, Ottoman statesmen often looked to the same European states, most prominently France, 75

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Theodore H. Papadopoullos offers a critical assessment of these writers in Papadopoullos, Studies and documents relating to the history of the Greek Church and people under Turkish domination, 2nd edn (Aldershot: Variorum 1990). Konortas argues for the transformation of the patriarchate into a fiscal unit, a fiscal shell with no real content in his article on the status of the patriarchate. Though the fiscal side of the relationship made it rather precarious, this does not mean that the men who became patriarch were merely administrators (Konortas, ‘Considérations’). Carter V. Findley has written the best works on the attempts to reform the bureaucracy and the changes that ensued: see Findley, Bureaucratic reform; Findley, Ottoman civil officialdom: a social history (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

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where they had studied abroad in greater numbers. Knowledge of Western languages and customs increasingly became an important factor in the day-today operations and mobility of Ottoman statesmen. The offices of the kalemiye, now referred to as the mülkiye (civil service), became differentiated into ministries, including trade, health, education and public works. The foreign ministry established official embassies in prominent European capitals, furthering the Ottoman’s involvement in Great Power diplomacy and the necessity of a larger translation bureau. Each of these offices developed more sophisticated salary systems; new regulations for promotion, duty and discipline; and specialized schools. The mülkiye, increasingly free from the control of other political forces, became self-perpetuating as it grew. And grow it did: while the number of those enlisted in the kalemiye at the end of the eighteenth century stood at 1,000–1,500, by the end of the nineteenth century the ranks of the mülkiye had swelled to 50,000–100,000.78 The remarkable growth of the civil bureaucracy resulted from the centralizing goals of the Ottoman centre. In the nineteenth century, activities and institutions that had traditionally been the purview of religious groups or communities – education, forms of tax collection, orphanages, hospitals, policing – were assumed by the state. In instituting these reforms, the bureaucracy and the imperial administration battled older institutions of the empire: tribes, religious groups, guilds, the janissary corps, provincial rulers and recalcitrant subjects, to mention nothing of the external military threats and financial woes.79 The result was a new power wielded by the Ottoman bureaucracy (the mülkiye effectively ran the Ottoman empire in the middle decades of the nineteenth century) in step with dramatic transformations in the everyday lives of Ottoman subjects. Looking at the direct-indirect rule dimension, an important goal of the Tanzimat was to integrate the imperial centre with indirect local networks that had developed over the long centuries of negotiated rule. Most scholars argue that the Tanzimat reforms failed at this since despite increases in centralization and social and economic development, the reforms were not able to remove the local intermediaries. Local notables, chieftains and others mostly kept their positions and acted parallel to the new central bureaucratic officials. Yet, a new stream of research sees this as a necessary and important step in the

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Findley, Bureaucratic reform, pp. 167–8. Metin Heper, Burokratik yonetim gelenegi: Osmanli imparatorlugu ve Turkiye Cumhuriyetinde gelisimi ve niteligi [The tradition of bureaucratic administration: its development in the Ottoman empire an Turkish republic] (Ankara: 1974); Halil İnalcık, ‘Application of the Tanzimat and its social effects’, Archivum Ottomanicum 6 (1980), 283–337; Resat Kasaba, A moveable empire: nomads, migrants and refugees (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009).

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process of bureaucratization and centralization without inciting anti-state rebellions.80 In the case of Ottoman rule, the main process of note was the slow bureaucratization of a patrimonial household. The speed of the process was variable, occurring more strongly at certain periods of Ottoman history than others, but the tendency was always to move from the core towards the periphery, helped by various forms of extra-bureaucratic control. The Tanzimat, the most fervent attempt at bureaucratization, sought to move decisively away from the patrimonial model, but it was never able to obliterate patrimonial features of rule that continued to crop up often in the transition to the modern politics of the nation-state.

80

Yonca Köksal, ‘Tanzimat ve Tarih Yazımı [Tanzimat and Historiography]’, Doğu Batı: Osmanlılar I, 51 (2010), 193–216; Yonca Köksal, ‘Imperial center and local groups: Tanzimat reforms in Edirne and Ankara’, New Perspectives on Turkey 27 (2002), 107–38.

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Part III From Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages

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‘The Late Roman Empire Was before All Things a Bureaucratic State.’ Michael Whitby

I

My title quotes the opening sentence of the chapter on ‘The civil service’ in A. H. M. Jones’s magisterial survey of the social, economic and administrative history of the late Roman empire published in 1964 – a work that still defines the field even after half a century.1 One might quibble about the emphasis in ‘before all things’, but it is difficult to deny that the late empire demonstrated many aspects of a developed bureaucracy as defined by Max Weber – for example, fulltime salaried officials organized into hierarchies of authority, both centrally and regionally, with particular spheres of responsibility and effective communications to ensure cohesion.2 Members of the administration might not always be exactly aligned with the policies of their imperial masters, as can be seen in the ruse used by Emperor Anastasius (r. 491–518) to abolish the chrysargyron tax, or in the opposition of the praetorian prefect, John the Cappadocian, to Justinian’s attack on Vandal Africa in 533. This capacity to resist emperors, however, also meant that administrative structures could survive through regime change, as in the transition from Roman to Ostrogothic Italy in the late fifth century, or the political chaos of the early years of Zeno’s reign (late 470s) or the usurpation of Phocas (r. 602–10).3 The late empire was a territorial state whose frontiers were, in the main, fixed, though this did not prevent the Romans from attempting to exercise authority outside their formal territory, in line with their centuries-old 1

2

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Jones, LRE, ch. 16, p. 563. In terms of historical periods, ‘late empire’ is used to cover the period from the accession of Diocletian in 284 through to the early seventh century, either the death of Maurice in 602 or the Arab invasions of the 630s; the ‘early empire’ refers to the first three centuries of rule by emperors, from the emergence of Octavian as sole ruler of the Roman world in 30 bce through to the accession of Diocletian. There is, however, a complication, in that the last two centuries of the Roman republic, from roughly 240 bce to 30 bce, were years of rapidly expanding imperial rule by the Romans. As observed by Stefan Rebenich, Jones developed his ideas ‘without preoccupying himself too much with the sociological theories of Max Weber’ (Rebenich, ‘Jones and continental scholarship’, in D. M. Gwynn (ed.), A. H. M. Jones and the later Roman empire (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 43–62, at 49). For resistance and endurance as two characteristics that support the identification of an administrative structure as a bureaucracy, see Haldon (Chapter 7, pp. 149–50).

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approach to giving orders.4 Jones’s perceptions of the late empire were undoubtedly influenced by the nature of imperial control and organization in the earlier stages of the Roman empire. He, after all, embarked on his study of late Rome after producing authoritative volumes on The Greek city and The cities of the eastern Roman empire, as well as working on the construction of the Roman empire under the first two holders of the title of princeps, Augustus (d. 14 ce) and Tiberius (d. 37 ce).5 The early Roman empire has been characterized as ‘undergoverned’ by comparison, for example, with the Chinese empire. This assessment appears in the chapter entitled ‘Government without bureaucracy’ in the authoritative introduction to the empire’s economy and society by Garnsey and Saller.6 The Roman empire employed relatively few administrators, who in many cases were appointed on the basis of patronage rather than set procedures and who never evolved a professional mindset, and it did not support a centralized system of keeping records. Nevertheless, however amateurish this approach might seem, Rome successfully controlled an increasingly substantial empire for several centuries. Rome’s methods of managing territory originated in the processes through which it expanded its control across all of peninsular Italy and then began to acquire external territories, starting with Sicily at the end of the First Punic War in 240 bce. On this opinions differ, with some accepting the Romans’ perception of themselves as reluctant imperialists, whereas others see a much more intentional process of asserting authority over all neighbours. There is, however, substantial agreement that a key factor was the intensity of political competition in Rome, where the wealth and reputation derived from successful military commands, almost invariably on external campaigns, underpinned electoral victory.7 4

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7

The issue of Roman attitudes to frontiers has been hotly debated, though not always with sufficient attention to the Romans’ own attitudes to obedience and allegiance. For a convenient summary of the debates, see A. Colás, Empire (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), pp. 41–7. My views are summarized in M. Whitby, ‘War’, in P. Sabin, H. van Wees and M. Whitby (eds.), The Cambridge history of Greek and Roman warfare, vol. ii: Rome from the late republic to the late empire. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 310–41, at 310–14. See also A. D. Lee, Information and frontiers: Roman foreign relations in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). A. H. M. Jones, The Greek city from Alexander to Justinian, 1st edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940); A. H. M. Jones, The cities of the eastern Roman empire, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). For discussion, see esp. L. Lavan, ‘A. H. M. Jones and “The Cities”, 1964–2004’, in Gwynn (ed.), A. H. M. Jones, pp. 167–91. Garnsey & Saller, Empire, ch. 2, p. 20, following K. Hopkins, Death and renewal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 186, who referred to the seventh-century T’ang and twelfth-century Song. Garnsey and Saller’s comparison is adapted, with only slight expansion, in N. Rosenstein, ‘War, state formation and the evolution of military institutions in ancient China and Rome’, in W. Scheidel (ed.), Rome and China: comparative perspectives on ancient world empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 24–51, at 28. On the Song, see also Ebrey (Chapter 2, p. 41). W. V. Harris, War and imperialism in republican Rome, 327–70 B.C. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); other views in Erich S. Gruen, The Hellenistic world and the coming of Rome

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‘The Late Roman Empire Was before All Things a Bureaucratic State.’ 131

The political competition that drove foreign wars also influenced the way in which any territorial gains were handled. Rome, on occasions, was notoriously slow to assume physical control of territory, as for example after the Third Macedonian War in 167 bce, and it was often content to leave regions in the hands of client dynasties for significant periods, as for example the family of Herod in Palestine over four generations from 40 bce.8 In part this was because the creation of what came to be known as ‘provinces’ – a term derived from the Latin word provincia that denoted the scope of a magistrate’s power and did not initially have to be given a precise geographical area9 – threatened to create abnormal opportunities for individual senators to increase their wealth and prestige, thereby elevating them above their peers. However, it also reflected what really mattered to the Romans, namely the ability to see their wishes enacted. This might be in response to direct orders, as on the notorious ‘Day of Eleusis’ in 168 bce, when the senatorial envoy Gaius Popilius Laenas drew a circle in the sand around the Seleucid king Antiochus IV and instructed him to desist from his attack on Alexandria; Antiochus obeyed, after only a brief hesitation, even though the annihilation of his Ptolemaic rival appeared to be within his grasp (Polybius 29.27). Much more commonly this was achieved through the indirect processes of local leaders internalizing Roman priorities and perceiving it to be in their interests to do what they believed their Roman neighbours would want. Thus, as the Romans acquired territory, they had no need to create or adopt complex mechanisms of control: there merely had to be inhabitants in positions of authority who were prepared to accept orders and deliver obedience. It was, perhaps paradoxically, often easiest for defeated enemies to understand how best to interact with Rome: in 168 bce, as the Third Macedonian War approached its climax, Antiochus IV knew from the crushing defeat of his father at Magnesia and subsequent humiliation in the Peace of Apamea (188 bce) that discussion was useless, whereas both Rhodes and the kingdom of Pergamum misjudged their ability to pursue objectives that did not coincide with those of their long-standing Roman allies. As a result, increasingly distant swathes of territory could be run for the benefit of Rome through the process of dispatching a succession of short-term senatorial governors. These were granted imperium, the religious power to act especially in military and judicial matters, over particular areas. Each senatorial governor would depart to his provincia with a small retinue, essentially elements of his personal household,

8 9

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); E. Badian, Foreign clientelae (264–70 B.C.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958). F. Millar, The Roman near east, 31 B.C.–A.D. 317 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). J. Richardson, ‘Polybius’ view of the Roman empire’, Papers of the British School at Rome 69 (1979), 1–15.

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plus in many cases a quaestor or junior magistrate to attend to financial matters, and perhaps a few friends who travelled out to make money and/or offer specialist help. The procedure was to manage the provincia, as far as possible, through whatever local mechanisms were already in place, dispensing justice in cases which local processes could not resolve, maintaining law and order primarily through the operation of local forces, and occasionally engaging in more substantial campaigns if the senate had allocated Roman troops to the provincia or if the governor had particular ambitions. There was no guarantee of continuity from one governor to his successor, since there was de facto some leeway in the interpretation and implementation of law, and in the absence of written records, the basis for a predecessor’s decisions might not always be obvious to an incoming governor. The allocation of provinces was originally done by the senate; the power was claimed by the popular assemblies in the late second century bce, but much of the business of managing the provinces and Rome’s external relations rested with the senate, to which embassies arriving in Rome delivered their reports and requests. The collection of some important taxes, notably those of the province of Asia, the richest part of the Roman world, was handled through the periodic auctioning of the right to secure the revenues to collections of financiers, the publicani, who would subcontract the actual business to local representatives. This was meant to ensure that provincial governors were detached from the financial temptations of responsibility for substantial sums of money.10 Matters could have been organized very differently. In the ancient Mediterranean, there were earlier models of empire that can reasonably be presented as bureaucratic. Achaemenid Persia is a case in point. Here the imperial elite of Iranians inherited complex systems of record-keeping from earlier Mesopotamian empires, which were then rolled out as their imperial borders expanded. The degree of central oversight was staggering: escorts of embassies effectively had ration coupons that they cashed in along their journeys but with a limit on how much could be spent in a single place to ensure that the missions kept moving; gangs of workers had their daily allowances calibrated according to sex and childbearing status; even the occupants of an imperial bird farm had their daily consumption specified.11 This administration was carried out in languages other than Persian, a language for which a script appears to have been created for royal propaganda and whose use was essentially restricted to this purpose. It is unlikely that the Iranian elite which ruled the empire engaged at all in the mechanics of the administrative practices 10 11

E. Badian, Publicans and sinners: private enterprise in the service of the Roman republic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972). D. M. Lewis, Sparta and Persia (Leiden: Brill, 1977), ch. 1; J. Wiesehöfer, Ancient Persia from 550 BC to 650 AD (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), chs. 3–4.

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that underpinned their position: as long as orders were obeyed and revenues arrived on time, that was enough. The process is well illustrated in the biblical story of the wicked Haman’s plot against the empire’s Jewish population: secretaries are summoned so that an oral command can be transformed into a written decree for dispatch throughout the provinces, in the appropriate language for each (Esther 3.12–14; cf. 8.9–10). The complexities of Achaemenid organization that have been revealed by modern archaeological work were not fully appreciated by contemporary Greeks, who preferred stories about the King’s Eyes or Ears, symbols of despotic surveillance, to hard information about efficient imperial administration. It is unlikely that much of the Achaemenid arrangements survived after Alexander the Great’s conquests (334–23 bce) through the two centuries of Seleucid rule to be encountered by the Romans in Asia Minor or Syria, but in Ptolemaic Egypt the Pharaonic administration, which the Persians and then the Ptolemies inherited, did continue to function until the death of Cleopatra (30 bce) left Octavian (soon to be Augustus) in charge of the country. Detailed records covered many economic activities – ownership of property, land usage, production of various monopoly items, transportation and, of course, taxation. Roman administration in Egypt continued these previous arrangements, but Egypt was organized separately from other provinces as a private property of the emperors, and there is no evidence that this approach to control was seen as superior to traditional Roman methods.12 In the classical world, elaborate bureaucracy, far from being associated with modernity, was in fact regarded as an aspect of backward, oriental despotism that contributed to the reduction of its subjects to servile status. During the Persian invasion of Greece in 480, Xerxes had scribes on hand when reviewing his troops and while watching the fighting at Salamis to record his observations (Herodotus 7.100.1–2; 8.90.4); the regular recording of royal comments and decisions was clearly standard practice, as in the story in Esther of the sleepless Artaxerxes calling for his day-book to be brought so that he could review his actions (Esther 6.1–2). The Roman empire did not require such administrative complications because, overall, it worked. The needs of empire were relatively simple: security, revenues and justice. Provided that the Romans secured what they wanted, all was well. The penalties for failing to deliver what was expected could be extreme, whether that failure was the inability to produce the required levy of troops, a lack of respect for Roman officials or outright rebellion. After the extreme violence of the process of conquest, in most places for most of the time local leaders, whether urban or tribal, understood that their personal interests were best served through displays of loyalty to Rome: there would 12

A. Bowman, Egypt after the pharaohs, 332 BC–AD 642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), ch. 3.

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be benefits in terms of status, in particular Roman citizenship, as well as in the development of stronger and more diverse client links with their Roman leaders. Whether one wants to term this empire ‘undergoverned’ or ‘protobureaucratic’ is perhaps a matter of terminology; it might, indeed, be the case that the somewhat ad hoc or ad hominen arrangements of the republic’s network of provinces can fairly be characterized as undergoverned, whereas the presence of an emperor gradually brought some consistency and coherence even within a light-touch approach while the independence of individual governors was reduced. There was no radical shift in the quality of Roman control of its provinces, but gradually some of the excesses and malpractices of provincial government under the republic seem to have been reined in.13 The linch-pin of this system was the network of cities. The Romans did take deliberate steps to extend their distribution by promoting municipal foundations in the less urbanized western provinces: this can be seen in the Flavian municipal law for Spain that is now known as the Lex Irnitana, which prompted the development of communities such as the predecessors of the modern cities of Malaga and Zaragossa as well as places like Irni that failed to survive the test of time.14 But a diversity of city statuses remained, from the notionally autonomous privileged elite such as Aphrodisias in Caria, a city whose determination to preserve its privileges has resulted in the survival of a mass of evidence for its diplomatic relations with successive emperors,15 through coloniae and municipia, to places which had forfeited rights because of some misdemeanour. Taxation too was not standardized. The evangelist Luke proclaimed that Caesar Augustus ordered that all the world was to be taxed, which might suggest some empire-wide coordination, but the census conducted by the governor of Syria, Cyrenius, was a provincial one. Responsibility for collecting tax revenues was split among the cities, whose elites took it in turn to discharge this duty, and imperial procurators who oversaw the elements of indirect taxation, for example, customs dues and inheritance tax. The army, which in many ways was a more homogeneous organization, substantially depended for its supplies, including its military equipment, on local initiative. The individual enterprise of military logistics is clearly revealed in the Vindolanda tablets from the Stanegate fort in north Britain: here, unlike many other frontiers, there was little local production, but much arrived from southern England or Gaul, either 13 14 15

Garnsey & Saller, Empire, pp. 34–40. J. Gonzalez, ‘The Lex Irnitana: a new copy of the Flavian municipal law’, JRS 76 (1986), 147–243. J. Reynolds, Aphrodisias and Rome (London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 1982), for example, doc. 25; C. Roueché, Aphrodisias in Late Antiquity (London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 1989).

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courtesy of private merchants who might build up a regular connection with a particular unit or through the dispatch of soldiers to secure certain items.16 In the same way, the food supply for the city of Rome, something that emperors had to ensure at all costs, depended upon regulated private enterprise.17 The increasingly far-flung empire was connected by the famous network of Roman roads; just as important as the engineering responses to major challenges was the development of a network of posting stations (mansiones) that facilitated travel, especially for those privileged to secure official travel permits.18 What provided glue for this system was culture, since the right to participate in public affairs and exercise authority was normally linked to the possession of the appropriate education.19 In the West, the process of municipalization stimulated, but was also expanded by, the adoption of Latin, the language of citizenship and imperial law; in the Greek East, the elites of its leading cities contributed to the cultural, but also political, phenomenon known as the Second Sophistic – a deliberate exaltation of the inheritance of the classical period of Greek society half a millennium earlier that helped Greeks as the cultural masters interact with their Latin-speaking political overlords on an equal footing.20 There were developments which in retrospect might seem significant – emperors took an increasing interest in the performance of cities, with a curator being centrally appointed and provincial governors expected to scrutinize how local councils were conducting their duties and whether promises of benefactions were being realized.21 A select number of important central roles, for example, oversight of the grain supply of Rome or, most powerfully, the command of the praetorian guard, the main military unit at Rome, were entrusted to equestrians, men of considerable wealth but inferior to senators in status in that they had not chosen to pursue a career in politics. Within the imperial household on the Palatine Hill at Rome, the palatium, the household staff of the princeps, soon came to be structured into particular divisions with responsibilities for letters, petitions, accounts and in due course judicial matters; the divisions were staffed by imperial slaves and freedmen, with the freedmen who initially headed each division acquiring considerable power under ‘bad’ emperors such as Claudius (d. 54 ce) and 16 17 18 19 20 21

A. Bowman, Life and letters on the Roman frontier: Vindolanda and its people (London: British Museum Press, 1994). G. Rickman, The corn supply of ancient Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). J. Matthews, The journey of Theophanes: travel, business, and daily life in the Roman East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), esp. ch. 4. R. A. Kaster, Guardians of language: the grammarian and society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 18. S. Swain, Hellenism and empire: language, classicism and power in the Greek world, AD 50–250 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Garnsey & Saller, Empire, pp. 34–40.

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Nero (d. 68 ce).22 The divisional heads became more socially palatable, but no less influential, when these freedmen were usually replaced by equestrians. The imperial household can be seen as the nucleus for a bureaucratic structure, but for generations it remained just what it was – a large household staffed by people of whom most were of inferior status, without systematic records to underpin its activity and supported by a shifting cast of friends and advisers. The operation of the empire was shared between this household and the senate, to which the emperor belonged and whose members continued to provide most provincial governors and almost all army commanders. With such a system, it is perhaps not surprising that emperors almost always operated in responsive mode, reacting to petitions from their subjects or other stimuli.

II

So, what brought about change to the more formal system that Jones characterized as bureaucratic? Granted that the trinity of security, finances and justice constituted the key tasks of imperial administration, it is inevitable that serious challenges in one or more of these areas would impact upon the processes of administration. First security. For much of the first 250 years in which the empire was ruled by an emperor, Roman armies were largely static formations, being based in increasingly solid camps around which civilian canabae grew up.23 External challenges were met at, or beyond, the frontiers along which the legions were based and where they received the surplus product of neighbouring regions and their hinterlands.24 In the third century, the increasing diversity of threats to the empire changed all this, so that armies became much more fragmented and mobile, thereby disrupting established patterns of supply. Since military failure often challenged an emperor’s perceived legitimacy, while signal victory might lead to the particular army commander being elevated by his troops as an imperial claimant, it became vital for emperors that armies be led by generals who were both capable and loyal; senators failed to qualify on both counts.25 The partnership between emperor and senate, which had directed the early 22

23 24 25

F. Millar, The emperor in the Roman world (London: Duckworth, 1977; repr. with afterword, 1992), ch. 3; B. Levick, Claudius (London: Batsford, 1990); M. Griffin, Nero: the end of a dynasty (London: Batsford, 1984). N. Hanel, ‘Military camps, canabae, and vici: the archaeological evidence’, in Paul Erdkamp (ed.), A companion to the Roman army (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), pp. 395–416. E. N. Luttwak, The grand strategy of the Roman empire from the first century AD to the third (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). K. Strobel, ‘Strategy and army structure between Septimius Severus and Constantine the Great’, in Erdkamp, Army, pp. 267–85; P. Kehne, ‘War- and peacetime logistics: supplying imperial armies in east and west’, ibid., pp. 323–38.

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empire, however unequal the two sides were in terms of real power, was no more. At the same time, the ability of different enemies to penetrate deeply into the empire damaged the empire’s economic base: revenues were either lost to invaders or might be said to have been lost to them, and with military expenses rising and the resources to pay for these contracting, the intrinsic value of the coinage collapsed. Finally both the invasions and the economic changes challenged the urban infrastructure upon which the empire relied: Antioch, one of the empire’s four greatest cities, was sacked by the Persians in 252 and Rome itself was sufficiently threatened to have a new circuit of walls constructed in the 270s, as had been happening in many smaller provincial cities. Even where cities survived, their revenues disappeared, so that funds which had underpinned, for example, bathing establishments or distributions of food were no longer available to support crucial aspects of the fabric of urban life. Individual city coinages, which had been an aspect of local pride, collapsed in the mid270s, quite possibly as a result of Aurelian’s efforts to stabilize the imperial currency.26 From the reign of Valerian in the 250s, emperors spent very little time at Rome, since military pressures required their presence in the provinces. The rhythms that had structured earlier imperial life were broken – largely by outsiders, but internal religious change would also have a substantial impact. Restoration under the Tetrarchy and its Constantinian successor regimes (284–337) brought about an intensification of central intervention.27 The empire came to be split between multiple rulers, who in theory ruled collegially, though in practice there were periods of high tension and even conflict; this undoubtedly helped pave the way for the final division of the empire into East and West in 395. Each emperor had to have his own central administration, which contributed to an increase in the number of official positions. There was a doubling in the number of provinces, which, apart from the acquisition of new territory, had increased only gradually after the major expansion under Augustus. As a result, more cities now played host as metropoleis to the gubernatorial retinues, however rudimentary they might have been, and governors naturally had the ability to peer more closely into the conduct of local affairs. Cities increasingly lost control of local resources, especially of those associated with the maintenance of traditional religious cults when Christian emperors permitted attacks on traditional forms of worship. The attractions of being a local councillor waned in comparison with the opportunities available in imperial service: a conflict of interest emerged between on the one hand the cities, which needed their richest inhabitants to devote their resources to local interests and the discharge of continuing 26 27

D. Potter, The Roman empire at bay, AD 180–395 (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 391–3. S. Williams, Diocletian and the Roman recovery (London: Batsford, 1985), part III.

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obligations to the central government, and on the other the imperial administration which depended on attracting these well-educated men into its service, for example, with offers of exemptions from local duties.28 Imperial legislation relating to administrative matters increased markedly in volume and complexity. Military supply was substantially centralized, with production of equipment and the collection and distribution of supplies being overseen by imperial officials; the praetorian prefect, originally commander of the main imperial bodyguard and then effectively the imperial chief of staff, a person of considerable military importance, became the head of the civilian administrative structure, effectively the emperor’s deputy.29 The economy was organized to support essential activity, especially the court and the armies, and hereditary obligations were placed on various professions. Finally taxation was placed on a more consistent basis, even if the system remained far from uniform: a fifteenyear cycle of indictions, or tax years, was established based on assessments of the whole empire’s taxable resources, with the result that emperors and their officials could, in theory, predict their likely income and construct budgets accordingly.30 Religious change also contributed to the growth of bureaucracy. The establishment of Christianity as the imperial religion by Constantine, and then its progressive adoption across almost all the empire’s cities, had significant administrative consequences. In terms of organization, the church slotted into existing imperial hierarchies by developing a parallel structure based on provincial dioceses, metropolitan sees and provincial cities. Moreover, by the end of the fourth century, the church was a substantial owner of property with all that entailed in terms of organization and revenue collection;31 even more significantly, the demands of doctrinal coherence involved a substantial task of documentary creation and coordination of information, as can be seen from both the procedures of episcopal councils and the mechanisms for communicating their decisions.32 As a result of all these changes, the administrative personnel engaged in running the system expanded dramatically, even if the numbers are impossible to quantify.33 These developments are all well known. They are also widely 28 31 32

33

Jones, LRE, pp. 734–57. 29 Ibid., pp. 370–2. 30 Ibid., pp. 451–6. Ibid., pp. 874–904. Michael Whitby, ‘An unholy crew? Bishops behaving badly at church councils’, in R. Price and Mary Whitby (eds.), The council of Chalcedon (Liverpoool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), pp. 178–96. P. Heather, ‘New men for new Constantines? Creating an imperial elite in the eastern Mediterranean’, in P. Magdalino (ed.), New Constantines (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1994), pp. 11–33, at 19, extrapolating from discrete calculations by Jones, LRE, ch. 16, postulated 3,000 high-level positions, 7,600 in various central offices and 10,000 in provincial government. By contrast, under early emperors, there were probably only between 100 and 200 high-level (senatorial and equestrian) positions, and only a few hundred formal positions in central and provincial governments.

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regarded – in antiquity as well as among modern authorities – as unfortunate changes: although necessary for the survival of the empire, they are also believed to have contributed to its decline by increasing the numbers of unproductive mouths which the hard-pressed tax base had to sustain, by undermining the quality of previous administration through the development of internal competition between rival centralized bureaucracies and endemic corruption, by encouraging the regular turnover of top officials who lacked the competence to fulfil their roles.34 The alleged result was an empire in which imperial authority could be flouted, as seen in the frequent need to reissue legislation or the emergence of local leaders to provide the security that the central government could no longer guarantee. Of course there is some truth in these perceptions, but questions also need to be raised. If one thinks of the dead weight of administrative staff that had to be supported from the tax base, it is undoubtedly true that numbers expanded greatly as senior officials such as the master of the offices or the praetorian prefect of the East came to be supported by hierarchies of officials, with their offices being replicated on a smaller scale at the provincial level. The level of administrative development is apparent in the stories surrounding the abolition of the chrysargyron tax by Emperor Anasastius in the early sixth century: not only were comprehensive tax records kept centrally, but they were also held in distributed fashion in provincial capitals (Evagrius, HE 4.39). In the same way, there were archives of imperial laws both centrally, in the imperial capitals, and regionally in major cities such as Antioch and Carthage, all of which could be drawn upon for the compilation of the Theodosian legal code.35 It is, however, impossible to balance the numbers employed by this system against those involved in the much less visible ‘undergovernment’ of the earlier empire: the varied administrative contributions of cities to the empire were simply uncosted, but the numerous people involved had to be supported by the agricultural base in the same way as the more visible later officials. Similarly with alleged corruption: there is clear evidence for buying office, nepotism and extraction of fees for services in the late empire, but it is wrong to assume that the urban administrations of the earlier empire were paragons of virtue. Bitter local rivalries existed, as we know from the occasional documented central intervention, and these were pursued with all available means. Even the institutionalized payment of fees for services can be seen as an alternative to the provision of an appropriate salary: the system came to function on the basis that those who wanted action enough to pay for it might secure what they 34 35

Jones, LRE, pp. 1045–58. R. MacMullen, Corruption and the decline of Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). See the contributions of J. Matthews and B. Sirks to J. Harries and I. Wood (eds.), The Theodosian Code: studies in the imperial law of Late Antiquity (London: Duckworth, 1993).

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desired.36 That was undoubtedly unfair and was seen to be so as the occasional anecdotes about the achievement of a surprising judicial result suggest (for example, Malalas 15.10), but the previous arrangements had also been decisively tilted in favour of wealth. In legislative terms, recent scholarship has argued that the phenomenon of repeated legislation reflects active engagement with imperial law – as users petitioned the emperor to clarify or redefine particular enactments – rather than disregard for the emperor’s authority.37 The fact that massive effort was devoted by both Theodosius II and Justinian to codifying imperial law reflects a commitment to improving the operation of justice.38 Ecclesiastical administration certainly introduced a new element into the overall equation, but its burden needs to be weighed historically against the less visible distributed costs of supporting the myriad urban and rural cult centres of the pre-Christian world. The allegedly ‘idle-mouth’ aspect of the church also needs to be set against the benefits which Christianity brought, despite all its divisions, in terms of imperial cohesion, at least in the eastern empire where the main enemies, Sassanid Persians, Huns, Slavs and Avars, were non-Christian.39 The administrative system of the late empire was far from perfect: it certainly privileged wealth and connections, but it was not necessarily any less effective than what had pertained in the early empire, where access to a senatorial governor in a province was much easier for those with resources and education. Whatever its defects, the system worked. The empire recovered from the challenges of the third century, which had come close to fragmenting it permanently, to flourish strongly in the fourth century. When the western half of the empire began to disintegrate in the fifth century, failings in the bureaucracy undoubtedly played some part, since it appears to have become difficult to move imperial armies quickly as the complex supply systems that underpinned their operation ceased to function, especially over long distances. Even in the West, however, the structures of Roman administration survived the Ostrogothic takeover in Italy, since Theodoric was able to control his territories effectively with the help of Roman officials such as Cassiodorus, and in Gaul (as Bernard Bachrach discusses in Chapter 8) local infrastructure also survived 36

37

38 39

S. Barnish, D. Lee and Michael Whitby, ‘Government and administration’, in Averil Cameron, Bryan Ward-Perkins and Michael Whitby (eds.), CAH, vol. xiv: Late Antiquity: empire and successors, A.D. 425–600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 164–206, at 184–9. J. D. Harries, Law and empire in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 77–88; Michael Whitby, ‘The role of the emperor’, in Gwynn (ed.), A. H. M. Jones and the later Roman empire, pp. 65–96. Harries and Wood, Code; T. Honoré, Tribonian (London: Duckworth, 1978). Michael Whitby, ‘Emperors and armies, 235–395’, in S. Swain and M. Edwards (eds.), Approaching Late Antiquity: the transformation from early to late empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 156–86, at 114–15.

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into Merovingian rule since cities retained the capacity to raise taxes and administer justice.40 The main factors behind Roman disintegration were the simultaneous incursions of several tribal groups and the fact that successive emperors lacked the authority to coerce or cajole key interest groups to follow imperial wishes: in the West, the different centres of power were not consolidated, apart from a period in the 390s when interests briefly coalesced at Milan; since ecclesiastical authority normally rested in Rome with the pope, military power was based in Milan or wherever the main Italian army happened to be quartered. From the early fifth century, emperors resided for most of the time in Ravenna, a place chosen on security grounds as being difficult to access. On the other hand, when the eastern empire had to confront critical challenges in the early seventh century, it proved possible for a resolute emperor to devise administrative expedients, such as temporary mints, to annex ecclesiastical resources, and to mobilize personnel so that the empire managed first to overcome the Sassanid challenge and then to survive that of the Arabs. III

In contrast to the negative views which bureaucracy tends to attract, I would like to touch in the final part of this chapter on certain ways in which the development of more formal bureaucratic structures may have strengthened the later Roman empire. The first relates to the pace of public life and the location and mobility of the emperors. Under the republic, the defining word for the conduct of public business has been identified as ambulare; ‘amble’ is the English derivative, which suggests the right pace, though ‘promenade’ better captures the complex opportunities for significant interaction in public spaces such as the forum provided by this activity. This approach to public life was ingrained into the senatorial elite, who paraded in public to assemble supporters or advertise their influence.41 Under the empire, there was a distinction between the enduring sedate progress of the senatorial elite, who continued to debate affairs of state even if key decisions were being taken elsewhere, provided the governors for most important provinces and controlled the historiographical memory of different rulers and the speed with which imperial initiatives might be pursued. The emperor was pulled between his status as the head of the senate, who should epitomize the ideals of senatorial behaviour, 40

41

On the overall process, see the relevant chapters in Cameron et al. (eds.), CAH, vol. xiv. Specifically on Italy, see C. Wickham, Early medieval Italy; central power and local society, 400–1000 (London: Macmillan, 1981), ch. 1; on Gaul, E. James, The origins of France: from Clovis to the Capetians, 500–1000 (London: Macmillan, 1982), ch. 2. See also Bachrach (Chapter 8, pp. 171–5). D. Spencer, ‘Movement and the linguistic turn: reading Varro’s de Lingua Latina’, in R. Laurence and D. Newsome (eds.), Rome, Ostia, Pompeii: movement and space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 57–80.

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and his role as the man of decision: in different contexts emperors had to function at the appropriate pace. For the emperor in senatorial guise, there is the portrait of Vespasian’s daily round in Suetonius (Vesp. 21), with the realities of hard work almost being concealed behind the façade of leisured aristocracy; for action there is Tiberius’ anticipation of senatorial debate when responding to the mutinies of 14 ce, or the constant tours of inspection carried out by Hadrian. It is certainly the case that emperors tended to move more purposefully than is suggested by ambulare. Their progress around the provinces was measured by the rhythms of imperial profectio and adventus – setting out from, and arriving at, a city.42 Within Rome itself, emperors no longer promenaded in public spaces; instead, their main engagement with the people occurred in places of mass entertainment, where the emperor sat in his box flanked by his entourage and guardsmen, in a position to hear, and occasionally respond to, chants and acclamations from the crowd. During the challenges of the third century, the speed of imperial movement undoubtedly increased, as military necessity dictated the presence of the emperor in different theatres, and the opportunities for sitting to watch entertainments at Rome decreased. In the restored empire of the fourth century, emperors remained highly mobile and exceptionally hard-working: in a letter, Julian portrayed himself as personally dealing with his correspondence in his tent late at night when no scribe was available (Ep. 9). The complexities of Christian doctrine and the disputes of bishops had added significantly to the list of potential imperial concerns, at least for rulers such as Constantius II (r. 337–61) or Theodosius II (r. 408–50) who became directly involved in such matters. But the emperor was no longer expected to engage on equal terms with members of the political elite: the nature of the empire had been transformed from ‘principate’ to a ‘dominate’. Not only was promenading irrelevant but so too was excessive familiarity even with members of the social elite: the historian Ammianus Marcellinus criticized his hero, Emperor Julian (r. 361–3), for participating in a consular inauguration on foot and for his undignified sociability in rushing to greet his former tutor, the philosopher Maximus (22.7); by contrast, Constantius II displayed appropriate reserve during his ceremonial entry to Rome, standing immobile in his carriage except when he bowed his head while passing under lofty arches, and even refraining from spitting (Ammianus 16.10.9–10).43 Sudden movement, especially without the expected bodyguard, signified crisis, as when Justinian (527–65) rushed to his church of S. Sophia after its dome was damaged by an earthquake in 558 (Paul the Silentiary, Ekphrasis 255–61), or Heraclius had to scurry back to the Long Walls of Constantinople in 623 after a planned meeting with the Avar Chagan at 42 43

Millar, Emperor, pp. 31–40. S. Tougher, Julian the Apostate (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 46–8.

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‘The Late Roman Empire Was before All Things a Bureaucratic State.’ 143

Heracleia turned into an ambush (Nicephorus, Breviarium 10). The business of empire had to be pursued at the appropriate speed, but the emperor as God’s representative on earth was expected to rise above the pace of mundane events. The transformation of imperial rule was consolidated in the East in 395, when emperors ceased to lead their armies in person, a habit which continued for more than two centuries with only rare exceptions.44 Constantinople became the locus of imperial life, with the emperor appearing to his people in the Hippodrome, where the royal box (Gk. kathisma) was connected directly to the palace, or in the Great Church, S. Sophia, which could again be accessed directly from the palace. In addition, emperors took part in the ceremonial processions, whose increasing elaboration structured the official calendar,45 so that imperial movement can now best be characterized as procedere. The imperial lifestyle in Constantinople both encouraged the bureaucratic consolidation of administration and crucially depended on it for support. The fourthcentury legislation preserved in the Theodosian Code of the 430s points to the extent of bureaucratic development before 395, but it is doubtful whether the imperial administration in the East would have developed in the same way if emperors had continued the peripatetic existence of the previous 250 years. From the mid-fifth century, for example, there appears to be a change in the detail of information derived from foreign missions that was available in Constantinople; when John Lydus, the best-known Roman bureaucrat, entered the praetorian prefecture as an exceptor, a shorthand secretary, in 511, he was joining an organization with strong traditions.46 Co-location of emperor and all main elements of the administration also helped rulers to counterbalance any tendency on parts of the bureaucracy to annex power for themselves. Emperors could vary the relative importance of different major offices, and hence of the administrative staffs that underpinned them, much to the annoyance of officials, for example, John Lydus, who found that his particular bureau was on the way down. The allocation of tasks to different bureaux did, on occasions, change, and both this fluidity and the competition that existed between administrative rivals helped ensure that successive emperors could control their officials rather than the reverse.47 Emperors, ultimately, were responsible for 44

45 46

47

Michael Whitby, ‘War and state in Late Antiquity: some economic and political connections’, in B. Meissner, O. Schmitt and M. Sommer (eds.), Krieg–Gesellschaft–Institutionen. Beiträge zu einer vergleichenden Kriegsgeschichte (Stuttgart: Verlag, 2005), pp. 355–85. B. Croke, ‘Justinian’s Constantinople’, in M. Maas (ed.), The Cambridge companion to the age of Justinian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 60–86, at 76–80. M. Maas, John Lydus and the Roman past: antiquarianism and politics in the age of Justinian (London: Routledge, 1992); C. Kelly, Ruling the later Roman empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). C. Kelly, ‘Emperors, government and bureaucracy’, in Averil Cameron and P. Garnsey (eds.), CAH, vol. xiii: the late empire, A.D. 337–425 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 138–83, at 145, 150–6, 169–75.

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making or confirming administrative appointments, with the result that the bureaucracy represented for them a substantial resource of patronage that tied the empire’s provincial elites to the imperial centre.48 Also, importantly, although the emperor in Constantinople was protected in his palace by the layers of courtly hierarchy, his regular involvement in public events and processions meant that he was less inaccessible to his subjects than contemporary Chinese rulers. The relationship between bureaucracy and education is also worth consideration. Education had defined the ruling elite of the early empire, and its distribution had expanded as additional groups became keen to participate more fully in the imperial enterprise. In the fourth century, an adjustment of emphasis can be detected in the works of Libanius, the orator and educator at Antioch. He bemoaned the fact that some of his students were abandoning their study of Greek for subjects with greater relevance for future employment, with Latin and shorthand as the main culprits (Or. 31.26–8; 48.22): Greek culture equipped its masters to be prominent within their eastern cities, whereas Latin gave access to expertise in Roman law, and shorthand was a prerequisite for appointment as a notary and hence entry to many administrative bureaux. John Lydus, a classic example of a provincial who pursued a successful career in the capital, was accomplished in Greek, Latin and shorthand. Education remained an important investment decision for families wanting to place their offspring in positions of influence, as can be seen in the career of Augustine, who might now be characterized as a part-time student who dipped into and out of higher education as family circumstances permitted (Confessions 2.3.5–6). It is also the case, however, that the spread of education contracted progressively during the fifth and especially the sixth centuries, partly because of the attitude of the church towards a pedagogic system in which pagan culture played a prominent part, and partly because fewer cities could locally provide education beyond a basic level. The bureaucracy, as seen through the eyes of John Lydus, remained one of the bastions of education – though he also bemoaned a decline in standards. Another bastion was the law, as one can see both from the backgrounds of many historians and from those involved in the composition of literary epigrams at Constantinople.49 Thus, different aspects of imperial administration contributed significantly to sustaining the appeal of traditional education, even if this no longer had quite the same significance that it did in the early empire. The imperial bureaucracy constituted one set of networks that helped bind the empire together. Another was the church, whose own structures mirrored 48 49

Barnish, Lee and Whitby, ‘Government and administration’, in CAH, vol. xiv, esp. pp. 200–2. Averil Cameron, Agathias (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), chs. 1–2.

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and complemented those of the secular state. Even if leading Christians increasingly objected to the pagan aspects of education and senior clerics in the sixth century did not possess the cultural breadth of their fourth-century predecessors, ecclesiastical administration depended on educated personnel similar to those who pursued secular careers. The doctrinal cohesion established at councils depended on massive administrative efforts to create and propagate their decisions in the interests of a unified church. In turn, Christianity underpinned the reputation of emperors: provided that they were regarded as orthodox, God would grant success to rulers who upheld the Christian faith, as Christian writers and church leaders repeatedly insisted to emperors, especially when attempting to impress on them the need to support the writer’s individual point of view. Emperors, however, did not entrust their fate entirely to these administrative networks. Emperors, even if they rarely led armies in person, were still the notional supreme commander of the empire’s military resources and, as the soldiers’ paymaster, could expect allegiance. The relationship of emperors and people was also important, and the reconfiguration of popular entertainments in the mid-fifth century to highlight the celebration of the emperor created an alternative empire-wide structure of vociferous, if sometimes unruly, support.50 The success and relative stability of the eastern empire through the challenges of the fifth and sixth centuries was due in no small part to the fact that a balance was maintained between the different elements in the state; this was demonstrated in the accession ceremonies from the mid-fifth century, for example, that of Anastasius in 491 which combined a central role for the senators, military elevation, participation by the patriarch and acclamations by the populace (de Caerimoniis 1.92). By contrast, almost three centuries earlier, the dying Septimius Severus had exhorted his sons in 211, ‘Agree, enrich the soldiers, and disregard everyone else’ (Dio 76.15.2). Such privileging of military force, even if it was the ultimate guarantee of the emperor’s position as Justinian had to demonstrate during the Nika riot of 532, was no longer a secure basis for ruling the state: the doctrinal preferences which put Anastasius at loggerheads with the church hierarchy in Constantinople throughout much of his reign demonstrated as much, as did the difficulties which Phocas, the Balkan army’s candidate for the throne, experienced in handling civilian business (602–10).51 It is notable that administrative experience might be the springboard to the highest positions in the state: Anastasius 50

51

Michael Whitby, ‘Factions, bishops, violence and urban decline’, in J.-U. Krause and C. Witschel (eds.), Die Stadt in der Spätantike – Niedergang oder Wandel? (Historia Einzelschrift 190, 2006), pp. 441–61, esp. pp. 444–53. D. Lee, ‘The eastern empire: Theodosius to Anastasius’, in CAH, vol. xiv, pp. 33–62, esp. 55–7; D. Olster, The politics of usurpation in the seventh century: rhetoric and revolution in Byzantium (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1993).

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was a silentiary, a senior official, before being proclaimed emperor, and both Tiberius (r. 578–82) and Maurice (r. 582–602) had experience as notaries before being appointed to command the imperial bodyguard as Count of the Excubitors, and from there to the imperial throne; at a slightly lower level, John the Cappadocian was a mere scrinarius in the office of one of the senior generals before he attracted the attention of the future Emperor Justinian, who subsequently elevated him to become praetorian prefect of the East. IV

If, in conclusion, I return to Jones’s assertion about the nature of the late empire, it was indeed bureaucratic, especially in comparison to the early empire in terms of formal structures. It is much less obvious that this development was detrimental to the health and prosperity of the empire. The proto-bureaucratic approach of the first half millennium of Roman imperial rule outside Italy (midthird century bce to mid-third century ce) had gradually evolved certain more formal structures of control, but it failed to cope with the challenges of the third-century invasions. The somewhat gentlemanly approach to affairs in which common cultural references played a large part in determining eligibility to take executive action was replaced by an emphasis on professional competence, especially in military leaders but also in the administrative structures that underpinned the army and other aspects of government. There was, however, no rapid or designed bureaucratization of government: arrangements were changed in different areas at different times in response to particular needs, with the result that Roman arrangements were characterized by a certain diversity and fluidity. The new approach was resented in some quarters, especially by members of elites who found that they had lost influence, but it contributed to the success of the empire in the fourth century and for a further two centuries to that of the East, since emperors at Constantinople managed to balance conflicting interests to preserve their authority and to communicate this to their subjects through the combination of legislation, popular acclamation, fiscal exaction, military might and ecclesiastical approval.

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7

Bureaucracies, Elites and Clans: The Case of Byzantium, c.600–1100 John Haldon

When the French courtier and economist Jean Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay (1712–59) first coined the term ‘bureaucracy’ in 1745, he defined it as ‘an illness’, and like Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), who described the French governmental system and its attendant social mores as ‘the giant power wielded by pygmies’, he regarded it as a bad thing. Of course, since Max Weber we have evolved a far more sophisticated and highly theorized view of what ‘bureaucracy’ can mean, so that rather than a pejorative description, the term now carries a heuristic and analytical value relating to a range of usually largescale and functionally determined social organizations.1 If we try to describe the administration of the East Roman or Byzantine empire (Map 7.1.) between the sixth and eleventh centuries ce simply in terms of its structural shape, we find something that looks remarkably modern – a complex set of institutionalized relationships determined by their function with respect to the needs of the state. Most of the administrative posts typical of the middle Byzantine period and found in the sources of the seventh to eleventh centuries can be traced in some way to a late Roman equivalent, sometimes directly, and involving the continued use of the same title, sometimes indirectly or with a change of name but a continuity of function. The east Romans did not necessarily differentiate by functional category in the way that modern historians tend to do to make sense of structures in our own terms, so any breakdown of the Byzantine administration will necessarily do some injustice to the ways in which Byzantines themselves perceived their system to operate. Whether we lose or gain by applying Weber’s criteria for bureaucracy is a moot point, and the key question is what might be the analytical value of employing the term. Crudely put, Weber defined ‘bureaucracy’ by a number of key elements: to count as a bureaucracy, a system should possess a clear hierarchy of authority; 1

Albrow, Bureaucracy, p. 16. For some useful comments on the application of some of Weber’s ideas to the historical process, see S. Breuer, ‘Max Weber als Historiker’, Rechtshistorisches Journal 7 (1988), 80–83; G. Korf, ‘Der Idealtypus Max Webers und die historischgesellschaftlichen Gesetzmässigkeiten’, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 11 (1964), 1328ff. See also Crooks and Parsons (Chapter 1, pp. 16–17); and Whimster (Chapter 18, pp. 438–9).

147

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Cherson

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Map 7.1 The East Roman empire in 565

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written rules governing conduct; a full-time and salaried officialdom; the personnel themselves have no ownership over the resources with which they operate; and there is a separation between organizational bureaucratic roles and life outside the organization. A bureaucratic organization must have the potential to reproduce itself effectively, regardless of the political power structures within which it operates (in other words, even if the personnel change, the roles and institutional functions do not). And I would add in this context that an administration or administrative apparatus is not in itself a bureaucracy: an administrative system must possess some of the criteria just mentioned, in whole or in part, to be counted properly as bureaucratic. Defining something for its own sake is, of course, a pointless exercise. There needs to be some broader heuristic motive for employing the term ‘bureaucracy’, since using it simply as a description may have a certain referential or symbolic value, but it does not achieve any analytical or explanatory end. If the term is to have analytical value, its application should bring with it certain agreed implications or effects; it should act as a framework within which we can ask certain questions of our sources and help us establish some parameters within which our analysis has interpretive value. This was Weber’s aim in attempting to establish a set of criteria by which bureaucracy could be determined, even if his ideal types have sometimes been understood overly rigidly as representative of specific historical developments. Weber was, as is widely recognized, bound by the traditional constitutionalist thinking of his own times, and by notions of ‘society’ as different from ‘state’ – the former the agent of spiritual and material values, the latter representing the juridical form and normative order of the society upon which it is imposed. Scholars who have used Weber’s approach have developed a range of more sophisticated approaches: Niklas Luhmann (d. 1998), for example, evolved a systemstheory account of political-functional structures, decision-making procedures and mechanisms of integration and differentiation in order to encapsulate better the complexity of modern political systems.2 One of the assumptions I would make in this respect is that a bureaucratic system – at least insofar as it effectively fulfils the functions which it evolved to carry out – should lend ‘resistance’ (that is, flexibility in responding to stress) to the system it supports, and it should help explain the historical trajectory of a political formation in terms of the feedback loop or dialectic between the institutional arrangements represented by the term ‘bureaucracy’ and the 2

See N. Luhmann, A sociological theory of law, trans. E. King and M. Albrow, ed. M. Albrow (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985); and cf. S. L. Andreski, ‘Method and substantive theory in Max Weber’, British Journal of Sociology 15:1 (1964), 1–18. For an interesting attempt to analyze late Roman/early Byzantine administrative and juridical systems from a neo-weberian approach, see Ch. Gizewski, Zur Normativität und Struktur der Verfassungsverhältnisse in der späteren römischen Kaiserzeit (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988).

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structures of which it was one element. Another is that bureaucracy might, to a greater or lesser extent, serve to transcend regional political, social, cultural and religious differences or dynastic competition and act as a cement which binds a political entity together. If these criteria, among others, can be found in the course of examining an administrative apparatus, then applying the term ‘bureaucracy’ becomes, in itself, a shorthand for explaining some of the characteristics and development of a social-political formation. What I want to do is to see whether the Byzantine system matched any of these criteria; and, if it did, examine what form it took, how it functioned, and what were its limitations. I

State and Elite in Byzantium The Byzantine imperial system of hierarchy was focused on the court, and since the ways in which social status was recognized and given effect was understood through this hierarchy, virtually any member of the imperial system in the widest sense counted as part of the administration and, therefore, of what we can reasonably call the bureaucracy. At the same time, possession of even the most humble imperial office or dignity gave one a certain elite status, however low down the scale that may have been. The elite itself was internally differentiated and nuanced, both by wealth and income, as well as by title and post. It was also differentiated by region and origin (although our sources do not always permit a clear insight into how such regional variations affected career and life chances).3 Yet the relationship between states and their elites is absolutely crucial to the ways in which the state actually works, as well as to determining the sorts of conditions under which centralized state power and authority are liable to break down.4 State–elite relations are also a necessary prerequisite for thinking about how central political authorities – ‘the state’, or its political-structural equivalent – were able to organize their resources and, especially important for our discussion, how the people who made up the 3 4

But see P. Magdalino, ‘Paphlagonians in Byzantine high society’, in S. Lampakis (ed.), Byzantine Asia Minor (6th–12th cent.) (Athens: National Research Foundation, 1998), pp. 141–50. The term ‘state’ is itself, of course, problematic. The definition I have used elsewhere is as follows: a state represents a set of institutions and personnel, concentrated spatially at a single point, and exerting authority over a territorially distinct area. The central point at which state power is nominally located may be mobile; authority is in principle normative and binding, and relies ultimately on coercion; the effectiveness of such authority will depend upon a series of contextual factors, such as the geographical extent of the state and the institutional forms through which power is actually exercised (Goldstone & Haldon, ‘Ancient states’, pp. 4–6; and J. F. Haldon, The state and the tributary mode of production (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 32–4). In what follows, I use ‘the state’ also to refer specifically to the central government and ruler.

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administrative apparatuses upon which the state depended were managed and selected. Unlike in modern industrial capitalist states, the primary means of surplus appropriation were embodied in the arrangements and relationships represented by the extraction of either rent or tax (or both), in their various forms, and was thus directly carried out by the state or dominant elite. In modern state formations, in contrast, taxation is in fact a secondary mode of surplus extraction, the means whereby the state redistributes surplus value already produced and distributed between the owners or controllers of the means of production on the one hand, and those who sell their labour power in return for a wage/salary. But in both cases, the nature of social and economic contradictions and tensions between exploiters and exploited, as well as the nature of the political relations of distribution of surplus within the dominant or ruling elite, is determined by two features: first, by competition over the distribution of resources between potentially antagonistic elements in this equation; and second, by the institutional forms taken by tax and rent, and through which surplus is appropriated.5 Both state centres and ruling elites in premodern formations thus have an equally powerful vested interest in the maintenance of those social and economic relations to which they owe their position. The state (as embodied in a central or ruling establishment) must appropriate surplus itself or ensure that an adequate portion of such surplus is passed on to it to be certain of survival. But there has historically always been a tendency for the functionaries entrusted with these duties to evolve, however gradually, their own independent power base, thus representing a competitor with the state for resources. The relationship between the ruler or ruling elite and those who actually appropriate surplus on their behalf is, in consequence, always contradictory and potentially antagonistic because, as indicated already, dominant socio-economic groups and states both operate at the same level of primary appropriation since there is no real difference, except in scale and administrative organization, between the extraction of tax and of rent, whatever the social and institutional forms these may have evolved. The antagonism is a structural one: it need not necessarily be expressed through any awareness on the part of the individuals or groups in question. Furthermore, this relationship is generally not a simple one-to-one equation: the state may be embodied in a particular power elite, which may or may not originate from a dominant social class or aristocracy, for example, so that a whole complex of 5

See for a detailed discussion, Haldon, State and the tributary mode, esp. chs. 3–4; and for some comments on the ways in which the Byzantine state has become the focus of a more sociological approach, see J. P. Arnason, ‘Byzantium and historical sociology’, in P. Stephenson (ed.), The Byzantine world (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 491–504; and J. F. Haldon, ‘Towards a social history of Byzantium’, in J. F. Haldon (ed.), The social history of Byzantium: problems and perspectives (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 1–30.

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interwoven social, economic and political vested interests is involved. But the ability of the state to extract surplus depends ultimately upon its power to limit the economic and political strength of such potentially competing groups. The only real way to achieve this has been to create, or attempt to create, a totally loyal, because totally dependent, governing class which is identified entirely with the interests of the central establishment. Byzantine emperors were enabled to achieve this, for a while (although they may not have had this intention) by the circumstances peculiar to the seventh century. This structured relationship was crucial both to the failure of the Byzantine state to resist economic challenges from elsewhere and to the success of the Italian commercial republics in respect of their own social and economic organization. Looked at from this perspective, the forms of bureaucratic management and organization become especially significant in the success or failure of a state formation to maintain itself against competition and the vested interests of its own elites. We can follow the ways in which these developments impacted on the history of the medieval eastern Roman or Byzantine empire in some detail, so that they offer a valuable comparative example in respect of some of the questions noted earlier about the ability of states to survive, and under what sorts of conditions. While the Roman empire extended across much of the Mediterranean during the sixth century, the early and middle years of the seventh century saw the loss of control over much of the Balkans, and the conquest by the Arabs of the oriental provinces south of Asia Minor. Such dramatic territorial losses signalled a major change in the empire’s conditions of existence. From a panMediterranean imperial system incorporating many ethnic and linguistic groups, the Roman empire, while retaining to a degree its multi-ethnic and multilingual character, shrank to a rump of its former extent. United by a particular form of Christianity (at least officially), by the use of Greek as the language of administration and high culture, and by a concept of ‘Roman’ widely accepted throughout society, it barely deserves the title of ‘empire’, although it is true that it retained far-flung provincial outposts, such as Cherson, in the Crimea; parts of Italy and Sicily; and, for a while, the Balearic isles.6 In responding to these changes, partly on a piecemeal basis and partly by design, the government was compelled to restructure the methods by which it extracted resources, as well as the means of distributing them. It also had to reduce expenditure to conform to the reduced resource base at its disposal. The effects of invasions and warfare on population numbers in the most 6

In some respects, the fact that the Byzantine empire, as well as its larger late Roman predecessor, were mature states of long standing – territorially unified, sharing a single legal and political structure, fiscal system and military organization – disqualifies them from being ‘empires’ in all but a purely territorial sense, and even that barely applies to the reduced medieval East Roman, the Byzantine, state. See J. F. Haldon, ‘The Byzantine empire’, in Morris & Scheidel, Dynamics, pp. 205–54; Goldstone & Haldon, ‘Ancient states’, pp. 17–18.

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affected regions, and therefore on productive capacity; on irrigation systems in more arid regions which had been turned over to arable exploitation in Hellenistic and Roman times; on lines of communication and the state’s ability to maintain a public transport system, were all ‘first order’ shifts in the conditions in which the Roman state found itself. But a whole range of ‘second order’ changes followed: the bureaucratic processes for ensuring the extraction of resources were modified, as well as those for the maintenance and support of military units; the power relations between the central government and its representatives at various levels in the provinces also changed. A rapid review of the political size and shape of the medieval East Roman empire from the seventh century illustrates the sorts of political-institutional and economic shifts which took place (Maps 7.2–7.4). Naturally, the state found itself not simply a victim of circumstances, nor again was it able to account for and plan each change that can be traced in our various types of sources. The emperors and their advisers both reacted to and anticipated situations; they responded to crises as well as planned particular responses grounded in their own grasp of what they thought was happening. In addition, not all the changes which took place in the seventh and eighth centuries were a result of the events of that period. On the contrary, many developments – notably as regards the evolution of urban centres and their changing role in the tax-collecting structure of the state, for example, but also in respect of the way the late Roman fiscal system operated – were a product of an already existing evolutionary process generated in a very different situation.7 II

Court and Administration One significant difference between the late Roman ‘pyramidal’ structure and that of the Byzantine empire from the later seventh or eighth century is that the emperor had, in theory at least, direct oversight over the affairs of many departments, rather than having everything channelled through a few highpowered officials such as the master of offices or the praetorian prefects. The Byzantine system appears as a much ‘flatter’ set of relationships, although in practice we know that the ruler still managed affairs only indirectly and 7

For a brief overview of the basic lines of development, see J. F. Haldon, ‘Political-historical survey, 518–800’, in E. M. Jeffreys, J. F. Haldon and R. Cormack (eds.), The Oxford handbook of Byzantine studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 249–63. A detailed modern survey of the social, cultural and political history of the empire, with literature, can be found in J. Shepard (ed.), Cambridge history of the Byzantine empire, c.500–1492 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); for the changes of the sixth–seventh centuries, see J. F. Haldon, Byzantium in the seventh century: the transformation of a culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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Exarchate of Ravenna Venetia and Istria Duchy of Rome Duchy of Naples Duchy of Calabria Command of Hellas Command of Thrace Command of Opsikion Command of Thrakesion Command of Anatolikon [?]Command of Kibyrrhaiotai Command of Armeniakon Command of Sicily Duchy of Sardinia Crete

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Map 7.3 The Byzantine empire, c.750

Lost to Lombards or local princes, c.751 Lost to Arab-Islamic conquests, c.820–930

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Exarchate of Ravenna Venetia and Istria Duchy of Rome Duchy of Naples Duchy of Calabria Command of Hellas Command of Thrace Command of Opsikion Command of Thrakesion Command of Anatolikon Command of Kibyrrhaiotai Command of Armeniakon Duchy of Sardinia Command of Sicily Crete

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Map 7.4 the Byzantine empire, c.1030

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Rostov

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through a range of intermediaries of varying rank and status.8 A glance at Figure 7.1 shows that the administration can be broken down into several areas of competence: state finance, justice and prisons, transport and the post, the imperial household, provincial military and palatine military. Each set of departments (sekreta) had its own staff. Some were substantial, as with the department of the general treasury (genikon logothesion) for example, whose bureau had some eleven grades, including subsections for each thema and many other finance-related activities. Others were very small, as with the orphanotrophos, the curator of the great imperial orphanage and its estates, whose department had just three grades and a limited number of sub-departments for the different estates. The figure also illustrates the complex interrelationships pertaining across many sections, and the overlapping nature of the competences of many departments. The central role of the imperial household needs to be underlined, both because access to the emperor was through one or another household department and because the distinction between public, palace and private (family) treasuries was never very particularly observed. This meant that state funds often flowed into what were essentially private hands, while the imperial family or the emperors themselves often invested substantial funds drawn from their personal revenues in state-related ventures. It has often been suggested that this system cannot have been as penetrating and as effective as it looks, yet the evidence from a range of sources across the period from the seventh to the later eleventh century suggests that it had surprisingly penetrative power: for example, Armenian notables in the 1070s were thoroughly integrated into the Byzantine fiscal apparatus in their territory, acquired by the empire only a generation earlier; and villagers from central Asia Minor forty years earlier were able to take legal cases from the provincial courts to Constantinople, and win.9 Naturally the imposition of a bureaucratic apparatus (often insensitive to local traditions) and its methods on a conquered population may not always be accepted without considerable resistance, nor does a population in the heart of an empire, long accustomed to the presence of a bureaucratic regime, necessarily acquiesce if that regime becomes overly oppressive. In the early 1040s, a series of rebellions in the 8

9

See J. F. Haldon, ‘Structures and administration’, in Jeffreys et al. (eds.), Oxford handbook of Byzantine studies, pp. 539–53; ‘The army’, ibid., pp. 554–61; W. Brandes and J. F. Haldon, ‘Revenues and expenditure’, ibid., pp. 562–70. For a detailed analysis of late Roman administrative practice in the context of court politics, see R. Pfeilschifter, Der Kaiser und Konstantinopel. Kommunikation und Konfliktaustrag in einer spätantiken Metropole (Millennium-Studien 44. Berlin-Boston 2013). For the Armenian text, an eleventh-century colophon in MS Matenadaran 10099: A. S. Mat‘evosyan, Hayeren dzeṙagreri hišatakaranner 5–12 dd [Colophons of Armenian manuscripts, 5th–12th centuries] (Erevan: G. A. Hratarakchʻutʻyu, 1988), no. 125 (p. 106). I am grateful to Dr Tim Greenwood for bringing this text to my attention and for kindly providing a translation. For the villagers from central Asia Minor: Peira sive Practica ex Actis Eustathii Romani, in I. Zepos and P. Zepos (eds.), Jus Graecoromanum, 8 vols. (Athens, 1931/Aalen, 1962), vol. iv, pp. 1–260, see XV. 8.

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The imperial administration c.700–1050 protostrator Imperial private entourage EMPEROR Imperial stables master of ceremonies

State finance sakellarios (general fiscal supervisor)

Military finance dept.

special treasury

general treasury

Justice logothete of the dromos

Transport curator of public wardrobe the Maggana orphanotrophos grand curator

state treasury (sakellion)

public post (dromos)

Provincial military and naval thematic generals (stratêgoi)

independent commands

kleisourarchs protonotarioi (thematic fiscal administration)

chancery prefect of Constantinople

judges of tribunals

quaestor

Noumera

judges of tribunals

minister of the inkwell parakoimomenos (chamberlain)

minister of petitions logothete of herds (metata)

imperial table butler

concierge of the Great Palace

imperial bedchamber concierge of concierge of the Magnaura the Daphne palace

optimatoi (logistics unit)

doukes katepans

chartoularioi (military administration)

Walls (Chalke Gate)

private wardrobe

privy purse

kritai (justice)

droungarios of imperial fleet

domestikoi of the Scholai

Elite & household units (tagmata)

Prisons (Constantinople)

Key:

Imperial household

Praitorion demes of Blues and Greens

scolai, exkoubita etc.

Tagmata seconded to thematic duty Major sphere of activity Bold characters Major department, senior official in charge of department, or key grouping of personnel Note The formal institutional nature of this structure was heavily tempered by the personal nature of the relationships between the various officials and their superiors or peers

Figure 7.1 Schematic of Byzantine administrative arrangements, c.700–1050

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newly conquered Balkan provinces were set off by a heavy-handed attempt to monetize the local provincial economies, which had hitherto been largely dependent on exchange and taxation in kind. While resistance was rapidly crushed, it illustrates the problems an insensitive administration could generate, although the fact that these provinces were thereafter thoroughly integrated into the empire both fiscally and commercially, remaining peaceful well into the last decades of the twelfth century, also nicely underlines the assimilative strength of Byzantine bureaucracy.10 In the later twelfth century, the corruption and oppression of the fiscal apparatus in Greece – a central territory of the empire since the ninth century, and in parts since the sixth century – led to serious civil unrest and resistance to government officialdom.11 On the other hand, the bureaucracy was not a neutral and impersonal set of relationships between functions. To the contrary, it was a field for competition between individuals embodying a range of vested interests, personal and familial as well as political and religious (although none of these can easily be separated). Membership of any administrative position meant membership in the imperial system of precedence; and, however humble the post, possession of it meant increased social status and connections to other more powerful persons, who might become one’s patron. While individuals in their administrative capacities behaved according to the institutional roles into which they had been inducted, outside that context they were often members of different sets of social relationships, generally dominated by kinship, competing for status, privilege and wealth. A key aspect of the structure of imperial administration was the system of precedence embedded within it. While this was always fluid – with new titles being introduced at times, with shifts in status between different ranks, and in particular with the relationship of any individual to the emperor being of crucial significance in determining what position he attained and how that was described through the system of titles – a certain regularity in these relationships did exist and is described in a variety of documents dating from the late Roman period through to the late Byzantine period. By the tenth century, this system had settled down, and it became possible to draw up lists of precedence by which imperial ceremonial public meals, processions and so forth could be regulated. The master of ceremonies, the staff of the imperial palace and the prefect of the city all played a key role in the maintenance and observance of tradition, although ‘tradition’ was itself constantly evolving. But these arrangements and the ways they were represented in contemporary documents, as well as the way they are represented in Figure 7.1, do somewhat misrepresent the 10 11

See P. Stephenson, ‘Balkan borderlands (1018–1204)’, in Shepard (ed.), Cambridge history of the Byzantine empire, pp. 664–91, esp. pp. 670–1. See J. Herrin, ‘Realities of Byzantine provincial government: Hellas and Peloponnesos, 1180–1205’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 29 (1975), 253–28.

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fluidity, complexity and personal interdependencies which informed the whole structure at both the capital and in the provinces.12 III

Bureaucracy and Career A career in the state administration was attractive because of the potential for illicit as well as regular rewards, and it could be achieved through various means. Before the collapse in the middle of the seventh century, study of the law was always a good qualification for court posts as well as provincial positions of authority and responsibility, although a general acquaintance with traditional classical scholarship was sufficient. During the later seventh and eighth centuries, this changed, and it seems that many provincial officials were almost entirely ignorant of the law and of the administration of justice. But literacy was generally the norm, since this was a literate and recordkeeping state administration which depended upon the transmission of vital information in written form, not just between officials, but from one generation to the next. By the tenth and eleventh centuries, knowledge of the law was once again an important part of the education of senior officials. The degrees of literacy varied considerably across society. For the most part – in spite of the older view that Byzantium was a far more literate society than, for example, the medieval west in the same period (discussed by Bernard Bachrach in Chapter 8) – literacy was not widespread.13 The vast majority of the population was made up of rural farmers and peasants whose literacy skills were nonexistent or, if they had had the opportunity to learn their letters through the church or a local monastic community, restricted to religious texts. For most of those who were able to read and write, literacy is best described as functional, sufficient for service in the fiscal or other branch of the administration, but not much more (although clearly there must have been exceptions). Only at higher levels of society, among the more privileged elite, was literacy the norm, and familiarity with both religious and various genres of secular literature was usual, indeed expected, one of the criteria through which social status was asserted and recognized. Letter writing was one aspect of this cultural habit, for letters served both as a means of communicating practical information about administrative, political and other matters and also as a means of demonstrating learning and culture and of asserting membership in a particular cultural 12

13

N. Oikonomides, Les listes de préséance byzantins des IXe–Xe siècles (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1972), pp. 21–4, 281–90; F. Winkelmann, Byzantinische Rang- und Ämterstruktur im 8. und 9. Jahrhundert, Berliner Byzantinistische Arbeiten 53 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1985). On the Carolingians and literacy, see Bachrach (Chapter 8, pp. 184–5).

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community. Numerous collections of letters, written by members of the higher echelons of Byzantine society, illustrate the sophistication and the learning, as well as the wide spectrum of competence, of members of the political and administrative elite of the empire.14 In this respect there is no doubt that the medieval Byzantine administration – the bureaucracy – depended heavily on functional literacy and record-keeping for its day-to-day working. And among the higher levels of the administration and imperial court – numerically relatively few in comparison with the mass of the population, of course – an advanced level of literacy and cultural knowledge was, if not a prerequisite, certainly a mark of identity of which those who possessed it were very aware. A shared literary cultural heritage was one key indicator of membership in the social and cultural elite of the empire, which embodied to a large extent also the leading elements of the administrative apparatus of the Byzantine state.15 While in theory all posts were open to all persons, in practice the system was heavily inflected by the existence of factors such as this, along with the networks of patronage which were a part of any medieval society. The administrative hierarchy was graded according to military and non-military posts, as well as (by the later ninth century, if not much earlier)16 ranks normally held by eunuchs and non-eunuchs, although the system was by no means exclusive or rigid. Officials were inducted into their posts by a formal ceremony at which they received the signs of their office – a ceremonial military girdle and a robe or other garment specific to their department and rank – and during which they swore an oath of loyalty to the emperor and declared their orthodoxy. By the ninth century, the great majority of junior posts were conferred by the award of a token of office, so that the emperor did not need to be present. Senior posts, in contrast, which were of greater significance to the emperor and which were often directly chosen by him, were appointed by word of mouth at a ceremony formally conducted by the ruler and during which the official or officer, if the post was military, did formal obeisance to the emperor. Such ceremonies applied to the clergy of the Constantinopolitan churches also, since they, too, were members of this hierarchy of state positions.17 Promotion depended upon a regular rhythm of movement within each department. During the eighth and ninth centuries, for example, provincial 14

15 16 17

See S. Papaioannou, ‘Letter-writing’, in P. Stephenson (ed.), The Byzantine world (Abingdon, NY: Routledge, 2010), pp. 188–99; M. Mullett, ‘Writing in early medieval Byzantium’, in R. McKitterick (ed.), The uses of literacy in early medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 156–85; M. Mullett, ‘Byzantium: a friendly society?’ P&P 118 (1988), 3–24. See C. Holmes, ‘Political literacy’, in Stephenson (ed.), Byzantine world, pp. 137–48. S. Tougher, The eunuch in Byzantine history and society (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). P. Magdalino, ‘Court society and aristocracy’, in Haldon (ed.), Social history of Byzantium, pp. 212–32.

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military commanders were rotated fairly frequently, sometimes across to an alternative post, sometimes upwards. Where the move was from one post to another comparable one, however, the incumbent would sometimes receive a higher-ranking title, so that salary and social standing would rise accordingly. If all went well, an individual of reasonable talents could expect to rise to a fairly senior position by the end of his career and if he came to the attention of the emperor or another powerful senior official, perhaps even become a senior minister or official himself. Salaries rose incrementally with promotion; upon retirement, since there was no system of pensions as such, officials received an enhanced sum, together with certain judicial rights and sometimes also fiscal exemptions. Some administrative officials, especially in the period from the tenth century, sold their posts in advance of their retirement as a means of putting a sum aside. But it is important to bear in mind that individuals saw service for the state as a means to an end – for their own individual and family interests – at least as much, if not more than, as a form of public service to ‘the state’ as an abstract entity or concept, although such a concept was part of the symbolic universe of the elite and brought with it a sense of certain duties and responsibilities, as well as rights. Office and title were aspired to as part of the process of realizing such vested interests, even if being in the service of the emperor, at court or in the provinces, was in itself an esteemed and praiseworthy attainment.18 Thus, while the administrative and military apparatus served the interests of the state, however conceived, it also needed to be paid or maintained in such a way and by such means as would secure its loyalty, or rather the loyalty of the individuals who comprised it. State salaries and privileges, which increased in quantity and scope with rank and title, were the chief means of securing such loyalty and thus were seen as desirable objectives of social and political competition and indeed investment. While in one sense the East Roman state was undoubtedly understood as essential to the fortune of individual members of the elite, it was largely and understandably taken for granted, so that what we might perceive as short-sighted overexploitation of resources or inter-clan fighting at certain moments would have been far less obviously seen as a threat to the empire’s continued existence. The factional competition and violence of the civil wars of some periods offer clear examples. By the same token, the payment of enormous salaries on a yearly basis to the chief officers of the state was

18

See A. P. Kazhdan and M. McCormick, ‘The social world of the Byzantine court’, in H. Maguire (ed.), Byzantine court culture from 829 to 1204 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1997), pp. 167–97; W. Schuller, ‘Grenzen des spätrömischen Staates: Staatspolizei und Korruption’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 16 (1975), 1–21; and Gizewski, Zur Normativität und Struktur der Verfassungsverhältnisse.

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a pragmatic and taken-for-granted response to the need to secure the loyalty of these important and potentially dangerous individuals.19 IV

Society, Kinship and Patronage The other side of this coin was represented by the personal ties of dependence and kinship which determined how individuals worked within the system. The imperial administration was embodied in individuals who occupied a multiplicity of social roles. On the one hand, as members of the state establishment bearing imperial titles, they were regarded as, and understood themselves as, members of an extended imperial household. On the other hand, they had roles in their own households and families – as heads of family, as landlords, as brothers or fathers or sons and so forth. This meant the imperial system was highly flexible and malleable, since the people who made it up, from highest to lowest, were members of frequently extensive networks of clientage and patronage, connected by family interest as well as local identities to a wide range of intersecting circles of influence. At the same time, prominent provincials could make use of personal connections at the capital among people who outranked the local state officials in respect of access to the emperor or one of his senior confidants. Friendship, social obligation and gift giving were common forms of putting pressure on people or obligating them in some way, locally as well as at the capital. Social power was thus embodied in a series of overlapping networks and is reflected in the vested interests and actions of various individuals and groups as they seek to negotiate their ways through these relationships. Social power was exercised to secure and improve one’s situation in respect to the centre and the imperial household, in respect to one’s family situation and one’s position in a hierarchy of associations with other individuals similarly connected and with access to greater or lesser sets of resources.20 19 20

N. Oikonomidès, ‘Title and income at the Byzantine court’, in Maguire (ed.), Byzantine court culture, pp. 199–215. What is known of the history of various clans and families illustrates these points: see J.-C. Cheynet, ‘Grandeur et décadence des Diogénai’, in B. Blyssidou (ed.), The empire in crisis (?): Byzantium in the eleventh century (1025–1081) (Athens: National Research Foundation, 2003), pp. 119–37; and in particular J.-C. Cheynet, Pouvoir et contestations à Byzance (963–1210), Byzantina Sorbonensia 9 (Paris: CNRS, 1990), pp. 261–301; B. Blyssidou, Αριστοκρατικές οικογένειες και εξουσία (9ος–11ος αι.). Έρευνες πάνω στα διαδοχικά στάδια αντιμετώπισης της αρμενο-παφλαγονικής και της καππαδοκικής αριστοκρατίας [Aristocratic families and power (9th–11th centuries): researches on the successive stages of confrontation of the Armeno-Paphlagonian and Cappadocian aristocracy] (Thessaloniki: Banias, 2001); and esp. the careful study by F. Winkelmann, Quellenstudien zur herrschenden Klasse von Byzanz im 8. und 9. Jahrhundert, Berliner Byzantinistische Arbeiten 54 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1987), pp. 143–219.

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What this meant in practical terms was that for members of the Byzantine bureaucracy, whether or not they were members of the social elite, it was their position in a network of relationships dominated by their household and kin and the prestige of court and imperial posts which framed their actions and determined how they interacted with others in the different social contexts in which they found themselves.21 The point is underlined by the ways in which emperors too – the most successful members of the power elite – surrounded themselves with relatives or associates of their families, and by the ways in which those outside this charmed circle strove to gain admittance.22 This was hardly less true of outsiders who aspired to enter this elite at whatever level. Most wealthy households maintained some servants and retainers, the wealthier sometimes considerable bodies of servants and armed retainers, and joining the ranks of such a retinue which, among the very powerful, was organized along the same lines as the imperial palace, could offer many advantages to someone who aspired to greater heights.23 However complex the actual forms of such networks, the importance of maintaining one’s position in the imperial system and of retaining the approval of the emperor and his immediate household and advisers was always paramount to the sense of social worth and honour of members of the Byzantine elite in both the capital and the provinces. This gave the emperor a clear advantage in neutralizing competition for control over resources.24 One outcome of the changes during the seventh century traced earlier was that up to the later tenth and mid-eleventh centuries, Byzantines identified no ‘aristocracy’ as such: they described their world in terms of those with state positions, the middling and private citizens or subjects of the emperor, and the poor; or in terms of those who held a palatine rank or state position; and the rest.25 The prosopography of the 21

22 23

24 25

P. Magdalino, ‘The Byzantine aristocratic oikos’, in M. Angold (ed.), The Byzantine aristocracy, IX to XIII centuries (Oxford: Oxbow, 1984), pp. 92–111; L. Neville, Authority in Byzantine provincial society, 950–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 85–93; J.-C. Cheynet, ‘The Byzantine aristocracy (8th–13th centuries)’, in J.-C. Cheynet, The Byzantine aristocracy and its military function (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 1–43; Cheynet, ‘Official power and nonofficial power’, in A. Cameron (ed.), Fifty years of prosopography: the later Roman empire, Byzantium and beyond, PBA no. 118 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 137–51, for the tenth and eleventh centuries. Cheynet, ‘Byzantine aristocracy’, pp. 13–14. H.-G. Beck, Byzantinisches Gefolgschaftswesen, Sitzungsberichte der bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-hist. Kl., Heft 5 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1965); Winkelmann, Quellenstudien, pp. 75ff; For Leo, Michael and Thomas, see Winkelmann, Quellenstudien, pp. 77f; R.-J. Lilie, C. Ludwig, T. Pratsch, I. Rochow et al., Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit. Erste Abteilung (641–867), 6 vols. (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1999–2002), nos. 4244, 4989, 8459; Cheynet, ‘Byzantine aristocracy’, p. 12 and nn. 31–35. For Basil I, see Winkelmann, Quellenstudien, pp. 79ff. See Kazhdan and McCormick, ‘Social world of the Byzantine court’, pp. 168–72, 195–7. For the absence of lineage and family identity as significant social markers before the middle of the ninth century, see R. Guilland, ‘La noblesse de race à Byzance’, Byzantinoslavica 9 (1948), 307–14 (repr. in R. Guilland, Recherches sur les institutions byzantines, 2 vols. [BBA 35,

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major office and title holders of the empire across the seventh to ninth centuries has shown how some of these networks functioned in practice. In particular, it has shown that the central authority managed to maintain a remarkably firm hand on the elite, rotating even the most powerful senior military officials on a fairly regular basis, able to isolate malcontents or potential threats and have them neutralized (exile, execution, imprisonment) and, time and again, ward off challenges to central authority by rebellious provincials.26 This promoted the continuing vitality of the palatine hierarchy and the system of precedence from which social status, privilege and access to power and wealth flowed. Even in the eleventh century, an emperor could praise a general for achieving his success and high rank by his own merit and not by virtue of family connections.27 By the ninth century, a substantial provincial aristocracy was evolving in the Byzantine world. Those who held state positions and who had invested a portion of their wealth in property in their native districts, for example, married into other wealthy families and inherited land and other property. They were able to transmit this wealth to successive generations and at the same time secure positions at court and in the army and administration through the exercise of patronage, connections, marriage and, just as importantly, the education available to those who could afford to acquire it.28 Access to elite status and position remained open to those of more humble origins, but it was certainly becoming increasingly difficult by the later eleventh century. In the course of the tenth century, the leading elements of this elite were able increasingly to assert their autonomy from the political demands of the Constantinopolitan power elite; during the eleventh century, the structural tension between the interests of those dominating the central power at Constantinople and those not directly involved in the government became apparent, to the extent that it was expressed in open and sometimes violent conflict between the different factional interest groups through which it was represented.29

26 27 28

29

Berlin-Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1967], vol. i, pp. 15–22); R. Guilland, ‘La noblesse byzantine à la haute époque’, Προσφορὰ ε҆ɩς Στí λπωνα Π. Κυριακí δην [Festschrift for Stilpon P. Kyriakides] (Thessaloniki), pp. 255–66 (=Guilland, Recherches, vol. ii, pp. 23–31); and for a brief discussion of the concept ‘aristocracy’ as it appears in the modern literature on the Byzantine élite, see I. A. Antonopoulou, ‘La question de l’«aristocratie» byzantine: remarques sur l’ambivalence du terme «aristocratie» dans la recherche historique contemporaine’, Symmeikta 15 (2002), 257–64. Winkelmann, Quellenstudien, pp. 99–142. Ioannis Scylitzae Synopsis Historiarum, ed. J. Thurn (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1973), pp. 483.13f. M. F. Hendy, Studies in the Byzantine monetary economy, c.300–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 100–107, for some magnate lands, their extent, origins and their location; Cheynet, ‘Byzantine aristocracy’, pp. 7–12. For aristocratic property and its transmission, in particular through women, see M. Kaplan, ‘L’aristocrate byzantine et sa fortune’, in M. Kaplan, Byzance: villes et campagne (Paris: Picard, 2006), pp. 184–204. See, in particular, Cheynet, Pouvoir et contestations; and the survey in P. Stephenson, ‘The rise of the middle Byzantine aristocracy and the decline of the imperial state’, in Stephenson (ed.), Byzantine world, pp. 22–33.

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Yet still, in spite of the potential for such an elite to reduce its dependency on the court and palace (through the acquisition of economic resources in land independent of the court and the emperors), it remained to the very end firmly anchored in the palatine hierarchy and the state’s bureaucratic apparatus. The values and self-esteem of individuals and families was determined always by their position within the system of court titles, ranks and administrative or military offices, and closeness to the throne, while the emperors were still able to exploit this situation to advance the careers of those of less privileged background who came to their attention. The system of yearly salaries or rogai paid to those who had invested a lump sum in return for certain titles and the social status they brought is an ample illustration of this, up to the later eleventh century, at least, for the return on such investments was often small indeed and may often have meant an absolute loss, if measured in purely financial returns, to the investor.30 But as an investment in status and esteem, the purchase of such titles clearly brought considerable benefits and was widely practised. This ideological identity of interests between those who joined or who were born into the social elite and the palace thus generated what we might call a systemic impasse, where in the end neither court nor elite could free themselves from each other, and where the elite could never assert an identity independent of the court in the way which Western aristocracies were able to do. At the top of the social pyramid, the elite was, in turn, not a single or monolithic group; it consisted of a range of competing and sometimes hostile families, clans and individuals, each with specific cultural and political origins and allegiances. Each of these elements acted in its own perceived best interests, not as members of any coordinated body, and certainly not with any sense of common identity except at the level of peer respect and worth. In addition, the range of people identified in imperial legislation as ‘the powerful’, those who presented an actual or potential challenge to the imperial government for resources, was wide and, in purely economic terms, represented people from disparate positions in society – indeed, it has been noted that it represented a relationship of relative power and wealth rather than a distinct social grouping.31 What they did have in common was senior imperial positions or ranks, and therewith also an income derived from imperial service – whether as a soldier in a guards regiment at Constantinople, at one level, or as a senior fiscal administrator and title holder at Constantinople or in the provinces, at 30

31

See P. Lemerle, ‘Roga et rente d’état’, Revue des études byzantines 25 (1967), pp. 77–100; Nicolas Oikonomides, ‘Title and income at the Byzantine court’, in Maguire (ed.), Byzantine court culture, p. 205; Neville, Authority in Byzantine provincial society, pp. 25–31. This system broke down in the second half of the eleventh century, however. R. Morris, ‘The powerful and the poor in tenth-century Byzantium: law and reality’, P&P 73 (1976), pp. 3–27; Neville, Authority in Byzantine provincial society, pp. 68–9, 79ff.

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another. All of this reinforces the point that it was primarily at and through the court, the imperial palace and in the presence of the emperor that social rank was conferred and wealth acquired. A legislative act of the later tenth century notes that wealth, in terms of coin and land and other forms of property, came from imperial titles and administrative office alone.32 Until the eleventh century, therefore, the imperial bureaucracy can be described as a pseudo-meritocratic regime, one in which connections, patronage, talent and opportunity were as important – and were sometimes, much more important – than birth. A theologian, writing in the early years of the eleventh century, noted that the elite fell into two groups – those who were present at court, who accompanied the emperor on campaigns and devoted themselves to imperial service; and those who dwelt on their own lands, stayed at home in luxury. The former were the archontes, one of the generic terms used for those in power and authority, and hence for the social elite.33 Only during the later eleventh and twelfth centuries did this situation change, and a process of what might reasonably be termed aristocratization set in.34 Yet even then the administration continued to operate – albeit on a more patrimonial basis with more limited access to high office from the lower levels, and compromised by factional politics and regional/provincial vested interests – until the end. When the Ottoman Turks finally took the great city of Constantinople in May 1453, the Byzantine state – reduced though it was to a few miles in the Peloponnese in Greece, some Aegean islands, and the city itself and its immediate hinterland – still retained a functioning, albeit reduced, fiscal, military and judicial apparatus. V

Conclusion How far can the East Roman empire be described as an effective bureaucratic state, both in respect of its central administrative capacities as well as an extended territorial polity? For Byzantium, just as for the later Roman state discussed by Michael Whitby (Chapter 6), some of Weber’s criteria apply and some do not. There was certainly a clear hierarchy of authority; there were legal constraints on the activities, rights and privileges of officials, and there were rules of conduct, although we do not know that they were codified by department, for example; the officials were salaried and at least nominally full time, although in practice this was often compromised in a number of ways; for the most part, the officials had no ownership of their bureaucratic means of 32 33 34

I. Zepos and P. Zepos (eds.), Jus Graecoromanum, 8 vols. (Aalen: Scientia, 1962), vol. i, pp. 417, 486. See J. Darrouzès (ed.), Traités théologiques et éthiques 2 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1967), p. 106. See Cheynet, Pouvoir et contestations à Byzance, pp. 339–77.

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production; but the divide between official and unofficial functions, particularly where vested interests and patronage came into play, remained vague. As far as the reproduction of the system is concerned, however, the answer is positive. Even in the worst of crises – as in the year 811, with the emperor slain on the battlefield along with many key officers, with the government at Constantinople in a state of near panic, with coups d’état in the air and discontent in the ranks – the state was hardly shaken. The local armies, half militia and half professional soldiers, continued to function at the regional level, regardless of the disaster which had befallen the imperial elite forces and the provincial units which had accompanied the emperor, illustrating the effectiveness of the localization of command and defence of strongpoints which had evolved. The state’s fiscal and administrative machinery continued to function with barely a murmur, while the various factions in the army and the Constantinopolitan establishment quickly reached a series of compromises and reestablished a common front. In other words, institutional stability was deeply rooted, and the state and its apparatus were embedded in the social-political order to the extent that a political crisis following a single defeat, given the resources still available to the new rulers or their advisers, was of no real long-term significance. It is precisely in the relationship between the roles occupied by individuals as members of state administrative arrangements and their overlapping identities also as members of other non-state social groupings, on the one hand, and the imperial court as a focus of social and political identity, on the other, that we can identify the feedback loop noted at the outset of this chapter – the flexibility that permits a given set of institutional relationships to respond to shifts in its conditions of existence and to strengthen rather than weaken a system in stress. Indeed, the strength of this institutional fabric can be seen in the results of the seventh century when, in spite of massive losses of territory and resources (some 70 per cent of its territory and an even higher percentage of its annual revenues in a period of about twelve years), a series of political crises, a serious decline in morale and a long string of military defeats, the state and its institutions were able to survive and evolve during the eighth century in new directions. And despite the suggestion that some of the losses to Islam in the first wave of conquests in the 630s may have been due to an alienation from the centre of provincial populations, it is not clear that this is associated with, for example, intrusive administration or bureaucracy (or taxation) as such, but rather with government-led oppression of religious dissent.35 At a later period, even through the period of crisis and tension in the later eleventh century when 35

Religious persecution was certainly carried out through partly bureaucratic means, but there is no evidence that bureaucracy in and of itself was a problem. See the summary with literature in Haldon, Byzantium in the seventh century, pp. 48–50.

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elite clans effectively seized the state, the traditions of a stable functional administrative apparatus survived, however mediated by social change and shifts in the political situation of the state. Having said all this, we must at the same time concede that the bureaucracy was itself articulated through networks of social patronage, networks which facilitated access to the resources needed to provide an education appropriate for the institutional roles to which an individual might aspire, access to the right people in terms of obtaining a place, and access to persons of higher status and rank to achieve promotion. None of this is, perhaps, exceptional or surprising, but it does mean that to understand the dynamics of the imperial system, we need to dig deeper into the associations and networks, motives and interests, of the individuals who made up the bureaucracy. While the Byzantine administrative establishment can be compared only in general terms with, for example, the bureaucratic structures which evolved in China (discussed by Patricia Ebrey in Chapter 2), or with the bureaucratic states of early modern Europe, it is nevertheless also the case that a stable fiscal-military apparatus, which functioned on the whole regardless of the political upheavals around it, was one of the major reasons for the longer-term survival of the empire, facilitating the survival of an early medieval state system under enormous stresses. In this sense, the Byzantine empire was a bureaucratic state.36

36

The institutional structures of the Byzantine church, which we have not discussed in the present chapter, also played a role in promoting a systemic stability within the empire

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8

Charlemagne and Carolingian Military Administration Bernard S. Bachrach

In the West during the Middle Ages and beyond, the idea of empire was driven by the history of Rome as understood from the works of Roman historians and the survival of imperial material civilization.1 Although the Roman experience, in general, served as the imperial touchstone for Europeans, it was the later or more specifically the Christian Roman empire, which gradually emerged following the edict of toleration issued by emperor Constantine I (r. 306–37) at Milan in 312, that served to animate the future of the imperial idea. A matrix of images of the later Roman empire in the West was vitalized by the famous ‘coronation’ of Charlemagne (d. 814) at Rome on Christmas day 800. Subsequently, the efforts of the Ottonian dynasty, especially under Otto the Great (r. 936–73), maintained this process, first in regard to the so-called German empire and later (as Len Scales discusses in Chapter 10) the Holy Roman Empire.2 The imperial idea was a subject of ongoing interest. This was especially the case in regard to those medieval rulers and their advisers who worked diligently to connect Rome’s successor states to its erstwhile empire through what scholars have come to call imitatio imperii. Of importance to this process of maintaining a more or less close identification with the imperial past were a variety of religious ceremonies. These included traditional Latin prayers for the health of the ruler and his family, and for the success of his administration of the state.3 Perhaps the most elaborate ceremonies were those quasi-religious efforts engineered to celebrate military victories.4 Coinage, both denominationally with the continued use of solidi and denarii and in terms of images and 1 2

3 4

In this chapter, the language of technical terms given in parentheses is Latin unless otherwise indicated. Robert Folz, The concept of empire in western Europe from the fifth to the fourteenth century, trans. Shelia Ann Ogilvie (London: Edward Arnold, 1969); also useful is Matthew Gabrielle, An empire of memory: the legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and Jerusalem before the First Crusade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). See, for example, Ernst Kantorowicz, Selected studies (Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1965). Michael McCormick, Eternal victory: triumphal rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium and the early medieval West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

170

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legends, was yet another means by which the governments of Rome’s early medieval successor states consciously maintained both ideological and material continuity with the imperial past.5 I

The Later Roman Legacy In a more mundane sense, and especially in Gaul, the later Roman empire left an enduring material and institutional inheritance to the Middle Ages. This included a large number of fortified cities and towns, a magnificent system of roads and bridges and excellent port facilities.6 However, the most important imperial legacy, at least from an administrative perspective, was the civitas, which later was often called the pagus (pl. pagi). This basic unit of administration and jurisdiction is generally referred to in English as the ‘county’. In the West, the civitas served administratively at the local level as the centre for political, religious, economic and social organization well beyond the Middle Ages, especially in France in the guise of the département. This basic later Roman administrative circumscription was composed, in general, of a massively fortified urban centre (the urbs) and its hinterland (territorium). By the time of Charlemagne’s death in 814, the regnum Francorum (‘kingdom of the Franks’) included more than 600 pagi north of the Alps.7 At the heart of the civitas was the urbs, where the greatest concentrations of population dwelled. Some cities, such as Regensburg, Paris, Metz, Tours and Mainz, are estimated to have had populations of 20,000 or more by c.800.8 These cities served as centres for manufacturing, commerce and ecclesiastical organization.9 When Charlemagne conquered Germania as far east as the Elbe, he not only reconquered a region that had been lost by Augustus in 9 ce but effectively established the Carolingian incarnation of the Roman imperial system of local administration beyond what had been, for a period of some 5

6

7

8 9

Philip Grierson and Mark Blackburn, Medieval European coinage: with a catalogue of the coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, vol. i: The early Middle Ages (5th–10th centuries) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Bernard S. Bachrach, ‘Imperial walled cities in the West and their early medieval Nachleben’, in James D. Tracy (ed.), City walls: form, function, and meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 192–218; and Bernard S. Bachrach, ‘Fifth century Metz: later Roman Christian urbs or ghost town?’ Antiquité Tardive 10 (2002), 363–81. Karl Ferdinand Werner, ‘Missus–Marchio–Comes. Entre l’administration centrale et l’administration locale de l’Empire carolingien’, in Werner Paravicini and Karl Ferdinand Werner (eds.), Histoire comparée de l’administration (IVe–XXVIIe siècles) (Munich: Artemis Verlag, 1980), pp. 191–239. Paul Bairoch, Jean Batou and Pierre Chèvre, La population des villes européennes: banque de données et analyse sommaire des résultats, 800–1850 (Geneva: Droz, 1988), pp. 6–8, 27–8, 30. Bachrach, ‘Imperial walled cities in the West’, pp. 192–218.

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four centuries, the frontiers of the later empire.10 In these newly reconquered regions, Charlemagne established pagi with walled urbes as their capitals in places such as Osnabrück, Verden, Münster, Halberstadt, Magdeburg and Paderborn. These ‘capitals’ served as centres for local administration and as bases for projecting military operations farther to the east. In many places, Charlemagne followed up these new establishments with the implantation of bishoprics.11 In general, a count (comes) appointed by the king (later, under the Carolingians, by the emperor) administered the pagus from the citadel (the praetorium of the later Roman empire) within the walls of the urbs.12 These officials, many of whom were of aristocratic or near-aristocratic rank, served at the royal pleasure.13 The count presided over cadres of administrative officials. These men oversaw the collection of various types of imposts on land, persons and trade.14 The count also oversaw the administration of justice through a system of local courts that were established in a hierarchy. These ranged from the high comital court generally based in the urbs, although they were known also to sit in other well-populated centres, through a series of lower courts to tribunals at the village level, which were presided over by ‘hundred men’ (centenarii). The latter administered districts which nominally were considered to have consisted of a hundred families each headed by a free man.15 As in the later Roman empire, the count was responsible for leading the local defence of the pagus that he administered. Also in the later Roman 10 11

12

13 14

15

F. L. Ganshof, Frankish institutions under Charlemagne, ed. and trans. Bryce and Mary Lyon (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1968), pp. 26–34. For a useful introduction with a substantial number of scholarly references, see Christopher Carrol, ‘The bishoprics of Saxony in the first century after Christianization’, EME 8 (1999), 219–45. See, for example, Jean Hubert, ‘Evolution de la topographie de l’aspect des villes de Gaule du ve au xe siècle’, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo 6 (1959), 529–58; Paul-Albert Février in collaboration with Chr. Goudineau, M. Fixot and V. Kruta, ‘Vetera et Nova: le poids du passé, les germes de l’avenir, iiie–vie siècle’, in Histoire de la France urbaine, tome i: La ville antique des origines au ixe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1980), pp. 393–493; idem, ‘Permanence et héritages de l’antiquité dans la topographie des villes de l’occident durant le haut moyen âge’, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo (1974), vol. i, pp. 41–138; and idem, ‘Towns in the Western Mediterranean’, in M. W. Barley (ed.), European towns: their archaeology and early history (London: Academic Press, 1977), pp. 315–42 Helen Maud Cam, Local government in ‘Francia’ and England (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1912). See, for example, with regard to tolls, F. L. Ganshof, ‘A propos du tonlieu à l’époque carolingienne’, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo 6 (1959), 485–508; and Ganshof, ‘A propos du tonlieu sous les Mérovingiens’, in Studi in onore di Amitore Fanfani, 3 vols. (Milan: A. Giuffrè, 1962), vol. i, pp. 293–315. Alexander C. Murray, ‘The position of the grafio in the constitutional history of Merovingian Gaul’, Speculum 61:4 (1986), 787–805; and Murray, ‘From Roman to Frankish Gaul: “centenarii” and “centenae” in the administration of the Merovingian kingdom’, Traditio 44 (1988), 59–100. Regarding continuity into the Carolingian period, see Ganshof, Frankish institutions, pp. 26–34.

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tradition, he mobilized a select levy from his competence for expeditionary campaigns beyond the borders of his pagus.16 In addition, the count also supported a military household composed of professional soldiers which was similar, both in organizational structure and in terms of the type of personnel who were recruited, to the bucellarii who served in the obsequia of generals and other important figures during the later empire.17 In Charlemagne’s government, the counts and their subordinates ostensibly were salaried officials, who, like later Roman administrators and military personnel, were paid in cash or in kind or in a combination of the two. To provide support for these local officials, the central government delegated the returns from estates that belonged to the royal fisc, which were located in each relevant pagus or nearby. The two most frequently employed official terms used to denote these estates which had been set aside to provide income for the count and his subordinates were designated in Latin as comitatus and ministerium. The central government maintained these resources in a stable manner or increased or decreased them depending upon local circumstances or as the king saw fit.18 In general, these estates were bipartite in nature, a form of organization developed originally in Roman Syria during the fourth century.19 It was introduced into Gaul during the early fifth century where gradually it came to displace the traditional villa organization based on the so-called great estate (pl. latifundia).20 One segment of this new type of organization was called the domain (terra in dominicatum). It was maintained in the hands of officials of 16

17

18 19 20

Janet L. Nelson, ‘Charlemagne and the paradoxes of power’, in Patricia Skinner (ed.), Challenging the boundaries of medieval history: the legacy of Timothy Reuter (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), p. 45; and Bernard S. Bachrach and Charles R. Bowlus, ‘Heerwesen’, in Heinrich Beck et al. (eds.), Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2000), pp. 14, 122–36. Bernard S. Bachrach, ‘Merovingian mercenaries and paid soldiers in imperial perspective’, in John France (ed.), Mercenaries and paid men in the Middle Ages: proceedings of a conference held at University of Wales, Swansea, 7th–9th July 2005 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 167–92. Bernard S. Bachrach and David S. Bachrach, ‘Continuity of written administration in the Late Carolingian East, c.887–911’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 42 (2008), 109–46, at 125. Peter Saris, ‘The origins of the manorial economy: new insights from Late Antiquity’, EHR 119:481 (2004), 280–311. Concerning the widespread development the bipartite estate in Gaul and its environs, see Pierre Toubert, ‘La part du grand domain dans le décollage économique de l’Occident (viiie–xe siècles)’, in La croissance agricole du haut Moyen Age: chronologie, modalités, géographie, Actes du 10e colloque de Flaran (Auch, 1990), pp. 53–86, which sustains and expands upon the earlier views of F. L. Ganshof, ‘Manorial organization in the Low Countries in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries’, TRHS, 4th series, 31 (1949), 29–59, at 29–31. From the archaeological perspective, see the evidence developed by Paul Van Ossel, Etablissements ruraux de l’antiquité tardive dans le Nord de la Gaule, Gallia, Supplément 51 (Paris, 1992), p. 183. Christoph Sonnlechner, ‘The establishment of new units of production in Carolingian times: making early medieval sources relevant for environmental history’, Viator 35 (2004), 21–48, takes note of Charlemagne’s successful efforts to impose this form of estate organization on areas newly integrated under his rule, for example, Bavaria.

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the comital government, and the other segment (pl. tenementa) was in the hands of tenants, who might be serfs (pl. servi), coloni or laeti (for example, a status midway between serfs and free men) or free men (pl. ingenuii). The resources produced by the domain (sometimes ‘demesne’ in English) went to pay local officials. Those who possessed tenements paid rents to the count, which were also used to support the officials of the local government. Rents were of three types: labour services, which were used to farm the domain; payments in kind, such as grain, which generally was sold in either local or regional markets; and money rents.21 In addition to receiving their salaries from the estates of the ministerium, the counts and their officials also earned income from a share in the ‘profits of justice’. Each case that came before the count, the viscount or the centenarius of necessity resulted in money paid by one of the parties to the other party involved in the judicial process. When the man who lost the case paid the fine that was levied by the court, the person who won the case received one-third of the money paid by the loser. One-third was forwarded to the king, and one-third went to the man who had presided over the court, that is, the count or one of his subordinates.22 These profits of justice were exceptionally lucrative. Therefore, important magnates, both lay and ecclesiastical, worked diligently to obtain from the king the right to hold a court in regard to cases that were initiated on their lands. As a result, when the case was completed, these magnates obtained the third of the payment that in normal circumstances was to go to the count or his subordinates. The right to hold a court was similar to rights held by some magnates, often identified in the sources as the ‘very powerful ones’ (pl. potentiores) during the later Roman empire.23 This right was called an immunity (immunitas), both in the Roman empire and in Frankish Gaul, because the lands of the man who obtained the right to preside over his own court were immune, in this regard, from the interference of the comital bureaucracy that operated in the pagus in which these estates were located. In effect, the immunist became an official of the central government because he acted not only as a royal judge at the local level by what amounted to an appointment by the king, but he also sent on to the royal court the third of the payment owed to the king.24 21 22 23 24

Concerning the structure, see Toubert, ‘La part du grand domain’, pp. 53–86; and Ganshof, ‘Manorial organization’, pp. 29–59. Ganshof, Frankish institutions, pp. 71–86. Jones, LRE, pp. 499–507; and see also, in general, Ramsey MacMullen, Corruption and the decline of Rome (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988). Regarding immunities, see the critical bibliographic essay by Alexander C. Murray, ‘Merovingian immunity revisited’, History Compass 8 (2010), 913–28. For the continuation of the immunity into the Carolingian era, see Ganshof, Frankish institutions, pp. 47–8; and cf. Barbara H. Rosenwein, Negotiating space: power, restraint, and privileges of immunity in early medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 111, 115–21, 124, 133–4, regarding Charlemagne’s use of immunities.

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As was the case in the later Roman empire, Christianity was the official religion in the Frankish kingdom, although Jews were tolerated, as Julius Caesar (d. 44 bce) had mandated, with various restrictions applied from time to time.25 Those strong rulers who flourished in Rome’s successor states, such as Clovis (d. 511) and Charlemagne (d. 814), controlled the church. The monarch summoned church councils and often provided the assembled clerics with the agenda that was to be treated during their meetings. Perhaps most importantly, the validity of the canons that were enacted by the bishops or their representatives in the synod required royal approval to have legal standing. At some councils which the central government regarded as being of exceptional importance (for instance, at Frankfurt in 794), Charlemagne chose to preside personally, as Constantine the Great had at Nicaea in 325.26 A glimpse of the extensive ecclesiastical bureaucracy can be obtained by examining the immense quantity of copies that were made of council and synodal proceedings, as well as ancillary documents, for distribution throughout Gaul.27 In addition to presiding over these ecclesiastical gatherings, the king appointed all bishops, abbots and abbesses; they served at his pleasure.28 Church organization was based on the diocese or see. The ecclesiastical administrative structure followed that of the secular government, as had been the case from the early fourth century when Constantine issued the edict of Milan. In general, the diocese was coterminous with the territorium of the civitas. The ecclesiastical hierarchy in each pagus, headed by the bishop, was established in the urbs where the cathedral was constructed along with ancillary buildings within the walls of the city. These fortress cities had been constructed throughout Gaul at imperial order by the government of the later Roman empire during the late third and fourth centuries.29 In Gaul, these fortified centres were maintained in defensible condition through the early Middle Ages and beyond.30 As Charlemagne expanded his regnum east of the Rhine to the Elbe, he oversaw the construction of new walled cities, also called either urbes or 25 26

27 28

29 30

Bernard S. Bachrach, Early medieval Jewish policy in Western Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977). See Gregory I. Halfond, The archaeology of Frankish church councils, AD 511–768 (Leiden: Brill, 2010); and for general background, see J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). Halfond, The archaeology of Frankish church councils. Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish church, pp. 3–16; and F. L. Ganshof, ‘The church and the royal power under Pippin III and Charlemagne’, in The Carolingians and the Frankish monarchy, trans. J. Sondheimer (London: Longman, 1971), pp. 205–39. Bernard S. Bachrach, ‘The fortification of Gaul and the economy of the third and fourth centuries’, Journal of Late Antiquity 2 (2010), 38–64. Bernard S. Bachrach and David S. Bachrach, ‘Early Saxon frontier warfare: Henry I, Otto I, and Carolingian military institutions’, Journal of Medieval Military History 10 (2012), 17–60; and with regard to a specific case study, see Bachrach, ‘Fifth century Metz’.

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civitates by contemporaries, as part of the continuing programme of imitatio imperii. These fortress cities, of course, also had great military value and formed an important element of Charlemagne’s strategy, as bases for future campaigns. In addition, when Charlemagne conquered territory in which the population was pagan, he saw to it that they were converted to Christianity, and he established bishoprics in the lands that he brought under his control. Like the Romans, Charlemagne arranged for newly created episcopal foundations to be established in fortified urbes. Some monasteries were established in urbes and lesser fortress centres (castra) as well. Other monastic houses were, however, established in the wilderness, an obvious analogue to the abodes established during the later Roman empire by those monks who dwelled in the Egyptian desert and other ‘wild’ places.31 The non-literate Franks and other ‘barbarians’, who originally had dwelled in the so-called Germanic forests east of the Rhine and had migrated into Gaul during the later Roman empire, brought nothing with them that was of enduring significance in regard to either secular or religious administration. On the European mainland, in contrast to England, even the so-called barbarian laws were drawn up and edited by Roman lawyers, who presented them in Latin to Clovis and his successors.32 The several tens of thousands of barbarian immigrants, perhaps a quarter of million ‘Germans’, over the course of some two centuries were absorbed into Gallo-Roman society, which, by contrast, was on average in the 9 to 10 million range.33 Therefore, it is hardly surprising that the educated Gallo-Roman aristocrats and later educated Franco-Roman aristocrats, who oversaw the functions of government at both the central and local levels, operated in Latin. But it is also well attested that the people as a whole not only worshipped in Latin but also spoke Latin in their daily lives.34 31 32

33

34

Ganshof, ‘The church and the royal power’; and, for a broader view, Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish church. Alexander C. Murray, Germanic kinship structure: studies in law and society in antiquity and the early Middle Ages (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1983); and Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘The history of marriage and the myth of Friedelehe’, EME 14 (2006), 119–51, who shows that nothing of so-called Germanic laws regarding marriage survived the settlement within the borders of the Roman empire. Patrick Geary, Before France and Germany: the creation and transformation of the Merovingian world (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 115, accepts earlier estimates that in Gaul c.500 there were between 6 and 7 million Gallo-Romans and approximately 150,000 to 200,000 Franks. Estimates for the Gallo-Roman population now are much larger than more than a generation ago. R. Wright, Late Latin and early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1982); Michel Banniard, Viva voce: communication écrite et communication orale du IVe au IXe siècle en occident latin (Paris: Institut des études augustiennes, 1992); and Michel Banniard, ‘Niveaux de compétence langagière chez les élites carolingiennes: du latin quotidien au latin d’apparat’, in F. Bougard, R. Le Jan and R. McKitterick (eds.), La culture du haut Moyen Âge: une question d’élites? (Tournout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 39–61.

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II

The Rise of the Carolingian Dynasty The regnum Francorum – the Roman empire’s ultimate successor state in Gaul – maintained considerable unity under the dynasty of Merovingian kings from Clovis, who came to power in 481, to the reign of Dagobert I (d. 639). Following the latter’s death, royal power gradually fragmented under a series of rulers known to scholars as les rois fainéants (‘the do-nothing kings’), who often were children when their succession to the throne was initiated. Most died young and, during their short lives, were generally puppet kings under the control of one or another aristocratic family or faction of powerful magnates. In this difficult political atmosphere, the central government, by and large, was unable to have its writ run effectively at the local level.35 In the course of the later seventh and early eighth centuries, the aristocracy seized more and more power. In the northeast of Gaul, this effort was undertaken by the Austrasian Mayors of the Palace, who were the ancestors of Charlemagne. Finally, in 751, Charlemagne’s father Pippin (d. 768) – after winning numerous military victories and securing vast landed and moveable resources, which built upon the accomplishments of his own grandfather the elder Pippin (d. 714) and his father, Charles Martel (d. 741) – wielded sufficient power over the Frankish aristocracy to take the title ‘king of the Franks’ (rex Francorum).36 The elder Pippin, Charles Martel and his son Pippin had worked diligently and with great success to reverse the autonomy enjoyed by many magnates, and they effectively brought the aristocracy under their control.37 35

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Cf. Ian Wood, The Merovingian kingdoms, 450–751 (New York: Longman, 1994), who tends to overestimate the successes enjoyed by the later Merovingian kings but is unable to defend the view that they maintained control at the local level. This story has been told many times: see, for example, Bernard S. Bachrach, Early Carolingian warfare: prelude to empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 1–50. Cf. Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes and Simon MacLean, The Carolingian World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 271–323, which ascribes to the notion of an independent and powerful aristocracy that constituted an ongoing threat to the exercise of royal government. Regarding this particular point, see Stuart Airlie, ‘Towards a Carolingian aristocracy’, in Matthias Becher and Jörg Jarnut (eds.), Die Dynastiewechsel von 751: Vorgeschichte, Legitimations Strategien und Erinnerung (Münster: Scriptorium, 2004), pp. 109–127; and more generally, Stuart Airlie, ‘The Aristocracy’, in Rosamund McKitterick (ed.), NCMH, vol. ii: c.700–c.900, pp. 431–50. For the view that the Carolingian empire under Charlemagne was dominated by the aristocracy, see Matthew Innes, State and society in the early Middle Ages: the middle Rhine valley, 400–1000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), although cf. Alexander C. Murray, AHR 107 (2002), 921–3. For a critique of Innes’s views regarding aristocratic v. royal power, see Stuart Airlie, ‘Semper Fideles? Loyauté envers les carolingiens comme constituant de l’identité aristocratie’, in R. Le Jan, Stéphane Lebecq and Bruno Judic (eds.), La royauté et les élites dans l’Europe carolingienne (début IXe siècle aux environs de 920) (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Centre d’histoire de l’Europe du Nord-Ouest, 1998), pp. 130–43; and Airlie, ‘Charlemagne and the aristocracy: captains and

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The ideological patina, which glossed the legitimacy of Pippin’s ‘usurpation’ of the Frankish throne, was provided by the pope, who recognized and supported a change of dynasties from the Merovingians to the Carolingians after the former had reigned for some 280 years.38 The Carolingians take their name from Pippin’s father Karolus, that is, Charles Martel. Although the central government of the Frankish kingdom was severely weakened during the era of les rois fainéants, the secular and religious institutions of imperial origin, which had flourished under the Merovingian monarchs, were maintained effectively at the local level with the help of the episcopate, composed largely of well-educated and wealthy Gallo-Roman aristocrats.39 The civitas or pagus remained the administrative base for government at the local level, and the fortress cities (urbes) built by the Romans remained the focus of political, economic and religious life.40 Latin continued to be the language of government, religion, law and education, all of which, of course, was based upon written documents in Latin produced by lay and ecclesiastical administrators.41 Spoken Latin, from which French ultimately would develop, remained the language of the overwhelming majority of the population for social and economic purposes; although a process of ‘vulgarization’ continued, as had been the case throughout Roman history, the emergence of Romance or proto-French was some centuries in the future.42 Between 687 and 768, Charlemagne’s predecessors maintained a long-term strategy by which they gradually reunited the regnum Francorum, an area of more than 700,000 square kilometres, under Carolingian rule.43 Charlemagne built on their reunification to bring under Carolingian rule as much of the erstwhile western half of the Roman empire as he could manage, for instance, the Saxon region lost by Varus in 9 ce, and northern Italy (Map 8.1).

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40 41 42 43

kings’, in Joanna Story (ed.), Charlemagne: empire and society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 90–102. The exact role played by Rome in the elevation of Pippin to the Frankish throne is controversial. See, for example, Rosamond McKitterick, Charlemagne: the formation of a European identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 73–5. See Martin Heinzelmann, Bischofsherrschaft in Gallien. Zur Kontinuität römischer Fuhrungsschichten vom 4. bis zum 7. Jahrhundert. Soziale, prospographische und bildungsgeschichtliche Aspekte (Munich: Artemis, 1976); and more broadly, Reinhold Kaiser, Bischofsherrschaft zwischen Königtum und Fürsten macht: Studien zur bischöflichen Stadtherrschaft im westfränkish-französichen Reich im Frühen und hohen Mittelalter (Bonn: Röhscheid, 1981). Werner, ‘Missus–Marchio–Comes’, pp. 191–239; and Bachrach, ‘Imperial walled cities in the West’, pp. 192–218. The foundational work here remains Rosamond McKitterick, The Carolingians and the written word (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Wright, Late Latin; Banniard, Viva voce; and Banniard, ‘Niveaux de compétence langagière’, pp. 39–61. Bachrach, Early Carolingian warfare, pp. 1–50.

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PICTS JUTES DANES NORTHUMBERLAND

ANGLOSAXON KINGDOMS

WA

LES

IRELAND

Elb e

SAXONY

MERCIA

Magdeburg Od er

SORBS

WESSEX Herstal

Aachen

Worms Paris

BRITTANY

nube Da

MORAVIANS

ALAMANNIA AVARS

BAVARIA

PANNONIAN

CARINTHIA

MARCH

Poitiers LOMBARD Pavia KINGDOM

AQUITANE

Venice

CROATS

Ravenna

PROVENCE Toulouse

KINGDOM OF THE ASTURIAS Burgos Eb

PAPAL

SPAN SEPTIMANIA ISH MA RC H

STATES

DUCHY OF SPOLETO DUCHY OF BENEVENTO

Rome

ro

Naples

Barcelona

EMIRATE OF CORDOBA Palermo

Cordoba

BYZANTINE EMPIRE

Carolingian kingdom in 768 Carolingian empire in 814

Territories conquered between 768 and 814

Regions occupied but not pacified in 768

Zone subject to Carolingian influence in 814

Territories paying tribute in 814

0 0

250 100

500 km 200

300 miles

Byzantine empire

Map 8.1 The Carolingian empire, c.800

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Until his death in 814, Charlemagne personally led or otherwise ordered regular military operations on an annual basis, and sometimes two or three were orchestrated in the course of a single year. On the whole, these efforts to conquer territory and subdue various peoples were successful and resulted almost in the doubling of the territory under Carolingian rule. As has recently been noted: ‘On a modern map of Europe, his [Charlemagne’s] lands would extend over the whole of France, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, and Austria, Germany as far as the Elbe, northern and central Italy, Istria, Bohemia, Slovenia, and Hungary as far as the Danube, and finally Pyrenean Spain as far as the Ebro.’44 This empire had a population in the range of 20 million.45 On the basis of his rule over this greatly expanded territory, and especially the fact that he held two royal titles, king of the Franks (rex Francorum) and king of the Lombards (rex Langobardorum), a sine qua non for someone to be elevated to the title of emperor, Charlemagne’s long-term aim was to claim the imperial title in the West.46 We all know, since Lorenzo de Valla’s essay on the subject during the Renaissance, that the ‘Donation of Constantine’ was a papal forgery. This fact, of course, did not impinge upon Charlemagne’s view of the situation. He believed – or, at the least, he acted as though he believed – that the imperial title in the West was in the gift of the pope.47 Beyond the political and administrative borders established by the reunification of the regnum Francorum under Charlemagne’s forebears as well as by his own conquests, the establishment of various client states buttressed the Carolingians’ strategic position, in military and economic terms. Charlemagne extended Carolingian power east of the Elbe both by bringing various Slavic groups under his influence and by using diplomatic methods to isolate the Danes.48 South of Rome, he dominated the duchy of Benevento.49 On the Iberian peninsula, much of the northeast (Catalonia) was integrated directly into the Frankish kingdom, and in the northwest, the Christian kings of Asturias regarded themselves as Charlemagne’s fideles.50 Carolingian 44 45 46

47 48

49 50

Alessandro Barbero, Charlemagne, father of a continent, trans. Allan Cameron (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 75 (quotation). Reinhard Schneider, Das Frankenreich (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1982), p. 124. Bernard S. Bachrach, ‘Charlemagne’s military responsibilities “Am Vorabend der Kaiserkrönung” ’, in Peter Godman, Jörg Jarnut and Peter Johanek (eds.), Kaiser Krönung: Das Epos ‘Karolus Magnus et Leo papa’ und der Papstbesuch in Paderborn 799 (Paderborn: Akademie Verlag, 2002), pp. 231–55. Regarding the ‘donation’, see Caroline J. Goodson and Janet L. Nelson, ‘Review article: the Roman contexts of the “Donation of Constantine” ’, EME 18 (2010), 446–67. Werner Budesheim, ‘Der “limes Saxoniae” nach der Quelle Adams von Bremen, insbesondere in seinem südlichen Abschnitt’, in Werner Budesheim (ed.), Zur slawischen Besiedlung zwischen Elbe und Oder (Neumünster: Wentorf bei Hamburg, 1994), pp. 28–41, with special attention to Charlemagne’s dealing with the Obodrites at pp. 29–31. Barbero, Charlemagne, p. 75. See Roger Collins, Early medieval Spain: unity in diversity, 400–1000, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 184, 208–9, 229–30, 251–3.

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fleets dominated much of the western Mediterranean from Barcelona to Rome (Ostia), and most of the Adriatic.51 In England, the hegemony of Offa (d. 796) king of Mercia depended, at least in part, on a close and, more importantly, a friendly working relationship with Charlemagne.52 No power posed a serious challenge to the dominance of Charlemagne’s military and naval forces in the English Channel, the western Mediterranean, the North Sea or the southern reaches of the Baltic, desultory Viking raids late in his reign notwithstanding.53 Charlemagne negotiated successfully with Hārūn al-Rašīd (d. 807), the fifth caliph of the cAbbāsid dynasty.54 As a result, commercial privileges were obtained for Frankish merchants and also religious privileges for pilgrims who travelled in the East and in the Holy City of Jerusalem, itself.55 These good relations enabled Charlemagne to have his commissioners (pl. missi dominici), who were based at the royal court, travel across the Mediterranean to survey Christian resources in the Holy Land.56 Finally, Charlemagne was in frequent contact with the Byzantine government, which, in 812, ultimately legitimized his ‘usurpation’ of the imperial title, which had taken place at Rome in 800.57 III

Bureaucracy and Communications The central administration of Charlemagne’s government was a highly complex affair. This, of course, might be surmised given the substantial 51

52 53 54

55 56

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There is much disagreement on details: see H. Sproemberg, ‘Die Seepolitik Karls des Grossen’, in H. Sproemberg, Beiträge zur belgisch-niederländerischen Geschichte (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1959), pp. 1–29; Ekkehard Eickhoff, Seekrieg und Seepolitik zwischen Islam und Abendland: das Mittelmeer unter Byzantinischer und Arabischer Hegemonie (650–1040) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1966), pp. 51–64; and John Haywood, Dark Age naval power: a reassessment of Frankish and Anglo-Saxon seafaring activity (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 95–109. Joanna Story, Carolingian connections: Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian Francia, c.750–870 (Aldershot: Variorum, 2003), pp. 169–96. See Sproemberg, ‘Die Seepolitik Karls des Grossen’, pp. 1–29; and Haywood, Dark Age naval power, pp. 95–109. See F. W. Buckler, Harunu’l-Rashid and Charles the Great (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1931); Giosuè Musca, Carlo magno e Harun al Rashid, 2nd edn (Bari: Edizioni Dedato, 1996), pp. 9–45; and Michael McCormick, ‘Pippin III, the embassy of Caliph al Mansur, and the Mediterranean world’, in Becher and Jarnut (eds.), Die Dynastiewechsel von 751, pp. 222–41. On the cAbbāsid dynasty, see also I. T. Kristó-Nagy (Chapter 3). Michael McCormick, The origins of the European economy: communications and commerce, A.D. 300–900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 433–43. Their detailed report still survives: Michael McCormick, Charlemagne’s survey of the Holy Land: wealth, personnel, and buildings of a Mediterranean church between Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2011). Philip Grierson, ‘The Carolingian empire in the eyes of Byzantium’, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo 27 (1981), 2 vols., vol. i, pp. 885–916.

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geographical area (ultimately in the neighbourhood of 1.5 million square kilometres) that was overseen effectively by his officials, the large population that they governed, and the long-term success of frequent Carolingian military operations.58 There were specialized bureaux, perhaps as many as a halfdozen, based at the royal court including those composed of clerics of various types under the direction of the archchaplain.59 Among the most important of the secular bureaux was a cadre of legal specialists who served under the direction of the count of the palace. These men dealt primarily with appeals that came to the king from lower courts. However, in the Roman tradition, which also was maintained in Byzantium, some cases generated by the lower classes were heard by the king.60 The royal court also could be a court of first instance as, for example, in dealing with matters concerning Jewish merchants.61 The man who was in charge of seeing that the royal court and its dependents were fed was the seneschal. His effort amounted to providing sustenance for several thousand people on a daily basis because a substantial number of the members of the king’s military household (obsequium regalis) were stationed at the court and its environs; in Latin, these men are considered presentales.62 It is noteworthy that when the Byzantine emperor undertook to reorganize the East Roman army in the wake of the substantial territorial and population losses suffered as a result of the success of the Muslim invasions, the unit of 58

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Werner, ‘Missus–Marchio–Comes’, pp. 191–239. Also see Nelson, ‘Literacy in Carolingian government’, pp. 258–96; and McKitterick, Charlemagne, pp. 137–213; Mark Mersiowsky, ‘Regierungspraxis und Schriftlichkeit im Karolingerreich: Das Fallbeispiel der Mandate und Briefe’, in Rudolf Schieffer (ed.), Schriftkultur unter den Karolingern. Referate des Kolloquiums der Nordrhein-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften am 17/18 Februar 1994 in Bonn (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996), pp. 109–66; and Philip Depreux, ‘The development of charters confirming exchanges by the royal administration (eighth–tenth centuries)’, in Karl Heidecker (ed.), Charters and the use of the written word in medieval society (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), pp. 43–62. For the view that the Carolingian government, both centrally and in the provinces, was a chimera, see, for example, Hans J. Hummer, Politics and power in early medieval Europe: Alsace and the Frankish realm, 600–1000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 8, who asserts: ‘Finally, because a central bureaucracy did not exist in the early medieval period any investigation of political order needs to be approached from the local context.’ See, for example, Werner, ‘Missus–Marchio–Comes’, pp. 191–239; Ganshof, Frankish institutions, pp. 17–23, 81–86; and Bernard S. Bachrach, ‘Are they not like us? Charlemagne’s fisc in military perspective’, in Felice Lifschitz and Celia Chazelle (eds.), Paradigms and methods in early medieval studies (The New Middle Ages) (New York: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 319–43. Regarding the clerics, see Josef Fleckenstein, Die Hofkappelle der deutschen Könige, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Hiersmann, 1959, 1966), vol. i, Grundlegung: die karolingische Hofkapelle. Ganshof, Frankish institutions, pp. 81–6. Bachrach, Early medieval Jewish policy, pp. 84–94. Bachrach, Early Carolingian warfare, pp. 65–76; and Ganshof, Frankish institutions, pp. 17–23. It should be noted that, on occasion, all the men called up for service by Charlemagne were referred to as the royal obsequium, which should not be confused with the military household.

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presentales that was deployed in the environs of Constantinople was called the opsikon theme. This is a rendering in a Greek spelling of the Latin term obsequium.63 Whether what we see here is the Byzantines imitating the Franks or vice versa is unclear, but it is evident that, at the least, there was a certain sharing of common institutional structures and terminology. Yet another high official of Charlemagne’s central government, who also held the office of count, had responsibility for overseeing the administration of the royal fisc. This institution was initially based upon the vast estates that had been controlled by the imperial fisc in Gaul during the later Roman empire. Under Clovis and his sons, the Merovingians took possession of these landed assets (pl. facultates) and retained the officials who administered them so that these installations could continue to function as they had when they belonged to the empire. Thereafter, the erstwhile imperial fisc in Gaul formed the basis for the fisc of the Frankish kings.64 When the Carolingians took the place of Merovingians, they took control of what remained of the royal fisc, which had had been looted by various aristocratic families, including Charlemagne’s ancestors, during the reigns of a series of rois fainéants. The Carolingians greatly increased the size of the fisc through the confiscation of lands from those magnates who lost out in various struggles for power within the Frankish kingdom, and also through large-scale territorial conquests, especially east of the Rhine. Another massive collection of landed assets, south of the Alps, was obtained by Charlemagne after he conquered the Lombard kingdom in 774 and took control of its royal fisc.65 Under Charlemagne’s direct control north of the Alps, there were in excess of 600 basic units (pl. villae) of the fisc administered from the royal court by the count. The bailiff (villicus) of each fiscal unit was chosen by the king and served at the royal pleasure. He was required each year to attend the royal court in person during Christmas and Easter, and, in general, he was to send a dozen or so written reports to the court throughout the course of the year. In addition, there were several thousand villae of the royal fisc, which were lent by the king to various of his loyal followers (pl. fideles) on easy terms (pl. beneficia) so that they could support themselves with the income from these estates while 63 64

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Warren Treadgold, Byzantium and its army, 284–1081 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 23–24. The basic work on the royal fisc remains Wolfgang Metz, Das karolingische Reichsgut: Eine verfassungs- und verwaltungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1960). Klaus Verhein, ‘Studien zu Quellen zum Reichsgut der Karolingerzeit’, part i, Deutsches Archiv fur Geschichte (Erforschung) des Mittelalters 10 (1954), 313–94; and part ii, 11 (1955), 333–92; Metz, Das karolingische Reichsgut; Ganshof; Frankish institutions, pp. 35–41; and Carlrichard Brühl, Fodrum, Gistum, Servitium Regis. Studien zu den wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen des Königtums im Frankenreich und in den fränkischen Nachfolgestaaten Deutschland, Frankreich und Italien vom 6. bis zur Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (Cologne: Bölau, 1968), vol. i, 392–451.

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undertaking all types of service for the royal government, including military service.66 These fiscal units were administered by the fidelis who held the beneficium, but the activities of these ‘loyal men’ were overseen by missi dominici, who were sent from the royal court to ensure that these assets were handled in an appropriate manner.67 Finally, Charlemagne also exercised ultimate control over the large numbers of ecclesiastical estates that were located throughout the regnum Francorum. By royal command (pro verbo regis), Charlemagne, following traditional Frankish practice, lent large numbers of church-owned villae to his fideles as beneficia. Both the churches from which these assets were ‘borrowed’ and the king, through his missi dominici, kept a close eye on these landed estates to ensure their sound administration and integrity.68 In many cases, one or another bureau had overlapping responsibilities. For example, the seneschal, who had responsibility for providing logistic support for the court, had to work closely with the count who was in charge of the royal fisc. The latter’s installations supplied the basic foodstuffs for support of the court. This count also had to consult with the leaders of the Magistratus, Charlemagne’s ‘general staff’, to work out the detailed matters that undergirded the organization of logistics for each year’s military campaigns, insofar as at least some troops were supported directly by the royal government.69 Each bureau of the central government was led by an experienced administrator, whose loyalty to Charlemagne was unquestioned because it had been demonstrated over the course of many years by faithful government service prior to appointment as a department head. From early in their formation, these men had benefited, at the least, from a traditional education. This was fundamental to being admitted to royal administrative service, which operated at all levels on the basis of the ‘written word’.70 In addition to the mastery of 66 67

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Bachrach, ‘Are they not like us?’, pp. 319–43. For the bipartite structure of the fisc, not to be confused with the bipartite structure of individual villae, see Ganshof, Frankish institutions, p. 35; Daryl Campbell, ‘The Capitulaire de Villis, the Brevium exampla, and the Carolingian court at Aachen’, EME 18 (2010), 243–64; and Bachrach, ‘Are they not like us?’, pp. 319–43. Later traditions, solidified by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims, unfairly identified Charles Martel as the major abuser of the church in regard to ‘borrowing’ church property to be used as beneficia for various of his vassals. See Janet Nelson, ‘The church’s military service in the ninth century: a contemporary view?’, Studies in Church History 20 (1983), 15–30 (repr. Nelson, Politics and ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London: Hambledon Press, 1986), pp. 117–32); Ulrich Nonn, ‘Das Bild Karl Martells in mittelalterlichen Quellen’, in Jörg Jarnut, Ulrich Nonn and Michael Richter (eds.), Karl Martell in seiner Zeit (Sigmaringen: J. Thorbecke, 1994), 9–21; and Paul Fouracre, The age of Charles Martel (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp. 183–4. Regarding the Magistratus in general, see Bernard S. Bachrach, ‘Charlemagne and the Carolingian general staff’, The Journal of Military History 66 (2002), 313–57 [hereafter Bachrach, ‘General staff’]. McKitterick, The Carolingians and the written word; Nelson, ‘The written word and oral communication’, p. 99, who makes clear: ‘Quite simply, it was much easier for [a Latin

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practical literacy, numeracy was a high priority and its mastery also was required.71 It can be shown that, at least in some cases, the education of secular royal officials went well beyond study of the Trivium and the Quadrivium, especially in the area of higher mathematics.72 Many of these bureau heads had started out working at the court while still youths and were observed from early on in their careers by senior officials. One of Charlemagne’s closest advisers, his cousin Adalhard, emphasized that a selection of educated young men, who were serving at court in minor posts (pl. ministeriales) came to be regarded by their seniors as having exceptional talent and, therefore, were thought worthy of advancement. These young ministeriales then were seconded to one or another of the specialist cadres, that is, the bureaux of the central government, to obtain detailed knowledge of a particular area of expertise and were trained to follow in the footsteps of their mentors.73 It was generally believed, a generation or so after Charlemagne’s death, that the men who served in various administrative cadres at the royal court wore uniforms by which their métier could be recognized.74 Indeed, Charlemagne is reported even to have provided uniforms for those who served as doormen for the churches.75 In general, the outfitting of civilian bureaucrats in uniforms,

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speaking] Frank to become literate than we have imagined hitherto.’ See also Matthew Innes, ‘Memory, orality and literacy in an early medieval society’, P&P 158 (1998), 3–36; and Nelson, ‘Literacy in Carolingian government’, pp. 258–96. E. Alföldi-Rosenbaum, ‘The finger calculus in antiquity and in the Middle Ages: studies on Roman game counters’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 5 (1971), 1–9, as basic for those who did not attend formal school. There was, however, much schoolwork as well. See John Contreni, ‘Education and learning in the early Middle Ages: new perspectives and old problems’, The International Journal of Social Education 4 (1989), 9–25; and Contreni, ‘The pursuit of knowledge in Carolingian Europe’, in Richard E. Sullivan (ed.), ‘The gentle voices of teachers’: aspects of learning in the Carolingian age (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1995), pp. 106–41; and Nelson, ‘Literacy in Carolingian government’, p. 273. With regard to higher mathematics, see Paul L. Butzer et al. (eds.), Karl der Grosse und sein Nachwirken: 1200 Jahre Kultur und Wissenschaft in Europe, 2 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), esp. Wesley M. Stevens, ‘Astronomy in Carolingian schools’, vol. i, pp. 411–87; and David Singmaster, ‘The History of some of Alcuin’s Propositiones’, vol. ii, pp. 11–99. See also Paul L. Butzer and Karl W. Butzer, ‘Mathematics at Charlemagne’s court and its transmission’, in Catherine Cubitt (ed.), Court culture in the early Middle Ages: the proceedings of the first Alcuin conference (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 76–89; Menso Folkerts and Helmuth Gericke, ‘Die Alkuin zugesschriebenen Propositiones ad Acuendos Juvenes (Aufgabe zur Schärfung des Geistes der Jugend)’, in Paul L. Butzer and Dietrich Lohrmann (eds.), Science in Western and Eastern civilization in Carolingian times (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1993), pp. 283–362. Cf. Alexander Murray, Reason and society in the Middle Ages, corrected edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 151–61. Bachrach, ‘General staff’, pp. 325–26; and F. L. Ganshof, Recherches sur les capitulaires (Paris: Sirey, 1958), pp. 22–3. See Notker, Gesta Karoli, book. ii, ch. 5 (Notker, Gesta Karoli, ed. and trans. R. Rau (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgessellschaft, 1960). In light of Notker’s audience (he was writing for the king and his court), it is highly unlikely that he was making up the matter of uniforms from the whole cloth. Einhard, Vita Karoli, ch. 26: Éginhard, Vie de Charlemagne, ed. and trans. Louis Halphen (Paris: Société d’Édition, 1947).

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which was the norm in the later Roman empire and in Byzantium, simply followed the military tradition, in which uniforms were necessary if only to avoid large numbers of ‘friendly fire’ incidents but also to limit the efficacy of various enemy stratagems.76 Patronage surely was at work in regard to the education of young men, especially those in the lower classes. It is clear that monks and priests, who provided elementary education to the brighter children in their ‘parishes’, were in a position to recommend them for future advancement.77 An illuminating anecdote repeated by Notker of St Gall catches the flavour of the situation that faced both young aristocrats and others of lesser status who needed to obtain a good education and also to show that they were working diligently to win Charlemagne’s approval for further advancement. Notker quotes from a presumed ‘tongue lashing’ that Charlemagne inflicted on a group of aristocratic young men who were reported to have failed to keep up with their studies: ‘Know that without any doubt, unless you rapidly make up for your idleness by vigorous study, you will never receive any benefit from Charlemagne.’78 In addition, Notker makes clear that Charlemagne promised those youth of lesser status who had done well in school that they would be advanced.79 Some students also had an opportunity to go on to more advanced study. Those who sought secular preferment were, in addition to the tuition of magistri (‘instructors’) experienced in military matters, given the opportunity to learn various aspects of leadership, strategy and tactics from reading and discussing Roman histories and military handbooks, such as Vegetius’ De re militari (‘Concerning Military Matters’) and Frontinus’ Strategemata (‘Stratagems’) while they also undertook arduous combat training.80 Alcuin points out that when he taught at Tours, he emphasized that he was carrying out Charlemagne’s orders to provide ‘ancient learning’ to his lay students. He contrasted this, however, to his teaching the ‘sweet honey of holy scriptures’ to future clerics.81 With regard to able young men who were marked out for 76 77

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Regarding military uniforms, see Bachrach, Early Carolingian warfare, pp. 166–9. John Contreni, ‘The Carolingian renaissance’, in Warren Treadgold (ed.), Renaissances before the renaissance: cultural revivals of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), pp. 66–7; and Monique Zerner, ‘Enfants et jeunes au ixe siècle. La démographie du polyptyque de Marseilles, 813–14’, Provence historique 31 (1981), 355–77. Notker, Gesta Karoli, i.3. Regarding Notker’s account, see Bachrach, Early Carolingian warfare, p. 73; and Thomas F. X. Noble, ‘Secular sanctity: forging an ethos for the Carolingian nobility’, in Patrick Wormald and Janet L. Nelson (eds.), Lay intellectuals in the Carolingian world (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 8–36, at 20, 22. Notker, Gesta Karoli, i.3. Concerning the training of young aristocrats for future careers as military leaders, see Heinrich Fichtenau, The Carolingian empire, ed. and trans. Peter Munz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 91, who traces this tradition to the court of Constantine the Great; and Bachrach, Early Carolingian warfare, pp. 71–5, with the literature cited there. Epist., no. 121 (ed. Ernst Dümmler in MGH, Epistolae Karolini Aevi, 2 (Berlin: Hahn, 1888)).

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future clerical advancement, many of the best of these, as noted earlier, were promoted to the royal chapel. Locally, in the pagi or counties, the Carolingian government maintained and controlled complex administrative assets, both lay and ecclesiastical.82 As we have seen, there were more than 600 of these secular administrative circumscriptions north of the Alps, each headed by counts.83 The administration of these counties, which was also based upon the use of a wide variety of documents, was supported in each pagus by the viscounts and their staffs as well as the centenarii, who along with their assistants administered the smallest subunits of the pagus.84 These units of local government were complemented by ecclesiastical administrative units headed by bishops, abbots and abbesses. Many of these men and women dealt directly with the central government because they had been provided with immunity by the king from the interference of the count and his subordinate officials.85 In terms of communications, the missi dominici played the key role in maintaining close ties between the bureaucracy of the central government and the administrations, both lay and ecclesiastical, at the local level. These men were generally drawn from among the most important lay and ecclesiastical magnates of Charlemagne’s government. They usually worked in pairs and numbered in the dozens.86 In these efforts, missi or, at least, the lesser members of their staffs, carried out many of the same functions that had been delegated to the agentes in rebus during the later Roman empire.87 These functions included the acquisition of intelligence that might be thought to have value for military operations as well as ascertaining where there might be unrest within Charlemagne’s kingdom.88 Generally, the missi dominici were sent with their staffs from the royal court with written instructions, often containing detailed orders on a wide variety of subjects, to operate at the

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Werner, ‘Missus–Marchio–Comes’, pp. 191–239; McKitterick, Charlemagne, pp. 137–213; and Mersiowsky, ‘Regierungspraxis’, pp. 109–66. For background purposes, see Murray, Germanic kinship structure; Murray, ‘From Roman to Frankish Gaul’, pp. 60–100; and Murray, ‘The position of the grafio’, pp. 787–805. Werner, ‘Missus–Marchio–Comes’, pp. 191–239; see also nn. 13–15. Murray, ‘From Roman to Frankish Gaul’, pp. 60–100. Alexander C. Murray, ‘Merovingian immunity revisited’, History Compass 8 (2010), 913–28; and David S. Bachrach, ‘Immunities as tools of royal military policy under the Carolingian and Ottonian kings’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung fur Rechtsgeschichte 130, Germanistische Abteilung (2013), 1–36. The basic work on the institutional structure of the missi dominici remains Victor Krause, ‘Geschichte des Instituts der missi dominici’, MIöG 2 (1890), 193–300. Regarding numbers of counts, vassi dominici and royal fideles, see the estimates by Werner, ‘Missus–Marchio– Comes’, pp. 191–239. Jones, LRE, vol. i, pp. 128–9, 547–9. Regarding spies, see Bachrach, ‘General staff’, pp. 320–3; and McKitterick, Charlemagne, p. 217.

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local level in specifically designated areas of jurisdiction; each of these was called in Latin a missaticum.89 The missi were instructed to see that royal orders were enforced, and to write reports regarding the effectiveness of their missions. When the situation arose, the missi were empowered by the king, as indicated in numerous capitularies, to act as judges to deal with those who were charged with failing to obey royal commands.90 One of their ongoing missions was to make sure that Charlemagne’s local officials (the counts) and immunists (such as abbots) did not abuse their powers in such a way that their activities undermined the interests of the royal government. This was of particular importance in making sure that military forces were raised in an appropriate manner. On the whole, various documents make clear that these missions were, in fact, executed successfully.91 Some scholars once believed, and perhaps some still do believe, that Charlemagne’s capitularies, which often set out the king’s orders in substantial detail and generally were supposed to be delivered by the missi dominici, were ‘mere royal wish lists’. Traditionally, this argument was made by those who espoused the unwarranted assumption that Carolingian government, despite its effective and ongoing military operations, was primitive and lacked a welldeveloped and effectively functioning administrative infrastructure capable of having its writ obeyed on a regular basis in the pagi. In this view of the situation, over-mighty magnates supposedly dominated the localities.92 An alternative view argues for the effectiveness of Charlemagne’s authority at a local level and suggests that ‘minimalist’ interpretations regarding the efficacy of Charlemagne’s capitularies in having the royal will enforced at the local level are overly pessimistic.93 The administrative complexity of the 89 90

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Krause, ‘Geschichte . . . der missi dominici’, pp. 193–300; and McKitterick, Charlemagne, pp. 214–16, 218, 222, 237, 244, 256–8, 260–6, 278, 298, 379. For a useful survey, see McKitterick, Charlemagne, pp. 214–16, 218, 222, 237, 244, 256–8, 260–6, 278, 298, 379. For a good example of the range of Charlemagne’s authority and of the missi dominici in carrying out his orders, which extended to the Holy Land, see McCormick, Charlemagne’s survey of the Holy Land. Nelson, ‘Charlemagne and the paradoxes of power’, pp. 37–8, discusses this point in regard to Charlemagne’s efforts to protect the lower echelons of society so as to preserve their ability to go to war. See also Bachrach, Early Carolingian warfare, pp. 58–9. See, for example, Innes, State and society; and Matthew Innes, ‘Kings, monks and patrons: political identities and the abbey of Lorsch’, in Régine Le Jan (ed.), La royauté et les élites dans l’europe carolingienne (début IXe siècle aux environs 920) (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Centre d’Histoire de l’Europe du Nord-Ouest, 1998), pp. 301–25, where the emphasis on the role of potentes, especially in the running of local affairs, overwhelms a proper appreciation of the real power exercised by the central government at the local level through its officials. Cf. the work of Stuart Airlie on the aristocracy, cited above, p. 177 n. 37. See Warren Brown, Unjust seizure: conflict, interest, and authority in an early medieval society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 134–5, who provides a good example of how Charlemagne, through his missi dominici, dominated at the local level when it was relevant to his policies and interests. Christiana Pössel, ‘Authors and recipients of Carolingian capitularies,

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Carolingian government was undergirded, in part, by the development of a ‘bureaucratic mentality’ embedded in an aristocracy that, by and large, was in the service of the state.94 In particular, the careful study of surviving capitulary manuscripts indicates the wide distribution of these documents and the enforcement of their provisions.95 In fact, some capitularies have survived in as many as forty copies, which may be taken prima facie as a rather small percentage of the number actually issued.96 The capacity for rapid communication between the central government and the various local authorities was maintained through the use of the tractoria, the Frankish incarnation of the later Roman cursus publicus.97 Relays of riders, working under best-case conditions, could cover in excess of 300 kilometres in a twenty four-hour period.98 The effective use of the tractoria was made possible by the continued maintenance of the Roman road system throughout the Frankish kingdom. These efforts, as contemporary documents make clear,

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779–829’, in R. Corradini, R. Meens, C. Pössel and P. Shaw (eds.), Texts and identities in the early Middle Ages (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2006), makes clear that fewer than 4 per cent of all capitularies were formulated at large assemblies and thus the aristocracy in general had no significant input on a regular basis, much less a role in determining what was valid and what was not. More recently, Matthew Innes has modified his former position and characterized the wish list argument as ‘pessimistic’ (Innes, ‘Charlemagne’s government’, in Story (ed.), Charlemagne, p. 78). Janet Nelson has begun to espouse a ‘more optimistic assessment’, which she sees to have ‘gained ground’ among scholars (Nelson, Opposition to Charlemagne, pp. 6 (quotation), 18–20). See, for example, Pössel, ‘Authors and recipients of Carolingian capitularies’, 253–74; and McKitterick, Charlemagne, pp. 233–63. Although the most complete general introduction to the capitularies remains Ganshof, Recherches sur les capitulaires, much work has been done since. See, for example, regarding the manuscripts, several studies of importance by Hubert Mordek: Biblioteca capitularium regum Francorum manuscripta: Überlieferung und Traditionszusammenhang der fränkische Herrschererlasse (Munich: MGH, 1995); Mordek, ‘Recently discovered capitulary texts belonging to the legislation of Louis the Pious’, in Peter Godman and Roger Collins (eds.), Charlemagne’s heir: new perspectives on the reign of Louis the Pious (814–840) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 437–53; and Mordek, ‘Kapitularien und Schriftlichkeit’, in Rudolf Schieffer (ed.), Schriftkultur und Reichsverwaltung unter den Karolingern. Referate des Kolloquiums der Nordrhein-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften am 17/18 Februar 1994 in Bonn (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996), pp. 34–66. For additional works which elaborate this basic theme, see Bachrach and Bachrach, ‘Continuity of written administration’, pp. 111–12, with the literature cited there. For an overview of the change in the state of the question, see McKitterick, Charlemagne, pp. 233–63. Mordek, Biblioteca, pp. 1081–2. F. L. Ganshof, ‘La tractoria: contribution à l’étude des origines du droit de gîte’, Tijdschrift voor rechtsgeschiedenis 8 (1928), 69–91; Brühl, Fodrum, gistum, servitium regis, vol. i, pp. 65–7; and Franz Staab, Untersuchungen zur Gesellschaft am Mittelrhein in der Karolingerzeit (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1975), pp. 32–106. A. M. Ramsay, ‘The speed of the Roman imperial post’, JRS 15 (1925), 60–74; and for modern acceptance of these speeds for a courier service, see Norbert Ohler, Reisen im Mittelalter (Munich: Artemis und Winkler, 1986), p. 138.

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were based upon enforcement of an edict issued by Theodosius I (d. 395).99 Under the watchful eye of the local counts and the missi dominici, the buildings (pl. mansiones), horses and vehicles required for the effective functioning of the tractoria were maintained.100 IV

Carolingian Military Campaigning: An Administrative Perspective The Carolingian record of highly successful military operations, often over long distances as some campaigns covered in excess of 2,000 kilometres, during a period of more than a century, required that Charlemagne and his forebears maintain the ability to mobilize well-organized, effectively supported and often large armies on a regular basis.101 At least in part, Carolingian military operations were so successful because, as McKitterick has observed, Charlemagne’s ‘campaigns were subjected to meticulous strategic planning’.102 Plans for Carolingian offensive military operations originated at the royal court and were undertaken on direct orders from Charlemagne, who issued the order for mobilization.103 The first step in the administrative process that undergirded Charlemagne’s decisions regarding where and when to lead his troops on campaign or to order one or more of his subordinates to undertake 99

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Ganshof, ‘La tractoria’, 69–91; Brühl, Fodrum, Gistum, Servitium Regis, vol. i, pp. 65–67; and Michel Rouche, ‘L’héritage de la voierie antique dans la Gaule du haut Moyen Ages (ve–xie siècle)’, in L’homme et la route en Europe occidentale au Moyen Age et aux temps modernes: Centre culturel de l‘Abbaye de Flaran: Deuxièmes Journées internationales d’histoire. 20–22 septembre 1980, Falaran, 2 (Auch, 1982), 13–32. Regarding the infrastructure required to maintain the tractoria, see, for example, two important studies regarding the southeast by Otto P. Clavadetscher: ‘Verkehrsorganisation in Rätien zur Karolingerzeit’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte 5 (1955), 1–30; and ‘Churrätien im Übergang von der Spätantike zum Mittelalter nach den Schriftquellen’, Joachim Werner and Eugen Ewig (eds.), Von der Spätantike zum frühen Mittelalter (Sigmaringen: J. Thorbecke, 1979), pp. 159–78; and Wilhelm Störmer, ‘Zur Frage der Funktionen des kirchilichen Fernbesitzes im Gebiet der Ostalpen vom 8. bis zum 10, Jahrhundert’, in Helmut Beumann and Werner Schröder (eds.), Die Transalpinen Verbindungen der Bayern, Alemannen und Franken bis zum 10. Jahrhundert (Sigmaringen: J. Thorebecke, 1987), pp. 383, 385–93, 396–401; Heinrich Dannenbauer, ‘Paraveredus-Pferd’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Germanistische Abteilung 51 (1954), 55–73. Gundrun SchneiderSchnekenburger, ‘Churrätien im Frühmittelalter auf Grund der archäologischen Funde’, Münchner Beiträge zur Vor- und Frühgeschichte, 26 (1986), 111–21, and plotted on Tafel 70; and with regard to the Middle Rhine, Staab, Untersuchungen zur Gesellschaft, pp. 32–106. Bachrach, Early Carolingian warfare, passim; and Bernard Bachrach and Bowlus, ‘Heerwesen’, pp. 122–36, for a brief overview. See McKitterick, Charlemagne, p. 217 (quotation). Ganshof, Frankish institutions, pp. 11–14, 16, 18, 28, 46, 59, 75, 81, 84, 93, 96–7.

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offensive military operations was the acquisition of intelligence.104 Information was gathered from throughout the Frankish kingdom and from beyond its frontiers through various formal and informal means, which included numerous spies.105 It is apparent, in addition, that those serving Charlemagne did not eschew torture in their efforts to acquire intelligence.106 All those in positions of responsibility, both lay and ecclesiastical, throughout Charlemagne’s regnum, had standing orders to provide to the court on a regular basis information that in any way could be construed to be of military value.107 In a more formal context, Charlemagne’s missi dominici travelled with their staffs throughout the realm and brought back information from the jurisdictions (missatica) in which they functioned.108 The same was true for diplomats, many of whom had special expertise in particular foreign regions.109 Among the informal sources of information that likely were of great importance were merchants who were engaged both in local and in long-distance trade such as the Rhadanite Jews.110 The gathering of information was a continuous process; at the court, analysts attached to the Magistratus were assigned to the task of dealing with these data in a systematic manner. The goal of these analysts was to put the information into an accessible form for the use of the government’s senior military planners, that is, the senior officials (pl. seniores) and special advisers (pl. praecipui consiliarii) who were the major figures of the ‘general staff’. As a result, these documents were divided (denominata) into ‘specifically titled units’. Each unit then was methodically organized (ordinata) into groupings as specific chapters (pl. capitula).111 104

105

106 108 109

110 111

See McKitterick, Charlemagne, p. 217, who calls attention to ‘Charlemagne’s network of communications, with its great variety of means for acquiring knowledge of all kinds, which underlay the remarkable success of Charlemagne’s armies’. Charlemagne’s intelligence network does not appear to have been unique in the early Middle Ages. See, for example, Richard Abels, Alfred the Great: war, kingship and culture in Anglo-Saxon England (London: Longman, 1998), p. 159, who emphasizes Alfred’s ‘finely honed system of scouts and messengers’, which, along with ‘careful planning’ and the ‘mastery of logistics’, were fundamental to his military success. Concerning spies, see McKitterick, Charlemagne, p. 217. Note that Charlemagne pointed out in a capitulary of 805 that he received detailed intelligence from his faithful supporters from every single region of his kingdom (Alfred Boretius and Victor Krause (eds.), Capitularia regum francorum: Legum Sectio II, 2 vols. (Hannover, MGH, 1883–97), vol. i, no. 124). 107 Bachrach, ‘General staff’, pp. 322–3. Bachrach, ‘General staff’, pp. 319–23. See Ganshof, Frankish institutions, pp. 23–6. The most famous of these was Abbot Fulrad of St Denis. See Alain. J. Stoclet, Autour de Fulrad de Saint-Denis (v. 710–784) (Paris: Champion, 1993); and Josef Fleckenstein, ‘Fulrad von Saint-Denis und der fränkische Ausgriff in den süddeutschen Raum’, in Gerd Tellenbach (ed.), Studien und Vorarbeiten zur Geschichte des grossfränkischen und früdeutschen Adels (Freibourg im Brisgau: E. Albert, 1957), pp. 1–39. See McCormick, Origins, pp. 688–93; and Bachrach, Early Medieval Jewish Policy, pp. 72, 97, 112, 126, 131. Bachrach, ‘General staff’, pp. 313–57; and Robert-Henri Bautier, ‘La campagne de Charlemagne en Espagne (778)’, Bulletin de la Société des Sciences, Lettres et Arts de Bayonne 135 (1979), 30, who considers the planning group that advised Charlemagne the

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At the winter or Christmas court, the Magistratus used these documents to aid them in making the plans for military operations during the forthcoming campaigning season. In this, these planners were greatly aided by the reports from the villae of the royal fisc, which provided masses of information regarding the availability of logistic support.112 Also of importance was information provided by the missi dominici, who oversaw the beneficia held by Charlemagne’s fideles and the surplus production of ecclesiastical estates which provided to the government in taxes between 40 and 50 per cent of the rents that they collected from their villae.113 These preliminary plans first would be approved in principle by Charlemagne and then vetted once again by the small council which met at Christmas time.114 In some cases, these specialists of the Magistratus even found it necessary to develop two sets of plans for the execution of military operations in different areas that had a potential for near-term military operations. This was the case, for example, in the winter and early spring of 773. Charlemagne wanted to continue military operations in the Saxon region that he had begun during the previous year. However, the constant flow of diplomatic intelligence from south of the Alps convinced him that it would be necessary to invade the Lombard kingdom in northern Italy. What is of signal importance here is that many months before Charlemagne actually made his decision regarding where to campaign in 773, he set in motion the preparations for the provision of logistic support that would be needed for his armies to cross the Alps.115 In addition to having available the carefully analyzed intelligence information, the Magistratus also was in possession of data concerning the wealth of the great landowners, both lay and ecclesiastical, as well as of vassi dominici and their dependents.116 Some of these landowners and landholders could be called upon to mobilize large numbers of men for expeditionary purposes consistent with their wealth. In addition, the central government maintained lists of people on a pagus by pagus basis who could be called upon to participate in expeditionary military service on a small scale down to producing only one soldier.117 In short, from these economic documents, which had some characteristics consistent with what could be expected in a formal census, the

112 113 114 116

117

‘État-major’ of the royal army. These latter ‘capitularies’ (capitula) are not to be confused with the royal orders, discussed above, pp. 188–9. Bachrach, ‘General staff’, pp. 338–41. Jean Durliat, ‘La polyptyque d’Irminon pour l’Armée’, Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 141 (1983), 183–208; and Bachrach, ‘Are they not like us?’, pp. 120–4. Bachrach, ‘General staff’, pp. 323, 326–8. 115 Ibid., pp. 343–45. Ganshof, ‘Charlemagne and the institutions of the Frankish monarchy’, p. 121, n. 153, p. 135 nn. 261–3, lists more than a dozen such orders that have survived. Still useful in this context is Giles Constable, ‘Nona et decima: an aspect of the Carolingian economy’, Speculum 21 (1960), 158–72. Bachrach, Early Carolingian warfare, pp. 54–7.

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central government was in a position to develop a good idea of the total number of royal subjects who potentially could be called upon to provide military service for offensive purposes.118 In drawing up these plans, the Magistratus also had to provide estimates in regard to how many fighting men and support personnel would be needed. These estimates had to be consistent with the nature or strategic purpose of the projected campaign and the likely availability of sufficient quantities of logistic support. In this context, the theatre of operations in which the campaign would be executed likely would play a role in determining the geographical distribution of pagi from which troops, or at least substantial numbers of troops, would be mobilized. For example, Charlemagne did not mobilize Gascons from south of the Garonne to carry out military operations east of the Rhine.119 He did, however, mobilize forces from the Lombard kingdom, which he had conquered in 774, for military operations in Spain in 778.120 In the latter case, it is to be noted that the force mobilized in northern Italy could march along the Mediterranean coast on the via Domitia while being supplied from offshore by naval assets. This entire planning process and ultimately the execution of operations in the field were greatly aided by maps of various types.121 In addition to estimating how many troops were needed and from where they were to be mobilized, the Magistratus also had to determine what types of fighting men were to be called up for service in the forthcoming campaign. For example, among foot soldiers were lightly and heavily armed men, others who carried spears and swords, others trained as archers or crossbowmen, and still others trained in the use of the sling. Among mounted troops were lightly armed cavalry and heavily armed fighting men. In both cases, such mounted troops were trained also to fight on foot. Finally, there were various types of specialists such as engineers who oversaw the construction of catapults and siege machines, artillery men to operate these machines, miners who were able to 118

119

120 121

Cf. R. H. C. Davis, ‘Domesday Book: continental parallels’, in J. C. Holt (ed.), Domesday studies: papers read at the novocentenary conference of the Royal Historical Society and the Institute of British Geographers: Winchester, 1989 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1987), pp. 15–39. However, Charlemagne’s grandson, Charles the Bald (d. 877), whose kingdom was much smaller than that of his grandfather, did mobilize Gascon troops to operate as far east as Lotharingia. See Janet L. Nelson, Charles the Bald (Harlow: Longman, 1992), p. 123. Annales regni Francorum, an., 778; and Annales qui dicitur Einhardi, an., 778, ed. Frederick Kurze (Berlin: Hahn, 1895). Concerning maps, see Ernst Klebel, ‘Herzogtümer und Marken bis 900’, Deutsches Archive für Geschichte des Mittelalters 2 (1938), 1–53, who mounts a compelling argument regarding their use by Charlemagne’s armies as a sine qua non for pincer operations. For more recent research regarding the availability and use of itineraries and maps by the early Carolingians, see Emily Albu, ‘Imperial geography and the medieval Peutinger map’, Imago Mundi 57:2 (2005), 136–48; and Bachrach, ‘General staff’, pp. 328–38.

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carry out sapping operations, and specialists in the construction of siege encampments.122 Clearly, different types of campaigns not only required different quantities of troops but also different types of troops. In 773, the Magistratus planned the invasion of the Lombard kingdom south of the Alps. It was well understood, in light of information available to the central government regarding King Pippin’s highly successful operations against the Lombards in 754 and 756, that this campaign likely would result both in an engagement with the Lombard army south of the Alps and also a siege of the fortress city of Pavia. As a result, Charlemagne’s army that invaded northern Italy required large numbers of foot soldiers to surround the Lombard capital. Also needed were specialists in the construction of a vallation (a wall around the enemy fortifications) and a contravallation to blockade the city and protect the besieging force. Engineers with expertise in the building and use of various types of machines were also required.123 By contrast, when the Magistratus planned a raid that was intended to penetrate Saxon territory and devastate a particular area in the region of the Weser, mounted troops would be important while siege engineers and artillery men were not.124 At the local level, the count of the pagus provided the central government with lists of landowners and landholders, both small and large, who were eligible for military service. He maintained copies for himself because he had the responsibility to mobilize expeditionary levies at the local level to serve under his leadership. In light of the number of militiamen and the kinds of militiamen that the count was ordered to mobilize by the central government, he decided which particular individuals would be mobilized for military service. This was done in consonance with criteria that had been established by the central government; if a count failed to obey orders, he was punished.125 In addition, the count also had data regarding the large landowners, who were immunists and, therefore, were not under his direct jurisdiction. The counts were given access to these data so that when the total number of men that Charlemagne ordered mobilized from each pagus was mustered, the count could report on the obedience of the immunists to the king’s orders. Similarly, the missi dominici reported on whether the count had followed orders and on whether the immunists had done so, as well.126 122 123 124 125 126

Bachrach, Early Carolingian warfare, pp. 212, 233, 234. Regarding Pippin’s operations in Italy, see Bachrach, Early Carolingian warfare, pp. 148, 157, 162, 227–30, 236. Annales regnum Francorum, an., 774; and Annales qui dicitur Einhardi, an., 774. Bachrach, Early Carolingian warfare, pp. 57–9, where violations by the count are also discussed. Ganshof, ‘Charlemagne and the institutions of the Frankish monarchy’, pp. 121 and 135.

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V

Conclusion So far as I have been able to ascertain, there is no epistemologically sound definition of bureaucracy – one that includes conditions of necessity and sufficiency. However, the weberian model, problematic though it may be, usefully aggregates several characteristics, many of which are to be found in Charlemagne’s government. Like that of contemporary Byzantium, the government of Charlemagne was based upon the extensive use of written documents, although it is noteworthy that a far greater corpus of sources has survived for the reign of Charlemagne than for his contemporaries in the east. The offices of Charlemagne’s government were staffed by educated (literate and numerate), well-trained, full-time salaried officials, who through a well-established system of schools were able to reproduce their successors. Both centrally at the royal court and at the local level in the counties, Charlemagne’s administrators, even at the highest level, did not own the resources that they managed for the government. These various bureaux were hierarchical in structure with specifically delineated spheres of authority and expertise. The cadres of administrators in various bureaux were governed by strict rules and some of these have survived in the sources, for instance the procedures that were operative for the Magistratus. Other rules and regulations that governed the behaviour of various officials can be gleaned from the few capitularies that have survived. It is clear that patronage played a crucial role in the process by which men were chosen to serve in the government and advancement was closely monitored, although we have no evidence that bureaucrats were required to sit for examinations to obtain promotion. They were, however, observed very closely by their mentors because a faulty recommendation redounded to the senior man’s discredit. Those who served in Charlemagne’s administration, regardless of rank or status, did so at his pleasure. As a result, they were differentiated by their relative proximity to the king (G. Königsnähe) from those men who were not part of the government. In this context, loyal aristocrats, who were dependent on Charlemagne’s gratia for success, can be classified as a Dienstadel (a service aristocracy), and differentiated from those who, in the constant competition for royal or imperial preferment, had lost out, at least temporarily. Being on the outside, however, encouraged aristocrats to strive even more vigorously to win Charlemagne’s support, which was the road forward towards success. A vast force of literate, trained and loyal men in government service administered the bureaux of the central government. Additionally, thousands of men administered more than a thousand government installations at the local level including the county governments, the villae of the royal fisc and the dozens of

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royal palaces (pl. palatii) distributed strategically throughout several areas of the Frankish kingdom. At the local level, these administrators, as a group, were not limited to supporting and sustaining military operations. For example, there were specialists who commanded a sound knowledge of the various legal systems, such as the lex Judaeorum which flourished in the Carolingian world under the system of personality of the law that had its origins in Roman practice. In addition, thousands of men and women served to administer the facultates of the church, both human and material, which in the final analysis were available to Charlemagne when he ordered their mobilization. If one were to conclude in the manner of A. H. M. Jones that the later Roman empire maintained a bureaucracy (as Michael Whitby discusses in Chapter 6), then it is clear that Charlemagne’s government was indeed bureaucratic. The view that Charlemagne was a Dark Age Germanic warlord, as represented in epic fantasies such as Beowulf, fails utterly when the facts are brought to light regarding the sophistication of Carolingian government and the education of its bureaucrats.

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9

Bureaucracy, the English State and the Crisis of the Angevin Empire, 1199–1205 John Gillingham

I

Introduction: 1199 and All That Throughout Western Europe, writing of many different kinds became increasingly important for the business of government during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.1 The more routinely that past governments have used the written word, the more advanced they have been thought to be – and the more advanced, the stronger. The development of bureaucratic kingship in England has been a major theme of English historiography, closely linked with what R. R. Davies identified as its ‘informing principle’ – ‘the belief that strong centralized government is a prerequisite of civilized life and human progress’.2 For English historians of this cast of mind – members of what Tim Reuter called ‘the “Sir Humphrey” school of medieval history’3 – the first regnal year of King John (r. 1199–1216), which ran from John’s coronation on Ascension day 1199 (27 May) to the eve of Ascension 1200 (17 May), has long enjoyed iconic status.4 The systematic recording of outgoing documents is widely taken to be a significant indicator of bureaucratic administration, and to all appearances it was in 1199 that the king’s secretariat – from about this time sometimes called the ‘chancery’ (L. cancellaria) – began to keep registers in the form of parchment rolls of

1 2 3 4

The English variation on this theme is the subject of the classic study, Clanchy, Memory. R. R. Davies, Historical perception: Celts and Saxons (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1979); Crooks, ‘State of the union’. Timothy Reuter, ‘Modern mentalities and medieval politics’, in Reuter, MPMM, p. 14. The ‘regnal year’ refers to the year of a given monarch’s reign, expressed in the shorthand form ‘1 John’ (= the first regnal year of King John). Under the Angevin kings of England, the regnal year was counted from coronation day. An oddity of the system is that because King John was crowned on Ascension, a movable Christian feast day, the dates on which his subsequent regnal years began moved with that feast. See C. R. Cheney and Michael Jones (eds.), A handbook of dates for students of British history, new edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 21.

197

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some of the types of documents which clerks attached to the royal household had long been writing on the kings’ behalf.5 For V. H. Galbraith, the year 1199 marked ‘the beginning of the deliberate archive-making by the State’, and meant that ‘the sovereign Chancery . . . could direct and control the administration better than ever before’.6 The earliest extant roll of charters (solemn grants, often in perpetuity) dates from 1199 (1 John).7 The earliest extant rolls of letters close (executive writs ordering action to be taken, sent folded and closed with a small blob of wax) date from 1200 (2 John).8 The earliest extant roll of letters patent (open letters with, like charters, the king’s seal hanging from them) dates from 1201 (3 John).9 For centuries, the chancery rolls functioned as a principal record of English government: the charter rolls until 1517, the close rolls until 1903, the patent rolls to the present day – a bureaucratic continuity of more than 800 years. What makes the earliest chancery rolls remarkable is ‘the fact that they are preserved from an earlier date than the registers and cartularies of neighbouring powers, and with a comprehensiveness unrivalled anywhere else in medieval Europe’.10 They were, of course, very far from being fully comprehensive. Some categories of documents were too routine to be registered, judicial writs for example. Hence chancery rolls have little to say about the bureaucratization of the English system for judicial settlement of disputes, the common law. Nonetheless, for the period, they are unusually complete. Thanks to the chancery rolls, for example, the itinerary of King John can be reconstructed in far greater detail than that of any contemporary or near-contemporary secular ruler. Some numbers usefully illustrate the scale of the ‘1199 effect’. The first full year for which chancery rolls of all three types survive is 6 John (1204–5). They contain over 1,300 documents – more than ten times as many 5

6 7

8

9

For both the institution and the word cancellaria, see N. Vincent, ‘Why 1199? Bureaucracy and enrolment under John and his contemporaries’, in A. Jobson (ed.), English government in the thirteenth century (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004), pp. 17–48, 30, 39. V. H. Galbraith, Studies in the public records (London: Nelson, 1948), pp. 69–70. Rot. chart. Just how innovative 1199 was remains disputed: see two essays in Nicholas Vincent (ed.), Records, administration and aristocratic society in the Anglo-Norman realm (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009), viz. David Carpenter, ‘In testimonium factorum brevium: the beginnings of the English chancery rolls’, pp. 1–28; and Nicholas Vincent, ‘Introduction: the record of 1204’, pp. xvi–xviii. It is accepted that another set of chancery rolls known as the fine rolls – not copies of outgoing letters but notes of offers made to the king in return for grants of land or other favours – had been established by the mid-1190s at the latest, though the earliest extant fine roll also dates from the first year of John’s reign: Rotuli de oblatis et finibus, ed. T. D. Hardy (London: RC, 1835). Hardy’s edition of the close rolls, Rot. litt. claus., begins with 6 John (1204–5). Earlier close rolls were printed, though unfortunately misidentified, in Rot. lib., pp. 1–108, and in Rot. norm., pp. 22–37, 45–122. Further fragments were printed by H. G. Richardson (ed.), The memoranda roll for the Michaelmas term of the first year of the reign of King John (London: Pipe Roll Society, 1943), pp. 91–8. 10 Rot. litt. pat. Vincent, ‘Why 1199?’, p. 19.

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per year as even a historian with a genius for archival research has managed to find for the decade before 1199.11 ‘Historians like bureaucracy because it feeds their hunger for written sources’; the historical profession developed in close symbiosis with government.12 For instance, the publication of the early chancery rolls ‘by command of His Majesty’ in the 1830s reflected the then government’s growing anxiety about the records of its past.13 These records, now kept in the National Archives of the United Kingdom, have almost always been treated as evidence of an archetypally English bureaucracy. But this is to ignore the context in which the ‘record revolution’ took place.14 The royal chancery functioned as a secretariat not just for the kingdom of England, but for all the dominions over which the king of England reigned. II

The Angevin Empire In 1199, King John succeeded his father Henry II (r. 1154–89) and brother Richard I (r. 1189–99) as ruler of an assemblage of lands which it has become conventional to refer to as the ‘Angevin empire’ – a term invented in 1887 (Figure 9.1 and Map 9.1).15 This empire can be cited in support of the notion that empires are ‘nurseries of bureaucracy’ because they need ‘tax lists and systems of written communication between centre and periphery’.16 In November 1203, King John wrote from the Norman port of Barfleur (from where he was planning to sail to England) to the people of Labourd (south of Bayonne) regretting that through forgetfulness, they had not been informed by letter (my emphasis) of the appointment of a seneschal for Gascony and Périgord.17 H. G. Richardson, who viewed the financial system under John as ‘part of a peculiar machine of government which was far in advance of anything that continental kings had at their command’, observed that although ‘we are apt to consider the system as essentially English’, it was in fact ‘born of the exigencies of a situation in which

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Nicholas Vincent gives a total of about 120 royal writs and letters a year in the 1190s (Vincent, ‘Why 1199?’, pp. 33–5). Robert Bartlett, ‘Lords of “pride and plunder” ’, New York Review of Books, 24 June 2010. On the concerns which led to the Public Record Office Act (1838), see John Kenyon, The history men (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), pp. 91–3. Robert Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin kings, 1075–1225 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 199–201. Kate Norgate, England under the Angevin kings, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1887), vol. ii, p. 491. Reynolds, ‘Empires’, 162. L. per oblivionem omisimus vobis litteras mittere (Rot. litt. pat., p. 36b).

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200

John Gillingham NORMAN KINGS WILLIAM I ‘THE CONQUEROR’ (r. 1066–87)

Robert, duke of Normandy (d. 1134)

WILLIAM II (r. 1087–1100)

HENRY I (r. 1100–35)

Adela (d. 1137)

STEPHEN (r. 1135–54) Henry V of Germany, king and emperor [1] m. (d. 1125)

‘Empress’ Matilda m. (d. 1167)

[2] Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou (d. 1151)

PLANTAGENET KINGS HENRY II = (r. 1154–89)

Henry (d. 1183)

RICHARD I (r. 1189–99)

Geoffrey (d. 1186)

Arthur of Brittany (d. 1203)

Eleanor of Aquitaine (d. 1204)

JOHN (r. 1199–1216)

HENRY III (r. 1216–72)

KINGS OF ENGLAND DYNASTY

Continued in fig. 11.2.

Figure 9.1 Rulers of the Angevin empire and their predecessors

a monarch had to govern lands on either side of the narrow seas, lands with different systems of administration, institutions and laws’. In Maurice Powicke’s words: ‘Henry II’s writs and letters controlled the payment of money or the course of business in all parts of his dominions whether he directed them from a hunting lodge in Northamptonshire or an Aquitanian fortress.’ Nicholas Vincent describes this as ‘an “imperial” system, capable of functioning in the king’s absence, lacking the focus or mythology that the Romans had invested in the city of Rome, yet with an empire-wide system for the levying of taxation and troops’.18 18

Richardson, Memoranda roll, p. xi; F. M. Powicke, The loss of Normandy, 1189–1204: studies in the history of the Angevin empire, 2nd edn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961), p. 34; Nicholas Vincent, A brief history of Britain, 1066–1485 (London: Robinson, 2011), p. 214.

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Bamburgh Alnwick

North

Carlisle

Ireland

Sea

Isle of Man York

Dublin Limerick

En g l an d

W

ale

s

Waterford

Warwick Oxford Th

am

Winchester

London es

Flanders

ne Rhi

Me us e

Canterbury

Bouvines Barfleur

Cambrai Rouen

Caen ChâteauFalaise Gaillard Normandy

OCEAN Brittany Rennes

Amiens Gisors Marne

Paris

Blois Sens Angers Orléans ToursAnjou Touraine Chinon Bourges Poitiers Maine

Loire

La Rochelle Niort Oléron Aquitaine

Bordeaux

Dijon Burgundy

Limoges

Angoulême Périgord G

ar

Dordo g ne

n on

Bazas Gascony

Lyon Le Puy Auvergne

e

Condom Bayonne

Troyes

Saôn e

Nantes

Reims Champagne

Seine

Toulouse

Avignon Provence

Albi Montpellier

Narbonne

e

Channel Islands

Rhôn

AT L A N T I C

Arles Marseille

Lands inherited by Henry II Lands acquired by Henry II’s marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine Lands claimed by right of suzerainity or conquest

M editerranean

Capetian royal domain Borders of France and the Empire Borders of Angevin lands Borders of other fiefs

Sea 0 0

100

200

300 km

100

200 miles

Map 9.1 The Angevin empire in the late twelfth century

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The fact that contemporaries only rarely referred to this assemblage of lands as an empire has the very considerable advantage of forcing us to make explicit the criteria by which we employ the term ‘empire’.19 Stephen Howe’s ‘basic definition’ is useful: [A] large political body which rules over territories outside its original borders. It has a core territory whose inhabitants usually continue to form the dominant ethnic group, and an extensive periphery of dominated areas, usually acquired by conquest, but sometimes, especially in the medieval world, expansion comes about by the intermarriage of ruling families from previously independent states . . . It was typically believed that the dominant core people were clearly culturally superior to the politically subordinate, peripheral ones.20

On this definition, Henry II and his sons ruled an empire. It had a core territory in the lands which Henry inherited: Anjou, Maine and Touraine from his father, Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou (d. 1151); also Normandy and England, to which his mother ‘empress’ Matilda (d. 1167) had been named heir by her father, King Henry I (r. 1100–35).21 England, it should be noted, had been rapidly transformed by the extraordinary completeness of the Norman conquest in and after 1066, so that by Henry I’s reign what had been a colonial periphery had turned into the greater part of the Norman empire’s dual core.22 To these inherited lands, I would add Poitou (the northern part of the duchy of Aquitaine), which Henry II acquired by virtue of his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine (d. 1204). But the ‘deep south’ of Aquitaine, notably the land inhabited by Gascons and Basques, was in some respects peripheral.23 Other 19

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For early thirteenth-century references in Latin and French to Henry II’s dominions as imperium and empire, see John Gillingham, The Angevin empire, 2nd edn (London: Arnold, 2001), pp. 3–4; and Martin Aurell, L’empire des Plantagenêt, 1154–1224 (Paris: Perrin, 2003). The following are representative of the arguments in favour of the term found in modern secondary authorities: J. A. Everard and J. C. Holt, Jersey 1204: the forging of an island community (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), p. 15 (‘So great and far-flung were the dominions under Plantagenet rule that “empire” is the only modern term that seems apt’); M. T. Clanchy, England and its rulers, 1066–1272, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 80 (‘For lack of any better term to describe this distinctive but passing phenomenon, the “Angevin Empire” stands as a necessary historical convenience rather than a precise twelfth-century reality’). Howe, Empire, pp. 14, 19. Compare Reynolds, ‘Empires’, 152: ‘empires are normally thought of as consisting of a ruling polity (sometimes called the metropolis) and subordinate polities (peripheries or colonies). They came together . . . on the initiative of what thus became the metropolitan polity, often by some kind of armed conquest.’ Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou, was Matilda’s second husband. Her title as empress derived from the fact that her first husband was the German emperor Henry V (d. 1125). On post-conquest England as ‘colony’, see J. C. Holt, Colonial England, 1066–1215 (London: Hambledon, 1997), esp. introduction; and, recently, David Bates, The Normans and empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). On perceptions of the people of Aquitaine and the terminology involved (Poitevins, Gascons etc.), see John Gillingham, ‘Events and opinions: Norman and English views of Aquitaine, c.1152–c.1204’, in Marcus Bull and Catherine Léglu (eds.), The world of Eleanor of Aquitaine (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), pp. 57–81, 63–4.

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peripheral territories – Wales, Brittany and, after 1171, Ireland – were acquired, or increasingly dominated, as a consequence of military invasions launched from the metropolis. Scotland can also be regarded as a part of this empire between the treaty of Falaise (1174) – by which the captive William ‘the Lion’ (king of Scots, 1165–1214) acknowledged Henry II as overlord of Scotland – and 1189, when Richard I restored Scotland’s independence.24 To a greater or lesser degree, the inhabitants of all these peripheral regions were regarded as cultural inferiors by metropolitans. For example, both the chronicler Ralph de Diceto (dean of St Paul’s, London, d. 1199/1200) and the author (who was almost certainly a Poitevin) of The pilgrim’s guide to Santiago de Compostela shared a condescending view of Gascons.25 That the ‘Celts’, especially the Irish, were barbarous was a view widely held by popes, saints and Englishmen.26 Henry II, wrote Dean Ralph, had gone to Ireland to bring peace to a land which lacked what he called ‘legitimate public power’ – a motif which was also used to justify armed intervention in Brittany and Wales.27 The earliest charter roll reveals a contrast between the Irish ‘barbarians’ and all the rest. Whereas in Gascony and in Wales, the clear majority of those who were granted charters were natives of those provinces, in Ireland all the beneficiaries were English incomers. There was, moreover, a consciously ‘imperial’ policy of introducing English procedures into Ireland. According to the chronicler Roger of Wendover (d. 1236), when John went to Ireland in 1210: ‘He there made and ordained English laws and customs, placing sheriffs and other agents who were to govern the people of that kingdom according to English laws.’28 This was, R. R. Davies noted, ‘the first time the institutions of 24

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Even after 1189, the history of Scotland’s coinage suggests that it remained part of England’s ‘informal empire’ (Richard Britnell, Britain and Ireland, 1050–1530 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 254, 337, 455–6). According to Ralph, Henry II’s son, Henry, died in 1183 ‘in Gascony among barbarous peoples’ (Radulfi de Diceto decani Londiniensis opera historica, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols. (London: RS, 1876), vol. ii, p. 19). Although the author of the Pilgrim’s guide felt that Gascons were not quite as barbarous as their Basque and Navarrese neighbours, he turned his nose up at their style of life: ‘they are gossipy, licentious, and poorly dressed; although they eat and drink far too much, they don’t sit at table but squat around a fire; they all share the same cup and when they go to sleep they share the same rotting straw, master and mistress, servants and all’ (The pilgrim’s guide to Santiago de Compostela, trans. W. Melczer (New York: Italica Press, 1993), pp. 91–2). On English and French perceptions of the Irish, Scots and Welsh, see the essays reprinted in John Gillingham, The English in the twelfth century (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), ‘Part One: Imperialism’, pp. 3–109. Radulfi de Diceto . . . opera historica, vol. i, p. 350. On Brittany, see the comment of William of Newburgh: ‘by bringing peace to Brittany, waste lands were gradually made productive’ (Historia rerum Anglicarum, Chronicles of the reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I (London: RS, 1884), vol. i, p. 147). On peace and productivity imposed on parts of Wales, see Gesta Stephani, ed. K. R. Potter and R. H. C. Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 14–16. Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ed. H. R. Luard, 6 vols. (London: RS, 1872–84), vol. i, p. 530. In a letter accompanying the earliest extant register of writs (datable to 1210), John wrote: ‘We desire justice according to the custom of our realm of England to be shown to all in our

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English governance had been transported en bloc to a conquered country’, and he contrasted it with ‘a pre-bureaucratic age’ when little or no attempt had been made to introduce English administrative machinery into Wales.29 Ralph of Diceto’s account of how the young King Philip II of France (r. 1180–1223) was advised to copy the methods which Henry II used to govern England suggests that in English court circles, English methods of government were thought good enough to introduce anywhere.30 Administrative responses to challenges such as the need to raise money for the crusades tended in the direction of uniformity; hence, the same measures were adopted throughout the empire for the collection of the ‘Saladin tithe’ (1188). Nonetheless, there is no evidence that an explicitly Anglicizing policy was tried anywhere else in the empire, not even in Gascony. Had there been any such attempt, it would probably have been counterproductive, hence the comparison which Powicke made in 1913: [Henry II’s] empire was in some ways like the recent empire of India, where native states and the imperial government met similar problems. King John’s administration in Angoulême probably made as little change in the actual state of affairs as would the intervention of the Indian government in Mysore during a minority.31

Normally rulers claimed to be upholding local custom, even – or especially – when they were adjusting it in their own interest.32 King John’s shortcomings meant that by 1204 the empire was in tatters, its heart torn out when Anjou, Normandy and much of Poitou succumbed to a combination of Capetian invasion and rebellion against a king blamed for the murder of his nephew Arthur of Brittany. The empire formed in the 1150s did not survive for long enough to become a traditional part of the European

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realm of Ireland who complain of wrongdoing’ (Elsa De Haas and G. D. G. Hall (eds.), Early registers of writs (London: Selden Society lxxxvii, 1970), p. 1). On the background and date, see Paul Brand, The making of the common law (London: Hambledon, 1992), pp. 451–5). For the status of the native Irish population under English rule in the late Middle Ages, see Crooks (Chapter 11, pp. 285–6). Davies, Domination, pp. 121–2. On the kinds of social and institutional changes which contemporaries thought rulers capable of imposing, see John Gillingham, ‘Expectations of empire: some twelfth- and early thirteenth-century English views of what their kings could do’, in Seán Duffy and Susan Foran (eds), The English Isles: cultural transmission and political conflict in Britain and Ireland, 1100–1500 (Dublin: Four Courts), 56–67. In 1181, Philip (soon to be known as Philip Augustus) was advised to adopt the methods used by Henry II in governing ‘so wide a kingdom in which there lived barbarians such as the Welsh and Scots’ (Radulfi de Diceto . . . opera historica, vol. ii, p. 8). Powicke, Loss of Normandy, p. 34. For a later claim that Richard had introduced an English custom of wardship into Gascony, see Frédéric Boutoulle, ‘La Gascogne sous les premiers Plantagenêt (1154–99)’, in M. Aurell and N. Y. Tonnerre (eds.), Plantagenêts et Capétiens: confrontations et heritages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), p. 310. John of Marmoutier (Tours), writing c.1170, claimed that Geoffrey Plantagenet advised his son not to introduce Norman or English customs into Anjou or vice versa. John presumably believed that either such introductions had already occurred or were likely to occur, and he disapproved (Gillingham, Angevin empire, pp. 80–5).

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political scene. Some historians, indeed, have denied that it was an empire on the grounds that ‘there were no institutions that gave this conglomeration of territories any coherence’.33 The core–periphery model, however, allows for varying degrees of bureaucratization in the different parts of the empire. Even within Britain, the king of England’s power was relatively weak in the northern and western border zones.34 On the continent, the immensely long eastern frontier inevitably posed much greater problems. It has been said that ‘the constant appeals of the barons of Berri and Auvergne to the French king were a permanent source of weakness to the duke of Aquitaine’.35 But it could equally be said that these same barons’ constant requests for help to the duke of Aquitaine were a source of weakness to the king of France. Henry and his sons ruled territories which, as Jean-Philippe Genet remarks, ‘were much more extended than those of the Capetians, and hardly less homogeneous’.36 Other historians have assumed that Henry and his sons cannot be regarded as ‘imperial’ rulers because they owed homage to the king of France for their lands in France. But too much is made of their ‘subordinate status’.37 Formal allegiances do not always count for much. The English East India Company was to pay obeisance to the Mughal emperors even while it was undermining their empire.38 True, in 1202–4 John lost Greater Anjou, Normandy and much of Poitou to the armies of Philip II, and the formal relationship between them meant that it was easy for the king of France to justify invasion on the grounds that he was disciplining a recalcitrant subject. But a king of France who could prepare to invade a separate kingdom such as England, as Philip did in 1213, 33

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Everard and Holt, Jersey 1204, pp. 23–4. The clear conclusion of a conference held at Fontevraud in 1986 was that there was no Plantagenet empire; it is permissible to speak of ‘l’espace Plantagenêt’, but that is all (R. H. Bautier, ‘Conclusions. “Empire Plantagenêt” ou “espace Plantagenêt”?’, Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 29 (1986), 139–47). For incisive comment, see Jean Dunbabin, France in the making, 843–1180, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. xxv–xxvi. M. Lieberman, The medieval march of Wales: the creation and perception of a frontier, 1066–1283 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For a ‘far northern’ case study, see Keith J. Stringer, ‘Nobility and identity in medieval Britain and Ireland: the de Vescy family, c.1120–1314’, in Brendan Smith (ed.), Britain and Ireland, 900–1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 199–239. Powicke, Loss of Normandy, p. 20. Carefully analyzed in D. Power, The Norman frontier in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). J.-P. Genet, ‘Histoire politique anglaise, histoire politique française’, in F. Autrand et al. (eds.), Saint-Denis et la royauté (Paris: Sorbonne, 1999), pp. 621–36, 622 (Fr. ils étaient alors beaucoup plus étendus que ceux du Capétien, et guère moins homogènes). At the time, Capetian France was less than a quarter the size of the Plantagenet dominions. Aurell, L’empire Plantagenêt, pp. 18, 138–44. The argument relies a good deal on J. F. Lemarignier’s influential study, Recherches sur l’hommage en marche et les frontières féodales (Lille: Bibliothèque universitaire, 1945), on which see John Gillingham, ‘Doing homage to the king of France’, in C. Harper-Bill and N. Vincent (eds.), Henry II: new interpretations (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), pp. 63–84, 64–7. A point I owe to the kindness of Peter Crooks.

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did not have to be John’s overlord to seize any convenient opportunity to attack. In reality, in terms of their control of the political and fiscal levers of power within their own lands, there was nothing that Henry II and Richard I were prevented from doing by the formalities of their relationship with the king of France. Indeed at times the question was not so much whether the French king would threaten the Plantagenet lands, but whether the Plantagenets might swallow up the whole of France. ‘Paris was increasingly a frontier city, encircled to the north, west and south by Henry II and his allies.’39 John lost the war that broke out in 1202 not because he had done homage to Philip II (as he had in 1200), but because by his treatment of his prisoners of war (most notoriously Arthur of Brittany), he threw away a winning hand. Had it not been for John’s incompetence, the heart would not have been torn out of the dynastic lands, and the passage of time would have lent the empire greater territorial stability. John’s son and successor as king of England, Henry III (r. 1216–72), succeeded to the whole that remained and, in 1254, made a grant of all the overseas dominions, Ireland, Gascony, Oléron and the Channel Islands to his own heir, later King Edward I (r. 1272–1307), ‘in such manner that the said lands may never be separated from the crown . . . but should remain to the king of England for ever’.40 Although not as short-lived as the Napoleonic empire discussed by Michael Broers (Chapter 14), in conventional historiography the Angevin empire’s role has been to disappear from the stage so that France and England could achieve their manifest destinies: in the case of France to become a hexagon ruled from Paris, in the case of England to establish an empire in Britain and Ireland.41 ‘What distinguished the Angevin empire from others’, says Jean Dunbabin, ‘was simply that it did not last long enough to acquire a justifying ideology.’42 Yet for a few short years in and after 1199, the sharp increase in the survival rate 39

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As late as 1198, Richard I’s troops were threatening the suburbs of Paris (Vincent, Brief history, pp. 217–18). For the view that the territories ruled by Henry II ‘could have created a lasting empire that either dwarfed France, absorbed it or annexed it outright’, see Geoffrey Koziol, ‘Political culture’, in Marcus Bull (ed.), France in the central Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 44. It may be that a Capetian discourse of hierarchy was developed in response to the threat posed by Angevin power (Bernd Schneidmüller, Nomen Patriae: Die Entstehung Frankreichs in der politisch-geographischen Terminologie (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke Verlag, 1987), pp. 228f). J. R. Studd, ‘The Lord Edward and Henry III’, BIHR 50 (1977), 4–19. For developments after the Treaty of Paris (1259), see Crooks (Chapter 11, pp. 259–64). Not that it was inevitable that France would be ruled from Paris (Powicke, Loss of Normandy, pp. 9–12). Because kings of England before 1066 had already claimed to be emperors of Britain, later historians could represent the loss of French territories as a return to the proper course of English history. For an interpretation of the pre-1066 evidence, see G. Molyneaux, ‘Why were some tenth-century English kings presented as rulers of Britain?’, TRHS, 6th series 21 (2011), 59–91. Dunbabin, France in the making, p. 346. See also Fanny Madeline, Les Plantagenêts et leur empire: construire un territoire politique (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014).

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of outgoing documents allows us to catch a glimpse of the central writing office at work while the empire was still at its height, and as it collapsed.43 III

Administering the Empire The administrations of the major constituent parts of the empire were headed by seneschals in Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine, and by justiciars in England and Ireland. Below them were the local officials: baillis, vicomtes and prévôts and sheriffs and reeves. Some developments make sense in provincial terms.44 In England, for example, the Normans established the exchequer on the foundations of the pre-1066 administrative system, which was notably well developed in fiscal and monetary aspects. English exchequer records – the records of audits of sheriffs and others before the exchequer court – survive from the 1120s, and then in a virtually unbroken series from 1155–6 (2 Henry II) until 1832.45 Supervising and coordinating the whole, the king and his court (L. curia) incessantly travelled the length and breadth of his dominions, from Alnwick, Bamburgh and Carlisle in the north to Agen, Bordeaux and Condom in the south. Wherever the king went, some of his clerks, as part of the royal household, went with him. Indeed it has been plausibly argued that the curious and user-unfriendly form of the registers – not books as elsewhere in Europe, but rolls (that is, membranes of parchment sewn end to end and rolled up) – was a product of that incessant travel.46 More indispensable than parchment were the carts loaded with treasure, especially silver in the form of pennies accounted for by clerks attached to the household financial office, the chamber.47 To facilitate this, money was stored in castle treasuries under chamber control.48 Not surprisingly, Henry II, 43 44

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A detailed study of this subject remains to be undertaken. Hence it is the government of England, not of the wider Angevin dynastic empire, which is at issue in Thomas N. Bisson’s controversial and wide-ranging comparative study, The crisis of the twelfth century: power, lordship and the origins of European government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). On the earliest fragment, see M. Hagger, ‘A pipe roll for 25 Henry I’, EHR 122:495 (2007), 133–40. ‘The one obvious advantage of rolls over books is their lack of binding which in turn can greatly reduce their weight’: this alone might have dictated their form (Vincent, ‘Why 1199?’, p. 42). Presumably this had also applied to the itinerant early exchequer and its pipe rolls. By King John’s time, the two departments used different forms of roll, and once established ‘bureaucracy ensured that they remained unchanged for centuries’ (Clanchy, Memory, p. 141). Their close proximity to the king meant that chamber clerks could make good careers, the classic example being Peter des Roches (d. 1238), later bishop of Winchester and a key figure in English politics from 1205 to 1238, on whom see N. Vincent, Peter des Roches: an alien in English politics, 1205–38 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 19–25. R. A. Brown, ‘The treasury of the later twelfth century’, in J. C. Davies (ed.), Studies presented to Sir Hilary Jenkinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), pp. 35–49.

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Richard I and King John all spent much more time within the core areas, where their castle treasuries were, than in the periphery.49 The chamber was more flexible and convenient than the increasingly bureaucratic exchequers of England and Normandy.50 Not that the chamber was entirely unaffected by the bureaucratic impulse, but the earliest surviving substantial chamber records postdate the collapse of John’s empire in 1203–4. They relate to years (1209–10 and 1212–13) when the king’s itinerary was limited to England, and so they throw no direct light on the government of the empire at its height.51 For the earlier period, with the exception of one small fragment, historians have to glean what they can from references to the chamber in other records, notably the chancery rolls.52 The early close rolls contain numerous letters from the king to exchequer officials acknowledging the receipt of large sums in the chamber.53 In some ways, indeed, the earliest chancery rolls are more revealing than later ones. Although they seem to have been established to register types of outgoing documents for which there was a predictable need, such as charters, letters patent of protection and writs with implication for expenditure and audit, in fact the earliest patent rolls contain many letters dealing with the unpredictable and sensitive business of high politics and diplomacy.54 Moreover the king’s clerks sometimes used the back or ‘dorse’ of the early rolls to make copies of, or 49

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For example, Henry II went to Gascony in 1156, 1159, 1161 and 1169, not thereafter. Richard as king went there only twice, both times in 1190, before his departure on crusade. John made three visits to Gascony, the first lasting about a month in summer 1200, the second a month in summer 1206, then a week in 1214 – in total about the same amount of time that he spent, as king, in Ireland. A point emphasized in H.G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, The governance of medieval England (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1963), esp. chs. 11–13. It obviously suited kings that a great part of their revenues was not audited at exchequer: the foresters (officers having charge of the royal forest), for example, were not called to account, nor were the collectors of customs duties or of extraordinary taxes such as the Saladin Tithe, the aids to raise Richard I’s ransom, and the levy of a ‘seventh’ which John imposed in 1207. Rot. lib., pp. 109–71; Rotulus Misae, in Documents illustrative of English history in the 13th and 14th centuries, ed. H. Cole (London: Eyre and Spottiswode, 1844), pp. 231–75. For a brief discussion of these and other records of royal expenditure, see John Gillingham, ‘Wirtschaftlichkeit oder Ehre? Die Ausgaben der englischen Könige im 12. und frühen 13. Jahrhundert’, in W. Paravicini (ed.), Luxus und Integration. Materielle Hofkultur Westeuropas vom 12. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2010), pp. 151–67. For that fragment, see Miscellaneous records of the Norman exchequer, 1199–1204, ed. S. R. Packard (Northampton, MA: Smith College Studies in History, vol. xii, 1926–7), pp. 67–9. For example, Rot. norm., p. 36; Rot. lib., pp. 43, 46, 48, 61–3, 102. To this extent, I think Richardson was wrong to lump patent rolls together with charter rolls as affecting private, as opposed to royal, interests (Memoranda roll, p. xliii). In this context, letters of protection given to foreign envoys or to the king’s servants while on his business need to be distinguished from routine letters of protection given to petitioners. When the king was in England, the clerks used the dorse of the first charter roll primarily to record routine letters patent; by contrast when he was on the continent, they used it primarily for matters of diplomatic, military and political moment, with at least as many relating to the affairs of Aquitaine as to Normandy.

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memoranda relating to, documents of special interest to themselves or to the king.55 One effect of the ‘record revolution’ of 1199 is to transform our understanding of what the chancery did, and for whom. As counted by J. C. Holt in 1996, no less than 88 per cent of Henry II’s letters and charters had been for ecclesiastical beneficiaries. By contrast, two-thirds of the beneficiaries registered in the charter roll for 1199–1200 were laypeople.56 We might well have suspected that a higher proportion of Henry II’s acts in favour of the laity had been lost; equally we might have assumed that the 88 per cent reflected the well-known ‘fact’ that in the ‘Middle Ages’ the written word was the preserve of the clergy. Only the existence of the charter roll makes it possible to see which is the better interpretation. Another revealing piece of chancery arithmetic is this: of the 1,300 documents recorded in the rolls of 1204–5, 116 were charters, 280 were letters patent, and about 940 were letters close.57 No doubt even before 1199, chancery clerks wrote many more letters close than charters and letters patent, but the writs and letters which survive from that period give exactly the opposite impression. Virtually all of them are charters or letters patent preserved because they were valued by the beneficiaries who had in most cases petitioned the king for them.58 It is perfectly true to say of government in Henry II’s reign that ‘the whole system as reflected in the surviving writs and charters was demand-led’.59 But it is equally true to say that the surviving writs and charters do not reflect the whole system. Similarly after 1199: the charter and patent rolls on the whole – though with the proviso about the earliest rolls noted earlier – show the king responding to demand. Any analysis which is based on a count of demand-led documents such as charters, the bulk of which relate to private, as opposed to royal, interests, runs the danger of underestimating the degree and the direction of the king’s initiatives in the administration of his empire.60 By contrast, enrolled letters close were orders sent to provincial and local officials and can tell us significantly more about initiatives 55

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For example, notes showing that the ‘original’ copies of important treaties were sent for safe keeping to the treasury at Caen or London (Rot chart., p. 58, Rot. norm., p. 37); and ordering the seneschals of Normandy and Poitou/Gascony to confiscate the fees of those knights who had not obeyed the summons to attack the Lusignans in the spring of 1201 (Rot. chart., p. 102). J. C. Holt, ‘The writs of Henry II’, PBA 89 (1996), 47–64, 59–61. Vincent, ‘Why 1199?’, p. 35; Carpenter, ‘In testimonium’, pp. 15–16; and see also Carpenter on the difficulties of counting entries on the rolls in Carpenter, ‘In testimonium’, p. 14 n. 69 (with which I entirely concur). The scale of chancery fees set down on 7 June 1199 is indicative of those documents which beneficiaries valued most: 2 shillings for a letter patent of protection, 18 shillings and 4d for a charter of confirmation, 12 marks 5 shillings for a charter making a new grant (Foedera, vol. i, part 1, pp. 75–6). The fees went to the chancellor and other chancery officials. Holt, ‘The writs of Henry II’, 59. See, for example, J. C. Holt, ‘The end of the Anglo-Norman realm’, PBA (1975), 10–11.

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taken at the centre.61 Unlike both charters and letters patent, which were registered on a single roll for the whole empire, at the start of John’s reign two separate rolls were maintained for letters close: one for English, Welsh and Irish business; the other, known by the shorthand name ‘Norman’ roll, for his continental dominions.62 At the heart of the bureaucratic ‘machine’, the Angevin empire was perceived as a political body with two halves.63 IV

Close Rolls and Exchequers Some letters close ordered officials to put individuals in possession of property, usually on a short-term recoverable basis.64 An even greater number relate to the management of royal finance. They either ordered payments to be made or pardoned or ensured that local officials would receive due allowance at audit for money which they had either already spent or were now being instructed to spend.65 About two-thirds of the writs recorded on the extant fragments of the earliest English close roll fall into this category.66 But once the orders had been executed and the costs incurred accounted for, there was no real point in any of the recipients keeping these administrative writs any longer, and as a result very few survive from before 1200. From the whole of Henry II’s reign, only six financial writs of this type are known.67 Yet exchequer records from Henry II’s reign indicate that in any one year of account, several or many hundred financial writs must have been issued in chancery and accounted for at, or delivered to, the English and Norman exchequers. Indeed, letters close were ‘so light that a single messenger could carry hundreds at a time’.68 But however 61

62 63 64

65 66 67 68

Hence – though with a touch of exaggeration – ‘it was through letters close more than anything else that England and the continental dominions were governed’ (Carpenter, ‘In testimonium’, p. 3). For further discussion of the Norman rolls, see pp. 213–16. Gillingham, Angevin empire, p. 71. In years of great turmoil such as 1203–4, this category was considerably enlarged because John, having been betrayed, as he saw it, by the landholders of Normandy and Anjou, was now claiming to confiscate estates and grant them to others (Carpenter, ‘In Testimonium’, pp. 15–16). Richardson, Memoranda roll, pp. xxxiv–xxxv. Carpenter, ‘In testimonium’, pp. 13–14. The fine rolls too were maintained primarily for the king’s financial advantage. Vincent, ‘Why 1199?’, p. 29. Galbraith, Studies, pp. 72–3. The fact that John’s chancery employed messengers who were paid money wages (Mary C. Hill, The king’s messengers, 1199–1377 (London: Athlone, 1961), pp. 8–14, 46) calls to mind the argument that throughout much of late twelfthcentury Europe, a surge in the money supply ‘allowed for a revolution in the government of states’ because it gave rulers the possibility of ‘maintaining power by the payment of regular salaries in money, without prejudicing the future by grants of land to maintain officials or soldiers’ (Peter Spufford, Money and its use in medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 247).

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much allowance we try to make for documents which no longer exist, it is in practice hard not to be more impressed by the evidence which does survive than by that which does not. For this reason, the survival of the close rolls from 1200 onwards transforms the picture we have of the government at work. Proliferation of chancery records in general fits into a wider European pattern. Other European rulers, notably the Capetian kings of France and the popes (rulers over utterly different types of polities) also began at about the same time either to record or more systematically to preserve outgoing letters. But whereas other polities tended to confine registration to documents of predictably long-term importance, the Angevin chancery chose to register great quantities of administrative and financial ephemera, above all in the close rolls. To account for this, Vincent has proposed two possible lines of explanation. One emphasizes the imperial dimension, the other the Englishness of the development. The first argues that it was not just a consequence of the sheer extent and diversity of the Angevin dominions but rather this in combination with ‘the costs and administrative strain’ incurred ‘in waging near constant warfare against neighbouring rulers in France, Wales, Scotland and Ireland’.69 A problem here is that the contemporary German kings and emperors, who tried to rule a far greater and more diverse assemblage of lands on both sides of the Alps and who also waged near-permanent war in Italy or along the eastern frontier, did so apparently without the need for records as elaborate as those of the Angevins.70 In all probability, the first line of explanation needs to be combined with the second: the inheritance from the Anglo-Saxon past. The making of the kingdom of England as a result of the West Saxon conquests of Mercia, East Anglia and Northumbria in the tenth century was followed in the eleventh century first by the Danish (1016) and then by the Norman (1066) conquests of this recently created polity. This meant that England became an unusually tightly-governed realm.71 In fiscal terms, this resulted in what Michael Clanchy characterized as ‘a bureaucracy unprecedented since the fall of the Roman Empire’.72 By the late 1170s, when the royal administrator Richard fitz Nigel (d. 1198) composed the self-consciously innovative treatise entitled the Dialogue of the exchequer (L. Dialogus de scaccario), the treasury can indeed be regarded as a bureaucratic office.73 Richard’s words show that those who worked in the treasury were aware that they were in an institution with a history behind it, an institution which 69 70 71 72 73

Vincent, ‘Why 1199?’, pp. 19–20. For the political development of the medieval Reich in this period, see Scales (Chapter 10, pp. 225–7). On what had been achieved by 1066, see James Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon state (London: Hambledon, 2000). Clanchy, Memory, p. 18. Hence Clanchy’s judgement that in England ‘bureaucracy begins with the pipe rolls of the twelfth-century Exchequer’ (Clanchy, Memory, pp. 35, 66–8).

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followed strict rules both in its proceedings and in the production of the record of those proceedings, a record kept in duplicate or triplicate.74 He called these rules ‘the laws of the exchequer’, and knowledge of them the sciencia de scaccario. In his eyes, he and his fellows followed a high calling. Knowing that ‘the power of kings rises and falls as their supply of money flows and ebbs’, they served them by giving ‘anxious care to the collection, keeping, distribution of and accounting for the money on which the security of the realm depends.’75 Kings, no doubt, were inclined to agree. The Norman poet Wace (d. c.1180) portrayed Duke Richard II of Normandy (d. 1026) as an ideal ruler – ‘Richard the Good’ – and represented him retreating to a quiet place every year to spend a week going over his accounts.76 In England, a bureaucratic system – what David Carpenter calls ‘a workedout system for passing knowledge’ between the king’s court and the exchequer – clearly predated 1199.77 A passage in the Dialogue of the exchequer indicates that counterparts of writs authorizing expenditure were kept in court (that is, by the chancery) until they were sent to the exchequer to authenticate claims made by officials: ‘The clerk of the constabulary is sent by the king to the exchequer at each term, with the counterparts or counter-writs (L. contrabrevia) of those writs which were issued in the king’s court.’78 Given that there was a Norman exchequer by the 1170s, the system presumably existed there too.79 But the system itself and the precise form of the records of the system are different. The system as operated before 1200 need not have been based on the enrolment of letters close. Chancery counter-writs could have been kept on file, each one on its own piece of parchment held together by cord, as the early files of other chancery documents seem to have been.80 No doubt such files would have been fragile; so had there been such a system, it would probably have made sense to switch to a more manageable method at some stage. But when? In 1200, the year of the earliest close rolls to 74

75 76 77 79

80

On Richard’s sense of history, see John Hudson, ‘Administration, family and perceptions of the past in late twelfth-century England: Richard FitzNigel and the Dialogue of the Exchequer’, in The perception of the past in twelfth-century Europe, ed. Paul Magdalino (London: Hambledon, 1992), pp. 75–98. Richard FitzNigel, Dialogus de Scaccaario, ed. C. Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 1–3, 5, 62. Wace, The Roman de Rou, trans. G. S. Burgess (Jersey: Société jersiaise, 2002), pp. 148–9. 78 Carpenter, ‘In testimonium’, p. 7. FitzNigel, Dialogus, p. 34. In May 1204, John ordered that the Norman archives should be sent from Caen to London, hence the survival in TNA of exchequer records for a few years between 1180 and 1202. Research suggests that the differences between the English and Norman exchequers may be less than traditionally supposed (V. Moss, ‘A new edition of the Norman pipe rolls’, Tabularia 6 (2006), 25–32). For discussion of the interrelationship between the chancery filing system and the enrolment of letters close in a later, and notably more bureaucratic, period, see R. F. Hunnisett, ‘English chancery records: rolls and files’, Journal of the Society of Archivists 5:3 (1975), 158–70.

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survive? Or earlier – even much earlier?81 The argument that counterparts of his financial writs should be kept as carefully as possible until they were needed would have made good sense to Wace’s ‘Richard the Good’. On this no certainty is possible, but it is worth noting that in June 1199 the newly appointed chancellor carried out an overhaul of chancery practice, laying down what fees were to be charged for the issuing (though not, let it be noted, the enrolment) of charters and letters patent.82 That chancellor was the archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter (d. 1205), an Englishman educated, as one of his critics put it, ‘in court and at the exchequer’. As chief justiciar (that is, head of government in England in the king’s absence) from 1194 until 1198, he had presided over the exchequer court for four of the previous five years. He was demonstrably interested in administrative innovation.83 He was also, as archbishop of Canterbury and papal legate, a political heavyweight. When he died in 1205, John was said to have remarked: ‘Now I am king at last.’84 Given Hubert Walter’s years of exchequer experience, it is likely that communication between court and exchequer would have been a particular concern of the new chancellor – which does at least suggest that the earliest close rolls to survive, the English and ‘Norman’ rolls for 2 John (1200–1), are unlikely to have been the first ones drawn up. It is certain that some of the early close rolls of John’s reign have been lost.85 Consequently, although the first chancery roll to survive is the charter roll for 1 John (1199–1200), it is quite possible that the close rolls went back at least as far. V

The ‘Norman’ Rolls Partly because the chancery rolls have been seen as quintessentially English, which at this stage they were not, analysis of the earliest close rolls has hitherto 81

82 83

84 85

As argued by Carpenter, ‘In testimonium’, p. 20. I am very grateful to David Carpenter for discussion. Contrast the opinion of Nicholas Vincent: ‘[A]fter 1199 the system was expanded . . . to include not only charters but letters patent and letters close’ (Vincent, ‘Why 1199?’, p. 43). Foedera, vol. i, part 1, p. 76. Since the charter roll for most of June 1199 is missing, the record survives only in Canterbury archives. On 15 July 1195, he had ordered that the terms of the settlement of dispute should be recorded in triplicate so that the third copy could be placed in the treasury (Clanchy, Memory, pp. 68–9). In 1194, he ordered the appointment of coroners in each county who were to make a roll recording crown pleas; the earliest extant plea rolls, recording cases before the king’s justices on eyre and at Westminster, date from that same year. The earliest known fine roll (for 1195–6) was his work (Carpenter, ‘In testimonium’, p. 7). Richardson suggested that the close rolls were devised at the same time as the fine rolls (Memoranda roll, p. xxxv). Matthew Paris, Historia Anglorum, ed. F. Madden, 2 vols. (London: RS, 1866–9), vol. ii, p. 104. The Norman roll for 4 John (1202–3) and the English roll for 5 John (1203–4).

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been principally devoted to the English ones.86 By contrast, the ‘Norman’ close rolls have been largely ignored – even though until December 1203 the king himself spent the bulk of his time in France, more than three and a half of the first four and a half years of his reign.87 This is certainly not the place for a detailed analysis of the extant Norman close rolls, those for the second, fourth and fifth years of John’s reign, but a few points are worth making. The range of business in them is similar to that on the English close rolls. Of the 99 items on the face of the earliest Norman roll (for 2 John), 79 dealt with money matters and 17 ordered local officials to put individuals in possession of lands.88 But in another respect, the two are very different. In the English close rolls, Ireland and Wales get scant notice indeed; 97 per cent of the entries deal with England.89 By contrast, although approximately 75 per cent of the entries on the Norman roll relate to Normandy – hence ‘Norman Roll’ was a contemporary office shorthand label90 – 25 per cent do not. The full label was ‘Roll of copies of writs and of delivery of land for Normandy, Anjou and Poitou’.91 Out of the total of 106 entries (including those on the dorse) on the roll for 2 John, 77 relate to Normandy, 21 to Anjou and 8 to Poitou. Like the seneschal of Normandy, the seneschals of Anjou and Poitou had staffs capable of auditing accounts.92 On 6 August 1200, for example, John sent a writ from Condom instructing the seneschal of Anjou, William des Roches, to make immediate payment, presumably out of a treasury at Chinon, of half the annual fees he had just granted to Eudes de Pons and Eudes des Martigny.93 A few weeks later, he ordered the seneschal of Poitou to pay Savari de Mauléon 200 livres angevines ‘at our Exchequer from the fee we have given him’. Other evidence suggests that La Rochelle was the principal hometown of the exchequer for Poitou.94 86 87

88 89

90 92

93

94

Carpenter ‘In testimonium’, pp. 12–17, though see also ibid., p. 5 n. 18. He was crowned king at Westminster on Ascension day (27 May) 1199. He was in France from the end of June 1199 to the end of February 1200 (8 months), from May to September 1200 (5 months), from June 1201 until early December 1203 (30 months): 43 months out of 54. Of this 4 weeks in Gascony in summer 1200. As with the English close rolls, the losing war with Philip Augustus led to an increasing number of grants of ‘traitors’ estates’ on the Norman rolls for the fourth and fifth years of the reign. Out of a total of about 740 entries on the first three English rolls (for the second, third and fifth years of John’s reign), only 17 relate to Wales and Ireland (mostly Ireland). Additionally one entry for Ireland was mistakenly entered on a Norman roll (Rot. norm., p. 77). Rot. lib., p. 16. 91 Rot. norm., p. 45. It was evidently on this basis that in August 1204 the victorious Philip Augustus assumed that the seneschals of Poitou and Anjou might be asked to impose and account for taxes on both Christians and Jews and were entitled to an annual payment of 50 livres and a mark of silver from each prévôté within their jurisdiction (Recueil des actes de Philippe Auguste, vol. ii, ed. H.-F. Delaborde and C. Petit-Dutaillis (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1943), nos. 829–30). Rot. norm., p. 28. For the treasury at Chinon and coordination with the chamber, see ibid., p. 29. On this roll, sixteen writs were addressed to William des Roches, and a letter to him was entered by mistake on an English close roll (Rot. lib., p. 11). Rot. norm., pp. 28, 61. See also other evidence, for example, Rot. litt. pat., p. 25, for La Rochelle as a financial centre.

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Marginal headings on the close rolls were presumably intended to help clerks searching them. These headings indicate either type of business such as ‘land grant’ or place such as ‘Normandy’, ‘Anjou’ and ‘Poitou’. Gascony, however, never appears as a heading in the extant Norman rolls. By contrast, there was a heading for Angoulême, the county which John acquired by virtue of his marriage to the heiress in August 1200.95 It does not appear that the absence of Gascony from the close rolls is just a case of ‘Poitou’ being office-speak for the whole of Aquitaine including Gascony. None of the eight items headed Poitou in 2 John deals with Gascon business, and only one of the fourteen items so headed in 4 John.96 Entries on the charter and patent rolls show that there were seneschals for Gascony in these years.97 But no seneschal of Gascony ever appears in the close rolls. Geoffrey de la Celle was referred to as seneschal of Poitou and Gascony in a charter roll for March 1201 but appears in the close roll only as seneschal of Poitou.98 Robert of Thurnham was specifically appointed by letter patent as seneschal of Poitou and Gascony. But only one of the eleven references to him in the close roll gives him that title; in the other ten, he is seneschal of Poitou.99 Politically, as recent work by Nicholas Vincent has shown, Gascony undoubtedly remained important in the king’s eyes.100 In the bureaucratic routine of the close rolls, however, it barely existed.101 When war broke out in 1202, the routine government of the empire began to fall apart. The last letter sent to the seneschal of Poitou and enrolled on the close roll was dated 13 December 1202.102 Links of a sort were maintained. On 16 April 1203, a letter patent to Queen Eleanor; the archbishop of Bordeaux; and the seneschals of Gascony, Poitou and Anjou accompanied an envoy who was to tell them how matters stood with the king (who was then at Falaise in Normandy).103 Nothing more plainly reveals the extent to which bureaucratic ties had broken down. Thus out of approximately 180 entries on the face of the 95 96

97 98 99 100

101 102 103

Rot. norm., p. 54. This was an assignment of 40 livres on the salt custom at Bordeaux (Rot. norm., p. 54). The reference to payment of 300 livres to a Gascon viscount in summer 1202 seems to be a ruleproving exception since that payment was made from the Norman treasury (ibid., p. 60). Rot. chart., pp. 35, 58 (dorse); Rot. litt. pat., pp. 21, 23. Rot. chart., p. 102b; Rot. norm., pp. 28, 34. Rot. litt. pat., p. 2; Rot. norm., pp. 46–7, 48, 52 (bis), 54, 56, 61, 64 (bis), 65. N. Vincent, ‘The Plantagenets and the Agenais (1150–1250)’, in M. Aurell and F. Boutoulle (eds.), Les seigneuries dans l’espace Plantagenêt (c.1150–c.1250) (Bordeaux: Ausonius, 2009), developed in N. Vincent, ‘Jean sans terre et les origines de la Gascogne anglaise: droits et pouvoirs dans les arcanes des sources’, Annales du Midi 123 (2011), 533–66, and slightly modified in N. Vincent, ‘Plantagenet Gascony, 1154–1204: an empire of memory?’ (forthcoming). It figures principally as a place in which armies were raised or sent (Rot. norm., pp. 31, 88, 92, 105). By contrast, letters patent continued to be dispatched to the seneschal of Poitou until July 1203, after which the silence of the rolls implies a long gap in communication until 8 August 1204. Rot. litt. pat., p. 28.

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Norman roll for 5 John (1203–4), not a single one relates to Poitou, and only three, all in August 1203, relate to Anjou; the rest dealt with Norman affairs.104 The last datable entry on the roll, for 5 December 1203, relates to the day before John’s departure for England, never to return to Normandy. The Norman close roll was then in effect shut down. From that day on, there would be just one close roll for what remained of the Angevin empire.105 VI

Bureaucracy on Behalf of the Subject That England was the most bureaucratically governed part of the Angevin empire is clear.106 By the 1180s, the development of the common law meant that routine writs of justice could be obtained from a branch of chancery settled permanently at Westminster, no matter where the king or his representative in England, the justiciar, happened to be.107 These routine writs represented the chancery side of a more ‘automated’, more predictable and more widely available provision of royal justice at the assizes held by itinerant judges.108 Court verdicts still had to be enforced, of course, which was not always a straightforward matter even in much-governed England.109 Nonetheless, this was a service to the king’s landholding subjects, and one which was appreciated, as can be seen from the demand in clause 18 of Magna Carta (1215) that justices should visit each county four times a year. It was also convenient for English landholders that copies of charters and other records of title, such as tripartite final concords, were kept not by the itinerant chancery, but in a fixed place such as the treasury, as was the case from, at the latest, the mid-1190s.110 Consequently, it is not surprising that King John’s 104 105 106

107

108

109 110

Rot. norm., pp. 101–2. Although a writ sent from Southampton to the seneschal of Normandy on 15 May 1204 and entered on the dorse of the roll implies that John was planning to return (Rot. norm., p. 121). In England, it was not only kings who adopted more bureaucratic systems from the late twelfth century onwards, so also did the lords of great estates who switched to methods of direct management employing unprecedented numbers of literate and numerate personnel. See Scott Waugh, ‘Tenure to contract: lordship and clientage in thirteenth-century England’, EHR 101:401 (1986), 811–39. At about the same time, a group of judges began to hear civil litigation in a central court at Westminster. By 1200, the volume of litigation there led to the emergence of professional lawyers – attorneys who for a fee were willing to represent any client. The law book, written in the late 1180s and long attributed to Ranulf Glanvill, is in effect a register of writs, describing the various forms of writs and the procedures to be followed in each case (Vincent, ‘Why 1199?’, pp. 32–3). For a case in point, see Gillingham, Angevin empire, p. 56. On the treasury cartae antiquae rolls, see Vincent, ‘Why 1199?’, pp. 37–9. On the feet of final concords kept in the treasury from 1195 onwards, see Clanchy, Memory, pp. 67–8. Cf. Carpenter, ‘In testimonium’, pp. 25–6.

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English subjects, far more than any of his French, Welsh or Irish subjects, looked to him to obtain written authorization of their property rights and privileges. Holt calculated that no less than 70 per cent of the entries on the charter roll for 1199–1200 concerned England (despite the fact that John was mostly in France), 13 per cent Normandy, 11 per cent the rest of Angevin France and 6 per cent Wales and Ireland.111 That his Norman subjects ‘came second’ is equally unsurprising. At the highest social level, there were still many landowners with estates in both England and Normandy. Supposedly ‘English’ administrative forms were to be found in Normandy too: the emergence of standardized writs, assizes held by itinerant judges and copies of ducal and other charters (including final concords) kept on exchequer rolls.112 There is little sign of anything similar farther south.113 Of all the continental provinces, Normandy was undoubtedly the most bureaucratically governed.114 As the close rolls show, Gascony was the one least bureaucratically integrated into the whole. Yet Normandy was lost in 1203–4, while Gascony stayed. The contrast can in part be explained by the fact that it was against Normandy, and to a lesser extent against Anjou, that Philip II concentrated his attack in 1203–4. To a king whose capital was Paris, control of the lower Seine valley was strategically vital, and Gascony was far away. But it was not quite as straightforward as that. Following the death in 1204 of King John’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, most of the lords, prelates and towns of inland Poitou acknowledged King Philip II’s lordship, while the seaports of La Rochelle and Oléron remained loyal to John.115 Farther south, Alfonso of Castile claimed Gascony, won some bishops and nobles to his cause, then 111

112

113 114 115

Holt, ‘The writs of Henry II’, 59–61. It is not evident why Holt based his calculations on a total of 493 entries. I count about 460 entries on the face of the roll and 106 on the dorse. Vincent ‘s total is ‘quelque 560’ (Vincent, ‘Jean sans terre’, 547). Recent work by Daniel Power supersedes all previous studies of the administrative and social structure of Angevin Normandy: Power, ‘En quête de sécurité juridique dans la Normandie angevine: concorde finale et inscription au rouleau’, Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 168 (2010), 327–71; Power, ‘Henry, duke of the Normans (1149/50–1189)’, in Harper-Bill and Vincent (eds.), Henry II: new interpretations, pp. 85–128; Power, ‘Les dernières années du régime angevin en Normandie’, in Aurell and Tonnerre (eds.), Plantagenêts et Capétiens, pp. 163–92, esp. pp. 170–92. For an earlier, but still useful, summary of his views, see Power, ‘Angevin Normandy’, in C. Harper-Bill and E. van Houts (eds.), A companion to the AngloNorman world (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), pp. 69–71. Vincent, ‘Jean sans terre’, 559–63. But for a refutation of the view that c.1200 Normandy was being governed by Englishmen, see Power, ‘Les dernières années’, pp. 175–9. On the stout resistance of La Rochelle, see Ralph of Coggeshall, Chronicon Anglicanum, ed. J. Stevenson (London: RS, 1875), p. 146. Niort fell but was soon recovered. In return for their loyalty, these urban communities were granted a degree of self-government: Georges Pon and Yves Chauvin, ‘Chartes de libertés et de communes de l’Angoumois, du Poitou et de la Saintonge’, Mémoires de la société des antiquaires de l’ouest, 5th series, 8 (2002), 25–149.

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invaded and besieged Bordeaux.116 Here too it was the ports, principally Bayonne and Bordeaux, which stood firm. As is plainly shown by the many letters of protection, safe conduct and exemption from paying ‘our [that is, the king of England’s] customs’ enrolled on the chancery rolls, the Angevin empire was not merely a bundle of territories brought together by dynastic accident and Henry II’s ambition; it was also a commercial, seaborne empire held together by the mutual interest of a number of complementary – and increasingly interdependent – economies.117 In the eyes of merchants, it was a unified governmental structure which offered the benefits of relative political stability to an immense trading area. For the Gascons, especially the elite among them – winegrowers, merchants and mariners – the king of England was worth fighting for, not because his government was chaotic or inadequate, but because he offered them protected access to important markets in north-western Europe.118 In April 1205, John wrote to thank the townspeople of Bordeaux, Bazas, La Réole and Saint Emilion for their good service in saving Gascony.119 Although at that date the Castilian threat was still not over, he had at least correctly recognized that towns were the crucial glue. After the losses of 1203–4, the ports of western France were desperate to maintain their links with the government in England. Only loans from towns such as La Rochelle, Niort and Bordeaux prevented the complete collapse of ducal administration in Aquitaine during the impoverished minority of Henry III, who succeeded John as king in 1216 at the age of nine. In 1220, the mayor and commune of Niort wrote to Henry III: [O]n bended knee and with tears in our eyes we implore and beseech you in every way we can to send us a governor who will defend both us and your land . . . Do not appoint someone from around here as seneschal, but send us a noble, prudent and influential man from England.120 116 117

118 119

120

On this war, see N. Vincent, ‘A forgotten war: England and Navarre, 1243–4’, in B. Weiler (ed.), Thirteenth century England XI (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), pp. 109–46, 113–17. Gillingham, Angevin empire, pp. 61–6; Judith Everard, ‘Le duché de Bretagne et la politique Plantagenêt aux xiie et xiiie siècles: perspective maritime’, in Aurell and Tonnerre (eds.), Plantagenêts et Capétiens, pp. 193–210; A. F. O’Brien, ‘Commercial relations between Aquitaine and Ireland, c.1000–c.1500’, in J. M. Picard (ed.), Aquitaine and Ireland in the Middle Ages (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1995); John Gillingham, ‘Problems of integration within the lands ruled by the Norman and Angevin kings of England’, in Werner Maleczek (ed.), Fragen der politischen Integration im mittelalterlichen Europa (Ostfildern: Thorbecke Verlag, 2005), pp. 84–135, esp. the sections ‘A common market’ and ‘Monetary union?’ at pp. 123–30. This orthodoxy is substantially reinforced in Vincent, ‘Jean sans terre’. Rot. litt. pat., p. 52b. Archbishop Hélie of Bordeaux, who travelled to England and in 1204 raised substantial sums of money, also played an important role, as was recognized by the chronicler Ralph Coggeshall, Chronicon, pp. 146–7. In addition to the material in F. Boutoulle, ‘Hélie de Malemort, archevêque de Bordeaux: un prélat politique au service de Jean sans Terre, 1199–1207’, Revue historique de Bordeaux 3 (2004), 7–23, see also Rot lib., p. 102. W. W. Shirley (ed.), Royal and other letters illustrative of the reign of Henry III (London: RS, 1862), vol. i, pp. 95, 125–6.

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Yet when King Louis VIII of France (r. 1223–6) marched against La Rochelle and Niort in 1224, Henry III’s ministers did nothing. Gascony too would have fallen to French troops had not – once again – Bordeaux and Bayonne held out long enough for the English government, shocked into action, to send soldiers and money enough to expel them.121 Not until the 1450s would ‘English’ Gascony finally succumb to the forces of a king of France. If, on a cynical and/or realistic assessment of the purpose of government, the main point is to survive, then on the continent Gascony was by far the best-governed part of the Angevin empire. VII

Conclusion: Bureaucracy and Oppression The belief that there is a close correlation between bureaucracy and strong government has led to the widely held view that Angevin government was strong in England, quite strong in Normandy and then increasingly weak farther south. Yet there are signs that many people, then as now, found bureaucratic government irksome. The great rebellion against Henry II in 1173–4 found far more supporters in England and Normandy than in other, supposedly more anarchic, parts of the empire.122 Both in England and in Normandy, exchequers in their inquiries into, and records of, baronial landholding and financial resources could come to be seen as instruments of oppression.123 In an ordinance of 1201 tightening up procedures for collecting debts owed to the crown, ensuring lords’ liability if their stewards did not pay the sums due, and threatening imprisonment and loss of land, the phrase ‘according to the law of the exchequer’ (L. secundum legem scaccarii) was used five times in a short document (twentysix lines in the printed text).124 This ‘law of the exchequer’ was used to break the 121

122

123

124

In 1225, in return for the tax granted to finance this expedition, the government issued the versions of Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest which were to remain on the English statute book for centuries. Aquitaine, by contrast, became notoriously rebellious only after 1175 when Duke Richard (the future King Richard I), at his father’s command, embarked on a more interventionist policy (Gillingham, ‘Events and opinions’, in Bull and Léglu (eds.), World of Eleanor of Aquitaine, pp. 61–2). M. Billoré, ‘Y a t-il une oppression des Plantagenêt sur l’aristocratie en Normandie à la veille de 1204’, in Aurell and Tonnerre (eds.), Plantagenêts et Capétiens, pp. 145–6; N. Vincent, ‘Les Normands de l’entourage d’Henri II Plantagenêt’, in Pierre Bouet and Véronique Gazeau (eds.), La Normandie et l’Angleterre au Moyen Age (Caen: CRAHM, 2003), pp. 84–7. There is, on the other hand, despite what is sometimes alleged, little evidence to suggest that bishops felt oppressed by Angevin rule and in consequence welcomed a change of government (Gillingham, ‘Problems of integration’, pp. 118–23; Jörg Peltzer, ‘Les évêques de l’empire Plantagenêt et les rois angevins: un tour d’horizon’, in Aurell and Tonnerre (eds.), Plantagenêts et Capétiens, pp. 461–84). Roger of Howden, Chronica, ed. W. Stubbs, 4 vols. (London: RS, 1868–71), vol. iv, pp. 152–3.

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magnate William de Briouze (d. 1211), as was made clear in a letter John dictated in 1210. In it, John asserted that his actions in proceeding against de Briouze not only conformed to the custom of the realm but also followed exchequer rules (L. per legem scaccarii) regarding non-payment of debt. Evidently John hoped that bureaucratic rectitude would counteract the perceived injustice of his actions.125 The Gascon elites did not have to fear this kind of discipline.126 In the end, even though King John’s ships destroyed a French invasion fleet in 1214, he lost control even of unthreatened England. In 1215, there came what Holt called ‘a rebellion of the king’s debtors’.127 As Tim Reuter observed in the course of a comparison between England and Germany: ‘English political medievalists are particularly state-fixated: the importance of the state in our history becomes self-reinforcing, so that real substance is seen to lie in administrative practice and innovation rather than in the relations between the members of the political community.’128 But in the crisis of the Angevin empire, the varying fortunes of Gascony and Normandy suggest that real substance lay elsewhere – in the commercial and social ties between those who, for instance, produced and consumed such vital commodities as wine and salt. These ties were not always strong enough to offset military and political pressures, particularly those along the Capetian-Norman border. They were, nonetheless, a force for cohesion. In that sense, the province which was, to judge from the surviving record, the least bureaucratically ruled part, was also the most successfully governed. This suggests that when after 1204, and all the more so after the Capetian conquest of Poitou in 1224, the Angevin empire gave way to an ‘empire’ centred on England (described by Peter Crooks in Chapter 11), it was not because bureaucratic government in England was superior to Angevin government in France, but because Britain and Ireland were two islands largely immune to the dangers and opportunities of Continental politics.

125

126 127

128

J. R. Maddicott, The origins of the English parliament, 924–1327 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 112–13, 116. For the text and translation of John’s long letter, see D. Crouch, ‘The complaint of King John against William de Briouze (c.September 1210)’, in Janet Loengard (ed.), Magna Carta and the England of King John (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010), pp. 168–79. See also David Crouch, ‘Baronial paranoia in King John’s reign’, ibid., pp. 45–62. Cf. J. C. Holt, Magna Carta, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 183. The colonizing English elites in Ireland may have seen it as a price worth paying in return for government support against the Irish. J. C. Holt, The northerners (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 34. It was only after the Magna Carta rebellion had broken out in England that the rulers of Scotland and Gwynedd were able to pose serious threats of their own. Timothy Reuter, ‘The making of England and Germany, 850–1050: points of comparison and difference’, in Reuter, MPMM, p. 294.

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10

The Parchment Imperialists: Texts, Scribes, and the Medieval Western Empire, c.1250–c.1440 Len Scales

‘The dear Holy Roman Empire, whatever holds it together?’ sings a reveller in Auerbach’s Cellar in part one of Faust, which Goethe completed in 1806, the year of the Empire’s extinction. For the late Middle Ages, it is a question with which historians continue to grapple, one which has elicited various theories, but no certainty.1 On one matter at least, however, a well-established and durable consensus does exist: whatever it may have been, it can have had little to do with bureaucracy.2 Of no period does this appear truer than of the late Middle Ages. The medieval Roman Empire was at no time an intensively governed polity. Even in the heyday of its power, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the institutions of the Empire’s government reached thinly and very unevenly across its vast geographic extent. About their working and their efficacy a great deal is obscure.3 Much always depended upon the monarch’s personal presence. However, in the two centuries between the end of the Hohenstaufen dynasty in the mid-thirteenth century and the long Habsburg 1

2

3

For the ‘stabilizing, underlying consensus’, or ‘political concert’, which allowed the Reich to function even without the concentration or institutionalization of power, see Peter Moraw, ‘Wesenszüge der “Regierung” und “Verwaltung” des deutschen Königs im Reich (ca. 1350–1450)’, in Werner Paravicini and Karl Ferdinand Werner (eds.), Histoire comparée de l’administration (IVe–XVIIIe siècles) (Munich: Artemis, 1980), p. 150; Peter Moraw, ‘Vom Raumgefüge einer spätmittelalterlichen Königsherrschaft: Karl IV. im nordalpinischen Reich’, in Michael Lindner, Eckhard Müller-Mertens and Olaf B. Rader (eds.), Kaiser, Reich und Region: Studien und Texte aus der Arbeit an den Constitutiones des 14. Jahrhunderts und zur Geschichte der Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Berlin: Akademie, 1997), pp. 68, 71. For the primacy of informal, non-bureaucratic and thus submerged structures over visible administrative hierarchies in explaining the monarchy’s functioning and capabilities, see Peter Moraw, ‘Räte und Kanzlei’, in Ferdinand Seibt (ed.), Kaiser Karl IV.: Staatsmann und Mäzen (Munich: Prestel, 1978), p. 286; Peter Moraw, ‘Die Verwaltung des Königtums und des Reiches und ihre Rahmenbedingungen’, in Kurt G. A. Jeserich, Hans Pohl and GeorgChristoph von Unruh (eds.), Deutsche Verwaltungsgeschichte (Stuttgart: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt, 1983), pp. 25–6. For the difficulty of even ascribing reliable dates to the meagre documentation bearing upon the Empire’s material resources in the high Middle Ages, see Benjamin Arnold, Power and property in medieval Germany: economic and social change, c.900–1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), ch. 3.

221

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ascendancy which begins in the fifteenth, such administrative structures as existed for the Empire appear actually to wither and contract. Relatively little in the way of new institutions emerged to take their place. And yet, despite all this, hold together the Empire largely did, albeit with some erosion, including the loss of significant territorial fragments at the margins. Explaining why this should have been raises important questions, both about the character of the medieval Reich as an empire and about the role of administration in extended premodern realms more generally.

I

The imperial character of the late-medieval Empire was expressed most explicitly in its fundamental doctrines, in its accustomed titles and in the views of history held by its literate partisans. An empire – in Latin, imperium; in German, less straightforwardly, rîche – was what documents issued in its ruler’s name consistently pronounced it to be.4 To lawyers, chroniclers, poets and their audiences, it was the direct continuator of the Roman empire of the Caesars. By the late Middle Ages, this principle, reinforced by an imperialist reading of a number of familiar biblical passages, had long provided a foundation for highly ambitious claims. Among these was the insistence that, as the temporal counterpart of the pope, the Empire’s ruler should move on a similarly universal stage and enjoy a primacy (although this was seldom precisely defined) over other Christian monarchs.5 How literally such claims were understood and how seriously they were taken, even among the Empire’s adherents, let alone neighbours and rivals, should not be overestimated.6 At the same time, they cannot be altogether dismissed, since their repetition, even in times of the Empire’s visible weakness, pertained to the public style of its 4

5

6

Eckhard Müller-Mertens, ‘Imperium und Regnum im Verhältnis zwischen Wormser Konkordat und Goldener Bulle: Analyse und neue Sicht im Lichte der Konstitutionen’, HZ 284 (2007), 561–95; Peter Moraw, ‘Reich (Das späte Mittelalter)’, in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhard Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politischsozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. v (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1984), pp. 446–56. For some of the more ambitious claims made on the Empire’s behalf, see Friedrich Baethgen, ‘Zur Geschichte der Weltherrschaftsidee im späteren Mittelalter’, in Peter Classen and Peter Scheibert (eds.), Festschrift Percy Ernst Schramm, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1964), vol. i, pp. 189–203; Othmar Hageneder, ‘Weltherrschaft im Mittelalter’, MIöG 93 (1985), 257–78. For its relative unimportance to French dealings with the Empire, see Karl-Ferdinand Werner, ‘Das hochmittelalterliche Imperium im politischen Bewußtsein Frankreichs (10.–12. Jahrhundert)’, HZ 200 (1965), 2–60. The dangers of reading high-medieval imperial rhetoric too literally were exposed by Karl Leyser, ‘Frederick Barbarossa, Henry II and the hand of St James’, in Leyser, Medieval Germany and its neighbours, 900–1250 (London: Hambledon Press, 1982), pp. 215–40. The medieval Reich, moreover, was only one heir to the western imperial tradition: see Chris Jones, Eclipse of Empire: perceptions of the Western Empire and its rulers in late-medieval France (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007).

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rulers. Doctrine, and doctrinal controversy, surrounded and defined the medieval Empire to an unusual degree. This element of distinctiveness helps account for the particular role taken by written acts in its late-medieval life. The Reich must also, however, be understood – and understood as an empire – by locating it in space. Enumerating its component lands makes clear that although geographically large, the Empire had limits just like any other medieval realm (Map 10.1). This was plain enough to late-medieval observers who, a handful of uncertain borderlands apart, could distinguish without difficulty between ‘places under the Roman Empire’ and those that were not.7 The political community supported by these far-flung territories was a composite one. Its original core, corresponding to the eastern portion of the Carolingian patrimony, north of the Alps and east of the Rhine, had emerged out of the fragmentation of Charlemagne’s empire during the course of the ninth century. In the tenth and eleventh, under rulers from the Ottonian (Saxon) and Salian (Franconian) dynasties, this kingdom of largely Germanic speech became joined together with blocs of territory in Italy and Burgundy. Each of these came likewise to be understood as a distinct kingdom, with its own crown.8 The same period also saw the addition of Lotharingia, west of the Rhine, with its mixed Germanic and Romance-speaking populations. The entry of the western Slavs into Christendom, meanwhile, had paved the way for the incorporation, over time, of further ethnic and political groupings along the Empire’s eastern marches in the north. The title of emperor itself was acquired by means of coronation in Rome, customarily (although, as the late Middle Ages were to prove, not necessarily) at the hands of the pope.9 Prior to that, however, the Empire’s ruler was normally crowned king at Charlemagne’s old capital of Aachen.10 In the late Middle Ages, a majority among these mainly German-speaking ‘kings of the Romans’ (L. reges Romanorum) had to settle for this northern coronation alone (Table 10.1). Such, then, was the Empire – or, as it was termed in its own official acts, the Roman Empire, or the Holy Empire, or (from the thirteenth century ever more frequently) the Holy Roman Empire:11 an idea, and a body of historic titles, but

7 8 9 10 11

For the evidence, see Len Scales, The shaping of German identity: authority and crisis, 1245–1414 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), ch. 5. For the Empire’s territorial growth, see Timothy Reuter, Germany in the early Middle Ages, 800–1050 (London: Longman, 1991). The history of imperial expeditions to Rome is traced in Bernd Schneidmüller, Die Kaiser des Mittelalters: von Karl dem Großen bis Maximilian I. (Munich: Beck, 2006). For the Aachen coronation, see Mario Kramp (ed.), Krönungen: Könige in Aachen – Geschichte und Mythos, 2 vols. (Mainz: Zabern, 1999). For the development of titles, see Jörg Schwarz, Herrscher- und Reichstitel bei Kaisertum und Papsttum im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau, 2003); Hermann Weisert, ‘Der Reichstitel bis 1806’, AfD 40 (1994), 441–513.

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0 0

100 50

200 100

300 km 150

200 miles

Marienburg Lübeck R. V ist ula

Braunschweig Magdeburg

R.

R. Elb

Cologne

er

Breslau

e

Aachen

Od

Erfurt

Si

l

e si

R R.

Nuremberg

Prague Kingdom of Bohemia M oravia R.

Strasbourg Ulm

a

e hin

Frankfurt Würzburg

Mainz

Da nu

Augsburg

be

Vienna

Salzburg Basel

Milan

Rome Imperial frontier Imperial/ ‘Free’ towns Other significant centres

Luxemburg lands Habsburg lands Wittelsbach lands

Map 10.1 The Reich in the time of Charles IV, c.1378

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Table 10.1 Rulers of the Empire (1211–1439) (* crowned emperor in Rome) Ruler

Dynasty

Reign in empire

Other major titles

Frederick II (*) Konrad IV Henry Raspe William of Holland Richard of Cornwall Alfonso (X) Rudolf I Adolf Albert I Henry VII (*) Ludwig IV (*) Frederick ‘the Fair’ Charles IV (*) Wenceslas Rupert I Sigismund (*) Jobst Albert II

Hohenstaufen Hohenstaufen Ludowinger Holland Plantagenet Castile Habsburg Nassau Habsburg Luxemburg Wittelsbach Habsburg Luxemburg Luxemburg Wittelsbach Luxemburg Luxemburg Habsburg

1211–50 1237–54 1246–47 1247–56 1257–72 1257–75 1273–91 1292–98 1298–1308 1308–13 1314–47 1314–30 1346–78 1376–1400 1400–10 1410/11–37 1410–11 1438–39

King of Sicily, Jerusalem King of Sicily, Jerusalem Landgrave of Thuringia Count of Holland Earl of Cornwall King of Castile Count of Habsburg Count of Nassau Duke of Austria Count of Luxembourg Duke of Upper Bavaria Duke of Austria King of Bohemia King of Bohemia Count Palatine of the Rhine King of Hungary, Bohemia Margrave of Moravia Duke of Austria, king of Hungary, Bohemia

also a large, loosely structured, polycentric political formation, multi-ethnic in composition but largely Germanic as regards the origin and culture of its rulers and their servants. In these respects, it does indeed appear as an ‘empire’ of a type recognizable in other historical periods and societies. Beyond its German ‘metropolis’ zone lay extended ‘peripheries’: Italy, Burgundy and the eastern marchlands, within which by the late Middle Ages the kingdom of Bohemia was the most distinct and prestigious element.12 These regions were no mere extensions of the German core, but constitutionally, culturally and geographically separate. The southern lands in particular were also unmistakably subordinate, in constitutional practice and historical memory: they were where the Empire’s German-speaking ruler, and his mostly German-speaking followers, went – although over time less often – to exercise rule. The Romance-speaking peripheries of the Reich supplied none of its medieval rulers – although for a significant portion of the later Middle Ages, the Empire’s monarch wore the Bohemian crown. By the late Middle Ages, the age of the Empire’s expansion lay far in the past: little substantive and lasting growth had occurred since the early decades 12

For the applicability of the metropolis-periphery model to the medieval Reich, see Reynolds, ‘Empires’, 152.

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of the eleventh century. Parcels of territory nevertheless continued to be added here and there, mainly as a fortuitous concomitant to dynastic acquisition strategies. And yet, despite the exhortation to the monarch, embedded in the German vernacular form of his documentary title, to be an ‘augmentor of the Reich’, the late Middle Ages brought little discernable ‘imperialism of intent’, still less an ‘imperialism of result’.13 At most, kings and emperors strove, with mixed success, to hold what they had, while encasing their public appearances within a luxuriating, legitimizing imperialism of performance.14 While spectacle has historically been central to many forms of imperial rule, in the latemedieval Reich an extended theatre of majesty evolved less to underpin the power of rule than as a means of negotiating some of its more visible limitations.15 In the thirteenth century, the principle of dynastic succession, according to which, in practice at least, the imperial throne had been filled for much of the Empire’s previous post-Carolingian history, had ended with the deaths of the last legitimate rulers from the Hohenstaufen dynasty. Henceforth, the monarch was chosen by an exclusive group of seven princes, the electors, whose constitutional status and powers were to receive definitive expression in the Golden Bull of 1356.16 Into the second half of the fifteenth century, the death of the reigning monarch would now almost always bring a break in continuity, as a new prince, with his own established servants and his own geographic powerbase, ascended the throne. For significant periods, moreover, 13

14

15

16

For the titles and their meanings, see Olaf B. Rader, ‘Zwischen Friedberg und Eco: die Interpretation von Urkundentexten Karls IV. oder Vom Gang durch die Säle der Erkenntnis’, in Lindner, Müller-Mertens and Rader (eds.), Kaiser, Reich und region, pp. 250–1. For ‘imperialism of intent’ and so on, see Crooks, ‘State of the union’, 7, citing P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British imperialism, 1688–2000, 2nd edn (Harlow: Longman, 2002), p. 54. For the performative elements in late-medieval imperial doctrine and rule, see Bernd Schneidmüller, ‘Inszenierungen und Rituele des spätmittelalterlichen Reichs: die Goldene Bulle von 1356 in westeuropäischen Vergleichen’, in Ulrike Hohensee, Mathias Lawo, Michael Lindner, Michael Menzel and Olaf B. Rader (eds.), Die Goldene Bulle: Politik – Wahrnehmung – Rezeption, 2 vols. (Berlin: Akademie, 2009), vol. i, pp. 261–97; Gerrit Jasper Schenk, Zeremoniell und Politik: Herrschereinzüge im spätmittelalterlichen Reich (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau, 2003); Martin Bauch, Divina favente clemencia: Auserwählung, Frömmigkeit und Heilsvermittlung in der Herrschaftspraxis Kaiser Karls IV. (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau, 2015). Ritual had always played an especially important role in the post-Carolingian Reich, where unities and continuities were constituted above all at great set-piece occasions: see Gerd Althoff, Die Macht der Rituale: Symbolik und Herrschaft im Mittelalter (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003). For some of the particular factors shaping late-medieval rituals for the Empire’s rulers, see Gerald Schwedler, Herrschertreffen des Spätmittelalters: Formen – Rituale – Wirkungen (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2008), esp. pp. 37–72, 297–329. The fundamental study remains Karl Zeumer, Die Goldene Bulle Kaiser Karls IV. (Weimar: H. Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1908); but see now also Hohensee et al. (eds.), Die Goldene Bulle. For the electors and the development of monarchical government in Germany, see John Gillingham, ‘Elective kingship and the unity of medieval Germany’, German History 9 (1991), 124–35.

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the Empire’s rule was contested by rival candidates, of different dynasties. The implications of these facts for any elements of bureaucracy serving the monarchy will already be plain.

II

Such elements were in any case very limited. Regional and local institutions of government amenable to oversight by the monarch and his court were meagre and unevenly distributed within the Empire, the means of their operation and supervision uncertain. The cadre of ministeriales (legally unfree military retainers), with whose aid the emperors of the central Middle Ages had sought to exercise a measure of control over local resources, were assimilated after the end of the Hohenstaufen era into the ranks of the lower nobility.17 They found successors of a kind in the regional ‘advocates’ (G. Landvögte), established under the Habsburg Rudolf I, to recover and administer the depleted imperial fisc (G. Reichsgut).18 But of the specific functions which these figures, drawn from the middling regional nobility, performed in the Empire’s service, relatively little is known. It is not certain whether they even had a common, defined round of duties, and there is little indication of how, and how successfully, they were called to account. Characteristically, their regional distribution was uneven and was confined to the territories north of the Alps. Under Charles IV, there are clear indications that the network of imperial ‘advocates’ was breaking down.19 It is possible that historians have been led by the scarcity of the records to underestimate both the extent and the efficacy of the monarchy’s access to local resources in the post-Staufer period. Chance documentary survivals seem to indicate more complex and durable local infrastructures than was once thought, and a widely acknowledged expectation that the king’s local ministers would answer for their acts.20 But while the meagreness and unevenness of 17

18

19 20

For ministeriales, see Karl Bosl, Die Reichsministerialität der Salier und Staufer: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des hochmittelalterlichen deutschen Volkes, Staates und Reiches, 2 vols. (MGH Schriften, vol. x, Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1950–1); Benjamin Arnold, German knighthood, 1050–1300 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). Hans Georg Hofacker, Die schwäbischen Reichslandvogteien im späten Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980). For the Reichsgut and its late-medieval custodianship, see Ernst Schubert, König und Reich: Studien zur spätmittelalterlichen deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979), pp. 151–71; Andreas Christoph Schlunck, Königsmacht und Krongut: die Machtgrundlagen des deutschen Königtums im 13. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1988). Heinz Thomas, Deutsche Geschichte des Spätmittelalters, 1250–1500 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1983), pp. 254–5. For the surviving records, see Mark Mersiowsky, ‘Römisches Königtum und Rechnungslegung im 13. und frühen 14. Jahrhundert’, DA 64 (2008), 550–3; Eberhard Isenmann, ‘The Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages’, in Richard Bonney (ed.), The rise of the fiscal state in Europe, c.1200–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 253. For the scrutiny of local agents, see Mersiowsky, ‘Römisches Königtum’, 574–6.

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documentary survivals in this field may have various explanations, merely the fact that so little was retained – even where a good deal more must once have been written down – invites conclusions about the character of imperial administration.21 These can hardly be optimistic, and it does not seem difficult to explain why the Empire’s resource base contracted so rapidly and irrevocably after the Staufer. Significantly, rather more is known about the arrangements which latemedieval rulers made to administer the large dynastic blocs which they were engaged in assembling within the frontiers of the Reich. It was here, and not in the management of imperial resources, that new developments are more often to be discerned. No monarch was more active in the field than Charles IV. The Landbook of the Mark Brandenburg, compiled for the north-eastern principality which the emperor acquired for his dynasty in the early 1370s, is a detailed land survey, unparalleled in the administration of the contemporary Reich.22 The cohesive (albeit, as it turned out, short-lived) territorial agglomeration which Charles constructed in the 1350s and 1360s in the Upper Palatinate, between Franconia and the Bohemian frontier, illustrates how new lands might be managed. Although constitutionally a limb of the Bohemian crown, ‘the emperor’s lordship in Bavaria’ was administered separately from the other Luxemburg territories, by a hierarchical structure of accountable officials, some of them local men, others appointed from the Bohemian court in Prague.23 Yet Charles’s reign brought no comparable creativity in administering what remained of the Empire’s own material base, or in governing its farflung provinces.24 The emperor’s fabled literacy, learning and wisdom in judgement were not applied in any significant degree to the institutional reform of the Reich: the Golden Bull, for all its constitutional importance, had little to say about material matters of government.25

21 22

23

24

25

For evidence of the routine discarding of records, see Mersiowsky, ‘Römisches Königtum’, 564, 576. Das Landbuch der Mark Brandenburg, ed. Johannes Schultze (Berlin: Gsellius, 1940); and see Hans Patze, ‘Die Herrschaftspraxis der deutschen Landesherren während des späten Mittelalters’, in Paravicini and Werner (eds.), Histoire comparée de l’administration, p. 365. Heribert Sturm, ‘Des Kaisers Land in Bayern’, in Seibt (ed.), Kaiser Karl IV., pp. 208–12; Jiří Fajt, ‘Die Oberpfalz – ein neues Land jenseits des böhmischen Waldes’, in Jiří Fajt (ed.), Karl IV., Kaiser von Gottes Gnaden: Kunst und Repräsentation des Hauses Luxemburg 1310–1437 (Munich and Berlin: Deutsche Kunstverlag, 2006), pp. 326–35. For the closeness of their administration, see Das ‘Böhmische Salbüchlein’ Kaiser Karls IV. über die nördliche Oberpfalz, 1366–68, ed. Fritz Schnelbögl (Munich and Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1973). For positive but hardly transformative changes introduced in the chancery under Charles – the application to documents of scribal authentication marks, and the employment for the first time of multiple protonotaries – see Moraw, ‘Räte und Kanzlei’, p. 291. Recent studies have tended to take a positive view of the ‘rationality’ and the westward-facing quality of Caroline government. Thus: Jiří Fajt and Robert Suckale, ‘Der Kreis der Räte’, in Fajt (ed.), Karl IV., Kaiser von Gottes Gnaden, esp. p. 181; and on Charles himself, Eva

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The rule of the Roman kings and emperors was located predominantly at their court. But the imperial court was, in European comparison, at most times a modest affair. Its size and capacity for growth were limited in part by its largely itinerant character. Even an emperor such as Charles IV, who developed his dynastic capital of Prague as a residential centre and a stage for the spectacle of monarchy, still travelled tirelessly throughout much of his reign. According to one calculation, Charles made in total more than 1,200 stays at 438 locations, within a zone extending from Rome to Lübeck and from Paris to Kraków.26 It is true that almost every late-medieval monarch had his favoured sites, where a disproportionate amount of his reign was spent. Such places might also be home to valued bodies of specialists and experts – as was Heidelberg under Rupert of the Palatinate, where the family seat of the Rhenish counts palatine included a university (founded in 1386).27 It is also true that the proportion of their reigns which kings and emperors spent at residential centres tended to become greater over the course of the late Middle Ages. It is even the case that with the development of metropolitan sites, certain offices of imperial government proved able to put down at least shallow and short-lived roots – with the most salient location for such growth being Caroline Prague.28 Nevertheless, at no time did there develop an institution comparable to the English exchequer, with firm geographic fixity regardless of the king’s movements.29

26

27

28

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Schlotheuber, ‘Die Rolle des Rechts in der Herrschaftsauffassung Kaiser Karls IV.’, in Hohensee et al. (eds.), Die Goldene Bulle, vol. i, pp. 141–68. However, the fact remains that the Luxemburger was no great innovator in the administration of the Reich: thus Hans Patze, ‘Karl IV., Kaiser im Spätmittelalter’, Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte 116 (1980), esp. 65. Winfried Eberhard, ‘Herrschaft und Raum: zum Itinerar Karls IV.’, in Seibt (ed.), Kaiser Karl IV., p. 102. For the role of Prague, see Peter Moraw, ‘Zur Mittelpunktsfunktion Prags im Zeitalter Karls IV.’, in Klaus-Detlev Grothusen and Klaus Zernack (eds.), Europa slavica, Europa orientalis: Festschrift für Herbert Ludat zum 70. Geburtstag (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1980), pp. 445–89; Paul Crossley and Zoë Opačič, ‘Prag: die Krone des böhmischen Königtums’, in Fajt (ed.), Karl IV., Kaiser von Gottes Gnaden, pp. 197–235. See Ernst Schubert, ‘Probleme der Königsherrschaft im spätmittelalterlichen Reich: das Beispiel Ruprechts von der Pfalz (1400–1410)’, in Rudolf Schneider (ed.), Das spätmittelalterliche Königtum im europäischen Vergleich (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1987), pp. 135–84. Peter Moraw, ‘Kaiser Karl IV. 1378–1978: Ertrag und Konsequenzen eines Gedenkjahres’, in Rainer Christoph Schwinges and Herbert Ludat (eds.), Politik, Gesellschaft, Geschichtsschreibung: Gießener Festgabe für František Graus zum 60. Geburtstag (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1982), p. 250. The most notable example of such transitory institutional growth is provided by Dietrich von Portitz, honorific Bohemian chancellor, who has been described as Charles IV’s ‘finance minister’. Dietrich presided for a time over his own separate chancery in Prague, with a competence extending to both the Reich and Bohemia and, while it lasted, permanently based in the capital. See Moraw, ‘Zur Mittelpunktsfunktion Prags’, pp. 469–73. W. L. Warren, The governance of Norman and Angevin England 1086–1272 (London: Arnold, 1987), esp. pp. 73–6. For the exchequer as exemplifying precocious weberian modernity, see Clancy, Memory, p. 66.

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An obvious obstacle to any such development was the strongly discontinuous character of the late-medieval imperial monarchy itself. Within a period of well over two hundred years, between the end of the Hohenstaufen and the late fifteenth century, son succeeded father on the throne just once.30 Particularly if a reign ended abruptly or with the monarch in distant parts, a breach in government was likely to result. When Henry VII died in Italy in 1312, many of his documents remained there, never to return north of the Alps.31 Such discontinuity was heightened by the circumstances of controversy and division in which the crown more than once changed hands. Of the scribes who had loyally served the excommunicate Ludwig the Bavarian, almost none put their pens at the disposal of his papally backed supplanter Charles IV.32 Rupert of the Palatinate tried in vain to gain possession of the chancery registers of his predecessor, Wenceslas, who following his deposition by the princes in 1400 continued to insist that he was the rightful king.33 Not only Wenceslas’s chancery books but also those of Charles IV proved beyond the reach of Sigismund, probably in consequence of the social and religious upheavals in his family’s Bohemian powerbase.34 It is little wonder, then, that imperial administration in the late Middle Ages appears locked into a downward spiral of narrowing possibility. One measure of this is provided by the Empire’s shrinking material base. Without durable instruments for their oversight and receipt, imperial revenues fell steadily. There is evidence (albeit uncertain and problematic) indicating that annual yields from the fisc may have declined from more than 100,000 gulden in the early fourteenth century to roughly 17,500 under Rupert and perhaps just 13,000 under his successor, Sigismund. Such sums were dwarfed by the incomes of the German territorial princes, to say nothing of those of other European monarchs.35 While periodic efforts were made to recoup losses, the impulse to grant and to pledge proved stronger, with the result that the fourteenth century in particular saw what proved to be an irreversible dissipation of the Empire’s 30

31 32

33 34 35

See generally Peter Moraw, ‘Gedanken zur politischen Kontinuität im deutschen Spätmittelalter’, in Mitarbeiter des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte (eds.), Festschrift für Hermann Heimpel zum 70. Geburtstag am 19. September 1971, 3 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1972), vol. ii, pp. 45–60. Thomas, Deutsche Geschichte, p. 249. One did so very briefly at the start of Charles’s reign, a second only after an interval of many years: Peter Moser, Das Kanzleipersonal Kaiser Ludwigs des Bayern in den Jahren, 1330–1347 (Munich: Arbeo-Gesellschaft, 1985), pp. 274–5. Peter Moraw, ‘Kanzlei und Kanzleipersonal König Ruprechts’, AfD 15 (1969), 451–2. Gerhard Seeliger, ‘Die Registerführung am deutschen Königshof bis 1493’, MIöG Eränzungsband 3 (1890/94), 246. For the figures, see Karl-Friedrich Krieger, König, Reich und Reichsreform im Spätmittelalter (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1992), p. 34. At the end of the fifteenth century, the annual revenues of the richest among the electors were estimated at between 60,000 gulden (Mainz, Palatinate) and 80,000 gulden (Cologne); elsewhere, by contrast, those of the republic of Venice amounted to more than a million gulden (Isenmann, ‘The Holy Roman Empire’, pp. 251, 260–1).

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properties. By the time of Frederick III’s accession in 1440, there was nothing left to pawn.36 Partial compensation was provided by the extension, in the same period, of the dynastic patrimonies of the kings and emperors, and their exploitation as resources of rule. No monarch built more avidly in this way than Charles IV, just as none pledged more liberally.37 Nevertheless, the Empire’s ruler now appeared to contemporaries at times as a threadbare figure. Rudolf I, according to one generally well-informed chronicler, could offer nothing beyond pious evasiveness when asked to name the keeper of his fiscal chamber.38 Under these circumstances, the limitations of imperial government were naturally more apparent to contemporaries – and have been more readily discernable by modern observers – than its capabilities. Those limitations are starkly apparent in the sphere of justice, the fundamental and defining activity of medieval monarchy. The ‘curial court’ (G. Hofgericht), established by Frederick II to receive appeals from the Empire’s subjects, was hamstrung by being tied to the peripatetic court, and by the exemptions from its jurisdiction enjoyed by the princes, and increasingly also by towns.39 Even at its height, the level of business handled by the Hofgericht was hardly impressive. Under Charles IV, it appears that the court was hearing no more than eight to ten cases per year.40 The late Middle Ages also saw the keeping of the public peace (G. Landfriede), for which Frederick II had in 1235 made general provision, pass increasingly out of the monarch’s hands and into those of the regional and local powers. The attempt made under Wenceslas, to divide the Empire’s German lands into regional peacekeeping ‘circles’ under imperial authority, proved short lived.41 The fact that emperors for a time lent their backing even to a judicial instrument as arbitrary and obscure as the Westphalian ‘free courts’ (G. Veme) is evidence of the smallness of their scope for effectual reform.42 36 37 38

39

40 41 42

Isenmann, ‘The Holy Roman Empire’, p. 255. Nearly a third of all medieval pledges of imperial property were thus contracted under Charles IV alone (Isenmann, ‘The Holy Roman Empire’, p. 254). Chronicon Colmariense, ed. Philipp Jaffé, in MGH Scriptores, vol. xvii (Hannover: Hahn, 1861), p. 246. For the recurrent motif of Rudolf I’s poverty, see Erich Kleinschmidt, Herrscherdarstellung: Zur Disposition mittelalterlichen Aussageverhaltens untersucht an Texten über Rudolf I. von Habsburg (Bern and Munich: Francke, 1974), pp. 229–30. As H. S. Offler long ago observed, ‘Material from which to write a continuous financial history of the late medieval Empire does not survive’: ‘Aspects of government in the late medieval Empire’, in J. R. Hale, J. R. L. Highfield and B. Smalley (eds.), Europe in the late Middle Ages (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), p. 227. Winfried Trusen, Anfänge des gelehrten Rechts in Deutschland (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1962), pp. 179–81; and see generally Otto Franklin, Das Reichshofgericht im Mittelalter: Geschichte – Verfassung – Verfahren – Rechtsprechung, vol. i (Weimar: Böhlau, 1867). Thomas, Deutsche Geschichte, pp. 251–2. As Thomas observes, this figure can be contrasted with the 921 known documents from the Paris Parlement for the year 1348 alone. Heinz Angermeier, Königtum und Landfriede im deutschen Spätmittelalter (Munich: Beck, 1966), pp. 278–97. See generally Theodor Lindner, Die Veme (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1896).

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Developments were just as sluggish and fitful in other areas of government. The Empire’s late-medieval rulers had no powers of general taxation, and no forum for convening representatives of the political community to seek such powers. While assemblies did meet periodically under the headship of the monarch (and increasingly, indeed, without him), before the late fifteenth century these were limited in scope and highly variable in composition.43 Regular taxation (when this had not been alienated) was confined to the imperial towns and the Jews, with the towns in particular putting up strong resistance to the attempts which their rulers occasionally made to increase the yield.44 Extraordinary levies and fines, judicial dues and fees for the issue and confirmation of diplomas afforded some additional sustenance.45 But only in the face of the Hussite emergency in the third decade of the fifteenth century were means sought, at first largely unsuccessfully, to extend the tax base.46 There was no standing military force at the ruler’s disposal, and his capacity to require service from the Empire’s subjects was highly limited. Before the campaigns against the Hussites, there does not seem even to have existed a full record of the military services owed to the Empire.47 The German communities from which the manpower for imperial armies was principally drawn showed a marked reluctance to support their rulers’ more extended military campaigns, ‘over the mountains’, into Italy. When the contingent from Mainz returned from King Rupert’s short and inglorious expedition to the south, the town informed the king that it was no longer willing to send its men into Lombardy – to ‘such a far-off land’.48 It is easy to understand why the Empire’s late-medieval rulers, in contrast to their European neighbours, generally avoided major military commitments. They were in no position to act the part of imperial conquerors, despite the efforts of contemporary writers and artists, in traditional style, to paint them in that role.49 43

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49

Krieger, König, Reich und Reichsreform, pp. 47–8, 112–13; Gabriele Annas, Hoftag – Gemeiner Tag – Reichstag: Studien zur strukturellen Entwicklung deutscher Reichsversammlungen des späten Mittelalters (1349–1471), 2 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004). Isenmann, ‘The Holy Roman Empire’, p. 255. For the resistance which Rudolf I encountered in attempting to extend urban taxation during the 1280s, see Thomas M. Martin, Die Städtepolitik Rudolfs von Habsburg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1976), p. 159. Charles IV’s success in augmenting his income from the towns during the 1370s was also characteristically short lived and had significant negative repercussions for the monarchy: Ferdinand Seibt, Karl IV.: ein Kaiser in Europa 1346 bis 1378 (Munich: Süddeutscher Verlag, 1978), pp. 332–5. Isenmann, ‘The Holy Roman Empire’, pp. 257–8. Ibid., p. 265; Steven W. Rowan, ‘Imperial taxes and German politics in the fifteenth century: an outline’, Central European History 13 (1980), 203–17. Thomas, Deutsche Geschichte, p. 417. Deutsche Reichstagsakten, vol. v (Deutsche Reichstagsakten unter König Ruprecht, zweite Abth., 1401–1405), ed. Julius Weizsäcker (Gotha: Perthes, 1885), no. 206, p. 267 (13 Mar. 1402). For this, see Len E. Scales, ‘Germen militiae: war and German identity in the later Middle Ages’, P&P 180 (2003), 41–82.

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III

The fundamental administrative institution for the late-medieval Reich was the chancery. This was a court institution and its servants were court servants: their allegiance was to the person of the monarch, not to abstract notions of ‘state’ or public duty. The emergence of the chancery as a body distinct from the court chapel was still a fairly recent development in the thirteenth century, and the chancery can easily be ascribed firmer substance than the meagre evidence warrants.50 It is best understood – particularly under the earliest post-Staufer kings – less as a settled bureau than as a pool of literate, beneficed clerks of fairly fluid composition and fluctuating size. In all this, it exemplifies the archaic qualities of late-medieval imperial government generally, within which document culture still showed few traces of the processes of internal differentiation and specialization evident elsewhere. Within the chancery, there seems to have existed at most an informal allocation of duties between different notaries.51 There was no subdivision into separate offices for different imperial territories. Not until the reign of the Habsburg Frederick III (1440–93) did the monarch’s dynastic lands become the responsibility of a separate staff of clerks, largely distinct from those engaged with imperial affairs.52 Only those writings which related to the business of the curial court (G. Hofgericht) were consistently kept apart, written by specialist scribes and issued under their own seal.53 The signs are that procedures long remained informal, with written instructions for the guidance of those writing in the monarch’s name limited or non-existent.54 There is no certain indication of any registration of outgoing documents before the reign of Henry VII; not until the time of Rupert of the Palatinate, a century later, do registers survive in substantial number.55 50

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For a warning against the anachronistic use of term and concept, see Hans-Walter Klewitz, ‘Cancellaria: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des geistlichen Hofdienstes’, Deutsches Archiv für Geschichte des Mittelalters 1 (1937), 44–79. For an overview of the late-medieval imperial chancery, citing older literature, see Arnd Reitemeier, Außenpolitik im Spätmittelalter: die diplomatischen Beziehungen zwischen dem Reich und England, 1377–1422 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999), pp. 82–104. Helmut Bansa, Studien zur Kanzlei Kaiser Ludwigs des Bayern vom Tag der Wahl bis zur Rückkehr aus Italien (1314–1329) (Kallmünz: Lassleben, 1968), p. 104; Moser, Das Kanzleipersonal, pp. 268–74; and see also S. Herzberg-Fränkel, ‘Geschichte der deutschen Reichskanzlei 1246–1308’, MIöG Ergänzungsband 1 (1885), 280–4. Paul-Joachim Heinig, ‘Zur Kanzleipraxis unter Kaiser Friedrich III. (1440–1493)’, AfD 31 (1985), 388–9. Theodor Lindner, Das Urkundenwesen Karls IV. und seiner Nachfolger (1346–1437) (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1882), p. 26. The most knowledgeable modern student of the chancery of the Luxemburg rulers has concluded that as late as the second half of the fourteenth century, no such written ordinances existed: Ivan Hlaváček, ‘Studien zur Diplomatik König Wenzels (IV.)’, MIöG 69 (1961), 294. The early evidence is surveyed by Seeliger, ‘Die Registerführung’, 224–31. From Rupert’s reign there survive fourteen volumes of registers: ten originals and four near-contemporary copies. There must originally have been more, in particular, further special registers: ibid.,

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Registration during the fourteenth century was partial and haphazard and may have been abandoned altogether for a time under Ludwig the Bavarian.56 The central administrative body of the late-medieval Reich therefore displays little conformity to the principles of weberian ‘legal-rational’ bureaucracy.57 Far from being obliged to fit their behaviour to an office defined by abstract rules, the more senior among the Empire’s servants in particular enjoyed considerable freedom to define the character and scope of their office for themselves.58 There was accordingly no single, fixed way of being chancellor. Some chancellors involved themselves extensively in the daily business of document production, while others did not.59 Johann von Neumarkt, the long-serving head of Charles IV’s writing office, devoted himself to wide-ranging literary, cultural and intellectual pursuits at court, about which much more is known than about his administrative duties.60 The vice chancellors who served under some, though not all, monarchs also varied markedly in their functions.61 Even protonotaries might be much more than just chief scribes, while some did not perform that role at all.62 The clerks who served under them were likewise involved in a wide array of tasks, beyond the drafting and writing up of documents – among them fiscal accounting and service as envoys. There is no trace of a body of regulations defining the extent of these roles, and nothing to suggest that they constituted clearly delineated offices.63 Appointment and advancement were governed by kinship, patronage and regional connections, rather than merit or open competition.64 When backed by the monarch, a chancellor’s initiative power could be great: Raban von Helmstatt is credited with assembling largely from scratch the body

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p. 263. For comparative dates for the introduction of registration in various European chanceries, see John Watts, The making of polities: Europe, 1300–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 240. Bansa, Studien, p. 300. Weber, FMW, ch. 8; and see also Eugene Kamenka, Bureaucracy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 82–3. See the comments of Moraw, ‘Zur Mittelpunktsfunktion Prags’, p. 469. The chancery activities both of Charles IV’s chancellors and of those of his son Wenceslas have left little trace in the records: Ivan Hlaváček, ‘Die Geschichte der Kanzlei König Wenzels IV. und ihre Beamten in den Jahren 1376–1419’, Historica 5 (1963), 13. For Johann’s literary activities, which encompassed works in both German and Latin, see Werner Höver, ‘Johann von Neumarkt’, in Kurt Ruh (ed.), Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, vol. iv (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1983), cols. 686–95. Dieter Hägermann, Studien zum Urkundenwesen Wilhelms von Holland: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Königsurkunde im 13. Jahrhundert (AfD, Beiheft 2, Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1977), pp. 33–4; Franz-Reiner Erkens, ‘Über Kanzlei und Kanzler König Sigismunds: zum Kontinuitätsproblem in der deutschen Königskanzlei unter dem letzten Luxemburger’, AfD 33 (1987), 436. Moraw, ‘Kanzlei und Kanzleipersonal’, 500–503. Bansa, Studien, p. 105. For the character of office in modern bureaucracy, see Weber, FMW, pp. 196–8. Moraw, ‘Die Verwaltung’, p. 28. For the several regional client-groups identifiable within Charles IV’s chancery, see Moraw, ‘Räte und Kanzlei’, p. 291.

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of scribes which served Rupert of the Palatinate, drawing on his own extensive contacts.65 But the initiatives of leading clerks might also run in more wayward channels. Ludwig the Bavarian accused his protonotary Ulrich Wild of acting without authorization and against the king’s interests, in drawing up a manifesto associating Ludwig’s cause with that of the Franciscan opponents of the Avignon papacy.66 Means of control capable of preventing unwelcome freelancing were lacking. The literate servants of the king might also on occasion answer to other masters, with the influence of the electors, above all the three Rhineland archbishops, particularly to the fore. Archbishop Gerhard of Mainz was able to ensure that one of his own close associates was appointed as protonotary under Adolf of Nassau, whom Gerhard had played an instrumental part in raising to the throne.67 The archbishop, whose honorific rank of imperial arch-chancellor for Germany reinforced and legitimized his political domination over the new king, asserted a power of veto over specific chancery appointments.68 The quantity of writings produced by imperial scribes appears distinctly modest, particularly when compared with the output of governmental acts from the Empire’s late-medieval neighbours. Recent estimates of the total number of documents issued in the monarch’s name in the busy thirty-two-year reign of Charles IV have proposed a figure between 9,000 and 10,000.69 This is certainly not a negligible tally, and it is higher than those attained under his predecessors. Yet already more than half a century earlier, the somewhat shorter tenure of King Philip IV of France (r. 1285–1314) had yielded more than 15,000 royal letters.70 The most prolific contemporary bureaucracies put Charles’s output in the shade. Under Pope John XXII (1316–24), the papal chancery issued on average 3,646 letters each year, while in 1324 the English king’s clerks sealed nearly 3,500 standardized writs in a single (admittedly exceptional) month.71 65 66 67

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Moraw, ‘Kanzlei und Kanzleipersonal’, 528. Raban was also responsible for the unusually sophisticated system of registration established under Rupert: ibid., p. 453. Bansa, Studien, p. 242. Vincenz Samenek, Neue Beiträge zu den Regesten König Adolfs (Sitzungsberichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, Philosophisch-historische Klasse 214, Vienna and Leipzig: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1932), pp. 7–8. Specifically, he sought, with some success, to prevent Adolf from having recourse to Heinrich von Klingenberg, Rudolf I’s protonotary and vice chancellor: ibid., pp. 9–10. Charles IV recognized his great-uncle, Archbishop Balduin of Trier, as enjoying the power to appoint and remove chancellors, protonotaries and notaries and confirmed the same powers to Balduin’s successor at Trier. In spite of this, however, Charles accepted in practice no limitation upon his own control of appointments: Lindner, Das Urkundenwesen, pp. 14–15. Mathias Lawo, ‘Sprachen der Macht – Sprache als Macht: Urkundensprachen im Reich des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts’, in Hohensee et al. (eds.), Die Goldene Bulle, vol. i, p. 535. Clanchy, Memory, p. 61. R. W. Southern, Western society and the church in the middle ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 109; D. A. Carpenter, ‘The English royal chancery in the thirteenth century’, in Fianu & Guth, Écrit, pp. 34–5. For further discussion of medieval English record-production, see Crooks (Chapter 11, pp. 258, 266–8).

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No less revealing is the character of the writings most often issued under the imperial seal. At least among surviving and known documents, it is diplomas granting or confirming favours and privileges that continued into the late Middle Ages to take the dominant share, as they had in earlier centuries.72 New documentary instruments of this sort characteristically reflected the aspirations of recipients more than central initiative.73 It is true that other kinds of writing – such as letters and mandates directed at important political actors, such as the imperial towns – were probably issued in greater quantity than we can now know;74 but the overall picture remains a traditional one. Typically, documents were addressed to individuals or to relatively small groups. Even perhaps the most famous constitutional text in the Empire’s entire history, Charles IV’s Golden Bull, is best understood, in its origins at least, as a privilege, issued as just seven originals (two of them retrospective), for individuals and communities directly touched by its provisions.75 Conceding and legitimizing came more easily than did commanding or forbidding. Only rarely did the written acts of the Reich aspire to speak to audiences across its length and breadth.76 Documents under the imperial seal were bespoke, individualized texts, not items of mass production – a fact which does much to explain their comparatively modest numbers.77 Routine and repetition, the hallmarks of modern bureaucratic method, are little in evidence.78 Standardized instruments along the lines of the English writ are no more to be found than are the networks of local royal officials which would have been necessary for their implementation.79 It is no surprise, 72

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75 76

77 79

Peter Moraw, ‘Grundzüge der Kanzleigeschichte Kaiser Karls IV. (1346–1378)’, Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 12 (1985), 22. For the solemn diploma as the characteristic imperial document, see Timothy Reuter, ‘Mandate, privilege, court judgement: techniques of rulership in the age of Frederick Barbarossa’, in Reuter, MPMM, pp. 413–31. That the output of the imperial chancery retained into the fifteenth century its highly traditional aspect is underlined by a current project to create a full record of Sigismund’s documentary output. For its first fruits, see Regesta Imperii XI: Regesten Kaiser Sigismunds (1410–1437): Die Urkunden und Briefe aus den Archiven und Bibliotheken Mährens und Tschechisch-Schlesiens, ed. Petr Elbel (Vienna: Böhlau, 2012). Thus, the growing popularity in the fifteenth century of grants of armorials: Andreas Zajic and Petr Elbel, ‘Wappenmarkt und Marktwappen: diplomatische und personengeschichtliche Überlegungen zum Wappenbrief König Sigismunds für Mohelno aus der Zeit des Konstanzer Konzils’, in Karel Hruza and Alexandra Kaar (eds.), Kaiser Sigismund (1368–1437): zur Herrschaftspraxis eines europäischen Monarchen (Vienna, Cologne and Weimar: Böhlau, 2012), pp. 301–64. For evidence supporting this conclusion, see Michael Lindner, ‘Es war an der Zeit: die Goldene Bulle in der politischen Praxis Kaiser Karls IV.’, in Hohensee et al. (eds.), Die Goldene Bulle, vol. i, pp. 93–4, 97. For the recipients, see ibid., pp. 101–12. Peter Moraw, concentrating on Germany, has suggested that less than 1 per cent of the documents issued in the name of Charles IV was concerned with affairs which can be termed gesamtdeutsch (translatable here as ‘touching the whole of the Empire’s German-speaking core’): Moraw, ‘Vom Raumgefüge’, p. 79. 78 See Hlaváček, ‘Studien’, 294. Moraw, ‘Grundzüge’, 22. For the proliferation of writs, see Clanchy, Memory, pp. 58, 67.

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therefore, that the Empire’s administration never became the subject of literary celebration, in the manner found in England as early as the twelfth century in the Dialogue of the exchequer.80 Even such documents as were produced covered the empire’s vast territories unevenly. Of the known output of Charles IV’s chancery, no less than 38 per cent were addressed to individuals and groups located in just three fairly compact German-speaking regions with traditionally close ties to the monarchy: Franconia, the middle Rhine and Swabia.81 By contrast, the entire northern third of Germany, together with the empire’s largely Romance-speaking western borderlands (comprising in total around half of the territories of the Reich north of the Alps) received just 15 per cent. For the greatest princely territories, different rules applied. Dealings with the Habsburg lands, whose princes never travelled to imperial assemblies, had something of the character of relations with a foreign power, conducted by means of envoys sent out from the imperial court.82 Under Charles IV (who was father-in-law to the reigning duke of Austria), only 3 per cent of imperial documents, and none of an intrusive or mandatory kind, were dispatched to this extensive zone.83 With growing distance from the court, grants of title and privileges were apt to loom increasingly large among the chancery’s output. In northern Italy by the midfourteenth century, the main role of imperial government had become the granting, in return for substantial payments, of legal titles to legitimize the power of those who ruled within their regions already.84 The men who drafted and wrote up these documents came disproportionately from a limited number of mainly German-speaking territories. Typically, these were again the old imperial heartlands around the Main, the middle and upper Rhine and in the German south-west, along with the dynastic powerbase of the reigning monarch. From Rudolf I’s reign, all surviving Hofgericht documents are in Swabian dialect.85 Ludwig IV’s scribes came, like their master, from the German south, particularly from the Wittelsbach lands in Upper Bavaria, as well as from Ludwig’s favoured urban support bases, Augsburg and Nuremberg.86 Charles IV’s chancery was staffed with a mix of recruits from the northern core lands of the Reich and from the vast eastern domains of the 80

81 83 84

85

86

For administrative literature as a characteristically English contribution to twelfth-century learning, see R. W. Southern, Medieval humanism and other studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), p. 176. 82 For what follows, see Moraw, ‘Vom Raumgefüge’, pp. 70, 75. Ibid., pp. 72–3. Moraw, ‘Grundzüge’, 23. An outstanding instance is Wenceslas’s bestowal upon Giangaleazzo Visconti of the heritable titles of duke of Milan and count of Pavia, in return for a payment of 100,000 gulden (Thomas, Deutsche Geschichte, pp. 332–3). Hanns Wohlgemuth, Das Urkundenwesen des deutschen Reichshofgerichts, 1273–1378: eine kanzleigeschichtliche Studie (Quellen und Forschungen zur höchsten Gerichtsbarkeit im alten Reich, vol. i, Cologne and Graz: Böhlau, 1973), p. 34. Moser, Das Kanzleipersonal, pp. 273–4.

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house of Luxemburg, especially Moravia and Silesia.87 When the monarch came from a princely dynasty with an established territorial chancery, as did Charles, this typically provided a kernel around which an imperial writing office took shape.88 Only when the new king lacked a family scriptorium, as did the count-king William of Holland, was a body of scribes of necessity brought together from more diverse sources.89 Those who wrote in the Empire’s name tended on the whole to display a princely dynastic, not imperial, orientation at the reigning monarch’s death. Most of the personnel from Ludwig IV’s chancery found new homes in Bavarian ducal service, while a majority of King Rupert’s clerks went on to write for his successor in the Rhineland Palatinate.90 The number of those employed to produce imperial documents was also notably modest – strikingly so under the earliest post-Staufer kings. Harry Bresslau was able to identify just eight notaries, along with two chancellors and three protonotaries, from the whole of Rudolf I’s eighteen-year reign.91 Six clerks can be ascribed to William of Holland as king, though to these must be added further, shorter-term manpower.92 The size of the body of scribes serving the monarch is difficult to gauge, since even among those active at court over a long period, some wrote documents only occasionally or untypically, among other tasks.93 Numbers of clerks might fluctuate sharply within a single reign.94 Yet even the highest figures look low beside the chancery of the fourteenthcentury English kings (discussed by Peter Crooks in Chapter 11), with its hierarchically graded staff of more than a hundred at any one time.95 The beneficiaries of imperial diplomas not uncommonly took a hand, alongside chancery staff, in their drafting. In some instances, although less often after the thirteenth century, they were clearly the creators of the finished and binding document, to which imperial servants can have done little beyond affix a seal.96 87

88

89 90

91 92 94 95 96

Taking Charles’s reign as a whole, 44 per cent of his chancery staff came from the German heartlands of his itinerary and 33 per cent from his dynastic territories (Moraw, ‘Grundzüge’, 38). Ibid., p. 33. Even when a princely writing office already existed, however, its importance as a basis for imperial administration was not in every case equally great. Thus, while King Rupert’s chancery certainly drew upon established Palatinate servants, the greater number was recruited from elsewhere following Rupert’s elevation to the throne (Moraw, ‘Kanzlei und Kanzleipersonal, 510). Hägermann, Studien, p. 22. Moser, Das Kanzleipersonal, pp. 275–6; Moraw, ‘Kanzlei und Kanzleipersonal’, 520. Such behaviour contrasts with what Weber regarded as the essence of modern bureaucratic loyalty, namely, that it ‘is devoted to impersonal and functional purposes’ (Weber, FMW, p. 199). Harry Bresslau, Handbuch der Urkundenlehre für Deutschland und Italien, 3 vols., 2nd edn (Leipzig: De Gruyter, 1912–31), vol. i, p. 570. 93 Hägermann, Studien, p. 40. See Bansa, Studien, pp. 106–7. For Charles IV’s long reign, see Thomas, Deutsche Geschichte, p. 250. Carpenter, ‘The English royal chancery’, in Fianu & Guth, Écrit, p. 35. Of the 507 known documents from the reign in Germany of Frederick II’s son Henry (VII), 1220–35, only 128 are identifiable as chancery products (Paul Zinsmaier, ‘Studien zu den Urkunden Heinrichs (VII.) und Konrads IV’, Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins

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The distinctly meagre resources of late-medieval imperial administration appear peculiarly ill matched to the task of governing a vast empire that was both multi-ethnic and multilingual. Even under the Staufer, it appeared, to say the least, paradoxical to many that Italy and southern Gaul, with their ancient literate cultures, were under the rule of monarchs drawn from regions where the cultivation of letters was generally less advanced.97 In the application of writing to government, the imperial centre had little indeed to teach the imperial periphery. By the late Middle Ages, a perceived cultural chasm was troubling thoughtful Germans too. Writing in the mid-fourteenth century, Konrad von Megenberg regretted what he claimed was a German custom of mocking literate knights as ‘book-eaters’, and trusting to physical strength alone.98 Around the same time, the importance (but implicitly also the difficulty) of fostering verbal and textual communications in the Empire’s highest affairs was acknowledged by that most literate of emperors, Charles IV. His Golden Bull stipulated (although to no effect) that the German-speaking sons of the temporal electors, from their seventh year, were to receive instruction in Italian and ‘Slavic’ (Czech), as well as Latin.99 Yet during this same late-medieval period, the Empire’s German-speaking core, from which its servants were overwhelmingly drawn, seems in the matter of governmental literacy to turn inward upon itself. The only vernacular language in regular use in the late-medieval imperial chancery was German. It had first appeared under the later Staufer, and its application then gathered pace under the count-kings of the second half of the thirteenth century – middling noblemen, whose own documentary milieu was increasingly a vernacular one.100 By the time of Wenceslas a century later, a clear majority of chancery documents was in German.101 Yet few comparable linguistic accommodations were made for the Empire’s large non-German populations.

97

98

99 100 101

100 (1952), 447–8, 556–7). However, not all the reigns of this period show a predominant reliance on outsiders. Of William of Holland’s known documents, a good 80 per cent are thought to be the work of scribes writing for the king (Hägermann, Studien, p. 363). For rare instances of diplomas still written by their beneficiaries under Wenceslas (and the more common practice of their involvement in drafting), see Hlaváček, ‘Studien’, esp. 326–7. For French and Italian representations of Germans, see Scales, ‘Germen militiae’, esp. 71. For the vibrant document culture in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy, and the resulting demand for paper, see Peter Spufford, Power and profit: the merchant in medieval Europe (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002), pp. 255–7. See Sabine Krüger, ‘Das Rittertum in den Schriften des Konrad von Megenberg’, in Josef Fleckenstein (ed.), Herrschaft und Stand: Untersuchungen zur Sozialgeschichte im 13. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1977), p. 303. Die Goldene Bulle Kaiser Karls IV. vom Jahre 1356, ed. Wolfgang D. Fritz, MGH Fontes iuris Germanici antiqui, vol. xi (Weimar: Böhlaus Nachf., 1972), cap. 31, p. 90. Max Vancsa, Das erste Auftreten der deutschen Sprache in den Urkunden (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1895), p. 10. Ivan Hlaváček, Das Urkunden- und Kanzleiwesen des böhmischen und römischen Königs Wenzel (IV.) 1376–1419 (MGH Schriften, vol. xxiii, Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1970), p. 88.

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There had been French-language documents bearing the imperial seal already under William of Holland, and there were more, although never many, under Charles IV.102 The reign of Wenceslas saw the isolated use of Czech.103 The imperial chancery is not, however, known to have drawn up documents in Occitan, or in an Italian dialect. The inhabitants of Lombardy, Tuscany and the kingdom of Arles had to make do with Latin for such communications as occasionally came their way. In light of all this, it would appear that what held the late-medieval Reich together was a relative absence of bureaucracy. The cohesion, it is true, was far from total. Territories were lost in Italy, in Arles and, to a lesser extent, along the western margins of the northern regnum, with the French crown the greatest beneficiary.104 But given the limited means available to kings and emperors for their defence, it is the modesty of the Empire’s territorial contraction that is chiefly remarkable. The explanation must lie at least in part with the lightness of the hand of imperial government upon outlying provinces. Coercive intervention south of the Alps in the style of the Staufer, while it long remained a potent symbol and memory, had ceased by the middle of the fourteenth century to be a fact of political life.105 Local and regional elites were left extensive scope to act largely unconstrained, albeit often under a mantle of imperial legitimacy that had been dearly purchased. An empire from whose centre so little was routinely to be expected or feared made among the provincial powers few intractable enemies.

IV

However, to concentrate only upon the benefits which flowed from what the Empire did not or could not do is insufficient. There are a number of reasons why the importance of documents and their makers within the political culture 102 103 104 105

Lawo, ‘Sprachen der Macht’, pp. 521, 535. Hlaváček, Das Urkunden- und Kanzleiwesen, p. 91. For an outline, see Scales, Shaping of German identity, ch. 5. This lightness of touch might be contrasted with the ‘big-government’ tradition which the Hohenstaufen inherited in the south from the Norman kings of Sicily. Much admired by some modern students of the period, Sicilian kingship had a well-established track record of provoking rebellions among its much-burdened subjects. Already a fact of life under the Norman kings, these continued under Frederick II, provoking a dismally familiar pattern of heavy-handed royal reprisals, culminating in Frederick’s mass expulsion of the island’s Muslim population (and its enslavement under his Angevin successors): see David Abulafia, ‘The Italian other: Greeks, Muslims, and Jews’, in David Abulafia (ed.), Italy in the central Middle Ages, 1000–1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 215–36. For the memory, and the pictorial re-enactment, of imperial triumph south of the Alps, see the picture chronicle of Henry VII’s expedition to Rome, commissioned c.1340 by his brother, Archbishop Balduin of Trier: Michel Margue, Michel Pauly and Wolfgang Schmid (eds.), Der Weg zur Kaiserkrone: der Romzug Heinrichs VII. in der Darstellung Erzbischof Balduins von Trier (Trier: Kliomedia, 2009).

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of the late-medieval Reich needs to be taken seriously. Most straightforwardly, while the absolute numbers of writings produced under the monarch’s seal cannot stand comparison with late-medieval Europe’s more prolific bureaucracies, they do nevertheless increase very considerably, even in spite of the major disruptions to which imperial administration was periodically subject. The total of more than 4,800 documents traceable from the ten-year reign of King Rupert represents a roughly sixfold increase on the tally for Albert I, produced over a comparable period just a century before.106 The upward trajectory was to continue: from Maximilian I’s reign, at the end of the fifteenth century, more than 100,000 chancery writings are known.107 If the Reich witnessed no late-medieval administrative revolution, growth of a more gradual kind did occur. Although the chancery remained small in comparative terms, its staff increased significantly over the course of the period. Only three scribal hands have been linked to the brief anti-Staufer kingship of the Thuringian Henry Raspe – and one of those probably belonged to a notary borrowed from a cardinal’s entourage.108 But by 1444, whence comes the earliest precise record, fourteen beds were needed in Frankfurt to accommodate Frederick III’s chancery staff, even without his Hofgericht scribes.109 Established practices changed to facilitate growth. In the fourteenth century, it became the norm to appoint as chancellor a bishop, whose diocesan clergy thereby became available as literate servants to the monarch, as also did ecclesiastical livings to support officials.110 Accompanying the extension of manpower and the growth of documentary production, there gradually developed more scrupulous methods for recording the chancery’s output. Registration of outgoing writings became not only more regular but also more elaborate. Under Wenceslas, Latin and vernacular diplomas began to be registered separately.111 The reign of his successor, Rupert, saw the employment of separate chancery books for imperial and territorial affairs, as well as for documents addressing a range of specific matters.112 A growing closeness in the court’s relations with urban society – symptomatic of the late-medieval ‘knitting-together’ (G. Verdichtung) of German society more generally – found reflection in the chancery as in other spheres.113 Under Charles IV and Wenceslas, an interrelated group of Bohemian, Moravian and 106 107 108

109 111 113

Lawo, ‘Sprachen der Macht’, pp. 524–5; Moraw, ‘Kanzlei und Kanzleipersonal’, 439. Peter Moraw, Von offener Verfassung zu gestalteter Verdichtung: das Reich im späten Mittelalter (Berlin: Propyläen, 1985), p. 172. Dieter Hägermann, ‘Studien zum Urkundenwesen König Heinrich Raspes (1246/47)’, DA 36 (1980), esp. 501, 508, 509, 542–3. Henry’s other two identifiable scribes had already written for him as landgrave of Thuringia. 110 Moraw, ‘Kanzlei und Kanzleipersonal’, 520 n. 64. Ibid., p. 466. 112 Seeliger, ‘Die Registerführung’, 245. Ibid., pp. 254–61. See Peter Moraw, ‘Monarchie und Bürgertum’, in Seibt (ed.), Kaiser Karl IV., pp. 43–63; and for Verdichtung, Moraw, Von offener Verfassung, pp. 15–27.

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Silesian patrician kindreds supplied successive chancellors over a sixty-year period. These men were clerics, but in 1433, with the appointment of Kaspar Schlick, a layman of burgher stock attained the office.114 Starting in the fourteenth century, the sons of rich urban families also gained growing responsibility for fiscal affairs at court.115 The capacity for institutional change and new growth, moreover, was not altogether stifled. By the start of the fifteenth century, the patent inadequacies of the Hofgericht, due particularly to the proliferation of exemptions, had stimulated a desire for new judicial solutions. Reflecting this, the personal justice of the monarch (from which none could be exempt) gradually attained more institutional form, as a ‘cameral court’ (G. Kammergericht), the rise of which had by mid-century completely eclipsed the older forum.116 But to look only for traces of the bureaucratic growth familiar from modernization narratives of the rise of ‘the state’ elsewhere in Europe is perhaps in any case to mistake the significance of documents and their makers in the late-medieval Reich. For the importance of both, although considerable and growing, did not lie only in strictly administrative spheres. Writings in the monarch’s name carried an ideological charge which, potentially, pervaded every detail.117 Documents did not need to be abundant to matter; and the late Middle Ages were famously a time of notable documents. The history of the Empire, like that of the papacy which it often appears to shadow, can be – indeed, once used to be – written through a succession of resonantly named public acts: the 1235 Peace of Mainz, Licet iuris, Fidem catholicam, the Golden Bull, the Reformatio Friderici and so on. Although texts of this sort, ideological in content and general in their significance, were few in number and quite untypical of the mass of imperial writings, the studies of earlier generations of constitutional historians have made them famous. And that fame has a degree of justification, since some of them at least attracted significant notice and comment at the time of their appearance. Even when the initial reception was muted, the general significance of such a document might attain recognition with the passage of time, as was the case with the Golden Bull, widely copied and disseminated (albeit almost solely within 114

115 116 117

Moraw, ‘Wesenszüge’, p. 157; and for Kaspar Schlick: Erkens, ‘Über Kanzlei’, 449; Franz Fuchs, ‘Schlick, Kaspar’, in Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. xxiii (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2006), pp. 77–8. Moraw, ‘Zur Mittelpunktsfunktion Prags’, p. 480. Trusen, Anfänge, pp. 190–208; Franklin, Das Reichshofgericht, part V. Graphically illustrated in the chronicler Salimbene de Adam’s anecdote claiming that Frederick II had punished with the loss of his thumb a notary who misspelt the emperor’s name: The Chronicle of Salimbene de Adam, ed. and trans. Joseph L. Baird, Giuseppe Baglivi and John Robert Kane (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1986), p. 352. Salimbene is a biased witness, but the intensely ideological character of Frederick’s documents is emphasized in Olaf B. Rader, Friedrich II.: der Sizilianer auf dem Kaiserthron, 4th revised edn (Munich: Beck, 2012), pp. 161–76.

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Germany) during the century and a half after its issue.118 The Golden Bull illustrates how, in an age with a prodigious and growing appetite for reproducing texts of all kinds, an imperial document too, once its importance had been duly acknowledged, might be disseminated by widespread copying, independently of the chancery. However, the Empire’s rulers themselves also grew increasingly alert to the power of documents, particularly their ideological potential, paying heightened attention to their production and communicative capacity. The commissioning by Wenceslas of a sumptuous illustrated manuscript of his father’s Golden Bull seems to have been a response to his deposition by the princes in 1400. By this means, he was able graphically to place himself at the centre of those constitutional processes by which legitimate kings were made – and kings made legitimate.119 The paraphernalia of document making, pictorial as well as scribal, became the subject of purposeful manipulation. Fourteenth-century emperors, most notably Ludwig the Bavarian, introduced new elements into their great seals to magnify their titles to rule.120 Sigismund employed one of the finest goldsmiths of his day, a master perhaps linked with the French royal court, to cut the matrix for his imperial seal.121 The external appearance of the documents themselves, and particularly of solemn privileges, came in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to be treated as a matter of foremost importance.122 With time, moreover, the means were attained of matching aspiration with achievement. If William of Holland’s clerks had struggled to create anything beyond the most workaday charters, the magnificent illustrated

118

119 120

121

122

A total of 173 copies of the Golden Bull are known from the late Middle Ages, with the highpoint for copying falling in the period 1435–75: see Marie-Luise Heckmann, ‘Zeitnahe Wahrnehmung und internationale Ausstrahlung: die Goldene Bulle Karls IV. im ausgehenden Mittelalter mit einem Ausblick auf die frühe Neuzeit’, in Hohensee et al. (eds.), Die Goldene Bulle, vol. ii, pp. 934, 938 (and map of dissemination at p. 935). Claudia Garnier, ‘Die Ordnung des Reiches: die Position des Herrschers in der Goldenen Bulle in der Wahrnehmung bis 1400’, in Hohensee et al. (eds.), Die Goldene Bulle, vol. i, pp. 227–9. Robert Suckale, ‘Die Hofkunst im 14. Jahrhundert’, in Matthias Puhle and Claus-Peter Hasse (eds.), Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation 962 bis 1806: von Otto dem Grossen bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters, 2 vols. (Dresden: Sandstein, 2006), vol. i, p. 326; Lieselotte E. Saurma-Jeltsch, ‘Zeichen des Reiches im 14. und frühen 15. Jahrhundert’, in ibid., p. 338. Ernö Marosi, ‘Reformatio Sigismundi: künstlerische und politische Repräsentation am Hof Sigismunds von Luxemburg’, in Imre Takács (ed.), Sigismundus Rex et Imperator: Kunst und Kultur zur Zeit Sigismunds von Luxemburg, 1387–1437 (Mainz: Zabern, 2006), pp. 25–7. The diplomas of Charles IV were in their visual qualities the successors to those of the Ottonians, Salians and Staufer: Rader, ‘Zwischen Friedberg und Eco’, pp. 287–8. As an example of imperial privileges created for visual effect, see the five solemn confirmations issued in 1361 in favour of the church of Freising: ibid., pp. 278–80. Heinrich Koller has emphasized the exceptional care with which documents in Sigismund’s name were produced: Heinrich Koller, ‘Sigismund’, in Helmut Beumann (ed.) Kaisergestalten des Mittelalters (Munich: Beck, 1984), p. 287.

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diplomas issued in the name of Ludwig the Bavarian, less than a century later, attest to the availability of scribal resources of a quite different order.123 Although most imperial documents were created for highly specific addressees, there was an important, if very small, minority in which the king or emperor and his advisers sought to excite a more general awareness. Ludwig the Bavarian had his mandate Fidem catholicam (1338) posted up on church doors, notably in the city of Frankfurt.124 There are signs, in the form of chronicle reports of its contents, that the emperor’s efforts thus to attain widespread notice for his case against the papacy achieved some success.125 The potential audience for public outbursts of monarchical self-justification may have been greater than first appearances suggest. As Ernst Schubert has pointed out, a lengthy imperial mandate, displayed in a public place, would have been impressive even to those unable to read its text.126 Report (if doubtless not always wholly accurate) of its contents would quickly have begun to circulate. There are signs that Ludwig’s court gave serious thought to the problem of communications, particularly with audiences in the north. The archbishop of Salzburg is to be found lamenting to the pope that when the emperor’s partisans publicly denounce the pontiff in Latin, translators are on hand to render their words instantly into German.127 If the documentary culture of the Reich remained in some ways comparatively limited and was certainly relatively unobtrusive in the lives of most of those who stood under the Empire’s rule, it was not in all respects unsophisticated. That the chancery, particularly from Ludwig IV’s reign onwards, was no marginal body is indicated by the quality of those who filled its most prominent roles. Its leading personnel came to represent for the monarch a reservoir of literate expertise whose value extended well beyond the strictly bureaucratic. By the early fifteenth century, doctors and licentiates of the two laws had come to dominate the leading posts.128 Such men were far from being mere stay-athome clerks; they were well connected and widely travelled diplomats and counsellors, richly experienced in the Europe of their day. Increasingly, they were attaining the characteristics of a careerist corps, moving easily between 123

124

125 126 127 128

For the difficulty which William’s scribes experienced in producing appropriately impressive documents, see Hägermann, Studien, pp. 208–9; and for Ludwig’s illustrated diplomas, Robert Suckale, Die Hofkunst Kaiser Ludwigs des Bayern (Munich: Hirmer, 1993), pp. 36–9. Ernst Schubert, ‘Ludwig der Bayer im Widerstreit der öffentlichen Meinung seiner Zeit’, in Hermann Nehlsen and Hans-Georg Hermann (eds.), Kaiser Ludwig der Bayer: Konflikte, Weichenstellungen und Wahrnehmung seiner Herrschaft (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002), p. 178. For the evidence, see Jean-Marie Moeglin, ‘Das Erbe Ludwigs des Bayern’, in Hohensee et al. (eds.), Die Goldene Bulle, vol. i, p. 23. Schubert, ‘Ludwig der Bayer’, 178. MGH Constitutiones et Acta Publica Imperatorum et Regum, vol. v, ed. Jakob Schwalm (Hannover and Leipzig: Hahn, 1909–13), no. 973, p. 811. Trusen, Anfänge, ch. 11.

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the higher reaches of ecclesiastical and secular governments, and united particularly by bonds forged in a common early experience of university studies.129 The foremost literate servants of the Reich did not obviously stand behind their counterparts in document-rich England in their cultivation and wide horizons.130 The more extended and informal networks of learned expertise which the imperial court was able to tap, at least on specific occasions, were no less significant. The Empire’s particular territorial form and extent, its historical and doctrinal foundations, and its unique relationship with the Catholic church and papacy had all tended to draw its rulers into fundamental conflicts of ideas and principles. These had formed a significant element in the history of the Reich since the eleventh century, with protracted controversy continuing well into the fourteenth and its resonances still discernable for long thereafter.131 At all times, these disputes had been fought out by textual, no less than political and military, means. As a consequence, writers and thinkers of the stature of William of Ockham and Marsilius of Padua gravitated to the late-medieval imperial court.132 The rulers of the Reich were able on occasion to profit from learned outside advice of rare distinction. It perhaps reflects his judgement on the limitations of the Empire’s literate culture that the duke of Austria, Rudolf IV, in the late 1350s felt able to confect the audacious bundle of forgeries known as the Privilegium maius, replete with purported charters of Caesar and Nero. However, if Rudolf had hoped thereby to establish ancient foundations for Austrian ambitions within the Reich, he had reckoned without the forensic skills of Petrarch, to whom Charles IV passed the documents, and who duly subjected them to his withering humanist scorn.133 Being a neo-Roman emperor could unlock sources of specialist literate expertise not available to every European prince of the day. 129

130 131

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Moraw, ‘Kanzlei und Kanzleipersonal’, 458, 485, 503. An outstanding example is the Paris-, Heidelberg- and Bologna-educated jurist Job Vener, who placed his learning at the service not only of King Rupert but also of Rupert’s successor in the Palatinate, Count Palatine Ludwig III, and of the church of Speyer. He also played a significant part in the Council of Constance. See Herman Heimpel, Die Vener von Gmünd und Straßburg, 1162–1447, 3 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982), esp. vol. i, pp. 159–328. For England, see T. F. Tout, ‘Literature and learning in the English civil service in the fourteenth century’, Speculum 4 (1929), 365–89; and see Crooks (Chapter 11, p. 258). See generally: Wilhelm Kölmel, Regimen Christianum: Weg und Ergebnisse des Gewaltenverhältnisses und des Gewaltenverständnisses (8. bis 14. Jahrhundert) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970); Helmut G. Walther, Imperiales Königtum: Konziliarismus und Volkssouveränität (Munich: Fink, 1976). Dick E. H. De Boer, ‘Ludwig the Bavarian and the scholars’, in Jan W. Drijvers and Alasdair A. MacDonald (eds.), Centres of learning: learning and location in pre-modern Europe and the Near East (Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 229–44. Alphons Lhotsky, Privilegium Maius: die Geschichte einer Urkunde (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1957). For Petrarch’s letter (misdated to 1355), see Peter Burke, The renaissance sense of the past (London: Arnold, 1969), pp. 50–4.

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What the rulers of the Reich most conspicuously lacked, in the eyes of contemporaries and evidently their own, were, at least for substantial parts of the late-medieval period, the resources not of ‘modern’ administration so much as traditional legitimacy. However, administrative institutions and personnel seemed in some degree able to supply resources of this second kind and were evidently valued for that reason.134 Where the Empire’s rulers often appeared particularly deficient was in the security of title which came from a sense of unproblematic continuity.135 Yet the literate servants of the monarch were better able to embody such continuity than may at first appear, and their capacity in this respect grew over the course of the period. Actual continuities of imperial service became increasingly conspicuous, reflecting in part the development of a more stable alternation of the crown, between just three rich princely dynasties – Wittelsbach, Luxemburg and Habsburg – during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. An outstanding, though untypical, example is provided by Wenceslas’s succession to the throne of Charles IV. This was accompanied by the transfer of a significant portion of the aged emperor’s corps of literate servants to his son.136 More common, however, was for the higher-ranking officers to remain in place between reigns. These were the figures whom rulers would most have wished to retain, not only for their expertise but also for the legitimizing continuity of distinguished service which they embodied. Their consolidation into an elite of interconnected, high-ranking graduate specialists made such men – in contrast to lesser clerks, with their local roots and territorial ties – more likely to prolong their service under an incoming monarch. By the fifteenth century, therefore, important administrators were staying on, or even shifting allegiance to serve a new king in a way that had previously been rare. Johannes Kirchen, a leading Hofgericht notary under Wenceslas, went on to act as protonotary to both Rupert and Sigismund.137 Kaspar Schlick served as chancellor under three monarchs – Sigismund, Albert II and Frederick III – and his contemporary, the chamberlain Konrad von Weinsberg, was able to show a similar record of high office under successive rulers.138 Sites of administrative memory, such as they were, were cherished, precisely on account of the ties which they offered to remote, legitimizing pasts. Speyer ceased to be an imperial mausoleum after the early fourteenth century; yet the 134 135 136 137 138

For the chancery as a source of legitimacy, see Moraw, ‘Kanzlei und Kanzleipersonal’, 434; Erkens, ‘Über Kanzlei’, 432–3. For the quest for legitimacy in the form of continuity, see Peter Moraw, ‘Gedanken zur politischen Kontinuität’, 51. Hlaváček, ‘Die Geschichte’, 12. Wenceslas’s chancery was always smaller than his father’s, however. Moraw, ‘Kanzlei und Kanzleipersonal’, 488–97. Fuchs, ‘Schlick’, 78; E. Schubert, ‘Konrad von Weinsberg’, in Lexikon des Mittelalters, vol. v (Munich and Zürich: Artemis, 1991), col. 1366.

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old Salian power base retained a surprising degree of importance to the Empire’s administration, continuing into the fifteenth century to provide a disproportionate number of bishop-chancellors and other senior figures.139 This is unlikely to be coincidence. Document culture, and those who sustained it, had particular benefits to offer the insecure and sometimes weak rulers of the late-medieval Reich. In securing the service of a chancery scribe who had previously written for the Staufer Henry (VII), William of Holland tapped a tradition extending back to the emperor and Sicilian king Henry VI (r. 1190–7), under whom that scribe’s own mentor had trained.140 Documents themselves, with their routine, traditional formulations, constructed unbroken pasts for times of confusion and rapid change.141 When William of Holland, in a diploma for the Frisians, refers in passing to Charlemagne as ‘our predecessor’, the effect is at once banal and audacious: a formulaic statement of the obvious and a resonant title for an otherwise dangerously under-entitled king.142 No pretender to the throne, however wild and marginal, could afford to forgo the visible and accustomed legitimacy which documents conferred. It was a strong argument in the hands of the imposter who briefly ‘reigned’ on the lower Rhine in the 1280s, in the guise of a returned or resurrected Frederick II that he was able to produce letters in the dead emperor’s name, authenticated with a plausible imitation of his seal.143 V

At least when judged by the actions and achievements of its rulers, the Reich was among the least imperialistic, as well as least bureaucratic, of the realms of late-medieval Europe. It did not order its far-flung provinces within centralizing structures like the kingdom of France or expand with the startling speed of Valois Burgundy. Instead, it contracted somewhat, although outright disintegration never looked likely. Its rulers showed neither the venturesome spirit of 139

140 141

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Moraw, ‘Kanzlei und Kanzleipersonal’, 454–6. For the basis of Speyer’s status, see Caspar Ehlers, Metropolis Germaniae: Studien zur Bedeutung Speyers für das Königtum (751–1250) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996). Hägermann, Studien, p. 223. For thirteenth-century continuities in the service of chancery scribes, see also Herzberg-Fränkel, ‘Geschichte’, 287–8. For the legitimizing power of documentary titles, see Wolfgang Eggert, ‘Bemerkungen zur Intitulatio in den Urkunden Karls IV.’, in Lindner, Müller-Mertens and Rader (eds.), Kaiser, Reich und region, pp. 295–311. Die Urkunden Heinrich Raspes und Wilhelms von Holland, ed. Dieter Hägermann and Jaap G. Kruisheer, MGH Diplomata regum et imperatorum Germaniae, vol. xviii (Hannover: Hahn, 1989, 2006), no. 48, pp. 82–4 (3 Nov. 1248). Vita Henrici archiepiscopi altera, ed. Georg Waitz, in MGH Scriptores, vol. xxiv (Hannover: Hahn, 1879), p. 462. On this figure, see generally Tilman Struve, ‘Die falschen Friedriche und die Friedenssehnsucht des Volkes im späten Mittelalter’, in Fälschungen im Mittelalter: internationaler Kongress der Monumenta Germaniae Historica, München, 16–19. September 1986 (MGH Schriften, vol. xxxiii.i, Hannover: Hahn, 1988), pp. 317–37.

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the Iberian kings in seeking new lands nor the English monarchy’s ready recourse to military solutions. Any talk of a late-medieval ‘imperialist dynamic’, such as others displayed, would be quite out of place.144 Nevertheless, the Empire’s government did not altogether stagnate. The two centuries after the fall of the Staufer brought modest and piecemeal steps towards greater administrative sophistication, although the effects of these were largely confined to the oldestablished core lands of the Reich, in central and southern Germany. Relations between government and society became more complex and more intimate – but again, mainly in regions where they had traditionally been close. The change primarily reflected developments in society, not government. A more thoroughgoing reform and extension of imperial institutions were to be instituted at the close of the fifteenth century.145 For this, the relatively limited nature of the imperial bureaucracy proved an advantage. Reform was not constrained by the existence of elaborate cadres of rule-bound, conservative mandarins (however constrained it may have been in other ways). The proliferation or perpetuation of bureaucracy is no more a necessary symptom of an empire’s health than limited institutions reliably indicate its impending collapse. The late-medieval Reich, with all its shortcomings, fared notably less badly in difficult times than did its depleted and crisis-stricken counterpart in Byzantium.146 When disaster finally came, in 1453, it was the proverbially bureaucratic eastern, not the western, Roman empire that was swept away.147 While the explanations for the Empire’s long survival are many and complex, they must be sought partly in what it could not do – and in the late Middle Ages did not aspire to do. The cities of northern Italy, which under the Staufer had joined together in military alliance against the emperors, now mostly free of the molestation of German armies, directed their concerns elsewhere.148 144

145 146

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Thus, Crooks, ‘State of the union’, 40, referring to English imperialism. Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001), p. 53, moves directly from Charlemagne to the sixteenth-century Habsburg, Charles V, on the grounds that the latter ‘briefly transformed [the Empire] from a merely German affair [requiring no discussion in a comparative history of empires] back into a true imperium’. Pagden does less than justice to the enduring imperial qualities of the late-medieval Reich (for which, see earlier discussion); but the emphasis on the lack of all expansionist momentum is appropriate enough. For the medieval Reich in relation to other empires, see also Reynolds, ‘Empires’. Heinz Angermeier, Die Reichsreform 1410–1555: die Staatsproblematik Deutschlands zwischen Mittelalter und Gegenwart (Munich: Beck, 1984). Charles IV’s reign is favourably compared with those of contemporary eastern emperors by Franz Tinnefeld, ‘Mehrer des Reiches oder Verwalter des Niederganges: ein Vergleich kaiserlicher Macht zur Zeit Karls IV. im Abendland und in Byzanz’, in Hohensee et al. (eds.), Die Goldene Bulle, vol. ii, pp. 619–37. Although bureaucracy can also, of course, provide an element of resilience in an empire, as in earlier centuries was the case with Byzantium: see Crooks and Parsons (Chapter 1, p. 27–8) and Haldon (Chapter 7, pp. 149–50). On the high-medieval opposition to the emperors, see Gianluca Raccagni, The Lombard league, 1167–1225 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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Relations between imperial ‘core’ and ‘periphery’, insofar as these terms are illuminating, were in the late Middle Ages less fraught – because less close – in the Reich than in other European empires. That the imperial court should have aspired to police the personal and cultural interactions of its German-speaking agents with the inhabitants of Lombardy or Arles in the manner of the English in Ireland was more than just unattainable: it was unthinkable.149 The Reich had no aspiration and made no attempt to reshape the customs of provincial society as other empires have historically sought to do.150 That, surely, is not the least among the reasons for its long endurance. To a degree, the Empire’s literate servants did what bureaucrats do: contributed, through their existence and their actions, to the public myth of their masters’ power and effectiveness. But this was a less feasible venture in the Reich than in some other realms, and it had less certain results. It would have been impossible – in contrast, for example, to medieval English imperialism – for the Empire’s rulers and their German clerks to have postured as the bearers of literate civilization to under developed barbarians in the provinces.151 Instead, charges of unlettered barbarism, when they were heard, mostly flowed in an opposite direction. Yet the Empire’s scribes too were servants of a myth – and a more potent and venerable one than was available to most medieval imperialists. The trouble with texts is that, by their existence, they tempt us to reach unfavourable judgements upon those places where they appear to be relatively less present.152 But, as recent studies of the political culture of the late-medieval Reich have insisted, texts did not stand alone but were joined to other communicative media within a ‘polyphonic concert for the staging of rulership’.153 Nevertheless, their role remained a fundamental one, since the medieval Roman imperium found its deepest legitimation in authoritative ancient texts, not least the Bible itself. Words had particular importance for the Empire’s rulers, and that importance grew rather than diminished in the late Middle Ages, for monarchs whose claims to the throne often appeared contestable and called for defence. Important too, therefore, were the clerks responsible for finding, framing and disseminating those words.

149 150 151 152 153

For the latter, see Robin Frame, ‘Exporting state and nation: being English in medieval Ireland’, in Scales & Zimmer, Power, pp. 143–65. For such ventures as a form of imperial behaviour, see Kamenka, Bureaucracy, p. 51. On this, see John Gillingham, ‘The beginnings of English imperialism’, in Wong & Sayer, British state, pp. 138–56. See Brian Stock, The implications of literacy: written language and models of interpretation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 30–1. Wolfgang Schmid, ‘Vom Rheinland nach Böhmen: Studien zur Reliquienpolitik Kaiser Karls IV.’, in Hohensee et al. (eds.), Die Goldene Bulle, vol. i, p. 464.

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11

Before Humpty Dumpty: The First English Empire and the Brittleness of Bureaucracy, 1259–1453 Peter Crooks

‘No Caesar or Charlemagne ever presided over a dominion so peculiar’, exclaimed Benjamin Disraeli in a speech of April 1878 on what he imagined to be the singular diversity of the nineteenth-century British empire.1 But what about the Plantagenets? In the later Middle Ages, the Plantagenet kings of England (Figure 11.1) ruled, or claimed to rule, a consortium of insular and continental possessions that extended well outside the kingdom of England itself. At various times between the treaty of Paris in 1259 and the expulsion of the English from France (other than the Pale of Calais) in 1453, those claims to dominion stretched to Scotland in the north, Wales and Ireland in the west, Aquitaine (or, more specifically, Gascony) in the south of France and a good deal else in between. By the standards of the ‘universal empires’ of antiquity or the globe-girdling empires of the modern era, the late-medieval English ‘empire’ was a small-scale affair. It was no less heterogeneous for its relatively modest size. Rather it was a motley aggregation of hybrid settler colonies gained by conquest and lands (mostly within the kingdom of France) claimed by inheritance though held by the sword. The constitutional relationship of the constituent parts to the crown of England was vaguely defined. There were marked differences in law and custom between the dominions, and variations in the legal status of the king’s subjects.2 Across – indeed within – the dominions, My title recalls David Fieldhouse’s much-cited essay, ‘Can Humpty Dumpty be put together again? Imperial history in the 1980s’, JICH 12:2 (1984), 9–23. 1 Koebner, Imperialism, p. 136. The idea that Britain was a ‘most peculiar’ empire also occurs in John Campbell’s Political survey of Britain (1774), cited by Greene (Chapter 13, p. 325 n. 12). 2 For these complexities, see Robin Frame, ‘Kingdoms and dominions at peace and war’, in Ralph Griffiths (ed.), The short Oxford history of Britain: the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 150–7. For the varying status of king’s subjects, see Ralph Griffiths, ‘The English realm and dominions and the king’s subjects in the later Middle Ages’, in Griffiths, King and country: England and Wales in the fifteenth century (London and Rio Grande: Hambledon, 1991), pp. 33–54; Andrea Ruddick, English national identity and political culture in the fourteenth century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), ch. 5.

250

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PLANTAGENET KINGS JOHN (r. 1199–1216)

HENRYIII (r. 1216–72)

EDWARD I (r. 1272–1307)

EDWARD II (r. 1307–27)

EDWARD III (r. 1327–77), assumed title ‘king of France’ on 26 Jan. 1340

Edward ‘the Black Prince’ (d. 1376) Prince of Wales and Aquitaine

Lionel of Antwerp (d. 1368) Duke of Clarence, Lieutenant of Ireland

RICHARD II (r.1377–99)

John of Gaunt (d. 1399) Duke of Aquitaine and duke of Lancaster

LANCASTRIAN KINGS HENRY IV (r.1399–1413)

KINGS OF ENGLAND DYNASTY

HENRY V (r. 1413–22), heir to kingdom of France (from 1420) m. Catherine of Valois (d. 1437)

John (d. 1435) Duke of Bedford Regent of France

HENRY VI (r. 1422–60; 1470–1), crowned ‘king of France’ in December 1431 YORKIST KINGS EDWARD IV (r. 1460–83)

Figure 11.1 Rulers of England and its dominions, 1199–1460

Humphrey (d. 1447) Duke of Gloucester

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administration was geographically fragmented, and there were marked modulations in the intensity of government.3 Given all the diversity and flux, one might well query whether ‘empire’ is the appropriate word at all.4 This essay starts from the assumption that it is the very peculiarity of the wider realm of the Plantagenet monarchs that makes it typical when considered in comparative terms as an empire.5 Among the structures that provided a degree of cohesion more than sufficient to warrant the ascription of that label was the royal bureaucracy.6 The transnational nature of this bureaucracy, and its role in creating a political culture and a shared imperial ‘space’ are key themes in the pages that follow. A second theme, paradoxically, is the brittleness of that same bureaucracy. The overseas empire of the Plantagenets was unusual in the late Middle Ages for its capacity to mobilize resources and coordinate action across geographically dispersed territories. By comparison, the Catalan overseas ‘empire’ of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has been shown to be a chimera.7 And yet, for all the sophistication of its military and bureaucratic apparatus, the administrative reach of England’s medieval empire was frequently beyond its grasp. Many of the lands that came into Plantagenet possession, whether through inheritance or conquest or a combination of the two, were subsequently lost – sometimes wrested away in wars of reconquest (as occurred in Scotland and France), sometimes lost by piecemeal nibbling at the edges (as occurred across much of Ireland). The final part of the chapter seeks to show that an explanation for this brittleness must take account of the markedly different attitudes of officialdom towards the various peoples subject to the English crown. The key question is not to what extent was the English ‘official mind’ willing to devolve power upon local elites in general, but rather which particular ethnic groups were deemed sufficiently responsible and civilized to exercise the offices of government, and how did the ‘rule of difference’ constrain the Plantagenets’ exercise of power across their empire. 3 4

5 6

7

Franchises or liberties (areas immune from the normal jurisdiction of the crown) were a commonplace: see n. 78. Michael Brown, Disunited kingdoms: peoples and politics in the British Isles, 1280–1460. London and New York: Routledge, 2013), who notes that the conquests of the English crown ‘did not result in the secure establishment of an “English empire” ’ (quotation at p. 69). Cf. Ged Martin, ‘Was there a British empire?’, HJ 15:3 (1972), 562–9. I consider other overarching political structures, including the royal dynasty and aristocratic estate holding, in Peter Crooks, ‘State of the union: perspectives on English imperialism in the late Middle Ages’, P&P 212 (2011), esp. 8–17. J. N. Hillgarth, The problem of a Catalan Mediterranean empire, 1229–1327 (London: Longman, 1975); David Abulafia, A Mediterranean emporium: the Catalan kingdom of Majorca (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Sally McKee discerns some similarities between England’s overseas bureaucracy and the rule of Crete by Venice in McKee, Uncommon dominion: Venetian Crete and the myth of ethnic purity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), esp. pp. 13–18.

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I

Concepts in Question With some notable exceptions, historians of the late Middle Ages have been slow to adopt ‘empire’ as a conceptual frame through which to draw together the histories of England’s continental and archipelagic possessions.8 The seminal study of the ‘first English empire’ by R. R. Davies was, for instance, primarily concerned with England’s impact on its insular neighbours in Britain and Ireland.9 It is only more recently that historians have thought to pursue the trail blazed by John Le Patourel, who sought to comprehend all the king’s territorial possessions, whether located on the European mainland or in the ‘British Isles’, as a political system.10 In this respect, historians of the (post-medieval) British empire long ago stole a march on medievalism when their interest in constitutional precedent and institutional origins set them on a whiggish quest for the ‘foundations of a colonial system of government’.11 They found what they sought in the late Middle Ages. In 1950, Julius Goebel published an essay whose title employed a metaphor more likely to evoke, in a contemporary readership, the dystopian virtual network of cyberpunk science fiction – ‘The matrix’ – than the image of incubation and incipient growth that its author originally 8

9

10

11

An important exception is John Le Patourel, ‘The Plantagenet dominions’, Feudal empires: Norman and Plantagenet (London: Hambledon, 1984), esp. pp. 302–6; John Le Patourel, ‘L’occupation anglaise de Calais au xive siècle’, in ibid., ch. 14. See also Robin Frame, The political development of the British Isles, 1100–1400, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), ch. 2 (‘Empires, continental and British’), and pp. 138–41. Kenneth Fowler traces the lineaments of a ‘politique impériale’ in his study of vice-regal office holders: Fowler, ‘Les lieutenants du roi d’Angleterre en France à la fin du moyen âge’, Actes des congrès de la Société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public, 29e congrès (1998), 193–205, at 203. Davies, Empire; see also Davies, Domination. On the need to bring the continental dominions into the analysis, see Robin Frame in ‘Overlordship and reaction, c.1200–c.1450’, in Frame, Ireland and Britain, 1170–1450 (London and Rio Grande: Hambledon, 1998), ch. 10, esp. pp. 181–90; Andrea Ruddick, ‘Gascony and the limits of medieval British Isles history’, in Brendan Smith (ed.), Ireland and the English world in the late Middle Ages: essays in honour of Robin Frame (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 68–88. See above, n. 8. For recent work in this vein, see W. M. Ormrod, ‘The English state and the Plantagenet empire, 1259–1360: a fiscal perspective’, in J. R. Maddicott and D. M. Palliser (eds.), The medieval state: essays presented to James Campbell (London: Hambledon, 2000), pp. 197–214; David Green, ‘Lordship and principality: colonial policy in Ireland and Aquitaine in the 1360s’, Journal of British Studies 47:1 (2008), 3–29; Crooks, ‘State of the union’; and Peter Crooks, David Green and W. M. Ormrod (eds.), The Plantagenet empire, 1259–1453 (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2016). For an earlier period, see David Bates, The Normans and empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). For a compendium of relevant constitutional documents, see A. F. Madden and D. K. Fieldhouse (eds.), The empire of the Bretaignes, 1175–1688: the foundations of a colonial system of government (Westport and London: Greenwood, 1985).

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intended.12 For Goebel, the Middle Ages were a period of institutional gestation; the Plantagenets, the unwitting midwives to an infant British imperial constitution: ‘When the first expeditions were outfitted for America’, he disclosed, ‘the English were already old hands in the business of empire.’13 A generation later Freddie Madden reached a similar conclusion when he surveyed the Middle Ages for its ‘relevance’ to the post-medieval constitutional development of empire: ‘Before ever [an] Elizabethan adventurer set foot in the New World there were five centuries (or more) of precedent stored away in the minds and archives of English officials.’14 There the matter appears to have rested. When, during the mid-1990s, the Humpty Dumpty historiography of the British empire was pieced together again with the publication of the Oxford history of the British empire,15 the ‘origins of empire’ were located in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with no more than a throwaway glance at medieval antecedents.16 It was the achievement of the Humpty Dumpty school to demonstrate that the far-flung polity ruled by England’s medieval kings could be conceptualized as an empire in terms of its institutional structure. In the lexicon of the present volume, its concern was with the interplay of ‘empire’ and ‘bureaucracy’. But the argument for straightforward continuity is problematical. Placed in diachronic perspective, the medieval English empire shows off a higher degree of central superintendence and institutional coherence than Britain’s ‘bureaucratically challenged’ empire in colonial North America, at least until the later seventeenth century.17 Indeed, if the relational system between imperial core and overseas dominions resembles anything in the early modern era, it is the transatlantic bureaucracy of the Spanish monarchy.18 Comparisons of this kind have yet to be 12 13 14

15

16

17 18

Julius Goebel, ‘The matrix of empire’, Appeals to the Privy Council from the American Plantations by Joseph Henry Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), pp. xiii–lxi. Ibid., p. xiv. A. F. McC. Madden, ‘1066, 1776 and all that: the relevance of English medieval experience of “empire” to later imperial constitutional issues’, in Gerald S. Graham, John E. Flint and Glyndwr Williams (eds.), Perspectives of empire: essays presented to Gerald S. Graham (London: Longman, 1973), pp. 9–26, at 9. For historiographical comment, see Andrew Thompson, ‘Is Humpty Dumpty together again? Imperial history and the Oxford history of the British Empire’, Twentieth Century British History 12:4 (2001), 511–27; Douglas M. Peters, ‘Is Humpty Dumpty back together again? The revival of imperial history and the “Oxford history of the British empire” ’, JWH 13 (2002), 451–67. Nicholas P. Canny (ed.), OHBE¸ vol. i: The origins of empire: British overseas enterprise to the close of the seventeenth century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). The same chronology is observed in Kevin Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Note, however, that there are some observations on the medieval antecedents of the later British empire in John Darwin’s recent volume: Unfinished empire: the global expansion of Britain (London: Allen Lane, 2012), pp. 13–16. See Greene (Chapter 13, pp. 321–5). John H. Elliott, ‘Empire and state in British and Spanish America’, in Serge Gruzinski and Nathan Wachtel (eds.), Le nouveau monde, mondes nouveaux: l’expérience américaine (Paris: Editions recherche sur les civilisations and Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1996); Elliott, Empires.

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properly worked out. As Robin Frame recently remarked: ‘The “English empire” may have been a small affair compared to the “Spanish system” of the early modern period, upon which so much ink has been expended; nevertheless, the character and speed of communications – and the whole business of networking and decision-making – deserves fuller study.’19 In part, but only in part, the reluctance of medievalists to engage in comparisons of this kind may be explained by the fact that the wider realm of the Plantagenet monarchs was an ‘unlabelled empire’.20 In unofficial contexts, England might be vaunted or decried as an empire by analogy with the ancient world monarchies. Bishop Thomas Brinton of Rochester (d. 1389) employed the trope of imperial decline in 1375 when he compared England to the archetypal empire of antiquity: The kingdom of England has, in the manner of Rome, been called the kingdom of kingdoms, because it has had so many victories, has captured so many kings, and has seized so many dominions . . . But I fear that because of all our sins, our kingdom has decayed and collapsed, and God, who used to be English, has withdrawn from us.21

This was the language of the sermon, not the official record. The king’s ministers had no single collective noun to describe the wider realm. Instead, they resorted to omnibus phrases to refer to the dominions, such as the ‘lordships and possessions overseas pertaining to the crown of England’ or his ‘lands and lordships overseas’.22 Nor was the title ‘emperor’ part of royal style, notwithstanding the appearance in the thirteenth century of the maxim that the ‘king is emperor in his own realm’ (L. rex in regno suo est imperator), which served as an assertion of England’s national sovereignty.23 None of these deficiencies in imperial nomenclature prevented the Plantagenets from basking in the reflected glory of empires past. Upon his return to England after his victory over the French at the battle of Agincourt in 1415, Henry V (r. 1413–22) entered the city of London in the manner of an imperial triumph, wearing a gown of purple and followed by a train of his prisoners.24 19 20 21

22

23

24

Robin Frame, ‘Rediscovering medieval Ireland: Irish chancery rolls and the historian’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 113 (2013), 14. See Crooks and Parsons (Chapter 1, p. 14). Mary Aquinas Devlin (ed.), The sermons of Thomas Brinton, bishop of Rochester (1373–89), CS, 3rd series, lxxxv–lxxxvi (London, 1954), vol. i, p. 47, trans. Andrea Ruddick, ‘National sentiment and religious vocabulary in fourteenth-century England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 60:1 (2009), 1 (quotation). F. ses seignouries, terres, villes et fortz depar dela (‘Richard II: October 1378’, item 18, PROME); F. terres et seignouries depar dela (‘Richard II: January 1380’, item 10, PROME); F. les seignuries du roy pardela (‘Richard II: September 1397’, item 11, PROME). Gaines Post, ‘Two notes on nationalism: ii. Rex imperator’, Traditio 9 (1953), 296–320. Brian Tierney, ‘Bracton on government’, Speculum 38:2 (1963), 295–317; Fritz Schulz, ‘Bracton on kingship’, EHR 60:237 (1945), 136–76. Frank Taylor and John S. Roskell (eds.), Gesta Henrici Quinti: The deeds of Henry the Fifth (Oxford: Oxford Medieval Texts, 1975), pp. 112–13. When John duke of Bedford, regent of Henry VI in France, entered Paris in 1424, an anonymous citizen remarked that ‘more honour

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Peter Crooks

Perhaps more significant as an explanation for the historical neglect of ‘empire’ is the fact that medievalists have, by and large, been more interested in matters of ‘state’ than ‘empire’ – specifically the origins or ‘genesis’ of the modern state.25 In this context, England appears as a precocious exemplar of a Europe-wide political development, providing an early case of the convergence of nation and state.26 Bureaucracy bulks large in this model. Indeed the word is something of a shibboleth among historians of medieval English government.27 The tone was set by the doyen of English administrative history, T. F. Tout (d. 1929). In a lecture delivered in 1915, Tout noted that the term ‘civil service’ originated with the English East India Company after Clive’s conquest of Bengal, but he had no doubt that the history of a professional administration within England itself was much older: ‘Whether or not we have the name, we have the thing, hundreds of years earlier.’28 Inspired by Tout, several generations of English administrative and institutional historians operated within the assumption that the primary object of their labours was the kingdom of England. Although the spectre of Max Weber rarely makes its presence felt in the work of these historians, their empirical findings fit some of the features of

25

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28

was never done at a Roman triumph than was done that day to him and his wife’ (Janet Shirley (ed.), A Parisian journal, 1405–1449, translated from the anonymous Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 201). The aims and methodology of a major collaborative venture to investigate this theme are described in Jean-Philippe Genet, ‘La genèse de l’état moderne’, Actes de la recherché en sciences sociales 118 (1997), 3–18. In a very different historiographical tradition, see Joseph R. Strayer, On the medieval origins of the modern state, new edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). A more subtle approach to the formation of ‘polities’ amid the ‘political convulsion’ of the late Middle Ages is John Watts, The making of polities: Europe, 1300–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). On national identity, see Ruddick, English national identity; David Green, ‘National identities and the Hundred Years War’, in Chris Given-Wilson (ed.), Fourteenth century England VI (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), both of which are better on the medieval evidence than Adrian Hastings, The construction of nationhood: ethnicity, religion and nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The following is merely a representative sample: G. L. Harriss, ‘Medieval government and statecraft’, P&P 25 (1963), 8–39, at 30 (‘It is difficult to see why [English medieval government] should not be termed a fully bureaucratic system’); Michael Prestwich, ‘English government records, 1250–1330’, in Richard Britnell (ed.), Pragmatic literacy, east and west, 1200–1330 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1997), p. 95 (‘Medieval England, by the thirteenth century, was a highly bureaucratic country’); Ifor Rowlands, ‘The Edwardian conquest and its military consolidation’, in Trevor Herbert and Gareth Elwyn Jones (eds.), Edward I and Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1988), p. 48 (‘During the thirteenth century, England became a truly bureaucratic country’); Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘Public and private bureaucracies in England and Wales in the fifteenth century’, in Griffiths, King and country, 137–59. T. F. Tout, ‘The English civil service in the fourteenth century’, BJRL 3 (1916–17), 185–214, at 192–3. An excerpt from this essay is published under the title ‘The emergence of a bureaucracy’, in Robert K. Merton, Ailsa P. Gray, Barbara Hockey and Hanan C. Selvin (eds.), Reader in bureaucracy (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1952), pp. 68–9.

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the weberian ideal type of ‘bureaucracy’.29 By the mid-fourteenth century, the English monarchy presided over what was, for its time in the Latin West, an administrative behemoth staffed by careerist functionaries several hundred strong. The central government was based primarily at Westminster, although between 1298 and 1330 the offices of state periodically ‘migrated’ northwards to York, so to be closer to the king on campaign in Scotland.30 The administration was increasingly differentiated and specialized: witness the long-established division by function not only between the secretarial (the chancery), financial (the exchequer and wardrobe) and judicial departments, but further subdivisions within the secretariat between the chancery and the offices of the privy seal and signet.31 The internal organization of departments was hierarchical, perhaps most obviously in the case of the chancery for which we have a detailed list of ordinances (1388–9).32 Below the chief office of chancellor of England were a hundred or so chancery clerks. At their head were twelve ‘masters’ or ‘clerks of the first form’, followed by a further twelve ‘clerks of the second form’, twenty-four cursitors, and a large pool of assistants and servants. The king’s ministers and clerks took a fee in their office, but since they were normally unmarried clerics – marriage being, in theory, subject to government prohibition as late as the reign of Henry V – they might also receive rewards in promotion to ecclesiastical livings and benefices.33 The occupants of the higher echelons of royal service often had university degrees and, increasingly during the 29

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Weber’s influence is more readily admitted in European scholarship: see the discussion by Patrice Mann, ‘La genèse de l’état moderne: Max Weber revisité’, Revue francaise de sociologie 41:2 (2000), 331–44. W. M. Ormrod, ‘Competing capitals? York and London in the fourteenth century’, in S. Rees Jones, Richard Marks and A. J. Minnis (eds.), Courts and regions in medieval Europe (Rochester, NY: Medieval Press, 2000), pp. 75–98. A vast literature is admirably surveyed in Christine Carpenter, ‘War, government and governance in England in the later Middle Ages’, in Linda Clark (ed.), The fifteenth century VII: conflicts, consequences and the crown in the late Middle Ages (Boydell: Woodbridge, 2007), ch. 1. For an older survey, see S. B. Chrimes, An introduction to the administrative history of mediaeval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), esp. pp. 129–43. On the authority of the privy seal and signet to ‘move’ the great seal, see B. Wilkinson, ‘The authorisation of chancery writs under Edward III’, BJRL 8 (1924), 107–39; A. J. Otway-Ruthven, The king’s secretary and the signet office in the XV century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939). A. L. Brown, The governance of late medieval England, 1272–1461 (London: 1989), ch. 3. For more detailed studies, see B. Wilkinson, The chancery under Edward III (Manchester, 1929), who prints the ‘Ordinaciones cancellarie’ as appendix vi (whence EHD, vol. iv, no. 312, at pp. 499–500). Janice Gordon-Kelter, ‘The lay presence: chancery and privy seal personnel in the bureaucracy of Henry VI’, Medieval Prosopography 10 (1989), 53–74, shows that lay clerks constituted only a significant minority in the reign of Henry VI (r. 1422–61). For the shift towards lay predominance by the reign of Edward IV (r. 1461–83), see Charles C. Smith, ‘Some trends in the English royal chancery: 1377–1483’, Medieval Prosopography 6 (1985), 69–94.

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fifteenth century, legal education.34 These mandarins offered English kings an impressive portfolio of services in furtherance of imperialist enterprises: a flair for legal casuistry was useful in diplomacy and treaty negotiation, while jingoistic propaganda sold the war effort to the domestic audience, not least in parliament so as to prise open the purse strings of the English commons.35 The lesser clerks received what would now be called in-house vocational training and shared an esprit de corps gleaned from, among other things, their common livings in the Inns of Chancery.36 Finally, this was routine administration based on ‘the files’. In any one year, the administration engrossed, sealed and issued as many as 50,000 writs.37 The chancery registered much of the outgoing correspondence, which was normally written in Latin, on parchment rolls ostensibly for its internal reference, though the enrolment of hundreds of ephemeral documents served no practical purpose other than to satisfy the expectations of bureaucratic routine.38 Before the turn of the fourteenth century, the English chancery was producing ten major series of enrolments, and many more were added in time.39 The sheer drudgery of it all was recorded in the verse of the poet-bureaucrat Thomas Hoccleve (d. 1426), whose day job saw him toiling in the office of the privy seal where he stared in silence ‘upon the sheep’s skin’ (membranes of parchment) keeping his songs and words within.40 Jean-Philippe Genet has identified the ‘critical phase’ in the formation of this machinery of state as the decades between c.1280 and c.1360.41 The explanation for its development is seductively simple. The waging of near-continuous war 34 35

36

37

38 39

40

41

Janice Gordon Richter, ‘Education and association: the bureaucrat in the reign of Henry VI’, Journal of Medieval History 12 (1986), 81–96. For samples documents with propagandistic purpose, see Chaplais, English medieval diplomatic practice, vol. i, pp. 422–64; and see G. P. Cuttino, ‘King’s clerks and the community of the realm’, Speculum 29:2 (1954), 395–409, for the role of officialdom in the birth of a ‘xenophobian nationalism’ by the reign of Edward III (at 407). W. M. Ormrod, ‘Accountability and collegiality: the English royal secretariat in the mid-fourteenth century’, in Fianu & Guth, Écrit, pp. 55–85, esp. pp. 76–84; Malcolm Richardson, The medieval chancery under Henry V, List and Index Society, Special Series, vol. xxx (Kew, 1999), pp. 34–5. See estimates in Michael Prestwich, Plantagenet England, 1225–1360 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 55; Brown, Governance, p. 52; see also figures cited by Scales (Chapter 10, p. 235). The best guide to the nature of these sources remains Pierre Chaplais, English royal documents: King John–Henry VI, 1199–1461 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). R. F. Hunnisett, ‘English chancery letters: rolls and files’, Journal of the Society of Archivists 5:3 (1975), 158–68, esp. 163, 167–8. M. S. Giuseppi, A guide to the manuscripts preserved in the Public Record Office (London, 1923), vol. i, pp. 17–42; List of chancery rolls preserved in the Public Record Office (Dublin: Public Record Office Lists and Indexes, no. 27, 1908). Thomas Hoccleve, Regiment of Princes, lines 1013–15 (‘But we laboure in travaillous stilnesse; | We stowpe and stare upon the sheepes skyn, | And keepe moot our song and wordes yn’). For discussion, see Ethan Knapp, The bureaucratic muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the literature of late medieval England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001); T. F. Tout, ‘The human side of mediaeval records’, TRHS 11 (1928), 1–16, esp. 2–3. Jean-Philippe Genet, L’état moderne, genèse: bilans et perspectives (Paris, 1990), p. 306.

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and the need to fund armies through taxation set in motion a mutually reinforcing process of war making and governmental growth that brought forth a ‘fiscalmilitary state’.42 The aspect of the analysis that has been comparatively neglected is that the same formative decades in the construction of the state were also a critical phase in the extension of England’s bureaucratic reach outside its original borders. A few intrepid English historians – notably H. G. Richardson (d. 1974) and G. O. Sayles (d. 1994) – followed the trail of parchment to compile studies of England’s dependent or devolved administrations; but the general tendency has been for work of this kind to carried on ‘locally’, resulting in a historiography compartmentalized along ‘national’ lines rather than brought into satisfactory correlation.43 To the analysis of war making and state formation, we need, then, to add a third dimension: empire-building. The emergence of England as the core of an overseas empire was a development of the mid- to late-thirteenth century. After the loss of Normandy in 1204 and the French conquest of Poitou in 1224 (described by John Gillingham in Chapter 9), the two principal overseas possessions remaining to the Plantagenets were Ireland and Aquitaine (Map 11.1). Under the terms of the treaty of Paris (1259), Henry III (r. 1216–72) renounced his claims to Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, Maine and Poitou to Louis IX of France (r. 1226–70).44 This left only the Channel Islands in English possession as a relic of the duchy of Normandy.45 The disputed status of Aquitaine was a major point of contention between England and France. Was the duchy, as Henry III had conceded in the treaty of Paris, a fief held of the king of France in liege homage? Or was it, as the Gascons believed and Edward I sought to argue in 1298, an hereditary estate (an ‘allod’) held by the Plantagenets in sovereignty with no superior save God?46 The irreconcilability of these opinions contributed to the outbreak in 1337 of the conflict between England and France that was fought, in fits and starts, for well over a hundred years.47 42

43 44 45

46

47

The most sophisticated account presents the shift as one from a ‘domain state’ to a ‘tax state’ by the fourteenth century: W. M. Ormrod, ‘England in the Middle Ages’, in Richard Bonney, The rise of the fiscal state in Europe, c.1200–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Admin. Ire. Pierre Chaplais, ‘The making of the treaty of Paris (1259) and the royal style’, in Chaplais, Essays in medieval diplomacy and administration (London: Hambledon, 1981), ch. 1. John Le Patourel, The medieval administration of the Channel Islands, 1199–1399 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937), pp. 6–7. For a later period, see Tim Thornton, The Channel Islands, 1370–1460: between England and Normandy (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012). L. terra Vasconie non erat nec esse recognoscebatur de feodo regis Francie, set de allodio regis Anglie: C 47/29/4, no. 9, TNA; printed in Pierre Chaplais, English medieval diplomatic practice, part I: documents and interpretation, 2 vols. (London: HMSO, 1982), vol. i, p. 422. Pierre Chaplais, ‘English arguments concerning the feudal status of Aquitaine in the fourteenth century’, BIHR 21:64 (1948), 203–13; Malcolm Vale, The origins of the Hundred Years War: the Angevin legacy, 1250–1340, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), esp. pp. 59–63; and, for a later period, Malcolm Vale, English Gascony, 1399–1453 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), esp. ch. 1.

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0

100

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300 km

Site and date of battle

1297

0

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‘LAND’ OF SCOTLAND Stirling 1297 1314

Bannockburn 1298

Falkirk

Edinburgh Berwick

SCOTLAND BEYOND THE TWEED

Carrickfergus

Carlisle

(Ceded to England 1333)

Dublin Carlow (1361–94) Caernarfon

LORDSHIP OF IRELAND c.1360

Waterford Cork

Sea

ISLE OF MAN

IRELAND Limerick

North

(Annexed by Edward III in 1333–4)

York Chester Nottingham

NORTH WALES

1403

Wexford Cardigan SOUTH WALES Carmarthen

Shrewsbury

KINGDOM OF ENGLAND London Westminster PALE OF CALAIS

Calais

Agincourt 1415

Crecy

OCE A N

BRITTANY

CONQUÊTE

Maximum extent of English-held lands in Normandy and the pays de conquête before1429

e

Welsh Marcher lordships

1346 Abbeville Cherbourg PONTHIEU CHANNEL Harfleur 1416–20 ISLANDS Rouen 1450 1436–49 Caen Formigny 1417–24 Rheims Paris NORMANDY 1424–36 1424 Brest AND THE PAYS DE Verneuil Sein

Orléans

Lands acquired by Edward I in Wales

1429

e Loir

Lands acquired by Edward III in Scotland, 1333–4

F R A N C E Approximate border of the enlarged Principality of Aquitaine created by the Treaty of Brétigny/ Calais (1360)

POITOU

Gaelic and Gaelicized lordships in 1360

Poitiers

1356

English-dominated areas in Ireland English possessions in Normandy and the Pays de Conquête English possessions in Gascony

LIMOUSIN

Castillon

Bordeaux

Bayonne

do

ne

1453

Ga

ro

AQUITAINE/ GUYENNE

D or

English possessions in Aquitaine

g

AT LA N T I C

nn

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Boundary of the extent of English possessions in Gascony in 1337

Map 11.1 England and the Plantagenet dominions in the later Middle Ages

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The final quarter of the thirteenth century was an era of ‘new imperialism’ within Britain, characterized by annexations and the expropriation of native rulers in the south and north of Wales between 1277 and 1283, and in Scotland (albeit with markedly less success) after 1296.48 Edward I (r. 1272–1307) took direct control of south Wales piecemeal after 1277, a development occasioned by the war of 1277–8 against Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the native prince of Wales. In 1279, Edward I acquired the castles of Carmarthen and Cardigan, which became the administrative centres of two new shires, each castle being fitted out with its own exchequer overseen from 1299 by the chief financial officer: the chamberlain of south Wales.49 The death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd late in 1282 while in rebellion against Edward I was followed in 1283 by the capture and grisly execution for treason of Llywelyn’s brother Dafydd. With Dafydd’s death, the line of Welsh princes supplied by the native dynasty of Gwynedd was all but extinguished.50 Edward I annexed Gwynedd Uwch Conwy (‘beyond the Conwy’) to the crown, creating the principality of North Wales composed of three shires of Anglesey, Caernarfon and Merioneth, whose English sheriffs were answerable to the chamberlain of the newly established exchequer at Caernarfon; a fourth county of Flint was administered from Chester.51 The Statute of Wales (1284) introduced much of the apparatus of English government and criminal law; Welsh law was tolerated in civil pleas.52 Between 1296 and 1328, the English sought to convert a long-standing claim to superior lordship over the kingdom of the Scots into direct rule.53 Following the massacre of its townspeople in 1296, the town of Berwick-on-Tweed was colonized with English merchants, and Edward I established a ‘Berwick exchequer’ which was to follow the procedures of the royal exchequer at Westminster.54 Berwick and its hinterland served as the headquarters of an embattled colonial administration from which the English sought to project 48 49 50 51

52

53 54

R. R. Davies, ‘Colonial Wales’, P&P 65 (1974), 3–23 (quotation at p. 14). Ralph A. Griffiths. The principality of Wales in the later Middle Ages: the structure and personnel of government (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1972), pp. 1–17, 35–6. R. R. Davies, The age of conquest: Wales, 1063–1415, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 333–54. W. H. Waters, The Edwardian settlement of north Wales in its administrative and legal aspects (1284–1343) (Cardiff: University of Wales Press Board, 1935), pp. 7–30. The eastern portion of Gwynedd (‘Is Conwy’) was carved into a series of Marcher lordships (James Given, State and society in medieval Europe: Gwynedd and Languedoc under outside rule (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 44). Llinos Beverley Smith, ‘The statute of Wales, 1284’, WHR 10:2 (1980), 127–54. James Given slightly overstates the case when he remarks: ‘What the statute envisaged, and what the English accomplished over the next few years, was the near total importation of an English-style government’ (Given, State and society, pp. 44–6). Fiona Watson, Under the hammer: Edward I and Scotland, 1286–1307 (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1998), esp. ch. 2. Joseph Stevenson (ed.), Documents illustrative of the history of Scotland [. . .] (Edinburgh, 1870), vol. ii, pp. 163–4.

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their power into Scotland until the town was lost to the Scots in 1318.55 When the Anglo-Scottish conflict resumed in 1332–3, Edward III achieved, albeit temporarily, a more radical dismemberment of Scotland when the claimant to the Scottish throne Edward Balliol (d. 1364) ceded six sheriffdoms in lowland Scotland: these lands were annexed to the kingdom of England and described as ‘the king’s land beyond the [river] Tweed’; the remainder of Scotland was to be held of Edward III in liege homage.56 Maintaining English rule in southern Scotland proved difficult, especially after Edward III declared war on France in 1337, but it was not until 1357 that the territorial integrity of Scotland seemed secure, although Berwick (formerly the richest burgh in the kingdom of the Scots) remained in English hands.57 These events occurred in interaction with the Plantagenets’ promotion of interests in continental Europe, which were normally accorded a higher priority than affairs within Britain or Ireland. In 1340, Edward III assumed the title ‘king of France’, and, by the mid-1350s, he was claiming jurisdiction in all the constituent lands of the erstwhile ‘Angevin empire’.58 His real administrative purchase was more limited. In 1279, Edward I became count of Ponthieu through his marriage to Eleanor of Castile (d. 1290), and the county was under English administration intermittently until 1369.59 After the siege of Calais in 1347, Edward III expelled the townsmen and installed a colony of English merchants. By the treaty of Brétigny (1360), which brought about a temporary cessation of hostilities, the French ceded Calais and the county of Guines to Edward III in full sovereignty; what became known as the ‘Pale of Calais’ was considered a parcel of the English crown, only to be lost in 1558.60 55

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58 59

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See Jonathan Gledhill, ‘Locality and allegiance: English Lothian, 1296–1318’, in Andy King and David Simpkin (eds.), England and Scotland at war, c.1296–c.1413 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 157–82. The ‘lands beyond the Tweed’ included the whole of Lothian together with the sheriffdoms of Dumfries, Kirkcudbright, Roxburgh, Selkirk, Peebles, Berwick and Edinburgh (with the constabularies of Haddington and Linlithgow): see Ranald Nicholson, Edward III and the Scots: the formative years of a military career, 1327 to 1333 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 158–62; Bruce Webster, ‘The English occupations of Dumfriesshire in the fourteenth century’, Transactions of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society 35 (1957), 64–80; Iain A. MacInnes, ‘ “To be annexed forever to the English crown”: the English occupation of southern Scotland, c.1334–1337’, in King and Simpkin (eds.), England and Scotland at war, pp. 183–201. Anthony Tuck, ‘A medieval tax haven: Berwick upon Tweed and the English crown, 1333–1461’, in John Hatcher and R. H. Britnell (eds.), Progress and problems in medieval England: essays in honour of Edward Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 148–67 W. M. Ormrod, ‘England: Edward II and Edward III’, in Michael Jones (ed.), NCMH, vol. vi: c.1300–c.1415 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 279. The years of English administration were 1279–94, 1299–1318, 1320–4, 1327–37, 1361–69. See Emmitt Howard Shealy Jr, ‘The English administration of Ponthieu, 1229–1369’ (PhD, Emory University, 1977), ch. 2. David Grummitt, ‘ “One of the mooste pryncipall treasours belongyng to his realme of Englande”: Calais and the crown, c.1450–1558’, in David Grummitt (ed.), The English

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By the same treaty, Edward III also gained an enlarged Aquitaine in full sovereignty, making the status of the duchy until the fall of Bordeaux in 1453 analogous to that of Ireland or Wales, although the territorial gains of 1360 were lost soon after the resumption of war in 1369. The real shift in the nature of the Anglo-French war occurred in the reign of Henry V, who followed up his victory at Agincourt with the full-scale invasion of Normandy beginning on 1 August 1417.61 The reduction of Normandy was largely complete by the late summer of 1419 – a stunning success that was only possible because of the fractiousness of a France riven between Burgundians and Armagnacs.62 The treaty of Troyes (1420) recognized Henry V as heir of Charles VI of France (r. 1380–1422), and the crowns of both kingdoms descended upon Henry VI in 1422 while he was still in the cradle.63 The flow and ebb of English power in France north of the Loire during the two decades of the precarious ‘double monarchy’ can be traced in the movement of the English-controlled financial offices.64 In January 1416, Henry V had appointed a treasurer of Harfleur, where a local exchequer operated according to English exchequer practice until 1420. With his full-scale invasion of Normandy underway, the king established a French-style chambre des comptes at Caen after the fall of the town in September 1417. This chambre was closed in 1424 when Normandy was placed under the authority of the chambre des comptes at Paris, now under English rule.65 When Paris fell to Charles VII of France (r. 1429–70) in May 1436, the English transferred the chambre back to the Norman

61 62

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experience in France, c.1450–1558: war, diplomacy and cultural exchange (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 46–62. See also Le Patourel, ‘L’occupation anglaise de Calais’, in Le Patourel, Feudal empires, ch. 14; and R. L. Baker, ‘The government of Calais in 1363’, in William C. Jordan (ed.), Order and innovation in the Middle Ages: essays in honour of Joseph R. Strayer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 208–11. C. T. Allmand, Lancastrian Normandy, 1415–1450: the history of a medieval occupation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). R. A. Newhall, The English conquest of Normandy, 1416–1424: a study in fifteenth century warfare (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1924), ch. 3; Anne Curry, ‘Henry V’s conquest of Normandy, 1417–19: the siege of Rouen in context’, Guerra y diplomancia en la Euorpea occidental, 1280–1480: XXXI Semana de Estudios Medievales Estella, 19–23 de Julio 2004 (Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, Departmento de Cultura y Turismo, 2005), 237–54. Anne Curry, ‘Two kingdoms, one king: the Treaty of Troyes (1420) and the creation of a double monarchy of England and France’, in Glenn Richardson (ed.), ‘The contending kingdoms’: France and England 1430–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 24–41. These movements are traced in Anne Curry, ‘L’administration financière de la Normandie anglaise: continuité ou changement?’, in P. Contamine and O. Mattéoni (eds.), La France des principautés: les chambres des comptes XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris: Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France, 1996), pp. 83–103; Curry, ‘La chambre des comptes de Normandie sous l’occupation anglaise, 1417–1450’, in P. Contamine and O. Mattéoni (eds.), Les chambres des comptes en France aux XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris: Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France, 1998), pp. 91–125. Guy Llewelyn Thompson, Paris and its people under English rule: the Anglo-Burgundian regime, 1420–1436 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), ch. 1.

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capital of Rouen, where it remained until 1449 when the English abandoned the town, along with the financial records, to the French.66 II

Empire of Parchment, Empire of Memory ‘By virtue of our right we appointed our officials and ministers to govern the realm of Scotland’, Edward I roundly informed Pope Boniface VIII in a letter of 1301 that sought to justify the use of overwhelming force to ‘suppress the insolence’ of his rebel subjects in Scotland.67 His protestation, specious though it was, underscores the point that the contribution of bureaucracy to empire was normative as well as instrumental. The king’s right to appoint to the chief offices of his dominions was itself a demonstration of the legitimate possession – or ‘effective occupation’ to borrow the imperialist language of the Berlin conference of 1884–5 – of the territory in question. Each of the dominions had its own potent traditions and customary laws, but there were structural similarities in their relationship to the crown.68 The common link was the person of the king, who from the mid-thirteenth century was normally resident in England and represented in the dominions by office holders. At the head of each devolved administration was an omnicompetent governor who acted in the place of the king himself: a seneschal in Gascony and Ponthieu, a justiciar in Ireland and in north and south Wales, and a warden in the Channel Islands.69 The main fault line in administrative practice ran between the continental possessions that followed French or local custom and the king’s lands within Britain and Ireland which approximated more closely the structures and 66

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Anne Curry, ‘The loss of Lancastrian Normandy: an administrative nightmare?’, in David Grummitt (ed.), The English experience in France, c.1450–1558: war, diplomacy and cultural exchange (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), esp. pp. 24–45. L. ad dictum regnum spectantibus officiales nostros et ministros ad regimen ejusdem regni Scocie prefecimus jure nostro (E. L. G. Stones, Anglo-Scottish relations, 1174–1328: some selected documents, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), no. 30, at pp. 216–17). Edward I’s assertion was in confutation of the papal bull Scimus fili (27 June 1299), which refers to Edward’s actions in establishing ‘royal officials in the same realm [Scotland], who fear not to perturb the prelates and other clergy and the ecclesiastical and secular persons of the realm with manifold vexations . . . [to] the injury of the royal welfare and reputation, the outrage of justice, and the grave scandal of many of the faithful’, and instructs him to recall his officials from Scotland without delay (ibid., no. 28, at pp. 172–3). Cf. Edward III’s claim to have ‘undertaken the government’ of the kingdom of France in his manifesto issued in 1340 upon assuming the title king of France (Foedera, vol. ii, pp. 1108–9). For structural similarities, see Ruddick, ‘Gascony and the limits’, in Smith (ed.), Ireland and the English world in the Middle Ages, p. 72; and for a direct comparison between Ireland and Aquitaine, see Green, ‘Lordship and principality’. Fowler, ‘Les lieutenants du roi d’Angleterre’.

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procedures of Westminster. The contrast is tangible in the surviving wax impressions of the seals that were used in each of the dominions to authenticate letters issued whether in response to mandates transmitted from Westminster or on the local initiative of the king’s ministers. In the French lordships, the king’s chief officer issued such letters in his own name and authenticated them not with a ‘royal’ seal but a seal of office: the ‘seal of the court of Gascony’ or the ‘seal of the seneschal of Gascony’;70 the seal of the seneschal of Ponthieu;71 or the seals of the baillis of Jersey and Guernsey.72 This presents a contrast with the practice in the royal chancery of Ireland,73 and the smaller secretariats based at Caernarfon and Carmarthen, and at Berwick.74 The chancellor (or chamberlain in the case of north and south Wales) prepared letters in the king’s name: these were attested by the king’s representative (the governor, justiciar or keeper) and authenticated using a double-faced royal ‘great seal’ whose design was based on the great seal of England.75 (These ‘deputed’ great seals were the sigillographic forebears of the royal seals later to be employed in the crown 70

71

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J.-P. Trabut-Cussac, L’administration anglaise en Gascogne sous Henry III et Edouard I de 1254 à 1307 (Geneva: Société de l’École des Chartes, Mémoires et Documents 20, 1972), pp. 175–91, 194–211. The seal was engraved ‘sigillum curie Vasconie’ until c.1390, when the legend was changed to read ‘sigillum officii senescallie Aquitannie’, which more accurately described its function as a seal of office: see Pierre Chaplais, ‘Le sceau de la cour de Gascogne ou sceau de l’office de sénéchal de Guyenne’, in Chaplais, Essays, ch. 9, pp. 19–29; Pierre Chaplais, ‘The chancery of Guyenne’, in Chaplais, Essays, ch. 8, pp. 76–7, 84. Sheila Bredon Storey-Challenger, L’administration anglaise du Ponthieu après le traité de Brétigny, 1361–1369 (Abbeville: Société d’émulation historique et littéraire d’Abbeville, 1975), pp. 33–44. In 1279, Edward I sent a seal to be used in the Channel Islands; but, from the early fourteenth century, the two seals in use were not ‘royal’ seals, sensu stricto, but rather seals of the office of bailli bearing the legend ‘sigillum ballivie’ (Julien Havet, Les cours royales des îles normandes (Paris, 1878), pp. 159–64). On the Irish chancery, see A. J. Otway-Ruthven, ‘The medieval Irish chancery’, Album Helen Maud Cam [. . .], 2 vols. (Paris and Louvain, 1961), vol. ii, pp. 119–38, repr. in Peter Crooks (ed.), Government, war and society in medieval Ireland: essays by Edmund Curtis, A. J. OtwayRuthven and James Lydon (Dublin: Four Courts, 2008), ch. 3; Admin. Ire., pp. 14–21. There was no chancellor or chancery in the principality of Wales: the chamberlains of the north and south had the keeping of the king’s seal of the principality and served the secretarial functions performed elsewhere by chanceries and their staff (Waters, Edwardian settlement, p. 24; Griffiths, Principality, pp. 37–8). The offices of chamberlain and the chancellor of Berwick were often invested in the same person, although separate patents of appointments were issued for each office (Beryl L. Atkinson, ‘Berwick upon Tweed in the wars of Edward III’ (MA, University of Leeds, 1959), pp. 140–1). The reverse side of the deputed seals shows the royal arms rather than an equestrian portrait of the monarch. For analysis of the deputed seals, see Hilary Jenkinson, ‘The great seal of England: deputed or departmental seals’, Archaeologia 85 (1936), 293–338; Griffiths, Principality, pp. 3–8, 37; Hilary Jenkinson, ‘A seal of Edward II for Scottish affairs’, The Antiquaries Journal 11 (July 1931), 229–39 at 229 (king’s seal ‘deputed for the governance of the realm of Scotland’ [L. ad regimen regni Scocie deputatum]); C. H. Hunter-Blair, ‘The mediaeval seals of Berwick-upon-Tweed’, p. 406 (king’s seal ‘for his land beyond the Tweed’ [L. pro terra sua ultra Twedam]).

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colonies of British North America.76) The significance of this contrast in administrative form can easily be pressed too far: the king’s authority embraced all his dominions. At the formal condemnation of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd prince of Wales in November 1276, Edward I issued a mandate to all his subjects – in England, Ireland and Gascony – inhibiting them from communicating with the Welsh or supplying them with victuals, horses or arms by land or sea.77 That the king’s will, expressed through the written word and authenticated by his great seal of majesty, should run untrammelled throughout his dominions was articulated by Edward III in 1339: ‘all his subjects are bound by their allegiance to obey his orders under the great seal of England.’78 The existence in the dominions of seals subsidiary to the English great seal was clearly a matter of administrative convenience, but it was also more than that. The deputed seal was the expression of the king’s will and an icon of his regality (Figures 11.2–3). While the king might be corporally absent from the dominions, his authority was never in abeyance – although, in the case of Edward I, a more accurate sense of his personal feelings on the matter may be gauged by his (alleged) indecorous remark upon entrusting the seal deputed for the governance of Scotland to a newly appointed lieutenant: ‘A man does good work when he rids himself of a shit.’79 Much of the routine documentation produced by the central administration concerned the dominions either directly or (in the case of preparations for war) indirectly. A change in record-keeping practices occurred early in the reign of Edward I to address the problems caused by this volume of business. The solution was to transcribe copies of outgoing letters concerning the dominions on rolls that took their name from the geographical areas in question.80 The first of these 76

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Peter Walne, ‘The royal seals of colonial America’, Antiques 114 (1978), 142–9; Adrian Ailes, ‘Signs, seals and symbols of imperial power, 1600–1960: a view from HM government’, Coat of Arms, 3rd series, 7:1 (2011), 11–24. CCR 1272–9, p. 361. CCR 1339–41, p. 259. The fact that the king had to articulate the point is a reminder that there were large areas, such as the Welsh march and the greater liberties of England, where the king’s writ was not current. The crown sought to develop the argument that the lords of even the greatest liberties (such as the palatinate of Durham) were his ministers. See the recent overview by Keith Stringer, ‘States, liberties and communities in medieval Britain and Ireland (c.1100–1400)’, in Michael Prestwich (ed.), Liberties and identities in the medieval British Isles (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008), ch. 1. The significance of the greater palatinates for later imperial history lies in the fact that their liberties provided the model for the proprietary colonies of early English America: see Tim Thornton, ‘The palatinate of Durham and the Maryland charter’, American Journal of Legal History 45:3 (2001), 235–55. at 14–15. Andy King (ed.), Sir Thomas Gray, Scalacronica, 1272–1363 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), pp. 38–9. On the lieutenant in question, see Andrew M. Spencer, ‘John de Warenne, guardian of Scotland, and the battle of Stirling Bridge’, in King and Simpkin (eds.), England and Scotland at war, pp. 39–51. List of chancery rolls, pp. 59–61, 65–6. A number of other miscellaneous rolls dating from Edward III’s absences on campaign in France, for instance the so-called Brittany, Calais, and Normandy rolls, have been printed in calendar form as part of the series of English patent rolls

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Figures 11.2–3 The images show the obverse and reverse of the wax seal attached by silken chords to a parchment royal charter granted to the city of Dublin in 1395 (Dublin City Archives, Royal Charter, no. 43). The front of the seal shows Richard II enthroned with the insignia of his kingship. The legend reads: ricardvs dei gracia rex anglie et francie et d[omi]n[v]s hib[ernie] et dux aq[uitanie] (‘Richard by the grace of God king of England and France, and lord of Ireland, and duke of Aquitaine’). The reverse displays the royal coat ‘quartered’ to display both the fleurs de lis of France and the lions of England.

specialized compilations was the class of enrolments known as the Rotuli vasconie (‘Gascon rolls’), which began 1273–4 and continued to the reign of Edward IV.81 They set a precedent that was followed when the growth of English power in Wales justified the creation in 1277 of the short-lived Rotuli wallie (‘Welsh rolls’) which run until 1294.82 The Rotuli scotie (the so-called ‘Scotch’ rolls), which form the longest such series in terms of chronology since they persist into the early Tudor era, began to be compiled in 1291: their first entry announces Edward I’s right as ‘sovereign lord of the realm’ of Scotland (F. sovereyn seignur du reume).83 When Henry V launched his invasion of Normandy in August 1417, the chancery instituted a series of Rotuli normannie

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82 83

(W. M. Ormrod, ‘A problem of precedence: Edward III, the double monarchy, and the royal style’, in James S. Bothwell (ed.), The age of Edward III (York: York Medieval Press, 2001), p. 139 n. 24). C 61, TNA. For an edition of the Gascon rolls of Edward II, see Yves Renouard (ed.), Gascon rolls, 1307–17 (Paris, 1966). The complete series of Gascon rolls (which also contain some entries for Ponthieu) are currently being calendared for publication (www.gasconrolls.org). C 77, TNA. See Calendar of various chancery rolls: supplementary close rolls, Welsh rolls, scutage rolls, 1277–1326 (London, 1912), pp. 157–361. C 71, TNA; Rotuli Scotiae in turri Londinensi et in domo capitulari Westmonasteriensi asservati, ed. D. Macpherson et al., 2 vols. (London, 1814), quotation at vol. i, p. 1.

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(‘Norman rolls’).84 The lordship of Ireland stands outside this development in archival practice: English chancery letters concerning Ireland continued to be enrolled on the main series of English patent, close, charter and fine rolls.85 All these series of chancery enrolments contain transcripts of the out-going post of the Westminster administration. To gain a complete picture of English record production concerning the dominions, we would need to aggregate several thousand more documents produced annually in the various devolved administrations of the empire.86 Truly this was an empire of parchment, not a parchment empire.87 Strategies of legitimation and superordination were embedded and encoded in the diplomatic formulae of these records. After Edward III assumed the title of king of France in 1340, letters issued in his name formally withheld from the (real) king of France the royal title and referred to him instead as ‘our adversary of France’ or, more resonantly, ‘Philip of Valois who calls himself king of France’.88 During the Anglo-Scottish wars, the English chancery refused to acknowledge the kingship of the Bruce family, styling King Robert I of Scots (r. 1306–29) merely as ‘Sir Robert de Bruce’. In 1328, Robert’s son, the future David II of Scots (r. 1329–71), married a daughter of Edward II (r. 1307–27), in consequence of which official records later referred to David not as king, but as ‘our brother of Scotland’.89 Even when the chancery grudgingly accorded the royal style to kings of Scots, the diplomatic etiquette which entitled a foreign monarch to be placed first in the opening protocols of royal letters were cast 84

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87 88 89

C 64, TNA. The earlier rolls, which begin in August 1417, are printed in Rot. norm. For a calendar of the later rolls (which continue until Henry V’s death and the start of the ‘double monarchy’ of Henry VI changed the constitutional situation), see the ‘Calendar of the Norman rolls’, DKR 41 (1880), 678–810; DKR 42 (1881), 313–473. The ‘Irish rolls’ referred to in List of chancery rolls, p. xi, are actually memoranda concerning affairs in Ireland that were transmitted to the administration at Westminster. Some of these memoranda are printed in J. Ayloffe (ed.), Calendar of the ancient charters [. . .] (1772), 444–62. A task that can now only be accomplished patchily because the surviving archives of these administrations suffered serious losses, even in the Middle Ages. For the fate of the archives of Gascony captured by the French when they took the island of Oléron in 1294, see G. P. Cuttino, ‘The archives of Gascony under English rule’, American Archivist 25:3 (1962), 315–21. There are no extant examples of the rolls kept by the chancellor of Berwick to record documents issued under the seal of the lands beyond the Tweed (Atkinson, ‘Berwick upon Tweed’, p. 23). The archival history of the Irish chancery is described in Peter Crooks, ‘Reconstructing the past: the case of the Irish chancery rolls’, in Felix M. Larkin and N. M. Dawson (eds.), Lawyers, the law and history: Irish Legal History Society discourses and other papers, 2006–2011 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2013), pp. 281–309. For a reconstruction of the Irish chancery rolls, which were destroyed in 1922, see https://chancery.tcd.ie/ Contrast the ‘parchment imperialists’ of the medieval German Reich: see Scales (Chapter 10, esp. pp. 226, 248). Pierre Chaplais, English diplomatic practice in the Middle Ages (London: Hambledon, 2003), p. 107; EHD, vol. iv, no. 19, quotation at p. 66. Michael Prestwich, ‘England and Scotland during the wars of independence’, in Michael Jones and M. G. A. Vale (eds.), England and her neighbours, 1066–1453: essays in honour of Pierre Chaplais (London: Hambledon, 1989), pp. 181–216.

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aside so that the king of England was granted priority.90 In Ireland, too, the chancery operated a form of bureaucratic disparagement by withholding the title ‘king’ from Gaelic lords, instead employing from the mid-fourteenth century terms such as nacionis sue capitaneus (‘chieftain of his kindred’) or insisting on a bare surname.91 The grandiose titles, such as princeps or dux, that appear in the submissions and letters received by King Richard II (r. 1377–99) in Ireland in 1395, served as a means of fixing provincial hierarchies within the Gaelic lordships without recognizing the Gaelic leaders as ‘kings’.92 Their combination of symbolic significance and practical utility meant that the records of colonial administration might themselves be the targets of agitation. During the revolt in 1294 of Madog ap Llywelyn (d. 1295), the Welsh broke into Caernarfon and slaughtered the king’s ministers, burning the records housed in the exchequer.93 This was a symbolic act that cut both ways. Conquest sometimes began with the ritual removal or destruction of records, as when Edward I transferred the muniments of Scotland to Westminster in 1296,94 or when Henry V publicly burned the title deeds of Harfleur and Caen at their surrender in 1417, thereby erasing the memory of French administration.95 If memory could be erased, it might also be systematized. A potent aspect of bureaucracy as a buttress of imperial rule was its function as the ‘strongbox of the empire’.96 It was, in other words, a source of written institutional memory, real or contrived – though few ‘memories’ were quite so brazenly invented as the 90 91

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94 95 96

Edouard Perroy (ed.), The diplomatic correspondence of Richard II, CS, 3rd series, xlviii (London, 1933), no. 34. Robin Frame, ‘English officials and Irish chiefs in the fourteenth century’, EHR 90:357 (1975), 748–77, esp. 751, 775 (repr. in Frame, Ireland and Britain); Katharine Simms, From kings to warlords: the changing political structures of Gaelic Ireland in the later Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1987), pp. 34–40. Edmund Curtis (ed.), Richard II in Ireland, 1394–5, and submissions of the Irish chiefs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), instrument vii (text p. 68, trans. p. 158); letter 10 (text p. 131, trans. p. 211). H. Rothwell (ed.), The chronicle of Walter of Guisborough, CS, 3rd series, lxxxix (1957), p. 251; a writ of 17 July 1306 refers to the ‘rolls of the exchequer [which] were burnt in the said castle of Carnervan [sic] during the war in Wales’ (CCR 1302–7, p. 397). See John Griffiths, ‘The revolt of Madog ap Llywelyn, 1294–5’, Caernarvonshire Historical Society Transactions 16 (1955), 14. The Welsh burned the records at Conwy during the revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr (M. M. N. Stansfield, ‘Prosopography and the principality of Wales, 1284–1536: the second stage’, Medieval Prosopography 12:2 (1991), 1–33, at 17). In Ireland, An Calbhach Ó Conchobair Failge (a leader of the O Conors of Offaly) captured the castle of Kildare in 1294 and ‘burned the rolls and tallies of the county’ (J. T. Gilbert (ed.), Chartularies of St. Mary’s Abbey, Dublin [. . .], 2 vols. (London: RS, 1884), vol. ii, p. 323). Stones, Anglo-Scottish relations, pp. 152–3. Gesta Henrici Quinti, p. 55 n. 44; Anne Curry, ‘The impact of war and occupation on urban life in Normandy, 1417–1450’, French History 1:2 (1987), 159. As Sir Francis Palgrave (1788–1861) referred to the Public Record Office founded at Chancery Lane in 1838 (Aidan Lawes, Chancery Lane, 1377–1977: ‘The strong box of the empire’ (Kew: PRO Publications, 1996), p. 19).

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forgeries produced by John Hardyng in the fifteenth century purporting to prove the English claim to overlordship over Scotland.97 English record-keeping, as John Gillingham describes in Chapter 9, was precocious. The first recorded royal archivist occurs as early as 1215.98 But the accumulation of records soon outpaced the crown’s ability to retrieve the information it required. Edward I declared to Boniface VIII that the English right to exercise superior lordship over Scotland was ‘graven upon the tablets of our memory with an indelible mark’.99 In reality, the king’s failure to discover relevant documents to support that claim within the royal archives exposed a weakness that he sought to remedy through the obsessive documentation of his dealings with Scotland from 1291. In 1296, Edward I recorded the submission of more than 1,500 defeated Scots at Berwick, and he later commissioned a public notary to transcribe the submissions in triplicate on parchment scrolls known as the ‘Ragman Rolls’, which were deposited in the chancery, exchequer and wardrobe.100 It was a striking case of the bureaucratic mentality working overtime to make up for the shortcomings of precedent.101 During the reign of Edward II, the administration made efforts to improve its ‘information retrieval’ systems by copying and listing significant documents with the purpose of ‘having a fuller memory of them in the future’.102 The compilations of this period have normally been ascribed to the class of English archives that deals with diplomatic administration, but that classification is only partially accurate.103 Large sections of the manuscripts were given over not to treaties and diplomatic relations with ‘foreign’ powers but rather to the rights claimed by the Plantagenets in (what they viewed as) their own 97

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See Jean-Philippe Genet, La genèse de l’état moderne: culture et société politique en Angleterre (Paris, 2003), p. 115, for the creation of a ‘mémoire écrite’. On Hardyng, see Alfred Hiatt, The making of medieval forgeries: false documents in fifteenth-century England (London: BL and University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 106–7. Hardyng’s forgeries are listed in E. L. G. Stones and Grant G. Simpson (eds.), Edward I and the throne of Scotland, 1290–1296: an edition of the record sources for the Great Cause (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), vol. ii, pp. 385–6. Nicholas Vincent, ‘The great lost library of England’s kings: royal use and ownership of books, 1066–1272’, Kathleen Doyle and Scot McKendrick (eds.), 1000 Years of royal books and manuscripts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 82. Stones, Anglo-Scottish relations, pp. 192–3. Stones and Simpson (eds.), Edward I and the throne of Scotland, esp. vol. i, appendix 3, pp. 209–10. For the information-gathering exercises of Edward I in Gascony (1273–4), the Channel Islands (1274), and Wales (1280), see esp. Sandra Raban, ‘Edward I’s other inquiries’, in Michael Prestwich, R. H. Britnell and Robin Frame (eds.), Thirteenth century England IX: proceedings of the Durham conference, 2001 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), 43–57. CCR 1318–23, p. 319. Discussion in G. P. Cuttino, English diplomatic administration, 1259–1339 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 78; V. H. Galbraith, ‘The tower as an exchequer record office in the reign of Edward II’, in A. G. Little and F. M. Powicke (eds.), Essays in medieval history presented to Thomas Frederick Tout (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1925), pp. 231–47, esp. pp. 234–5, 244. G. P. Cuttino, English diplomatic administration, 1259–1339 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940); Stones and Simpson (eds.), Edward I and the throne of Scotland, vol. i, p. 36.

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dominions.104 Already in the reign of Edward I, a codex known as Liber A – compiled in book form as a means of easy reference to loose documents held in the coffers of the exchequer – contained documents concerning, among other things, relations between the English crown and the rulers of Wales and Scotland.105 In Edward II’s reign, the exchequer began a more thoroughgoing sortation of its records, together with the transcription or listing of documents into books. A Gascon ‘register’ (containing full transcripts) was completed in 1319, followed in 1322 by an inventory or ‘calendar’ of Gascon documents.106 These compilations were the prelude to a more general inventory overseen by the energetic treasurer of England, Bishop Walter Stapeldon (d. 1326), which was to include in summary form ‘all letters, processes, instruments, and memoranda . . . affecting the realm and the king’s lands in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland’.107 The result, known as Bishop Stapeldon’s calendar, was completed by 1323.108 The contents of the calendar are marked off by pictograms drawn in the margin corresponding to the devices (L. signa) painted on the chests or coffers in which the original documents were deposited in the exchequer. Many of these signa are simply armorial devices, but among those concerning Ireland and Wales are caricatures that play on ethnic stereotypes: an image of a Welsh archer or spearman identifies the chest containing records concerning Wales; a hooded warrior bearing an axe was marked on a chest containing the documents concerning Ireland (Figures 11.4–5).109 The imagery of ethnic difference,

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107

108 109

The distinction is a fuzzy one: the problem of Scotland within English diplomacy is considered in J.-P. Genet, ‘Scotland in the later Middle Ages: a province or a foreign kingdom for the English?’, in Hannah Skoda and Robert Shaw (eds.), Contact and exchange in later medieval Europe: essays in honour of Malcolm Vale (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012), ch. 8. E 36/274–5, TNA (compiled between c.1282 and c.1305). The Welsh section of Liber A is printed in J. Goronwy Edwards (ed.), Littere Wallie preserved in Liber A in the Public Record Office (Cardiff: University Press Board, 1940). For the missing Scottish section of Liber A, see n. 113. Gascon register A (series of 1318–1319), ed. by G. P. Cuttino with the collaboration of J.P. Trabut-Cussac, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); G. P. Cuttino (ed.), The Gascon calendar of 1322, CS 3rd series, lxx (London: RHS, 1949). Later in the century, inquisitions concerning the laws of Calais were copied onto the ‘French rolls’ of the kings of England (Le Patourel, ‘L’administration anglaise de Calais’, in Le Patourel, Feudal empires, ch. 14, at p. 233). CPR 1321–4, p. 7; Mark Buck, Politics, finance and the church in the reign of Edward II: Walter Stapeldon, treasurer of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 167–8. F. C. Palgrave (ed.), The antient kalendars and inventories of the treasury of His Majesty’s Exchequer, 3 vols. (London, 1846). Palgrave (ed.), Antient kalendars, vol. i, esp. pp. 116, 118, 122. Similar signa also appear in Liber A, the Welsh signa being reproduced in facsimile in Edwards (ed.), Littere Wallie, frontispiece and facing p. 139. The Irish signa, reproduced from E 36/274, fos. 38r and 435r, TNA) are discussed in H. F. McClintock, Old Irish and highland dress (Dundalk: Dundalgan Press, 1950), pp. 23–5.

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Figures 11.4–5 Illustrations of Welsh archer and Irish axeman from Liber A (E 36/274, fos. 32 and 435, TNA), late 13th cent.

not to say the presumption of English cultural superiority, was embedded in the mnemonic devices of English record-keeping (see Figures 11.4–5).110 The immediate spur for the creation of the exchequer compilations was the desire to improve and control the collection and disbursement of revenue.111 They also served a wider purpose. A compilation such as the ‘Great Roll’ concerning the English claim to Scotland made by the notary Andrew de Tange between 1315 and 1318 was clearly not an impartial record of events; it was a pièce justicative.112 In 1400 when Henry IV (r. 1399–1413) revived his claim 110

111 112

For the wider context of ‘ethnographic illustration’ in the Middle Ages, see Robert Bartlett, ‘Illustrating ethnicity in the Middle Ages’, in Mirian Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac and Joseph Ziegler (eds.), The origins of racism in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), ch. 6. Seymour Phillips, Edward II (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 445. Stones and Simpson (eds.), Edward I and the throne of Scotland, vol. i, pp. 45–7, 81–2; vol. ii, pp. 378–80.

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to the overlordship of the Scottish kingdom as a prelude to a military campaign across the northern border, a series of documents concerning Scotland were removed from Liber A to provide the necessary evidence.113 In the next reign, Henry V received ambassadors from the Scots to negotiate the release of their king, James I (r. 1406–37), who had been in English captivity since 1406. Henry V took the opportunity to revive his claim to ‘the submission, homage, and other peculiar rights due from of old to the crown of England from the kings of the Scots and their people’, which (so his biographer tells us) were ‘demanded of the king in accordance with lawful documents which are listed in a volume of records’.114 Records might also be used to jog the memory of a king who would have preferred to indulge in a convenient amnesia, as when the English settler population of medieval Ireland sought to saddle the crown with unsought military and financial commitments. In 1394–5, Richard II received a series of submissions from the lords of Gaelic Ireland which were recorded in writing by notaries. The deeds of submission were brought back to England and deposited in the chancery, while a transcript of all the ‘public instruments, indentures and other muniments’ was enrolled among the memoranda of the English exchequer by order of the treasurer of England.115 In 1421, in an effort to prod Henry V into undertaking the ‘final conquest’ of the island, envoys from the Irish parliament (an assembly representative only of the settler population) reminded the king that these records were languishing in the royal treasury and requested that a crusade be launched against the Gaelic ‘rebels’ who had breached the terms of their submissions.116 III

Space and Communications When the Spanish viceroy Don Antonio de Mendoza (d. 1552) quipped that ‘Peru was the best place that the King of Spain gave, save that it was somewhat too near Madrid’,117 he unwittingly pre-empted the ‘spatial turn’ in imperial 113

114 115 116

117

As a result, the Scottish section of Liber A is now missing, but a list of its contents survives and is printed in Stones and Simpson (eds.), Edward I and the throne of Scotland, vol. i, appendix iv (pp. 211–12). See also E. L. G. Stones, ‘The appeal to history in Anglo-Scottish relations between 1291 and 1401, part ii’, Archives 9 (1969). Gesta Henrici Quinti, pp. 138–9 (L. petitis pro parte Regis per legitima documenta que intitulantur in codice recordorum). Curtis (ed.), Richard II in Ireland, prints the submissions taken from the memoranda roll: E 159/171, TNA. The original deeds survive as C 47/10/25, TNA. Henry F. Berry (ed.), Statutes and ordinances, and acts of the parliament of Ireland, King John to Henry V (Dublin: HMSO, 1907), pp. 564–5; Elizabeth Matthew, ‘Henry V and the proposal for an Irish crusade’, in Smith (ed.), Ireland and the English world, ch. 11. The anecdote occurs in the apothegms of Sir Francis Bacon (d. 1626): The works of Francis Bacon, [. . .] lord chancellor of England, ed. J. Spenning, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath, 14 vols. (London: Longmans, 1861–79), vol. vii, pp. 130–1.

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studies, with its insistence that space is relative and is experienced relationally as well as in absolute terms.118 The bureaucrats in England’s medieval empire were not menaced by the tyranny of distance so much as by their close monitoring from Westminster – far too close for the comfort of ministers suspected of peculation or those who were called to render accounts by the exchequer and pursued for their debts relentlessly, literally beyond the grave (through their executors) should they have the impertinence to die before being acquitted.119 The nodal points in the crown’s administrative network were the towns that accommodated the sedentary departments of dominion government, most importantly the local exchequers or treasuries at Dublin (and briefly Carlow); Berwick; Caernarfon and Carmarthen; Bordeaux; and the outpost of Calais which, among its other advantages, provided a secure port for the passage of cross-channel communications.120 Messengers in the royal service received a fixed sum for regular journeys to these locations. In the mid-fourteenth century, ten shillings was the standard amount paid for carrying letters from Westminster to Dublin, the sum being increased if the messenger had to journey inland beyond the city.121 The speed of communications between Westminster and these local ‘capitals’ was variable, but in most cases (assuming good conditions and a feeling of urgency122) the time in which a messenger might be expected to deliver the king’s writs would be measured in weeks, and nothing like the minimum of two or three months that it took for an outbound Spanish fleet to cross the Atlantic in the sixteenth century, let alone the twelve months it took to reach the Philippines.123 In April 1322, it took thirteen days for the records of the exchequer to trundle from Westminster to their new 118

119

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121 122

123

David Harvey, ‘Space as a keyword’, in Harvey, Spaces of global capitalism (London: Verso, 2006), ch. 3. For an application of Harvey’s ideas to imperial history, see Alan Lester, ‘Relational space and life geographies in imperial history: George Arthur and humanitarian governance’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 21:2 (2010), 29–46. Admin. Ire., p. 58. On royal control of office holders more generally, see Frédérique Lachaud, L’éthique du pouvoir au moyen âge: l’office dans la culture politique (Angleterre, vers 1150–1330) (Paris: Éditions classiques Garnie, 2010), pp. 544–56. For the financial offices in English France between 1416 and 1449, see n. 64; and Neil Murphy, ‘War, government and commerce: the towns of Lancastrian France under Henry V’s rule, 1417–22’, in Gwilym Dodd (ed.), Henry V: new interpretations (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2013), ch. 10. Mary C. Hill, The king’s messengers, 1199–1377: a contribution to the history of the royal household (London: Edward Arnold, 1961), p. 107. James F. Willard, ‘The dating and delivery of letters patent and writs in the fourteenth century’, BIHR 10:28 (1932), 1–11: ‘When there was need of haste the chancery and exchequer could act quickly’ (at 11). The return crossing from the Americas to Spain was considerably longer than the outward voyage: for a table showing voyage times from Andalusia to the Indies, see Mark A. Burkholder and Lyman L. Johnson, Colonial Latin America, 7th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 95. See also J. H. Elliott, ‘King and patria in the Hispanic world’, in Elliott, SEWW, p. 174; Storrs (Chapter 12, p. 291).

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accommodation in the castle of York: the pace of approximately twenty miles per day was fair given that the journey was slowed by the carriage of all the records of the office, which were stored in specially commissioned wine chests.124 In July 1455, news of the relief of Berwick from the Scots was carried the longer distance from Newcastle to London in six nights; in 1482, Edward IV initiated a relay system with riders stationed at intervals of twenty miles so that a letter passed at the rate of 200 miles in two days.125 Sea travel was less certain. One prominent Irish prelate who was no stranger to travel between Ireland, England and Rome preached that he had known of men who had to wait in an English port from the feast of St John (24 June) until after Christmas for a favourable crossing to Ireland.126 In fair weather, the crossings could be accomplished in a single day (by comparison Bordeaux was four or five days’ distant from the southern English ports), and the administration at Westminster could expect that a mandate transmitted to Ireland would reach its destination and be acted upon within six or eight weeks of its issue.127 Land routes radiating outwards from London are depicted on the remarkable ‘Gough map’, the earliest surviving map of Britain in which the island appears in recognizable form, dating from the second half of the fourteenth century (though possibly based on a late thirteenth-century original).128 Its most recent interpreters emphasize the positional accuracy with which the main settlements are plotted, which would have made the map useful in estimating distance and travel times.129 Pictographic ‘vignettes’ depict Dublin, Berwick, Carmarthen and Calais as walled towns – an indication of the strategic or political significance they were accorded by the makers of the map, who may have been

124

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126 127

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Dorothy M. Broome, ‘Exchequer migrations to York in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries’, in A. G. Little and F. M. Powicke (eds.), Essays in medieval history presented to Thomas Frederick Tout (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1925), pp. 295–7. C. A. J. Armstrong, ‘Some examples of the distribution and speed of news in England at the time of the Wars of the Roses’, England, France and Burgundy in the fifteenth century (London: Hambledon, 1983), pp. 107, 113. For other examples of a postal system on the roads from London to Scotland and Wales, see J. R. Alban and C. T. Allmand, ‘Spies and spying in the fourteenth century’, in C. T. Allmand (ed.), War, literature and politics in the late Middle Ages (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1976), pp. 73–101, at 85–6. Aubrey Gwynn, ‘The black death in Ireland’, Studies 23:93 (1935), 34. Frame, English lordship, pp. 114–19, esp. table 9. For the voyage time to Bordeaux, see Yves Renouard, ‘Ce que l’Angleterre doit à l’Aquitaine’, in Charles-Edmond Perrin (ed.), Études d’histoire mediévale (Paris: SEVPN, 1968), p. 872. A digitized and searchable version of the map is accessible online at www.goughmap.org. For discussion of the roads, see Brian Paul Hindle, ‘The road network of medieval England and Wales’, Journal of Historical Geography 2:3 (1976), 207–21. Keith D. Lilley, Christopher D. Lloyd and Bruce M. S. Campbell, ‘Mapping the realm: a new look at the Gough map of Britain (c.1360)’, Imago Mundi 61:1 (2010), 2. See also Daniel Birkholz, The king’s two maps: cartography and culture in thirteenth-century England (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).

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agents of the royal administration.130 From the vantage points of their parapets, these local ‘capitals’ must have seemed like the local hubs of ‘central’ government; but it is useful to invert the perspective. Colonial towns were often ethnically and geographically liminal, being English enclaves perched precariously on the peripheries of the societies they were supposed to dominate, their heavy fortifications betraying a sense of insecurity even while seeking to convey the dread power of the king. Projecting administrative will from the castles that clung to the coast of north Wales into the mountainous interior, or from lowland Berwick into the vastnesses of the Scottish highlands, was highly problematic. It may be no coincidence that these mountains are among the few relief features to be depicted on the Gough map.131 From 1361 until 1394, the Irish exchequer was relocated from Dublin to the inland town of Carlow in an effort to provide better access to the south and south-west of the island. The experiment failed. The Gaelic lords of Leinster repeatedly attacked the town.132 Richard Walsh, a mid-ranking parchment pusher in the Irish administration, pleaded to the crown in 1392 for recompense in consideration of his forty years of service in the chancery and exchequer of Ireland: ‘now in his old age’, so his petition ran, he had been ‘ruined for the rest of his days’ because his property had been burned and destroyed by the king’s ‘Irish enemies’.133 A cultural gulf might separate agents of the crown and the native population, even when in absolute terms they were thrust up against each other, cheek by jowl. A different aspect of the ‘relationalization’ of imperial space is suggested by the shuffling of bureaucrats around the dominions. The medieval ‘English world’ was scarcely global in its extent, but it was geographically dispersed and bureaucrats on the move served to shrink it to manageable, or at least imaginable, proportions.134 In 1293, the treasurer of Ireland and the constable of Bordeaux – the chief financial officers in Ireland and Gascony respectively – were mentioned in the same breath in the order specifying that ‘henceforth each year the account of Gascony and Ireland shall be rendered at the English exchequer and there audited by the king’s treasurer and barons’.135 Audits of the Irish exchequer did not in fact take place annually; but once the process was 130

131 132

133 134 135

Keith D. Lilley, ‘Mapping Plantagenet rule through the Gough map of Great Britain’, in Ingrid Baumgärtner and Martina Stercken (eds.), Herrschaft verorten: politische Kartographie des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit Chronos, 2012), pp. 77–97. Lilley et al., ‘Mapping the realm’, 2. Philomena Connolly, ‘ “The head and comfort of Leinster”: Carlow as the administrative capital of Ireland, 1361–1394’, in Thomas McGrath (ed.), Carlow: history and society (Dublin: Geography Publications, 2008), ch. 12. James Graves (ed.), A roll of the proceedings of the king’s council in Ireland [. . .], 1392–93 (London: Rolls Series, 1877), pp. 11–12. Smith (ed.), Ireland and the English world. Cf. Miles Ogborn, Global lives: Britain and the world, 1550–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Paul Brand (ed.), ‘Parliament of Edward I, roll 6, Item 23’, in PROME.

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put in train (as happened every few years, and certainly at the end of a term of office), both the Irish treasurer and a chamberlain travelled to Westminster with duplicate sets of their accounts, together with ancillary supporting documentation, for scrutiny before the barons of the English exchequer.136 The result was a periodic traffic of people and parchment between core, periphery and back again. Less obvious, but perhaps more important in terms of binding the empire together, was the circulation of ministers between dominions.137 Robert Power served as the king’s escheator in north and south Wales, and later as chamberlain of north Wales.138 In January 1325, while chamberlain, Power sent to Ireland for corn and other supplies for the king’s castles in north Wales.139 Two years later, he was transferred to Ireland, where between 1327 and 1331 he served as treasurer. In 1333, he was in Scotland and was rewarded for his service at the siege of Berwick. Unlike two other treasurers of Ireland, Thomas Burgh and John Bolton, who became chamberlains of Berwick, Power returned to Ireland, where he served as a baron (and later chief baron) of the Irish exchequer until 1344.140 Peripatetic careers such as his were not restricted to circuits of the king’s dominions in Britain and Ireland. In the last decades of the fourteenth century, two successive archbishops of Dublin who held office as chancellor of Ireland had earlier seen service in Gascony: Robert Wikeford (d. 1390) as constable of Bordeaux;141 and Robert Waldby (d. 1397) as keeper of the seal for the seneschal of Aquitaine.142 Few were perhaps as mobile as William Allington (d. 1446), whose early service was as receiver of the English garrison at Brest (1397) and treasurer of Calais (1398). In 1403, Henry IV appointed him as treasurer of Ireland, a post Allington held for much of the next decade. On 1 May 1419, he became treasurer-general of the duchy of Normandy and the pays du conquête. So important were these administrative roles to Allington’s sense of personal prestige that his memorial brass in the church at Horseheath (Cambs) described him as sometime treasurer of Ireland and Normandy.143 136 137 138 139 140

141 142 143

The procedure is outlined in Admin. Ire., pp. 57–64. For Gascony, see E. C. Lodge, ‘The constables of Bordeaux in the reign of Edward III’, EHR 50:198 (1935), 225–41. See Crooks, ‘State of the union’, 23–6; Green, ‘Lordship and principality’, 27 n. 118 (on ‘colonial staff’); Frame, ‘Rediscovering medieval Ireland’, 11–12. Griffiths, Principality, pp. 317–18. The financial officers in Wales, Berwick, Calais (from 1360) and Harfleur (1417–19) also presented accounts at the Westminster exchequer. CCR 1324–7, p. 77. Atkinson, ‘Berwick upon Tweed in the wars of Edward III’, p. 126; Frame, English lordship, p. 92 and n. 47. In addition, Power also held office in Ireland as escheator and justice of the common bench (Admin. Ire., pp. 101, 108, 127, 158; Griffiths, Principality, pp. 317–18). T. Runyan, ‘The constabulary of Bordeaux: the accounts of John Ludham (1372–3) and Robert de Wykford (1373–5)’, Mediaeval Studies, 36 (1974), esp. 224–6. Chaplais, ‘Le sceau de la cour de Gascogne’, in Chaplais, Essays, ch. 9, p. 25. J. S. Roskell, ‘William Allington of Horseheath’, Parliament and politics in late medieval England, vol. iii (London: Hambledon, 1981), pp. 317–29; W. M. Palmer (ed.), Monumental inscriptions and coats of arms from Cambridgeshire (1932), p. 85.

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The aspect of communications that has been more intensively studied than any other is the logistical organization of war, which is minutely documented in the records of the royal bureaucracy. It was England’s skill in military logistics that Tito Livio Frulovisi memorialized in his Life of Henry V (c.1438): ‘They lacked neither mines to undermine the ground, nor carpenters to make and raise [siege] engines, nor labourers to delve the ground and to lade ditches, nor masons to hew stones for shot to break walls, to subvert strongholds, nor gunners to shoot the guns.’144 This is stirring stuff, but we require a sense of proportion. Frulovisi was writing retrospectively ‘with the stench of decline hanging in the air’ in the aftermath of the Congress of Arras (1435), when the Burgundians deserted the cause of the English in France.145 More generally, the history of military administration carries with it the risk of adopting the quartermaster’s view of the subject. Christine Carpenter has recently urged that ‘[England’s] bureaucratic heroes need to be studied alongside the military heroes whose great deeds they made possible’.146 The subject matter is certainly important, but the note of triumphalism may be somewhat premature. Arguably, the greatest test faced by bureaucrats was not so much the organization of war,147 but the conversion of a military campaign into regular civil administration – in other words, bridging the gap between ‘conquest’ and ‘empire’.148 IV

Empire of Difference A more sober assessment of the capacities of the English state to bridge that gap was offered by R. R. Davies in a series of influential publications. Drawing on the categories of Max Weber, Davies distinguished the ‘patriarchal and tributary’ character of the English state and its relations with the Celtic peripheries in the eleventh and twelfth centuries from an increasingly ‘bureaucratic and integrative’ approach discernable in the thirteenth 144 145 146 147 148

Titi Livii Foro-Juliensis, Vita Henrici Quinti, regis Angliae, ed. Thomas Hearne (Oxford, 1716), p. 33. David Rundle, ‘The unoriginality of Tito Livio Frulovisi’s Vita Henrici Quinti’, EHR 123:504 (2008), 1128 (quotation). Carpenter, ‘War, government and governance’, in Clark (ed.), Fifteenth century VII, p. 22. Contrast Prestwich, Plantagenet England, p. 77 (‘the greatest test that was faced was that of organizing war’). A point noted by Anne Curry in her study of Normandy under English occupation in the second quarter of the fifteenth century: Anne Curry, ‘Pour ou contre le roi d’angleterre? La discipline militaire et la contestation du pouvoir en Normandie au xve siècle’, in Catherine Bougy and Sophie Poirey (eds.), Images de la contestation du pouvoir dans le monde normand: xe–xviiie siècle: actes du colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle, 29 septembre-3 octobre 2004 (Caen: Université de Caen-Basse Normandie, 2007), pp. 147–62.

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century.149 With bureaucracy arose a ‘mentality of uniformity’ promoted by and grounded in the growth of written records as a medium of English governance: ‘Once the steam-roller of uniformity was on the road nothing was to be allowed to stand in its way.’150 Davies reserved his most scathing remarks for the new breed of bureaucrats who were ‘the advocates of uniformity; indeed without uniformity their world is shattered, their authority undermined’.151 This bureaucratic insistence on uniformity of rule portended a failure of governmental control and political imagination that ‘disabled [England] from reaching out effectively and constructively to the other peoples and power centres of the British Isles, except possibly on its own terms’.152 Consequently, in his Ford lectures of 1998 on the ‘first English empire’, Davies chose to date the ‘ebb tide’ of empire to the early fourteenth century, by which time the limits of integration within Britain and Ireland were apparent.153 On this point, somewhat ironically, Davies’s views were consonant with those of an earlier Ford lecturer, namely T. F. Tout, founder of the very school of administrative history whose accumulated interpretation of ‘the pretensions and the capaciousness of the English state’ Davies subjected to such searching reinterpretation.154 In the 1913 Ford lectures on the ‘place of Edward II in English history’, Tout identified the early fourteenth century as marking a shift away from ‘what we may by anticipation call imperial history’ because it witnessed the ‘collapse of the imperialistic visions of Edward I’.155 Significantly, there is a degree of conceptual slippage or inadvertent conflation in these interpretations between ‘empire’ and the idea of an integrated, uniformly ruled ‘state’.156 There is little, in fact, to suggest that it occurred to Edward I – or, for that matter, any other late-medieval English king – to 149

150 152

153 154

155

156

R. R. Davies, ‘The English state and the Celtic peoples’, in Wong & Sayer, British state, p. 160. Susan Reynolds uses similar weberian terminology in her study of lay collective solidarities in Europe between 900 and 1300 to describe ‘a change from traditional and patrimonial government to bureaucratic government, with attitudes towards it – reasonably enough – lagging behind’ (Reynolds, Kingdoms and communities in Western Europe, 900–1300, 1st edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 334). 151 Davies, Domination, p. 120. Davies, Domination, p. 121. Davies, Empire, p. 201; Davies, ‘The failure of the first British empire? England’s relations with Ireland, Scotland and Wales, 1066–1500’, in Nigel Saul (ed.), England in Europe, 1066–1453 (London, 1994), p. 131. Davies, Empire, ch. 7. Davies, ‘English state’, in Wong & Sayer, British state, p. 165 (quotation); and see also R. R. Davies, ‘The medieval state: the tyranny of a concept?’, in Wong & Sayer, British state, pp. 294–314. T. F. Tout, The place of Edward II in English history: based upon the Ford lectures delivered in the University of Oxford in 1913 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1914), pp. 34, 206. For the distinction, see Reynolds, ‘Empires’, 152; Burbank & Cooper, Empires, p. 8; Crooks and Parsons (Chapter 1, p. 15).

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shoehorn Wales or Scotland, let alone the dominions outside the island of Britain, into a ‘single, united, England-centred kingdom’ or state, even had they been able to.157 By considering England’s insular and continental possessions together as a concatenation, an interlinked whole, their cardinal feature appears to be ‘organized diversity’, rather than rigid uniformity.158 The devolved administrations were kept separate and subordinate. Delegation and accountability were the order of the day; integration and incorporation were not – at least until the passage of the so-called Act of Union between England and Wales in 1536. But if the reversals that the English experienced in the first quarter of the fourteenth century were not really a ‘failure’ of state making, they might possibly be understood as a symptom of the unstable dynamics of empire-building that persisted into the fifteenth century. In that light, the disjunction that Davies identified between ‘state power’ and ‘indigenous “political” society’ is a key insight whose application can be extended, perhaps with even greater application, into the late Middle Ages.159 Within England, a broadening of political society during the fourteenth century resulted in the co-optation of the crown’s middling landholders in the administration of justice in the English localities.160 It was precisely this alliance between the royal bureaucracy and local elites that was difficult to replicate in a stable fashion among populations that viewed English-appointed officials with attitudes ranging from suspicion to outright hostility. During the revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr (c.1359–c.1416) in the first decade of the fifteenth century, a letter from Prince Henry (the future Henry V) concerning the killing and murder of his loyal servitor and officer refers to the fact that the Welsh rebels wished to see to it that no Englishman should hold office in Wales.161 Of course, within England itself, the royal administration was the subject of a large literature of complaint,162 and 157

158 159 160

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162

Davies, Domination, p. 126 (quotation); and see also Davies’s comments on the ‘integrationist and uniformist’ language of the ‘unitary state’ (‘English state’, in Wong & Sayer, British state, esp. p. 165). For this phrase, see Barkey (Chapter 5, p. 122); Barkey, Empire of difference. Davies, ‘English state’, in Wong & Sayer, British state, p. 169. G. L. Harriss, ‘Political society and the growth of government in late medieval England’, P&P 138 (1993), 28–57; Chris Given-Wilson, ‘The problem of labour in the context of English government, c.1350–1450’, in James Bothwell, P. J. P. Goldberg and W. M. Ormrod (eds.), The problem of labour in fourteenth-century England (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2000), pp. 85–100. M. Dominica Legge, Anglo-Norman Letters and Petitions from All Souls MS 182 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1941), no. 230. Compare the first letter of Joan of Arc to the English (dated c.22 Mar. 1429) in which she calls on John duke of Bedford, ‘who call[s] himself regent of France’, to leave the kingdom of France, together with his commanders, threatening that any Englishmen who remained in France would be killed (Craig Taylor (ed.), Joan of Arc: La Pucelle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), no. 4, pp. 74–5). Janet Coleman, ‘A political analysis of literary works, c.1280–1400: ideology and the perception of “the state” in England’, in J.-P. Genet (ed.), Culture et idéologie dans la genèse de l’état moderne (Rome: École française de Rome, 1985), pp. 433–62.

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individual ministers occasionally fell victim to popular agitation. In the dominions, however, bureaucratic ‘efficiency’ and activity – as measured by the ability to intrude and extract – could prove the undoing of English rule. The classic case is that of Hugh Cressingham, that ‘busy man on the spot’ as G. W. S. Barrow memorably described him, whose vigour as treasurer of Scotland may have hastened the demise of English rule in Scotland in 1296–7.163 The very title of Cressingham’s office was an affront to the Scots, who referred to him not as the king’s treasurer, but as the ‘treacherer’ (L. non thesaurarium sed traiturarium regis). Before the kingship of John Balliol (r. 1292–6), the officer charged with the financial administration of Scotland was the chamberlain. The title ‘treasurer’ was an English innovation and, like Cressingham himself, short-lived. After Cressingham’s death at the battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297, the Scots expressed their contempt by flaying his body and dividing the skin among themselves.164 Edward I’s response to the shock defeat of his army at Stirling was to let loose all the financial and military resources at his disposal. By 1304, he had bludgeoned the Scots into submission. A new governmental dispensation issued in 1305 – ‘The ordinance for the good order of Scotland’ – envisaged an administration less uncompromisingly English in character and composition than the short-lived administration based at Berwick in 1296–7. The ordinance specified that the four chief officials in Scotland (lieutenant, chancellor, chamberlain and controller) were all to be Englishmen, but to enforce justice four pairs of officials were nominated, each pair composed of an Englishman and a Scot. The local administrative office of sheriff could be occupied by men born in either Scotland or England, and although the power of appointment lay with the king’s lieutenant (with the exception of the sheriffdom of Berwick, which was in the gift of the chamberlain of Berwick), a preponderance of Scots filled the sheriffdoms outside the lowland territories.165 Whether the disposition of Scotland as set out in 1305 would have been viable cannot be known. Robert Bruce seized the throne of Scotland in 1306–7, and the further brutalities that Edward I unleashed upon his Scottish ‘rebels’ in response stiffened resistance to English rule into a movement of national independence.166 163

164 165 166

G. W. S. Barrow, Robert Bruce and the community of the realm of Scotland, 1st edn (1965), p. 110. Watson, Under the hammer, p. 55, notes that the very effectiveness of Cressingham made him unpopular. Chronicle of Walter of Guisborough, ed. Rothwell, p. 303; Henry Summerson, ‘Cressingham, Hugh of (d. 1297), administrator and justice’, ODNB. Stones, Anglo-Scottish relations, no. 33, esp. pp. 122–3. See Prestwich, Plantagenet England, pp. 236–9, which takes a more sceptical view of Edward I’s success in fostering ‘consensus and acquiescence’ in the ordinance of 1305 than Watson, Under the hammer, p. 220. For Edward I’s brutalities after 1306, see Matthew Strickland, ‘Treason, feud and the growth of state violence: Edward I and the “war of the earl of Carrick”, 1306–7’, in Chris Given-Wilson, Ann Kettle and Len Scales (eds.), War, government and society in the British Isles, c.1150–1500 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008), pp. 84–113.

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Peter Crooks

The compromises of the 1305 ordinance, inadequate as they may have been, were an acknowledgement of what should have been obvious in the first place: the necessity of working with the grain of local political society. In the Plantagenet lands in France, the Englishness of bureaucracy typically ran quite shallow. The hierarchy of officials in the county of Ponthieu adhered to a French pattern, with an administration headed by a seneschal supported by a receiver and controller, and five local baillis. Englishmen served the three Edwards as seneschal of Ponthieu, but the receiver was customarily a Pontevin until the reign of Edward III, who appointed English clerks.167 In Gascony, similarly, the highest offices – the seneschal and the constable and mayor of Bordeaux – were normally reserved for Englishmen or non-Gascons, who were actually preferred by the Gascon population because they were perceived as impartial.168 The vast majority of lesser officials – the sub-seneschals, prévôts and baillis – were Gascons, whose first language was not French (with which the English were conversant) but Gascon.169 The local chancery accommodated this by routinely producing formal documents in the local vernacular.170 In this light, the policy of Edward the Black Prince (d. 1376) during his residence in the enlarged principality of Aquitaine (1363–71) stands out as exceptional. The prince appointed ‘pure English’ men even to the lesser offices, and not only in Gascony but across regions that had, until the treaty of Brétigny, owed their allegiance to the king of France. This caused mounting resentment among the local nobility. The imposition of a fouage (hearth tax) in 1368 offered the excuse for a revolt in 1368–9 that quickly pushed effective English rule back to its traditional heartland around Bordeaux.171 It was an object lesson in the virtue of salutary neglect. Even in Normandy, which Henry V took by conquest and pinned down by a landed settlement that favoured English proprietors, the king was eager to present himself as a rightful ruler, and he promised to receive those Normans 167

168

169 170

171

Shealy, ‘The English administration of Ponthieu, 1229–1369’ (PhD), pp. 59–60; E. Howard Shealy, ‘The persistence of particularism: the county of Ponthieu in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries’, in J. S. Hamilton and Patricia J. Bradley (eds.), Documenting the past: essays in medieval history presented to George Petty Cuttino (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989), pp. 35–6. Vale, Origins of the Hundred Years War, pp. 73–4; Malcolm Vale, ‘Nobility, bureaucracy and the “state” in English Gascony, 1250–1340: a prosopographical approach’, in F. Autrand (ed.), Genèse de l’état modern: prosopographie et histoire (Paris, 1985), esp. pp. 309–10. Trabut-Cussac, L’administration anglaise en Gascogne, pp. 175–91, 194–211; Ruddick, ‘Gascony and the limits’, in Smith (ed.), Ireland and the English world, pp. 72, 77. Malcolm Vale, ‘Language, politics and society: the uses of the vernacular in the later Middle Ages’, EHR 120: 485 (2005), 28. On the dissemination by the royal administration of AngloFrench to Gascony, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, see Serge Lusignan, La langue des rois au moyen âge: le français en France et en Angleterre (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2004), pp. 180–5. See Green, ‘Lordship and principality’, esp. p. 8. More generally, see Eleanor C. Lodge, Gascony under English rule (London: Menthuen, 1926), ch. 5.

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who would submit to him as his loyal subjects.172 The English conciliated the Norman population by ruling through existing institutions or by reviving old ones, such as the ancient office of seneschal of Normandy and (at least between 1417 and 1424) the Norman chambre des comptes, both of which had fallen into abeyance under French rule since 1204.173 At the local level in civil (as opposed to military) administration, English officialdom was a veneer. It was nearly always an Englishman who held the office of bailli in each of the eight Norman bailliages, but the form of administrative practice was Norman and the lower offices of local administration were nearly all occupied by Frenchmen.174 John duke of Bedford deliberately cultivated the local significance of the vicomte precisely because the vicomtes were normally Frenchmen who played a key role in summoning the ‘estates of Normandy’ – the representative assembly, almost entirely French in composition, empowered to vote subsidies in support of the English war effort.175 The heavy reliance on local collaborators made English rule in northern France vulnerable, especially when the tide began to turn against them: as Juliet Barker observes, ‘it was hardly surprising that fear of treachery haunted the Lancastrian administration.’176 But a new regime also offered new opportunities. The career of Louis de Luxembourg (d. 1443) provides an illustration of how high a non-English minister might rise. Louis was a Burgundian whose service to the English brought him to the pinnacle of administrative power in occupied France. In 1425, he received the office of chancellor of France for the English; by 1433, he was related to the royal kin through the marriage of his niece Jacquetta to John of Bedford, in whose stead Louis served in 1433 as regent – the supreme position in the government of ‘English’ France. It was shortly after this that the anonymous bourgeois of Paris recorded in his journal that among the people of Paris, Louis was ‘more hated and cursed than ever the Emperor Nero was’.177 Louis’s personal fortune was now bound up with the English. Forced to flee Paris in 1436 when the city fell to the French, he was jeered by the citizens. In 1437, Louis sought and was granted a charter of 172

173 174

175 176

177

Richard A. Newhall, ‘Henry V’s policy of conciliation in Normandy’, in C. H. Taylor (ed.), Anniversary essays in medieval history by students of Charles Homer Haskins (Boston, 1929), pp. 205–29, at 207. Allmand, Lancastrian Normandy, p. 17; Curry, ‘La chambre des comptes’, in Contamine and Mattéoni (eds.), Les chambres des comptes, pp. 91–125. W. T. Waugh, ‘The administration of Normandy, 1420–1422’, in A. G. Little and F. M. Powicke (eds.), Essays in medieval history presented to Thomas Frederick Tout (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1925), pp. 349–59, esp. pp. 351–2. B. J. H. Rowe, ‘The estates of Normandy under the duke of Bedford, 1422–1435’, EHR 46:184 (1931), 561. Juliet Barker, ‘The foe within: treason in Lancastrian Normandy’, in Peter Coss and Christopher Tyerman (eds.), Soldiers, nobles and gentlemen: essays in honour of Maurice Keen (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009), pp. 305–20, at 309. Shirley (ed.), Parisian journal, p. 289.

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Peter Crooks

denizenship, which paved the way for a run of preferment in lands and benefices (including the diocese of Ely in commendam) in England, granted in compensation for his losses in France.178 Louis de Luxembourg found it possible to assimilate to the English without the need of acculturation because he shared in a wider world of Western European culture that the English considered ‘civilized’. The obstacles thrown up against the native population in the principality of Wales were more difficult to overcome. The Welsh faced ethnic discrimination and legal disabilities, notably in the ordinances issued in 1295 after the revolt of Madog ap Llywelyn, which forbade the native Welsh from purchasing or residing in the walled towns of the principality.179 Nevertheless, since the generation after the conquest of Wales, the English had relied upon native Welsh to fill local offices, not least because they spoke Welsh.180 Members of the uchelwyr, or native Welsh squirearchy, were soon drawn into the ambit of English administration in the principality, even while patronizing a native literary tradition of Welsh bardic poetry that was guardedly hostile to English overlordship.181 As David Johnston has commented of the Welsh poetry of Iolo Goch, the bard of (among others) Owain Glyn Dŵr: ‘The crucial condition of Iolo’s acceptance of English rule was that Welshmen should hold influential office in local government in order to ensure the just treatment of the Welsh people. When that condition was not fulfilled tension appeared in his poetry.’182 The normal situation was one of cooperation punctuated ‘by periodic spasms of racial hatred and rebellion’.183 The exclusion of the native Welsh from administrative office was only placed on a statutory footing in response to the revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, following which the English parliament enacted that no Welshman was to be appointed ‘justiciar, chamberlain, chancellor, treasurer, sheriff, steward, constable of castle, receiver, escheator, coroner nor chief forester, nor other officer, nor keeper of the records, nor deputy in any of the said offices in any part of Wales’.184 178 179 180

181

182 183 184

C. T. Allmand, ‘A note on denization in fifteenth century England’, Medievalia et Humanistica (1966), 127–8. Henry Ellis (ed.), Registrum vulgariter nuncupatum ‘The Record of Caernarvon’ (London: Record Commission, 1838), pp. 131–2. As Griffith observes: ‘At the lower levels the English had long discovered that Welsh-speaking Welshmen were more satisfactorily governed by fellow Welshmen’ (Griffiths, Principality, p. xviii). See also Stansfield, ‘Prosopography and the principality of Wales, 1284–1536’, 28. Helen Fulton, ‘Class and nation: defining the English in late-medieval Welsh poetry’, in Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones (eds.), Authority and subjugation in writing of medieval Wales (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 191–212. David Johnston, ‘Iolo Goch and the English: Welsh poetry and politics in the fourteenth century’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 12 (1986), 73–98, at 98. Glyn Roberts, ‘Wales and England: antipathy and sympathy, 1282–1485’, WHR 1:4 (1963), 375–96 (quotation at p. 386). Statutes of the realm, 4 Henry IV, c. 32. The French text appears also in Ellis (ed.), Record of Caernarvon, pp. 239–40. See R. R. Davies, The revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 286–7. The statute amplifies the ordinances issued on

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So far as a ‘native policy’ is concerned, colonial Ireland is a case of the dog that did not bark. In one sense, it was the most mundanely English of the dominions, with a departmentalized administration closely modelled on English administrative practice.185 The Englishness of colonial Ireland was also thoroughgoing in another, perhaps more sinister, sense. As John Gillingham discusses in Chapter 9, King John formally extended English law to the lordship of Ireland in 1210.186 As a result, in contrast to Wales, the native population of Ireland came to be excluded (with, by 1300, only minor exceptions) from lay political society within the English colony.187 The Gaelic Irish could not hold land in Ireland by English tenures and were unable to plead in the king’s courts. This meant that they could not participate in the English administration of Ireland, even at the lowermost levels of local government.188 ‘Irish’ bureaucrats were either born in England or born in Ireland but English by descent. But to conclude that Ireland was a ‘little England beyond the sea’ would be seriously misleading.189 English institutions proved relatively durable in the fertile lowlands, where a substantial settler population served the crown in war and local administration, and sometimes made a nuisance of itself to English-born chief governors.190 But across the greater part of the country, the royal administration faced difficulties in routinizing its authority. Even as the royal government reached its zenith in Ireland in the mid-1290s, the administration’s ability to raise revenue on the basis of a lay subsidy assessed at the level of the household was limited mostly to the south and east, where the economy was manorialized and conditions were peaceful. This was an indication of the difficulty of extending English-style rule outside those areas that were ethnically or

185 186

187 188

189

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18 March 1401 (Foedera [O], vol. viii, p. 184); the calendared version of this record simply states that ‘certain offices in north Wales shall be held by Englishmen only’ (CPR 1399–1401, pp. 469–70). Frame, English lordship, ch. 3; Frame, ‘Rediscovering medieval Ireland’; Crooks, ‘Reconstructing the past’. On the application of English law to Ireland in 1210, see Gillingham (Chapter 9, pp. 203–4); and also Paul Brand, ‘Ireland and the literature of the early common law’, in Brand, The making of the common law (London: Hambledon, 1992), pp. 445–63, which usefully shows how the need to issue legal guidelines (e.g. registers of writs) to the newly acquired lordship of Ireland stimulated the process of legal definition of the common law itself. Frame, Political development, p. 214, brings out the contrast between Ireland and Wales. Robin Frame, ‘Ireland after 1169: barriers to acculturation on an “English” edge’, in Keith J. Stringer and Andrew Jotischky, Norman expansion: connections, continuities and contrasts (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), esp. pp. 118–19. The variable texture of English power in Ireland is the theme of a seminal essay by Robin Frame: ‘Power and society in the lordship of Ireland, 1272–1377’, P&P 76 (1977), 3–33 (repr. in Frame, Ireland and Britain). Robin Frame, ‘Exporting state and nation: being English in medieval Ireland’, in Scales & Zimmer, Power, pp. 143–65; Peter Crooks, ‘Representation and dissent: “parliamentarianism” and the structure of politics in colonial Ireland, c.1370–1420’, EHR 125:512 (2010), 1–34.

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topographically predisposed to accept it.191 The problems only became more severe after the economic and demographic collapse of the early fourteenth century. In this sense, the ‘attempt at recovery’ of the later fourteenth century was wildly optimistic in what it thought it could achieve.192 In 1361, Edward III packed his son Lionel (d. 1368) off to Ireland with an army funded by the English exchequer with the aim of returning the lordship to profitability and, by implication, restoring regular administration.193 The policy was doomed to failure before it began because its operating principle was the unyielding extension of English norms, when it was precisely the refusal to fold the native population within its structures that made bureaucracy in colonial Ireland so brittle in the first place. The origins of the Irish ‘Pale’ are to be found in this state of mind. V

Conclusion: Control and Crisis Empires are often successful at unleashing military force, whether in pursuit of territorial conquest or to discipline rebellious subjects; they find it more difficult to exercise power sustainably over long periods of time.194 In the case of the ‘first English empire’, this contrast between ‘force’ and ‘power’ is found in an intensified form. The formidable capacity of England’s bureaucracy to marshal resources and men for the purposes of waging war is scarcely in doubt. As Ifor Rowlands remarked of the Edwardian conquest of Wales: ‘Welsh independence did not as much perish in a clash of arms as suffocate in a welter of parchment.’195 But given the scale of the resources that they had at their disposal, it is surely the setbacks that the bureaucrats experienced – and sometimes provoked – that is most striking. Part of the explanation for the brittleness of bureaucracy, I have sought to argue, lies in the structuration of the bureaucracy itself. Little could be achieved by English officials without the cooperation or compliance of power brokers within indigenous political societies. In the French dominions, and to a degree 191

192 193

194

195

Mark Hennessy, ‘Making Ireland English in the thirteenth century: the evidence of the Irish lay subsidy of 1292’, in Patrick J. Duffy and William Nolan (eds.), At the anvil: essays in honour of William J. Smyth (Dublin: Geography Publications, 2012), pp. 81–91. A. J. Otway-Ruthven, A history of medieval Ireland (London: Barnes and Noble, 1968), ch. 9, ‘The attempt at recovery: Lionel of Antwerp and William of Windsor’. For the circumstances of the appointment, see Peter Crooks, ‘ “Hobbes”, “dogs” and politics in the Ireland of Lionel of Antwerp, c.1361–6’, in Stephen Morillo (ed.), The Haskins Society Journal 16 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), pp. 117–48, at 117–20. For the distinction between ‘force’ and ‘power’, see Edward Luttwak, The grand strategy of the Roman empire from the first century A.D. to the third (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 195–200. Rowlands, ‘Edwardian conquest’, in Herbert and Jones (eds.), Edward I and Wales, p. 48.

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also in Wales, collaborative elites made Plantagenet rule viable even while rendering it intensely vulnerable. English officials in these dominions would have been no stranger to what Bruce Berman described, in quite another context, as the oscillation between control and crisis: ‘between a commanding sense of volitional power and a fearful sense of impotence in the face of unseen and incomprehensible forces.’196 The settlers of English Ireland were, of course, like settlers everywhere, the ‘ideal prefabricated collaborators’, especially since (unlike the Gascons) they had no source of alternative allegiance to which they might appeal over the head of the English king.197 Gaelic Ireland was another story. Power sharing was not merely a concession to pragmatics; it was constrained also within the mental horizons of the rulers. Where the English official mind refused to countenance any indigenous intermediacy, there it proved hardest to achieve stable imperial rule. To that extent, white or Anglophone settler colonialism, which consigned native peoples to oblivion through its exterministic agenda, was the ‘solution’ to a problem that the English encountered but chose not to confront in Ireland during the late Middle Ages.198

196 197

198

Bruce Berman, Control and crisis in colonial Kenya: the dialectic of domination (London: Currey, 1990), p. 440. Ronald Robinson, ‘Non-European foundations of European imperialism: sketch for a theory of collaboration’, in Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe (eds.), Studies in the theory of imperialism (London: Longman, 1972), pp. 117–42, quotation at 124. For the Gascon parallel, see Frame, English lordship, p. 10. Recent debates on ‘Anglo’ settler colonialism and genocide are considered in Stephen Howe, ‘British worlds, settler worlds, world systems, and killing fields’, JICH 40:4 (2012), 691–725, esp. 701–5. See also Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8:4 (2006), 387–409; James Belich, Replenishing the earth: the settler revolution and the rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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Part IV From the Age of European Expansion to the End of Empires

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12

Magistrates to Administrators, Composite Monarchy to Fiscal-Military Empire: Empire and Bureaucracy in the Spanish Monarchy, c.1492–1825 Christopher Storrs

Between 1492 and 1600, Spain acquired a remarkable overseas empire in the Caribbean, mainland America and the Pacific.1 Discovery and conquest were by no means complete by 1600: indeed, the Spanish empire was still expanding in mainland America in the eighteenth century.2 Nevertheless, Spanish America was already substantial by 1600 (Map 12.1). At the same time, Spain was extending its overseas dominion nearer to home, in North Africa, Italy and the Low Countries (Flanders). These acquisitions, creating the largest empire Europe had known to date,3 and the first real European maritime or overseas empire, represented a number of major challenges for Spain’s monarchs and ministers, including how to administer them and ensure obedience and loyalty at such a distance. This was especially true of the newly acquired transatlantic dominions: whereas it took just two to three weeks for a letter from Madrid to reach Brussels in Spanish Flanders, it took between two and eight months for a letter to reach New Spain, and twelve months to reach the Philippines.4 For many historians, the elaboration of an imperial machinery was one of the great Spanish successes of the sixteenth century. Indeed, among the enduring images of King Philip II of Spain (d. 1598) is that of the king as bureaucrat, sitting at his desk in the palace of the Escorial reading and signing great numbers of state 1

2

3 4

In this chapter, the language of technical terms given in parentheses is Spanish. There is a vast literature on the discovery and conquest of Spanish America: see H. Kamen, Spain’s road to empire (London: Allen Lane, 2002); W. S. Maltby, The rise and fall of the Spanish empire (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan, 2009), pp. 20ff, 52ff. See D. J. Weber, The Spanish frontier in North America, 1513–1821 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992); D. J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and their savages in the age of enlightenment (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005). Anthony Pagden, Spanish imperialism and the political imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 12. J. H. Elliott, ‘King and patria in the Hispanic world’, in Elliott, SEWW, p. 174; G. Parker, Felipe II (Madrid: Alianza, 1984), p. 44.

291

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San Francisco

San Diego

St Louis

UNITED STATES

Santa Fe San Antonio

VICEROYALTY OF Saltillo NEW SPAIN

A T L A N T I C

Pensacola St Augustine

New Orleans Gulf of Mexico

Mexico City Veracruz

O C E A N

Havana CUBA

SANTO DOMINGO

JAMAICA

Santo Domingo Caribbean Sea Santa Granada CAPTAINCY-GENERAL Cartagena Marta La Guaira OF GUATEMALA Portobelo TRINIDAD San José Caracas Panama Guatemala San Salvador

VICEROYALTY OF Bogotá

NEW GRANADA Quito Guayaquil São Luís

Belém O ALTY ROY VICE

Trujillo

Callao Lima

F

P A C I F I C

B R A Z I L

Recife

Cuzco PE

RU

La Paz

Salvador

PRESIDENCY OF CHARCAS

Chuquisaca Potosí

VICEROYALTY Salta

OF

O C E A N CAPTAINCY-GENERAL OF CHILE

Valparaíso Santiago Concepción

Tucumán

Ascunción

Rio de Janeiro

RÍO DE LA PLATA Córdoba Santa Fe Mendoza Buenos Montevideo Aires

Valdivia

0

500

1000

1500

2000 km

Cape Horn 0

500

1000 miles

Map 12.1 Spanish Americas, c.1780

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papers produced by that administration,5 although for many historians the latter was one more element in the so-called black legend of Spanish imperial government, which is invariably contrasted with the supposedly more beneficent British model and legacy in the Americas.6 Spain in this period is invariably described by historians as ‘imperial’, and the collection of territories ruled from Spain as an ‘empire’7. There is some justification for this. Those territories and their inhabitants were governed from Spain, often by Spaniards, in accordance with policy objectives formulated in Spain, and were regarded as offering resources to be exploited by and for Spain and its rulers. In that sense, there was a Spanish empire, as ‘empire’ is defined by Michael Doyle: Empire is a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, by economic, social or cultural dependence. Imperialism is simply the process or policy of establishing or maintaining an empire.8

Spaniards did not, however, think of their overseas possessions as an empire in the way nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialists did, and few conceived of their transatlantic territories as colonies of Spain until relatively late, in the eighteenth century. Instead, the whole territorial conglomeration was thought of as a collection of more or less separate and equal polities, ruled – and held together – by the same monarch and dynasty (the Habsburgs between 1516 and 1700, the Bourbons thereafter). ‘Spain’ was itself a ‘composite state’ – that is, a collection of territories: the largest and most important of these territories was Castile (the main beneficiary of the link with Spanish America for most of our period); and each territory retained its own political institutions and practices (fueros).9 This territorial ensemble was known to most contemporaries as the Spanish ‘monarchy’, rather than empire. No Spanish monarch ever took the title of emperor of the Spanish empire – although Joseph Bonaparte was proclaimed king simply of Spain and the Indies in 1808, when his brother effectively ousted the Bourbons from Spain – and none visited the Indies. Just how appropriate the term ‘bureaucracy’ is to describe Spain’s imperial administration in this era is also a moot point. For some historians and theorists, bureaucracy seems to mean little other than government or the state, such that 5

6 7 8 9

See H. Kamen, Spain, 1469–1714: a society of conflict, 3rd edn (Harlow: Longman, 2005), p. 151ff. Much of that documentation is now in the Archive of the Indies in Seville and the General Archive at Simancas. C. A. Irigoin and R. Grafe, ‘Bargaining for absolutism: a Spanish path to nation-state and empire building’, HAHR 88:2 (2008), 173–209. See J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (London: Edward Arnold, 1963); J. H. Parry, The Spanish seaborne empire (London: Hutchinson, 1966); and Kamen, Spain’s road to empire. Doyle, Empires, p. 45. J. H. Elliott, ‘A Europe of composite monarchies’, in Elliott, SEWW, pp. 3–24.

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the elaboration of a bureaucracy is simply part – often a crucial, even defining, part – of the process of (early modern) state formation.10 In fact, bureaucracy was by no means a preserve of or peculiar to the state: noble families developed their own administrative structures – private bureaucracies – to manage patrimonies which were often complex and scattered entities.11 For some, of course, then and now, the term ‘bureaucracy’ had and retains pejorative overtones. When originally coined, in reaction against the development of administrative monarchy (absolutism) in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, ‘bureaucracy’ implied a negatively conceived rule by royal officials, bureaucrats. More positive and sophisticated theories or concepts of bureaucracy do exist, that of Max Weber being the most influential.12 But in exploring any administrative structure before (and sometimes after) 1800, including that of the Spanish monarchy, we must be careful not to be unduly influenced by later, nineteenth- and twentieth-century notions of the bureaucratic as career oriented, impersonal, hierarchic, meritorious, professional – to indicate just some of the key characteristics which have been suggested for such an organization.13 If the term ‘bureaucracy’ is to be useful, it must be used flexibly, adapted to the conditions and realities of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but without of course being adapted out of all recognition and value for comparative purposes.14 The sixteenth century witnessed the construction of an impressive Spanish imperial administration. However, it remained limited in size and scope and was not merely the tool of the crown or able alone to achieve the objectives of the latter. This meant that cooperation, or ‘negotiation’, with the settler elites was necessary from early on, and well before the seventeenth century 10

11

12 13

14

See T. Herzog, Upholding justice: society, state and the penal system in Quito (1650–1750) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), p. 4ff; and for an example of such usage, J. A. Marino, Becoming Neapolitan: citizen culture in baroque Naples (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp. 4, 62, 113, 238. For a similar interpretation in the literature on the formation of states in the Western Middle Ages, see Gillingham (Chapter 9, pp. 197–9) and Crooks (Chapter 11, p. 256). For early modern Spain, see I. Atienza Hernandez, Aristocracia, poder y riqueza en la España moderna: la casa de Osuna, siglos XV–XIX (Madrid: Siglo xxi de España Editores, 1987), pp. 291–349; A. Carrasco, El Poder de la sangre: los Duques del Infantado, 1601–1841 (Madrid: Actas Editorial, 2010), pp. 245–81. Many of the following observations on public, imperial or state bureaucracies apply equally to these private ones. Weber, FMW, ch. 8. On Weber, see Crooks and Parsons (Chapter 1, pp. 16–17) and Whimster (Chapter 18, pp. 437–41). See J. A. Armstrong, ‘Old-regime governors: bureaucratic and patrimonial attitudes’, CSSH 14:1 (1972), 2–29; A. Bullock and O. Stallybrass (eds.), The Fontana dictionary of modern thought (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 81 (‘bureaucracy’). In recent decades, historians of ‘imperial Spain’ have sought to grasp the reality of Habsburg and Bourbon bureaucracy in a multitude of prosopographical studies identifying the background, careers and connections of many of these officials: see J. L. Castellano (ed.), Sociedad, administración y poder en la España del antiguo régimen (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1996).

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when the effectiveness of that administration is thought to have declined – although that ‘decline’ has been exaggerated and sometimes confused with necessary cooperation. The focus here will be in large part on America or the Indies (although reference will also be made to Spanish imperial administration in Italy and Flanders) and on relations between the monarch and officials on the one hand and settler/creole elites on the other.15 As for the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, I want to complicate a recent revisionist historiography which – in seeking to explain the astonishing collapse in Spanish America within less than three decades from 1808 onwards of a dominion which had lasted for three centuries – has sought to downplay the importance of a growing resentment among creole elites in Spanish America sparked by the refurbishment and strengthening of the imperial bureaucracy in the later eighteenth century.16 Revisionists correctly observe that reform was not always successful. Certainly, as late as 1808, local elites and Spaniards (including imperial administrators) shared a political culture that remained committed to continued Spanish Bourbon rule. Nevertheless, the changes introduced transformed the imperial bureaucracy into one which was more typical of administrative rather than judicial monarchy, and of what historians have termed the ‘fiscal-military’ state.17 Although independence was also a consequence of the failure or breakdown of other institutions, mechanisms or ties of loyalty, as well as other, shortterm pressures on local elites in the Americas by the Spanish crown in the decade or so before 1808, reform and the creation of a more clearly bureaucratic imperial structure did create tensions in Spanish America which found an outlet when the Spanish monarchy imploded from 1808. Spanish America was, of course, vast – far larger than British America at its height – and what was true of Mexico was not always applicable to Peru, or other parts of the empire. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify some common features and strands across the empire as a whole, and in this way to suggest ways in which the Spanish experience – when compared with both the contemporary British and Napoleonic empires discussed by Jack P. Greene (Chapter 13) and Michael Broers (Chapter 14) – reflects general trends in the development of empires and imperial government but also offers a more distinctive contribution to that phenomenon. 15 16

17

Pagden, Spanish imperialism, p. 4, notes the general neglect of Italy in discussions of Spain’s early modern empire. See J. M. Portillo Valdés, Crisis atlántica: autonomía e independencia en la crisis de la monarquía hispana (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2006). An important new survey and reinterpretation of the independence struggle is offered by A. McFarlane, War and independence in Spanish America (New York and London: Routledge, 2014). See the essays in C. Storrs (ed.), The fiscal-military state in eighteenth-century Europe: essays in honour of P. G. M. Dickson (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).

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Creating an Imperial Bureaucracy The process of Spanish discovery and conquest in the Americas in the half century or so after 1492 was one in which the crown played, initially at least, little part except for authorizing and investing in explorers and conquistadores, many of whom quickly went their own way; in many respects, the whole process was ‘privatized’.18 The immediate beneficiaries were the settlers or conquerors who began to elaborate a sociopolitical structure based in part upon the grant to them, to support them, of indigenous (Native American) tribute (encomienda).19 In some respects, the encomenderos were agents of indirect imperial rule.20 However, the sheer extent of discovery and conquest; the possibilities in terms of resources opened to the crown; the lobbying of those, mainly ecclesiastics – including the conquistador turned friar Bartolomé de las Casas (d. 1566) – seeking to protect the Native Americans from the demands of the encomenderos and other Spanish settlers; and a fear finally that the latter might become too independent led the crown to assert itself and to develop a remarkable system of law and royal government in the Indies. The laws of Burgos (1512) were the first of a succession of legal provisions for the Indies which were codified in the so-called Recopilación of the Indies of 1680.21 In 1542, against the background of one of the most remarkable debates ever carried on by an imperial power about the legitimacy of empire and of the obligations that it entailed vis-à-vis its new subjects overseas,22 one of those 18 19

20

21

22

See M. Restall, Seven myths of the Spanish conquest (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 27ff. L. B. Simpson, The encomienda in New Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950); J. Lockhart, ‘Encomienda and hacienda: the evolution of the great estate in the Spanish Indies’, HAHR 49:3 (1969), 411–29; R. G. Keith, ‘Encomienda, hacienda and corregimiento in Spanish America: a structural analysis’, HAHR 51:3 (1971), 431–46; R. Himmerich y Valencia, The encomenderos of New Spain, 1521–1555 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991); and W. Kramer, Encomienda politics in early colonial Guatemala, 1524–1544: dividing the spoils (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994). Invaluable on this, as on all other aspects of the governance of New Spain, is P. Gerhard, A guide to the historical geography of New Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). Throughout this essay, the term ‘Native American’ is used to designate the indigenous population of Spanish America, although the Spaniards always understood and referred to the inhabitants of their Indies as ‘indians’. For an interesting attempt to compare encomenderos with the British agents in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India in this respect, see B. García Martínez, ‘Encomenderos españoles y British residents: el sistema de dominio indirecto desde la perspectiva novohispana’, Historia Mexicana 60 (2011), 1915–78. See R. D. Hussey, ‘Text of the laws of Burgos (1512–1513) concerning the treatment of the Indians’, HAHR 12:3 (1932), 301–26; and J. Lynch, ‘The institutional framework of colonial Spanish America’, Journal of Latin American Studies 24 (1992), 69. The classic discussion of this topic is L. Hanke, The Spanish struggle for justice in the conquest of America (London: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949), but see also E. O’Gorman,

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codes, the ‘new laws’, represented a major assault on the independence of the encomenderos. The character, independence and duration of encomiendas were restricted, and the importance of the encomenderos as a distinctive social and political force in the Indies and a threat to royal authority there declined thereafter.23 But laws needed to be enforced, and – short of any substantial royal military presence in the Indies before the eighteenth century – one means of achieving this was to develop some machinery of administrative or judicial oversight, both in Spain and in the empire. In Spain, imperial administration meant the council of the Indies in Madrid and the casa de contratación (‘house of trade’) in Seville.24 The former was typical of a distinctive Spanish style of government by council, or ‘polysynody’. At its heart, and reflecting the ‘composite’ character of the Spanish monarchy, were a number of territorial councils (Aragon, Castile, Flanders, the Indies, Italy, Portugal), each responsible for a distinct part of the monarchy;25 a number of functional councils of higher standing which took a monarchy-wide view (State, War and Finance); and a number of other secondary specialized councils (Inquisition, Orders).26 In the hierarchy, the Council of State – which broadly dealt with foreign and ‘imperial’ policy and strategy – came first and provided a framework within which the other councils operated in their own spheres. From early on, the councils were supplemented by committees (juntas), some of them ad hoc and short lived, others more permanent.27 The need to collaborate with the other councils and committees and a certain rivalry regarding their respective spheres, rank and so on meant that this system could in fact work to the detriment of effective administration. Indeed, in 1625 Philip IV (d. 1665)

23 24

25 26

27

‘Lewis Hanke on the Spanish struggle for justice in the conquest of America’, HAHR 29:4 (1949), 563–71; and Pagden, Spanish imperialism, pp. 13–36. See P. Marzahl, ‘Creoles and government: the Cabildo of Popayán’, HAHR 54:4 (1974), 636–56. See E. Schafer, El Consejo Real y Supremo de las Indias, 2 vols. (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1935–47; reissued Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 2003); C. H. Haring, The Spanish empire in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 112ff. The acquisition of Portugal was followed by the creation of an appropriate council in 1581 (P. Williams, Philip II (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2001), p. 67). There is a large literature on the councils. In general, see J. M. Batista i Roca, ‘Foreword’, in H. G. Koenigsberger, The government of Sicily under Philip II (London and New York: Staples, 1951), pp. 9–35; Williams, Philip II, 64ff. For specific councils, see J. Arrieta Alberdi, El Consejo Supremo de la Corona de Aragón (1494–1707) (Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 1994); I. A. A. Thompson, War and government in Habsburg Spain, 1560–1620 (London: Athlone Press, 1976); and T. García-Cuenca Ariati, ‘El Consejo de Hacienda (1476–1803): los orígenes, establecimiento y afianzamiento de la institución’, in Miguel Artola (ed.), La economía española al final del Antiguo Régimen: Investigaciónes, vol. 4 (Madrid: Alianza, 1982), pp. 405–502. J. F. Baltar Rodríguez, Las juntas de gobierno en la monarquía hispánica (siglos XVI–XVII) (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Politicos y Constitucionales, 1998) is an exhaustive study of the juntas of the Habsburg era.

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established a special junta de competencias precisely to resolve intra-conciliar clashes of this sort.28 The council of the Indies was originally an offshoot of the council of Castile, becoming independent in 1524.29 The first formal orders for its operation were included in the new laws of 1542, but more wide-ranging provisions – which fixed the council’s shape and working into the eighteenth century – were issued in 1571, following a major inquiry by Juan de Ovando, subsequently (1571–4) president of the council.30 The council of the Indies consisted of a president and a growing number of councillors, about five initially but rising to about twenty at the end of the seventeenth century, when the personnel of all councils was reduced (in 1691, during the Nine Years War) as a cost-cutting measure.31 The president of the council of the Indies was usually by the later seventeenth century a titled noble, but the council itself was not the most prestigious, and councillors sought – and were often on their way to – membership of the more important council of Castile.32 Serving the councillors was a clerical staff which also grew, reflecting a trend apparent in the other councils, and was increasingly specialized. The post of secretary to the council was split in 1604 into two separate secretariats for each of the two viceroyalties into which the Habsburg Indies was divided: Peru and New Spain (Mexico).33 To help fulfil its responsibilities, the council initiated a major information-gathering exercise in the Indies in the 1570s, such that it had a far better knowledge of Spanish America.34 The appointment of a royal cartographer-historian of the Indies attached to the council to make sense of this material facilitated the accumulation of an archive which underpinned its institutional, or official, ‘memory’. The council of the Indies, which had almost exclusive jurisdiction over affairs in the Indies, increasingly followed a routine procedure, in that sense conforming to what we might call a bureaucratic norm.35 Like the other 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35

Baltar Rodriguez, Las juntas, p. 747ff. The fundamental work on the council of the Indies remains Schafer, El consejo. S. Poole, Juan de Ovando: governing the Spanish empire in the reign of Philip II (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000). C. Storrs, The resilience of the Spanish monarchy, 1665–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 186; Schafer, El consejo, p. 268ff. J. Fayard, Les membres du conseil de Castille à l’époque moderne (1621–1746) (Geneva and Paris: Librairie Droz, 1979), p. 80ff. J. Manzano, ‘Un documento inedito relativo a “Como Funcionaba el Consejo de Indias”’, HAHR 15:3 (1935), 313–51, lists in an appendix all secretaries of the council of the Indies to 1793, making it possible to determine career pathways within it and between it and other governmental agencies. H. F. Cline, ‘The Relaciones Geográficas of the Spanish Indies, 1577–84’, HAHR 44:3 (1964), 341–74. Exceptions were the inquisition in the Indies, which was answerable to the council of that name in Madrid; and finance which, from the accession of Philip II, was centralized in the council of Finance. For an account of the working of the council of the Indies on the eve of its reform in 1714, see Manzano, ‘Un documento inedito’.

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councils, it operated in an essentially reactive fashion, receiving reports, petitions and requests for orders from the Indies, advising the king on appointments there and so on: it ‘consulted’ the king in often lengthy advice papers (consultas) whose production was at the heart of the Habsburg conciliar system. The recommendations it made were not always unanimous, and they sometimes contradicted royal policy.36 Nor was the view of the council binding on the monarch, who had the final word, and who received advice from many other interested individuals and interest groups besides.37 As for the casa de contratación, it was established before the council of the Indies in 1503 to oversee and control migration and trade between Spain and its transatlantic empire.38 It was located in Seville, through which all communication with the Indies was legally channelled in an attempt to make effective a royal and Spanish (or Castilian) monopoly of the Indies: its registers of migrants are a crucial source of information for passage between Spain, Mexico and Peru in this period. From the middle of the sixteenth century, the casa’s responsibilities included organizing, in collaboration with the Seville merchant guild (consulado) established in 1543, the annual convoys which sailed between Seville and a small number of designated ports in America, the fleet (flota) destined for New Spain and the galleons (galeones) heading for Panama which protected the trade (and returning bullion) from foreign predators. It was one thing, however, to establish an imperial administration in Spain, another to be effective in the Indies. In many respects, the administration which developed was an adaptation of one already tried and tested in Spain and Spanish Italy.39 In all the kingdoms of the Spanish monarchy from which the monarch was absent – Aragon, Valencia and Navarre in Spain itself; Naples, Sardinia and Sicily in Italy; and both New Spain and Peru in the Indies – government was headed by a viceroy, usually appointed by the crown for relatively short terms, in part to prevent them from ‘going native’ in the sense of identifying with the settler elites. Between 1535 – when the first viceroy of New Spain, Don Antonio de Mendoza (d. 1552), was appointed – and 1700, there were thirty-one viceroys of Mexico, an average tenure of just over five years each; and between 1543 – when the first 36

37 38

39

For examples of the council of the Indies opposing royal policy, see K. J. Andrien, ‘The sale of juros and the politics of reform in the viceroyalty of Peru, 1608–1695’, Journal of Latin American Studies 13 (1981), 1–19; and K. J. Andrien, ‘The sale of fiscal offices and the decline of royal authority in the viceroyalty of Peru, 1633–1700’, HAHR 62:1 (1982), 49–71. For the various influences around a monarch, see the essays in J. Martínez Millan (ed.), La corte de Felipe II (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1994). For this paragraph, see C. H. Haring, Trade and navigation between Spain and the Indies in the time of the Habsburgs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918), passim; and Parry, Spanish seaborne empire, 34ff. See R. Peréz-Bustamante, El gobierno del imperio español: los Austrias (1517–1700) (Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid, 2000), p. 11ff.

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viceroy of Peru, Don Blasco Nunez Vela, was appointed – and 1700, twenty-six viceroys of Peru, an average of six years.40 The viceroys oversaw the exiguous military establishment of Spanish America and a network of subordinate captainsgeneral and governors of the provinces into which their viceroyalties were increasingly divided.41 In Spanish Italy and Flanders, the viceroys presided over administrative systems which they hardly changed. This was because the territories were acquired either by marriage or by a conquest which was not decisive: Spanish rule here had, therefore, to accommodate established practices and institutions or risk insurrection. Philip II’s efforts to reform the government of the Low Countries provoked a Dutch revolt which resulted in the loss of the northern parts of Spanish Flanders.42 In the Indies, however, the more complete Spanish conquest allowed for greater innovation and the imposition of alien, Spanish institutions, although in much of Spanish America, at the lowest levels, local offices and practices might survive the conquest, being adapted by the Spaniards.43 These importations included the superior law courts, or audiencias, ten of which were created in the Indies in the sixteenth century.44 Although primarily courts of appeal, hearing appeals from inferior courts, they also had an important administrative role.45 Indicative of the importance of the audiencias in imperial administration was the fact that their areas of jurisdiction often determined the shape of emerging provinces. The audiencias also oversaw subordinate local magistrates, the corregidores – another institution or office which had long existed in Spain and was used by the crown from the later fifteenth century to reassert its authority in the Castilian towns46 – and the alcaldes mayores (or mayors). In the Indies, the 40

41

42

43

44 45

46

Peréz-Bustamante, El gobierno, p. 439ff; and A. S. Aiton, Antonio de Mendoza, first Viceroy of New Spain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1927). The averages mask some lengthy and some very brief tenures. Peréz-Bustamante lists all viceroys in the Habsburg era; for Naples, see G. Guarino, Representing the king’s splendour: communication and reception of symbolic forms of power in viceregal Naples (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. xiii–iv. For the creation of new provinces in the sixteenth century, see A. Garcia Gallo, ‘Los orígenes de la administración territorial de las Indias’, Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español 15 (1944), 832–3; Elliott, Empires, p. 125. Naples was especially sensitive, despite the Spanish ‘conquest’: in 1647, Spanish fiscal demands provoked a serious though ultimately unsuccessful challenge to Spanish rule: A. Villari, La rivolta antispagnola a Napoli. Le origini, 1585–1647 (Bari: Laterza, 1976). See J. P. Heilman, ‘From the Inca to the Bourbons: new writings on pre-colonial and colonial Peru’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 12 (2011); and on the Incas, see GivenWilson (Chapter 4, esp. p. 100 n. 54). See Elliott, Empires, p. 124. The audiencias were regulated by the ordinances of Monzón (1563). For individual audiencias, see J. H. Parry, The audiencia of New Galicia in the sixteenth century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), and Herzog, Upholding justice. M. Lunenfeld, Keepers of the city: the corregidores of Isabella of Castile (1474–1504) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Keith, ‘Encomienda, hacienda and corregimiento’.

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corregidor effectively replaced the encomendero in civilian administration.47 The Spanish monarchs sought to separate Native Americans and Spaniards, each living in their own communities, in part to protect the former from the latter.48 The settlements within the two ‘republics’ had their own corregidores. Unfortunately, the corregidores de indios were often poorly trained and ill-paid amateurs who were tempted to enrich themselves at the expense of their charges, such that this was one of the least successful institutions of Spanish America in terms of fulfilling that particular objective or responsibility of the imperial regime.49 One of the key reasons for asserting royal authority and developing an effective imperial administration was the need to protect crown revenues in the Indies, above all, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the crown’s share of mined silver. Equally important, therefore, was the financial organization. In every viceregal and provincial capital, there was a royal treasury (caja real) with three to four officials (treasurer, controller, factor), and subordinate officials at the chief ports and mining centres. Some taxes were collected directly by officials (weighing the royal ‘fifth’); others were contracted out to tax farmers who paid the results into the cajas. Initially, officials were responsible to the accounts department (contaduria) of the council of the Indies, and they made arrangements for the shipment of surplus sums (after local payments) on the regular fleets passing between the Indies and Spain. The council of the Indies was, however, soon overwhelmed. Therefore in 1605, the crown established local accounting agencies (tribunales de cuentas) in the Indies at Lima, Mexico and Santa Fe de Bogota, with wide powers, responsible to the council.50 The viceroys tended to be nobles, with the elevated birth necessary to represent the dignity of the king and to ensure respect and obedience; some were drawn from the greatest families, those with titles and even grandee status, although they were more likely to be younger sons than the heir to the core family title and patrimony. Of thirty-one viceroys of New Spain between 1535 and 1700, twenty-one were titled, while a number of the non-titled were drawn from titled families; nineteen of the twenty-six viceroys of Peru in the same period were titled.51 Many – for example, the first viceroy of New Spain, 47 48

49

50 51

Parry, Spanish seaborne empire, p. 181. In part this reflected a persistent racism on the part of Spaniards, and a sense of racial superiority to the Native Americans; for an example from 1570, see Guarino, Representing the king’s splendour, p. 5. J. H. Rowe, ‘The Incas under Spanish colonial institutions’, HAHR 37:2 (1957), 155–99; S. J. Stein, ‘Bureaucracy and business in the Spanish empire, 1759–1804: failure of a Bourbon reform in Mexico and Peru’, HAHR 61:1 (1981), 2–3; R. W. Patch, ‘Imperial politics and local economy in colonial central America, 1670–1770’, P&P 143 (1994), 77–107. P. Bakewell, A history of Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 124; Andrien, ‘Sale of fiscal offices’, 52–6; Irigoin & Grafe, ‘Bargaining’, 182ff. Peréz-Bustamante, Gobierno, pp. 441–2. However, appointments to Flanders and Italy were often of men of more distinguished birth.

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Antonio de Mendoza – also had distinguished careers behind them, often in the military. Magistrates in the audiencias on the other hand were from rather different backgrounds and had different career trajectories. They were required to be law graduates (letrados),52 such that this developing Spanish imperial administration depended upon and offered opportunities to the thousands of letrados, who were turned out by the Spanish universities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.53 Non-lawyers secured some offices, which were largely reserved for men with a military background (capa y espada);54 but since many letrados went on to distinguished administrative, judicial and/or ecclesiastical careers in Spain, Italy, Flanders and the Indies, they and a distinctive legal culture which they embodied provided one of the threads binding the Spanish empire together.55 By 1600, therefore, the Spanish crown had elaborated a network of institutions in Spain and across the Atlantic to administer the empire. Given the extent of its responsibilities, it was remarkably small. Between its establishment and 1700, the council of the Indies employed a total of 484 men, including 249 councillors, and 187 in the casa de contratación, while 3,200 men were employed in the Indies as viceroys, members of audiencias, provincial governors, archbishops and bishops (to say nothing of a host of lesser officials, paid and unpaid).56 That administration was also rather limited in what it did: tax collection was largely privatized in the hands of tax farmers. As the list suggests, non-royal agents and bodies supplemented the royal administration. These included the towns which were such a marked feature of Spanish settlement in the Indies, and whose governing councils (cabildos) were in some respects an arm of government.57 52

53 54 55

56 57

M. A. Burkholder and D. S. Chandler, ‘Creole appointments and the sale of audiencia positions in the Spanish empire under the early Bourbons, 1701–1750’, Journal of Latin American Studies 4 (1972), 201; I. A. A. Thompson, ‘The rule of the law in early modern Castile’, European History Quarterly 14 (1984), 221–34; R. Kagan, Students and society in early modern Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). See figures in Kagan, Students, p. 83 (number of posts for letrados); and ibid., p. 200 (number of students matriculating). See Batista i Roca, ‘Foreword’, in Koenigsberger, Government of Sicily, pp. 33–5. G. Bernard, Le secrétariat d’état et le conseil espagnol des Indes (1700–1808) (Geneva and Paris: Librairie Droz, 1972). For individual letrado careers in the Spanish imperial bureaucracy, see I. J. Ezquerra Revilla, ‘El Ascenso de los letrados eclesiasticos: el presidente del Consejo de Castilla Antonio Mauriño de Pazos’, in Martínez Millán (ed.), La corte de Felipe II, pp. 271–303; and P. Volpini, Lo spazio politico del ‘letrado’: Juan Bautista Larrea magistrato e giurista nella monarchia di Filippo IV (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004). Batista i Roca, ‘Foreword’, in Koenigsberger, Government of Sicily, p. 31. See J. P. Moore, The cabildo in Peru under the Habsburgs, 1535–1700 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1954); and J. P. Moore, The cabildo in Peru under the Bourbons: a study in the decline and resurgence of local government in the audiencia of Lima, 1700–1824 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1966); and J. Dym, ‘ “Our pueblos, fractions with no central unity”: municipal sovereignty in central America, 1808–1821’, HAHR 86:3 (2006), 431–66.

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Equally, or perhaps more important was the church. If Spain had an ideology of empire in the Americas, it was religious. The Spanish title to the Indies was a papal one, and the Spanish monarchs were expected to convert the heathen Native Americans to Christianity. To help the crown achieve this objective, it enjoyed, by virtue of a papal grant of 1508, a control of ecclesiastical appointments (patronato) in the Indies which it did not have in Spain itself outside Granada until well into the eighteenth century.58 This ensured that although relations between them were not entirely without their difficulties, the church hierarchy in the Indies – a network of archdioceses, dioceses and parishes was promptly established59 – supplemented the royal administration.60 They would be followed later by communities of Native Americans organized especially on the frontiers by other bodies of religious, the so-called congregations and reductions.61 This administration, a rather simple bureaucracy in many respects, was by no means always successful, for example, in looking after the subject native population of the Indies. The attempt to segregate communities of Native Americans and Spaniards, to protect the former from the latter, was not entirely effective.62 Nor was the crown able to prevent the growth of the large estates – haciendas – in Mexico.63 Perhaps the most notorious failure of government was its inability to prevent serious breaches of the monopoly of trade with the Indies, such that registered cargoes on the organized convoys seriously understated the value of goods and bullion shipped from the Indies. In 1646, the Manila galleon carried fourteen times the registered amount of silver.64 But on the whole, the system did work as far as the crown was concerned. In the late 1540s, rebellious conquistadores overthrew and killed the first viceroy of Peru 58

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60 61 62

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The ordinance of patronato (1574) was typical of the codification process of Philip II’s early years. Operating the patronato was one of the main functions of the council of the Indies, suggesting the enormous importance of patronage to effective, successful imperial government. Forty-five dioceses were created in the colonial era, twenty-two of them by 1550; the first mainland episcopal see was Tlaxcala (Mexico), established in 1526; the archbishopric of Mexico was established in 1547 (Bakewell, History, p. 131). An invaluable guide to the ecclesiastical governance of New Spain is Gerhard, Guide to historical geography. For the activities, not least as founder of new settlements, of Vasco de Quiroga, audiencia judge and first bishop (1538) of Michoacán, see Bakewell, History, pp. 140–2. J. R. Fisher, Bourbon Peru, 1750–1824 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003), p. 39; Bakewell, History, p. 242. See M. Mörner, La corona española y los foráneos en los pueblos de indios de América, Instituto de Estudios Ibero-Americanos, Suecia, Serie A (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiskell, 1970). For the failure of legislation protecting the Native Americans in New Granada in the face of the determination of the encomenderos to exploit them, see T. Gomez, L’Envers de l’Eldorado: économie coloniale et travail indigène dans la Colombie du XVIe siècle (Toulouse: L’Université Toulouse-Le Mirail, 1984). F. Chevalier, La formation des grands domaines au Mexique: terre et société aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie, 1952). Bakewell, History, pp. 201–2. There is a vast literature on the many facets of fraud in the Indies trade: see Elliott, Empires, pp. 224–8.

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when he tried to enforce the new laws against encomenderos, but this was a unique episode. Broadly speaking, royal authority was maintained in the Indies and successive Spanish monarchs received substantial bullion revenues from there. There was trouble in New Spain in the 1620s, but there was no revolt, by Spaniards or Native Americans; the Indies remained loyal until 1808. Indeed, the nascent bureaucracy scored some remarkable executive successes. Thus, the catastrophic decline of the Native American population in the sixteenth century,65 together with the need for a labour force to supply the colonists and work the mines and to pay tribute, necessitated the imposition upon the survivors of resettlement and forced labour. In Peru, the viceroy Francisco de Toledo implemented an extensive resettlement of Native Americans in the 1570s, to some extent following Inca precedent, while the viceroy of Mexico carried out something similar a generation later at the insistence of Madrid. The system of forced labour was codified by the council of the Indies in 1609. In Peru, forced labour was known as the mita (applying the Inca word to what was in effect an adaptation of the Inca practice described by Chris Given-Wilson in Chapter 4),66 and in Mexico as the repartimiento, In both cases, the local corregidor directed the headman (cacique) or curraca of every Native American settlement to send a fixed portion of the local adult male population to work each year for a fixed number of weeks, in rotation. Other officials, including the juez repartidor, allocated the drafted men to the mines and other public works.67 But the Spanish imperial achievement in the Indies – and elsewhere – in the sixteenth century was not simply a top-down process. The success of imperial government owed much also to the fact – it could not be otherwise given the size of the administration relative to the sheer geographical extent of Spanish America – that there was collaboration between settlers and bureaucrats and between the crown and other bodies in a colonial society still as yet in the early stages of development.68 At the same time, the strong legal culture which informed Spanish society and institutions also ensured a certain independence on the part of crown officials, encapsulated in the phrase: ‘I obey but do not 65 66 67

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This is a debated subject, see N. D. Cook, Born to die: disease and New World conquest, 1492–1650 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See Chris Given-Wilson (Chapter 4, pp. 84–5). From 1645, the Huancavelica mercury mines were allocated 620 mitayos (A. J. Pearce, ‘Huancavelica 1700–1759: administrative reform of the mercury industry in early Bourbon Peru’, HAHR 79:4 (1999), 669–702, at 673). To secure such labour in Peru, a specific order was necessary from the viceroy or governing audiencia, and in Mexico by a special court set up to deal with Indian affairs in 1576 (Juzgado General de Indios), following another major epidemic, demonstrating the variety in imperial administration. See E. Ruíz Medrano, Gobierno y sociedad en Nueva España: Segunda Audiencia y Antonio de Mendoza (Michoacán: Colegio de Michoacán, 1991). The observations of Irigoin & Grafe, ‘Bargaining’, although primarily focused upon the late colonial empire, clearly apply to the earlier period.

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comply’ (Obedezco pero no cumpló). This implied that the official, while being essentially and generally obedient, would not implement or execute a specific order until the sovereign had been informed of the negative consequences of its execution.69 This culture was also reflected in the fact that the council of the Indies, like other councils, did not simply represent or defend the interests of the crown. The council also to some extent safeguarded those of the Indies. In effect, it acted as well as a legal, almost a constitutional, watchdog on the activities of the king and ministers. And, as in Spanish Italy and Spanish Flanders, individuals and interests in the Indies manoeuvered at the royal court, through agents, letters and the council, against a viceroy and officials thought to have gone too far, upsetting local interests.70 This attitude, which helped the crown monitor and control its agents in the Indies, followed from a belief, deeply held by Spaniards in the Indies, in their inalienable rights as the king’s subjects. As one Spaniard put it, in 1604: ‘We are Spaniards, the harvest of Spain and its government, and under so great a king and sovereign lord that we should be ruled by his laws, in accordance with the fuero of Castile, for the laws must be the same.’71 At the same time, however, monarchs and ministers sought to encourage loyalty and obedience among the king’s more distant subjects by granting of favours (mercedes) of all sorts, including offices. This had important implications for the extent to which this Spanish imperial administration conformed to the bureaucratic norms identified earlier. Whereas men might be appointed on grounds of merit, just how and why they were thought to be deserving in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Spain was not necessarily the same as in later bureaucracies. Those seeking an office would cite their own merits, but while these might include their qualifications, they tended above all to stress their loyalty, evidenced not least in years of service to the king and his predecessors. They also referred to the loyalty and service of as many of their ancestors and kin, and of those of their wives, if appropriate, as was possible. Clearly, what constituted merit in terms of appointment to office is by no means a timeless norm. II

Administrative Decline in the Seventeenth Century The success of the royal administration in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries owed something, then, to the fact that it did not simply or merely 69 70 71

See J. L. Phelan, ‘Authority and flexibility in the Spanish imperial bureaucracy’, Administrative Science Quarterly 5 (1960), 59; Irigoin & Grafe, ‘Bargaining’, 179. H. G. Koenigsberger, Practice of empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976); Marino, Becoming Neapolitan, p. 98; Guarino, Representing, pp. 178–80. J. H. Elliott, ‘The same world, different worlds’, in Elliott, SEWW, pp. 207–8.

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impose. It also collaborated with, and mediated between, the Spanish settlers in the Indies, whose position it also underpinned.72 This need to bargain with local interests represented a degree of what has been called ‘flexibility’ in dealing with those creole elites.73 Such flexibility grew in the seventeenth century with the development of a practice which vitally affected the bureaucracy: the sale of office throughout the monarchy. The financial needs of the crown led to sales of minor offices of lesser importance from the late sixteenth century,74 but ultimately to that of more senior posts,75 including those responsible for the administration of justice. From 1687, the crown sold magistracies in the all-important audiencias. This was a step too far for the council of the Indies, which made (fruitless) representations against such sales to Charles II (d. 1700) – an indication of the way the council could oppose the monarch if it thought a measure harmful to the Indies.76 Nonetheless, sales continued: indeed, in the reign of Charles II, viceregal positions were also sold.77 This may have affected the quality of administration.78 Scholars generally regard sales of office as undermining crown control, the monarch abandoning a policy of not allowing creoles to hold office in their own land, in consequence of which local elites entrenched themselves in the administration. In Lima, Peruvian creoles provided 19 per cent of local magistrates (alcaldes ordinarios) in 1599, but 81 per cent in 1700; as for the most senior posts, between 1610 and 1687 creoles obtained almost 25 per cent of top audiencia jobs,79 and sale from 1687 onwards meant that the creole presence in those tribunals rose to 44 per cent by the middle of the eighteenth century. Local elites were encroaching on administration in other ways too, through intermarriage between their members and royal officials, including those appointed from Spain, and often in breach of rules specifically aimed at preventing this. This was one aspect of what John Lynch has labelled the ‘Americanization’ of the Spanish monarchy in the seventeenth century, as the balance of wealth and influence within it supposedly shifted from Spain itself to the Indies.80 Royal officials in Spanish America could certainly find it difficult to push through unattractive reforms, as the viceroy of Peru, the conde de Lemos, found 72 74 75 76 78 79 80

73 Irigoin & Grafe, ‘Bargaining’, p. 203. Phelan, ‘Authority and flexibility’. J. H. Parry, The sale of public office in the Spanish Indies under the Habsburgs (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953). A. Sanz Tapia, ‘La venta de oficios de hacienda en la audiencia de Quito (1650–1700)’, Revista de Indias 63 (2003), 633–48. 77 Burkholder and Chandler, ‘Creole appointments’, 189. Storrs, Resilience, p. 124. Andrien, ‘Sale of fiscal offices’, 58ff. Herzog, Upholding, passim, insists that the audiencia of Quito was more influenced by local society than by royal fiat. Bakewell, History, pp. 217–18. J. Lynch, Spain under the Habsburgs, vol. ii: Spain and America, 1598–1700, 2nd edn (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), p. 212ff. See also L. S. Hoberman, Mexico’s merchant elite, 1590–1660: silver, state and society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).

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in trying to overhaul the mita system in the 1670s.81 We should not, however, exaggerate the loss of control consequent on sale of office or the establishment of kin connections. No creole was appointed to the key office of viceroy, while periodic enquiries into an official’s period of office (visitas) may have helped counter corruption. These investigations, the first of which was held in the Indies as early as 1501,82 were not always carried out, or rigorous when they were, and did not always lead to disciplinary action. Where they resulted in the imposition of a fine or other penalty, the offender might in fact be the victim of a successor’s desire to tar the man he followed in office, perhaps in alliance with local enemies of the guilty man. But for all their defects, visitas offered some scope for keeping in check distant bureaucrats.83 It is also possible that these developments tied the emerging creole elites to the crown, and that – in the case of sale of office – they tapped creole wealth in ways which ensured continued acceptance of Spanish Habsburg rule, rather than resentment of its fiscal demands. Creoles certainly were not tempted to throw off the Spanish yoke. In 1621–24, the attempt by the count-duke of Olivares (d. 1643) to implement the Union of Arms provoked rioting in Mexico,84 but Americanization did not spawn an independence movement within the Spanish Indies.85 Indeed, it was part of a larger, monarchy-wide ‘devolution’, which followed Olivares’s disastrous attempts to impose greater unity and fiscal obligation across the empire.86 At the same time, we cannot ignore the way pressure groups within the Indies lobby in Spain could secure measures favouring their interests at the expense of others in the Indies. In 1631, the Seville merchant guild, concerned at the loss of silver to the east (from Mexico via Manila) secured from the crown a ban on trade between Peru and Mexico.87 81 82 83

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J. A. Cole, ‘An abolitionism born of frustration: the Conde de Lemos and the Potosi Mita, 1667–73’, HAHR 63:2 (1983), 307–33. Carrasco, Poder de la sangre, p. 346. For a critical assessment of visitas, see T. Herzog, ‘La comunidad y su administración: Sobre el valor politico, social y simbólico de las residencias de Quito (1653–1753)’, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 34 (2004), 161–83; for a more upbeat view of visitas, see K. Andrien, Crisis and decline: the viceroyalty of Peru in the seventeenth century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985), as reviewed by J. Fisher, Journal of Latin American Studies 19 (1987), 189–90. As initially conceived the ‘Union of Arms’ involved the creation of a common reserve force of 140,000 men, with each part of the empire responsible for a fixed proportion of that total (Elliott, Imperial Spain, p. 330). J. I. Israel, ‘Mexico and the “general crisis” of the seventeenth century’, P&P 63 (1974), 33–57; and J. I. Israel, Race, class and politics in colonial Mexico, 1610–1670 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). I. A. A. Thompson, ‘Domestic resource mobilization and the Downing thesis: war and the state in Spain in the mid-17th century’, in E. Martínez Ruiz and M. de Pazzis Pi Corrales (eds.), Spain and Sweden in the Baroque era (1600–1660), pp. 281–306; Irigoin & Grafe, ‘Bargaining’, 178–9. Bakewell, History, p. 201.

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Indeed, historians have undoubtedly exaggerated the extent of ‘decline’ of both the bureaucracy and of the monarchy in the last Habsburg decades. In fact, both were far more effective and successful than has been generally allowed. By way of example, in the 1690s, the Scots sought to colonize Darien, close to the heart of Spanish central America. In response, the Spanish imperial bureaucracy – in Spain and in the Indies – organized an effective counterstroke, helping ensure the Scottish intrusion ended in disaster. We may want to stress the importance of what was by this time a mature bureaucracy to some extent compensating for a weak monarch, Charles II, but clearly both in Spain and in the Indies the bureaucracy successfully rose to the Scots challenge, ensuring that on Charles’s death he left an impressive, functioning global empire.88 III

Eighteenth-Century Reform and Reconstruction The ‘war of the Spanish succession’ (1701–13/14) transformed the Spanish monarchy, which following the loss of Flanders and Spanish Italy was reduced to just Spain and the Indies. The following decades saw remarkable changes in Spanish America, designated by some historians as a ‘revolution in government’, a ‘second Spanish conquest’ and a ‘second empire’.89 For most commentators, these developments were largely confined to the second half of the century, but we should not ignore those implemented in the first half, in the reign of Philip V (d. 1746).90 In Spain, Philip V oversaw a remarkable loss of authority by all the councils. Those of Italy and Flanders disappeared with the territories they had been responsible for; that of Aragon was suppressed together with the quasiautonomous status of the territories of that crown. Others, including the council of the Indies, survived,91 but they were eclipsed by a cadre of new ministers, in this case by the secretary of state for the Indies (sometimes held jointly with the office of secretary for the navy) who dealt directly with the king and whose office oversaw the execution in the Indies of the royal orders.92 In part, the council of the Indies was a victim of a perceived need for greater executive 88

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Christopher Storrs, ‘Disaster at Darien (1698–1700)? The persistence of Spanish imperial power on the eve of the demise of the Spanish Habsburgs’, European History Quarterly 29 (1999), 5–38. See J. Lynch, Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 329–74. See Pearce, ‘Huencavelica’, passim. M. A. Burkholder, ‘The council of the Indies in the late eighteenth century: a new perspective’, HAHR 56:3 (1976), 405. The council was limited to judicial matters and to advising on appointments. It recovered some ground at the end of the century following the abolition of the secretariat of the Indies (1790–1808) (ibid., p. 407). See Bernard, Le secrétariat d’état.

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efficiency than the conciliar system seemed able to provide,93 and applying a bureaucratic model which may have owed something to Philip’s French background.94 But it was also perceived as being too close to those involved in the Indies trade, including the Seville merchants, although this was not surprising given its reliance on them.95 The new bureaucratic arrangements were not foolproof: ministerial capacity and drive remained important, and individual secretaries of state and their secretariats might be eclipsed by an all-powerful chief minister such as Cardinal Alberoni (d. 1752), José Patiño (d. 1736) and the first marqués de la Ensenada (d. 1781). Nevertheless, the secretariat was an important step in the direction of bureaucracy and the post of secretary an important springboard, not least for later reformers such as José de Gálvez (d. 1787), secretary of state for the Indies between 1776 and 1787. Across the Atlantic, Philip V also innovated, carving a new viceroyalty of New Granada out of the northernmost part of Peru, in large part to enhance the defence of this vulnerable part of Spain’s American empire and to combat contraband there.96 Other innovations, all of which suggest a more ‘absolutist’ approach on Philip’s part, included the establishment of new trading organizations, most notably the Caracas company created in 1728 to trade directly with Venezuela in breach of the monopoly system of trade (centred on Cadiz from 1717).97 Despite an attempt in 1720 to revive the system of regular fleets by José Patiño, then intendant of the navy and a future secretary of state, and despite pressure for their continuance from the merchant guilds of the interested ports in Spain and the Indies, the system was in decline by 1750.98 On the other hand, Philip continued to sell offices in the Indies, particularly in wartime, during and after the war of the Spanish succession.99 This facilitated the continued insertion of the colonial elites into the administration: between 1701 and 1750, and again in the face of opposition from the council of the Indies, Philip and his son and successor Ferdinand VI (d. 1759) sold about 25 per cent of all audiencia appointments, for a total of just over one million pesos.100 93 94

95 96 97 98 99 100

C. de Castro, A la sombra de Felipe V: José de Grimaldo, ministro responsable (1703–1726) (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2004), pp. 11–27. A. S. Aiton, ‘Spanish colonial reorganization under the family compact’, HAHR 12:3 (1932), 269–80; A. J. Kuethe and L. Blaisdell, ‘French influence and the origins of bourbon colonial reorganisation’, HAHR 71:3 (1991), 579–607. Kuethe and Blaisdell, ‘French influence’, 584; S. J. Stein, ‘Reply’, HAHR 62:3 (1982), 469–77, at 471. Bakewell, History, p. 268. R. D. Hussey, ‘Antecedents of the Spanish monopolistic overseas trading companies (1624–1728)’, HAHR 9:1 (1929), 1–30. Fisher, Bourbon Peru, 61; G. Walker, Spanish politics and imperial trade, 1700–1789 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 93–113, 210–25. See F. Andújar Castillo, Necesidad y venalidad: España e Indias, 1704–1711 (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Politicos y Constitucionales, 2008). Burkholder and Chandler, ‘Creole appointments’, pp. 187, 197, 202–3; Herzog, Upholding, p. 71ff.

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Historians have, however, been more impressed by the reforms of Charles III (d. 1788). The main stimulus for these came from Spain’s disastrous performance in the Seven Years War, when in 1762 the British captured both Havana, linch-pin of the Spanish Caribbean and gateway to Spanish America, and Manila in the Philippines. To prevent this happening again, Charles improved the defences of the Indies, with stronger fortifications, larger garrisons, and an enhanced military presence the bulk of which was composed of local militia regiments in imitation of those long established in Spain itself.101 The reforms also introduced the register of seamen (matricula de mar) who might be called on to serve with the royal fleet.102 But improved defences were costly, and the burden was passed onto the colonies, as ministers sought to end tax evasion, generally improve yields and thus increase remittances for local defence and, should a surplus remain, onward to Spain. The increase in the existing taxes and the imposition of new ones represented a significant increase in the tax burden per head of population in Spanish America.103 These changes were associated, too, with a growth in the number of royal officials in the Indies and a shift in the balance from magistrates to financial officials and those connected with the military. In the newly created viceroyalty of Buenos Aires, for example, the number of bureaucratic posts rose from 14 in 1767 to a peak of 164 in 1803 before falling back to 142 in 1810; financial officials always constituted the vast bulk of the total, the staff of the newly created audiencia representing little more than 10 per cent of the total from the mid-1780s onwards.104 This was in part due to a change in the mode of tax collection, with the appointment of salaried royal collectors instead of using private contractors as in the past.105 Important, too, was the creation of a whole 101

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For the militias and their long-term impact on Spanish American society and politics, see L. N. McAlister, ‘The reorganisation of the army of New Spain, 1763–1766’, HAHR 33:1 (1953), 1–32; and J. Marchena, ‘The social world of the military in Peru and New Granada: the colonial oligarchies in conflict, 1750–1810’, in J. R. Fisher, A. J. Kuethe and A. McFarlane (eds.), Reform and insurrection in Bourbon New Granada and Peru (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 54–95. M. Alfonso Mola and C. Martínez Shaw, ‘La introducción de la Matrícula de Mar en Indias’, in C. Martínez Shaw and J. M. Oliva Melgar (eds.), El sistema atlántico español (siglos xvii–xix) (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2000), pp. 271–84. A. J. Kuethe, ‘The early reforms of Charles III in New Granada’, in Fisher, Kuethe and McFarlane, Reform and insurrection, pp. 19–40. José Garcéa de León y Pizarro imposed taxes in Quito from 1778 which ensured that per capita taxation was perhaps greater than that in contemporary Europe and remitted much of the yield to Europe: K. J. Andrien, The kingdom of Quito, 1690–1830: the state and regional development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). See also S. Deans-Smith, Bureaucrats, planters, and workers: the making of the tobacco monopoly in Bourbon Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992). See the figures in S. M. Socolow, The bureaucrats of Buenos Aires, 1769–1810: Amor al Real Servicio (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), pp. 263–4; and for the different branches of the administration (hacienda, aduana, tobacco monopoly etc.), ibid., pp. 274–99. For New Granada, see Bakewell, History, p. 272; for Quito, see K. J. Andrien, ‘Economic crisis, taxes and the Quito insurrection of 1765’, P&P 129 (1990), 120.

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new cadre of officials, intendentes with their subordinate subdelegates in place of the discredited corregidores: this structure was introduced in 1782 in the new viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata, which had been carved out of that of Peru in 1776, in 1784 in Peru,106 and in 1786 in New Spain. The duties of intendentes and subdelegates were essentially and above all fiscal, and their introduction was accompanied by reform of the colonial exchequers.107 Other new administrative units included the captaincy general of Venezuela (1777), and that of Chile (1778). The expanding administration was increasingly hispanized: there was a discernable, and deliberate, reaction on the part of the Spanish royal court against the appointment of creoles and in favour of that of Spaniards (peninsulares). Whereas 52 per cent of appointments to American audiencias were of creoles between 1730 and 1750, they secured just 12 per cent between 1751 and 1777, although they secured 30 per cent between 1778 and 1808.108 As for the viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata, of 158 appointments made between 1776 and 1810, 64 per cent were of men sent from Spain, and 36 per cent of men born in the Indies.109 Not surprisingly, this new approach to appointments – which was related to the end of the practice of selling offices (or at least of the more important ones),110 and which reflected a suspicion of the creoles111 – provoked some resentment among the latter.112 The expanding administration was also ‘militarized’ in that more appointments were of men with a military background,113 while the military establishment itself grew. In some respects, the preference for Spaniards reflected a new ‘imperial’ attitude, exemplified by one of Philip V’s chief ministers José Campillo (d. 1743), and which more explicitly than before saw the relationship between the Indies and Spain as a ‘colonial’ one: the Indies were to supply Spain with the raw materials for its industry, and to offer markets for Spanish manufactured goods.114 The opening up of trade between more ports in Spain and more ports in the Indies in 1765 and 1778 furthered this objective, which was not intended to 106 107 108 109 110 111

112 113 114

Fisher, Bourbon Peru, p. 34 Fisher, Bourbon Peru, pp. 58, 72ff; Socolow, Bureaucrats, pp. 274–5. Fisher, Bourbon Peru, p. 30; Socolow, Bureaucrats, p. 132. Socolow, Bureaucrats, p. 132. Most of the creoles were local men, rather than from other parts of Spanish America. For the survival of venality, see Socolow, Bureaucrats, pp. 96, 300. According to José de Carvajal y Lancástre, who served on the council of the Indies, ‘In the Indies they forget jurisprudence and acquire friendships’ (J. M. Delgado Barrado (ed.), José de Carvajal y Lancástre. Testamento político o idea de un gobierno católico (1745) (Córdoba: Universidad de Córdoba, 1999), p. 96. For the protests in Lima following royal efforts to regain control of that audiencia from 1776, see Burkholder and Chandler, ‘Creole appointments’, 191, 206. Fisher, Bourbon Peru, pp. 29–30. Stein, ‘Bureaucracy and business’, 8, 22. See J. Campillo y Cossio, A new economic policy for America (1762), in J. Cowans (ed.), Early modern history: a documentary history (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 217–24.

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facilitate foreign access to Spain’s American empire: the objective was something more like a Spanish trading area.115 One final ‘reform’ deserves mention: this is the extent to which a regalist policy was pursued towards the church, one which further tilted the balance in the crown–church partnership in favour of the crown.116 These measures – what has been identified as a process of ‘modernization’ of the Spanish monarchy or empire117 – enjoyed some remarkable success. Government was attempting to do more and was achieving more: a more effective fiscal bureaucracy enabled the crown to tap the vibrant economy of Spanish America in the last decades of the eighteenth century.118 Crown income from Peru rose from 2 million pesos annually in the 1740s to about 6 million in the 1800s, while revenues from Mexico increased to more than 15 million pesos a year by the late 1790s. By this time too, revenues derived from state monopolies, notably tobacco, were beginning to rival those from the old staple, mining.119 The colonial state was imposing far more on its subjects than ever before, not least in the fiscal sphere.120 The bureaucrats still, however, represented a tiny proportion of the total population of the Indies. The ratio of bureaucrats to inhabitants in Buenos Aires was 1:229 in 1810; in Mexico City it was 1:334 in 1812.121 And just how bureaucratic was the new bureaucracy? The extent to which the expanding bureaucracy conformed to the weberian model, staffed by career meritocrats, is not clear, but the evidence suggests that many appointments were still of 115

116

117 118

119

120

V. Llombart, Campomanes, economista y político de Carlos III (Madrid: Alianza, 1992), p. 113ff; J. Fisher, Commercial relations between Spain and Spanish America in the era of free trade, 1778–1796 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1985), passim; S. J. and B. H. Stein, Apogee of empire: Spain and New Spain in the age of Charles III, 1759–1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 69ff, 143ff. D. Brading, Church and state in Bourbon Mexico: the diocese of Michoacán, 1749–1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Fisher, Bourbon Peru, p. 37ff. In 1767, the government had established a special agency to govern the frontier area bordering Brazil which had been the responsibility of the Jesuits (expelled that same year): Socolow, Bureaucrats, p. 305. See also M. Chowning, ‘Convent reform, catholic reform, and Bourbon reform in eighteenth-century New Spain: the view from the nunnery’, HAHR 85:1 (2005), 1–37. Fisher, Bourbon Peru, p. 61. The economy was increasingly diversified, but bullion production remained overwhelmingly important and boomed in the eighteenth century, although New Spain now outdistanced Peru in its output (Fisher, Bourbon Peru, pp. 66–7). For Peru, see Fisher, Bourbon Peru, p. 72; for Mexico (1795–99), see C. Marichal and M. Carmagnani, ‘Mexico: from colonial fiscal regime to liberal financial order’, in M. D. Bordo and R. Cortés-Conde (eds.), Transferring wealth and power from the Old to the New World: monetary and financial institutions in the 17th through the 19th centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 289. By this time, mining taxes were outdistanced by the yield of state monopolies. For the revenues of New Granada (1783), where more than 50 per cent came from state monopolies, see J. U. Jaramillo, A. R. Maisel and M. M. Urrutia, ‘Continuities and discontinuities in the fiscal and monetary institutions of New Granada, 1783–1850’, in Bordo and Cortés-Conde, Transferring wealth, pp. 418, 421. 121 Bakewell, History, p. 284. Socolow, Bureaucrats, p. 305.

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clients, protégés, and friends of ministers and others.122 Loyalty continued to imply merit, while men continued to cite the services of ancestors and kin to demonstrate how deserving or meritorious they were in petitions for appointment and promotion.123 As for a salaried bureaucracy, the cost of the administration might now exceed income,124 but a growing number of unpaid supernumerary officials also hoped to secure – finally – a paid post.125 There is some evidence, too, that despite royal policy the creole elites continued to establish connections of all sorts with officials.126 Not least because the bureaucracy remained relatively small,127 effective government continued to allow creoles some input into policy. In 1735, for example, a representative of the Lima merchants participated in discussions in Madrid which resulted in the temporary suspension of the galeones and the halving of the royal quinto share on Peruvian silver.128 One of the most striking examples of this continued negotiation with colonial elites occurred in Cuba: there the elite was consulted over the introduction of the alcabala sales tax in 1765 and used this to secure a liberalization of the trade controls.129 This was not an isolated example: petitions from the Mexican elite triggered a change of policy regarding the Apaches (1782).130 Thus, despite the elaboration of a bureaucracy, authority in the Spanish empire – as in the British – was still to a degree negotiated, but negotiated differently.131 More generally, local elites throughout the Spanish world, including the Indies, participated in such quasiofficial institutions as the Economic Societies set up with government encouragement in the 1770s and 1780s, whereby they established further links with officials and army officers in discussions of enlightened reform and improvement.132 While the crown sought to limit creole appointments in the

122

123 124 126

127 128 129 130 131

132

J. A. Barbier and M. Burkholder, ‘Critique of Stanley J. Stein’s “Bureaucracy and business in the Spanish empire, 1759–1804: failure of a Bourbon reform in Mexico and Peru” ’, HAHR 62:3 (1982), 460–8, at 466; Socolow, Bureaucrats, passim. See Socolow, Bureaucrats, pp. 82, 89–90, 107 (example from 1801). 125 Weber, Barbaros, p. 203; Socolow, Bureaucrats, p. 158. Socolow, Bureaucrats, p. 68. For Argentina, see Socolow, Bureaucrats, passim; for Peru, see Fisher, Bourbon Peru, pp. 176, 191–2; for Chile, see J. A. Barbier, ‘Elites and cadres in Bourbon Chile’, HAHR 52:3 (1972), 416–35, at 418, 425. In Buenos Aires, there were not enough bureaucrats to staff the proliferating committees (Socolow, Bureaucrats, pp. 38–41). Pearce, ‘Huencavelica’, 684. A. J. Kuethe and G. D. Inglis, ‘Absolutism and enlightened reform: Charles III, the establishment of the Alcabala, and commercial reorganization in Cuba’, P&P 109 (1985), 118–43. Weber, Bárbaros, pp. 158–9. ‘[W]hat distinguished Spain from England was not whether authority was negotiated . . . but that the channels of negotiation were less clearly defined and there were more of them’ (Irigoin & Grafe, ‘Bargaining’, 182). See also Greene (Chapter 13, esp. pp. 342–3). See M. P. McKinley, Pre-revolutionary Caracas: politics, economy and society, 1777–1811 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

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Indies, creoles were appointed to positions in Spain, including – in a new development – to the council of the Indies itself.133 Some historians have emphasized the failure of Bourbon imperial reform.134 Thus, the bureaucracy did not effectively manage the former Jesuit missions after the expulsion of the Jesuits, while a regalist ‘new missions’ policy failed, not least because of the weakness of the state, or bureaucracy, hitherto dependent in this respect on the orders and their missions. Some failures may have owed something to policy disagreements within the bureaucracy,135 while officials who did not agree with official policy continued to obey but not comply, delaying the implementation of changes decreed from Madrid.136 To some extent, the conflicts and delays consequent on the proliferation of officials and new offices necessitated greater clarity of hierarchy and departmental responsibility, and further regulation of the bureaucracy, although hierarchy and departmental demarcation could still give way before a powerful individual.137 Despite the shift in the weight of the bureaucracy, away from the judicial or legal, the latter was not completely lost sight of.138 Nor had reform eradicated maladministration and corruption:139 in Buenos Aires, the growth of bureaucracy was accompanied by an increase in the backlog of uncleared accounts.140 At the same time, the development of a larger, and more demanding fiscalmilitary bureaucracy in Spanish America was in some respects counterproductive. Reform had undermined (but not completely eradicated) that earlier approach to government which was characterized by bargaining, cooperation and flexibility, but without putting in place an administrative (and military) structure capable of compelling compliance. The authorities successfully overcame a wave of resistance to the new burdens which exploded in Quito (1765)141 and in the early 1780s in the shape of the Tupac Amaru and Comunero revolts.142 More serious was the response of the creole elites, whose growing alienation found voice in complaints of ‘despotic’ government: the cabildo of Buenos Aires complained of this to the council of the Indies in Madrid in September 1808, at the same time lamenting a decline in the quality 133 134 135 137 139 141

142

Burkholder, ‘Council of the Indies’, passim; Barbier, ‘Elites and cadres’, 434. For that of one new institution, see M. Molina Martínez, El real tribunal de minería de Lima (1785–1821) (Seville: Diputación Provincial de Sevilla, 1986). 136 Stein, ‘Bureaucracy and reform’, 28. Pearce, ‘Huancavelica’, 680–81, 687–8. See the variables in Socolow, Bureaucrats, p. 10. 138 Socolow, Bureaucrats, p. 206. Fisher, Bourbon Peru, p. 45. 140 Socolow, Bureaucrats, pp. 34, 306. Andrien, ‘Economic crisis’, 104–31. Andrien takes a more radical view of the trouble in Quito in 1765 – and of the subsequent riots and revolts in Spanish America – than does A. McFarlane, ‘The “rebellion of the barrios”: urban insurrection in Bourbon Quito’, HAHR 69:2 (1989), 283–330. See also Bakewell, History, p. 286. J. L. Phelan, The people and the king: the comunero revolution in Colombia, 1781 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). See also Barbier, ‘Elites and cadres’, 432, and Irigoin & Grafe, ‘Bargaining’, 198–9.

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of government.143 In some respects reminiscent of developments in British North America in the 1760s and 1770s, the new concept of the state implicit in the Bourbon attempt to recover control over the empire of Indies was seen by creoles as a betrayal of the contractual foundations on which the viceregal societies had been established, and by which they had been governed by the Habsburgs for two hundred years, and they saw themselves as guardians of the Hispanic community.144 The intense fiscal burden imposed on the Indies by Charles IV (abdicated 1808) and his ministers in the years of war against and subsequently in alliance with revolutionary France from 1793 may have contributed to the undermining of loyalty, sharpening the sense of being asked to contribute substantially without any real participation in power.145 Demands for a greater say were certainly to the fore from 1808: in 1809, typically, the otherwise conservative town council of Lima ordered its representative to the Junta Central, the body in Spain which assumed responsibility for imperial government following the departure of Ferdinand VII (d. 1833), to demand a share in that administration.146 The bureaucracy was not the only issue exercising colonial elites, for some of whom Spanish protection against a non-white subject majority was a compelling reason to remain loyal.147 In Cuba, where the elite got a good deal from Madrid, formal subjection to Spain remained attractive and the creoles remained loyal. Where crown policy provoked fears of social revolution, that elite might finally have to embrace independence.148 For loyalists in Spanish America, it was the radicalization of Spain following the revolution of 1820 which triggered a breach with Spain, not least because the new regime seemed to threaten rather than to uphold traditional processes and structures.

IV

In its first couple of centuries, the Spanish empire in the Americas had depended upon a relatively small bureaucracy and was in this respect 143 144 145

146 147 148

Socolow, Bureaucrats, p. 246. Elliott, ‘Same world, different worlds’, in Elliott, SEWW, p. 209. For these impositions, see, for Mexico, B. Hamnett, ‘The appropriation of Mexican church wealth by the Spanish Bourbon government: the Consolidación de Vales Reales, 1805–1809’, Journal of Latin American Studies 1 (1969), 85–113; A. Lavrin, ‘The execution of the laws of Consolidación in New Spain: economic aims and results’, HAHR 53:1 (1973), 27–49; and M. Chowning, ‘The Consolidación de Vales reales in the bishopric of Michoacán’, HAHR 69:3 (1989), 451–78; and S. J. and B. H. Stein, Edge of crisis: war and trade in the Spanish Atlantic, 1789–1808 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), pp. 308–18. For Peru, see Fisher, Bourbon Peru, p. 74. See also Irigoin & Grafe, ‘Bargaining’, 185, for these measures and protests against them, and ibid., p. 190, for greater remittances to Spain from the late 1790s. Fisher, Bourbon Peru, p. 89. For these issues, see C. Wu, ‘The population of the city of Queretaro in 1791, Journal of Latin American Studies 16 (1984), 277–307. G. Paquette, ‘The dissolution of the Spanish Atlantic monarchy’, HJ 52:1 (2009), 183, 190.

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Caribbean Sea CENTRAL AMERICA

BARBADOS

A T L A N T I C

Caracas

Barranquilla

TRINIDAD

Maracaibo

PANAMA

VENEZUELA

Panama

Esmeraldas

Quito ECUADO R

Guayaquil Tumbes

Manaus

Belem

B

PERU

R

A

Z

I

Recife

L

Cuzco

Salvador

Mato Grosso La Paz BOLIVIA

Arequipa

Puerto Suárez

Potosí

P A C I F I C E

PA R

I

I

Santa Fe

Mendoza Rosario Buenos Aires

Montevideo

T

N

H

Rio Grande

URUGUAY

E

Concepción

A T L A N T I C

R

C

G

Bahia Blanca

O C E A N

A

Puerto Aysén

Rio de Janeiro

A

Córdoba Valparaíso Santiago

São Paulo

Porto Alegre

N

L

Tucumán

Y UA

O C E A N

A

Salta Ascunción

G

Antofagasta

Valdivia

São Luís

Manicoré

Trujillo Lima

O C E A N

Fortaleza

Iquitos

Callao

Georgetown Paramaribo F Cayenne Dutch GUI ANA

British

nch re

Medellin Bogotá CO L O M BI A

Deseado

Punta Arenas 0 0

500

1000 500

1500 km

Falkland Islands Cape Horn

South Georgia

1000 miles

Map 12.2 Independent South America

comparable to the British imperial administration. But this changed in the eighteenth century, with momentous consequences for Spanish imperial dominion across the Atlantic. The recent historiography of the collapse of Spanish America in the early nineteenth century questions an earlier approach which attached great importance to creole resentment of exclusion from office

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after 1759. Yes, creole patriotism was developing, most notably in Mexico, in the eighteenth century, but creoles wanted greater freedom within the Hispanic world – that is, the Spanish empire – not independence. For those who take this view, the monarchy remained viable in 1808, when elites throughout the Hispanic world had to decide how to react to the dethronement of the Bourbons in Madrid.149 In that sense, 1808 provoked a split in a creole peninsular elite which was otherwise united.150 But in understanding the decisions made in and after 1808, we cannot ignore the reform of imperial government in the preceding half-century, when a new – more clearly imperial – approach to Spain’s overseas territories found expression in the elaboration of a more bureaucratic approach to their administration. It may be that all imperial regimes evolve into larger, more bureaucratic structures, but whether this is so or not, these changes provoked resentment in the Indies. This contributed to the breakdown of less obviously bureaucratic ‘ties that bind’ – loyalty to dynasty and monarch – as late as 1814 when Ferdinand VII was restored and proceeded to undermine the image of the paternal monarch by his harsh attitude towards the American rebels.151 In that sense, bureaucratic ‘efficiency’ was counterproductive, undermining imperial stability. At the same time, the fragmentation of Spanish America into new states whose boundaries were defined by the old imperial administrative divisions suggests just how far the Spanish bureaucracy shaped independent Spanish America (Map 12.2).152

149

150 151 152

J. E. Rodríguez O., ‘The emancipation of America’, AHR 105:1 (2000), 131–52, asserts the continued validity of monarchy rather than that of empire, the latter implying a much greater centralization than was the case (at 131 n. 1). V. Guedea, ‘The process of Mexican independence’, AHR 105:1 (2000), 116–30. T. Anna, ‘Spain and the breakdown of the imperial ethos: the problem of equality’, HAHR 62:2 (1982), 254–72. See Irigoin & Grafe, ‘Bargaining’, 207.

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13

Britain’s Overseas Empire before 1780: Overwhelmingly Successful and Bureaucratically Challenged Jack P. Greene

As a result of the American War for Independence, the British overseas empire in 1783 lost just under half of the thirty-three Atlantic colonies it had held when war began in 1775. In addition to the thirteen that became the United States, East and West Florida were retroceded to Spain and the French did not return Tobago, which they had captured during the war. Over the next half-century, the focus of empire shifted heavily to India, which until the 1760s had been a lucrative commercial venture presided over by a publicly chartered but privately controlled company with no significant territorial jurisdiction and little state oversight. Before 1783, however, the British empire had been primarily an Atlantic empire divided into thirty-four separate and self-contained polities, one in Ireland, eighteen in North America, eleven in the West Indies, three in the western Atlantic, and one in Africa. Formal political connections among these polities ran through London, and, except for the African colony of Senegambia, they were all settler colonies in the sense that settlers either constituted the overwhelming majority of the population or controlled most patented land and bound labour and dominated political and economic life. Indeed, settler demand for slaves accounted for the vast majority of British activities in Africa.1 Formal political ties among its various parts in this sprawling polity ran through London, not laterally among overseas provinces. Although commercial 1

In this chapter, I refer to the empire under discussion as the ‘English empire’ for the period before the Anglo-Scottish union of 1707, and as the ‘British empire’ for the period thereafter. The chapter draws upon ideas set out in my earlier writings, esp. Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and center: constitutional development in the extended polities of the British empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986); ‘Negotiated authorities’; ‘Transatlantic colonization and the redefinition of empire in the early modern era: the BritishAmerican experience’, in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy (eds.), Negotiated empires: centers and peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 267–82; ‘Traditions of consensual governance in the construction of state authority in the early modern empires in America’, in Maija Jansson (ed.), Realities of representation: state building in early modern Europe and European America (New York: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 171– 86; and The constitutional origins of the American Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

318

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exchanges and boundary issues often brought neighbouring polities together and colonies were generally free to trade with one another over long distances, they had no constitutional connection to one another. From very early on, the colonies had enjoyed considerable self-government; for most of the eighteenth century, various commentators spoke with pride on the fact that, as George Dempster put it in the British House of Commons in October 1775, Britain, in contrast to the ancient Roman and the modern Spanish, French, Dutch and Turkish empires, had, in the best British tradition, diffused ‘the blessings of liberty and good government . . . through our remotest provinces’.2 Yet, from the mid-seventeenth century, metropolitan authorities contested the extent of that liberty, making sporadic efforts to assert greater control over the colonies and provoking strong colonial resistance. The recurrent tensions over the extent to which British colonists might enjoy the traditional hallmarks of English liberty, specifically the right to consensual governance and the rule of law, were never resolved before the American revolution. In addition to strong and increasing commercial ties, powerful cultural attachments and, beginning in the late 1730s, defence needs bound the provinces to the metropolis and held Britain’s loosely textured empire together. Rooted in the early colonists’ determination to recreate the Old World in the new by founding their new societies on English law and English traditions, the strength of this cultural attachment increased over time as, particularly after the early decades of the eighteenth century, the rapid development of these new societies lent plausibility to colonial elites’ mimetic aspirations to anglicize all aspects of provincial life and thereby reinforced metropolitan charisma throughout the colonies.3 The constitutional changes associated with the glorious revolution; the mildness of the Hanoverian monarchy after 1717; and Britain’s growing commercial, maritime and military strength further enhanced this charisma in the colonies. In its organization, then, Britain’s Atlantic empire resembled nothing so much as a political archipelago of disconnected, self-contained and, at least in their internal affairs, largely selfgoverning polities loosely bound to one another and to a common centre by mutually advantageous commercial ties, defence needs and a powerful cultural attachment to a metropolis. None of the overseas polities that comprised this predominantly Atlantic and settler empire troubled themselves to incorporate indigenous peoples whose lands they had overrun, or to extend civil rights to the thousands of enslaved 2

3

George Dempster, speech, 27 Oct. 1775, in R. C. Simmons and P. D. G. Thomas (eds.), Proceedings and debates of the British parliaments respecting North America, 1764–1783, 6 vols. (White Plains, NY: Kraus, 1982–86), vol. vi, p. 140. Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of happiness: the social development of the early modern British colonies and the formation of American culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), and various essays in Jack P. Greene, Imperatives, behaviors, and identities: essays in early American cultural history (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), address this phenomenon in detail.

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peoples on whose labour they relied. To be sure, in the wake of the Seven Years’ War and the new acquisitions in India, Canada, the West Indies and the trans-Appalachian west, some imperial analysts casually referred to independent Indians in the North American interior, black Caribs in St Vincent and the indigenous peoples of Bengal and other areas of the subcontinent under British jurisdiction as ‘subjects’ of the British crown, but this was a term without precise legal meaning, connoting nothing more than mere residency in territories claimed or, in the case of India, administered by Britain. Amerindians could be allies and trading partners, but not fellow subjects. From the point of view of both metropolitans and colonials, this empire was an overwhelming success and, following some early problems with the first large-scale colonial venture in Virginia, was so at every stage of its development. By 1660, just a half-century after the founding of Virginia in 1607, the English empire consisted of substantial beachheads of settlement and activity in the West Indies, in Bermuda, in Newfoundland and, on the North American mainland, in the Chesapeake and New England, which, along with trading factories in India and on the west coast of Africa, contributed to the commercial well-being of the English nation without substantial cost to the English state. A measure of the importance that metropolitan interests attached to this commerce was the dispatch of a military force to the West Indies and the Chesapeake in the early 1650s, an unprecedented expenditure of state funds in overseas activities to make sure that royalist sympathizers in Barbados and Virginia yielded allegiance to the Commonwealth. Also extraordinary was Cromwell’s Western Design in 1655, an expedition that, while failing to capture Hispaniola, did manage to drive the Spanish out of Jamaica. A half-century on, by the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, the British empire in America had spread considerably. The conclusion of that war brought the French half of the rich sugar island of St Christopher and Nova Scotia into British hands; the American empire now extended along the North American coast from the Strait of Canso south to the Savannah River. Joined by other European immigrants and enslaved Africans, British settlers and traders had pushed settlement to the fall lines of the Chesapeake’s major rivers, throughout most of southern New England, well up the valleys of the Hudson and Delaware rivers, and into much of the Carolina low country. In the West Indies, they had fully settled the Leeward Islands and partially settled Jamaica; in the Atlantic, they had begun to occupy the Bahamas. Overseas trades – to America, India and Africa – had increased substantially. By the 1690s, England’s most important economic writers, including Sir Josiah Child and Charles Davenant, were producing learned treatises touting the importance of these overseas trades to English economic life; in 1708, the historian John Oldmixon directed attention to the growing importance of the American

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colonies by publishing in two volumes the first comprehensive history of The British Empire in America.4 The third half-century was a period of extraordinary growth throughout the overseas empire in terms of the volume and value of all colonial trades and in the territorial, demographic, economic, social, political and cultural development of the American colonies. British subjects established new colonies in Georgia and the Virgin Islands and consolidated and extended their areas of effective occupation in all of the older colonies. A growing volume of metropolitan economic and political writing stressed the economic and strategic importance of the colonies to Britain, and their welfare became a prime consideration in the state’s decision to invest heavily in imperial conflicts with France and Spain between 1739 and 1763. Britain’s stunning and virtually worldwide victory in the Seven Years’ War drove the French and the Spanish out of eastern North America, expanded Britain’s holdings in the West Indies and led, for the first time, to significant territorial acquisitions in India by the East India Company. Over the next two decades, these conquests led to the establishment of nine new American colonies and one African one. In the wake of victory, Britons throughout all areas of the empire gloried in the success of what they said was the greatest empire since Antiquity – and sought to explain it. Significantly, for the subject of this book, no contemporary suggested that the efforts of bureaucracy were in any way responsible.5 I

This is hardly surprising, for the energy exhibited in the construction of the early modern British empire came almost entirely from other sources. Before the middle of the seventeenth century, the English state had surprisingly little to do with the construction of overseas empire, authorizing, sometimes well after the fact, but never sponsoring or expending funds for imperial projects. England was not alone in this aloof stance. Especially during the early decades of overseas ventures, all European states engaged in overseas expansion had to overcome the problem of limited fiscal resources. Initially, none of them had 4

5

John Oldmixon, The British empire in America, containing the history of the discovery, settlement, progress and present state of all the British colonies, on the continent of America, 2 vols. (London, 1708). My usage of the term ‘bureaucracy’ requires qualification to distinguish among its various functions. The ‘metropolitan bureaucracy’ refers to two overlapping entities: an ‘imperial bureaucracy’ specifically created to deal with problems of empire and a ‘domestic bureaucracy’ consisting of those bureaucrats whose primary responsibilities antedated the creation of an empire and whose imperial duties, such as they were, represented an addition to their regular duties. The term ‘colonial bureaucracy’ refers here to those officials designated by the British state to perform bureaucratic functions in the colonies: this laid the groundwork for the British colonial civil service discussed by Parsons (Chapter 17). For the alternative developments in India under company rule and later the ICS, see Heath (Chapter 15).

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the funds to pursue government-sponsored imperial projects. To resolve this problem, they all turned over the tasks of funding, organizing and administering such projects to private adventurers, prominent merchants, mariners or influential and well-connected political leaders, who, in the pursuit of profits or glory, were willing to venture capital and enterprise in return for royal authorization. For European monarchs, this system offered the possibility of bringing under national jurisdiction, without cost to national treasuries, new territories or trades to which they had no effective claim. In the English case, this situation meant that during the entire seventeenth century, private adventurers operating as chartered trading companies, individual or groups of proprietors or unauthorized bodies of migrating settlers both initiated and presided over the establishment of every American colony except Jamaica, as well as over the East Indian and other overseas trades; that the English state bore no immediate responsibility for overseeing them; and that private agents with crown authorization performed the functions of initiating, succouring and managing most overseas enterprises indirectly in the name of the state, but most directly on their own behalf. Except in the case of Massachusetts Bay, which managed to transfer company government to the self-governing polity its settlers had established in America, the governing boards and their individual members remained in England and so were subject to monitoring by crown officials and metropolitan courts. In the main, however, state interference was limited to the collection of customs duties on colonial products imported into England, principally tobacco; to the judicial resolution of disputes among rival groups; and, in the case of the Virginia Company in the mid-1620s, to the forfeiture of its charter. This last development brought Virginia under the crown’s immediate supervision. But none of these activities required the establishment of a special state bureaucracy to deal with matters concerning the overseas empire. Insofar as metropolitan attention to the colonies was necessary, imperial affairs were handled by existing government institutions, including both the Privy Council and the secretaries of state, and were rarely of more than peripheral concern to them. In this situation, the chartered companies, proprietors and settler-directed plantations (which by 1650 included Plymouth, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New Haven) remained the principal agencies of English overseas expansion for most of the seventeenth century and theoretically had wide scope to establish whatever bureaucratic or governing institutions they thought necessary within the broad parameters specified by the royal charters that supplied the legal foundations for their establishments as English entities. Initially, most of these agencies relied on a few clerks in a London office to manage their enterprises at home and a small number of officers to preside over their affairs at various overseas sites. Typically, they established a conciliar form of polity consisting

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of an appointive governor from England assisted by a body of advisers drawn from the most prominent and successful emigrants. But these private adventurers were by no means free agents in these projects. Except for the Massachusetts Bay Company, which found no lack of recruits and investors among groups interested in establishing a model Puritan colony in New England, few of them possessed or could attract the resources to sustain the high cost of settling, administering and developing a colony for more than a short period. As a result, most of them were quickly forced to seek cooperation and contributions from settlers, traders and other individual participants in the colonizing process. To attract settlers, they had to offer cheap land and favourable tenures and tolerate political arrangements that, without exception, involved the active consultation and formal consent of colonial landholders. The actual process of establishing effective centres of English power in America was less the result of the activities of licensed adventurers than of the many groups and individuals who took actual possession of the land. From the beginning, these culture-bearing migrants were determinedly intent upon reproducing in their new environments the same legal and political protections that people of similar achievement enjoyed in England, including, especially, the rule of law and consensual governance. As the legal historian George Dargo has remarked, ‘the attempt to establish English law and the “rights and liberties of Englishmen” was constant from the first settlement’ of the American colonies.6 Between roughly 1620 and 1660, every American colony with a substantial body of settlers adopted some form of elected assembly to pass laws for the polities they were creating. By 1660, all thirteen settled colonies in the Americas had functioning representative assemblies. Even where company officials or proprietors took the initiative in establishing them, as was the case in Virginia, Bermuda and Maryland, these bodies acted as the aggressive spokesmen for the expanding settlements within the colonies and rarely shrank from controversy with local executives7; they all made the English common law the foundation of their civil polities, its indeterminacy and flexibility making it admirably suited to adaptation in a wide variety of physical environments. By the end of the second quarter of the seventeenth century, the English tradition of consensual governance was thoroughly implanted in colonial English America.8 Observing that ‘no colonies’ had exhibited ‘more rapid’ progress than had the English in America, Adam Smith in 1776 in the Wealth of Nations famously drew upon their experience to theorize that the ‘prosperity of 6 7 8

George Dargo, Roots of the republic: a new perspective on early American constitutionalism (New York: Praeger, 1974), p. 58. Michael Kammen, Deputyes & libertyes: the origins of representative government in colonial America (New York: Knopf, 1969), pp. 7, 9, 11–12, 61–2, 67. For more detail, see Greene, Peripheries and center, pp. 1–42.

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all new colonies’ could be attributed to ‘two great causes’: ‘Plenty of good land, and liberty to manage their own affairs their own way’.9 If settlers exerted far and away the largest amount of agency and power in the construction of the new societies and polities in early modern colonial America, the metropolitan mercantile community followed closely behind. America was rich in land and resources but notoriously poor in terms of capital and labour, and the necessity of supplying colonies with both provided many new opportunities for the commercial and shipping sectors of the English economy. They carried migrants to the colonies; organized first the servant trade, then, after about 1660, the slave trade to fill labour needs; provided much of the credit to enable colonial producers to purchase that labour; and developed insurance practices to protect against loss. As the colonies began to produce commodities that were vendible in England and in Europe – tobacco, fish, furs, sugar products and a host of other commodities early in the seventeenth century; naval stores, lumber, rice, wheat, iron, indigo, coffee and dyewoods after 1690 – merchants provided the ships and developed the commercial systems that would carry these products across the Atlantic and bring back the manufactured items that the colonists, focused heavily on agricultural production, did not provide for themselves. As colonial ports grew, resident colonial merchants participated in these systems, especially cultivating new intercolonial trades between North America and the West Indies.10 By no means confined within national imperial boundaries, British traders by the third quarter of the eighteenth century were operating throughout the Atlantic basin and as far east as Bengal within what the imperial analyst Thomas Pownall referred to as a ‘grand marine dominion’ knit together and constituted by a vast, and continuously multiplying, set of separate commercial transactions and exchanges among individual producers, traders and customers.11 From the 1690s on, economic and other writers celebrated the empire for its commercial orientation and defined it primarily as a commercial undertaking. The opening of trade to the east had obviously been commercial in intent from the beginning, but, many analysts insisted, so also had the colonization of America, which as John Campbell wrote in 1774 in his massive twovolume Political Survey of Britain, was the direct result of ‘the Idea of Fixing Settlements in distant countries for the sake of Commerce’. This orientation, Campbell explained, had made the British empire ‘a most peculiar one’: ‘Whereas other great Empires have been founded in Violence, and the 9 10 11

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), pp. 571–2. K. G. Davies, The North Atlantic world in the seventeenth century (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1974), provides an excellent summary of these developments. Thomas Pownall, The administration of the colonies, 4th edn (London, 1768), pp. 9–10.

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Success of Armies’, the British empire, he declared, had ‘been acquired and united to us’ through ‘the influence of Commerce and maritime Power’ and ‘the Ties of mutual Interests and a reciprocal Communication of Benefits’.12 Of course, government-chartered trading companies such as the East India Company, the Royal African Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company contributed to the creation of this vast trading and maritime construct; from the 1650s, the English state took measures to divert imperial trades into channels that would exclude interlopers such as the Dutch, encourage colonies to develop products that were beneficial to the metropolis, and, after 1699, prohibit colonies from competing with a few itemized metropolitan manufactures. After 1690, especially during the intercolonial wars from 1689 to 1713, the government sent convoys to protect the valuable tobacco and sugar trades, and in the quarter century beginning in 1739, it spent vast sums on naval and land forces in its competition for empire with the Spanish and French. Throughout the first century and a half of English colonization, moreover, special interests within the mercantile, maritime and manufacturing communities in Britain and among colonial producers often sought state aid for measures that would bring them benefit. But the role of the state, practically non-existent until the 1650s, was distinctly secondary to that of independent merchants, mariners and producers in the creation of the great commercial empire celebrated by Campbell and many other analysts in eighteenth-century Britain. II

To argue that private adventurers, culture-bearing settlers, licensed commercial companies and independent traders played the primary role in constituting, constructing and sustaining Britain’s stunningly successful overseas empire is not to suggest that the state had no part in that achievement. State involvement was, admittedly, slow to develop. In contrast to the Spanish government described by Christopher Storrs (Chapter 12), the English established no Consejo de Indias and no Casa de Contratación to deal with the governance and trade of the early empire, and no Recopilación de Leyes de las Indias to provide a uniform system of law. Colonial matters fell under the purview of the secretaries of state, the crown’s principal executive officers, and revolving committees of the Privy Council. Even after the state took over administration of Virginia from the Virginia Company in the 1620s, it showed no haste to settle on a permanent plan of colonial governance, preferring a conciliar form with a 12

John Campbell, A political survey of Britain: being a series of reflections on the situation, lands, and inhabitants, revenues, colonies, and commerce of this island, 2 vols. (London, 1774), vol. i, p. iv; vol. ii, p. 561.

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royal governor and a few councillors and taking almost fifteen years to acknowledge the utility of the provincial legislature that the Virginia Company had already established in 1619. When the state acquired Jamaica in the mid-1650s, it had no prescribed form of colonial governance until, in 1661, metropolitan officials established for that colony the tripartite government of executive, council and elected assembly that had already emerged in all the private colonies as well as Virginia over the previous decades, on the grounds that such an arrangement represented, as the Barbadian government declared in 1651, ‘the nearest model of conformity to that under which our predecessors of the English nation have lived and flourished for above a thousand years’.13 Not until 1660, after the restoration of Charles II, did the administration set up two special permanent advisory councils, one for trade and the other for foreign plantations, to oversee English overseas activities; but these bodies, consisting, respectively, of sixty-seven and forty-eight members, were cumbersome and did little, and the administration superseded them in 1670 with a new ‘council of plantations’ composed of just ten regular members with a permanent secretary and a small staff of clerks, doormen and messengers. The earliest instance of a bureaucratic body specifically devoted to England’s overseas affairs, this body was intended to gather information on all aspects of colonial life, correspond regularly with colonial governors, prepare instructions for royal governors and review colonial laws for confirmation or disallowance by the privy council. Demonstrating considerable vigour, the council of plantations was strictly advisory and, as Ian Steele has remarked, was clearly intended to be no more than ‘an information bureau, a source of “intelligent advice and opinion”, and not an executive organ of government to deal with either trade or colonial affairs’.14 Within less than five years, it fell victim to political change and cost cutting. Its successor, the ‘lords of trade’, a permanent committee of the privy council set up in 1675 and directed by a small core of colonial experts, marked the beginnings of what came to be known as the plantation office, with a permanent set of records and an office staff, including a long-serving secretary, William Blathwayt (d. 1717), and several clerks. For a decade, until it lost its power to the full privy council under James II, this body, assisted by several new crown officers in the colonies, provided, for the first time since the beginning of English overseas colonization nearly three-quarters of a century earlier, vigorous and systematic supervision – insofar as oversight was possible for polities at such a distance. 13 14

Yunlong Man, ‘English colonization and the formation of Anglo-American politics, 1606– 1664’, (PhD, Johns Hopkins University, 1994), pp. 15–16, 391–2. I. K. Steele, Politics of colonial policy: the board of trade in colonial administration, 1696– 1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 3–8, provides an excellent brief summary of these developments.

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Originating in little more than an impulse to emulate Portugal and Spain in their successes in overseas ventures in the sixteenth century, English expansion overseas had developed neither a unified approach to nor a coherent theory of empire. As a result, the development of new trades and the establishment of colonies, as William Burke correctly observed in his remarkable two-volume An Account of the European Settlements in America (1757), the earliest effort to write a transnational history of early modern European colonization in America, were not ‘pursued upon any regular plan, but . . . were formed, grew, and flourished, as accidents, the nature of the climate, or the dispositions of private men happened to operate’.15 Faced with the gargantuan problem of bringing some administrative coherence to this welter of English overseas activities, the lords of trade made no effort to articulate an explicit theory of empire. Instead, this body endeavoured to formulate a set of four long-term policy objectives or working principles designed to bring overseas polities and trading operations under some semblance of state control. The agenda it laid out continued to govern metropolitan colonial policy for the next century. Moreover. the lords’ close relationship to the privy council enabled it to implement, if none too perfectly, a few of these principles. First, affirming the principle articulated by the navigation acts passed between 1651 and 1673 that colonial economies should be subordinated to the English economy, the lords of trade for the first time put some teeth into the trade regulations contained in those acts. With the commissioners of the customs, it oversaw the appointment of royal customs collectors in most of the colonies, except those in the West Indies, where a collection system was already in place, as well as a roving surveyor to oversee them. By 1744, the American customs establishment consisted of 131 men. Of these, 85 were office holders, including 43 collectors, 11 surveyors and 15 comptrollers serving 63 ports in 22 colonies plus two surveyor generals, one for the northern and the other for the southern district. The remaining 46 men occupied subordinate positions as land waiters, clerks and boatmen. Except in Barbados and the four Leeward Island colonies – which together accounted for almost half of the total number of officers and staff – this establishment, which was selffinancing, was thinly distributed throughout the colonial British American world.16 In 1697, metropolitan authorities supplemented these officers with 15 16

[William Burke] An account of the European settlements in America, 2 vols. (London, 1757), vol. ii, p. 288. A List of the Commissioners and Officers of His Majesty[’]s Customs in England & the Plantations and their Respective Salaries as they stood at Xmas 1744, Add. MS 8831, ff. 121–34, BL. Thomas C. Barrow, Trade and empire: the British customs service in colonial America, 1660–1775 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), is the classic work on this subject, but see also the still-impressive Charles M. Andrews, The colonial period of American history, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934–38), vol. iv, pp. 178–221.

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vice admiralty courts presided over by judges appointed by the admiralty. By 1760, there were eleven of these judges in the colonies from Newfoundland to Georgia.17 This establishment provided the English state with a significant presence in the American colonies, including, for the first time, the private ones, and it elicited intensive opposition and evasion among colonial producers and traders throughout the late seventeenth century. In the early eighteenth century, however, this opposition gradually declined to the point that most merchants and producers operated within the broad parameters established by the navigation acts. But the consensus among contemporary and modern historians has been that given the conditions under which it worked, the American customs system, except possibly in Barbados and the Leeward Islands, was insufficient to enforce regulations among provincials who did not find it in their interest to obey. It was altogether too distant, too unsupervised and too weak, and its officers were too creolized to be able to monitor fully state interests in the seething mass of commercial activity in the western Atlantic. Considerations of cost, preoccupation with domestic matters, a cumbersome administrative system and the state’s inattention to imperial matters combined to stymie recurrent proposals for the reform and tightening of this system. In 1760, the efficient collection of customs duties and the enforcement of the laws of trade remained an incompletely realized metropolitan aspiration, and the existing system had not had a significant effect on the commercial growth of Britain’s Atlantic empire.18 The lords of trade also set in motion a second objective: the elimination of private colonies, which, over time, achieved considerable success and broadened the scope of state responsibility in colonial administration. When the lords of trade was established in 1675, the crown had only seven royal colonies: Virginia, Jamaica, Barbados, and the four Leeward Island colonies. By 1730, this number had increased to fourteen by legal forfeiture, conquest or purchase. This left outside the royal jurisdiction only the charter colonies of Rhode Island and Connecticut, and the proprietary colonies of Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware. New colonies in Georgia and the Virgin Islands over the next quarter century raised this number to sixteen. In the wake of the conquests of the Seven Years’ War, eight more were added: Québec, East Florida, West Florida, Grenada, St Vincent, Dominica, Tobago, and St John. This development required a considerable expansion of the royal civil bureaucracy in the colonies. With the exception of Pennsylvania and 17

18

Andrews, Colonial period of American history, vol. iv, pp. 222–71. See also Carl Ubbelohde, The vice-admiralty courts and the American revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), an excellent analysis of the changes in the colonial vice admiralty system after 1763. Barrow, Trade and empire.

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Table 13.1 The expansion of the Civil List

Year

No. of civil officers

No. of military officers

No. of cultural officers

No. of colonies included

Mean per colony

Median per colony

1730 1747–8 1760/61 1775 1780–81

89 91 95 110 225

7 8 0 0 0

0 0 0 12 0

18 19 16 22 24

5.3 5.5 6.3 8.3 9.0

4.0 4.0 6.0 8.5 9.5

Maryland, during the brief periods following the glorious revolution when they were under royal control, none of the remaining private colonies had any crown civil officers. But each royal colony eventually required, at a minimum, a governor, a secretary, a chief justice, an attorney general and after 1696 at least one naval officer to keep track of incoming and outgoing shipping. Some colonies also had a receiver general, a provost marshal and one or more clerks or registers. A few – and, after 1760, many more – had lieutenant governors.19 With no pool of professional administrators upon which to draw and no systematic mode of impartial recruitment, metropolitan authorities filled these offices using the same criteria they employed for the domestic bureaucracy but drawing from the smaller set of those willing to serve in such remote, isolated, culturally crude and sometimes unhealthy places. Although expertise and prior experience were not unimportant, political or kinship connections were often the key. Military and naval officers, younger sons of prominent and wellconnected families, men who had political capital that they could trade for office, accomplished clients of influential patrons, prominent colonials and successful bureaucrats filled most of these positions. The expansion of the civil list over the eighteenth century can be followed in a series of lists prepared by the Board of Trade or the secretary of state and scattered through various archives. The data from these lists are summarized in Table 13.1. The earliest of these lists, prepared for a house of lords’ investigation into colonial affairs, dates from 1730 and shows a bureaucracy of 89 civil officers and 7 military officers spread over eighteen colonies with a mean of about 5.3 officers per colony, but this figure is highly deceptive. Seven colonies registered only 1 officer and four others only 3 so that the median number was only 4.0. In fact, 70 of the 89 officers were concentrated in just five colonies: the four 19

The duties of colonial officers are most fully set forth in Leonard Woods Labaree, Royal government in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), pp. 92–171, 373–419.

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Leeward Islands (22), Barbados (19), Bermuda (12), Virginia (11) and the Bahamas (9). All but Bermuda and the Bahamas were colonies that had voted substantial permanent revenues to pay officers’ salaries.20 A second list, dating from 1747–8, shows only a modest increase to 91 civil officers and 8 military officers in nineteen colonies, including Cape Breton (then temporarily in British hands), with a mean of 5.5 officers each and a median of 4.0. But the distribution among colonies was somewhat less unequal, the five colonies with the most officials – Jamaica (12), South Carolina (10), the Leeward Islands (10), Barbados (9) and Virginia (7) – having only 48, or just under half of the total. Two of the new officers – a surveyor of the woods and a commissioner of quit rents (that is, small token annual payments to the crown in acknowledgement of the crown’s right to grant the land to which the rent applied) – were at-large appointments.21 A third list, dating from 1760 or 1761, reveals the beginnings of a distinct new policy in regard to the colonial bureaucracy. Including no military offices, it shows a slight rise in the total number of civil officers to 95, two of which were the at-large offices of Indian Superintendent for the Northern and Southern Districts of continental North America. The remaining 93 were divided among sixteen colonies, including Guadaloupe while it was under British occupation, but both the mean (6.3) and median (6.0) were larger and suggestive that a consolidation and rationalization in the overall distribution of offices were underway. The four Leeward Islands (14), Jamaica (10), Virginia (10) and South Carolina (9) were still among the colonies with the largest cadres of officials, but Nova Scotia, newly settled beginning in 1748, also had 10 officials and was the first instance of a new policy of providing new colonies from the start with a full complement of officials paid out of state funds. This policy in turn suggests that metropolitan bureaucrats were beginning to put more emphasis upon an extended colonial bureaucracy as an instrument of imperial control.22 As yet a fourth list (dated 1775) reveals, the long standing trend towards a gradual increase in the numbers of bureaucrats in the colonies accelerated dramatically in the dozen years after the Seven Years’ War. Including only three at-large offices – the two Indian superintendencies in North America and an agent for Newfoundland and Cape Breton – this list shows a total of 182 officials distributed among twenty-two colonies, an increase of almost 20 21 22

Colonial Establishments, 7 Apr. 1730, House of Lords Manuscripts, House of Lords (London), ff. 186–262. List of Places in the West Indies in the Disposal of a Secretary of State, 1747–48, Colonial Office Papers 5/5, ff. 227–30, TNA. List of Offices in the American Colonys the Nomination to which was vested in the Board of Trade by Order in Council of the 11 of March 1752, 1761–62, Chatham Papers, PRO 30/8/ 95, TNA.

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100 percent. The mean number of bureaucrats per colony had risen to 8.3, and the median to 8.5. Continuing the trend first exhibited in the early 1760s list with Nova Scotia, the new colonies created out of the conquests of the Seven Years’ War – Québec (12), East Florida (12), West Florida (12), Grenada and the Windward Islands (11), St John (10), Dominica (6) and Senegambia (8), the first African colony to be included as part of the crown’s overseas bureaucratic establishment – all began with a full slate of officials and accounted for 71 of the 89 new positions, just under 80 per cent. Three of the older colonies with the highest numbers from the early 1760s list – the four Leeward Island colonies (17), Jamaica (13) and South Carolina (13) – registered significant increases and still had more officials than any of the new colonies. Most of the other colonies showed a modest increase. Widely perceived in Britain as the hotbed of American resistance to British measures after 1764, Massachusetts displayed an increase of 100 per cent from four royal officials to eight. Not all of the new officers were civil. For the first time, a few – ten clergymen for new colonies, and a schoolmaster and a secretary for Moorish Affairs in Senegambia – fell into a category of cultural affairs officers. Everywhere in America after 1765, the royal bureaucracy had become more numerous and potentially more intrusive in provincial affairs.23 Expansion continued through the American War for Independence, although, with no new colonies created between 1775 and 1782, at a vastly decelerated rate. A fifth list from the early 1780s reveals a total of 225 office holders, 7 in the at-large category and 218 in twenty-four colonies for a mean figure of 9.0 and a median of 9.5, both figures significantly higher than those for 1775. Québec (18) and the four Leeward Islands (18) had the most bureaucrats, followed by South Carolina (15), New York (14), East Florida (13) and Jamaica (12). Both South Carolina and New York were occupied by British forces for long periods during the war. After the outbreak of war in April 1775, of course, few of these officers in the revolting colonies actually occupied their offices.24 Metropolitan officials were far less successful in achieving the other objectives sponsored by the lords of trade during its short tenure in colonial administration and subsequently taken up by the Board of Trade following its creation in 1696. The four most important of these objectives require mention here. First, when the crown assumed control of Barbados and the Leeward Island colonies in 1663–4, the legislatures of those colonies had all voted a perpetual revenue in the form of a 4.5 per cent duty on several categories of exports to provide for the costs of their provincial civil lists and other public expenses. This duty yielded a significant annual revenue that the crown often diverted to 23 24

A List of Officers in the North American and West Indian Colonies, Shelburne Papers, 46, William L. Clements Library (Ann Arbor, Michigan). List of Official Appointments, 1780–81, Add. MS 22129, BL.

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purposes that had nothing to do with those colonies, and it soon became a sore point with their settler leaders. For the next century, the metropolitan colonial bureaucracy endeavoured to persuade the legislatures of every other royal colony to vote a similar establishment to pay the salaries of royal governors and royal officers. It succeeded only in Virginia, however, where in the late 1670s in the wake of Bacon’s rebellion the legislature granted a duty of two shillings per hogshead on exported tobacco, and, a half-century later, in Jamaica, where the legislature granted a revenue in 1723 only after the crown agreed to accept an act declaring that free Jamaicans were entitled to English laws and English rights. Elsewhere, legislatures adamantly refused to vote funds that would render royal officers independent of them.25 The consolidation for administrative and defensive purposes of the colonies into three general governments to be presided over by representatives of the crown unhampered by representative assemblies was a second objective that came to naught. It ended with a single experiment, the ‘dominion of New England’, begun in 1686 after the accession of James II and including all the colonies from New York to Maine. But the dominion evoked massive resistance, and both New Englanders and New Yorkers seized the occasion of the glorious revolution to overthrow it, and metropolitan officials never again revived it.26 The result was that the empire continued to be composed, as it had been from the start, of a multiplicity of overseas polities that were connected mainly through their common association with Britain. The political organization of the English empire resembled nothing so much as one of the contemporary composite nation-states then emerging in early modern Europe. A third objective of the lords of trade was to reduce the extensive powers of the representative assemblies that in every colony, in imitation of the English House of Commons, exercised broad legislative authority and provided a venue for the expression of provincial, specifically settler interests. In the late 1670s, the lords of trade directly assaulted the legislative powers of these assemblies by insisting that the Virginia and Jamaica legislatures agree to yield their legislative initiative by accepting Poynings’ law, which required the crown’s prior approval of all laws to be passed by the Irish parliament. When neither legislature would yield, however, the lords of trade had to abandon that effort.27 25 26

27

Greene, Peripheries and center, pp. 1–42. On these developments, see David S. Lovejoy, The Glorious Revolution in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); A. P. Thornton, West-India policy under the Restoration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956); J. M. Sosin, English America and the revolution of 1688: royal administration and the structure of provincial government (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982); Stephen Saunders Webb, 1676: the end of American independence (New York: Knopf, 1984); and Richard R. Johnson, Adjustment to empire: the New England colonies, 1675– 1715 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981). Robert M. Bliss, Revolution and empire: English politics and the American colonies in the seventeenth century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 182–9.

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The glorious revolution effectively ended any efforts to do away with representative government in the colonies. By the first decade of the eighteenth century, representative assemblies had become a fixed feature of English colonial governance. Thereafter, each new British colony acquired an assembly as soon as it had sufficient settlers to support and demand one, including the Bahamas in 1729, Georgia in 1755, and Nova Scotia in 1758; all the new colonies established in the 1760s and 1770s had assemblies, with the notable exception of Québec, whose majority French population initially showed little interest in adapting to English political institutions. But this long-term acknowledgement of the appropriateness of representative government did not mean that the metropolitan colonial bureaucracy had abandoned its efforts to curtail the authority of those bodies, a subject to which we will return shortly. The failure of the metropolitan bureaucracy in this and its other objectives also underlined its inability fully to control the behaviour of the governors and other members of the provincial bureaucracies sent to represent the authority of the crown and the state in colonial dependencies. Already in the 1670s, the lords of trade had foreseen and tried to guard against this problem by articulating a fourth objective of colonial administration, which was to place royal governors under much tighter regulations. Not only did the lords insist upon more frequent and fuller reports on a wide range of activities within the colonies and the submission of all journals, laws and accounts for perusal in London, it also put the governors under more detailed and rigid directions than ever before by expanding in scope and specificity the royal instructions given to governors at the time of their appointment to guide them in their conduct of government. In effect, this was an effort to control the legislatures by controlling the governors. Colonial legislatures never acknowledged that such instructions bound them constitutionally, however, and governors who insisted upon adhering to them frequently created so much political turmoil that metropolitan authorities had to recall them.28 The situation in Ireland was considerably different from that of the rest of the overseas empire. Ireland’s proximity to Britain meant that it was subject to much closer supervision, had considerably less political autonomy, was more thoroughly drawn into the metropolitan patronage network, contributed far more to metropolitan pension lists and had many more absentees among its landholding population. Under Poynings’ law, every piece of Irish legislation was vetted and re-vetted by the British-appointed Irish privy council and the British privy council, extensive patronage funds drawn out of the crown’s hereditary revenues enabled the crown’s representatives as lord lieutenants to build majorities in the Irish parliament that could easily turn away demands for 28

See Labaree, Royal government in America, pp. 420–48, and Greene, Peripheries and center, pp. 43–54.

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more economic and political autonomy, and the bureaucracy was more numerous, better paid and more effective in achieving crown policy objectives than was the case in any of the distant American colonies. Political discourse in Ireland and the American colonies frequently addressed the same issues, such as the initiation of money bills and the tenure of judges and thus bore some degree of similarity. But the context in which those issues were discussed and the reach of the bureaucracy were radically different.29 III

In charge of colonial oversight from the time of its creation in 1696 to its abolition in 1782, the board of trade inherited both the records and, directly through the personage of William Blathwayt, who had served as secretary to the lords, the policies and administrative practices the lords had devised.30 Composed of eight permanent members, a permanent secretary, a large number of clerks and after 1717 its own legal counsel to advise on the suitability of colonial laws for confirmation or disallowance, the board of trade acted with considerable diligence through most of its history, meeting two or three times a week with at least four and usually five members attending. A series of highly competent secretaries probably set the agenda for these meetings, which included reading over substantial portions of the vast literature flowing in from the colonies; corresponding with governors; evaluating petitions from colonists, merchants, projectors or provincial civil officers; reviewing the recommendations of legal counsels; and initiating or responding to requests for detailed representations for privy council, administrative or parliamentary action on colonial matters. If neither board members nor staff had the necessary expertise to make the required decisions, the board knew where to find it – from colonial agents, metropolitan merchants or ship captains trading to the colonies or former colonial officials, all of whom were quite willing to provide information in the hope of possible favours.31 As C. A. Bayly has observed, British colonial affairs throughout the early modern era were ‘largely . . . mediated through groups of complaisant mercantile elites and creoles’.32 29

30

31 32

The metropolitan discussion of these subjects is found in Jack P. Greene, Evaluating empire and coming to terms with colonialism in eighteenth-century Britain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), ch. 7. The best study of the board of trade is Steele, Politics of colonial policy; but see also the classic studies by Oliver Morton Dickerson, American colonial government, 1696–1765 (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1914), and Arthur H. Basye, The Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, Commonly Known as the Board of Trade, 1748–1782 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925). The best work on this subject is Alison Gilbert Olson, Making the empire work: London and American interest groups, 1690–1790 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). C. A. Bayly, Imperial meridian: the British empire and the world, 1780–1830 (London: Longmans, 1989), p. 5.

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Unlike the lords of trade, which as a committee of the privy council had direct access to that body and was able to put its measures into effect, the board of trade was always a purely advisory body. Except for a brief period in the 1750s when the ambitious earl of Halifax was its president,33 the board could not nominate, appoint, recall or remove a colonial governor or other officers. It could nominate people to serve on colonial executive councils, but the secretary of state often ignored its nominees. It did not command the resources to pay salaries to officials in the many colonies that refused to vote permanent revenues. It could not manage migration or regulate major trades. Indeed, ultimate authority on all matters rested with the secretary for the southern department, for whom colonial affairs were peripheral, and political considerations and patronage opportunities paramount. Rarely were these secretaries or the privy council ready to make any decisions that might provoke either a major altercation in parliament or a serious constitutional crisis in the colonies, offend a powerful interest group or weaken the administration’s political standing in Britain.34 The board also sometimes found itself at odds with the admiralty, the treasury, or the war department, other agencies with responsibility for special areas of colonial oversight.35 As a consequence, as Steele has noted, the ‘Board’s influence, much more than its policy, was bound by politics’, and its deficiencies as an agency of ‘imperial control stemmed not only from the distance between London and the colonies, but also from the increasing distance between the Board of Trade and the executive power in British government.’36 In this situation, the board of trade functioned principally to establish, monitor, gather information about and make recommendations for decisions concerning the many overseas polities under its purview. It played a limited role in encouraging, reinforcing or denying settler and mercantile impulses for developing new sectors of the economy. Through its review of colonial legislation, it reinforced settler-driven efforts to ensure that locally modified versions of English common law were entrenched in all colonial legal systems, except that of Québec. For such settler-dominated societies, metropolitan laws and institutions, as Jorg Frisch has noted, were ‘a concomitant of immigration’ that were not ‘imposed upon settlers but claimed by them’.37

33 34 35 36 37

Jack P. Greene, ‘ “A posture of hostility”: a reconsideration of some aspects of the origins of the American revolution’, American Antiquarian Society Proceedings 87 (1977), 27–68. See James A. Henretta, ‘Salutary neglect’: colonial administration under the duke of Newcastle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). Dora Mae Clark, The rise of the British treasury: colonial administration in the eighteenth century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960). Steele, Politics of colonial policy, p. 172. Jorg Frisch, ‘Law as a means and as an end: remarks on the function of European and nonEuropean law in the process of European expansion’, in W. J. Mommsen and J. A. De Moor

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Despite the small size of the colonial bureaucracy, its lack of influence in the metropolitan administration and its overall weakness on the ground in the colonies, the metropolitan bureaucracy exerted a profound influence upon the political culture of the empire. In response to the stubborn resistance of the colonies to its efforts to bring established colonial polities under tighter metropolitan control and to undermine the systems of authority earlier established within almost all of them, the lords of trade during the late 1670s managed to define the framework within which fundamental questions about the nature of the empire and the relationship between the English state and its many peripheral extensions would be discussed over the following century. In response to the provincial assemblies’ determined resistance to its measures, the lords of trade in 1679 enunciated and elaborated a new doctrine based on the assumption that the colonies were not simply commercial enterprises in the service of the metropole, as might have been concluded from the logic implicit in the Navigation Acts, but also adjuncts of royal power that were politically subordinate to the parent state and might be governed from London directly, not simply through colonial institutions indirectly. According to this doctrine, the assemblies’ law-making power and indeed their very existence depended on the grace and favour of the crown as extended to them by royal charter or some other official document such as the king’s commission or instructions to governors, and the crown might thereafter change the constitutions whenever and however it saw fit. To reinforce this post hoc doctrine, metropolitan bureaucrats also insisted that whatever attributes of self-government the assemblies had acquired before the crown took the colonies under its wing had been made at the expense of the crown’s extensive prerogative powers. So, far from violating any colonial rights, the lords of trade reasoned, the crown was merely acting to retrieve the just prerogatives that the assemblies had unconstitutionally seized. Carried forth into the eighteenth century through governors’ instructions, the board of trade’s correspondence with governors, privy council pronouncements and governors’ communications with colonial legislatures, this set of ideas became the centrepiece of metropolitan colonial policy. Ever after, metropolitan bureaucrats in London and the colonies identified recurrent conflicts over the distribution of authority between governors and legislatures as struggles to prevent aggressive assemblies from encroaching on the crown’s prerogatives.38 But the colonists flatly refused to agree that this doctrine had ever been constitutive or foundational for the English imperial state. Having long enjoyed a large amount of political autonomy over their internal affairs with little

38

(eds.), European expansion and law: the encounter of European and indigenous law in 19thand 20th-century Asia and Africa (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1992), p. 21. Greene, Peripheries and center, pp. 7–18.

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interference from the English state, colonial leaders principally conceived of the colonies not as adjuncts of royal power and not as purely commercial enterprises but as overseas extensions of the metropolis, and they rapidly and fully articulated an elaborate argument designed to counter this new metropolitan bureaucratic doctrine and to legitimate their early claims to what they thought of as their inherited rights as English people. According to this argument, the original settlers and their descendants were all equally freeborn English subjects who had left their native country to establish English hegemony over portions of the New World. Denying that they could lose any of their inherited rights simply by moving to America, they pointed out that they had created their own civil governments for the specific purpose of securing those rights to themselves. At the same time, they argued that far from being a grant from the crown, their assemblies derived from their basic English right to consensual governance and, by the last half of the seventeenth century, many decades of customary practice. Like Magna Charta itself, they contended, no charter or other instrument could grant English people a right which they already enjoyed as part of their inheritance. Such instruments, like Magna Charta, merely constituted an acknowledgement on the part of the crown that such rights inhered in the people themselves. In the colonies, no less than in the metropole, they thus insisted, parliaments were the bulwark of the people’s liberties and properties. By and large, colonials did not contest metropolitan authority over their external affairs, never claiming competence on matters of general concern to the empire and, especially after 1739, regarding trade restrictions and other economic constraints as a fair exchange in return for protection from the imperial designs of France and Spain, but they had no intention of giving up their autonomy over internal affairs. Indeed, as through the middle decades of the eighteenth-century colonial legislatures became more sophisticated and more adept in strategies of resistance, they became ever more determined to preserve their long-standing authority over their internal affairs.39 Except for a short period in the early 1750s when the board of trade made a concerted, if almost wholly unsuccessful, effort to implement its vision for establishing metropolitan supremacy in imperial governance, the metropolitan administrations’ reluctance to push measures that would stir up trouble in the colonies or interfere with colonial cooperation during wartime, combined with the tenacity and vehemence with which colonial leaders defended their selfgoverning rights during the century after 1675, largely frustrated metropolitan bureaucratic efforts to reduce the scope of colonial law-making authority and self-governance. As a result, the metropolitan bureaucracy’s ideas about the political organization of the empire remained little more than a bundle of 39

Ibid., pp. 19–54.

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oft-asserted but rarely realized goals. Through more careful monitoring, the bureaucracy after 1750 did manage in new colonial regimes such as Nova Scotia and Georgia to limit, at least in the short run, settler demands for selfgovernment, but even there the balance of power eventually shifted in the direction of more self-government. With regard to the older colonies, however, it could show little success. In 1760, as in 1660, the overseas empire continued to be a collection of selfcontained, and, at least in their internal affairs, largely self-governing polities, tied to a metropolis, which had proven incapable of marshalling and deploying the fiscal and administrative resources necessary to fuse the overseas empire into a tidily organized whole under the direction of an effective bureaucracy. The result was what I have elsewhere referred to as a system of ‘negotiated authority’,40 whereby the metropolitan bureaucracy acceded to or winked at a functioning constitutional arrangement by which effective internal governance remained under the control of provincials while holding fast to what one of its most successful governors referred to as its ‘established maxims’. Authority in the extended polity of the early modern British empire flowed in both directions, from the centre to the peripheries, and vice versa. For governors and other royal bureaucrats in the colonies to succeed in this system, they needed maximum scope to manoeuvre to accommodate to provincial as well as metropolitan demands, and they could obtain such latitude only by keeping their metropolitan superiors in the dark. Bureaucrats who managed to strike just the right balance could function to enhance metropolitan authority in the colonies, but those who did not only called attention to the underlying tensions between metropolitan conceptions of colonial governance and the actual operation in the colonies.41 When metropolitan officials decided after 1750 that they no longer wanted to be kept in the dark, the expanded royal provincial bureaucracies tended to be both less creolized and more politicized. Alexander Dalrymple (1737–1808), an analyst of East Indian affairs, certainly exaggerated when he charged in 1778 that ‘American officers appointed in this reign’ were ‘notoriously . . . nonresidents, children, . . . unworthy persons . . . and pack-horses, or those nominal officers, who are saddled with men whose names do not appear’, and speculated that ‘this abuse’ was a significant ‘cause of American resistance’.42 Certainly, however, few provincials found their way into the royal American bureaucracy 40

41

42

Greene, ‘Negotiated authorities’. This piece also posits that this system of negotiated authority was not peculiar to the British empire but was a feature of all early modern Atlantic empires, each of which contained a consensual dimension, and that imperial centres had little choice but to take into account the interests and wishes of provincial power holders. William Gooch, ‘Some Remarks on a paper transmitted into America . . . ’, in Jack P. Greene (ed.), Great Britain and the American colonies, 1606–1763 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 196. [Alexander Dalrymple] Considerations on the present state of affairs between England and America (London, 1778), pp. 8–9.

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after 1760, and the British placemen who occupied those offices were expected to hue the party line of the administration that appointed them. ‘Those gentlemen who hold American employments’, William Burke complained in September 1776, had ‘been the most zealous of all others against the . . . claims of the Colonists’.43 By adding to the grievances colonials had against the metropolis, the expansion of the bureaucracy had, ironically, also contributed to intensifying the very development its enhancement had been intended to prevent. IV

This chapter has employed what some may consider a narrow definition of Britain’s imperial bureaucracy. It includes those officials in England whose principal duties involved the oversight of overseas affairs, specifically the members and staff of the board of trade and its predecessors and those paid representatives of the state or their tenants in overseas plantations whose offices were filled by state officials in Britain and whose duties involved the administration or enforcement of state rules or the performance of other duties involving state service. This definition might be enlarged in several ways. For one, it could be extended to include those members of the substantial metropolitan bureaucracy that emerged during the early modern era to handle England’s increasingly complicated domestic affairs and who participated in several aspects of colonial administration, a bureaucracy that underwent further expansion after 1690 with the state’s growing naval and military activities.44 These included the customs commissioners, who monitored colonial customs officers and the collection of duties on colonial products; the treasury, which was responsible for overseeing the collection and dispersal of crown revenues from the colonies, including quit rents; the admiralty, which after 1690 provided convoys for colonial tobacco and sugar products and, after 1739, organized and oversaw the many naval actions against Spain and France in the intercolonial wars; the war office and associated offices, which, especially after 1754, provided and supplied the troops for military actions in the overseas empire; the members and staffs of the privy council’s committee on colonial affairs; and the secretaries of state and their helpers, who bore ultimate responsibility for colonial affairs. But domestic and foreign affairs, not colonial, were the principal concern of all these officials, except, perhaps, in the case of the admiralty and war office during wartime.45 A second way this definition might 43 44 45

[William Burke] The letters of Valens (London, 1777), p. 94. John Brewer, The sinews of power: war, money and the English state, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), is the classic work on this subject. See Kurt Nagel, ‘Empire and interest: British colonial defense policy, 1689–1748’, (PhD, Johns Hopkins University, 1991), on increasing government spending for colonial defence during the early eighteenth century; and Julian Gwyn, ‘British government spending

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be extended would be to include those overseas agents who administered the policies of state-authorized chartered companies, such as the East India Company. Despite the fact that they were principally engaged in company affairs, the state’s interest in those affairs also rendered them important agents in Britain’s expanding empire. A third way this definition might be loosened would be to include the dozen or fewer councillors in each royal colony who, although usually unremunerated, in other ways meet the criteria stipulated previously, that is, they were appointed by the British privy council and were engaged in the execution, administration and, in a few colonies, adjudication of state as well as provincial law. Until the very end of the period under consideration, however, most councillors were successful creoles or socialized immigrants whose commitment to provincial interests and mores often made them less than dependable defenders of metropolitan goals whenever those goals seemed to be at variance with local opinion. Indeed, except for governors, crown officers in the colonies were also frequently drawn from the same groups and displayed the same flexibility, and many of those who were not were soon naturalized to provincial ways through marriage, political or business alliances or successful participation in the dominant local economic enterprises. Infiltration of the agencies of colonial administration by members of colonial elites and the ‘naturalization’ or cooption of officials sent from Britain often functioned to mediate the application of royal authority and to inhibit the strict pursuit in the colonies of metropolitan bureaucratic goals. Indeed, the most successful and long-serving governors – men such as William Gooch (1727–49) and Francis Fauquier (1758–68) in Virginia, Edward Trelawny (1738–52) in Jamaica, and James Glen (1743–56) in South Carolina – eschewed confrontation and accommodated to local power holders. The good will they and other naturalized bureaucrats engendered helped reinforce metropolitan charisma in the colonies. But the important points are that, however defined, the imperial bureaucracy was thinly spread across a gigantic geographical space, was mostly confined to provincial capitals or major port towns, and did not encompass more than a fraction of the executive and judicial officials in the overseas colonies. The legislatures often appointed treasurers, collectors of provincial taxes and duties, commissioners of public works and many other provincial officers who were largely independent of royal control and operated by virtue of provincial statutes or custom. But a much more numerous group of officials – magistrates, sheriffs, coroners, clerks and an occasional ‘king’s’ attorney – at the local level acted under the authority of the king’s writ to enforce provincial and the North American colonies 1740–1775’, in Peter Marshall and Glyn Williams (eds.), The British Atlantic empire before the American revolution (London: Frank Cass, 1980), pp. 74–84.

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law, try cases, preside over elections, record wills and deeds, oversee the performance of local services and attend to a variety of other public matters. Outside New England, where they were mostly elected by town meetings, these officers, operating through parish units in South Carolina and most of the island colonies and through county units elsewhere, were usually appointed from among local magnates by royal governors in consultation with their councils. Notwithstanding the fact that they acted under the royal writ, however, they were essentially provincial officers operating under provincial laws; they were not imperial but, if you will, provincial bureaucrats. Undermanned, underpowered, and under-supported, with its overseas representatives forced by the very structure of the empire to adapt themselves to the local conditions of the self-contained and distinctive polities in which they had to operate, Britain’s imperial bureaucracy was not central to Britain’s extraordinary success as an imperial power. It neither contributed to nor was a drag upon Britain’s overseas expansion. Although its policies operated to stimulate and keep alive the powerful tensions between centre and peripheries that shaped the political culture of empire, the working system that evolved on the ground to handle those tensions, combined with the settlers’ emotional and material attachments to the metropolis, kept the imperial bureaucracy’s attempts to enforce objectionable policies from fostering the growth of colonial nationalism. It is true, however, that the revolt of thirteen mainland colonies in 1776 can be attributed to administration and parliamentary efforts to act on the widely shared post-1763 conviction that Britain’s continued dominion over its increasingly valuable empire required, as one analyst put it in 1765, that the colonies be placed under some appropriate ‘restraint now, while’ it could still ‘be made binding’, and that ‘the loose texture of that empire’ be moulded ‘into that form which is best calculated for the . . . good’ of the parent state;46 it is also true that the metropolitan bureaucracy shared and endorsed this conviction. ‘The board of trade and plantations has not been of any use to the colonies, as colonies’, Edmund Burke (1730–97) declared in a general critique of Britain’s colonial bureaucracy in 1780, when he sought as part of his economical reform bill to abolish the board, ‘so little of use, that the flourishing colonies of New England, of Virginia, and of Maryland, and all our wealthy colonies in the West Indies, were of a date prior to the [creation] of the first board’ under Charles II. Georgia and Nova Scotia were the only colonies that owed ‘their origins to that board’, he pointed out, and despite the fact that they had both cost Britain an enormous sum, the former still carried ‘a dead pallid visage’, while the latter was an ‘ill-thriven, hard-visaged, and ill-favoured brat’ that had been so 46

The political balance, in which the principles and conduct of the two parties are weighed (London, 1765), pp. 44–5. See also Greene, Constitutional origins.

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unsuccessful that after thirty years, it was still unable to pay its own way. By contrast, he insisted, those ‘colonies which have had the fortune not to be godfathered by the board of trade never cost the nation a shilling, except what has been so properly spent in losing them’.47 As Burke’s remarks suggested, the development of the empire had not required an attentive metropolitan bureaucracy, a point underlined more succinctly in 1772 by the agricultural writer Arthur Young (1741–1820). ‘Whether our’ colonial administrators ‘were asleep or awake’ in their handling of the colonies never made much difference, Young wrote, ‘because the colonies did the business for them: their increase caused the national trade to increase, and all went on silently, but prosperously’.48 Young’s words return us to where I began, with the assertion that settlers, commercial and maritime participants in the colonizing process and private adventurers, not England’s small, tardily established and ineffective bureaucracy, were, in that order, the principal agents in creating the early modern British empire and contributing to its extraordinary success. To the extent that the small size and ineffectiveness of the imperial bureaucracy contributed to the enhancement of the colonial self-government that Adam Smith, in a passage quoted earlier, identified as one of the two most important reasons for the spectacular growth and development of the American colonies, it can be said that it was at least in part responsible for the early modern British empire’s overwhelming success. V

The overseas empires sponsored by European states beginning in the fifteenth century, including the early modern British empire, differed considerably from most of the empires of antiquity and the Middle Ages. Like them, they were of course extended polities that invited well-designed and efficient forms of administration. But, unlike them, they were widely dispersed over geographic space, being separated from imperial centres by vast oceans as well as small seas. These larger, maritime empires were subject to the vagaries of sea travel under sail and the corresponding uncertainties of communication. To administer, to police or to evangelize such far-flung territories effectively required vast sums, which at the time of initial encounter no European monarch possessed. Nor, before the eighteenth century, did imperial expansion bring the necessary fiscal resources to any of them except the Spanish, whose relatively early conquests of Mexico and Peru yielded rich mineral resources and large pools of indigenous labour to be channelled into production. All the other overseas 47 48

Edmund Burke, speech, 11 Feb. 1780, in William Cobbett (ed.), The parliamentary history of England from the earliest period to the year 1803, 36 vols. (London, 1814), vol. xxi, p. 59. Arthur Young, Political essays concerning the present state of the British empire (London, 1772), p. 552.

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empires were more slowly built, initially by trade with indigenous peoples and then by settler agriculture, which used imported labour and private capital and was geared, not to the production of state revenues, but to private accumulation. Settlers and merchants extended the boundaries of empire and built economies producing items to be exchanged in the European market for the manufactures, labour and capital available to the metropolitan state. Yet, many decades would elapse before the various transoceanic economies could generate the resources necessary to underwrite either bureaucratic oversight or adequate defences. In this situation, the less wealthy imperial states had little choice but to rely primarily upon the enormous normative resources that they all had in abundance. Along with enduring and expanding economic connections, the powerful pull of metropolitan culture in the form of political, legal and religious traditions and other forms of social and cultural capital gave metropolitan centres a deep charismatic authority that rendered a highly bureaucratized colonial administration unnecessary. Notwithstanding the presence of substantial bureaucratic and military resources in the Spanish colonies, metropolitan charisma, not force,49 was what principally bound colonial polities throughout the Americas to their respective European centres. Bureaucrats with the right credentials or temperament could sometimes function to enhance metropolitan charisma. But bureaucrats with unimpressive credentials and perspicuity and lacking an identity of interest with the polities in which they served could undermine that charisma and subvert the imperial project.

49

Greene, ‘Negotiated authorities’, whose interpretation has been reaffirmed by recent analyses: Irigoin & Grafe, ‘Bargaining’; and see also Storrs (Chapter 12, p. 313).

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‘Les Enfants du Siècle’: An Empire of Young Professionals and the Creation of a Bureaucratic, Imperial Ethos in Napoleonic Europe Michael Broers

I

The Myth of the Charismatic Military Dictatorship There is an art that conceals art, of which only the exceptional individual is capable.1 Napoleon I was one such person. He knew how to cultivate his own image, how to win battles and how to persuade contemporaries and posterity of his singular talents. Military success and personal magnetism win attention, but they can also conceal much. Napoleon was much more than a soldier or a romantic icon. He knew about power, not just glory, and power is often a prosaic, silent force. It must be cultivated; it rests on cooperation, on consensus and on clarity in purpose and execution. To gain power is not at all the same as to be able to wield it effectively. Perhaps it was Napoleon’s real genius to understand this. His rise and fall were not brought about by the same methods as his tenure of power in Europe between 1799 and 1815. Thus, the true nature of his regime is not to be found in its rise or fall, but in the manner of its government. Napoleon was, without doubt, the greatest and most successful military commander in European history, just as he was also the most charismatic figure of his times. His military conquests, at the strategic level, and his battlefield victories, on the tactical level, ensured his status as a soldier whose campaigns are still studied for their practical lessons in modern military academies, and they are written about in terms of their present value for serving soldiers, as much as for their historical impact. In like manner, Napoleon is the most written 1

Napoleon I uses the phrase ‘les enfants du siècle’ throughout his memoires to denote the generation of Frenchmen who came of age c.1800, the young men whose careers began under his rule. The phrase is taken up by ‘Stendhal’ – the pseudonym of Marie-Henri Beyle (d. 1842) – in both his great novels: Le rouge et le noir (‘The red and the black’, 1830) and La chartreuse de Parme (‘The Charterhouse of Parma’, 1839).

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about figure in European history, after Hitler. His meteoric career and the enigmatic personality that drove it are, indeed, the stuff of legend, and a legend he was the first to cultivate by means of an ardent publicity machine he had created from a very early point in his career.2 When these two elements, military brilliance and personal greatness, are taken together, the cumulative impact is enough to mesmerise friend and foe alike. The soberest of historians, as well as the legions of hagiographers and demonizers, have been led to see his political creation, the first Napoleonic empire, in exactly these terms.3 The presence of the man himself at the apex of the state had to signify charismatic leadership as the essence of the regime. With such a singular individual at its helm, the Napoleonic state could only be the work of one, exceptional, individual. That imposing figure was a soldier and a conqueror, whose charisma and genius had first been felt on the battlefield and within the ranks of the army. Consequently, Napoleon’s regime would be built on his military machine, itself in thrall to him personally. His early career was, most certainly, built on foundations which correspond very closely to two of the three weberian typologies of political leadership:4 the charismatic element is there for all to see, both in hard facts and in the imagery cultivated in the paintings of David and Ingres.5 The patrimonial (or ‘traditional’) aspect of Napoleonic rule appears manifest in his relationship with the army and his family, his loyal following, which was bribed and fêted from the outset. Charismatic in his rise, patrimonial in his pomp, there is much circumstantial evidence for a regime built principally on these two pillars of the weberian edifice rather than the third, that of bureaucratic, legally based, state authority. Even when military power is uncoupled from charisma, or patrimonialism from personal autocracy, the empire as a fundamentally bureaucratic polity is still easily obscured. The bureaucratic empire may have existed, in great part, to service the military, but the Napoleonic empire was not a state ruled by the military, save in parts of Spain, which was on the front line of the conflict from 1808 onwards. It is important to assess what did not happen at the apex of the Napoleonic state, as well as what did, when trying to grasp its nature. Napoleon showered his family and his military commanders with spoils – noble titles drawn from foreign, conquered territories and substantial incomes – but he never allowed the latter any political or administrative office; even his family was not exempted from the civil law. Napoleonic nobility did not equate to 2 3

4 5

A biography that concentrates on this is Philip Dwyer, Napoleon: the path to power, 1769–1799 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007). The first biography to break with this was that of the Marxist, Georges Lefebvre, Napoléon (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1941). The mould was truly broken with Stuart J. Woolf, Napoleon’s integration of Europe (London: Longman, 1991). As outlined in Weber, Theory, pp. 324–85. Timothy Wilson-Smith, Napoleon and his artists (London: Constable, 1996).

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feudal privilege; rather, it was a reward for service, even if that service might be interpreted as being to an individual leader, not the state. Above all, the spoils system emerges, in fact, as a way of keeping the military out of government. It was not the great commanders but civilians such as Talleyrand, Lebrun and Cambacérès who dominated the hub of the administrative system: the Council of State. Tellingly, the only troops ever allowed into Paris were the Imperial Guard, Napoleon’s elite corps, and he never allowed anyone to command it save himself. Napoleon had taken power in a military coup because he had been able to turn troops loyal to his opponents to his side; he saw to it that nothing of the kind ever happened to him. The regime may have been dominated by a soldier, but it was not the plaything of the army. Seen in isolation, this can be interpreted as the embodiment of personal, autocratic rule, but that was far from the case. The case for personal ambition, made real by charisma, and the increasing importance of a spoils system to sustain patrimonialism, as the motors of expansion is compelling. Nevertheless, this does not explain how or why the lands of the Napoleonic hegemony came to be ruled as they were.6 Charisma and patrimonialism were incentives to action and means to an end. They did not form the basis of how territories, once acquired, were governed, nor were they meant to comprise the lasting, durable foundations of Napoleonic rule in Europe, whether in those vast territories annexed directly to France, in the ‘satellite kingdoms’ accorded to the Bonaparte family, or to those many middle-sized states, principally in Germany, bound to the Napoleonic alliance system in looser ways. The Napoleonic empire was governed as an ‘empire of the laws’, in both the narrow definition of ‘the Grand Empire’ of 130 departments, and in the still larger sense of a wider imperial hegemony. It had more to do with Cicero’s vision of Rome than Caesar’s, still less with the careering hedonism of the legend of Alexander the Great. Napoleonic Europe was ruled, behind the lines, by professional bureaucrats and magistrates within precisely defined administrative structures now, as then, considered ‘unbreakable’ by those who staffed them. This empire of the laws has proved as durable and pervasive in its influence on the civilization of modern Europe as the ethos of conquest that introduced it to Europeans proved transient. 6

Napoleonic historians increasingly use the term ‘hegemony’ in a specific context. ‘Empire’ denotes those areas annexed directly to France and ruled from Paris: the départements réunis, which numbered 130 at the height of Napoleon’s power. Alongside these were the ‘satellite kingdoms’, which were ruled by Napoleon’s siblings, and other states closely allied to France but under their native rulers, principally the German states of the Confederation of the Rhine (chaired by Napoleon under the title of ‘Protector’); the Helvetic Republic (Switzerland) also fell into the latter category. These categories, taken together, form the ‘Napoleonic hegemony’, controlled through a multiplicity of methods.

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II

The French State in Absolutism and Revolution: The Roots of Napoleonic Government Napoleon inherited the basis of a centralized, uniform national polity from the revolutionary regimes of the 1790s, which had swept away the archaic patchwork of ancien régime jurisdictions, first with cold, if benevolent, logic and then with ruthless revolutionary zeal. The revolutionaries had left him the system of departments and a single system of national courts; the principle of equality before the law which was, of itself, the end product of the abolition of feudalism; and the concept of the unitary state, devoid of regional autonomy or civic pluralism. It is essential to remember that Napoleon inherited a polity that would allow a powerful bureaucracy to emerge because the traditional impediments to centralized power had been done away with under the revolution: the regional parlements; law courts dominated by nobles; the overlapping jurisdictions of church, monarchy and local, semi-independent bodies such as the provincial estates in those areas where they had still existed but were no more. The revolutionaries had replaced these bodies with elected local councils in the new departments, not the centrally appointed bureaucrats Napoleon quickly put in their place, but the way towards a uniformly governed state had been cleared, if in a very different spirit to Napoleon’s. The revolutionaries had also left him a nationstate that was already becoming an empire avant la lettre, through the annexation of the non-French territories of modern Belgium (1795) and Germany west of the Rhine (1797). They had invented a wholly original concept of national boundaries in the ‘natural frontiers’ by which they claimed all territory to the west of the Rhine and the Alps. In terms of Realpolitik, this entailed seizing territories from the Holy Roman Empire, the papacy and the Savoyard monarchy. In international relations, precedents had also been set. Napoleon was quick to discover that the heritage of the old monarchy was far from moribund after 1799; the tradition of absolutism itself was still a living memory in 1799, and the Napoleonic regime soon sought to harness its deeper instincts to itself. The outward manifestations of this were the revival of a nobility and, less arguably, of the imperial title. This was almost artificial, however. The real atavism the regime sought out and succeeded in reviving was the tradition of professionalism that had formed the essence of the Bourbon state from the late seventeenth century and extended beyond the bureaucracy and judiciary into the liberal professions, the law, above all. The return of a professional ethos to the army under Napoleon has often been remarked upon by historians, as older military traditions reasserted themselves, even among

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officers with no backgrounds as ancien régime soldiers.7 The same phenomenon was present in the magistracy and the bureaucracy.8 Napoleon and his collaborators swiftly began to tighten their control over the provincial administration by replacing the election of judges, departmental councils and other local offices with appointment by the central government. Above all, within months of taking power, Napoleon created a new local official for each department, the prefect, centrally appointed to coordinate and command the entire local administration within his department.9 There were evident similarities between many of the Napoleonic institutions and those of the old order, that between the new prefects and the old royal intendants probably the most obvious among them. However, the reforms of the revolution ensured they operated in different local circumstances; above all, the prefects were the representatives of a stronger, more interventionist state. The real revival of the ancien régime is found less in institutional comparisons than in the return of a culture of government in which the professional bureaucrat was all. The convulsed, widespread disorder of provincial France and the increasingly clear weariness of large sectors of the propertied classes with the conditions of virtual civil war made these measures acceptable.10 However, the process of administrative centralization would have amounted to nothing, and could never have been effected so rapidly or thoroughly, without the engrained culture of professionalism embedded in France during the preceding century and a half. The almost overnight displacement of election by appointment and of politically dictated office holding by the structured career, based on professional qualifications, could not have taken place otherwise. The establishment of a professional state from the popular tumult of the 1790s was holistic and carefully meditated, on Napoleon’s own terms, its deep cultural roots notwithstanding. In the same breath as the prefects were born and professional magistrates returned to the bench, Napoleon created the twin prongs of a new era: the University and the Grandes Écoles, together with 7

8

9 10

John A. Lynn, ‘Toward an army of honour: the moral evolution of the French army, 1789–1815’, French Historical Studies 16:1 (1989), 24–36; Alan Forrest, Napoleon’s men: the soldiers of the revolution and empire (London: Hambledon, 2002). On the impact of the Terror on the legal profession, see Jean-Louis Halpérin, L’impossible code civil (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), pp. 169–200. For the longer term, see Michael P. Fitzsimmons, The Parisian order of barristers and the French revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). For the provincial bureaucracy’s growing disenchantment with the revolution, see Lynn Hunt, David Lansky and Paul Hanson, ‘The failure of the liberal republic in France, 1795–1799: the road to Brumaire’, Journal of Modern History 51:4 (1979), 734–59. On the higher echelons, see Clive H. Church, Revolution and red tape: the French bureaucracy, 1770–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 213–53. For a succinct explanation of the office of prefect and the civil administration, see Geoffrey Ellis, The Napoleonic empire, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 28–30. For a sweeping but detailed study of provincial disorder: Howard G. Brown, Ending the French revolution: violence, justice and repression from the Terror to Napoleon (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006).

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the secondary schools, the lycées, which would feed them.11 Their recruitment and curriculums were laid down by the government; their products soon came to serve it, forming the elite of a new, post-revolutionary and post–ancien régime generation, whose allegiance would be more than just expedient loyalty to a new, more stable regime, and still less a devotion to the personal leadership of Napoleon. The new ethos was perfectly expressed by Napoleon’s ‘right arm’, Eugène de Beauharnais – ironically a man linked to Napoleon by virtue of his mother Joséphine (from 1796, Napoleon’s wife) – who declared the regime wanted ‘men whose personal interests are bound to those of the state, not men whose private interests might reflect those of the state’.12 He got what he wanted, and the key to the new ethos was the resurgence of professionalism in the public sphere. The whole new edifice was underpinned by the legal system brought to maturity between 1800 and 1804, a process which culminated in the establishment of the Civil Code – known rightly as the Code Napoléon – which fixed definitively the laws under which the new state would be governed and also the court structures and legal procedures through which the Code would be administered. The statutes of the Code guaranteed equality before the law, respect for private property and the equal division of inheritance among all children. The new codes of procedure ensured that the terms of the Code would be enforced through open, public trials, thereby ensuring the end to inquisitorial proceedings held behind closed doors. The determined revival of the professional ethos in public service sought to ensure that all this was in the hands of properly educated magistrates. From this system, the Napoleonic regime derived its own distinct but clear concept of ‘the division of powers’, an almost sacred precept which underpinned ‘the unbreakable model’. This division did not correspond to that between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, although in theory such divisions did exist. For the Napoleonic regime, where administrative professionalism eclipsed parliamentary politics from the outset, the key to a balance of power was the clear separation of the civil administration from the magistracy. There is no question that the Napoleonic state was authoritarian to its core, but this insistence on the clear separation of the judiciary from the bureaucracy was meant to guarantee the rule of law within the empire. What united magistrates and civil servants was their shared professional ethos and their confidence in the ‘unbreakable model’ (Fr. le modèle inébranlable) as a whole,13 common ground that would become 11

12 13

Philippe Savoie, ‘Constuire un système d’instruction publique: de la création des lycées au monopole renforcé (1802–1814)’, in Jacques-Olivier Boudon (ed.), Napoléon et les lycées (Paris: Nouveau Monde Éditions, 2004), pp. 39–55. Cited in Livio Antonielli, I prefetti dell’Italia Napoleonica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1983), p. 256. This term le modèle inébranlable was used frequently by contemporary administrators and, particularly, by magistrates, to describe the whole Napoleonic administrative system, but

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ever more solid as the frontiers of empire expanded into regions where such principles, and the model itself, were alien and often unwelcome. A vital component of Napoleonic professionalism was its deliberately impersonal nature. The unbreakable model prohibited local men from ruling their own areas, a maxim that would make a particularly powerful imprint on the character of Napoleonic imperial rule, as the empire expanded after 1805. Prefects in the civil administration, public prosecutors in the magistracy and even gendarmes – the newly revitalized paramilitary police distributed in sixman brigades over the countryside – were all, always, outsiders to the areas they served, and they were, in principle if not always in practice, moved periodically about the empire. The aims of this policy were to produce objectivity in serving local communities and to foster a sense of loyalty to the state – that complete identification of personal and patriotic interests between the state and its servants espoused by Eugène de Beauharnais. Eugène was Napoleon’s viceroy in the kingdom of Italy, and he formed his view of the ideal public servant in that regional, extra-French context. It betokened a great deal. By 1805, the French had annexed the Austrian Netherlands (modern Belgium), the entire left bank of the Rhine and all the mainland possessions of the house of Savoy in north-western Italy. These areas were now run from Paris in exactly the same manner as France – itself now increasingly referred to by the regime as ‘the interior’, or as ‘old France’. Alongside them were Napoleon’s kingdom of Italy, centred on Milan and Bologna; the Batavian republic; and his close allies of the southern and western German states of Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden and Nassau. Taken together, these lands would comprise an ‘inner hegemony’, as Napoleon’s power grew after 1805.14 A significant section of the elites of these regions were not bound to the French purely by formal ties. The house of Savoy had practiced a rigid, but highly professionalized, form of absolutism since the early eighteenth century, while many of the small German states had long been governed through reforming cameralist principles. Above all, the former Austrian Netherlands and the Lombard component of the kingdom of Italy had direct, recent experience of the centralizing reforms of Emperor Joseph II (d. 1790). Indeed, many of his most devoted adherents had transferred their services to the rulers of south German states following his death in 1790 and the reversal of many of his more radical policies thereafter. Chief among them were

14

especially its judicial procedures and law codes. It continued to be used in legal textbooks and by law professors in France into the twentieth century: Jean-Pierre Royer, La société judiciaire depuis le XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de la France, 1979); Jean-Pierre Royer, Histoire de la justice en France: de la monarchie absolue à la République (Paris: Presses Universitaires de la France, 2001). Michael Broers, ‘Napoleon, Charlemagne and Lotharingia: acculturation and the borders of Napoleonic Europe’, HJ 44:1 (2001), 135–54. Michael Broers, Europe under Napoleon, 1799–1815 (London: Arnold, 1996), is predicated on this configuration of the empire.

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Sigismund von Reitzenstein and Maxmillian von Montgelas, the chief ministers of Baden and Bavaria, respectively, who replicated the Napoleonic system within their own states to a great degree.15 In Lombardy, Napoleon also drew on men who had supported Joseph II, headed by Francesco Melzi d’Eril, his vice president in Milan, 1800–5. These men were only the most prominent among a generation of administrators who turned to Napoleon after the demise of their idol. They were not disappointed and found in the new regime much of what they had hoped for in the old. The inner hegemony was not purely a geographical expression of French expansion; it drew into Napoleon’s orbit exactly those parts of Europe where the new regime created in France found men who understood its workings and sympathized with its ethos. Put another way, it vastly increased the pool of talent on which the empire could draw when it expanded after 1805. This in great part explains how the French were able to staff their empire with only minimal recourse to local elites in areas annexed later, who did not readily assimilate to their system. Piedmontese were deployed throughout the courts and local administrations of the Tuscany, Liguria and Rome as they were successively annexed to France.16 In like manner, Lombards took over the administration of the territories of the old republic of Venice, annexed to the kingdom of Italy in 1806–7.17 When these human resources are added to those of the interior, it becomes clear that there were just enough able, acculturated administrators available to Napoleon to keep local involvement in the bureaucracy to a minimum, where the presence of indigenous elite figures might compromise the purity of the unbreakable model. Translated into practical terms, it meant the regime could always adhere to its maxim of using senior local administrators who were drawn from outside the jurisdictions they served. There is an important caveat to this sense of mutual identity between the French and the elites of the inner hegemony. The ready support the new regime found in these areas came from a highly educated, professionally trained minority, usually within the cadres of the administration or among men recently expelled from it. It was, in a word, elitist. The reforming initiatives of Joseph II 15

16 17

For an overview in English, see the entire issue of Central European History 24:3 (1991), ‘Symposium: state-building in the “third Germany” ’, which contains an article devoted to each of these German states. On the republic/kingdom of Italy, see Antonielli, Prefetti, passim. Michael Broers, The Napoleonic empire in Italy, 1796–1814: cultural imperialism in a European context? (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 175–212. In contrast, Rhinelanders were kept out of the Hanseastic departments because, by 1811, Napoleon considered them too corrupt. However, some Rhinelanders were appointed to senior positions in 1806–7, to administer the new duchy of Berg, around Düsseldorf, and to other parts of the German possessions: Gabriele B. Clemens, ‘Integrazione imperiale e progressione di carriera: la politica napoleonica per i funzionari dei territori annessi’, in Marco Bellabara, Brigitte Mazohl, Reinhard Stauber and Marcello Verga (eds.), Gli Imperi dopo l’Impero nell’Europa del XIX secolo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008), pp. 433–66, 450–3.

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in the Habsburg lands or of other rulers in his mould, such as Max Joseph of Bavaria, had been anything but popular.18 The last years of Joseph II’s rule had seen massive popular revolts against his reforms and significant reversals of his policies. Napoleon faced the same hostility, and those who served him had to confront it. In Piedmont, in particular, he lost many able public servants less through fundamental disagreements with the ethos of his regime than from deep dynastic loyalty to the Savoyards, whom he had overthrown. Nevertheless, there were enough willing hands in these territories, when combined with the French, to flood the rest of Europe when the time came. In the years of almost universal peace between 1800 and 1804, when the war was confined to naval and colonial skirmishes with the British, the unbreakable model of the professional state was forged within the borders of an enlarged France. By the time French hegemony had expanded beyond all imagination, following the lightening victories of 1805–7, it was ready to extend itself, confident and fully formed, to vast tracts of western and central Europe, and it was increasingly in the hands of a new generation of professional administrators and magistrates emerging from the Napoleonic education system. When much of Europe virtually fell into Napoleon’s lap by the peace of Tilsit with Russia in 1807, he and his administration knew what to do with it in rigid, minute detail. III

The Grand Empire and the New Regime, 1805–14 The conquests of 1805–7 and the annexations that followed the institution of the Continental System and the blockade after 1807 saw the ‘unbreakable model’ extend itself along the whole of the North Sea coast as far at Lübeck, to the whole of the Italian peninsula, far into central Germany with the creation of the duchy of Berg and the kingdom of Westphalia, into the Balkans with the acquisition of the Illyrian provinces – modern Slovenia and Croatia – and, in principle if seldom in practice, to the shadowy Napoleonic kingdom of Spain. The extent of these conquests made the Napoleonic empire and its satellite kingdoms as heterogeneous an empire as is possible in a European context. The empire was not, however, governed by pluralistic compromises with powerful local elites, or by patrimonial enfeoffments accorded to the conquering marshals, save de facto in those parts of Spain under marshals Soult (Andalucia) and Suchet (Valencia and, temporarily, Catalonia) – and even 18

These revolts swept the whole empire. For a penetrating local study of an area where resistance recurred during the Napoleonic hegemony, see Laurence Cole, ‘Nation, anti-enlightenment and religious revival in Austria: Tyrol in the 1790s’, HJ 43:2 (2000), 475–95.

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here, Soult, if less so Suchet, strove to enforce French norms on these regions.19 There were easier ways to rule vast, disparate territories, but the Napoleonic state chose not to do so, convinced both that its concept of the public sphere was superior to anything else existing in contemporary Europe, and that only its particular methods of administration could deliver the taxes and conscripts necessary for the war machine. Increasingly, as the empire expanded, it came to be believed that only Frenchmen could cover key posts, whether this was the administration of particularly disturbed, recalcitrant regions or simply in terms of routine competence in senior positions. No tribunal of the imperial departments in Italy, save those in Piedmont annexed as early as 1802, ever had a non-French or Piedmontese public prosecutor, for instance, and the vast majority of prefects in all the imperial departments of Italy and Germany were all, always, French. The court system is a striking example of an imperial regime sacrificing efficiency for control. The French judicial system was ‘personnel heavy’ in the extreme. No court session could be held without the presence of three judges, which meant that even local courts needed at least five magistrates on the bench. Beyond this most basic requirement, the public prosecutor also needed assistants, as did the greffiers (‘clerks of the court’), if the administrative formalities were to be observed properly. The French simply had to compromise at the lower levels of the hierarchy, but in many cases, they preferred to leave courts understaffed than to rely too heavily on local jurists who they thought did not grasp their legal culture. This was compensated for by the powerful presence of the gendarmerie and, equally, by its wholly reliable composition. In a remarkable feat of consistent transhumance, two-thirds of all the six-man gendarmerie brigades throughout the Dutch, German and Italian departments of the empire were always composed of Frenchmen, something made possible by the number of veterans generated by the Grande Armée in the course of the wars who needed employment.20 In simple terms, the Napoleonic regime had a powerful, loyal and ubiquitous strong arm to offset the lacunae of the bureaucracy or the courts. Behind the often thin line of civilian administrators and magistrates stood this unique, formidable instrument of control. There was, however, more at work in this than the need for efficiency or even the iron rule of impersonal professionalism. Even the satellite kingdoms were entrusted to French hands, although only at the apex of the state, and in specific roles. Each satellite kingdom in its turn, save Spain and Holland, received 19 20

Jean-Marie Lafon, L’Andalousie et Napoléon: contre-insurrection, collaboration et résistances dans le midi de l’Espagne (1808–1812) (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2007). For an overview, see Clive Emsley, Gendarmes and the state in nineteenth-century Europe (Oxord: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 56–80, 155–72; Michael Broers, Napoleon’s other war: bandits, rebels and their pursuers in the age of revolutions (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 85–104.

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a team of French constitutional experts the moment a Bonaparte took power, usually led by Pierre-Louis Roederer, Jean-Claude Beugnot and Joseph Jérôme Siméon; Antoine Saliceti and Charles-François Lebrun were also seconded from Paris to help in the initial stages of Napoleonic rule. Their main function was to create constitutions for the new kingdoms, virtually cloned from the French model, and their continuing influence was often such that even Napoleon’s siblings came to object to their attempts at tight control and perfect emulation of French norms in ‘their’ states. The point to note here is less Napoleon’s desire for personal control over the satellite kingdoms than the more fundamental policy of ruling through the French bureaucratic model at all costs, even if it meant the alienation of his own family, to say nothing of the traditional local elites. Perhaps the proof of this came in 1810, when Napoleon sacked his brother Louis (d. 1846) as king of Holland for failing to enforce the blockade effectively. Napoleon’s solution was not to replace him with someone else but to annex his kingdom to France and send in two highly trusted collaborators, Lebrun, his financial expert, and the Belgian magistrate, François Joseph Beyts, to organize the region into French departments. In the same year, he stripped his brother Joseph (d. 1844), king of Spain since 1808, of the province of Catalonia and sent in a team of commissioners to divide it into departments and to establish the French legal system there; French prefects and some magistrates soon followed. Here, the rationale was to secure this strategic region from enemy control, but whether on the North Sea coast or the Mediterranean, the permanent solution to a problem was not just direct rule, but the establishment of the entire unbreakable model that was the Napoleonic system of government. An interesting pattern also emerges in relation to those non-French elements the French considered suitable collaborators and those they regarded as incapable of integration into the ranks of the bureaucracy or the judiciary. Indigenous elites were admitted to public service in so far as they were considered to resemble the French, to have worked in public spheres comparable to the Napoleonic model and, occasionally, for their ideological commitment to Napoleonic rule. Although the French always initially sought the support of the most powerful and influential elements within indigenous elites, they could and did do without them, antagonize them and, above all, refuse their offers of participation if they could not conform to the unbreakable model. Perhaps the most striking instance of this occurred after the annexation of the territories of the former republic of Venice to the kingdom of Italy in 1807. Venice had lost its independence in 1797 and had been under Habsburg rule ever since, while the core of the Italian kingdom – Lombardy and the former papal marches around Bologna – had been under Napoleonic rule more or less since 1796. Members of the Venetian nobility offered their services to their new rulers, Napoleon and his viceroy in Milan, Eugène de Beauharnais. Many were

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prepared to serve as prefects, but in their ‘home departments’, an offer Eugène, his views on bureaucracy notwithstanding, was ready to accept to secure local influence in his new possessions. Napoleon rebuffed the Venetians, however, declaring the principle of the prefect as ‘outsider’ immutable. Instead, he ordered Eugène to send in men from Bologna, known for their political loyalty and long experience of ‘the system’.21 Conversely, there were many examples of certain non-French administrators coming to dominate new satellite states or their own local administrations because they were deemed capable of assimilation. The French occupation of the Illyrian provinces marked the rise of men who had served the Habsburgs under the reforming emperor, Joseph II, as was also the case in Italy. At the micro-level, particularly in the patchwork of the small German states absorbed into both France and satellite states such as Westphalia or Berg, different local experiences could be equally determining of who was taken up by the French and who was not. By almost a fluke of history, the ruler of the small German principality of Arenberg had embraced the Napoleonic reforms on his own initiative, well before his state disappeared in 1807, first into Westphalia and then into a French department in 1811. His local magistrates were few in number, but the French found their experience of the Code invaluable and sought to raise them to the highest court in the new Hanseatic departments; as a result, several of them emerged from rural obscurity to serve on the shortlived imperial Court of Appeal in Hamburg, at the expense of more prestigious magistrates from the Hansa, who had no grip on the new system, so alien was it to them.22 In Naples and the Dutch departments, Napoleonic rule brought a return to high office of men who had been determined opponents of the privileges of the nobility, the church and the provinces under the old order, such as Giuseppe Zurlo and Francesco Ricciardi in Naples, and Cornelis van Maanen in the Netherlands. All of these men had fallen foul not only of the reactionary elements in their states but also of regimes more inclined to conciliate local interests, in van Maanen’s case including that of Louis Bonaparte. The search, and the choice whatever the cost to good relations with the traditional local elites, was for ‘people like us’, and the unbreakable model offered a clear vision of who ‘we’ were in the first place. As has been seen, within the 130 departments of Grand Empire, this transplantation of French personnel to the new peripheries was made possible by the unparalleled pool of educated talent France possessed in these decades. The recruitment of the imperial administration, the judiciary and the gendarmerie included, was the concrete manifestations of the impressive human 21 22

Antonielli, Prefetti, pp. 232–6. ‘Observations sur la composition de la Cour Impériale de hambourg et les autres tribunaux des nouveaux départments hanséatiques’, internal memorandum to minister of justice, July 1811, BB5 268 (Organisation Judiciaire, Hansa), ANP.

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resources France could draw on for its needs when faced with rapid, extensive imperial expansion on the form of direct annexation. This is all the more remarkable, as the records reveal the general reluctance of older, more experienced men of the revolutionary generation to take service far from their families and properties, and to face real dangers, as well as a less perilous discomfort, in some postings. Napoleon and his minister of justice, Reynier, had hoped to compose the local courts of the new Hanseatic departments with senior, experienced magistrates, drawn from the German-speaking French departments of Alsace and Lorraine, but none of their first choices, men of middle age and substantial property, accepted the challenge. As one of the few exceptions to this, the president of the new imperial court of Hamburg, told his superior in August, 1811: The lateness of the presidents and imperial prosecutors in taking up their posts in the new [local] tribunals, the absence of any news regarding their arrival, makes us worried that those named to these posts are refusing to accept them, as they are far from their homes, and the pay attached to them is very modest, in a region where the cost of living is high.23

He was right in all his assumptions. Increasingly, the imperial mission fell on the shoulders of a younger generation emerging from the educational institutions created in the first months of the regime, who felt no such impediments or constraints. Indeed, they grasped these opportunities with both hands. IV

Les Enfants du Siècle: A Social Anthropology of an Imperial Service There was an inherent contradiction in the origins of the new generation of administrators. They were intended to be, and duly became, highly mobile imperial professionals, moved from place to place all over Europe, in search of advancement and thoroughly imbued with a sense of loyalty to the regime they served and its values. Nevertheless, they were drawn from the most stable elements in French society, with deep, immoveable roots in the provinces. Isser Woloch, in a particularly prescient essay, has drawn attention to how accurate was the correlation between the new generation of civil servants, concentrated in the institution of the auditeurs of the Council of State and the masses de granit. Auditeurs had to prove they could command a private income of 6,000 francs per annum, a sum which put them firmly within the ranks of the 23

President, Imperial Court, Hamburg, to minister of justice, 22 Aug. 1811, BB5 268 (Organisation Judiciaire, Hansa), ANP.

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provincial elites.24 Even if many families had to scrimp hard to ensure such a sum, auditeurs were almost invariably the scions of families among the 600 highest taxpayers of their native departments; these 600 highest taxpayers were, almost invariably, landowners; and the auditeurs were almost invariably the young administrators sent forth to be tested on the wildest frontiers of the Grand Empire. They were accompanied by young magistrates, mainly public prosecutors, drawn from the same provincial backgrounds. Their similar social backgrounds were often in contrast to the different political and ideological histories of their families during the revolution, however. Many came from royalist backgrounds, particularly among the magistrates, who were often the sons of members of the most senior courts of the old order, the parlements, whose higher offices were synonymous with noble status. Others, more commonly among the civil administrators, were the sons of prominent revolutionaries. Tournon, in Rome, came from a very old noble family in the northern Rhone; his father had fled the revolution and, together with his mother, younger sister and brother, he had to flee the Jacobin bombardment of the city as a boy of only fourteen, in 1794. His colleague in neighbouring Umbria, Antoine Roederer, was the son of a prominent revolutionary, himself an imperial servant; a Lutheran from Alsace, his redoubtable wife was the daughter of Marshal Berthier, Napoleon’s chief of staff. Their attitude to the Italians they ruled and their commitment to enforcing Napoleonic policy were no different. They were professional bureaucrats.25 There was far more to it than professionalism, however. They were imbued with a clear mission to extend the unbreakable model to wherever the emperor sent them, for embodied in the Code, its system of judicial administration and the whole edifice of civil government was their own vision of enlightened progress. They had a perfect template with which to reform Europe, and Europe would not be reformed until its peoples, with all their diversity notwithstanding, fitted that template. It took a remarkable degree of confidence and clarity of purpose to proceed to rule half a continent by such lights. Madame de Rémusat had this to say about the attitude and conduct of the young officials detailed for service in the non-French parts of the empire: ‘Only the briefest acquaintance is needed with the attitude and despotic ideas these young men exercised in their own country, to understand what a danger these attitudes had been when the administration of some conquered French province 24

25

Isser Woloch, ‘The Napoleonic regime and French society’, in Philip G. Dwyer (ed.), Napoleon and Europe (London: Longman, 2001), pp. 60–78, esp. pp. 73–5. For the classic study upon which Woloch draws, see Charles Durand, Les auditeurs du conseil d’état de 1803 à 1814 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958). Broers, Napoleonic empire in Italy, pp. 118–22.

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had been given to them.’26 Madame de Rémusat caught their spirit of selfconfident arrogance well. They were not the children of the revolution, still less the battered survivors of Terror and counter-terror, but the generation that emerged into adulthood under the blazing sun of Austerlitz. However, despatched to the treacherous fringes of the empire, they soon found their selfconfidence sorely tested. There emerged a determination to fight and to pursue the ‘civilizing mission’ against impossible odds, even among rather unlikely candidates. The young, aristocratic auditeur Viefville des Essars was made prefect of the short-lived, makeshift department of the Serge, in the Catalan Pyrenees, in 1812. He could not even enter his chef lieu for eight months because of the guerrillas. Once there, he suffered a nervous collapse but refused leave, pulled himself together and stayed at his post to the end. In the meantime, he paved the streets, built sewers and a hospital and led armed patrols himself most nights.27 The French nobility had come a long way from the gilded youth of Versailles. ‘The frontier spirit’ could galvanize across gender, as well as caste. The arrogant confidence depicted so acidly by Madame de Rémusat was often badly dented, but the lasting commitment of the young imperial servants to their task, and to their sense of superiority, seldom vanished. The need to create l’homme régénéré beyond France28 was perceived as more urgent than ever, and close encounters with the dégénérés of non-French Europe only served to bolster French cultural self-confidence. In the words of one French official in central Italy: ‘There is much to do . . . but it must not be denied that it is impossible to obtain results in a country in need of complete regeneration, and where all its received ideas must be changed.’29 As imperial rule in central Italy collapsed around the bourgeois wife of the prefect of Umbria, although worried about her children, wrote home: ‘I have decided not to take advantage of the permission now granted to return with them to France, because that would create a very bad impression here.’30 The wives of many French officials in Tuscany told the director-general of police in Florence that they believed they, not their husbands, would be the first targets of any renewed counterrevolution late in 1813, and that ‘their throats . . . would be cut first’. Their 26

27 28 29

30

Claire de Rémusat, Mémoires, 1802–1808 (Paris: Hachette, 1957), p. 367. For an excellent overview, see Rebecca Rogers, ‘L’éducation des filles à l’époque napoléonienne’, in Boudon (ed.), Napoléon et les lycées, pp. 275–90. Juan Mercader-Riba, Puigcerdá, capital del department del Serge (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 1971), pp. 18–19. The concept is developed by Mona Ozouf, L’homme régénéré: essais sur la révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). Director-general of police, Florence, to minister, 3e arrondissement, Police-Générale, 23 Feb. 1812, F7 8809 (Police-Générale, Arno), ANP. On the concept of ‘regeneration’ in this period, see Mona Ozouf, ‘Regeneration’, in François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds.), A critical dictionary of the French revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 781–791; Ozouf, L’homme régénéré. Madame A. Roederer to P.-L. Roederer, 15 Nov. 1813, 29-AP-15, ANP.

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reaction was to demand arms for themselves and their husbands, not to ask to be evacuated. There was little talk of surrender, and very few deserted their posts as the last storm gathered, whatever their political backgrounds or, indeed, their sex. Napoleonic women had their part to play in the new imperial order, and it was a far from passive role. When French women came into direct contact with their Italian, Spanish and even German sisters, they knew themselves to be the most liberated in Europe, certainly in the social world of the salon and in the control of the domestic sphere. The Tournons – the aristocratic couple to whom Rome, the second city of the empire, was entrusted – defiantly flouted the sexist conventions of Roman society in the private sphere by holding mixed dinner parties, and in the public, when Madame Tournon, herself the daughter of a prominent legal family from Nîmes, took charge of the prefectural office in her husband’s absence.31 The wife of Marshal Suchet did not so much shock as ‘floor’ Catalan and Valencian society by riding in breeches to review the troops, kiss them on both cheeks and hand out medals, to say nothing of her own very bourgeois, highly intellectual salons in Barcelona and Valencia.32 Madame Tournon’s position in Rome was far from unique. Prefects toured their departments four times a year under Napoleon to carry out conscription; in their absence, their wives usually ran the prefectoral bureaux. As time went on and a newer, truly Napoleonic generation of young couples emerged, it could get even more aggressive. This is Madame Dumont, only twenty-two, new wife of a junior magistrate in Bonneville, department of Léman, to the minister of justice in 1812: A little less than a month ago, Your Excellency did me the honour of receiving me, and deigned to promise me that he would inform himself about (my husband) and that, since he speaks German, that he might be placed in one of the Hanseatic departments, so I would ask you not to forget me . . . The small salary of his present post has forced me to live apart from my husband . . . I would remind Your Excellency that he served four years in the army and that his wounds have prevented him pursuing a military career. He also speaks Italian . . . I shall take the liberty of using your own words and of asking you to recall that you have wished to accord me your goodwill.33

She is assertive, and not timid, because this is her ‘follow-up’. An earlier letter, of 3 July 1812, is remarkable for its political and ideological awareness:

31 32 33

Broers, Napoleonic empire in Italy, pp. 250–6. Louis Gabriel Suchet, Mémoires sur ses campagnes en Espagne, 2 vols. (Paris: Bossagne, 1828), vol. ii, pp. 224–27. Madame Dumont, wife of the juge d’instruction, arrondissement Bonneville, département Léman, to the minister of justice, 29 May 1812, BB5 268 (Hansa, Organisation Judiciaire), ANP.

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[As well as German] he speaks Spanish and Italian. He speaks the latter language as well as his own, having lived a long time in Italy when he marched under the glorious flag of His Majesty. My Lord, his desire is always to be useful to his country, in whatever way, as an honest man and a good Frenchman, duty may call him . . . The knowledge of the language of the country where he might be employed means he will not need interpreters, and so he will not need an intermediary between plaintifs and his staff . . . If there is not currently a post at your disposition in one of the Hanseatic cities, perhaps he might be found one among the vacant posts in Italy; the French Empire is large, and my husband is not tied to one department any more than to another.34

This is a striking example of women in the front line of their husbands’ careers, and of the willingness of couples, not just single men, to accept the mobility of imperial professionalism. The date is not without significance, either: 1812, when the new generation was increasingly present in the system. Madame Dumont was not alone. Some wives were not only unafraid to bully a minister of state but also to push their men into the most dangerous front lines of the empire. Here is Louise de St Romain, all of twenty-five, writing to the minister of justice in February 1812 on behalf of her husband, who was a public prosecutor on the Imperial Court (the senior tribunal) of Rome. She wants him appointed the senior public prosecutor on the new projected Imperial Court of Barcelona: Convinced as I am of the good will you bear my husband, M. de St Romain, I would dare to observe to Your Excellency, that I have once again delayed my departure for Rome in the hopes that it might allow an occasion for Your Excellency to give me evidence of the interest he has sought to show in me. I understand that . . . a new Imperial Court is going to be organized in Barcelona; I would to dare to remind Your Excellency, in my own name, as much as in that of my husband’s, to accord him the post of general prosecutor. The zeal M. de St Romain has always shown in carrying out his duties is Your Excellency’s surest guarantee of the efforts he will make to ensure he will merit the preference you will accord him, and the honour of being your protégé.35

A young professional couple would serve anywhere to get promotion; the wife will trade the relative safety and ease of Rome for the front line if it gets her husband promoted. Her husband is not dictating this: he is in Rome, while she is in Paris. She, too, is assertive. Other things emerge from these petitions. These young women were not just uninhibited about writing letters for their men. Madame Dumont was leading a rather modern life, certainly in light of the stereotypical image of Napoleonic womanhood. Unable to join her husband in Léman, but certainly able to do so were he promoted, she was sharing an 34 35

Madame Dumont, wife of the juge d’instruction, arrondissement Bonneville, département Léman, to the minister of justice, 3 July 1812, BB5 268 (Hansa, Organisation judiciaire), ANP. Louise de St Romain to the minister of justice, 11 Feb. 1812, BB5 287 (Catalonie, Organisation Judiciaire), ANP.

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apartment with her cousin and an old school friend in Paris, rue de Tracy, 2, as she had before her marriage and was getting tired of it. It has a very contemporary ring. The school created by Madame Campan to educate the female orphans of members of the Legion of Honour was meant to turn out exactly such women. If Napoleon ever came close to espousing a clear ‘woman policy’, it was through Campan’s academy. Although the education she, under Napoleon’s supervision, prescribed for them fell short of the standards of later ages, it was certainly liberated – and liberating – by those of the time, as witnessed by her justified fears for its survival under the restoration: Louis XVIII closed it and shut down its secular ethos, almost immediately in 1814. He did not want the wives of his prefects, officers or magistrates educated in modern languages, mathematics or basic science, still less given only one hour of religious instruction per week or boarding without a confessor ‘on site’, as had been Campan’s system. There was a practical need for this: prefects’ wives were generally expected to assume the day-to-day running of departmental administration in case of short absences. Prefects toured their departments on obligatory tours of inspection at least three times a year, for a total of at least six weeks per annum, but in the actual circumstances of the period, these tours were dominated by the enforcement of conscription. They could run much longer and took place as often as four times a year. As a consequence, women were running large tracts of the empire for as much as a third of the year. A new sensibility was also at work among this generation that emerges in male petitions, as well as those of the administrators’ wives and girlfriends. They wanted to be together, the men just as much as the women. It becomes clear how much elite society was polarizing along generational lines, in their aspirations and ways of life. This was not the way of an earlier generation of ‘macho’ Jacobin revolutionaries, who regarded the imperial adventure as an unprecedented chance to ‘play away’, as it were. Moeurs were changing, from this evidence, and the result was turning ‘empire’ into a family undertaking, not just a masculine adventure. The regime encouraged this, as the salon and the example of the civilized French bourgeois or aristocratic home was regarded as a weapon against acculturation. The Tournons and the Suchets were to set le bon ton among their non-French administrés. A concrete example of this, and by more than implication a damning comment on Italian womanhood, comes from the wife of Antoine Roederer, the prefect of Umbria, who spoke Italian well and spent almost five years in Spoleto at her husband’s side. In a letter to her father-in-law, she lambasted her Italian gardener for refusing to take orders from a woman but turned her real bile on the women of the Umbrian elite:

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I got up and took over running the house . . . five days after giving birth. They regard that as some sort of miracle in this part of the world, where the accepted wisdom is that, without exception, you have to spend forty days in bed after a birth. I, however, am a good little French peasant girl, healthy and of good heart.36

Here, too, stands the myth of an idealized France among the imperial servants, a homeland filled with a brave, sturdy yeomanry and a peasant heritage the young professionals on the periphery shared in the face of a decadent ‘other’. Her self-image was not only in keeping with that of her male counterparts, it also had no empathy or respect for Italian women of her own station, exactly because they were, in her eyes, weak, trivialized and decadent. She had to set them an example. V

Enlightenment through Order, Regeneration through Youth: Bureaucratic Idealism The main thrust of French progress was in the realms of moeurs, culture and public institutions; it turned on the salon, education widely defined and above all on the law, as encapsulated in the Civil Code. By its last years, the civilizing mission became more marked among the bureaucracy, as the younger men, together with their wives, increasingly took the helm of administration, particularly in the most difficult parts of the Napoleonic hegemony. The imperial bureaucracy, both the civil administration and the magistracy, saw its role as regenerators, as those who would awaken other peoples from the slumbers of a degenerate old order. Through the Code, they would free them from the corruption of privilege and caste; through professional government, they would show them how to rule themselves. Only empire could bring enlightenment. Perhaps the last word should come from within the bureaucracy, itself, in a report to Napoleon by the minister of justice in 1811: Almost all the institutions of Europe were created by the conquerors . . . Men would never have escaped barbarism, had they continued to live in small, isolated settlements: They would have remained sunk in anarchy and brutishness. Such has always been the fate of peoples who were not held in check by a superior force: such was the fate of the Gauls, when they were conquered by the Romans, such was the state of the peoples of Italy until only recently, until they were reunited to France. Only great empires provide the encouragement and rewards for talent, that make for progress. Empire fosters the spread of law and, of necessity, perfects it through so many diverse

36

Madame A. Roederer to P.-L. Roederer, 23 Sept. 1812, 29-AP-16, ANP.

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states . . . The first rays of gentility shone on Europe through the exploits of Charlemagne.37

It was less a case of an enlightened empire than empire, itself, as enlightenment. At its beating heart was the ever more youthful bureaucracy, and at its heart, the imperial law.

37

Minister of justice, report to Napoleon, 29 Oct. 1811, BB18 700 (Affaires criminelles, Rome), ANP.

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15

Bureaucracy, Power and Violence in Colonial India: The Role of Indian Subalterns Deana Heath

The study of bureaucracy in a colonial context such as India is a rather unfashionable subject, evocative of images of privileged white men struggling to uphold their moral authority and maintain a gendered, racialized and coercive form of power. Until fairly recently, however, it provoked a notably different image thanks to the romantic mythology surrounding the Indian Civil Service (ICS), which from the late 1850s was the ‘steel frame’ of the British Indian empire. According to this myth, there was ‘no Service like it in the world’ since, as viceroy Lord Dufferin (1826–1902) enthused, ‘for ingenuity, courage, right judgment, disinterested devotion to duty, endurance, open-heartedness, and at the same time, loyalty to one another and their chiefs [the ICS officer was] superior to any other class of Englishman’.1 Dufferin’s statement is oddly lacking in any reference to India, Indians, or the actual effectiveness of the ICS. Nonetheless, this myth served to justify British rule in India, and it grew in stature from the early twentieth century as that rule became increasingly threatened. It also served to shore up the claims of other empire builders. For Theodore Roosevelt, India offered ‘the most colossal example history affords of the successful administration by men of European blood of a thickly populated region in another continent’, which for him was not only ‘a greater feat than was performed under the Roman Empire’ but ‘one of the most notable and most admirable achievements of the white race during the past two centuries’.2 Such a myth – which served to foster an image of ‘a benign, paternalistic Raj governing a quiescent society through the “rule of law” ’,3 and through 1

2 3

Quoted in L. S. S. O’Malley, The Indian civil service, 1601–1930 (London: John Murray, 1934), p. 173. That Dufferin was not, perhaps, quite secure in his conviction was clear when he went on to say that the men of the ICS were ‘absolutely free from any taint of venality or corruption’, and while they were ‘not of equal worth . . . if the Indian Civil Service were not what I have described it, how could the government of the country go on so smoothly? We have 250 million of subjects in India and less than 1,000 British Civilians for the conduct of the entire administration’ (ibid., p. 173). Cited in Spangenberg, BB, pp. 7–8. David Arnold, Police power and colonial rule: Madras, 1859–1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 230.

364

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collaboration with indigenous elites rather than coercion – was perpetuated by much of the literature published on bureaucracy in colonial India up to the 1970s, particularly works by former ICS officials such as L. S. S. O’Malley and Philip Mason.4 The myth has, therefore, served the function (as a later historian of the ICS has termed it) of ‘white washing the British bureaucracy’.5 Such ‘white washing’ was in many ways literal as well as metaphorical, for although the ICS comprised roughly one-tenth of a per cent of the individuals employed by the state by the late colonial period (namely slightly more than 1,000 men out of a workforce of one million),6 the considerable literature on it is unmatched by anything remotely comparable on the subordinate – but in terms of understanding the nature of the colonial Indian state, arguably far more significant – Indian-dominated elements of the colonial bureaucracy.7 The aim of this chapter is twofold: to re-assess the nature of the colonial bureaucracy in India, and with it that of the colonial state; and to consider the role of such a bureaucracy in the exercise of sovereign, rather than governmental, power – in particular, how it employed or condoned the operation of violence as a technology of colonial rule.8 Rather than focusing on the colonial state as an abstract entity, I examine the agents who made up its various rungs and explore how power operated through and between them, concentrating on the lower, Indian-dominated rungs of the state machinery. In light of the dominance of lowranking officials in the colonial state and the dependence of British officials upon them, it was such subaltern officials who were responsible for the day-to-day business of governance – as well as for perpetuating the system of everyday violence upon which colonial rule depended. Not only were so-called traditional forms of violence, such as police torture, a by-product of the colonial system but in regarding them as an aspect of ‘indigenous’ practices and as a personnel problem rather than acknowledging their true origins or nature, the colonial bureaucracy ultimately served to legitimate and perpetuate them.9 4 5 7

8 9

O’Malley, The Indian civil service; and Philip Woodruff [pseudonym for Mason], The guardians (London: Jonathan Cape, 1954). The title of the latter work is indicative of its ideology. 6 Spangenberg, BB, p. 347. Potter, IPA, p. 21. Much of the literature that does exist, produced in the 1970s and 1980s, focuses on issues such as ‘collaboration’ by local elites or on urban municipal government. See, for example, David A. Washbrook, ‘Country politics: Madras 1880 to 1930’, Modern Asian Studies 7:3 (1973), 475–531; and David A. Washbrook, The emergence of provincial politics: the Madras presidency, 1870–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); and C. A. Bayly, The local roots of Indian politics: Allahabad, 1880–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Robert Frykenberg’s, Guntur district: 1788–1848: a history of local influence and central authority in South India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), while it does not deal with the colonial bureaucracy, explores structures and systems of bureaucratic power and local authority that continued throughout the colonial period. For an overview of state violence in colonial India in the twentieth century, see Taylor Sherman, State violence and punishment in India (London and New York: Routledge, 2010). This is not to say that practices such as police torture did not exist in pre-colonial India, but rather that they were systematized under colonial rule.

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State of the Question Although some notable works have been published on the subject since the 1970s,10 the study of bureaucracy in colonial India was largely displaced by new questions that arose in the wake of the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). These questions focused on the role the role of ‘discourse’ – in particular, the colonial quest to ‘know’ India – in shaping colonial rule and its impact on Indian society and culture;11 on the role of both Indian subalterns and elites in shaping such processes;12 and on how to write ‘postOrientalist’ histories of India.13 New areas of research emerged, on subjects such as gender, sexuality and the body,14 and – drawing on the work of the 10

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See, in particular, William Gould’s excellent recent study of bureaucracy and corruption in the late colonial and early post-colonial era: Gould, Bureaucracy, community and influence in India: society and the state, 1930s–1960s (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011). See also Clive Dewey, Anglo-Indian attitudes: the mind of the Indian civil service (London: Hambledon and London, 1993); and Potter, IPA. This is a vast literature and far too extensive to consider at great depth. Notable works, however, include Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990); Carol Breckendridge and Peter van der Veer (eds.), Orientalism and the postcolonial predicament: perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); Nicholas Dirks, ‘From little kingdom to landlord: colonial discourse and colonial rule’, in Dirks (ed.), Colonialism and culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 175–208; Eugene F. Irschick, Dialogue and history: constructing South India, 1795–1895 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: the British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); and C. A. Bayly, Empire and information: intelligence gathering and social communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). This is by now a huge literature: see, in particular, the eleven volumes of Subaltern Studies (1982–2000). See, for example, Ranajit Guha, ‘On some aspects of the historiography of colonial India’, Subaltern Studies 1 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982); Gyan Prakash, ‘Writing post-orientalist histories of the third world: Perspectives from Indian historiography’, CSSH 32:2 (1990), 383–408; Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook, ‘After Orientalism: culture, criticism, and politics in the third world’, CSSH 34:1 (1992), 141–67 (and Gyan Prakash’s reply to this article, ‘Can the “subaltern” ride? A reply to O’Hanlon and Washbrook’, CSSH 34:1 (1992), 168–84; and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). This is another literature almost too vast to list. Pioneering texts include Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh K. Vaid (eds.), Recasting women: Essays in Indian colonial history (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989); J. Krishnamurty (ed.), Women in colonial India: Essays on survival, work and the state (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989); David Arnold, Colonizing the body: State medicine and epidemic disease in nineteenth-century India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993); Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial masculinity: the ‘manly Englishman’ and the ‘effeminate Bengali’ in the late nineteenth century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Bharati Ray (ed.), From the seams of history: essays on Indian women (Delhi: Oxford, 1995); Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and boundaries: women in India’s partition (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998); Lata Mani, Contentious traditions: the debate on sati in colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Tanika Sarkar, Hindu wife, Hindu nation: community, religion, and cultural nationalism (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2000).

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French philosopher Michel Foucault – new conceptions about how power operated in colonial India. As conceived by Foucault, power is both diffuse and productive (in shaping social discipline and conformity), and it is embodied in discourse, knowledge and ‘regimes of truth’, rather than wielded by people or groups through ‘episodic’ or ‘sovereign’ acts of domination or coercion (or of the structures in which they operate).15 This conception led, in turn, to a shift in emphasis from bureaucracy to the colonial state.16 A considerable body of literature on colonialism inspired by Foucault emphasizes the lack of homogeneity in colonial enterprises, the struggles not only between colonizers and colonized but also within and between groups, and the different political rationalities and configurations of power that emerged from the late eighteenth century and that changed over time.17 Yet the state that has emerged from this literature is both largely monolithic and, as Frederick Cooper argues in Chapter 16, disturbingly powerful. Although recent work on the post-colonial Indian state has revealed it to be nothing but a fractured assemblage of institutions, the incoherence of which makes it impossible to dominate or control, much of the work on colonial India has yet to consider what William Gould refers to as ‘the disaggregated qualities of the state’.18 15

16

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See Michel Foucault, The history of sexuality, vol. i: an introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990); ‘Society must be defended’: lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, ed. Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 1997); Security, territory, population: lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, ed. Michel Snellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and ‘The subject and power’, Critical Inquiry 8 (1982), 777–95. See Partha Chatterjee, The nation and its fragments: colonial and postcolonial histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), and Chatterjee, ‘Was there a hegemonic project of the colonial state?’, in Dagmar Engels and Shula Marks (eds.), Contesting colonial hegemony: state and society in Africa and India (London and New York: British Academic Press, 1994), pp. 79–84; Tapan Raychaudhuri, ‘Dominance, hegemony and the colonial state: the Indian and African experiences’, in Engels and Marks (eds.), Contesting colonial hegemony, pp. 267–76; Ranajit Guha, Dominance without hegemony (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1998); Gyan Prakash, Another reason: science and the imagination of modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); U. Kalpagam, ‘The colonial state and statistical knowledge’, History of the Human Sciences 13:2 (2000), 37–55; and Stephen Legg, Spaces of colonialism: Delhi’s urban governmentalities (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). See, for example, Peter Pels, ‘The anthropology of colonialism: culture, history, and the emergence of western governmentality’, Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997), 163–83; David Scott, ‘Colonial governmentality’, Social Text 43 (1995), 191–220; Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s culture: anthropology, travel and government (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the education of desire: Foucault’s history of sexuality and the colonial order of things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995); and Deana Heath, Purifying Empire: obscenity and the politics of moral regulation in Britain, India and Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Gould, Bureaucracy, p. 13. See also Thomas Blom Hansen, The saffron wave: Democracy and Hindu nationalism in modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); C. J. Fuller and John Harris, ‘For an anthropology of the modern Indian state’, in C. J. Fuller and Véronique Bénéï (eds.), The everyday state and society in modern India (London: Hurst and Co., 2001); Craig Jeffrey and Jens Lerche, ‘Dimensions of dominance: Class and state in Uttar

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Yet although a ‘governmental state’ which strove to discipline its populace had begun to emerge in India by the early nineteenth century and had come to full fruition by the century’s end,19 its chief concern was to maintain British rule in India, rather than to fulfil the primary goal of governmental power, namely regulating the bodies of its subjects to maintain a healthy and productive population. The effects of colonial policies were, furthermore, often unclear. The colonial government may, for example, have initiated the allIndia census in 1879 in an effort to ‘know’ and impose ‘order’ on Indian society, but whether its ultimate effect was to make Indians objectify their own culture and to enshrine colonial conceptions of caste in Indian society, as a number of scholars have claimed, is far from clear.20 A governmental form of power such as law21 did become the key signifier of both state legitimacy and civilization and the moral bulwark of colonial rule. Yet as a regime of conquest, dependent on the authority of its executive and the strength of its police and army, it was undoubtedly sovereign power (a repressive form of power exercised by an authority figure or his or her agents and based on elected, inherited or violently won ‘legitimacy’) that ultimately made British rule over India possible.22 Indeed, not only did what Partha Chatterjee terms the ‘rule of colonial difference’ make the completion of the project of the modern state impossible in India, but also the so-called rule of law was despotically

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Pradesh’, in Fuller and Bénéï (eds.), Everyday state, pp. 91–114; Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, ‘Customs of governance: colonialism and democracy in twentieth century India’, Modern Asian Studies 41:3 (2007), 441–70; and Heath, Purifying empire. Scott, ‘Colonial governmentality’; and Nasser Hussain, The jurisprudence of emergency: colonialism and the rule of law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), p. 61. As Nasser Hussain argues, while India was on the verge of what Foucault termed ‘the birth of modernity’, namely ‘a shift from sovereign extraction to governmentality’, this was accompanied by the promulgation of ‘emergency regulations’ to ensure the maintenance of sovereign power (Hussain, Jurisprudence, p. 61). Seminal works that make such claims include Bernard Cohn, ‘The census, social structure and objectification in South Asia’, in Cohn, An anthropologist among the historians and other essays (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 224–54; and Nicholas Dirks, ‘The ethnographic state’, in Dirks, Castes of mind: colonialism and the making of modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 43–60. Work on particular castes has, however, called such claims into question: see, for example, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, ‘Popular religion and social mobility in colonial Bengal: the Matua sect and the Namasudras’, in Rajat Kanta Ray (ed.), Mind, body and society: life and mentality in colonial Bengal (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 152–92; and Philip Constable, ‘Early Dalit literature and culture in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century western India’, Modern Asian Studies 31:2 (1997), 317–38. The ‘content and character of modern law are’, as Nasser Hussain argues, ‘essentially normative’, since not only does modern law consist ‘of rules stipulating expected behavior but also that such rules are themselves validated out of a theory of power that is itself normative, that inscribes itself deep into social life and seeks its legitimacy and validity by regulating that life in an expectant and improving direction’ (Hussain, Jurisprudence, p. 12). Hussain, Jurisprudence, p. 6. Governmentality did not replace sovereignty or disciplinary forms of power; modern power instead operates, according to Foucault, as a triangle of all three forms of power (Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, p. 102).

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imposed and discriminatory in its operation and, in fact, frequently suspended.23 This was true not only during moments of purported danger, when the British regularly resorted to undertaking what they termed ‘acts of state’ that were beyond the realm of judicial inquiry, but also on a daily basis through such agencies as the police.24 As Elizabeth Kolsky reveals in her study of white violence in colonial India, British power in India was sustained through ‘quotidian acts of violence’.25 The focus on ‘the colonial state’ in much of the recent literature on colonial governance in India has, moreover, left little scope for analyses of either agency or structure – in other words, of the ‘sovereign’ and ‘episodic’ exercise of power. Although the state has been envisioned as largely autonomous from Indian society, such autonomy was impossible in a context in which local power operated through a largely clientist system. This perspective also fails to account for the dynamics that played out among various groups within the colonial bureaucracy.26 Lower rungs of the state machinery, such as the subordinate police, posed particular problems for the colonial regime. While they served as a vital intersection between the state and the people, the strong social and cultural ties that they retained with the rest of Indian society made it impossible to reduce them ‘to dehumanized agents of colonial control’.27 II

Historical Development of the Colonial Bureaucracy Up to 1858, the colonial bureaucracy in India served a trading company – the East India Company, founded by royal charter in 1600 – whose primary interest was to maximize profits. The shortcomings of such a bureaucracy became apparent as early as 1765, when the company assumed authority for the civil administration of Bengal and became a significant political entity. What ensued was an age of plunder in which company servants sought to get rich without hindrance, a state of affairs that led, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, 23

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Chatterjee, The nation and its fragments, p. 10; and Hussain, Jurisprudence, p. 6. Although the ‘rule of law’ was envisioned as treating all subjects alike, in India ‘a whole range of special exemptions and statuses divided the legal domain’, both by race and religion. British rule in India was (as Radhika Singha terms it) ‘a despotism of law’: Hussain, Jurisprudence, p. 9; and Radhika Singha, A despotism of law: crime and justice in early colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). As David Arnold argues: ‘Police power was often used to circumvent or supplement the legal process because the latter was too dilatory or too scrupulous to satisfy the colonial need for prompt retribution and collective punishment’; the police, therefore, ‘not infrequently usurped the role of judge, jailor and executioner’ (Arnold, Police power, p. 3). Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial justice in British India: white violence and the rule of law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 1. Gould, Bureaucracy, p. 74. 27 Ibid., p. 61.

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to the company’s subjection to parliamentary control. Such a process facilitated the laying of the foundation stone of a ‘modern’ bureaucracy in colonial India.28 The importance of an efficient, well-trained bureaucracy to ‘execute the task of empire-building within the framework of the developing capitalist system’ became particularly evident as the company embarked on an aggressive new campaign of conquest and colonization beginning at the end of the eighteenth century and, with the loss of its monopoly over Indian trade in 1813, came to assume ever greater administrative responsibilities in governing its Indian empire.29 Since, as Steven Pierce and Anupama Rao argue, ‘legal regimes are founded through violent practices, and legal practices ultimately depend on the threat of violence and its application under state sanction’, this process of empire-building was accompanied by a new respect for law and procedural precision as a means, in part, of legitimating company rule.30 Rather than the ‘personal discretion’ embodied in what the British regarded as ‘Oriental despotism’, British rule was to be distinguished by a ‘rule of law’ applicable to all its subjects.31 But apart from the need for legitimacy, the codification of law (in addition to developments such as the introduction of Western property rights) was also necessary for the nascent state to provide a secure economic and administrative environment conducive to British trade and investment.32 Moreover, the emphasis on the rule of law was accompanied by ‘a strong insistence on the needs of a regime of conquest, particularly the discretionary authority of the central executive’, as governor general Warren Hastings (1732–1818) surmised: ‘A rigid observance of the letter of the law is a blessing in a well-regulated state; but in a government loose as that of Bengal is, an extraordinary and exemplary coercion must be employed to eradicate these evils which the law cannot reach.’33 The revolt of 28

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Trade was distinguished from governance: revenue and judicial functions were separated; courts of civil and criminal justice were established, including a supreme court; and officers engaged in revenue and judicial administration were prohibited from engaging in commercial transactions. The central government was strengthened (under a governor general and council invested with executive and judicial powers); and the company’s servants became subject to disciplinary control. An esprit de corps, moreover, began to emerge among the ‘covenanted service’ (so called because recruits were required to sign a covenant to the company ensuring their loyalty and good conduct service) as their training, pay and prospects were improved and the service was Europeanized, with Indians – whom governor general Lord Cornwallis (1738–1805) regarded as being ‘unworthy of trust, especially as instruments of modernization’ – excluded from key posts (Misra, Bureaucracy, p. 57). Ibid., p. 65. Anupama Rao and Steven Pierce, ‘Discipline and the other body: humanitarianism, violence, and the colonial exception’, in Steven Pierce and Anumpama Rao (eds.), Discipline and the other body: correction, corporeality, colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 7. Hussain, Jurisprudence, p. 4. 32 Arnold, Police power, p. 12. Hussain, Jurisprudence, p. 5; Misra, Bureaucracy, p. 50 (quotation). As John Stuart Mill famously argued: ‘Representative government is not suitable to “a rude people” ’, because ‘though in some degree alive to the benefit of civilized society, [the people] may be unable to practice the forbearances which it demands . . . in such a case, a civilized government, to be

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1857, following whose brutal suppression the governance of British India was transferred from the company to the crown, led not only to important changes in the administrative structure of the colonial state but to the further enlargement of such ‘extraordinary and exemplary’ coercive powers.34 Colonial rule, with its violent underpinnings, was further legitimated through its re-inscription as a moral duty and sacred trust. The colonial bureaucracy was, in turn, reconstituted beginning in the early nineteenth century to fulfil that trust, as the power and prestige of the Indian civil service came to be invested in the integrity and uprightness of conduct of its officers (while the moral virtuousness of public service served, in turn, to foster an esprit de corps).35 In conjunction with the professionalization of the civil service that was taking place in Britain, ICS officers were now expected, in short, to be gentlemen, whose public school training imbued them with qualities such as virtue, courage, honesty, loyalty, generosity, modesty and, crucially, ‘Selfrestraint founded on a combination of self-respect and self-denial’.36 In spite of the challenges, as E. M. Collingham has demonstrated, in maintaining such a self-disciplined, bureaucratic body in a colonial context such as India, where it was perceived to be constantly under threat of degeneration, it was such virtues that purportedly made ICS officers fit to govern as agents of ‘justice and effective action’ – particularly when contrasted with the purported depravity and moral decline of Indians – and to be given a wide degree of autonomy in carrying out their duties.37 The ICS did not, however, quite live up to the gentlemanly ideal that was envisioned for it, particularly following the introduction of a merit-based recruitment system in the 1850s. As Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1829–94), former law member of the viceroy’s council, lamented in 1876, ‘19 civilians in 20 [were] the most common place and the least dignified of second and third class Englishmen’.38 Not only were their social backgrounds generally more modest than was desired (including a small portion from the lower middle

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really advantageous to them, will require to be in a considerable degree despotic’ (Hussain, Jurisprudence, p. 120). Hussain, Jurisprudence, p. 89. 35 Misra, Bureaucracy, p. 57. David Vincent, The culture of secrecy: Britain, 1832–1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 39. In Britain such values led to the formation of what David Vincent terms the ‘nonbureaucratic bureaucracy’, in which ‘the behaviour of individual officials was conditioned not by external regulation but internal moral imperatives’. This in turn fostered the creation of a ‘culture of secrecy’, in which the ethical standards of civil servants were believed to be a sufficient guarantee of their conduct (Vincent, Culture of secrecy, p. 28). Cited in Potter, IPA, p. 72. See also E. M. Collingham, Imperial bodies: the physical experience of the Raj, c.1800–1947 (Cambridge: Polity, 2001). Cited in Spangenberg, BB, p. 145. A quarter of a century later, viceroy Lord Curzon denigrated the ICS as being comprised by men who were ‘indifferent’ and ‘incompetent’, while the secretary of state Lord George Hamilton believed them to be so motivated by self-interest that they exploited India for their own benefit rather than serve it (Spangenberg, BB, p. 3).

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classes),39 but few held degrees from those breeding grounds of gentlemanliness, Oxford or Cambridge (or, for that matter, from any university).40 The problem in attracting desirable recruits was that, contrary to the myth of the ICS, ‘Indian service of any sort . . . was widely regarded as an enterprise solely for second-rate minds and middle class citizens.’41 But by the late nineteenth century, even such supposedly ‘second-rate minds’ were becoming loathe to pursuing a career in the ICS, as growing numbers of left its employ before fulfilling their terms of service.42 After World War i, lack of interest in Britain in the ICS was so great that recruitment by examination was virtually abandoned (since so few suitable candidates showed up to sit for them) in favour of direct appointments.43 Yet while the ICS may not have lived up to the ideals the British envisioned for it, it was still regarded, as David Lloyd George declared in a rousing speech in 1922, as ‘the steel frame of the whole structure’ of British rule in India, without which ‘the fabric will collapse’.44 Unfortunately for the British, the ‘steel frame’ was beset by more than simply staffing problems. It was undermined, to begin with, by a highly fractured system of governance in the face of regional governments (namely those of the three presidencies of Bengal, Bombay and Madras), which functioned virtually autonomously and were riven by both intergovernmental and internal rivalries.45 Intergovernmental relations were particularly tense in moments of crises such as famines, and attempts by the government of India to promote administrative reform simply heightened tensions and revealed its lack of centralized control. As viceroy Lord Lytton (1831–91), who was 39

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It was for this reason that the competitive examination included a viva voce test, which former ICS member L. K. Jha notes was ‘more an attempt to assess the personality and background of the candidate than his ability’ (L. K. Jha, ‘Reflections on the civil service’, in Raj K. Nigam, Memoirs of old mandarins of India: the administrative change as the ICS administrators saw in India (New Delhi: Documentation Centre for Corporate & Business Policy Research, 1985), p. 115). Spangenberg, BB, pp. 10, 19. Such a situation changed during the course of the twentieth century, and by the interwar period three-quarters of all ICS recruits had attended Oxford or Cambridge (Potter, IPA, p. 71). Spangenberg, BB, p. 16. Spangenberg, BB, p. 43. Spangenberg attributes the cause of such a trend to the decline of the perceived perks for ICS officers in the late nineteenth century, thanks to issues such as stagnation in promotion, the falling value of the rupee, and the general disadvantages of an Indian career like health hazards, climate and separation from family for long periods (ibid., pp. 45–52). Potter, IPA, p. 45. This was at a time, moreover, when no more than several dozen Europeans were recruited to the ICS each year (Potter, IPA, p. 85). Cited in Potter, IPA, p. 88. The governors of Madras and Bombay were generally political appointees from Britain and were in many respects independent of the governor general since they communicated directly with the secretary of state in London. They often used their position to defend their own interests and those of their associates over a central government that they regarded as oppressive and remote and of colleagues (at least those in Bengal) who regarded them as inferior (Spangenberg, BB, p. 81).

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notoriously at odds with what he regarded as a conservative establishment, noted in 1877: ‘The more I see of India . . . the more it strikes me that the only serious danger we have to fear lies in the wretched personal susceptibilities, the petty spirit, local jealousy, and deficient loyalty of our own authorities.’46 There were, moreover, considerable conflicts between different branches of the service, particularly the executive and judicial.47 Tensions between the executive and the high courts were often so great that it was virtually impossible to maintain any cooperation between them. As a senior ICS officer, Sir Archibald Earle, lamented in 1911 in regards to the problem of police torture: ‘The Courts here are extremely jealous of the Executive, and if they are in the least suspicious of undue zeal on the part of the latter, they will make their meaning plain, as we know to our cost.’48 Owing to such dysfunctionality, the government of India, according to viceroy Lord Curzon (1859–1925), was ‘a mighty and miraculous machine for doing nothing’.49 III

Indianization That anything at all was accomplished is a miracle in light of the ludicrous rapidity of transfers in administrative appointments, particularly after 1868 when paid furlough (leave of absence) for ICS officers was extended from a total of three to six and a half years.50 This meant that one-fifth of the ICS was essentially on home leave at any given time. An officer on furlough was entitled to the same job or one of equivalent rank when he returned from leave, which led to an ‘immense tangle of transfers’, since comparable positions for the acting men later had to be found to avoid any appearance of demotion.51 As the Bengal government discovered to its chagrin in 1879, a total of 675 officials were required to maintain 462 ICS posts in the province.52 Such ceaseless 46

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Cited in Spangenberg, BB, p. 94. Madras posed, for him, the most serious problem, since it was ‘a country which does not belong to India, and over which the Government of India cannot exercise the smallest influence . . . For all practical purposes it is to us a foreign state, abominably ill-governed’ (ibid., p. 102). Such tensions were a result of perceptions of the inferiority of the judicial to the executive branch of the ICS. While the judicial branch resented the superior emoluments and status of the executive, the latter denigrated what it regarded as the execrable training of judges (ibid., p. 113). A. Earle, Memorandum, July 1911, Home, Police, Deposit, 30 Aug. 1911, NAI. Spangenberg, BB, p. 351. Ibid., p. 62. Transfers could also, however, be precipitated by efforts to prevent officers from taking early retirement, or because of illness, accident, or death. Bengal, for example, lost a number of men to terrorism in the 1930s and was forced to send notices to other provinces appealing for volunteers (Potter, IPA, p. 31). 52 Potter, IPA, p. 28; Spangenberg, BB, p. 61. Spangenberg, BB, p. 63.

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transfers meant that in a district – the key administrative unit of British India – as many as three or four district magistrates could be in charge during the course of a year, and in extreme cases as many as eight.53 ICS officials in the districts therefore generally had little knowledge of local conflicts or problems. In light, moreover, of the highly stratified nature of colonial administration, with promotion largely by seniority rather than merit, they had little incentive to do anything about the problems that they were aware of (particularly since ‘The maverick who stepped out of line inevitably stayed at the bottom of the heap’).54 Those with initiative often lacked the wherewithal, especially new recruits, who not only ‘knew nothing about India or the work they were to do’ but whose training was poor.55 Training consisted largely of the study of written materials such as acts, rules and codes and observing officers in various departments at work.56 As one Indian recruit, who joined the ICS in 1928, revealed, his training consisted of ‘sitting for an hour or two in the courts of some twelve Deputy Collectors’, after which he was given his own court room ‘to try cases as an Assistant Collector and Magistrate, third class’.57 The intrusion of Indian recruits into the citadel of the ICS highlights another problem for the government of India in maintaining its ‘steel frame’, namely the growing process of ‘Indianization’, particularly from the 1920s. Indians were never technically excluded from the ICS, but the obstacles they had to overcome to join it were so great that by 1888 only twelve had managed to do so (with Satyendranath Tagore, the eldest brother of Rabindranath, becoming the first to do so in 1863).58 By 1911, only 5 per cent of ICS posts were held by 53

54

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58

The government of India prepared a chart in 1900 showing the number of times in the period 1898–99 the charge of districts had changed. In 48 districts this had happened once; in 61 it had happened twice; in 49 it had occurred three times; in 27 it had taken place four times; in 23 it had happened five times; in 6 no less than six times; in 7 a ridiculous seven times; and in 2 an astounding eight times. The rate of transfers remained an endemic problem: by 1936 two-thirds of district collectors had held their posts for less than a year, and it was rare for officers to be in the same district for more than two years (Spangenberg, BB, p. 72; Potter, IPA, p. 27). Potter, IPA, p. 33. As one disgruntled civil servant opined, ‘the men who are most successful are those who are machines devoid of individuality, without original ideas, or who humour the ignorance . . . of their superiors’ (cited in Spangenberg, BB, p. 161). 56 Potter, IPA, p. 102. Ibid., p. 111. J. M. Lobo-Prabhu, ‘Commitment to covenant and country’, in Nigam (ed.), Memoirs, p. 175. The disturbing ignorance of the job such training inculcated was not, furthermore, mitigated once recruits assumed their new posts – another Indian recruit, R. A. Gopalswami, maintained that: ‘It was impressed on me very early in my I.C.S. career that I should perform my official duty and exercise my official powers without seeking advice beforehand from my superiors’ (Gopalswami, ‘Initiatives and implementation in ICS’, in Nigam (ed.), Memoirs, p. 77). Debash Das, ‘Contribution of ICS to national consciousness’, in Nigam (ed.), Memoirs, p. 49. While parliament undertook a number of initiatives in the late nineteenth century to provide more opportunities for Indians in the ICS, particularly once their exclusion became a target of animus of the nascent Indian nationalist movement, British officials used their ingenuity to ensure they were kept out (Spangenberg, BB, p. 309).

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Indians, although this had increased to 13 per cent by 1921.59 In spite of considerable Indian nationalist pressure from the late nineteenth century to Indianize the ICS, the process did not begin in earnest until after World War i when there was a severe shortage of European recruits.60 With the publication of the Lee Commission Report in 1924, recruitment shifted decidedly in favour of Indians (since 40 per cent of ICS posts were to be filled by Indian recruits via competitive examinations and nominations, with an additional 20 per cent by promotion from the largely Indian Provincial Civil Service).61 This included a policy of reservation for minority communities, a process that was ultimately ‘geared towards the maintenance of stability and political loyalty’ (and was, moreover, highly gendered, based on the perceived ‘masculinity’ of various communities).62 Constitutional reforms, such as the 1919 Government of India Act, which led to the devolution of legislative and financial powers from the centre to the provinces, meant that British members of the ICS could, moreover, find themselves working under Indian ministers.63 Political developments in the 1920s and 1930s, such as the Round Table Conferences and civil disobedience movements, offered a major challenge not just to the personnel of the ICS but also to the values that it was perceived to embody, which augmented and amplified the core elements of the bureaucratic esprit de corps.64 This meant that the ICS remained highly racialized: even as late as the 1930s, former ICS officer R. C. Dutt (who joined in 1937) maintained that ‘discrimination between the Indian and the British members was not only restricted to stray cases, but was institutionalised’.65 As devastating as the process of Indianization may have been for the selfimage of the ICS, the ICS managed to stave it off for much longer than most other branches of the colonial administration. One of the means through which 59 60 63

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N. C. Srivastava, ‘ICS and development administration’, in Nigam (ed.), Memoirs, p. 315. Potter, IPA, p. 85. 61 Ibid., p. 81. 62 Gould, Bureaucracy, p. 54. Potter, IPA, p. 44. By 1937, following the implementation of the second Government of India Act, which led to the virtual complete handover of power in the provinces, British ICS officers found themselves serving provincial governments run by their political adversaries. David Potter, however, maintains that since ministers were inexperienced in administration or in the ways of government, most of the decision-making power remained with ICS men (Gould, Bureaucracy, p. 27; Potter, IPA, p. 45). Gould, Bureaucracy, p. 28. R. C. Dutt, ‘The civil service before and after independence’, in Nigam (ed.), Memoirs, p. 61. Although interracial mixing was more common in the districts, where officers’ clubs were generally open to Indians and socializing was more acceptable (and doubtless necessary for the British), cities like Delhi and Calcutta witnessed stringent racial exclusion up to World War ii. This, not surprisingly, rankled many Indian members of the ICS, but the increasing Indianization of the services also fostered a decline in interest among Indian ICS officers to seek contact with British members, particularly in light of what many Indian ICS members regarded as their own superior social and educational backgrounds vis-à-vis those of their British colleagues (M. K. Kripalani, ‘Civil servants held the country together’, in ibid., p. 154; R. N. Banerjee, ‘Three decades in the Indian civil service’, in ibid., p. 22; and Khub Chand, ‘Administration: backbone of a nation’, in ibid., p. 141).

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this was done was the creation, in 1892, of a Provincial Civil Service (PCS). Its formation was ostensibly intended to appease nationalist demands, but since it had a much lower salary scale and less liberal rules of leave than the ICS and was to be staffed primarily by Indians, it served to maintain the ICS as a British preserve.66 Its creation did, however, lead to a shift in the dynamics of power in colonial India that was to prove far more profound than the later Indianization of the ICS. For since most members of the PCS, unlike their ICS counterparts, remained in one district or area for the bulk of their careers, they came to operate as what Aijaz Ahmad has termed ‘ “intermediate and auxiliary” classes’ who, while agents of the colonial state, also exercised a wide range of important political and social interests of their own – recruitment to government service was, for Indians, one of the key means to attain local influence.67 It was, therefore, subaltern officials who were the true source of power in colonial India. This was not only because of their sheer numbers – by the early twentieth century, more than 20,000 Indians served in the lower levels of government service in India; by the time of independence, the subordinate services had grown ‘to become one of the largest machineries of state in the world’ – but also because of the nature of rule at the core of British administration in India: the district.68 Roughly 235 districts in British India were governed by individuals variously referred to as magistrates, collectors or deputy commissioners, whose ludicrously wide-ranging powers, which combined both executive and judicial functions, included heading the magistracy, police, land revenue and general administration over areas averaging 4,000 square miles (and no less than 5,700 square miles in Madras) and containing between 1 and 2 million people each.69 The areas to be administered were so immense that assistant collectors were expected to be on tour 210 out of 365 days of the year, although since districts were so large that meant visiting every village no more than once in five years.70 In the patriarchal tradition of British rule, these men ‘on the spot’ governed as virtually autonomous despots and could hence ‘potentially rule by terror’.71 There were, however, at least a thousand subordinate Indian officials to every ICS officer in a district (keeping tabs on the efficiency, integrity and loyalty of whom added to the exhaustive itinerancy of ICS officers).72 The impossibility of the task at hand – particularly 66 68 69

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67 Spangenberg, BB, p. 326. Cited in Gould, Bureaucracy, p. 19. Spangenberg, BB, p. 307; Gould, Bureaucracy, p. 19 (quotation). Spangenberg, BB, p. xii; Potter, IPA, p. 21; and Arnold, Police power, p. 21. It is not surprising therefore, that the popular image of the ICS officer was of ‘the courageous and self-confident English gentleman doing his duty in a remote rural district’ (Potter, IPA, p. 77). S. D. Nargolwala, ‘Civil servants had to be generalists and specialists’, in Nigam (ed.), Memoirs, p. 239. Gould, Bureaucracy, p. 31. Ibid.; and Potter, IPA, p. 40. Former ICS officer, J. M. Lobo-Prabhu, reveals the ludicrousness of such an endeavour: on the way to each village the assistant collector would be met by village

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in light of the generally abysmal lack of knowledge of the areas over which they governed, including the local language(s) – meant that district magistrates were virtually dependent upon their Indian subordinates. The colonial regime operated, therefore, through forging political bargains with local collaborators, who then ruled on its behalf. This meant that although the British may have controlled major policy issues and the legal framework of the Raj, when it came to the everyday business of governance ‘it was Indians who did most of the ruling’.73 IV

Bureaucracy and Violence It was, moreover, largely Indians who operated the system of violence that ultimately made British rule over India possible. This was sustained, as Arvind Verma argues, by a ‘brutal criminal justice system’, elements of which included the infamous ‘Kala Pani’ (black water) prison on the Andaman islands, the labelling of millions of people as ‘criminal tribes’, and the terror unleashed by agencies such as the police.74 Indeed, rather than offering protection, the foremost priority of the Indian police – as embodied through legal statutes such as the Indian Penal Code and Criminal Procedure Codes (1860–1), in which offences against the state were accorded the greatest prominence – was to suppress the people through ‘develop[ing] a sense of fear of authority’.75 Such fear was heightened by the lack of administrative oversight of the police (or, for that matter, over other subordinate officials, such as revenue officers) at the district level. It was overworked and ill-informed district magistrates, completely dependent upon their subordinates, who were ultimately responsible not only for the administration of the police in their districts but also for investigating and adjudicating cases of violence committed by them. This meant that police brutality could proliferate virtually unchecked. The oppressive and violent nature of the Indian police was an open secret in colonial India, documented from the early nineteenth century onwards through

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officials, who brought the village revenue records for inspection, and these were ‘checked by inquiries from farmers, who quickly collected’; but ‘the very multitude of entries made effective checking difficult if not impossible’ (Lobo-Prabhu, ‘Commitment to covenant’, p. 176). Gould, Bureaucracy, p. 43. As Anil Seal has aptly remarked, the terms of the bargain were that ICS collectors ‘could depend on the collection of revenue, provided they did not ask too officiously who paid it’, and ‘they might take public order for granted, provided that they themselves did not play too obtrusive a part in enforcing it’ (cited in Gould, Bureaucracy, p. 43). Arvind Verma, ‘Consolidation of the Raj: notes from a police station in British India, 1865–1928’, Criminal Justice History 17 (2002), 112. Ibid. As the commission appointed in 1860 to propose a reorganization of the Indian police was informed, ‘the line that separates the protective and repressive functions of the civil police from functions purely military, may not, always, in India be very clear’ (cited in ibid., p. 112).

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a rising tide of judicial verdicts, the reports of various committees and commissions, parliamentary debates (where most of the pressure to set up such committees and commissions came from) and the British and later Indian press. The general tenor of these observations can be summed up by a witness to the 1854 commission established to investigate allegations of torture in the revenue and police departments in Madras, who scathingly declared that The police establishment has become the bane and pest of society, the terror of the community, and the origin of half the misery and discontent that exist among the subjects of Government. Corruption and bribery reign paramount throughout the whole establishment; violence, torture, and cruelty are their chief instruments for detecting crime, implicating innocence, or extorting money. Robberies are daily and nightly committed, and not unfrequently [sic] with their connivance; certain suspicious characters are taken up and conveyed to some secluded spot far out of reach of witnesses; every species of cruelty is exercised upon them; if guilty, the crime is invariably confessed, and stolen property discovered; but a tempting bribe soon released them from custody.76

The British laid the blame for such oppression not on their despotic regime, but on Indians since, in the words of the torture commission, ‘the character of the native when in power displays itself in the form of rapacity, cruelty, and tyranny’.77 It was in the day-to-day realities of rural life that the injustice, extortion and tyranny of the police, often in collusion with rural elites, was most manifest, particularly for the poorest and most marginalized sections of the population such as the lower castes and classes. As the report of the 1902 Indian Police Commission observed, although ‘corruption was no more an essential characteristic of the constable than of the revenue peon, the process-server or the forest chaprasi’, the corruption of the constable was more problematic than that of other low-ranking officials because of ‘the greater opportunities of oppression and extortion which his police powers afford, because of the intimate connection he has with the general life of town and country, and because of the possibility of his being brought at any time into special relations with the individual’.78 The police, moreover, carried out their duties in a ‘course and 76

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Report of the commissioners for the investigation of alleged cases of torture in the Madras presidency. Submitted to the Right Honourable the Governor in Council of Fort St George, on the 16th April 1855 (Madras (India: Presidency): Commissioners for the Investigation of Alleged Cases of Torture, Fort St George Gazette Press, 1855), p. 42. Report of the commissioners for the investigation of alleged cases of torture, p. 40. Such beliefs remained sacrosanct throughout the period of British rule; as viceroy Lord Hardinge (1858–1944) informed the secretary of state Sir Edwin Montagu (1879–1924) in 1911: ‘Hateful as the practice of torture is, it must not be forgotten that it is a practice innate to the people of India’ (Hardinge to Montagu, 5 June 1911, Home, Police, A, July, 240, 1911, NAI). Report of the Indian police commission, 1902–03 (Simla: Printed at the Government Central Printing Office, 1903), p. 14.

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brutal way’.79 Such brutality extended to the routine practice of torture, which was most commonly resorted to elicit confessions. The Madras torture commission listed the myriad forms such torture took: Twisting a rope tightly around the entire arm or leg so as to impede circulation; lifting up by the moustache; suspending by the arms while tied behind the back; searing with hot irons; placing scratching insects, such as the carpenter beetle, on the naval, scrotum, and other sensitive parts; dipping in wells and rivers, till the party is half suffocated; squeezing the testicles; beating with sticks; prevention of sleep; nipping the flesh with pincers; putting pepper or red chillies into the eyes, or introducing them into the private parts of men and women.80

Such violence was often carried out in collusion with rural elites. As a later member of the Indian government noted: ‘In a very considerable number of the cases [of torture] that occur the subordinate police are instigated and abetted in the ill-treatment by prominent villagers.’81 Since police torture was regarded as ‘a matter so deeply affecting the honour of the British nation, and so utterly repugnant to the principles of government’,82 there were periodic efforts to curb the problem.83 It nonetheless persisted, in part because little had actually been done to reform the subaltern elements of the police force primarily responsible for its enactment. Moreover, as a member of the Bombay government complained to the Government of India in 1908, the measures that had so far been adopted ‘instead of improving, have produced a distinct change for the worse in the conditions of service of the rank and file of

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Ibid., p. 17. The commission detailed the manner in which investigations were generally carried out: ‘A body of police comes down to the village and is quartered on it for several days. The principal residents have to dance attendance on the police all day long and for days together. Sometimes all the villagers are compelled to be in attendance, and inquiries degrading in their character are conducted coram populo. Suspects and innocent persons are bullied and threatened into giving information they are supposed to possess’ (ibid., p. 15). Report of the commissioners for the investigation of alleged cases of torture, p. 34. Sir Richard Craddock, Minute, 6 May 1913. Home, Police, A, July, 85–95, 1913, NAI. Extract from the Minutes of Consultation, Public Department, 9 Sept. 1854, IOR/P/311/44, BL. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the company’s Sudder Foujdaree Udalut (criminal court) issued ten circular orders on the subject of extorting confessions. This was followed by the Madras torture commission and the police commission of 1860, both of which led to a major reform of the Indian police. There were numerous further commissions that dealt with the workings of the police, many of which concentrated on reforming the police in particular provinces, and periodic bouts of parliamentary pressure to put a stop to police brutality. It was concern over such pressure that led the government of India in 1890 to request local governments to furnish it with reports of all cases of police torture that were exposed in the press. Such requests were repeated over the following two decades and in 1911 culminated, after a very vocal parliamentary campaign, in the government of India keeping a register of all police torture cases and issuing the first substantive orders to local governments on measures to curb the practice of torture by the police (Report of the commissioners for the investigation of alleged cases of torture, p. 43; and H. Wheeler, Minute, 19 Apr. 1912, Home, Police, Deposit, June, 20, 1912, NAI; Home, Police, A, March, 150, 1917, NAI).

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the force’.84 Other critics were more scathing in their condemnation of the failure of the Indian government to eradicate police brutality. Frederic Mackarness MP (1854–1920), chairman of the executive of the India Civil Rights Committee and one of the staunchest critics of the Indian government, declared in his 1910 pamphlet on police torture (which was banned by the Indian government) that little had, in fact, been done to eradicate ‘this intolerable oppression of our fellow-subjects’.85 Between 1906 and 1911 – the only period for which, thanks to parliamentary pressure, full data are available – 120 policemen were convicted of ill-treating prisoners or witnesses (although none were convicted of murder, in spite of the fact that 31 of the victims died); an additional 158 cases of ill-treatment were disposed of by enquiry rather than judicial trial and 424 cases were dismissed by magistrates.86 The Indian police remained, therefore, ‘a terror to the people’.87 Why, in spite of so many apparent efforts to eradicate police brutality, did it persist? The reasons were, in fact, well known by the mid-nineteenth century and were reiterated by every commission, report and debate on how to stem the problem. The first concern was the poor working conditions of the police and the calibre of the men thus recruited. To begin with, police pay, particularly among the lower ranks, was woefully deficient.88 Although pay scales were improved during the course of the nineteenth century, that of constables remained so insufficient that it was ‘hardly equal to the market rate for unskilled labour’, which meant that constables were forced ‘to choose between starvation and serious crime’.89 The lack of adequate supervision over the lower ranks compounded the problem. Head constables, and often even constables, were in charge of police stations and were responsible for carrying out investigations. Meanwhile their superior officers engaged in fruitless and timeconsuming work such as inspecting thanas (police stations) and touring, which led to absurd situations such as ‘a Head Constable on Rs. 15 extorting 84

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H. O. Quinn, Acting Secretary to the Government of Bombay, to the Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, 18 Jan. 1908, Home, Police, A, May, 124–130, 1908, NAI. Frederic Mackarness, The methods of the Indian police in the 20th century (London: National Press Agency, 1910), Home, Political, A, August, 159–170, 1910, NAI. A. Earle, Minute, 25 Nov. 1911, Home, Police, A, April, 37–100, 1912, NAI. Report of the Indian police commission, 1902–03, pp. 15, 115. A police constable in the mid-nineteenth century was paid as little as Rs. 3 per month. Report of the committee appointed by government under resolution (police dept). No. 373/VIII186A-2, dated 6th June 1890. To enquire into certain questions connected with the police administration of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (Allahabad: North-Western Provinces and Oudh Government Press, 1891), p. 70; and Evidence recorded by the committee appointed by government under resolution (police department) no. 373/VIII-186A-2, dated 6th June, 1890, to enquire into certain questions connected with the police administration of the North-Western Provinces & Oudh (Allahabad: North-Western Provinces and Oudh Government Press, 1891). By the early twentieth century, constables in some provinces were still earning as little as Rs. 7 a month (Mackarness, Methods of the Indian police).

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a confession . . . while an Inspector on Rs. 200 is counting the pice in the pound fund, or measuring the size of the men’s puggries (turbans)’.90 Even when police officers did conduct investigations, their lack of training (the first detective training school was not set up until 1917)91 and use of so-called Oriental methods of detection (which entailed ‘the assembling together of all the bad characters of the neighbourhood and keeping them for days in a sort of informal custody, until somehow a clue is gained’) meant that they were as prone to using violent and oppressive tactics in carrying out their duties as their subordinates.92 Such charges were rarely levelled against British officers, who were generally regarded as being ‘upright men’ who were ‘obnoxious to blame’; but when it came to the perpetration of acts of violence like torture, there were endless complaints about the calibre of the men recruited (which from 1893 was via direct recruitment in England).93 The paucity of their numbers relative to the size of the force that they administered meant, moreover, that they were able to exercise little authority.94 A second and arguably even greater problem was the administrative and judicial system at the district level. The most glaring concern, and one that severely undermined British claims to govern according to the ‘rule of law’, was the lack of separation of powers between the executive and judicial branches of the colonial bureaucracy. The situation was most extreme in Madras prior to the reformation of the Indian police in the early 1860s, since ‘all revenue, police, and magisterial authority [was] centred in one and the same set of functionaries’, a concentration of powers that ‘destroyed that check which would have resulted, had these powers been committed to two distinct 90 91

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Evidence recorded by the committee appointed by government under resolution (police department) no. 373/VIII-186A-2, dated 6th June, 1890, p. 51. Report of the committee appointed by government under resolution (police dept). No. 373/VIII186A-2, dated 6th June 1890, p. 19; and Home, Police, A, February, 128–130, 1920, NAI. The first school was set up by the Bengal government, in Calcutta. The government of Bihar and Orissa was the next to follow suit several years later. Report of the committee appointed by government under resolution (police dept). No. 373/VIII186A-2, dated 6th June 1890, p. 19. They may, in fact, have been more prone to use such tactics, thanks to the ongoing custom, despite endless suggestions to eradicate it, ‘of promoting or degrading Police Officers solely on returns without any reference to the general character of their work’, which made it ‘next to impossible for an officer . . . to retain his appointment by honest work only’ (Report of the committee appointed by government under resolution (police dept). No. 373/VIII-186A-2, dated 6th June 1890, p. 21). European recruits were often accused of having ‘an imperfect knowledge of the language’, of being ‘out of touch with the people’, of paying ‘insufficient regard to public opinion’ and of ‘fail[ing] to realise the importance of their own duties’ (Mackarness, Methods of the Indian police, p. 15). In Midnapur, for example, the district superintendent of police was responsible for administering an area of 5,186 square miles and supervising 9 inspectors, 79 sub-inspectors, 83 head constables and 778 constables, who were employed in no less than 26 police stations and 21 outposts, some of which were ‘very difficult of access’ (‘The character of the Indian police’, pp. 15–16).

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bodies’.95 There were concerns as early as 1826 that the lack of such a check meant that ‘Acts of great atrocity may be practised by the native officers, and the proceedings of magistrates and assistants may be arbitrary and injurious, without any probability of their authors being called to account’.96 But although a separate revenue establishment was formed in Madras, district magistrates continued to function both as head of the police and as magistrate.97 This served to exacerbate rather than relieve the problem of police violence, because, as the 1886 public service commission observed: So long as the Magistrate continues to be the head of the Police Department he is bound to uphold the action of his subordinates be they right or wrong, and . . . consequently the magistrates instead of protecting the public from their natural enemies the police, are . . . forced to countenance and even to encourage the misdoings of the force.98

There was, in fact, ample evidence that district magistrates failed to ‘look into the internal administration of the police in their district so much as they should do’.99 For those who took their administrative duties with regard to the police seriously, endless transfers made such a task impossible – a frequently transferred district magistrate could know little of the police work in his district or get to know his police subordinates when the district superintendent of police was also repeatedly transferred. One district superintendent, for example, was posted to seven districts in the course of five years, while another was rotated through no less than eight districts in seven years.100 But even when, thanks to their sheer flagrancy or violence, cases of police brutality came to the attention of district magistrates, they were notoriously lenient in dealing with them, as well as for allowing confessions to be used as evidence (in some cases, even as the sole evidence to form the basis of a conviction) without bothering to determine whether such confessions were in fact voluntary.101 Yet in spite of all the evidence of the problems inherent in such a union of powers in district magistrates, nothing was done to alter it, since it was seen to serve as 95 96 97

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Report of the commissioners for the investigation of alleged cases of torture, pp. 39, 40. Cited in ibid., p. 46. The immediate head of the police at the district level was the superintendent of police, but he was subject to the authority of the district magistrate. Although the exact relationship between district magistrates and superintendents of police was subject to considerable debate during the second half of the nineteenth century, the ultimate outcome was the increase rather than the diminishment of the control of magistrates over the police (Proceedings of the sub-committee, public service commission. Police department (Simla: Superintendent, Government Central Press, 1887), p. 4). Proceedings of the sub-committee, public service commission, p. 74. Report of the committee appointed by government under resolution (police dept). No. 373/VIII186A-2, dated 6th June 1890, p. 75. Evidence recorded by the committee appointed by government under resolution (police dept). No. 373/VIII-186A-2, dated 6th June 1890, p. 2. Report of the commissioners for the investigation of alleged cases of torture, p. 7; and Report of the Indian police commission, 1902–3, pp. 115–16.

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‘the connecting link between the executive and judicial functions of the administration’.102 When it came to the legal framework of the Raj, district magistrates were not the only problem in perpetuating police brutality. Victims of police oppression largely submitted to such tyranny because of the impossibility of obtaining redress when a lawsuit in colonial India was a ‘tedious, expensive, and uncertain process’.103 As a result of their belief in the general dishonesty of ‘native character’, judges had a tendency ‘to discredit all assertions of ill-treatment coming from the mouth of parties on their trial’, particularly in light of the general lack of evidence to substantiate it.104 Judges, like district magistrates, were also notorious for ‘the extraordinary lightness of the punishment generally awarded in those instances in which the charge [of police torture] has been held to be proved’.105 It was for these reasons that the verdict issued by the court of directors in 1826, that there was ‘hardly a case wherein the sufferers who have had the courage or been in circumstances to enable them to complain against their oppressors have met with redress of their grievances’, held true throughout the period of British rule.106 V

Police Torture and Bureaucratic Complicity A sample torture case from 1909 illustrates the nature of the problems that plagued the colonial bureaucracy in India, the intersections between its lower strata and indigenous elites, and its ultimate complicity in police violence in spite of all of the apparent efforts to put a stop to it. This was a complex case, since in addition to entailing no less than three separate inquiries by districtlevel officials and a jury trial, the gross injustice of the case and utter incompetence with which it was handled was so extreme that it drew the attention of 102

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Report of the Indian police commission, 1902–3, p. 82. As the 1860 police commission report observed, although ‘there should be a complete severance of Executive Police from Judicial authorities’, so that ‘the Judge and detective Officer should not be one and the same . . . an exception must be made in favour of the District Officer’ [emphasis in original]: Indian police commission report, 1860, p. 13. Home, Judicial, A, October, 34–38, 1860, NAI. Report of the commissioners for the investigation of alleged cases of torture, p. 8. Ibid., p. 27. The lack of evidence of police brutality was due to factors such as the use of torture tactics that did not leave visible marks (like ‘scratching insects, dipping in wells, starvation, prevention of sleep, and the like’); ‘the facility with which witnesses are tampered with by means of bribes or intimidation’; or the fact that ‘far too great importance is often attached to trifling discrepancies’ in witness testimony (ibid., pp. 28, 35). Ibid., p. 28. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, this generally amounted to no more than a fine of a few rupees or the removal of the offender to a different district, although even later in the century considerable acts of violence could be met with as little as a three-month prison sentence. Cited in ibid., p. 36.

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parliament – rendering it one of the litany of scandals that beset British colonial regimes from the late eighteenth century onwards for failing to live up to their civilizing rhetoric – and thus, inevitably, of the local government, the government of India, and the India Office in London.107 At midnight on 20 February 1909, one Hriday Nath Bose, a gomosta, or manager, who worked for his second wife’s brother, was tortured in the cutcherry ghar (administrative office) of the Raja of Naldangar by several of the Raja’s employees and a police chaukidar (village policeman) to force him to confess to complicity in the theft of Rs. 300 in money and jewellery from one of the Raja’s servants. Bose was tortured by a method known as bansdola, which entailed compressing his chest with bamboo lathis (long sticks) and left him with seven broken ribs.108 The torture was carried out on the orders of the Kaligunge daroga (a police officer in charge of a station), sub-inspector Madhu Sudhan Sen and possibly also the Raja’s son and was witnessed by numerous individuals, including the Raja’s diwan (chief minister) and his private secretary. Bose was then allowed to go home upon the exaction of a considerable surety of Rs. 500 from his brother-in-law Kunjo Sarkar (with whom he lived and for whom he worked) that Bose would not make a complaint about his illtreatment. Bose seems, incredibly, to have travelled home on foot, because he was seen by his wife Hari Dasi ‘walking homewards in a sitting posture with his knees bent to the fullest extent’.109 To hide his condition, Bose was not taken to hospital but was instead treated at home, on the orders of a Dr Behari Lal Dutt (whose services were paid for by the Raja) with a rigorous regimen of massage with turpentine (a treatment probably more excruciating than the original torture, since it made Bose’s ribs, according to his wife, make a ‘khuch-khuch sound’).110 After ten days of this agonizing treatment, and in fear of his survival if he did not get to a hospital (another relative, Jogendra, claimed that Bose was bringing up blood through his nose and mouth), Bose managed to get a message to his first wife Ramrangini, who lived in another nearby village, begging her to go to the deputy magistrate, Gyanendra Nath Chaudhuri, to lodge a complaint. Chaudhuri ordered Bose to be taken to the Civil Hospital at Jhenida, where the doctor treating him – who was either 107

108 109

The case attracted the attention of parliament thanks to Sir Henry Cotton MP, a former ICS officer and vocal critic of the government of India. For more on colonialism and scandal see, for example, Nicholas Dirks, The scandal of empire: India and the creation of imperial Britain (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2006); James Epstein, The scandal of colonial rule: power and subversion in the British Atlantic during the age of revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Kirsten McKenzie, Scandal in the colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1820–1850 (Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 2004); and Steven Pierce, ‘Punishment and the political body: flogging and colonialism in northern Nigeria’, Interventions 3:2 (2001), 206–21. Sir Charles Allen, officiating chief secretary to the government of Bengal, to the secretary to the government of India, Home, 7 Aug. 1909, L/PJ/6/943, File 2227–228, BL. 110 Emperor vs. Madhu Sudan Sen and Sorojit Chandra Mukharji. Ibid.

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astoundingly incompetent or in the Raja’s pay – claimed that Bose was suffering from bronchitis, and Chaudhuri initiated an inquiry.111 But when one Ambika Charan Mazumdar, a muktar (village head), requested that he refrain from proceeding on the grounds that Bose was going to withdraw the case, Chaudhuri concurred, provided that Bose appear personally to do so.112 Though he was in no condition to leave the hospital, on 22 March Bose appeared in the magistrate’s court to withdraw the case. But in spite of clear signs of foul play, including the dire state of Bose’s health and his declaration that he was only withdrawing the case since the witnesses were all under the influence of the Raja, Chaudhuri allowed the withdrawal.113 Upon returning home, Bose’s condition continued to worsen. Although on 18 April his nephew Jogendra spirited him away from the tyranny of the police and the Raja’s men and the incompetence of the local authorities to the Medical College hospital in Calcutta, such salvation came too late; an honorary magistrate was eventually summoned to record his dying statement. In it Bose described the torture to which he had been subjected and by whom and declared that he had been forced to drop the case.114 He died on 13 May, and although the post mortem revealed that he had seven broken (although by now reunited) ribs, the cause of death was listed as pleurisy and pneumonia.115 There the matter would doubtless have rested had it not been for the verdict of the coroner’s jury on 28 June that Bose had ‘met his death from the effect caused by the breaking of the deceased’s ribs by violence, by certain members of the police and men of the Raja of Naldanga’.116 The verdict led first to another enquiry, this time by the district magistrate; because the case had elicited parliamentary interest, the matter was not allowed to drop. But it still took two more inquiries before legal proceedings were finally initiated, and only two individuals, sub-inspector Madu Sudhan Sen and the victim of the theft, Sorojit Mukharji, were committed to trial for torturing Bose – but not, notably, for causing his death.117 The judgement is a remarkable document. Although the case was tried by a jury (a rare occurrence for a torture trial in this period),118 the judge, L. Plait, 111 112 115 116 117 118

Sir Charles Allen, Officiating Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to the Secretary to the Government of India, Home, 7 Aug. 1909. 113 Emperor vs. Madhu Sudan Sen and Sorojit Chandra Mukharji. Ibid. 114 Ibid. Ibid. Sir Charles Allen, Officiating Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to the Secretary to the Government of India, Home, 7 Aug. 1909. Emperor vs. Madhu Sudan Sen and Sorojit Chandra Mukharji. A limited system of trial by jury existed in colonial India. First restricted to the three presidency capitals of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, it was later extended to a small range of other districts under the Criminal Procedure Code (CPC) of 1861. Its operation, however, proved unsatisfactory, since ‘The judges from want of legal training and inexperience were often incompetent to deal with juries, and, further, the verdict of the jurors was often biased and perverse’. In 1872, therefore, changes were introduced to the CPC. In trials without a jury

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went to great pains to discredit what can only be described as glaring evidence in favour of Bose’s claims, and to pressure the jury to corroborate his views. He insisted, first, that Bose had broken his ribs prior to his apprehension by the police, a claim that he based largely on the extremely suspect medical evidence of the Jhenida doctor and of the post mortem doctor, Dr Jordan, who discredited Bose’s claim about the bansdola by claiming that his fractures appeared to have been caused by ‘kneading with knees and elbows’ rather than by having bamboo staves rolled across his chest.119 Plait, moreover, found it impossible to believe either that Dr Behari Lal Dutt would have prescribed such a torturous treatment as massage if Bose had actually had seven broken ribs or that a man in such a condition could possibly have endured such treatment.120 He never, however, offered any suggestions as to how Bose could possibly have received such major injuries if he had not been tortured. Plait maintained, furthermore, that there were too many inconsistencies and discrepancies in the evidence against the accused to justify conviction. He was particularly distrustful of Hari Dasi’s evidence, since over the course of the many enquiries and the trial she gave a number of conflicting statements as to what had happened to Bose. She, like her brother, initially denied that Bose had been tortured, and although her brother told her that ‘I live on the Raja’s land; it is your husband, you say what you like’, she was clearly terrified of the consequences of speaking out against the Raja’s men and appears to have been both threatened by them and tutored to say that her husband had fallen from a cart.121 For Plait, not only was there no evidence that she had ever been threatened or coerced, but Hari Dasi was in fact the aggressor in the case, or rather its agent – she had, according to Plait, been used as a tool ‘to frighten the Raja and his people’.122 What made the case further implausible, in Plait’s eyes, was the improbability that ‘a man of Bose’s position in life’ – he was, as Plait made clear,

119

120 122

appeals were henceforth freely allowed, but in jury trials if the judge disagreed with the verdict he could refer the case on appeal to the High Court, while local governments were given the authority, ‘in certain carefully defined and clear cases’, to appeal against acquittals – a procedure alien to British law but deemed ‘necessary under the circumstances prevailing in India’. ‘Appeals against Acquittals’, p. 2, IOR/L/PJ/6/1368, File 1823, BL. Emperor vs. Madhu Sudan Sen and Sorojit Chandra Mukharji. Plait claimed: ‘A man may get his ribs broken in all sorts of circumstances which may not transpire in evidence, and advantage may be taken of the fact of broken ribs to make a false charge.’ 121 Emperor vs. Madhu Sudan Sen and Sorojit Chandra Mukharji. Ibid. Ibid. While British colonial officials generally distrusted the truthfulness of the oral evidence of all Indians and thus sought to undermine such evidence, they regarded that of some segments of the Indian population – particularly women and groups such as what the British referred to as ‘criminal tribes’ – as being particularly unreliable. See, for example, Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of empire: the figure of woman in the colonial text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Elizabeth Kolsky, ‘The rule of colonial indifference: rape on trial in early colonial India, 1805–57’, Journal of Asian Studies 69:4 (2010), 1093–117; and Ishita Pande, ‘Phulmoni’s body: the autopsy, the inquest and the humanitarian narrative on child rape in India’, South Asian History and Culture 4:1 (2013), 9–30.

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a member of the bhadrolok (respectable people) – ‘was likely to have been treated in this fashion; and if so treated, whether he was likely to keep quiet for ten days before taking any steps’.123 There was no evidence, he claimed, of the surety that Kunja Sarkar had purportedly given to ensure Bose’s silence, or of Bose being forcibly prevented from seeking better medical treatment, as he had alleged to Jogendra. For Plait there was, moreover, no motive for the police or the Raja’s servants to treat Bose in such a fashion. One Bibhuti Bhusan Ganguly had already confessed to the theft and all but Rs. 50 worth of the stolen property had been recovered from him at the time the alleged torture occurred. As Plait informed the jury, So far as my opinion goes (which the jury are not bound to accept), it seems to me incredible that a police officer should run the risk of being arraigned for murder or grievous hurt, and for what? Not for kudos . . . in detecting a case (for he had already caught the principal thief and had recovered five-sixths of the stolen property), but to obtain a third share of the remaining one-sixth of the stolen property. That means that only about Rs. 17 worth of stolen property could be recovered from the man supposed to have been so maltreated as to have his ribs broken – seven ribs broken . . . To suppose this torture would be to suppose wanton torture.124

It was at this point, according to Plait, that the jury ‘gave their verdict before I had finished my charge, and practically stopped me’ – a verdict, not surprisingly, of not guilty.125 For Plait, the case was so clearly a false one that it should never have been committed to trial.126 In light of the considerable attention the case had attracted, the Bengal government was not pleased with the outcome. Although it refrained from critiquing Plait’s verdict – whether because of the particularly tense relationship between the executive and judiciary in Bengal, or because it did not regard Plait’s judgement as being as incompetent as it appears is unclear – it maintained that ‘In India the fact that a case is supported by a large amount of false evidence does not necessarily prove that the initial allegation was untrue’, and that had Bose’s ribs been broken before the accident there would have been evidence of this since ‘In an Indian village everyone lives in public and numbers of people must have known of such an accident’.127 It focused its critique, instead, on the members of the district bureaucracy who had so mismanaged it, namely the officiating superintendent of police, Babu Nand 123 124 126

127

Ibid. The fact that Bose was neither poor nor low caste was indeed a rare feature of the case for the time period. 125 Ibid. Ibid. Bose had, Plait was convinced, broken his ribs some time before his apprehension by the police and a malignant ‘outside party’ used this to try to ‘get at the Raja’. He actually went so far, on absolutely no evidence whatsoever, to declare the case part of an extremist plot against the Raja and the superintendent of police. Ibid. Minute, 11 July 1910, L/PJ/6/943, File 2227–228, BL.

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Kumar Basu; the deputy magistrate, Gyanendra Nath Chaudhuri; and the district magistrate, an ICS man named Mr Agasti. Chaudhuri and Agasti were regarded as the chief culprits. In the case of Chaudhuri, he showed a ‘lamentable want of decision in failing to insist on a thorough enquiry when the allegations were first brought to his notice’ and withdrew the case even though ‘the fact that the accused persons were the servants of a powerful zamindar should have aroused a suspicion that influence was being brought to bear to suppress [it]’.128 The chief responsibility for the ‘dilatory and ineffective character of the proceedings’ lay, however, with the district magistrate, since it ‘was his duty to have insisted at first on a prompt and thorough inquiry’. Agasti failed, however, to initiate an enquiry even when he was informed that Hriday Nath Bose was so ill that a magistrate had been called to record his dying statement.129 But although Agasti was regarded as ‘notoriously a very bad officer’ and ‘the sort of man who ought to be got rid of’, since he was a member of the ICS doing so involved an enquiry – which meant exposing the ICS to public scrutiny.130 No action was taken, therefore, either in regard to him or to the other officials involved, apart from the lieutenant governor, Sir Edward Baker, having his ‘sense of displeasure at their conduct placed on record’.131 Moreover, in spite of the fact that appeals against acquittals for individuals found not guilty were admissible under Indian law, no further action was taken against the policemen implicated in the torture of Bose. Had the case occurred just two years later, when parliamentary pressure forced the Indian and provincial governments to take the most stringent efforts to date to eradicate police torture, the situation might have been different.132 Nor was any further action taken against the Raja or his henchmen. Although the influence of local 128 129 130

131 132

E. V. Levinge, esq., Officiating chief secretary to the government of Bengal, to the secretary to the government of India, Home, 5 May, 1910. Ibid. Minute, 11 July 1910, L/PJ/6/943; and E. V. Levinge, Officiating chief secretary to the government of Bengal, to the secretary to the government of India, Home, 5 May 1910; and Minute, 20 June 1910, L/PJ/6/943, File 2227–228, BL. E. V. Levinge, Officiating chief secretary to the government of Bengal, to the secretary to the government of India, Home, 5 May 1910. ‘Appeals against acquittals’. The legality of such a process also, however, came under considerable critique in 1912 when three men were acquitted by a judge of committing a murder, but on appeal two of the men were later sentenced to death and the third to transportation for life and the local government appealed. Between 1902 and 1911, twenty-seven people were sentenced to death on appeal who had been acquitted by subordinate courts. Such proceedings were defended on the grounds that ‘In India the executive is more directly and singly responsible for the security of life and property, and for bringing criminals to justice than the executive of a country where society is strong, self-reliant and accustomed to range itself actively on the side of the law’, and because ‘Defects in the personnel and methods of the police; defects in the constitution, the procedure, the capacity, and sometimes the integrity of the subordinate Courts, exist in a degree and to an extent unknown in [Britain], and result in frequent failures of justice’ (‘Appeals against acquittals’, pp. 3–4).

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zamindars (powerful landlords) over the police was well known and often decried – village police had traditionally been servants of the zamindar, and zamindars still retained considerable powers over them and over the system of policing, as a whole, in their localities – this was a power British officials nonetheless hastened to protect, both to preserve local power structures and to diminish the responsibility of the colonial state for rural policing.133 In the end, the Bengal government simply contented itself with the belief that such an obvious failure of justice was ultimately the fault of Bose’s relatives, who ‘did their best to destroy their case by false and malicious additions alleging clearly against the truth’.134 There are rare glimpses in the colonial archives that British officials were aware that they were complicit in, if not responsible for, police brutality in colonial India. As one witness informed the torture commission, not only did European officials refrain from discussing the matter of torture, claiming that ‘We have nothing to do with that; that is all sub rosa’, but since ‘torture had continued to be with ourselves the “institution” they had always found it with our predecessors’, Indians were convinced that the government and its British officers tacitly connived in and tolerated such practices.135 There is ample evidence that British officials did indeed do so. For British bureaucrats in India, the main consideration when it came to the Indian police was the loyalty of its men, since as they were quick to point out: ‘only [through] the loyalty and fidelity of the police can we govern [India] at all.’136 As Arvind Verma asserts: ‘So long as the local police served the British interests and did not become a burden on the British purse, the administrators remained unconcerned about their failings, ill reputation, and depredations upon the people.’137 Although this led to critiques of the oppressive nature of the colonial state, these could always be met with the response, in the words of secretary of state for India, Viscount Morley (1838–1923), that the ‘gentlemen’ who ran India were ‘Englishmen . . . and have the same standards of what is just and right as we have in this kingdom.’138 Given that English gentlemen ran the colonial administration in India, the plight of victims of police brutality such as Hriday Nath Bose could scarcely be blamed on the colonial ‘system of government’. Colonial officials insisted that the conditions leading to the abuse of power were ‘none of our making, and no expenditure that is possible to 133 134 135 136 137 138

Report of the committee appointed by government under resolution (police dept). No. 373/VIII186A-2, dated 6th June 1890, p. 92. E. V. Levinge, Officiating chief secretary to the government of Bengal, to the secretary to the government of India, Home, 5 May 1910. Report of the commissioners for the investigation of alleged cases of torture, p. 97. Minute, Sir Richard Craddock, 6 May 1913, Home, Police, A, July, 85–95, 1913, NAI. Verma, ‘Consolidation of the Raj’, p. 121. Excerpt from a debate in the House of Lords on ‘Indian police methods’, 16 Mar. 1911, p. 518, IOR/L/PJ/6/1070, File 831, BL.

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contemplate will remove them’.139 The blame was instead laid upon ‘the instruments which it is necessary to employ’ in order for the system to operate. This served to perpetuate a mode of violence that the colonial regime was allegedly pledged to eradicate and ensured the systematization of torture as a technology of colonial rule.140

139

140

Home, Political, A, August, 159–170, 1910, NAI; H. Forbes, esq., Collector and Magistrate of Tanjore, to the Torture commisisoners, n.d., Report of the commissioners for the investigation of alleged cases of torture, p. 11. Resolution, Home, Police, March, 248–259, 1905. IOR/L/PJ/6/716, File 998, BL.

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16

From Chief to Technocrat: Labour and Colonial Authority in Post–World War ii Africa Frederick Cooper

If the nineteenth century was supposed to be the age of bureaucratization in Europe, then the empires that European powers established in Africa at the end of that century should have marked the highpoint of the relationship of bureaucracy to empire. On paper, such appeared to be the case. Governors, provincial commissioners, district commissioners and district officers administered clearly marked territories as part of a civil service carefully recruited and supervised. But the realities of colonial administration were otherwise. The local official was, in the French expression, le roi de la brousse (‘king of the brush’).1 His authority depended on relations with local elites, referred to as chiefs; while chiefs were subject to sanctions, they knew that white officials depended on them to collect taxes, recruit soldiers and round up young men for forced labour. Day-to-day administration relied on layers of tacit understandings between European officials and local authorities, with another layer of translators, clerks and guards beneath them; colonial courts and military force were to be used only as needed.2 This system kept Africa fragmented enough that challenges could be contained for a time, but it was inadequate to fulfilling colonial claims of a ‘civilizing mission’ or, later, a project of ‘development’. In this chapter, I argue that the bureaucratization of empire in Africa was a task that remained to be accomplished at the end of World War ii; when colonial powers at last got serious about the task, the result was not a consolidation of their power. On the contrary, it was 1

2

Former colonial administrator Herbert Deschamps used this phrase in the title of his autobiography: Le roi de la brousse: mémoires d’autres mondes (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1975). On the French civil service generally, see William B. Cohen, Rulers of empire: the French colonial service in Africa (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1971). Chieftaincy in colonial Africa has received considerable scholarly attention. A good example is Olufemi Vaughan, Nigerian chiefs: traditional power in modern politics, 1890s–1990s (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2000). On the French administration and religious authorities, see David Robinson, Paths of accommodation: Muslim societies and French colonial authorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 1880–1920 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000). See also Sara Berry’s penetrating article, ‘Hegemony on a shoestring: indirect rule and access to agricultural land’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 62:3 (1992), 327–55.

391

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during the attempt to modernize imperial rule that the British and French empires unravelled. Beginning in the late 1930s, and especially after World War ii, British and French governments developed a new administrative structure to take a more active role in economic development. My chapter takes as its principal case study the Inspection du Travail in French West Africa, with some comparisons to the labour officers of British Africa. Getting people to work in a productive and orderly fashion was, for obvious reasons, of great importance to imperial regimes, and both the lateness of the attempt to systematize control of labour and the urgency with which that effort was finally undertaken are striking. Here we have a set of officials, marginalized in pre-war Africa, who were empowered after the war. Behind the bureaucratic innovations and the change in balance of power between the ‘technical’ and the ‘provincial’ officials lay the possibility of putting forth a new conception of Africans, as workers, as French citizens, as ‘modern’ people. The Inspection du Travail became an advocate for rethinking the nature of ‘the African’. Its reports and correspondence reveal it as both a reflection of a change in the nature of empire and an agent in promoting change – with only limited success. In French and British Africa, it was African workers who catalyzed the change in how the labour question was posed. From the mid-1930s in British Africa, and dramatically in 1946 in French Africa, strike waves forced officials to confront the reality of Africans as workers. They could not simply be thought of as ‘natives’. In the British case, the strike wave included the West Indian colonies as well as Central Africa and later East and West Africa and thus confronted officials with a problem on an imperial scale. The strikes in French Africa put a new spin on the tentative moves of the government to extend some form of citizenship to colonial subjects at the same time as it confronted officials with the reality of workers as active, self-defining parts of a social order.3 That the need to fashion a bureaucratic structure to focus on a basic aspect of rule in the 1940s suggests that there is something inadequate about attempts by many scholars to generalize about colonial empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on apparently new forms of power ‘that were systematically and uniformally [sic] diffused’.4 As Deana Heath discusses in Chapter 15, such interpretations, taking off from Michel Foucault, single out 3 4

On the strike waves and colonial initiative in response to them, see Cooper, Decolonization. The quotation is from Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 175. For related arguments, see David Scott, Refashioning futures: criticism after postcoloniality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), esp. pp. 40, 52; and Antoinette Burton, ‘Introduction: the unfinished business of colonial modernities’, in Burton (ed.), Gender, sexuality and colonial modernities (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 2. For a fuller discussion of such issues, see Cooper, Colonialism.

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a ‘colonial modernity’ and posit an extension to overseas empires of ‘modern governmentality’ characteristic of the era.5 A well-structured bureaucracy (as opposed to more personal forms of authority) would, one might think, be central to the process of governing under colonial modernity. Yet, as we shall see, it was under specific, and chronologically quite late, circumstances, that the bureaucratic imperative arose with regard to labour in French and British Africa. We need a more precise focus on historical circumstances, not generalizations about the supposed nature of ‘modernity’. Let us begin with the way one of France’s leading experts on colonial affairs Robert Delavignette (d. 1976) described in 1948 the position of the minister of colonies before the war: ‘Head of all the administration and legislator, he exercised imperium on behalf of the Republic, by the intermediary of a hierarchy of European civil servants and indigenous authorities.’ Then, ‘All that changed’. The minister could no longer legislate by decree, and ‘the powers of the hierarchy were also diminished . . . The indigenous chiefs saw their traditional authority blown apart’. Delavignette claimed not to regret the change. Assemblies in Paris and in the territories themselves would have their say, and administration had now become ‘inter-ministerial’.6 He meant that the colonial ministry would share its powers with technical specialists – and the Inspection du Travail was a case in point. I

The Labour Question Unanswered When in 1936 the advent of the Popular Front in France brought into the Ministère des colonies, the socialist Marius Moutet (d. 1968), he asked – following a logic of republican and socialist universalism – for the views of influential actors in Africa about extending the Front’s new social legislation to Africa. The representatives of colonial businesses in Dakar replied that such a move was ‘inconceivable’. Africans worked too slowly for the forty-hour week to have any relevance; they quit work whenever they felt like it, so legislation concerning vacations was not needed. French administrators agreed. Nor did they think trade unions a good idea in Africa. As far as workers’ interests and rights were concerned, it was up to colonial administrators ‘to protect the native masses.’7 5 6

7

See Heath (Chapter 15, pp. 365–9). ‘Rapport sur la situation politique dans les Etats et territoires relevant du Ministre de la France d’Outre-Mer’, 4 Sept. 1948, Delavignette Papers, 19PA/3/30, AOM. In 1946 Delavignette republished a book he had originally published in 1939, changing the title from Les vrais chefs de l’empire français to Service africain (Paris: Gallimard, 1946). President, Syndicat de défense des intérêts de la côte occidentale d’Afrique to Governor-General, 28 Aug. 1936, and Directeur de la Compagnie Français de l’Ouest Africain, ‘Les lois sociales en

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Even a small opening encouraged workers to act for themselves, and a series of strikes took place in Senegal in 1936–7. Popular Front officials were sensitive enough to the risks of collective action – and to the legitimacy of the grievances of miserably paid workers – that they made significant concessions on wages. But it would only tolerate union organization among workers who could demonstrate a minimum level of Western education, which excluded the vast majority. When the Popular Front fell, colonial officials and spokesmen debunked ‘socalled social legislation, for which we would prefer to reserve, in so far as it concerns the subjects of our Empire, the old name of native policy.’8 There was an Inspection du Travail in French Africa before World War ii, but it was marginal. Although French West Africa had in place a labour ordinance from 1926, the first inspectors designated to enforce it arrived around a decade later. They were supposed to look into conditions on major sites of wage employment. But in some domains, they could not ask too many questions. Although France claimed not to use forced labour for private interests, the two most important zones of settler farming, in Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea, functioned on the basis of tacit understandings. The local official, the commandant de cercle, knew that his career depended on ensuring the labour supply to French planters. He in turn leaned on chiefs to supply men – and they might draw on weaker families or low-status individuals, and in any case young men who, more easily than marriageable young women, could be spared from the local economy. Occasional reports filtered out about these coercive practices and the miserable conditions which employers, not needing to make work attractive, fostered on their farms, but they were quickly buried in the archives. When the Popular Front governor general tried to find out what was going on, he was met with obfuscation and denials from the governor of the Côte d’Ivoire. He knew that there was a cover-up, but he was not willing to sacrifice the vertical channels of imperial authority to get to the bottom of the situation.9 The few Inspecteurs du travail on the scene had shown their ineffectiveness. What counted was the hierarchy – the relationship of governor to local administrator to chief. They were solving the native problem. Natives might work, if not very eagerly and not very efficiently, but they were not workers. In British Africa, several colonies that had created rudimentary labour departments in the 1920s eliminated them in the 1930s, regarding them as not

8 9

A.O.F.’, Aug. 1936, Rapport de Chambre de Commerce du Dakar, in Administrateur, Dakar, to Gouverneur-Général, 8 Oct. 1936, K 170 (26), AS; Notes de la réunion de Chambre de Commerce, Dakar, 19 Nov. 1936, K 7 (1), AS; Administrateur du Dakar to GouverneurGénéral, 8 Oct. 1936, Gouverneur, Côte d’Ivoire, to Gouverneur-Général, 1 Oct. 1936, K 170 (26), AS. Conseil supérieur de la France Outre-Mer, Commission des lois sociales, 16 Dec. 1938, K 218 (26), AS. Babacar Fall, Le travail forcé en Afrique Occidentale Française, 1900–1945 (Paris: Karthala, 1993); Cooper, Decolonization, chs. 2 and 3.

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serving an important purpose in a time of budget constraints. Kenya’s government told officials in London that it had no need for a specialized labour department because ‘native’ labour was ‘part of the normal duties of District Officers’.10 Even when the first big strike in Central Africa took place in 1935 – on the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia – officials thought they could stuff the genii of labour unrest back into the bottle of native administration. Sending workers back to their villages once their contracts were expired, controlling migration of women to the mine towns, and placing chiefs in town to look after men from ‘their’ communities while they fulfilled labour contracts seemed the remedy to disorder, more so than addressing the problems that the strike had brought out – low wages, bad housing, lack of social services, daily humiliation.11 Even missionaries and others with humanitarian concerns accepted the model of the African as tribesman. In French Africa, people critical of the colonial status quo argued that forced labour took people who were naturally peasants out of their milieu, leading to social dislocation in both urban and rural areas. Migrant labour came in for similar criticism in British Central and East Africa. Only when the 1935 mine strike proved to be part of a bigger pattern did British thinking about doing something about the situation get very far. And Paris and London were ahead of the administrations in the field, so imbued were the latter in their self-conception as men who knew their natives, especially how to keep them in their place, geographically as well as socially. II

Reforming Labour, Reforming Empire By 1938 and 1939, the West Indies strikes and riots had shaken up the colonial office in London. They began to see that the problem was not one of the inherent backwardness of primitive people – that did not account for what happened in colonies in the Caribbean that had been British for centuries and where officials wished they could take pride in having emancipated the slaves a century earlier. Recognizing the reality of wage labour, the colonial office began to think that workers needed services, and that colonies needed to take a more long-term view 10

11

Minute, P. V. Vernon, 14 June 1937, CO 323/1319/1766/2, TNA; J. E. W. Flood, Minute, 4 Aug. 1937, CO 323/1429/1766/1937, TNA. The ‘technical’ departments that were best developed in pre-war British colonies were in health and agriculture. Some of their personnel played a role in developing a ‘scientific’ approach to understanding problems of ecology, disease and nutrition in the colonies, but they, like labour departments, had trouble turning ideas into practices and suffered severe cuts in the depression. See Helen Tilley, Africa as a living laboratory: empire, development, and the problem of scientific knowledge, 1870–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Report of the commission appointed to inquire into the disturbance in the Copperbelt, Northern Rhodesia (Lusaka, 1935).

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of economic progress. Rather than insisting that locally generated revenues cover all costs of government, colonial office officials came to believe that metropolitan funds had to be used for ‘development and welfare’, for improving the quality and contentment of the labour force, making it both more productive and more orderly. The result was the Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940, although significant spending under it did not begin until 1945.12 The government in French Africa was slow to transcend its pre-war limitations. The government that succeeded the Popular Front in France 1938 pulled away from considering social programmes for African workers. After France’s surrender to Germany in 1940, the collaborationist Vichy government made noises about the systematic development of Africa – including the ‘rational’ allocation of labour on a large scale – but it lacked the means to do anything about it. The most short-sighted and sordid forms of forced labour became more overt during the war, as the Vichy government lacked even the decency to pretend it was doing something other than rounding up unwilling young men, forcing them to migrate to areas where their labour was needed and treating them badly once they were there.13 Only as the Free French took over as the war was ending did officials decide that they should abolish forced labour – but then they gave themselves five years to wean the agricultural economy from it.14 Their schedule was pre-empted by the new political dynamic after the war, for the desire to associate African elites with France led the metropolitan government to allow the election of a tiny number of African deputies to the French legislature, and these deputies quickly brought into a public forum the issue of forced labour after a war fought in the name of freedom. A law proposed by the deputy from Côte d’Ivoire, Félix Houphouët-Boigny (d. 1993), formally abolished forced labour – and made clear to administrators that they could no longer tolerate the practice.15

12

13

14

15

See Parsons (Chapter 17, p. 417); and Michael Havinden and David Meredith, Colonialism and development: Britain and its tropical colonies, 1850–1960 (London: Routledge, 1993); Stephen Constantine, The making of British colonial development policy, 1914–1940 (London: Cass, 1984), pp. 233–57; J. M. Lee, Colonial development and good government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). Cooper, Decolonization, ch. 4. Vichy, and the republican government before it, made extensive use of the deuxième portion du contingent (‘second portion of the contingent’) – Africans conscripted into military service but directed to civilian rather than military duties. Military service was a fiction that occluded the reality of forced labour. The post-war government was reluctant to give up this practice even when it formally repudiated forced labour. In French Equatorial Africa, unlike French West Africa controlled by the Free French throughout the war, forced labour was used extensively, allegedly to support the Allied war effort: Eric Jennings, Free French Africa in World War II: the African resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). The Inspecteurs du travail saw forced labour as a dead end in terms of promoting a more productive and orderly labour force, although they had their doubts about the ‘stability’ of African labour, particularly in areas such as the Côte d’Ivoire where coercion had been

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The post-war French government was trying to walk a fine line between retaining control of its overseas territories and adapting to a new situation, in which colonialism and white domination were no longer so easy to defend internationally, France’s military and economic resources were weakened, and its need to make colonies both more efficient and more legitimate posed a difficult dilemma. Its effort to co-opt elite Africans outside of the vertical channels of colonial command and chiefly authority went along with its willingness to abolish the hated category of indigène (‘native’) from the official vocabulary, to do away with the special powers vested in local administrators to inflict arbitrary punishments on people in that category (the indigénat) and to extend the ‘quality’ of the citizen to all inhabitants of the overseas territories, while limiting the franchise, the number of deputies Africans could elect and the power of the newly elected territorial assemblies. That game would soon prove difficult to control. In any case, the reforms provided an alternative to and seriously weakened the channels characteristic of authority in empires. Elections for the national assembly in Paris and territorial assemblies – even with a limited franchise – quickly set Africans to organizing political parties, and these in some cases became parallel organizations to those of the colonial command structure. The elected officials were more consistent in their advocacy of universalistic notions of law and administration than had been the pre-war territorial administration. African politics, strange as it might seem, contributed to the bureaucratization of colonial rule. Politicians wanted the laws they helped write to be administered correctly; the command structure of colonialism had functioned otherwise.16 As the government wanted more active policies of development, it saw an increasing need to gain the cooperation of African ‘modernizers’. Chiefs were becoming less useful. In some cases, such as the Côte d’Ivoire, acute tensions between that command structure in rural areas and African parties trying to organize the countryside resulted. But the direction of change was against the local administrator and the African chief and in favour of the

16

the norm. Promoting that stability would become their cause: Côte d’Ivoire, IT, RA, 1946; AOF, IT, RA, 1946; IGT, AOF, ‘Rapport relatif à l’évolution du problème de la main d’ouevre en Côte d’Ivoire et à son incidence sur la situation économique locale’, 5 Nov. 1946, AP 960, AOM; Sénégal Sud, IT, RA, 1950. For a fuller analysis of the abolition of forced labour in French Africa, see Frederick Cooper, ‘ “Conditions analogous to slavery”: imperialism and free labour ideology in Africa’, in Frederick Cooper, Thomas Holt and Rebecca Scott (eds.), Beyond slavery: explorations of race, labour, and citizenship in postemancipation societies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), ch. 3. Labour law was a case in point, as African deputies made clear in their advocacy of a labour code and in their support of the Inspection du Travail as enforcers of it. See Cooper, Decolonization, ch. 7.

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politician and the bureaucrat who expected to administer laws and programmes of development.17 In British Africa, the trajectory was different, but not entirely so. Citizenship did not have the same valence in Britain as in France, and politics was focused more on individual territories. But the labour question had already been posed as an empire-wide problem and with Britain trying to get the most out of its colonies during the war – whereas French Africa, under Vichy control, was kept isolated by the allies – tensions rose during the war. Demand for Africa’s primary products was high, and Britain’s capacity to supply the cloth or other manufactured goods Africans wanted to buy was low. The war was a time of high inflation and great strain on wage workers, even as demand for them rose. There were major strikes in West, East and Central Africa. This situation played into the hands of the heretofore marginalized labour officers, who had the training and the orientation – or so it seemed – to understand the labour question. As the pattern continued into the post-war period, expertise became more in demand. Labour officers could keep an eye on centres of employment, try to persuade employers to improve the situation of workers and mediate between unions – or more often workers who had no visible organization – and employers when conflict erupted. Several commissions investigated labour conditions, for example, in the port of Mombasa after a threatened strike in 1945 and after a big general strike in 1947. Together, labour officers and commissioners began to articulate a vision of a more stabilized workforce – no longer going back and forth between village and workplace – on which the state could concentrate resources such as housing for families, schools and medical facilities. It was only in the early post-war period when colonial governments finally got interested enough in Africans as a population – as distinct from an aggregate of tribes – to take methodologically sound censuses and carry out surveys of urban populations. Kenya’s first census was in 1948 – around the time the first social survey of its major port of Mombasa was undertaken. The district officer who knew his natives was no longer a sufficient source of knowledge.18 Labour issues soon came to the fore in French West Africa. In December 1945, workers in Dakar’s dockyards began a strike, which spread in January to other sectors, and soon became a twelve-day-long general strike. It embraced the illiterate dockworkers and the highly literate civil servants. The strike spread beyond Dakar to Saint-Louis and Kaolack. ‘Equal pay for equal work’ was a key slogan. Ordinary labourers focused their demands on the calculation of the minimum wage: there could not, they insisted, be an African 17 18

Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between empire and nation: remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). Cooper, Decolonization; and Frederick Cooper, On the African waterfront: urban disorder and the transformation of work in colonial Mombasa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

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standard of living distinct from a French one. Civil servants demanded family allowances equal to those of European workers. Such payments to workers with children to offset the costs of child rearing had previously been intended to promote the reproduction of French people in the face of foreign challenges.19 What was at stake here was not just a series of demands focused on the workplace. A conceptual apparatus was being questioned, a classificatory grid based on race, tribe, civilization. By the time the general strike ended, followed by negotiated settlements with other workers, the strikers had improved wages and benefits, and they had remade categories by their insistence that questions of wages and benefits be decided on the same basis for all workers, regardless of race. Civil servants won their family allowances (not yet equal ones), and ordinary workers won the principle of standard calculation of the minimum needs of a worker, even if the government continued to fudge the calculations. And the trade union movement developed confidence in itself. The Inspection du Travail plays an important role in the story. In trying to contain a challenge to colonial authority, it entrenched itself in the governance of post-war empire and helped re-conceptualize the labour question. The Inspection had been out of commission during the Vichy period, but it was reinstituted by decree in August 1944. When the strike movement began in December 1945 and spread in January 1946, the administration’s first instinct was to follow its old authoritarian ways. Workers were requisitioned (that is, put under military discipline). But the workers ignored the injunctions and threats. Here, the administration was caught in its own ideological blinders – the belief that Africans, with access to rural resources, worked only when they had a particular need for cash and might leave en masse if the government cracked down too hard on strikers. Nor were officials sure whom to talk to. Unions had been completely suppressed under Vichy, and even as the old Popular Front legislation was revived, it applied only to literate workers. But Dakar was a mixed city, with a well-established, literate elite, some of whom occupied civil service posts, some of whom were in a position to lead unions of manual workers. The distinction between literate and non-literate groups of workers broke down, as did the distinction in French law (until the constitution of October 1946) between citizens and subjects.20 The 1946 strike had elements of classic trade unionism, with individual unions in the 19 20

Frederick Cooper, ‘The Senegalese general strike of 1946 and the labour question in post-war French Africa’, Canadian Journal of African Studies 24 (1990), 165–215. Dakar, Saint-Louis, Gorée and Rufique were special cases because, as old (seventeenth-century) colonial outposts, their inhabitants were granted most of the rights of the French citizen, whereas the people incorporated into the French empire by the conquests of the late nineteenth century were subjects, lacking those rights. But labour migration brought subjects into the four cities, working alongside citizens, and the government was unable to use the distinction against the strikers. The category of subject was abolished and citizenship extended to all inhabitants of the Overseas Territories by a law in May 1946 and turned into a constitutional provision that October. See Cooper, Citizenship between empire and nation.

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commercial sector, in the civil service and in skilled trades cooperating in a Union des syndicats. But it also had elements of a mass urban movement – daily mass meetings in a sports field and cooperation with market sellers. The Inspection du Travail tried to figure all this out. When authoritarian solutions failed, the government flew in a labour expert, Inspecteur Masselot, who had previously been involved in settling a labour dispute on the other side of the Atlantic, in the French colony of Martinique. Masselot set about doing what he knew how to do – treating unions as if they were normal interlocutors. He negotiated with union leaders and sought to give each part of what they wanted: to manual workers a substantial increase in basic wages and a promise that they would be revised regularly in accordance with the same principles of calculating minimum wages for French workers; for civil servants, revised salary scales and, most important, family allowances that while not yet equal to those of the higher ‘cadres’ of the bureaucracy, acknowledged the principle that workers’ families needed support. The very process of negotiating with Masselot brought union leaders into a system of industrial relations. Masselot used standard contracts, filling in the blanks, fitting African workers into job hierarchies designed in France. The workers of Senegal had shown remarkable solidarity during the twomonth-long movement, but the offers were too attractive to struggling families, and the strike peeled back layer by layer. Both the workers’ movement and the Inspection recognized it as a victory. When it was all over, Masselot opined: ‘There is a technique to organizing work, as with everything, and it cannot be improvised.’21 Here was the assertion of expertise, of a technically minded bureaucracy.22 And this new bureaucracy moved to secure its position in the colonial hierarchy. The historian can observe the process in the systematic nature of the reports filed in the archives: annual reports in the late 1940s on the state of labour across all of French West Africa, attempts to enumerate the wage workers in each of the territories of French West Africa, counts of the membership of each of the major trade union organizations. None of this information had been systematically collected before the war. III

Labour Inspectors and the Making of an African Working Class The inspectorate was organized in classic bureaucratic fashion: the Inspection générale in Paris (whose director, Pierre Pélisson, participated actively in 21 22

Inspecteur Masselot to ministre des Colonies, 23 Feb. 1946, AP 960, AOM. See Timothy Mitchell, Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). My emphasis is on the quite particular circumstances in which colonial regimes turn to experts in the social sciences.

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discussions of labour policy), an inspectorate based in Dakar covering French West Africa as a whole (similarly in Brazzaville for French Equatorial Africa) and beneath it Inspecteurs in each territory. As of 1946, there were supposed to be fifteen Inspecteurs in French West Africa, but in fact there were four, plus eleven other administrators from other branches as well as interns who helped with the work. By 1952, their numbers had grown to sixty-five, plus seventeen trainees. Those Inspecteurs in turn had a small staff charged with collecting information, assisting in negotiations and resolving disputes. The Inspecteurs went through the training at the Ecole de la France d’Outre-Mer but were seconded to the Ministère du travail to learn the techniques of labour management alongside people working in metropolitan France.23 More interesting is the ideological construction one reads in the reports.24 The workforce was divided into occupations and each occupation into a hierarchy of jobs: the structure attempted to reduce contestation to a question of filling in numbers corresponding to the wages of each category: Inspecteurs wanted to ‘separate out an African elite and consequently maintain the attractiveness of superior positions.’ They sought to break the pattern of African workers working for wages for short periods and returning to their village by ‘provoking the stabilization of manpower’. A body of stable workers would have to be paid enough to support a family and receive more pay with increasing seniority, but stabilization would ‘facilitate better output from labour’ and ‘make the family situation less unstable’. Over time, such a process would lead Africans to ‘orient themselves progressively towards the European way of life.’25 A differentiated labour force would reduce the danger of ‘social trouble and a strike which would rapidly become general’.26 No longer were unions seen as inappropriate for Africans. They were necessary to the promotion of a predictable labour force, so that officials would have someone to negotiate with and workers would be incorporated into social structures that officials thought they could understand. After 23

24 25

26

IGT, ‘Organisation de l’Inspection du Travail Outre-Mer’, 13 Feb. 1947, Report to International Labour Conference, 1950, IGT 29, AOM; Gouvernement Général de l’AOF, L’organisation de l’Inspection du Travail (Rufisque: Imprimérie du Gouverement Général, 1946); IGT, ‘Note sur le problème de l’Inspection du Travail’, n.d. [1953], IGT 1, AOM; P.-F. Gonidec, Droit du travail dans les territoires d’outre-mer (Paris: Librarie Générale de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1958), p. 302. The most revealing reports are those covering French West Africa as a whole in 1946, 1947 and 1948: AOF, IT, RA. AOF, IGT, RA, 1946, 57; 1948, 27; 1951, 41, 52; Sénégal, IT, RA, 1951; Côte d’Ivoire, IT, RA, 1949; Inspecteur Desbordes, ‘Conditions de recrutement, d’orientation, de distribution et d’emploi de la main d’oevure par les employeurs publics ou privés en A.O.F.’, 26 July 1949, K 419 (144), AS; AOF, IGT, ‘Rapport sur les salaires en Afrique Occidentale Française’, 1 Oct. 1949, 2G 49–58, AS. Inspecteur du Travail, Sénégal, au Secrétaire Général, AOF, 13 May 1947, et ‘Notes d’études sur l’appel de la sentence surarbitrale du 24 avril 1947’, 29 Apr. 1947, IGT 13/4, AOM.

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a negotiated wage settlement in one place, the Inspection could make it applicable across the territory or across French West Africa. In its annual report for 1948, the Inspection situated its view of industrial relations in terms of a new vision for Africa: The worst error that we could commit would be to refuse Africa such an industrialization under the pretext of breaking the evolution of the masses and conserving as long as possible the peasantry in a primitive state that we believe to be tranquil. Frightened by the beginnings of African proletarianization and by that class struggle which inflames race struggle, certain Europeans have tended to oppose industrialization in order to maintain the peasant world of the savannas in what they call the good old times.27

African legislators and trade unions had overlapping interests with the Inspection du Travail. They kept pointing to discriminatory practices in employment that went against the 1946 constitution’s assertion that all French citizens were equal. In response, the French parliament in 1950 passed a law (introduced by the Senegalese deputy Lamine Guèye) equalizing the benefits of all public employees across the overseas territories, although the intent of the law was compromised somewhat by special displacement allowances for civil servants from the metropole who had to distance themselves from the comforts of home to work in distant French territories. This measure was particularly important since the largest employer in French Africa was the state; bureaucrats were both the subject and object of reform. The 1950 law clearly established that, officially at least, the civil service was not a racialized structure of whites governing blacks. The constant efforts of African parliamentarians and union leaders to chip away at discriminatory practices made the labour question one of defining general standards for labour and developing an administrative apparatus for general enforcement.28 This was grist to the mill of the Inspecteurs du travail. They became advocates of a new labour code (code du travail) for all workers, a struggle that labour unions and African parliamentarians – for their own reasons – pushed ever since the constitutional changes of 1946.29 Before the new constitution came into effect, the Ministry of Overseas France had begun to draft a code for indigènes, but with the generalization of citizenship there were no more indigènes and any code would have to apply universally. Thus began a six-year legislative battle, with stakes high since all wage and benefit legislation would 27 28

29

AOF, IGT, RA, 1948, 18. Omar Guèye, Sénégal: histoire du mouvement syndical, la marche vers le Code du Travail (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011). It took some time, but the French government began in the 1950s to actively recruit Africans to different levels of the civil service, a process known as ‘l’africanisation des cadres’. See Michelle Pinto, ‘Employment, education, and the reconfiguration of empire: Africanization in postwar French Africa’ (PhD, New York University, 2013). The Inspection laid out its arguments in a variety of contexts, most explicitly as the legislature began to take up the code it had helped draft: AOF, IGT, RA, 1951, 197–98.

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apply to many thousands of private sector workers, mostly with low pay and few benefits, not just to a few thousand workers from metropolitan France. The code garnered support not just from the French left but also from a strong current in France of ‘social Catholics’ – a largely centre-right set of politicians who wanted to develop alternatives to communism as a way for workers to advance their conditions and especially to have a chance to form stable families. It still took many years, parliamentary manoeuvring on the part of the coalition of African deputies, left parties and social Catholics – plus a well-organized general strike throughout French West Africa – to get a code passed in 1952. That code made explicit provisions against racial discrimination and specified that all wage workers would benefit from a limited workweek (forty hours in most cases), paid vacations, minimum wages and the right to organize and strike. Officials thought they were defining the universal worker, and they insisted that their policy was part of an international consensus.30 Particularly revealing is the discussion in which Inspecteurs played a prominent role of extending the French system of family allowances to African wage workers. African civil servants in Senegal had won a partial victory in 1946 in their quest for allowances similar to those enjoyed by metropolitan functionaries, and unions continued to campaign not just for ‘equal pay for equal work’ but also for ‘equal benefits for equal work’. Labour officials began to see family allowances as a useful part of their programme of social engineering: they would promote family stability within the essential class of wage workers. Their thinking was similar to that of their British colleagues: the industrial age was making its own cultural demands, and an African working class had to be separated out from its backward brethren, acculturated and socialized to behave in appropriate ways. Creating such a working class would take more than one generation, and the reproduction of the family had to take place in the workers’ milieu, with its very reproduction linked to the workers’ continuity of employment and to the long-term effects of professional observation and intervention in shaping the lives of future workers. The Inspecteurs had a specific worry, a belief – based on data of unknown reliability – that wage workers, ‘who were the most able-bodied, and as a result the most useful element from a demographic point of view’, faced such difficult conditions of family life that they tended towards ‘abstention in the domain of marriage 30

Cooper, Decolonization, ch. 7; Guèye, Marche vers le Code du Travail. Madame Guelfi, chief labour inspector of Overseas France, told the 1953 Inter-African Labour Conference: ‘Labour law follows from universal rules of justice and of respect for man; they have been powerfully pulled out, over the last thirty years, with enlightenment and authority by the ILO. Whether it is a question of an African worker employed in the mine of Rhodesia or of Tanganyika or whether it is a question of English or French miners working in the coal mines of their countries, there exists among them a community of experience and of life which is born of the similitude of the trade and which calls forth the same protection and similar guarantees’ (Première séance de l’Inter-African Labour Conference, Bamako, 27 Jan. 1953, transcript in K 463 (179), AS).

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and of procreation’.31 The argument has a eugenic ring to it, as if the New African of the post-war era had to be selected from the virile ranks of wage labourers and not the genetically less desirable rural population. But the main conclusions were sociological: an argument that the family was ‘the only possible framework for the growth of individuals and that this basic psychosociological structure dominates all economic and demographic phenomena’.32 The argument about the peculiar nature of African modes of reproduction was now rebutted by the contention that wage workers – unlike other Africans – tended to form families of a ‘European type’ and adopt European culture, a tendency which social policy had to support: The African wage-earner, head of a family, above all the detribalized urban worker, runs into particular difficulties from the fact of having to support a family, notably when, having attained a certain level of social evolution and of stabilization as a worker, he tends to base his conditions of life on those of the European worker.33

In contrast, African family life was considered a brake on progress, both social and economic. If the transformation of African culture was the ultimate goal, the immediate need was to pull wage workers out of the backward village and enable them to live their life course – especially the upbringing of children – in a modernizing environment. Supporting a new type of family among Africans was a means to such an end: The disaggregation of the traditional family corresponds to an emancipation, a liberation of its members . . . The extended family must be succeeded by the household (and even the monogamous household), established by the reciprocal consent of the spouses, just as one can hope that the village or the tribe will little by little become the rural commune. And the African collectivity, organized, protected by the public French power, will in its turn be able to assure total and effective protection of the family and the child.34

The 1952 labour code – in a compromise needed to get past opponents who thought family allowances for Africans unnecessary and too expensive – authorized consideration of such allowances for the private sector but did not yet institute them. In the mid-1950s, consequently, there were more campaigns by African social and political movements, more strike threats and some actual strikes and more efforts by Inspecteurs and others – including prominent 31

32 33 34

Afrique Equatoriale Française, ‘Note sur l’instauration d’un régime d’allocations familiales en Afrique Equatoriale Française’, 16 Feb. 1951, IGT 17/1, and Ministre, Lettre circulaire aux Gouverneurs Généraux, 3 Sept. 1953, IGT 15/3, AOM, both generalizing on the basis of a survey done in Equatorial Africa in 1949. Service des Affaires Sociales, Note, 20 Jan. 1955, IGT 15/1, AOM. Note of Inspecteur Général du Travail, Afrique Equatoriale Française, ‘Etude préliminaire de l’institution de prestations familiales’, 28 Sept. 1954, IGT 16/1, AOM. ‘Rapport biannuel sur la protection de la collectivité, de la famille et de l’enfance’, 1951–52, 2G 52–3, AS. See also AOF, IGT, ‘Rapport: possibilités conditions et modalités d’organisation en A.O.F. d’un système d’allocations familiales pour les salariés’, 26 July 1949, K 455 (179), AS.

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Catholic politicians concerned with promoting family values – and the system of family allowances was finally extended to the private sector in 1956.35 Family allowances, like the labour code in general, applied only to wage workers, leaving out the large majority of Africans who toiled in the fields or small workshops, on the basis of family ties, clientage, apprenticeship or tenancy. But that was consistent with the overall thinking about labour. The goal was not ‘proletarianization’, that is, the creation of a class separated from land or other means of production whose only option would be wage labour. It was ‘stabilization’ – the shaping of a working class that did not depend on rural resources and would reproduce itself near places of work, under the watchful eyes of teachers, nurses and Inspecteurs du travail. A curious but indicative move within the bureaucracy was the creation in 1951 of the Office des Etudes Psychotechniques, which organized training programmes ‘to prepare the young worker to hold his own in the Europeanized technical world’, and to study the ‘particular mental habits’ of Africans.36 The office arose from the neo-Taylorism in vogue in certain management circles in France, where a heavy dose of psychology was added to concerns with efficient industrial organization. A newspaper called its director Raoul Durand ‘one of the most powerful French reconstructors of the black man.’ Asked, ‘Is the black man malleable?’ Durand replied: ‘He is, at times marvelously.’37 The effort towards defining an African labouring class and institutionalizing mechanisms to define its contours and observe its evolution was expensive – particularly in the public sector, which was from 1946 onwards putting considerable funds not only into routine administration but also into ‘development’ of infrastructure and social services. French officials by the mid-1950s were becoming alarmed at the escalating wage bill, while the promised improvements in productivity and output were taking time to emerge. When the French government in 1956 devolved important powers to elected African governments in each of its African territories, it was hoping to get away from the consequences of a largely European bureaucracy using French models to manage the labour question, with the French standard of living as the ultimate reference point for wages and benefits. It realized that the only way it could get

35 36

37

Cooper, Decolonization, ch. 7. AOF, ‘Rapport biannuel sur la protection de la collectivité, de la famille et de l’enfance’, 1951–52, 2G 52–53; Rapport sur les Centres Sociaux en Afrique Occidentale Française, 1956, 2G 56–125, AS. Assemblée de l’Union Française, Débats, 13 Dec. 1951, 1079; Combat, 24 Dec. 1954, K 418 (144), Mission d’Etudes Psychotechnique, ‘Le facteur humain dans la formation professionelle en Afrique’, Aug. 1951, K 456 (179), ‘Quelques aspects de la psychologie africaine’, July 1953, 2G 53–113, AS; Raoul Durand, ‘La formation professionelle et la psychologie des noirs’, Problèmes d’Afrique Centrale 24 (1954), 102–8.

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African leaders to distance themselves from the French reference point was to give them real power to run the affairs of their own territories.38 Of particular importance was that the law devolving power gave each state control of its own civil service: each government would decide how to respond to employee unions’ demands for salary increases and would have to pay for them out of revenues raised from its own taxpayers – who were also the voters to whom elected African leaders were responsible. But the French government maintained certain services in its own control – at its own expense – including those connected with ‘sovereignty’ (defence and foreign affairs) as well as economic issues that needed central authority. That included the Inspection du Travail. This organization remained under central control because it administered the labour code – a law passed by the French legislature. The result was a certain tension between the French inspectors – and the service was only a little Africanized – and the ministers of labour in each government.39 Not the least of the sources of tension was that the Inspecteurs were applying a law written in universalistic language, while the ministers were trying to administer a policy based on particular politics. Many of these ministers were ex–trade unionists themselves, but they were no longer hitching their political projects to the demand for equality – a levelling upwards of wages and benefits – from a government that they perceived as ‘French’. Now, they were on the receiving end of demands and had other uses for the resources – services for peasants left out of the stabilization doctrine, patronage for power brokers on whom elected officials now depended and projects intended to express the will of African governments to turn territories into nations. The governments increasingly resisted the demands of unions similar to those that had been made in the past decade and which had been consistent with the Inspection’s vision of a stable, well-socialized, well-managed labour force. A trade unionist in Dahomey remarked in 1958, ‘it was easier to obtain satisfaction from a European Inspecteur du Travail than it is now from an African Minister’.40 The British case was not quite the same, because there was no central, empire-wide organization corresponding to France’s Inspection générale du travail. Nor was there as clear a notion of citizenship at the level of the empire that provided a clear ideological basis for claims to equality with workers in the metropole. But the 1950s were the years of labour departments in British 38 39

40

For more on the 1956 law, see Cooper, Citizenship between empire and nation, ch. 5. IGT, Rapport au Ministre, 26 Mar. 1958, AP 2189/5; ‘Note à l’attention de M. le Directeur du Cabinet’, 12 Jan. 1957, AP 2189/5, AOM; ‘Indices et effectifs, Fonction Publique, AOF’, attached to Haut Commissaire, Circulaire aux Gouverneurs, 5 Sept. 1957, 18G 628, AS. Dahomey, ‘Renseignements, du mois d’octobre 1957 au mois d’avril 1958’, in 17G 588, AS; Governeur, Dahomey, to minister, 30 Jan. 1958, AP 2189/12, AOM. See also Cooper, Decolonization, ch. 11; and Babacar Fall, Le travail au Sénégal au XXe siècle (Paris: Karthala, 2011).

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Africa. Colony by colony, the post-war administrations recognized that Africans could no longer be ruled as ‘natives’ but that the place of different components of society, prominently including wage workers, had to be recognized. Unions were useful interlocutors. Rules had to be applied; minimum wages calculated; disputes resolved. The labour officer was the key to operating in such terms within the sector defined by wage labour. As in France, labour officers went through training with other colonial officials but were seconded to the Ministry of Labour for training in how things were done in the industrial relations arena in Great Britain.41 The idea of stabilization was promoted in British Africa as well as French, notably in crucial and vulnerable sectors of the labour market, such as mines, railroads and ports. Labour unions turned the desire for productive and orderly work into an escalation of demands for decent wages and working conditions. When Britain finally began to devolve power to African governments in each colony, elected governments felt similar imperatives to bring the labour movement under control. And British officials in London expressed a certain envy for the ability of African governments – in the semi-autonomous Gold Coast and later independent Ghana for example – to tame the labour movement in a way their own labour officers had not. A revealing sidelight to this story of bureaucratic mastery of an element of colonial policy is what happened to chiefs, the old repositories of a form of colonial authority that regarded itself as having appropriated traditional legitimacy and provided the state with much of its capacity to collect taxes, recruit labour, build roads and schools and enforce or implement regulations or reforms top officials wanted. After the war, British officials, hoping to confine politics to local levels, had encouraged educated Africans to play a bigger role in local and regional councils, diluting in effect the aura of ‘tradition’ that hung around rural administration. The policy quickly failed; African political movements wanted power at the centre, not the periphery of each territory. As African politicians came to exercise more influence and eventually power, they had a choice between co-opting or marginalizing chiefs, and some oscillated between the two options.42 In French Africa, officials and then African politicians realized the necessity for the reorganization of the ‘commandement indigène’.43 The movement away from this particular form of vertical power was even more rapid than in 41

42 43

These passages summarize the discussion of the labour question in British Africa in Cooper, Decolonization, chs. 8 and 12. On the limitations of British approaches to development, see Parsons (Chapter 17, pp. 418–27). See Vaughan, Nigerian chiefs; and Richard Rathbone, Nkrumah and the chiefs: the politics of chieftaincy in Ghana, 1951–1960 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000). ‘Rapport sur la situation politique dans les Etats et territoires relevant du Ministre de la France d’Outre-Mer’, 4 Sept. 1948, Delavignette Papers, 19PA/3/30, AOM.

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British Africa. Political parties – now that they were seeking the votes of citizens throughout each territory – sought to establish political machines, sometimes working through chiefly authorities but also bypassing them. In Côte d’Ivoire, relatively wealthy farmers became the nucleus of party organization; in Senegal, Muslim brotherhoods, which had organized agricultural production as well as religious life in much of the countryside, were sought out by Léopold Senghor (d. 2001) and his political apparatus. French officials and then African governments wondered whether chiefs should be assimilated to the status of local administrator in the bureaucracy or should be venerated – if not necessarily obeyed – as embodiments of an African tradition whose legitimacy might be put to political ends. There was a great deal of hesitation over what to do.44 The irony of the situation emerged when chiefs in parts of French West Africa tried in the mid-1950s to organize themselves into a union.45 IV

The Limits of Bureaucratic Control But if the old organization of chiefly authority was no longer playing a central role in official thinking or in the practice of government, the new bureaucratic impetus only went so far. Keeping track of a labour force and ensuring that benefits went to the families of workers and pensions to retired workers meant knowing who was who. But the French government did not know. It repeatedly acknowledged the need to expand the état-civil – the system of keeping track of people as they moved through their life cycle, recording births, marriages and deaths.46 Not just labour legislation but also keeping voting rolls and regulating the admission of children into schools depended on an accurate état-civil. But the best the French government could do was in 1950 to require that people living within 10 kilometres of a centre where such records were kept register births and deaths. They did not even try to keep track of marriages. So what by 44

45 46

Assemblée Nationale, proposed resolution no. 1711, 17 June 1947, and other proposals from 1947, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1954 and 1956, all in AP 2152, AOM; Committee on Overseas France of the Assemblée Nationale, Meeting of 31 Mar. 1954, C//15640, ANF; Senegal, Assemblée Territoriale, Débats, 12 Jan. 1956, 19–43, 29 Apr. 1956, 228–56. The relationship between electoral politics and the chieftancy is explored in Elisabeth Fink, ‘Elections and political mobilization in the time of decolonization: voting in postwar French Africa’ (New York University PhD, 2015). Sûreté, Renseignements, Nov., 1 Dec. 1956, 5 July 1957, 17G 602, AS. This paragraph is based on Frederick Cooper, ‘voting, welfare, and registration: the strange fate of the état-civil in French Africa, 1945–1960’, in Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter (eds.), Registration and recognition: documenting the person in world history, PBA 182 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), ch. 16.

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any logic was a bureaucratic necessity was not implemented – not even in the very last years of empire. There were two reasons for this state of affairs: first, the lack of administrative infrastructure and the lack of enough literate personnel in each district to manage such a process. The countryside had, in the 1950s, still not been bureaucratized. Second, there was uncertainty about how to deal with diversity. Africa contained many forms of marriage, filiation and inheritance. The French état-civil was linked to the civil code (also known as the Napoleonic Code), which standardized social practices. Should there be one état-civil or two (for those following the French civil code and those who did not), or many, corresponding to the actual diversity of Africa? Did French – or African – personnel know enough about all the systems to record such data accurately? Was not the act of recording also an act of social intervention – prescribing what social forms should be? French officials went around and around over whether plural états-civils violated the constitutional requirements of equality or whether a single état-civil violated the constitutional provision recognizing the rights of overseas citizens to keep their own regimes of personal status and their own forms of marriage, filiation and inheritance. Africans, it turned out, made use of the état-civil when they had an interest in doing so – to get a child into school or claim a pension or family allowances or to get the documentation needed to enter European France – and they made use of social linkages to get witnesses to testify about births or marriages long after the fact, at the point when the information was useful to the individual. The disputes were never resolved, and the French colonial regime bequeathed the problem of the état-civil to its successors. The British dealt with the problem by not trying to solve it at all. So population registration, supposedly representing the homogenizing ubiquity of state and bureaucratic authority, was mainly used when it served the particular interests of African individuals. That is not the way our social theorists think about bureaucratic rationality or the governance of populations. As French African territories passed in 1960 from the regime of internal autonomy to that of full independence, the national governments took over the Inspection du Travail. On paper, the model for the industrial relations bureaucracy would be French, and the labour code of 1952 served as the legal basis for labour regulation in the early years of independence across former French West Africa. But the substance of the politics of labour was moving in another direction. Organized labour became less of an integral part of the structure of a social democratic state apparatus than an interest group that posed an alternative to the apparatus of party rule and patron-client relations that new governments were developing. Well aware that even the wealthy French government had balked before the demands for equality coming from its African citizens, the leaders of new African states feared that they could not

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meet the demands of a politics of citizenship and needed to rely on more vertical methods of maintaining power, including the suppression of alternative modes of collective organization. The number and power of functionaries did not necessarily decline in independent African countries, but state administration became more inflected by patron-client relations and manipulation of ruling cliques eager to exclude potential challengers from access to resources. The era of labour organization presided over by a bureaucracy that believed that there was a proper technique to organizing labour was coming to an end.47 V

Conclusion This account of the bureaucratization of a crucial domain of colonial policy shows how late in the game the process took place. Confronted with strikes and other challenges in the late 1930s and especially in the 1940s, French and British governments found themselves without the means to address labour as a specific problem for a government apparatus to solve. They had to build up from a minimal institutional basis, and they had to undergo a conversion experience in how they thought about ‘natives’ and ‘workers’. They did so on the basis of what they knew, or thought they knew – European experience of how to manage class conflict, complete with an idea of ‘industrial relations’ and a bureaucracy to enforce standards and settle disputes. In the conditions of late colonial Africa, the work of such a bureaucracy had to be focused on a segment of society that governments now wanted to be distinct, on which services could be focused, whose transformation into something like a European workforce could be imagined. ‘Stabilization’ would be the watchword of the new bureaucracy; its role was to think about a segment of society, not society in general, which was too numerous, too geographically dispersed, too poor to be the objects of reform. Rural society, perhaps, could be left to the old system of colonial command, or perhaps it could more gradually be transformed by ‘development’ policies administered by another – also quite new – part of the governmental apparatus. The new institutional apparatus and the new thinking about labour were notably unstable. The bureaucracy became an object of claim making by African social movements, which understood that the colonial state in the 1940s and 1950s was constrained by the task to make colonies both more 47

For fuller consideration of the process and consequences of the transition to independence, see Cooper, Decolonization; Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: the past of the present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Frederick Cooper, ‘Possibility and constraint: African independence in historical perspective’, Journal of African History 49:2 (2008), 167–96.

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productive and legitimate and by the hope that its officials repeatedly expressed that if only European governments acted as if Africans could become workers like any other, then they would both want to and be able to do so. In trying to pre-empt demands to overturn the colonial system, French leaders had opened up space in which claims could be made. And they had organized a bureaucracy that believed enough in the universal nature of its task to support a reformist agenda in the domain of wage labour. The rulers of empire could not control the process they had helped foster. By the mid-1950s, British and French governments were reeling under the escalation of claim making while realizing that plans for economic development would take a long time to reach fulfilment. The process that led, at long last, to British and French governments taking seriously the project of transforming African societies in a European image – and the administrative apparatus hastily developed to deal with the problem – did not make European rule more durable. The Inspection du Travail – by its very structure and its new mission – became both the expression of the attempt to bring Africans more fully into the institutional structure of the ‘modern’ world and the recipient of demands from Africans to make real the theoretical equivalence of French citizens. It was in a time of institutional and ideological reform that the colonial project became unsustainable.

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17

The Unintended Consequences of Bureaucratic ‘Modernization’ in Post–World War ii British Africa Timothy H. Parsons

Look, young man, if you’re going to understand colonial administration, there are two words you will instantly excise from your vocabulary. The first word is ‘bureaucracy’ and the second word is ‘theory’. Without them you’ll get on much better. —J. J. Tawney (Director, Oxford Colonial Records Project) to Bruce Berman

J. J. Tawney’s seemingly dismissive statement about administration in British Africa, which he made to a young academic in 1975, was actually quite telling.1 In offering this blunt advice, Tawney – a former member of the colonial civil service – acknowledged that imperial systems of rule were fundamentally different from the bureaucratic institutions of Western nation states, and he made it clear that the men who ran British Africa did not see themselves as bureaucrats. Max Weber’s ideal-type bureaucracy was depersonalized, rational and ordered precisely by regulation.2 Social scientists often list this kind of efficient bureaucracy as a central characteristic of ‘modernity’, but the administrative systems that the architects of the ‘new’ empires of the 1880s used to govern their African territories met few of Weber’s criteria. Until World War ii, the primary inspiration for British systems of imperial rule in Africa were the chartered companies of the early modern era, not the Western nation state. Most significantly, the post-war Labour government’s attempt to revitalize Britain’s African empire by making it more rational and efficient actually accelerated its unexpectedly rapid demise a decade later. Empire, by strict definition, was the formal, permanent and authoritarian rule of one group of people over another. In hindsight, the great empires of the past appeared omnipotent and stable because they were long lived, but they actually lacked the capacity to govern directly at the local level. This meant that 1

2

A. H. M. Kirk-Greene (ed.), The transfer of power: the colonial administrator in the age of decolonisation (Oxford: University of Oxford Inter-Faculty Committee for African Studies, 1979), p. 160. See also J. J. Tawney, ‘The oral history programme of the Oxford Colonial Records Project’, Oral History 1 (1972). Weber, Theory, p. 337.

412

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conquerors needed allies from subject populations to assert authority and extract revenue. They had to share power to exert power. Contrary to Weber, bureaucratic inefficiency was thus a virtue in that it made imperial rule more stable by forcing foreign rulers to temper their demands for tribute and labour. The system of indirect rule, which British administrators developed in India, was an inexpensive pragmatic innovation that allowed a small handful of field officers to govern colonial majorities by enlisting some of them in their own subjugation.3 With important exceptions, sociological analyses of bureaucracy rarely consider twentieth-century African case studies and count the imposition of Western bureaucratic systems on ‘primitive’ societies as a modernizing benefit of Western rule. Britain’s African empire was short lived precisely because it was an authoritarian system that aspired to become more efficient. It made the mistake of departing from the administrative template that made earlier empires more stable. Seeking to compensate for the loss of India, the rulers of post-war Britain looked to reform and develop their remaining African colonies to provide resources for reconstruction and preserve their status as a global power. This required them to expand, rationalize and update systems of imperial rule that had more in common with the long-defunct British East India Company than a Western nation state.4 The Labour government’s colonial experts depicted this project as a mutually beneficial partnership with their remaining colonial subjects. In essence, they sought to create a liberal empire through bureaucratic reform that would defuse African demands for independence and answer the critics of empire in the United States, the Soviet Union and the British metropole. Instead, the reformers accelerated the end of empire by making it more burdensome to their African subjects. I

Planned Decolonization? The inability of this developmentalist brand of imperialism to sustain the British empire in Africa shows that modern bureaucratic efficiency was fundamentally incompatible with sustainable imperial rule. Yet its architects denied that their project was a failure and claimed that their goal had always been to prepare Africans for independence. Speaking in 1979 to an Oxford University conference on the ‘transfer of power’, Sir Hilton Poynton (1905–96), a former undersecretary of state for the colonies, insisted that decolonization was simply 3 4

For discussion and relevant secondary literature on ‘indirect rule’, see the Crooks and Parsons (Chapter 1, p. 24 n. 95). On Company India, see also Heath (Chapter 15, pp. 369–71).

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the ‘culmination of an evolutionary process . . . logically carried out at [a] varying tempo over a period of nearly two hundred years’.5 This revisionist assertion was part of a long-standing historical debate as to whether African independence was the result of a planned transfer of power or a bureaucratic failure that forced a pragmatic retreat from empire in the face of growing nationalist opposition to foreign rule.6 Poynton and his colleagues were sincere in their confidence that it was the former, but in reality Britain never had a precise blueprint for leaving Africa. It is easy to draw conflicting conclusions about the nature and purpose of the post-war development reforms because British imperial rule was so decentralized. The Colonial Office advised the colonial secretary and supervised the colonial civil service, but it did not make ironclad policy. Instead, it exercised influence through colonial governors and their administrations, and men such as Poynton had relatively little direct authority over district officers, soldiers and settlers. The Colonial Office was also only responsible for the colonies in West, East and Central Africa. The Sudanese administration was a separate service, and the Dominions Office dealt with South Africa, Swaziland, Basutoland and Bechuanaland. Consequently, honest idealistic statements about reform, partnership, trusteeship and nation-building in London did not translate into specific actions in Africa. Moreover, the real question was not whether Britain intended to grant its colonies self-government, but when it would do so. Suggesting African colonies might one day become dominions on a par with Canada, Australia and New Zealand sounded noble, but imperial thinkers made that privilege contingent upon a largely undefined level of civilization, culture and infrastructure. In the 1920s, Frederick Lugard (1858–1945) was confident that ‘the era of complete independence is not as yet visible on the horizon of time’, and in 1947 a Colonial Office report still asserted that British minority rule in Africa was necessary owing to the ‘present inability of the majority to stand alone in the strenuous conditions of the modern world’.7 In effect, the imperial authorities treated Africans as adolescent primitives who were not ready to govern themselves. Colonial officials in London spoke earnestly of the duties of trusteeship, but for most settlers, and even a few field administrators, these same sentiments spun out as pernicious racism. As late as 1949, the Kenyan governor Sir Philip Mitchell (1890–1964) defended racial segregation by declaring that ‘white 5 6

7

Kirk-Greene, Transfer of power, pp. 5, 15–16, 20, 65. See, for example, John Flint, ‘Planned decolonization and its failure in British Africa’, African Affairs 82:328 (1983), 389–411; R. D. Pearce, ‘The Colonial Office and planned decolonization in Africa’, ibid., 83:330 (1984), 77–93; Richard Crook, ‘Decolonization, the colonial state, and chieftaincy in the Gold Coast’, ibid., 85:338 (1986), 75–105; Wm. Roger Louis, ‘The dissolution of the British empire’, in Wm. Roger Louis (ed.), OHBE¸ vol. iv: the twentieth century, ch. 14. Lugard, Dual mandate, p. 193; Colonial Office summer conference on African administration: African local government, 1st session (London: CO, 1947), p. 120.

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settlement . . . is the framework around which the whole economy of the Colony has been constructed’.8 Mitchell was representative of an earlier generation of reactionary administrators, but in practice both he and the reformers in London agreed that Africans could not govern themselves. II

The Imperial Bureaucracy This assumption was at the root of the post-war Labour government’s plans to modernize Britain’s African empire through top-down and direct state intervention. Confident that self-government, to say nothing of full independence, was comfortably far off, the reformers ambitiously sought to remake virtually every aspect of colonial society. This included updating and expanding the small, antique and highly inefficient system of imperial rule with which Britain had governed its African territories since the 1890s. Ever mindful of the Treasury’s insistence that the colonies had to be selfsupporting, the Colonial Office ran the pre-war colonies on a shoestring. It selected, appointed, trained and promoted civil service officers, but the territorial governments themselves paid, posted and pensioned them. This meant that each individual colony had a self-funded separate bureaucracy, and the Colonial Office did not finish amalgamating them into a unified civil service until 1940. Colonial administrations consisted of a few understaffed technical departments; the field administration; and subordinate non-European grades for clerks, artisans and various categories of ‘assistants’. The marginal, largely token, pre-war African school systems in most colonies dictated that governments relied on slightly better paid South Asians, Arabs and Greeks. Small territorial armies, which in peacetime were little more than lightly armed gendarmeries, and equally rudimentary police forces were more than sufficient to protect a system of rule that made relatively few direct demands on the subject population. Consequently, in 1926 Britain governed Nigeria, a colony covering 373,000 square miles and encompassing a population of 20 million people, with a tiny European staff that consisted of 368 field administrators, 233 military officers, 61 policemen, 462 railway engineers, 204 doctors and nurses and 101 teachers.9 African chiefs, headmen and other ‘native authorities’ made this administrative sleight of hand possible. In adapting Indian indirect rule to Africa, pioneer administrators such as Lugard developed a thin but economical 8 9

Kenya governor to colonial secretary, Arthur Creech Jones, Memorandum on legislation involving racial discrimination, 28 Feb. 1949, CO 859/129/1, TNA. Anthony Kirk-Greene, On crown service: a history of HM and Overseas Civil Services (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999), p. 114.

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bureaucratic system that made African allies responsible for enforcing British rule. Like the submerged mass of an iceberg, the chiefs and their tribal police constituted the bulk of the actual colonial bureaucracy. Lugard and his men, who depicted themselves as experts in native law and custom, justified this decidedly non-modern system as necessary to protect fragile tribal cultures. In West Africa, indirect rule therefore required the first generation of imperial administrators to purge the Gold Coast civil service of African district officers, lawyers, doctors, city councillors and militia commanders on the grounds that these trained specialists, who essentially ran British West Africa in the midnineteenth century, were too westernized to govern tribesmen. The British district officer, by comparison, viewed himself as the mentor and patron of native authorities.10 These anachronistic systems of imperial administration had little in common with the twentieth-century bureaucratic ideal. While Weber asserted that it ‘would be sheer illusion to think for a moment that continuous administrative work can be carried out in any field except by means of officials working in offices’, colonial district officers disdained desk work and prided themselves on governing from ‘the bush’. Where Weber’s European bureaucrats were superior by virtue of their ‘technical knowledge’, the ideal colonial civil servant was a self-avowed generalist who developed the habits of ‘rigorous mental exercise’ by studying Greek and Latin at Oxford or Cambridge.11 Their goal was to run their districts with minimal interference from the colonial capital. In rural Africa, the imperial bureaucracy essentially was the government, and autonomous district officers both made and administered policy. While pre-war imperial rule was inexpensive and expedient, it was incompatible with a sweeping development agenda. Whereas Weber tied the Western bureaucratic tradition to the rise of capitalism, most British district officers presided over simple subsistence agrarian and pastoral economies. Frederick Cooper thus makes the convincing argument that in adopting indirect rule and embracing tribal culture, the first generation of colonial administrators admitted implicitly that the new imperialism’s project to transform and modernize primitive African societies had failed.12 This reality became obvious after the great depression shrank the market for African exports. Colonial governments and private employers tried to cope with the crisis through harsh austerity programmes that cut wages and placed greater demands on ordinary labourers. The result was a wave of strikes that swept through West Indian plantations, the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt, 10 11 12

Kirk-Greene, Transfer of power, pp. 91–3, 175. Robert Heussler, Yesterday’s rulers: the making of the British colonial service (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1963), pp. 109–10, 114; Weber, Theory, p. 337. Frederick Cooper, ‘Conflict and connection: rethinking colonial African history’, AHR 99:5 (1994), 1516–45, at 1531.

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West African railways, and the East African ports of Mombasa and Dar es Salaam between 1935 and 1938. The uncoordinated but widespread unrest unnerved colonial officials by threatening to overwhelm their simple internal security systems. It also demonstrated conclusively that the native authorities, who were the cornerstones of indirect rule, could not address the root causes of the strikes. Under the leadership of Malcolm MacDonald (1901–81), who became colonial secretary in 1938, the Colonial Office undertook a comprehensive policy review that laid the groundwork for the post-war development programme. The depression had already convinced metropolitan British leaders that state intervention and management could promote positive social change and prosperity. To this end, the Colonial Office added new specialist departments focusing on labour, social services, public relations and other technical aspects of development. MacDonald also convinced Parliament to pass the Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940 that allocated £5 million per annum over a ten-year span to increase agricultural production, invest in infrastructure and improve social services. In abandoning the precedent that colonies had to be self-sustaining, MacDonald and his advisers argued that prosperity born of this pump priming would bring labour peace and overall stability to the empire. The Colonial Development and Welfare Act also usefully rebutted Nazi anti-imperial propaganda and blunted a negative report by a royal commission investigating the West Indian labour unrest.13 MacDonald’s imperial policy review also included a 1938 declaration in the House of Commons that Britain’s central objective in the empire was to create self-governing colonies. One year later, he sent Lord Arthur Hailey to Africa to investigate how indirect rule might be reworked to become more efficient and promote economic development. Not surprisingly, Hailey concluded that illiterate tribal chiefs were inefficient bureaucrats, and he recommended overhauling local governmental systems to give educated Africans greater administrative experience. During the war, Oliver Stanley (1896–1950), one of MacDonald’s successors as colonial secretary, assured the Allies that Britain’s aim was to guide its colonies to self-government within the empire. In 1944, the Treasury increased funding for the Colonial Development and Welfare Act, which had essentially been postponed by the hostilities, and extended it into the 1950s. Proponents of the planned decolonization hypothesis cite these developments as evidence that MacDonald’s Colonial Office had a coherent programme to transfer power to suitably prepared colonial elites.14 13

14

John Hargreaves, Decolonization in Africa, 2nd edn (London: Longmans, 1996), p. 48; Joanna Lewis, Empire state-building: war and welfare in Kenya, 1925–52 (Oxford: James Currey, 2000), p. 98. Flint, ‘Planned decolonization’, 390, 398–9.

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There was no such plan, and the main aim of these new policies was to buy the empire time by countering anti-imperial propaganda and diverting ambitious Africans into local politics. Self-government remained undefined, and political change was still contingent upon a colony reaching an unspecified stage of social and economic modernity. While George Orwell considered that the policy shifts in London allowed ‘well meaning, over-civilised men, in dark suits and black felt hats, with neatly-rolled umbrellas crooked over the left forearm’ to impose a ‘constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay’, in the short term the discussions in the pre-war Colonial Office had relatively little immediate impact on Africa.15 The Gold Coast appointed two Africans as assistant district commissioners as part of larger constitutional reforms in 1942, but otherwise the colonial bureaucracies remained largely the same. III

Developmental Imperialism and the Second Colonial Occupation This changed in 1945 when the physical and economic destruction of World War ii led Clement Attlee’s Labour government to look to the empire to fund British reconstruction. While Britain could claim satisfaction and relief in the Allied victory, fighting a global war cost one-quarter of its national wealth and £1 billion worth of its foreign assets. The British debt in 1945 stood at £3.7 billion, and its industrial base was largely crippled by wartime mobilization and Nazi bomb and rocket attacks. Faced with shrinking overseas markets, and owing an enormous Lend Lease debt to the United States, Britain struggled to find dollars to pay for essential imports of food, energy and building materials as sterling lost value. By 1946, the public grew understandably restive as a brutal winter and poor harvests made it necessary to continue wartime rationing.16 The leaders of post-war Britain had to make significant economic concessions to the United States to refinance their loans and secure essential reconstruction aid. With Indian independence inevitable, they had no choice but to focus on their remaining empire in Africa to preserve Britain’s status as a global power and generate wealth to meet these obligations. Ernest Bevin (1881–1951), the Labour foreign secretary, spoke of revitalizing the empire, perhaps in cooperation with the French, to create a common African market that would act as a ‘third force’ to balance the United States and Soviet Union. Similarly, the minister for economic 15 16

Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds.), The collected essays, journalism and letters of George Orwell, vol. ii: 1940–43 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968), p. 73. L. J. Butler, Britain and empire: adjusting to a post-imperial world (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), p. 60.

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affairs, Sir Stafford Cripps (1912–93), told African governors that it was essential to ‘force the pace’ of raw material production to produce more exports from the Commonwealth and sterling-using countries that could be sold to the United States for dollars.17 This pragmatic but entirely unrealistic agenda was at the root of the Labour Colonial Office’s reformist post-war development plans. The socialist Arthur Creech Jones (1891–1964), who had been a vocal and persistent critic of imperial policy in his capacity as the chair of the Fabian Colonial Bureau, now became colonial secretary. But African leaders such as Tom Mboya, who hoped that he might dismantle the empire or at least limit the power of the settler class, were sorely disappointed. Liberal paternalists to the core, Creech Jones and his men never intended to surrender political control but instead sought to create a more efficient and politically acceptable form of imperial rule. Like Lugard and the first generation of colonial administrators in Africa, he believed British rule was justified because most Africans were ‘backward people’ who lacked the ‘revolution of habit and mental capacity’ to make use of the benefits of the ‘modern state’.18 No longer willing to trust development to private interests, Labour experts believed Britain’s tribal wards needed the state to integrate them into the global economy while protecting their fragile social customs. The resulting mutually beneficial development would supply the world (and Britain) with rubber, fibres, sugar, cocoa, tin and gold while providing the wealth needed to save Africans from famine, disease and tribal war.19 Nonetheless, Creech Jones and his senior advisers were fully aware that global opinion was turning against empires and that a small but vocal class of educated Africans had nationalist ambitions. Asserting that ‘all imperialism is evil’, the delegates to the Fifth Pan-Africanist Congress, which met in Manchester in late 1945 and included the future African heads of state Kwame Nkrumah (?1909–72), Hastings Kamuzu Banda (c.1898–1997), and Jomo Kenyatta (c.1895–1978), insisted on the ‘immediate right to selfdetermination’ for all colonial peoples. Anticipating the Labour government’s reformist colonial policies, they also asserted that the ‘European left’ had ‘forfeited the right to leadership of the struggle against Imperialism’. In 1948, Creech Jones acknowledged these demands when he predicted 17

18

19

John Kent, ‘Bevin’s imperialism and the idea of Euro-Africa, 1945–49’, in Michael Dockrill and John Young (eds.), British foreign policy, 1945–56 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989), p. 47. Tom Mboya, ‘On behalf of a group of Africans’, in The Kenya controversy, Fabian Colonial Bureau controversy series, no. 4 (London: Fabian Publications, 1947), p. 13; Colonial office summer conference on African administration: the encouragement of initiative in African society, 2nd session (London: CO, 1948), p. 15. CO summer conference, 2nd session, pp. 12–13.

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a ‘troublesome period ahead’ when African leaders would ‘clamour for the benefits of civilization without the economic basis to sustain them.’20 The colonial reformers’ goal was, therefore, mutually beneficial development that would make British rule more acceptable to ordinary Africans. Just as the Labour government was remaking metropolitan Britain through top-down economic management and popular socialism, Creech Jones and his advisers believed that paternalistic good intentions and rational administration could modernize tribal societies in the colonies. Abandoning, at least on paper, their alliance with the traditional chiefs who were the cornerstones of pre-war indirect rule, they sought to make native councils more representative and create a new class of progressive farmers. Trade unions would promote efficiency by managing the labour force and preventing workers’ grievances from turning political. Additionally, the new system would isolate troublemakers such as Kenyatta and Nkrumah by drawing the still-small class of politically conscious Africans into democratic systems of local government modelled on the British county council system. These responsible elites would eventually qualify for seats in the colonial legislative councils, which at some point would evolve into national parliaments within the commonwealth. With the redemption of this promise of self-determination reassuringly over the horizon, the idealists in the Colonial Office looked to remake every aspect of African society. Their top priority was to bring about a colonial agricultural revolution. While Attlee’s government backed grandiose large-scale development projects through the Colonial Development and Overseas Food Corporations, colonial officials considered peasant farmers best equipped to produce the raw materials and dollar-earning exports that were essential to their larger plans. State-run marketing boards, which required Africans to sell their crops at reduced prices on the premise that the surplus ensured guaranteed prices in down years, helped rebuild British dollar reserves and strengthen the sterling area because London banks held their accounts. In terms of policy, the colonial experts acknowledged that this agricultural revolution meant ‘reaching into every village’ to teach scientific techniques, introduce better crops and grades of livestock and overcome the traditional tribal resistance to change.21 Yet this did not mean the wholesale promotion of commercial agriculture for the Labourites retained the earlier generation of colonial administrators’ distrust of unrestrained capitalism. Certain that privatized production would undermine tribal society by requiring new systems of land tenure, Creech Jones disavowed revolutionary change: ‘it is our deep rooted policy to preserve the social organisations we have inherited and modify 20 21

George Padmore (ed.), History of the pan-African congress (London: Hammersmith Bookshop, c.1947), p. 11; CO summer conference, 2nd session, p. 15. CO summer conference, 2nd session, p. 17; Colonial Office summer conference on African administration: agricultural development in Africa, 3rd session (London: CO, 1949), p. 7.

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them only gradually.’22 Worried that individualism and the unchecked pursuit of profit would overuse the soil, they stressed that tribal land was a trust for the entire community and promoted cooperative and ‘group farming’ to better utilize mechanization and create credit-worthy land units. Those who refused to acknowledge their obligations to future generations by using approved growing methods faced strict sanctions, and colonial legal advisers ruled that ‘compulsion’ to get Africans to terrace their fields did not violate international conventions against forced labour because soil conservation was a ‘civic duty’.23 The colonial experts hoped that using the social sciences to gain a deeper understanding of the ‘cultural characteristics of colonial peoples’ would reduce the need for such authoritarian tactics. To this end, the Colonial Research Committee funded extensive ethnographic surveys of tribal societies in every corner of British Africa with an eye to helping colonial governments better manage social and economic change.24 The Colonial Office expected to use this information to shape mass education campaigns that promoted proper farming and living. Through these community development initiatives, the reformers made every person part of the larger development project. This included women and children on the assumption that a proper home life produced the right kind of farmer, worker and colonial subject. Community development officers therefore promoted Boy Scouting, Girl Guiding, 4-H clubs and other state-controlled youth movements to ensure that materialistic young people did not slip the bonds of generational authority or tribal discipline. New courses in needlework, ‘cookery’, interior decoration, childcare and other aspects of Western domesticity also aimed to produce the wives and mothers who would inspire ‘African manhood to better his lot.’25 This was bureaucracy at its most invasive, and the authorities in London recognized that it would take a new kind of administrator to implement their ambitious reforms. They undertook steps to transform the colonial civil service and local administrations into something closer to a specialized and efficient Western bureaucracy. Funded largely by the Colonial Development and Welfare Act, the modernization programme recruited 1,715 new officers in 1946 and raised the overall strength of the service to 10,000 in 1947.26 Many of these men were veterans of World War ii, but overall recruiting remained in the 22 23 24

25 26

Quoted in Paul Keleman, ‘Planning for Africa: the British Labour Party’s colonial development policy, 1920–1964’, Journal of Agrarian Change 7 (2007), 85. Colonial Office summer conference on African administration: African local government, 4th session (London: CO, 1951), p. 106. David Mills, ‘Anthropology at the end of empire: the rise and fall of the colonial social science research council, 1944–1962’, in Benoît de L’Estoile, Federico Neiburg and Lygia Sigaud (eds.), Empires, nations, and natives: anthropology and state-making (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 156. CO summer conference, 2nd session, pp. 64–5; CO summer conference, 3rd session, pp. 73–4. Kirk-Greene, On crown service, pp. 47, 77, 94.

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hands of Sir Ralph Furse (1887–1973), a long-serving Colonial Office official who used his contacts at Oxford and Cambridge to nominate graduates from good families with a strong athletic background. Furse was an accomplished cricketer who had a strong bias against intellectuals and ‘spectacled chaps’. When the Colonial Office gathered field administrators for semi-regular summer conferences to discuss topical issues relating to imperial administration, the programme always included tennis, crew races and cricket matches with Furse himself taking a leading role. This clubby culture created something of a problem as the new developmental imperialism required technically proficient specialists, but in 1949 a senior Colonial Office official observed that ‘bad empire publicity’ in the schools made it difficult to recruit skilled agricultural officers.27 This admission spoke to the reality that the administrative branch of the colonial civil service remained a closed and insular fraternity. Looking back nostalgically, Terence Gavaghan captured the enormously high self-esteem of the colonial field administrator: ‘We were an elite corps of an elite system, created for the benevolent exercise of paternal power.’28 For all the talk about making imperial rule more scientific, post-war district officers remained committed generalists. In terms of training, successful applicants received only an additional year of study at Oxford or Cambridge before being posted to Africa. In 1951, a Colonial Office report listed their many duties: magistrate, police officer, forestry officer, land officer, transport officer, postmaster, liaison with missions, collector of revenue, labour and mines officer, game warden, military representative, information officer and supervisor of native courts, authorities and treasuries.29 The Colonial Office promoted district teams to get administrative and technical officers to work together on specific local projects, but realistically most district officers did not have the time or inclination to share authority in their de facto fiefdoms. Moreover, the Colonial Office could actually do very little to compel colonial governments to implement the sweeping policies that sounded so grand and revolutionary in London. Governors such as Arthur Richards in Nigeria and Philip Mitchell in Kenya, who began their careers in the Lugard era, had their doubts about replacing chiefly indirect rule with representative African local government. One of the main aims of the Colonial Office’s summer conferences was to win over younger administrative officers, and its 1948 handbook spoke of the need to move away from old-school officers who ‘liked people but could not get on well with the educated native’.30 Yet in 27

28 30

P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British imperialism: crisis and deconstruction, 1914–1990 (London: Longman, 1993), p. 25; Heussler, Yesterday’s rulers, pp. 116–17; CO summer conference, 3rd session, pp. 9, 90. 29 Kirk-Greene, On crown service, p. 126. CO summer conference, 4th session, p. 155. Kirk-Greene, On crown service, p. 99.

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practice it was senior men such as Mitchell and Richards who made the substantial policy decisions in the post-war years. This was particularly true in East and Central Africa where racial segregation remained an intractable problem despite the Colonial Office’s urgent plea to eliminate ‘all traces of colour prejudice’ as the first step towards reaching an understanding with the African elites that it needed to draw into local government. But when Creech Jones asked the African governors to report on racially discriminatory legislation in their colonies in 1947, Mitchell unapologetically defended Kenya’s policy of treating Africans differently under the law on the grounds that they were at a ‘different stage of development’.31 Wilfully tuning out the talk of partnership and local government that was taking in place in London, Mitchell spent the immediate post-war years working to confirm Kenya’s status as a ‘white man’s colony’ by bringing elected settlers into the executive council through a new member system. In West Africa, where there were no entrenched settlers, the Colonial Office urged the governors to withdraw licenses from segregated social clubs and declare specifically that racial discrimination was not official policy. But in the case of the settler colonies, it suggested tepidly that governments institute measures to educate the European public on racial tolerance. Similarly, Creech Jones did not pressure the East and Central African colonies to keep pace with Nigeria and the Gold Coast in granting Africans military commissions.32 While the West African governments began to reopen their civil services to Africans in the early 1940s, the settler colonies were committed to keeping their senior bureaucratic ranks segregated regardless of what the Colonial Office said about racial understanding. Where the Gold Coast took the lead in recruiting Africans as full district officers, the best Kenya could do was to create a distinct and inferior grade of ‘African assistant administrative officer’. In terms of wages, the Holmes Commission, which reviewed the civil services of the East African colonies, found that the ‘time was not ripe’ for non-racial pay scales on the grounds that Africans were not sufficiently removed from ‘a state of society far more primitive than that of Britain at the beginning of the Christian era – a society which was completely illiterate . . . ignorant of the wheel, the plough, the loom, a society in which the only rule was the rule of the spear or of the sorcerer’. Noting that governments had to respect civilian racial pay scales, the commission recommended that African civil servants receive three-fifths of European salaries even if they did substantially the same work.33 31

32 33

CO summer conference, 2nd session, p. 46; Kenya governor to colonial secretary Arthur Creech Jones, Memorandum on legislation involving racial discrimination, 28 Feb. 1949, CO 859/129/ 1, TNA. CO summer conference, 1st session, pp. 139–40. The commissioners also recommended that the relatively small handful of European female civil servants receive four-fifths of their male counterparts’ salaries (Great Britain, CO, Report

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This unapologetic discrimination was one of the key factors that derailed Labour’s post-war colonial agenda. Creech Jones and his allies fell into the trap of believing that they could preserve the privilege and authoritarianism of empire by making it more humane and palatable. Moreover, the Colonial Development and Welfare Act’s primary purpose was clearly to rebuild and enrich metropolitan Britain. The roughly £40 million that the Labour government spent in the empire between 1946 and 1951 amounted to less than 1 per cent of the British gross domestic product, and in return the colonial governments informally lent Britain £250 million by banking their cash crop earnings in London. African produce might have earned dollars in North America, but African farmers got their pay in sterling.34 Labour’s imperial partnership was an unequal one at best. Few Africans were aware of the scope of the disparities in these high policies, but they found the significant problems that plagued many colonies after the war were deeply frustrating. Inflation driven by wartime spending and the post-war restrictions on dollar-denominated imports exacerbated a food shortage caused by expanded cash crop production.35 Those able to mobilize sufficient land and labour to take advantage of the new commercial opportunities prospered, but colonial restrictions on private wealth and investment were maddening. Ultimately, the mutually beneficial partnership envisioned by the Labour colonial experts never materialized, and there were no significant sources of new wealth to mitigate the most oppressive aspects of the larger post-war imperial bureaucracy. Indeed, many people found the well-meaning but high-handed officials and experts who arrived in the colonies to implement the new development agenda unacceptably intrusive. In what Anthony Low and John Lonsdale termed the ‘second colonial occupation’, colonial bureaucracies grew substantially after World War ii. In Kenya, the number of Europeans in state employment more than quadrupled to 5,590 between 1945 and 1955. And for each European civil servant colonial governments employed, many more were subordinate and poorly paid Africans. These included agricultural, veterinary, soil reconditioning, community development, welfare, sanitary, medical, probation, survey, and military reabsorption assistants, instructors and demonstrators. Efficient African clerks and tribal policemen ensured that most rural communities now had to pay their taxes in full. This bureaucratic explosion made imperial rule more of a daily reality to the average person. In the 1950s, the staff of a typical Kenyan district included European officials from the agriculture, education, public works, medicine and veterinary departments, plus representatives of the

34

of the commission on the civil services of Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, and Zanzibar (London: HMSO, 1948), pp. 24–5, 39–40). Butler, Britain and empire, pp. 84–5. 35 Cooper, Decolonization, p. 207.

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Produce Control and African Land Development Boards. African district councils, which grew out of the Colonial Office’s local government initiative, had no authority over these foreign functionaries, who answered only to Nairobi.36 While bureaucratic efficiency could bring security and improved services to the citizens of Western nation states, in British colonial Africa it extended the authoritarian reach of a foreign regime. In Uganda, Akalule Sempa spoke for many when he wondered what African soldiers had fought for in World War ii: ‘The point is it is cheating sending our men to the front to fight for Democracy only to come back to find the Government autocratic and bureaucratic.’37 Similarly, the Kenyan government’s insistence that entire communities build terraces as part of its soil conservation programme provoked widespread resistance. Far from seeing communal labour as a civic duty, Kikuyu women in one district temporarily halted the entire programme with a well-organized mass protest. A Public Works Department official working in a nearby Kamba district warned hostility towards soil reconditioning was so intense that ‘the most trivial incident might be made the excuse to set the whole [Kamba] reserve ablaze’.38 In neighbouring Tanganyika, community leaders also questioned the value of the new development agenda: ‘We are a poor people . . . and yet we are made poorer by demands of taxes and working for projects which make us no better.’39 The Colonial Office’s elaborate trade union and local government schemes were entirely unsuited to managing this widespread discontent. As Frederick Cooper discusses in Chapter 16, the inability of wages to keep pace with inflation touched off another wave of strikes and riots that swept through Southern Rhodesia, Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda and West Africa between 1946 and 1950. Constitutional concessions in the Gold Coast, which gave Africans a majority in the Legislative Council in 1946, failed to make the population more tolerant of British rule. In 1948, anger over the government’s attempt to cut down diseased cocoa trees and veteran discontent over unemployment and unpaid benefits culminated in a protest that turned into a fullscale riot in Accra, which ended with two deaths when the panicked police fired into the crowd. One year later, the Ugandan authorities arrested more than 1,700 people when Kampala and its environs similarly erupted over the slow 36

37 38 39

D. A. Low and John Lonsdale, ‘Introduction: towards the new order, 1945–1963’, in D. A. Low and A. Smith (eds.), History of East Africa, vol. iii (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 43; Bruce Berman, Control and crisis in colonial Kenya: the dialectic of domination (Nairobi: East African Publishers, 1990), pp. 290–2. Censored Letter, Akalule Sempa to Canon H. M. Grace, 22 Feb. 1945, CS 1/17/23/291a, KNA. Berman, Control and crisis, p. 308; P. H. Huth to Kenya Labour Commissioner, 25 Apr. 1946, DC Machakos 3/90/50, KNA. Quoted in John Iliffe, A modern history of Tanganyika (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 443.

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pace of constitutional reform and government controls on cotton production, ginning and marketing. Following that, it took a baton charge by 2,000 Kenyan policemen to break up a protest sparked in part by the settlers’ celebration of Nairobi’s award of a Royal Charter in 1950.40 The signs of this simmering discontent were plainly visible in most colonies, but the resulting strikes and riots usually took British authorities by surprise. While Creech Jones and his advisers did not let the civil unrest derail the development plans, the Accra riots were a deciding factor in their decision to put the West African colonies on an accelerated path to self-government. This was not as large a concession as it might appear. The partition of Palestine and Egyptian pressure on the Suez Canal Zone had already convinced Attlee’s government that it was time to leave the Middle East. Moreover, the 1951 agreement with Kwame Nkrumah – giving the Gold Coast national independence in six years in return for his promise to respect British commercial interests and remain within the Western sphere of influence – was in many ways a return to the successful nineteenth-century policy of ‘informal empire’. While the British retreat from the Gold Coast made independence for Nigeria, Gambia and Sierra Leone inevitable, it would be wrong to take the West African concessions as evidence of a planned transfer of power. Events in Africa outpaced policymaking in London, and the relatively sudden and pragmatic decision to withdraw from West Africa did not launch an African nationbuilding project. Colonial officials in fact envisioned an entirely different timeline for East and Central Africa whereby politically entrenched settlers made the West African model of informal empire impossible and unthinkable. In this case, Britain tried to deflect African demands for independence with multiracial federations in which Africans shared power with settlers, South Asians and Arabs. Instead of ‘one man, one vote’, these racially gerrymandered plans envisioned political representation based on a community’s degree of civilization. Not surprisingly, few Africans found this arrangement acceptable. Intense opposition in Uganda and Tanganyika to federating with settler-dominated Kenya forced British planners to settle for a non-political East African Common Services Organization that oversaw regional transportation, communications and customs. In Central Africa, where settlers were more numerous and influential, the new Conservative government in London ignored vociferous African protests to create the Central African Federation (CAF) in 1953. 40

Report of the commission of enquiry into disturbances in the Gold Coast (London: HMSO, 1948), pp. 12–13; Uganda Protectorate, Report of the commission of inquiry into the disturbances in Uganda during April, 1949 (Entebbe: Government Printer, 1950), pp. 21–3; Brigadier A. C. F. Jackson to East Africa Command, 26 May 1949, WO 269/67, TNA; Diary of events on active internal security service, East Africa armoured car squadron, 13–24 May 1950, WO 269/ 238, TNA.

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In linking Northern and Southern Rhodesia with Nyasaland, Tory colonial officials sought to create a more productive economic unit and block the northward spread of extreme South African politicized racism. Theoretically, British oversight and the federation constitution protected African rights, but white leaders made it clear that they expected to join the Gold Coast in full independence at the end of the decade.41 IV

Bureaucracy and the Transfer of Power Tellingly, these political changes in Africa had relatively little impact on the mission of the colonial civil service and bureaucracy for most of the 1950s. Winston Churchill remained an unapologetic imperial partisan during his last premiership, and his Conservative government was committed to preserving Britain’s global influence, not dismantling its remaining empire. Moreover, Britain and its sterling-using allies still suffered a significant dollar shortage in the early 1950s, which led the 1952 Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference to issue a communiqué directing that ‘development should be concentrated on projects which directly or indirectly contribute to the improvement of the [sterling] area’s balance of payments with the rest of the world’.42 One year later, Sir Charles Lockhart, head of the Overseas Food Corporation, affirmed that in Africa this meant a continued focus on primary agricultural production because the colonies could not afford mechanized farming, much less secondary industries.43 The Colonial Office also remained committed to its local government initiative, and in turning a blind eye to the new realities in Africa. Sir Ralph Furse used a cricket metaphor to counsel that Britain should not play its ‘strokes too late . . . or jab at the ball’ in trying to turn the ‘coloured colonies’ into national members of the Commonwealth.44 While Furse and his colleagues still believed that full self-rule for most of British Africa remained comfortably far off, the Gold Coast’s looming independence had a negative impact on recruiting for the colonial civil service. In 1953, the permanent undersecretary of state for the colonies declared that there were still good careers for British college graduates in the colonies for ‘so far ahead as we can yet foresee’ and reassured colonial civil servants that their pensions were safe by citing Nkrumah’s promise to respect their terms of service.45 Nevertheless, 41 42 43 45

Hargreaves, Decolonization in Africa, pp. 146–9, 179; Pearce, ‘The Colonial Office and planned decolonization’, 87–8. Colonial Office summer conference on African administration: rural economic development, 5th session (London: CO, 1953), pp. 18–19. 44 Ibid., pp. 22–3. CO summer conference, 4th session, pp. 13–14, 28. CO summer conference, 5th session, pp. 14–15.

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one year later 40 per cent of the civil service positions in East Africa and half of the posts in West Africa were unfilled. Thwarted by the Treasury’s refusal to assume responsibility for colonial pay and pensions by allowing colonial administrators to transfer to the Foreign Office or Home Civil Service, it replaced the colonial service with Her Majesty’s Overseas Civil Service (HMOCS) in 1954. In part, the move was to preserve British influence in post-colonial Africa by ensuring that the careers and benefits of expatriate British officials would not suffer if they stayed on after independence. Two years later, a white paper promised colonial civil servants that the government would guarantee their pensions, give enough notice of the transfer of power in a particular colony and compensate them if independence cut their careers short. Yet despite these reassurances, the HMOCS still struggled to attract recruits through the end of the decade.46 Interestingly, while university graduates in Britain recognized that political change in Africa reduced the appeal of an imperial career, very little actually changed in the day-to-day operations of most colonial bureaucracies. This was true even as the transfer of power drew nearer in West Africa. Peter Stallard, a district officer, recalled that he and his colleagues in Nigeria generally assumed that full independence remained ‘over the horizon.’47 This meant that the racial distinctions that separated senior European officials and their African subordinates generally remained. As late as 1952, another Nigerian district officer told his parents that his club was split by a controversy over whether to admit a newly appointed senior African official and his wife: ‘Some people are still making these racial affronts and we only have ourselves to blame if the Africans have a dislike of us.’48 The situation was even worse in East Africa where the Holmes Commission’s racial pay grades for the civil service remained in place until 1954, and even then the upper levels of the civil service remained closed to Africans because there were no opportunities to earn the degrees required for senior administrative positions until the end of the decade.49 Therefore, British officials could argue that it was not time to ‘Africanize’ the colonial bureaucracies because not enough Africans had the qualifications to master the complexities of Western-style administration. As with the promise of self-government, this was a self-serving and self-fulfilling argument for it made the indefensibly backward colonial education system the excuse to continue British rule. For example, there were only two hundred African secondary students in all of Tanganyika in 1962, which was one year 46 47 49

The original name was Her Majesty’s Overseas Civil Service (Kirk-Greene, On crown service, pp. 65–9). Kirk-Greene, Transfer of power, p. 60. 48 Ibid., p. 85. Report of the commission on the civil services of the East African territories and the East Africa high commission, 1953–54 (London: HMSO, 1954), pp. 18–19, 24.

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after independence.50 Furthermore, senior colonial officials may have declared that representative local government had replaced indirect rule as their underlying philosophy, but as late as 1957 the Colonial Office’s summer conference still maintained that ‘it is highly improbable that an effective substitute for government through chiefs can be found in [East Africa] for a long time’.51 From the hindsight of 1979, one-time senior colonial officials such as Margery Perham (1895–1982) and Sir Hilton Poynton lamented that tardiness in Africanizing the civil service had necessitated ‘crash training programs’ on the eve of decolonization, but this was the result of a conscious policy to extend the shelf life of the British empire in Africa for as long as possible.52 The expansion and modernization of the internal security apparatus in the colonies, one of the most overlooked aspects of imperial bureaucracy, in the 1950s bears this out. Intimidation and compulsion were central components of all empires, and the benevolent face of Britain’s post-war development agenda obscured the reality that the bureaucratic expansion that accompanied it included the growth of colonial armies, police forces and intelligence-gathering services. Indeed, the greater efficiency of postwar imperial rule made these modern forms of coercion and surveillance necessary. Before World War ii, most of the colonial bureaucracies born of the ‘new imperialism’ of the 1880s were so small and anaemic that they provoked relatively little resistance; but by the late 1940s, it took state resources to suppress labour unrest and compel Africans to play their assigned roles in commodity crop production and community development. To this end, most colonies established paramilitary police units equipped with armoured cars and automatic weapons after the riots and general strikes of the late 1940s. Army companies often deployed in support of the police and conducted live fire exercises to demonstrate that British rule still had teeth.53 Furthermore, the East Africa Command maintained a covert Field Security Section within the army that monitored the African soldiery for political contamination and helped the civil authorities investigate ‘subversive organizations’. The African non-commissioned officers serving in this secretive unit

50 51 52 53

Tanganyika, Africanization commission of 1962 (Dar es Salaam: Government Printer, 1963), pp. 1–2. Colonial Office summer conference on African administration: the place of chiefs in African administration, 8th session (London: CO, 1957), p. 91. Kirk-Greene, Transfer of power, pp. 14, 23, 76, 164. Great Britain, CO, Report of the Nyasaland commission of inquiry (London: HMSO, 1959), pp. 36–7; Robert Foran, The Kenya police, 1887–1960 (London: Robert Hale Limited, 1962), pp. 146, 190–1; East Africa Command circular on company safaris, 23 Apr. 1951, PC Nakuru 2/21/ 5/4, KNA; Africa Defence Committee, report on army operations, 1961, WO 305/531, TNA.

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wore the uniforms of the signals and transport branch and dressed in civilian clothes while conducting their investigations.54 Historians have tended to miss these kinds of operations because colonial officials either destroyed or repatriated key archival records back to Britain as they dismantled the empire. In Kenya, they burned stacks of files on the eve of independence in 1963 and sent three hundred boxes of material (which measured more than 100 feet end to end) concerning the activities of its security forces back to London where until recently they remained sealed.55 In Tanganyika’s Lake Province, only a single file detailing the surveillance of the anthropologist Monica Wilson survived the documentary purge. Nevertheless, glimpses of the post-war African imperial security apparatus remain in the form of oral histories. While the Colonial Office may have appeared to have gracefully accepted the necessity of turning power over to Africans after the Accra riots, Peter Stallard later admitted to being part of a covert West African political intelligence network.56 The Kenyan and Central African Federation security services were particularly robust because their settler populations rejected African demands for independence outright. Kenya’s Special Branch failed to detect the warning signs of the Mau Mau revolt in the early 1950s, but as a result of the Emergency it grew from 20 to 450 officers (only 128 of them European) between 1952 and 1958.57 In the Central African Federation, the Federal Special Branch and senior army staff officers considered the government of Nyasaland too lenient in dealing with African opposition, and they were so ruthless in crushing the 1959 anti-federation protests that a Colonial Office investigative commission declared that the protectorate had become a ‘police state’.58 Be that as it may, the colonial security services were still much too small to deal with significant outbreaks of unrest despite their rapid expansion. Nevertheless, white federation leaders still hoped they might win independence along with the West African colonies, and Kenyan settlers and civil servants, particularly those worried about their pensions, took heart in the Colonial Office’s calculation that Africans would not be ready to share power in East Africa for another ten to fifteen years. Moreover, the War Office’s 54

55

56 57

58

Instructions for officer commanding the 277 Field Security Section, 25 Apr. 1947, WO 269/4, TNA; historical report, Counter-Intelligence Unit, 1 Jan. 1960 to 31 Mar. 1962, WO/276/ 374, TNA. The FCO denied the existence of these documents when the Kenyan government requested their return in 1967 (Foreign and Commonwealth Relations Office minute, 10 Aug. 1967, FCO 31/ 211/4, TNA). Kirk-Greene, Transfer of power, pp. 60, 64, 154. F. D. Corfield, Historical survey of the origins and growth of Mau Mau (London: HMSO, 1960), p. 35; Reorganization in Kenya 1958 by Prendergast, Manby papers, MSS Afr. s. 2159, Rhodes House Library, Oxford University. Commander Nyasaland Area to Chief of Staff CAF Army, 19 Aug. 1960, F/248/2072/CAC/155/ 3/G (Ops)/25, Malawi National Archives; Nyasaland commission of inquiry, p. 1.

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decision to build a major military base outside of Nairobi in 1958 seemed further confirmation that Britain would retain control over the colony. If the end of the British empire in Africa was part of a long-term strategy to turn colonies into independent members of the Commonwealth, these officials and settler politicians were unaware of it. Consequently, Harold Macmillan’s decision as prime minister to retreat from all of Africa in 1960 caught the East and Central African governments almost entirely by surprise. Macmillan’s ‘Wind of Change’ speech, which endorsed ‘the formation of new independent nations on the continent of Africa’, was a logical move to give Britain as much influence as possible in an age when empires had become ungovernable and diplomatically embarrassing.59 The Rhodesian and Kenyan settlers screamed betrayal, but Macmillan and his advisers, when faced the choice of ‘shoot or get out’, pragmatically chose the latter option.60 The glacially slow rate of Africanization in the civil services, including the West African colonies, meant that British officials, many of them quite junior, put Macmillan’s declaration into practice. Their primary responsibility was to maintain law and order and keep the wheels of government turning, while the new class of African political elites implemented the Westminster constitutions that British government insisted upon. In Tanganyika this meant that British field administrators answered to Julius Nyerere (1922–99) in his capacity as chief minister of the transition government. Most were unprepared for this assignment because their training as district officers assumed that the colonial civil service was apolitical. Recalling his role in Kenya’s decolonization, Colin McLean admitted: ‘I personally was almost never instructed from above on what to do . . . and even less frequently on how to do it. Most of the time what I did was up to me rather than my masters.’61 These improvisational measures maintained continuity between the colonial and national eras, but the failure of both the Colonial Office and individual colonial governments to open the higher ranks of the administration to Africans threatened Macmillan’s plan to hand over power to pro-Western regimes. While senior colonial planners acknowledged the necessity of Africanization, a deep-seated sense of paternalism permeated the colonial civil service and meant that few ‘tribesmen’ qualified to join its ranks. In 1955, the Nigerian government acknowledged that independence was looming but still resisted appointing Africans to senior positions because this would accelerate the departure of key British staff. In Kenya, only 51 of the 228 members of the field administration in 1961 were Africans. There were no African district 59 60 61

Harold Macmillan, ‘Africa’, African Affairs 59:236 (1960), 193. The ‘shoot or get out’ advice came from Paul-Marc Henri, a foreign development expert invited to one of the Colonial Office summer conferences (Kirk-Greene, Transfer of power, p. 63). Ibid., p. 126.

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officers at all in Nyasaland until 1959, which meant that expatriate Britons ran Malawi for several years after independence.62 While loaning former colonial bureaucrats to the new governments ensured efficiency and continued British influence, it was politically unacceptable in the nationalist era. Consequently, most every government rushed to train African civil servants once the Colonial Office fixed an actual date for independence. In Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta accepted foreigners in the civil service, but he demanded a ‘crash-programme of Africanisation’ to replace them as soon as possible.63 To meet this need, chiefs’ schools and community development training centres became ‘institutes of administration’. Kenya’s Jeanes School thus became the Kenya Institute of Administration in 1962. Similar establishments in other former British colonies included Malawi’s Institution of Public Administration and Nigeria’s Institute of Administration. The United States played a central role in funding most of these projects on the expectation that efficient administration would check the spread of communist influence in Africa. V

Epilogue Taking the long view, post-war developmental imperialism and the second colonial occupation attempted to repair an unfixable system. Senior colonial officials were sincere in their conviction that they were preparing Africans for self-government, but their refusal to set a precise timetable for it demonstrates that they expanded and modernized the civil service to make the empire stronger and more useful to Britain. There was no planned transfer of power. More importantly, the attempt to use administrative rationalization as a development tool was doomed to fail for the simple reason that formal empire had become an unworkable anachronism by the twentieth century. The British empire in Africa appeared viable before World War ii precisely because its bureaucracy was so limited and weak. While the end of the postwar empire was inevitable, African popular resistance to extending its reach through bureaucratic modernization played a direct role in accelerating its demise. After independence, the ideal of a depersonalized, rational and regulated bureaucracy remained a central feature of Cold War–era nation-building. But the popular depiction of contemporary African states as ‘kleptocracies’ implies 62 63

Ibid., pp. 40, 164, 168–70; Anthony Clayton and Donald Savage, Government and labour in Kenya, 1895–1963 (London: Frank Cass, 1974), p. 409. Jomo Kenyatta, The KANU Manifesto (Cairo: Dar el-Hana Press, 1960), pp. 18–19.

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unfairly that Africans are to blame for failing to maintain responsible and apolitical bureaucracies inherited from their colonial masters.64 Quite the contrary, the legacy of authoritarian and unrepresentative imperial rule was a key contributing factor in the development of autocratic and corrupt independent African states. While there is no denying that British colonial civil servants were passionately committed to the paternalistic ideal of good governance, they were not answerable to the people they ruled. The Kenyan civil service was 98 per cent African by 1971, and its head G. K. Kariithi wrote passionately that the new bureaucrats had an obligation to serve the Kenyan public by rejecting the arrogant traditions of their colonial predecessors.65 In reality, the first generation of African politicians found the colonial-era bureaucratic model useful as they dispensed with Westminster constitutions to create single party states. Consequently, the Malawian field administration answered directly to President Hastings Kamuzu Banda, and Jomo Kenyatta spoke of the Africanized provincial administration, which still governed through bureaucratized chiefs, as his ‘eyes and ears’.66 In the latter case, the Akiwumi Commission – which investigated the causes of the violent civil strife accompanying the return to multiparty Kenyan elections in the 1990s – explicitly charged the civil service with inciting the clashes. The commissioners described the field administration as a colonial holdover with ‘entrenched practices and traditions’ and deemed it to be President Daniel arap Moi’s main instrument of ‘policy and control’.67 Just as colonial district officers served an unrepresentative and autocratic regime, eventually so too did their African successors.

64 65 66 67

‘A cure for corruption? The scourge of Africa’s kleptocrats’, Independent, 27 Oct. 2006; ‘In Zimbabwe’s chaos a kleptocracy thrives’, New York Times, 2 Aug. 2007. Kenya Institute of Administration, K.I.A.: 10 Years of progress (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1971), pp. 1, 3. Kirk-Greene, Transfer of power, pp. 154, 172. Judicial Commission Appointed to Inquire into Tribal Clashes in Kenya, Report of the judicial commission appointed to inquire into tribal clashes in Kenya (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1999), pp. 20–1, 27, 29.

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Part V Afterword

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18

Empires and Bureaucracy: Means of Appropriation and Media of Communication Sam Whimster

I

Weber’s Ideal Types of Bureaucracy The sociological writings of Max Weber (1864–1920) are an immediate starting point for analyzing bureaucracy. He offers two ideal types: his classic account of rationally organized bureaucracy of the modern state and modern organizations, and his far denser account of administration and officialdom in the premodern patrimonial state.1 In the index of these writings, ‘empire’ hardly appears at all, although the adjective ‘imperial’ crops up frequently, usually in descriptive passages exemplifying cases of bureaucracy and administration. This is somewhat surprising since Weber stands for wide-ranging comparative historical sociology and, in a work as comprehensive as his Economy and society, the reader might well expect to find a separate treatment of empire as a structure of power. In part, this absence of ‘empire’ may be explained by the fact that Economy and society remained unfinished at the time of Weber’s death. He had hoped to complete a sociology of the state, so ‘empire’ might have appeared there, although recent scholarship suggests that it was the modern state in which he was interested.2 An early draft chapter on political communities has a section on the ‘Economic foundations of “imperialism”’, but this provides only a starting point for further work. We have to conclude, therefore, that Weber did not treat ‘empire’ as a concept (G. Begriff). ‘Bureaucracy’, by contrast, is a concept for Weber – and within his methodology this matters. As noted in Chapter 1, Susan Reynolds urges historians to distinguish between words, concepts and phenomena.3 ‘Empire’ is a word with 1

2 3

These analyses are the opening chapters of an extensive section of Weber, E&S, entitled ‘Domination and legitimacy’ (G. Herrschaftssoziologie). There is considerable latitude in how Herrschaft can be, and is, translated. I tend to ‘rulership’, especially in premodern contexts; ‘domination’ reflects the exigencies of power; ‘authority’ is best suited to legitimate power. Gangolf Hübinger, ‘Max Weber’s “sociology of the state” and the science of politics in Germany’, Max Weber Studies 9:1/2 (2009), 17–32. Reynolds, ‘Empires’, 1; and see Crooks and Parsons (Chapter 1, p. 12).

437

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a bewildering number of usages. Placing ‘empire’ within a theory and providing it with a corresponding definition turns a word into a concept. In Weber’s methodological writings, phenomena are considered infinite in terms of the dimension of time. For historians, especially of ancient empires and societies, evidence is all too scarce, but Weber’s point remains valid in a logical sense: at any one point in history, an infinity of things were happening – being said, being done, being thought about it. The empirical world is dense with endless phenomena. The social scientist and historian are forced, maybe not always consciously, into being selective in what they choose to study and how they go about their investigation. The concept is the theoretical tool that represents those selection decisions.4 Modern bureaucracy has been a ubiquitous phenomenon in advanced countries since the nineteenth century. Weber pinned down bureaucratic phenomena with conceptual precision, which we may summarize here. ‘Bureaucracy’ is an administrative machine that operates with fixed rules and jurisdictions, an office with a clear hierarchy of super- and subordination, and with specialized personnel whose expertise is matched to designated tasks. The modern official is paid a salary, has a career for life within the bureaucracy, and treats all tasks impersonally without showing favour to individuals or special interests. This allows for a complete separation of private and public spheres, something not observed in patrimonial officialdom. Bureaucracy’s machine-like efficiency makes it indispensable for the functioning of the modern state and army; the modern corporation; the administration of justice; and the running of political parties, churches and large voluntary organizations. The frictionless machine of officials dedicated to specific tasks offers unmatched precision, speed, clarity, information, continuous operation, discretion and an army-like discipline. The bureaucratic machine has power; its decisions are obeyed and enforced. It sweeps away the older aristocratic administration, and socialist parties while publicly hostile to the bureaucracy find it indispensable. Modern bureaucracy is only enabled through a money economy and taxation system. The speed and the intensity of its operations are furthered by roads, canals, railways and telegraphs. Weber wrote this account around 1912.5 We may disagree that bureaucracy is efficient, or that bureaucratic organizations exclude favouritism and emotions, or that the structures are not clear functional hierarchies. Weber’s goal is, 4

5

The basic text on this is Weber’s essay on ‘Objectivity’ (first published in 1904): see Hans Henrik Bruun and Sam Whimster (eds.), Max Weber: collected methodological writings, trans. Hans Henrik Bruun (London: Routledge, 2012). On the genesis of Weber’s Herrschaftssoziologie, see the MWG edition and the editorial introductions by Edith Hanke: MWG, i/22–4: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte. Nachlass (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005). There is some ambiguity as to whether the title of the chapter is Bürokratie or the more pejorative Bürokratismus (ibid., i/22, pp. 155–6).

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however, to lay out an ideal type against which empirical cases of modern administration can be assessed. It is the theorist’s role, says Weber, to exaggerate and intensify features: the ideal-typical model does not fit or correspond to any one reality and should not be taken for real. I want to suggest at the outset that empires have embedded irrationalities, and the functioning of their apparatuses of violence and coercion operate on entirely different principles from rationally organized bureaucracies. Weber’s ideal type of the modern bureaucracy can be used as a checklist, which proves useful in thinking about how empires maintain their power and, more importantly, why they fail. Clearly modern bureaucracy was not created ex nihilo, and its development had long historical roots whether in Roman law, patrimonial administration or the development of the royal household. Patricia Ebrey observes of the Song government that it possessed ‘traits of a rational-bureaucratic organization’ with a tendency to ‘standardization and routinization’.6 The Chinese examination system for officials was a significant precursor of Western state bureaucracy. But modern state officials with modern files, offices and means of communication are qualitatively different, especially in how they work, from their empire equivalents. Weber cannot be accused of the elision of the premodern and the modern. He develops an extensive ideal type of patrimonial rulership in ch. 12 of Economy and society, and it is within the patrimonial model that the dependency of rulership on an ever-problematic administration is richly and incisively discussed.7 The typology of patrimonialism (G. Patrimonialismus) is developed out of an ideal type of patriarchal domination, which is based on the master’s complete authority over his household or oikos. The latter was composed of wives, children, slaves and dependents whose obedience derives from ‘piety toward tradition and toward the master’.8 Patriarchal rule can be scaled up to the level of empire, where the imperial territory is the property, or demesne, of the ruler.9 Where a patriarch acquires further territories by whatever means, he will place his children, retainers or trained slaves in positions of authority, so vesting his dependents with the exercise of power outside the orbit of the original household: ‘Patrimonial domination is thus a special case of patriarchal domination – domestic authority decentralized through assignments of land and sometimes of equipment to sons of the house or other dependents.’10 With decentralization comes the loosening of the absolute and arbitrary power of the patriarch. But patrimonial obedience still operates on the basis of personal dependence and loyalty of his slaves, children and retainers wherever they are placed. They have no status and so no authority without the patriarch, although over time there is always the danger that 6 7 8

See Ebrey (Chapter 2, p. 46). Weber’s extensive sections on ideal typologies of pre-bureaucratic rulership are reliably translated by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich in Weber, E&S, chs. 12–15 (vol. ii, pp. 1006–1211). 9 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 1008. Ibid., vol. ii, p. 1045. 10 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 1011.

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a dependent in the exercise of his power over a territory may come to be seen not only as the sole administrative and military authority but an authority in his own right. The next step in Weber’s argument is the ‘patrimonial state’, a category that subsumes empire: We shall speak of a patrimonial state when the prince organizes his political power over extrapatrimonial areas and political subjects – which is not discretionary and not enforced by physical coercion – just like the exercise of his patriarchal power. The majority of all great continental empires had a fairly strong patrimonial character until and even after the beginning of modern times.11

The extension of power here involves a qualitative change in its nature. It becomes political as opposed to absolute personal authority: ‘The establishment of a “political” domination, that is, of one master’s authority over other masters who are not subject to his patriarchal power.’12 The two levers through which political power is acquired are lawmaking and military command. These initially start as a conferment of judicial power as an arbiter in disputes between patriarchal lords and as a temporary war leader in a case of external military threat. These powers are consolidated and over time are converted into patrimonial authority, to the extent that the basic obligation of political subjects is ‘the material maintenance of the ruler, just as in the case in a patrimonial household’.13 In addition, the patrimonial ruler will take free political subjects, independent lords, into his household administration. Such a person gives up his previously free status for the servile one of household dependent, but as a holder of patrimonial ‘office’, he becomes immeasurably more powerful. For example, a manorial lord joins the household and makes over his own land to the patrimonial ruler, who then gives it back to him as a conditional grant but with further lands added for his upkeep. The intricacies of Weber’s analysis revolve around the inherent instability of using household officials as decentralized extensions of patrimonial power, and incorporating previously independent centres of power within the patrimonial state. Empires are built up in this way, but in the absence of a modern bureaucratic apparatus, their sustainability is always open to mishap. With the establishment of patrimonial offices, in place of local or baronial independence, the oncepersonal dependents are able to form a legally constituted status group. In the weberian problematic, the extension of power beyond the patriarch’s core 11 12

13

Ibid., vol. ii, p. 1013 (emphasis in original). Ibid. Hinnerk Bruhns argues that the political dimension of patrimonialism represents a break with patriarchal domination (Bruhns, ‘Weber’s patrimonial domination and its interpretation’, in Daniel C. Bach and Mamoudou Gazibo (eds.), Neopatrimonialism in Africa and beyond (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 13). Weber, E&S, vol. ii, p. 1014.

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power and territory always involves strategies of keeping the administration in line with the emperor’s wishes and not those of his ‘officials’, who are often presented with the economic, administrative and military means of breaking free from the emperor. Both emperor and his officials are faced with revolt and insubordination of political subjects. Weber devotes a whole section to ‘Defenses of the patrimonial state against disintegration’: itinerant courts imposing the ruler’s will, residence of officials or their children in the imperial court, recruitment of officials from new social strata, splitting up of spheres of jurisdiction and separating treasury from army command.14 Equally, the internal dynamics of empires are stabilized, and their longevity ensured, by the specific nature and authority of officials as status groups. This semi-autonomy of an official caste, frequently described in the studies presented in this volume, is sociologically significant: the official caste stands out by virtue of being a status group, with its own esoteric and religious or magical expertise. For example, the Confucian official, especially under the Song, were Kulturträger (‘bearers of culture’) of order and authority: this is a weberian concept, but one insufficiently explored by Weber himself with respect to empire. II

Empire: A New Typology While Weber’s description of the patrimonial state provides a rich source for thinking through just how problematic is the maintenance of imperial rule, I now want to break away from this ideal type and propose in its stead one built solely on the concept of ‘empire’. There are a number of reasons for this innovation. First, Weber places ‘empire’ within a typology of patriarchalism and the patrimonial state, and this imposes a certain developmental logic to which empire is subsumed. Empires, however, have no inherent narrative driving them towards nation-state modernity. Weber’s chapter on modern rational bureaucracy appears prior to the chapters on traditional rulerships. His intention was to scotch the idea that he was offering an evolutionary account of stages of bureaucratization. Nevertheless, clear narrative themes lead from the successful patrimonial state to the European absolutist states, which for Weber form the antechamber to the final centralization of power and the rationalization of bureaucracy in the modern state. The same narrative can be detected in a section by Weber on the Chinese empire, which is again the survivor of what Weber terms an ‘imperial patrimonial regime’, made possible after the pacification enabled by the construction of the Great Wall by a loyal Chinese officialdom kept in check by a competitive examination system.15 As Patricia Ebrey shows, it is quite possible to conceive of China under the Song in 14

Ibid., vol. ii, pp. 1042–3.

15

Ibid., vol. ii, pp. 1047–51.

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this way. The greater challenge was, for instance, to sustain the aggressive expansionism of the Qin–Han period, whose rulers imposed unification on separate kingdoms. Under Emperor Wudi (r. 141–87 bce) – who is reported as saying ‘I slaughter and slay’ – the Han extended military commanderies into today’s Korea, Vietnam and Central Asia, only for expansion to end in collapse.16 Empires are reckless; patrimonial states consolidate. Second, Weber is concerned primarily with forms of legitimate rulership, whereas I think there should be an opportunity to present empire as the exercise of illegitimate power. Weber’s typology of Herrschaft considers the sources of the legitimacy of patriarchalism, patrimonialism, feudalism, charisma and hierocracy and caesaro-papism. The theoretical thrust of Weber’s approach in these types is to explain the structure and the exercise of power through the specific form of legitimacy. The patrimonial administration of a king, as noted, is the personal dependency of clerk, slave or mercenary to the ruler himself. This creates an island of patrimonial legitimacy separate from the wider legitimacies of aristocratic court, feudal ties and sacred kingship. Empires, by contrast, do not necessarily concern themselves with whether or not they are legitimate. Suspending the issue of legitimacy provides a rugged starting point in defining what empires are. Emperors enjoy and indulge in asymmetric legitimacy. They have their own unquestioned status – sacral, magical, absolute control over resources – and the rest of the ruled have few or no rights or status. Emperor and the ruled are incommensurable in status, so should we be seeking to employ the discourse of political legitimacy? The latter assumes there is some sort of community, albeit unequal, between rulers and ruled. As Weber put it: ‘the political patrimonial leader is linked with the ruled through a consensual community . . . rooted in the belief that the ruler’s powers are legitimate insofar as they are traditional.’17 Reworking passages from Weber on empire (in particular, pharaonic, Roman and Chinese) as illegitimate forms of rulership, two types of empire can be constructed, which I develop later: 1. Imperialist capitalism (Section iii.1); 2. Empires based on the household or oikos and collective forced labour, which Weber, somewhat mysteriously, calls ‘liturgies’ (Section iii.2).

Both types involve economic appropriation and exploitation through violence: as Jack P. Greene points out in the case of English colonists, there is no extension of 16

17

See Ebrey (Chapter 2, pp. 41–2); Michael Nylan, ‘The rhetoric of “empire”’, in Fritz-Heiner Mutschler and Achim Mittag (eds.), Conceiving the empire: China and Rome compared (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 49. Max Weber, E&S, vol. ii, p. 1020 (emphasis in original). Hinnerk Bruhns has pointed out that Weber formulated a typology of power without legitimacy in one version of his political sociology, probably an earlier draft than the chapter on patrimonial rule (Bruhns, ‘Weber’s patrimonial domination’, in Bach and Gazibo (eds.), Neopatrimonialism, p. 14). My argument is that this would have been more appropriate for the treatment of empires.

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civil rights ‘to the thousands of enslaved peoples on whose labour they relied’.18 Economic power, for Weber, is itself a form of illegitimate power tout court.19 A third reason to break away from Weber’s model of the patrimonial state is that he misses an important communicative dimension in analyzing the problematic of the extension of power over territorial space and its durability over time. In addressing this in Section iv, I turn to the Canadian Harold Innis (1894–1952) and his ideas on empire presented in Empire and communications (1950) and in a volume of collected papers, The bias of communication (1951).20 Innis started his career as an economic historian with works on the Canadian staples industry, including paper, and the Hudson Bay Company. The problem of running from London (England) an extended trading company in the winter wastes of the Arctic Circle captured his attention. His intellectual development moved from lines of communication to the significance of the media of communication themselves. Marshall McCluhan (1911–80), Innis’s junior colleague at the University of Toronto, caught the essence of this approach in his famous one-liner: ‘the medium is the message.’21 Innis admitted that his political approach to empire reflected ‘an Anglo-Saxon obsession’ with what he called the two dimensions of political organizations: ‘on the one hand the length of time over which the organization persists, and on the other hand the territorial space brought within its control.’22 Weber shares this ‘obsession’ with many of the essays in the present volume, and it becomes a form of counterfactual: ‘what if’ an emperor had been more rational with a better developed ‘bureaucracy’ that could, somehow, ensure extension over time and space? Innis’s purpose, however, is to probe the ways in which the media of communication – pregiven to a ruler and not under his control – allow empires to function in different ways and without the assumed temporality of telos. III

1

Weber on Imperialist Capitalism

In a subsection of a chapter of the older and unrevised part of Economy and society, entitled ‘The economic foundations of “imperialism”’, Weber writes: 18 19

20

21 22

See Greene (Chapter 13, pp. 319–20). Weber, E&S, vol. ii, p. 943: ‘There are two diametrically contrasting types of domination, viz., domination by virtue of a constellation of interests (in particular: by virtue of a position of monopoly), and domination by virtue of authority, that is, power to command and duty to obey.’ Harold A. Innis, The bias of communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951). See also Harold A. Innis, Empire and communications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950; repr. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), based on his 1948 Beit Lectures on Imperial History at the University of Oxford. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding media: the extensions of man, 1st edn (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), ch. 1, ‘The medium is the message’. Innis, Bias of communication, pp. xvii–xviii.

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Rome’s overseas expansion, as far as it was economically determined, shows features that have since recurred in basic outline again and again and which still recur today. These features occurred in Rome in pronounced fashion and in gigantic dimensions, for the first time in history. However fluid the transitions to other types may be, these ‘Roman’ features are peculiar to what we wish to call imperialist capitalism, or rather, they provide the conditions for the existence of this specific type. These features are rooted in the capitalist interests of tax-farmers, of state creditors, of suppliers to the state, of overseas traders privileged by the state, and of colonial capitalists. The profit opportunities of all these groups rest upon the direct exploitation of political power directed towards expansion.23

Weber subordinates imperialism to a type of capitalism. Ancient Rome provides not only the template in its ‘gigantic’ scale, but it stands as the ‘first example’ of imperialist capitalism.24 This type – imperialist capitalism, as Weber says – ‘still recurs today’ (c.1914): By forcibly enslaving the inhabitants, or at least tying them to the soil (glebae adscriptio) and exploiting them as plantation labor, the acquisition of overseas colonies brings tremendous opportunities for profit for capitalist interest-groups. The Carthaginians seem to have been the first to have arranged such an organization on a large scale; the Spaniards in South America, the English in the Southern States of the Union, and the Dutch in Indonesia were the last to do it in the grand manner. The acquisition of overseas colonies also facilitates the compulsory monopolization of trade with these colonies and possibly with other areas. Wherever the administrative apparatus of the polity is not suited for the collection of taxes from the newly occupied territories – of this, later – the taxes give opportunities for profit to capitalist tax-farmers.25

The origins or a prerequisite for this type of economic imperialism is capitalism. It is worth expanding Weber’s analysis of capitalism in antiquity by turning to his underappreciated postdoctoral thesis of 1891, Roman agrarian history (G. Die römische Agrargeschichte);26 and a later encyclopaedia article of 1909, translated as ‘The agrarian sociology of antiquity’ (G. Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum).27 23

24

25 26

27

Weber, E&S, vol. ii, p. 917 (emphasis added). The same passage is translated in Weber, FMW, pp. 166–7, and it is the latter that is reprinted under the title ‘Structures of power’, in P. J. Cain and Mark Harrison (eds.), Imperialism: critical concepts in historical studies, 3 vols. (London: Routledge, 2001), vol. i, ch. 20 (quotation at pp. 331–2). That Weber is prepared to conceive of ancient Rome as an economic form of capitalism was an endorsement of ‘modernism’, that is, that antiquity was not defined by a slave mode of production (Karl Marx (1818–83)) or autarkic households (the oikos theory of Johann Karl Rodbertus (1805–75)). Weber, E&S, vol. ii, p. 917 (Weber, FMW, p. 167). When Weber includes the Dutch in Indonesia in this list, this surely implies that the English in Hindustan should also be added. Max Weber, Roman agrarian history, trans. Richard I. Frank (Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 2008); first published as Max Weber, Die römische Agrargeschichte in ihrer Bedeutung für das Staats- und Privatrecht (Stuttgart: F. Enke, 1891). Max Weber, The agrarian sociology of ancient civilizations (London: Verso, 1998); first published as ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’, in Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften (1909).

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Weber takes Roman settlements, even early in the republic, to be urbanbased forts that turned outwards to trade with other cities on the Italic peninsula and thereafter the Mediterranean basin. A market for buying land and deriving rents from land was established in the early history of the republic. For Weber, the significance of the Twelve Tables (thought to be c.430 bce) was the push by the plebeian class for equality of treatment in the ownership of land whose juristic claim had previously been confined to the patrician order and their ‘quiritarian rights’ to land. This was a move from oral law to published written law, and it enabled ‘the complete freedom of contract’.28 The old ritual of transfer of land between patricians by mancipatio was now opened up to the freedom to buy and sell landed property and to have access to juristically defensible title to land. But this ‘equal right of settlement offered opportunities not to the small farmer but only wealthy capitalists, patricians as well as plebeians. Uncontrolled capitalism was introduced into the agrarian sector to a degree never known before.’29 Rome was the metropolis and seat for the capitalist class that lived off their rents and engaged in large-scale commerce. A market even existed in futures for land that favoured speculation by those same large landholders. Capitalism was further deepened through a merchant stratum, crucial for the import of staples to Rome, and through the use of money and a credit market for money. Weber could have left his argument at the level of agrarian capitalism. Landowning farmers produce corn, wine, olives and some manufactured goods and sell their output on the market at a market price. The move to capital investment in the productivity and improvement of land, however, was excluded by the speculative market in land, which was cornered by the wealthy. The small independent farmer was reduced to supplying the large landowner, even becoming his tenant and performing servile duties. When the small farmer was unable to pay his debts, under the draconian laws on credit, he was reduced to a debt-slave and forced to work in the appalling underground prisons (L. ergastula). Weber likens the extreme stratification in landowning to the enclosure movements in Prussia and England that forced the peasants off their own land and into poverty and dependency. This ties inhabitants to the soil as well as their use as plantation labour alongside slaves on the great estates. It needs to be noted that this process starts early in the Roman republic and reaches its highpoint in the late republic, which was profoundly disrupted by social wars that reflected the new stratification created by agrarian capitalism. Imperialist capitalism in Rome, therefore, is not a feature of empire as it developed after the principate of Augustus. Nor is it a central feature of Italic settlement colonies. Those foundations were urban, with allocations of land to Roman citizens. In Weber’s argument, each new settlement brought new land 28

Weber, Roman agrarian history, p. 79.

29

Ibid., p. 86.

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onto the market, thereby widening the base of agrarian capitalism. This same argument applies to an extent to the colonies in the Roman provinces, which by virtue of conquest become public land but enter the capitalist circuit through wholesale tax farming, leasing and the use of tenants and slaves for cultivation. While Rome remained a monetized capitalist market in land, the landowning plutocracy lived in Rome off their estates – but not living on their estates. The chronological marker for Weber is not the republic and empire as a change in the nature of the polity (and from plebeian and patrician conciliar rule to imperial household bureaucracy, as Michael Whitby describes in Chapter 6 ), but rather the collapse of urbanism, markets and a monetized economy. This implosion was caused by the Roman empire reaching the maximum extent of its frontiers (a movement that for Weber was driven by plebeian ‘land hunger’) and the drying up of the regular supply of slaves coming onto the market. By the time of Emperor Diocletian (r. 284–305), imperialist capitalism had morphed into a command economy regulated by numerous officials.30 Weber handles the idea of a command economy in his second type, liturgies and oikos empires – and these are pre-capitalist. Before moving on to the second type, Weber makes it quite clear that imperialist capitalism is more attractive (for the rulers) than industrial capitalism: In general and at all times, imperialist capitalism, especially colonial booty capitalism based on direct force and compulsory labor, has offered by far the greatest opportunities for profit. They have been greater by far than those normally open to industrial enterprises which worked for exports and which oriented themselves to peaceful trade with members of other polities.31

When we read Weber’s The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (1904–5), we gain the impression that it is only by taming and disciplining the free-roaming acquisitive, profit-seeking spirit through Calvinism and puritanism that modern industrial capitalism is possible. But Weber is quite explicit here that imperialist capitalism was an alternative to industrial capitalism into the twentieth century. All colonizing European nations had populations quite open to taking advantage of ‘booty capitalism’: the slave trade, plantations and the high-value commodities of sugar, coffee and cotton, tax farming and rent extraction. Weber himself was not opposed to the benefits flowing into Germany of its colonialization policy.32 Wherever there is capitalism, there is the possibility of imperialist exploitation. 30 32

See Whitby (Chapter 6, pp. 136–9). 31 Weber, E&S, vol. ii, p. 918. See Wolfgang J. Mommsen, The age of bureaucracy: perspectives on the political sociology of Max Weber (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), p. 31: ‘Max Weber was convinced that, in an age of imperialism and unrestricted international economic competition, the German nation state simply had to embark upon expansionist policies overseas.’ Apart from the geopolitical advantages, the nation’s working class enjoyed a higher standard of living. This argument has subsequently been termed ‘social imperialism’.

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Oikos and Collective Forced Labour

What I want to propose here is an ideal type of empire that does not turn on the legitimacy of rulership and is as economistic as ‘imperialist capitalism’.33 The nearest we come to this in Weber’s writings is when he construes the patrimonial state, as in Egypt ruled by the pharaoh, as a ‘single tremendous oikos’: ‘The Egyptian administration always retained characteristics of the oikos economy, and the Romans treated the country essentially like a huge Imperial domain. The Inca state and in particular the Jesuit state in the Paraguay were based on forced labor.’34 Leaving aside the gradations of patrimonial power, a purer type of empire has a ruler who treats all domains as his own and has no conception of inhabitants as political subjects. His ‘officials’ may be loyal out of personal dependency, a category Weber defines by its opposite: ‘commitment to impersonal purpose and not on obedience to abstract norms’.35 But equally they can be thought of as carrying out tasks for a variety of other reasons, both negative (fear) and positive (mastery of a specific task or skill in the administrative apparatus). Do we see Charlemagne as the restorer of statecraft in the Dark Ages, or was he indulging in something more primitive: imperial dynastic rule with direct control of demesne lands? In the case of the cadre of quipucamayocs sent from their villages to Cusco to learn quipu literacy, to be trained to extract tribute, and to be versed in mythic history and officiation of the rites, why should we imagine that personal loyalty to a patrimonial ruler had anything to do with Inca rule? Was there even a concept of the personal? ‘Liturgy’ for Weber is the servile labour owed to the royal/imperial manor or oikos. Weber uses this concept for the delivery of tribute to the emperor and his storehouses as a collective responsibility of a kinship, corporate or occupational group, or whatever common links define a community. The same idea surfaces in Chris Given-Wilson’s essay on the Incas (Chapter 4). The tribute set by Sapa Inca was fixed according to the units of population: village and province. In Weber’s thinking, this was a collective liability rather than an individual tax.36 Liturgies 33

34

35 36

What is presented here is gathered predominantly from Weber’s ideal type of patriarchal and patrimonial rulership, but rejecting the complexities of feudal loyalty versus patrimonial loyalty and their economic provision through fiefs, prebends and benefices. Weber, E&S, vol. ii, p. 1013. The passage continues: ‘A vivid picture of the administration of these domains is provided by the reglements [sic] of the Carolingian period and also by the extant ordinances of Roman Imperial domains. On a vast scale, the Near Eastern and Hellenistic states contained areas the inhabitants of which were manorial and personal dependents of the monarch and which were administered in manorial fashion from his household.’ Ibid., vol. ii, p. 1006. The examples Weber mentions occur ‘in Egypt and in parts of the Hellenistic world and again in the late Roman and the Byzantine empire. With less consistency these methods were also applied in the Occident and played a considerable role, for example, in English administrative history . . . they share with the Oriental liturgies the existence of compulsory association

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could include obligation to maintain roads, irrigation schemes, road building and the provision of armies passing through a region. In ideal-typical terms, this involves both direct slave and serf labour on the imperial oikos and indirect tribute through compulsory labour services performed in kind rather than a monetized taxation system. Markets and ways of measuring value short of coinage itself often existed within the societies named earlier. But the material demands made by an emperor would have restricted any development of a merchant class, and many of the examples, including the Incas, did not know the concept of private property. Collective responsibility of the liturgy went hand in hand with collective holding of land and other resources. Agrarian capitalism, or any other form of capitalism, is excluded. When Weber turns to the collapse of agrarian capitalism and the rise of autarkic manorialism in the late Roman empire, he succinctly summarizes the position: ‘Rome was a world empire but its economy was based on barter.’37 A final point to note is that tribute is not a form of taxation in the sense that it will be put to public good use or indeed be used as a treasure chest for future conquest (although there is more to be investigated on the relation between tribute and mass armies). The storage and use of tributes were frequently wholly irrational by our standards of taxation. Tribute and labour services were frequently devoted to monumental schemes of conspicuous display such as palaces, pyramids, monuments to honour a god or a sacred dynasty – or, as Weber says sarcastically, ‘the preservation of corpses’.38 IV

The Bias of Communication Weber’s Herrschaftssoziologie is predominantly concerned with aligning people, or groups of people, within a structure of rulership through economic provision and legitimacy that commands obedience. Harold Innis’s ‘bias of communication’ is less interested in the contents of rulership as people or groups, and the motivational reasons for their compliance or rebellion. He identifies the pattern of a culture which itself is born by a technology of communication. When a pattern is recognized, the investigator grasps a key that remains hidden to the social actors themselves. When applied to empires, the bias of communication makes the origins and what Innis calls the ‘nemesis’ of political organizations a matter of contingency, even accident.

37 38

guaranteeing collective liability for the obligations of individuals’ (Weber, E&S, vol. ii, p. 1023). Weber, Roman agrarian history, p. 135. Quoted in Sam Whimster, Understanding Weber (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 27.

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Empires are bound to their means of communication, which are both a technology and an acquired medium. In archaic empires before 2500 bce – Sumerian and pharaonic – writing and paper did not exist. Communications were scratched into rock (glyphs) and clay tablets. Cuneiform script was developed as a way of describing quantities, the accountancy and commerce of empires: supplies, taxes, populations. The means of communication were heavy and, perhaps, limited in their transportability (although Assyriology, since Innis’s day, has shown that flows of trade were accompanied by documentation). Their counterparts in the political organization of empires were strong hierarchies, decentralization and a belief in the eternal existence of imperial power. The first pharaohs were gods: they were eternal; existence was timeless: The position of the monarch was strengthened by the development of the idea of immortality. The pyramids and the elaborate system of mummification carried with them the art of pictorial representation as an essential element of funerary ritual.39

The invention of lighter means of communication – papyrus and paper with the brush and the reed pen – took place alongside the development of written languages. The direct representational languages of cuneiform (for numbers) and pictograms gave way to languages that reflected the spoken word, so that hieroglyphs came to have a phonetic sense. With the development of the alphabet in Babylonia and Greece, letters represented both consonants and vowels. The alphabet is in itself a highly innovative form of communication technology. The correlate in the political organization of empires was the extension of rule over space and a reduction in hierarchy; gods propagated by priests downgrade the sacral status of the ruler: The concepts of time and space reflect the significance of media to civilization. Media that emphasize time are those that are durable in character, such as parchment, clay, and stone. The heavy materials are suited to the development of architecture and sculpture. Media that emphasize space are apt to be less durable and light in character, such as papyrus and paper. The latter are suited to wide areas in administration and trade. The conquest of Egypt by Rome gave access to supplies of papyrus, which became the basis of a large administrative empire. Materials that emphasize time favour decentralization and hierarchical types of institutions, while those that emphasize space favour centralization and systems of government less hierarchical in character. Large-scale political organizations such as empires must be considered from the standpoint of two dimensions, those of space and time, and persist by overcoming the bias of media which over-emphasize either dimension. They have tended to flourish under conditions in which civilization reflects the influence of more than one medium and in which the bias of one medium towards decentralization is offset by the bias of another medium towards centralization.40 39

Innis, Empire and communications, p. 33.

40

Ibid., pp. 26–7.

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Table 18.1 Classification of empires: means of appropriation, media of communication Media of Communication Light

Heavy

Imperialistic Capitalism

• Roman republic • 16th–18th centuries European colonialism

No cases because dependent on light media of communication.

Forced Labour

• • • •

• Sumerian empire • Egypt, Old Kingdom

Means of appropriation

Ptolemaic Egypt Inca empire Chinese dynasties Plantation slavery

The last sentence is important. Innis makes clear that he is not offering an either/ or model of space and time biases, and, by implication, further work is required to explain transitions from one modality to another. In the light of what has been expounded earlier, we have enough theoretical material to offer a schematic grid against which historical examples of empire can be considered (Table 18.1). On the economic axis stand Weber’s two types of economic appropriation: imperialist capitalism and direct compulsion. On the communicative axis stand Innis’s ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ media of communication. Weber’s economics has a consistent concern with appropriation, which tends to be taken for granted by Innis; but the media of communication are to a large extent ignored by Weber, so here one turns to Innis. In his analysis of ‘imperialist capitalism’ in the Roman republic, Weber fails adequately to address the media through which agrarian capitalism operates. Those media are ‘light’: money; written communication on papyrus; and limited file-keeping, such as the census of all citizens for military service and inheritance tax, and the land registry which had a record of allocation of public land to citizens and tax farmers. Central record-keeping was held on linen rolls and brass plaques – both light media. In addition, a sophisticated, alphabetical language, Latin, was used, and its number system allowed reasonable manipulation by experts. If examples of imperialist capitalism are used, the lightness of the media of communication is a constant. Paper is the form in which messages are sent, and in which tax liabilities and income are recorded. As many of the essays in this volume point out, bureaucracy is undeveloped because the basic mechanisms for extracting profit are commercial, including privately instigated debt slavery, and not governmental enforcement. Rents are compulsory, gathered in the case of India through indigenous village chiefs or in Rome through tax farming and municipal officials, but there

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is no direct means of compulsion as with slave drivers. The quadrant – capitalist and light – fits many of the cases. Once the capitalist world system kicked in, certainly by the sixteenth century, trading capitalism developed new or improved media of communication. Spanish and English colonists in South America, the Indies and North America operated sugar, coffee and cotton slave plantations on the basis of welldeveloped trade for slaves and commodities, which were bought and sold through reliable contracts and, therefore, law.41 Money and bullion were no longer stored treasure but gave way to banking, the credit account and the bill of exchange.42 The English colonists not only held onto self-administration as a tenet of liberty but also to English common law as the basis of ‘that greediest of legal categories’ – contract.43 Law, courts and judgements played a crucial role but had a small footprint, for they functioned only to service certain interests of the colonists and the crown. As Greene notes in Chapter 13, this was the logic of the Navigation Acts.44 Where should China be placed in this schema? In Innis’s terminology, it falls into the category of centralized power extending over long distances. It had lightweight media of communication: indeed, China is the standout example in this regard, with its early invention (certainly by 106 ce) of paper and brush. Its lettering system was fluid with as many as 5,000 characters, and complex content and expressiveness could be conveyed by writing. But, contra Innis, did not certain Chinese dynasts seek to memorialize their rule, as with the massive cliff-face carvings of the first Qin emperor (221 bce)? Raising the emperor to sacred status and presuming a continued existence after physical death would indicate the heavy media and extreme hierarchy end of the spectrum. There is also much evidence of weberian corvée labour: irrigation systems, road building and defensive structures for the ruling dynasty. Following Ebrey (see Chapter 2), it would be a mistake to assume empirical continuity across distinct Chinese dynasties, since each faced very different 41 42

43

44

See Greene (Chapter 13, pp. 318–21). Fernand Braudel makes the important point in relation to Europe’s first world system, pioneered by the Venetians and Genoese, that for payment for slaves and commodities where this crossed a cultural boundary, for example, from Christendom to Islam, specie was essential: Civilization and capitalism, 15th–18th century, vol. iii: the perspective of the world, trans. Siân Reynolds (Collins: London, 1984), pp. 62, 132, 217. In his classic study of the Venetian money market, Reinhold Mueller shows that the price of specie (gold ducats) often departed from bank credit money, which was also reckoned in ducats: Reinhold C. Mueller, Money and banking in medieval and renaissance Venice, vol. ii: the Venetian money market: banks, panics and the public debt, 1200–1500 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 303–11. The specific feature of finance capitalism in ‘light’ imperialism is, of course, an important subject in its own right. The phrase is that of the medieval historian Frederic William Maitland in his ‘Translator’s introduction’ to Otto Gierke, Political theories of the Middle Ages (1900), pp. xxiv–xxv (cited by Innis, Bias of communication, p. 45). See Greene (Chapter 13, p. 327).

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political challenges and external enemies. ‘Centralization and hierarchy’ or ‘decentralization and pluralism’ can be seen as fluctuations according to circumstances. The bias of communication – the form that marked an imperial administration – is not a voluntary, or even a conscious, awareness. It is a given, and not readily changed, and external enemies and internal rebellion stand for unpredictable contingencies. This same line of thought has validity for the final collapse of the western provinces of the Roman empire, which had switched to the category of a command economy. Late Rome, like China, had light media of communication – papyrus – but something more physical in the way of communication had collapsed. Rome and the major cities were no longer the hub of commerce and administration. The command economy operated locally and gradually descended into autarkic manorialism. Power was not so much decentralized as collapsed. While Rome knew how to dispatch armies to confront the waves of tribal invasions, it could simply no longer muster the resources necessary. Weber writes as though this descent were an inevitability after the de-urbanization of the economy and its ‘undergoverned’ administration.45 But more than three hundred years separated the late republic from Diocletian, which is a long period in comparison to most of the empires discussed in this volume. But for barbarian invasions, a different category of empire was emerging, and it is an interesting counterfactual to think through how it might have stabilized. Allocating empires to a particular corner the Weber-Innis grid is less interesting than the question of why one form of imperialism moves into another modality. Are the conceptual tools of the grid able to explain these transitions? A common theme in a number of chapters is why light imperialist capitalism becomes bureaucratically top-heavy. (This is why, in the quadrant of light, imperialistic capitalism, European colonialism is given an end date in the eighteenth century; of course, colonialism and full-fledged imperialism are features of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.) In colonial Spanish America, bureaucratic control from Madrid proved antithetical to imperialist capitalism.46 The bureaucratic modernization of African colonies after World War ii was not only unsuccessful but also antithetical to colonizing capitalism.47 And once the British established the Raj in the second half of the nineteenth century, the monopoly-enforcing and rent-taking East India Company lost its exorbitant profitability. These examples occur during the ‘modern’ era, which is generally regarded as irreversible, so there is no question of the media of paper and writing regressing to something heavier. In this respect, it is noteworthy that as the speed and media of communication improved, metropolitan powers were tempted to exert hierarchy over large 45 47

See Garnsey & Saller, Empire, p. 20 (quotation). See Cooper (Chapter 16) and Parsons (Chapter 17).

46

See Storrs (Chapter 12, pp. 314–17).

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distances and to amass records, so counteracting the original lightness and immediacy of the medium. The case of the Inca empire is particularly challenging for the Weber-Innis grid. It fits to the corner of tribute, liturgy and demesne slavery but operates with exceedingly light media of communication. Here, the decimal numerator and aide-mémoire technology of the quipu trump papyrus, nib and alphabet. The quipu is both light and durable, and quipu storehouses amount to archived bureaucratic information of extraordinary detail.48 As befits light means of communication, imperial power is extensive, yet it is also intrusive: the quipucamayoc can order whole populations to relocate and to demand tribute in kind. This is not devolved decentralization. It is an entirely novel bias of communication. V

‘Bureaucrats’ Most essays in this volume examine the status, legitimacy and power of those who are integral parts of the media of communication. This is a central feature of Weber’s analyses of types of ‘traditional’ rulership as well as bureaucracy. It is also a major topic for Innis, who is inevitably drawn to the personnel who control the media of communication. We know that ‘bureaucrat’ is almost certainly the wrong word for early bureaucratic forms, hence the frequent scare quotes. Other terms are sought: official, agent, professional administrator, messenger, scribe, priest, magician. With priest and certainly magician, the attempt to refer back to modern civil servants is given up, but there is a persistent need to translate to the level of the modern researcher as opposed to plunging into the peculiarities at the object level of empires. The quipucamayoc brings this out nicely. He was an empowered messenger of the emperor, the intermediary between the ruler and the ruled; yet he was also empowered through his mastery of the technology of communication. His power, legitimacy and magic resided as much in the quipu as in his relation to the emperor and the range of sanctions that could be called upon. In empires, the subject peoples are not part of the political community. People are there to be exploited as slaves and in other forms of forced labour. Ethnically, they may well not belong to the colonizing class or imperial dynasty, and hence they are deemed to be inferior: the instrumentum vocale of Roman law, for example. Subjugated peoples are the wrong race, the wrong colour, the wrong religion: they are Untertanen. They are natural victims of imperial exploitation. And they will be, mostly, illiterate, which again will be 48

See Given-Wilson (Chapter 4, pp. 87–94).

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the natural state of existence. The people’s bias of communication will not even be a language with delineated words. The bearer of the media of communication, therefore, is rendered into a figure of power, terror and awe by virtue of the technology of communication. The lead seal of a charter from the chancery of the seat of the Holy Roman Empire, the breaking of the wax seal and unfurling of the medieval writ written on parchment, the calligraphy on paper, the deployment of the quipu, the missive from the civilized metropole – all these media command respect. Hence, a special legitimacy accrues from the technology of communication, which runs alongside the weberian analysis of special status groups within the structure of rulership. The medium of communication is the command (to rephrase Marshall McCluhan). This also suggests that communication legitimacy is cultural in the wide sense of being esoteric, magical, beyond comprehension, ritualistic, religious. This leads the argument away from bureaucracy where Weber’s insistence on the monocratic is misplaced, or so I would argue in the imperial context. Rational bureaucracy is appropriate to the governance of the modern nationstate, but even there Weber’s rational legitimacy may be missing the point. It is the impersonal modality of modern bureaucracy, the machine-like technology of administration, that commands respect and obedience, and not the reflexive thought that it is legitimately constituted as part of the modern state. Weber’s ideal type of bureaucracy is deliberately cold, sine ira et studio, its règlements forbiddingly mechanistic and comprehensive. Max Weber’s brother Alfred adopted the same position on bureaucracy and taught the young Kafka in Prague (c.1905).49 The Prussian official was a recognizable type: cold, formal, superior. Weber has an equivalent view of the Confucian-trained official. He is a refined, aloof gentleman scholar. This lies in contrast to the depiction of the professional cadre in the Napoleonic administration, as described in Chapter 14 by Michael Broers: this is a close cousin of Weber’s ideal type of bureaucracy, but here the official has the warmth of fervour, ambitious to become the new modernizing elite in the empire, just as the creole South American expresses fueros, and the English settler elites in north America held to ‘metropolitan charisma’ – at least until 1776.50 This brings in cultural legitimacy – warm and cold – as an adjunct to the communicative bias. What a local Savoyard or Spaniard objected to was not only an alien polity but also the unfamiliarity with the new ways of a communicative order. It is reasonable to regard scribes in pharaonic Egypt as a status group. They had an indispensable function in the collection of taxes and tribute and the implementation of work programmes, and this was based 49 50

For Kafka on bureaucracy, see Crooks and Parsons (Chapter 1, p. 17). See above, Storrs (Chapter 12, p. 293); Greene (Chapter 13, p. 319); and Broers (Chapter 14, p. 350).

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on the expert skill of reading and writing on papyrus. Commenting on the ‘inefficiency’ of Egyptian bureaucracy, Christopher Eyre has advised against seeing the scribes as a ‘literocracy’ – impersonal functionaries carrying out instructions generated from a central office of archived, written records. Archaeologists have unearthed masses of written materials on papyrus rolls, but these were often held for ritual reasons and could not be accessed by index or any other way of ordering information. The scribe’s main form of communication was oral, face to face. His writing was functional only as an aidemémoire for the day. In everyday encounters, the ability to write and the presence of the papyrus was ‘a symbol of authority’. The bureaucracy did not house a record; it was ‘a process’. The scribe stood apart in the street by virtue of ‘wearing fine white clothing, of having a soft body’, and of being accompanied by servants who carried the visible means of literacy.51 Status here was acknowledged by the performance of ‘cool’. We find a final example in the description of the scribe as bureaucrat offered by a study of early Chinese bureaucracy and state under the Western Zhou.52 In this case, writing on light media – ideograms on bamboo sticks woven together – existed, but writing referenced back to divination and oracle bones, not to more profane means of communication. The scribe was invested in an elaborate and established ritual. His insignia from the ruler written on bamboo sticks and placed around his body. The ritual was memorialized in a bronze casting. Writing was hieratic; the investment represented the imparting of the ruler’s Mandate of Heaven, which defined the modus vivendi of the official in his province. To describe the Zhou state, as does Li Feng, as vulnerable to collapse for want of a ‘stable and routine bureaucracy’ is to address questions which may seem sensible to us but would not have occurred to the Zhou at that time.53 Yet it is possible to discern more than one form of writing. Ernest Caldwell sees the ritualistic use of writing and bronze inscriptions as part of the ceremony of forging inter-kingdom alliances or ‘quasi-contractual statements of allegiance’. Within the regional kingdoms of the Zhou, writing was used to announce law and penalties which were ‘posted’ on a placard (xiangwei) displayed and read out in a prominent place.54 Innis’s medium here becomes a part of the communicative space of power, where what is important is who is communicating and with whom: a ruler as god who is affirming timelessness, 51 52 53 54

Christopher Eyre, ‘On the inefficiency of bureaucracy’, in P. Piacentini and C. Orsenigo (eds.), Egyptian archives (Milan: Cisalpino, 2009), pp. 15–30, at 16–17. Li Feng, Bureaucracy and the state in early China: governing the Western Zhou (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Ibid., p. 301 (quotation). Ernest Caldwell, ‘Social change and written law in early Chinese legal thought’, Law and History Review 32:1 (2014), 1–30, at 7–9, 18–20.

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a sacred ruler empowering his appointees, the proclamations of the ruler’s official to the ruled where the text retains auratic qualities, or intra-official communication where the administration threatens to displace the ruleremperor. VI

Conclusion Empires live and die according to their own rules and standards. Indeed, they have failure built into their construction. Many empires were civilizations sui generis with no self-understanding calibrated to other societies. Europeans tend to naturalize empires to their own civilizational Kreis – notably the Roman and Carolingian empires – just as Chinese scholars in modern-day China are naturalizing imperial dynasties along with Confucianism. The challenge is to come up with ideal types or models that carry the least presupposition about how empires worked so as not to conceptualize them according to presentist criteria. Max Weber said that the relation between the subjective community of researchers and the object world of their investigations is determined by the presuppositions of the former. In the field of empire, we are perhaps too often let down by regnant presuppositions. If we are the beneficiaries of empires, we are prone to the rhetoric of civilizing mission, ‘killer apps’, Confucian harmony and so on. If we are the victims of empire, the exploitative mechanisms stand out, made worse by a continuing legacy of racism. In the case of Max Weber, his cognitive interests amounted to an obsession with legitimacy and the exercise of power; this was offset by his dispassionate accounts of imperialist appropriation and the vicious nature of colonial capitalism. In the case of Harold Innis, situated in his Canadian province and looking back at the metropolitan centre, his strongly theoretical mind opened up the communicative plane, which sets intrinsic limits on what can and cannot be accomplished. The chapters in this volume, which explore the ‘how’ and the means of empire, demonstrate the focus that is required for expert historical research to penetrate complex reality. Orientating models matter, but they can also mislead. The function of a schema is not to fit empires to a grid, but to ask what communicative forces have existed that might both constrain and progress the dynamics of empire. Once past the modelling stage, the real task begins of ascertaining the causal mechanisms at work: this is where true explanation lies.

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Index

Aachen (Germany) 223, 223n I 0 cAbbas, al- 63 ~ cAbbasid caliphate .2,±1, 54, 62, §1, .§§,§1,~ 68n37, 22, I!, ll., 11, Zi, 12, 78, 12_, ill cAbd al-l:lamTd b. Yabya al-Katib (b. c.688)

ll,14.

Abu Ayyub a l- MuriyanT 2.! Abu Bakr, caliph _63_ Abu Sufyan b. l;larb 70 Abyssinia ill Accra (Ghana) 425, 426, 430 Achaemenid (Persian) empire (550- 330 BCE)

2Q,.Lll.,fil Jewish population of 133 Ada Ihard of Corbie (d. 827) 185 Adolf of Nassau (r. 1292- 8), king of the Romans fil fil 235n68 Adriatic Sea l.8.l Aegean islands (Greece) llQ,_ ill Africa 20, 28, 56, IO I n55, l.Qb_ 129, 29 1, ~ l1Q,_ J.2.!., 39 1n I , 392, 393, 122,_ ~ 398,402,406, ~ 410 412 4 14 415, 41 6, 417, 418, 419,422, 423,425, 426, ill., 428, 429, 1lQ.,. 43 1, 452 Agen (France) 207 Agincourt, battle of ( 1415) ~ 263 Ahmet Cevdet Pa~a l!l Akiwumi Commission ( 1998- 9) 433 A lbania llQ A lberoni, G iulio (d. 1752), cardinal .3.ill A lbert ! (r. 1298- 1308), kg of the Romans .lli, 24 1 A lbert II (r. 1438- 39), kg-elect of Germany .lli, 246 Albrow, Martin, sociologist I 6 n53 Alcuin of York (d. 804), scholar lR6. Alexander the Great (d. 323 BCE) .i(i.H, lJ.1,3.4.6 A lexandria ill patriarchate of ill Alfonso X, kg of Castile f i l 225

Alfred the Great (d. 899), kg of Wessex 191nl04 Algeria ill cAIT, caliph §J, .N Allington, William (d. 1446) 277 Alnwick (England) 207 Alps (Europe) .!l.!., .!.fil..,, l_g ~ i l l ~ lll, llQ, ill HQ, 240n I 05, 347 Alsace (France) 356, li1 Amazon, river 2.6. America 101n55, ~ 293, 295, 122.,.RQ,_lll,_ 323, 324, 327, fil 337, 342 see also North America; South America; United States of America Ammianus Marcellinus, historian 1.42. Anadolu(Anatolia) 107, 11 2 Anastasius (r. 491- s m Eastern Roman emperor ll2., I 39, 145 Anatolia .!.Qb_ 103, 105, .!Ql, 108, 109, !.!l, l.1.2. 12 1 tax system 120 Andalusia (Spain) 274n 123 Andaman is lands (India) 377 Andes (South America) 22n78, 8 1, 82, 84, 84n5, 87, 94, 2§,. 97, 98, 99, 100, 101 Angevin empire 2, 197, 197n4, 199, 200, 20 1, 202nl9,206, 206n39, 20 7n44,2 10, ill 216, lll, 2 18, 219, 2 19nl 23, 220, 240nl05, 262 Anglesey (Wales) 261 Anglo-Saxon period 2 11 Angouleme (France) 204,215 Anjou (France) 202, 204, 204n32, 205, lQ1, 2 10n64, 2 14, 214n92, 215, 2 16, f i l 259 seneschal of 2 15 Antioch 137, 139, 144 patriarchate of 123 Antiochus IV Epiphanes (d. 164 BCE), kg of the Seleucid empire ill Aphrodisias (Anatolia) I 34

457

458

Index

Aquitaine (France) 200, 202, 202n23, 207, 208n54, fil IB 2 19n 122, l2.Q.,. 263, 264n68, 267, 282 duke of 205. Arabia fil_,_ fin attack on Roman empire .lAl Arabic language ill literature 1A Aragon (Spain) 297, 299, 308 A rdasir (r. 224-241 ), founder of Sasanian dynasty 76 Arenberg (Germany) 355 Arendt, Hannah (d. 1975), political theorist 2]__ Argentina 2§., 313 n 126 A ristotle 11 Aries (France) 240, ~ Armenia l2l, l 57n9 tax system 120 Arras, congress of ( 1435) 278 Arthur of Brittany, grandson of Henry ll, kg of England ~ 206 As ia ~ ill central TI, 36, 442 European views on lL Asia Minor filllb 157 Astrakan (Russia.) I 03 Asturias (Spain) 180 Atahuallpa (r. 1532- 33), Sapa Inca ~ ~ .al, 100 Atlantic, ocean British empire in l.!1, 3.20. a nd commercial activity 324, 32.& Spanis h crossings of 274, 274n 123 Attlee, C lement (d. 1967), UK prime minister 418, 1IQ,. 426 Augsburg (Germany) 237 Augustus (d. _G CE), Roman emperor l.3..2..5.. ilQ.,_ fil ll1, il1. l1L. 445 Aure lian (d. 275 CE), Roman emperor .!12 Austerlitz , battle of ( 1805) 358 Australia 414 Austria l.QL ~ 237 Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) l5fi A uvergne (France), baron of 205 Avar Chagan ill Avars l.4ll Avignon papacy 235 Ayacucho (Peru) 2S Aztec empire I 00 see also Moctezuma II

m

Babylonia 449 Bacon' s Rebe llion ( 1676) 332 Baden (Germany) liQ,_ 35 1

Bagehot, Walter 14n46 Baghdad, city of 23, .6.1, 67, 68, 7..2.,. .!.!2 conquest of ( 1534) J1Q Bahamas, the ]1Q, llQ., 333 Baker, Sir Edward Nonnan ( I 857- 19 I 3), lieutenant governor of Bengal 388 Balearic isles (Spain) ill Balduin, archbishop of Trier 235n68, 240n I 05 Balkh (now Afghanistan), city of6.1 Balkans, the ~ lQi.. l.QL .l.Q2,_ .lll., I 12n30,

IB m

m

IB 352

and lslamicization lll and tax system l.20_ Balliol, family (claimants to Scottish crown) see Edward Balliol; John Balliol Baltic Sea l.8.1 Balzac, Honore de ( 1799- 1850), novelist ill Bamburgh (England) 207 Banda, Hastings Kamuzu (d. 1997), president of Malawi 41 9,433 Barbados JlQ., .:l1.§., 327, 328, 330, 331 Barcelona (Spain) fil 359, 360 Barfleur (France) 199 Basque, people ~ 203n25 Basra (Iraq) 54, 65, _!_!2 Basu, Babu Nand Kumar 387, 388 Basutoland 414 Batavian Republic 350 Bavaria l 73n20, 228, ~ 35 1 Bayezid I (r. 1389- 1402), 4th Ottoman sultan lfil Bayezid IT (r. 148 1- 15 12), 8th Ottoman sultan l.Ql Bayly, C.A. , historian 334 Bayonne (France) 199, 2 18, 219 Bazas (France) 21.8 -Beauharnais, Eugene de (d. 1824) 349, ~ 354, 355 Bechuanaland 414 Beijing (China) 32 Belgium ~ 347 Belgrade (Serbia) 103 Benevento (Italy) 180 Bengal 256, ]1Q, 324,369, 370, 372, 3721145, 373, 373n50, 38 1n91 , 384n108, 387,3 89 Berbers .6.8 Berg (Germany), grand duchy of 35 1n 17, 352, 355 Berlin (Gennany) 264 Berman, Bruce, historian 11 , 287 Bermuda 323, 330 Berri (France), baron of 2l15. Berthier, Louis-Alexandre (d. 18 15), marshal of France 357

Index

459

Berwick-on-Tweed (England) ~ 262, 262n56, IQi,. 265n74 , 268n86, 270, ~ 275, 276, 277. 277n l 38, 28 1 chamberlain of 281 sheriffdom of28 I Betanzos, Juan de (d. 1576), chronicler ~ 2.L

22.., 21 Beugnot, Jea n-Claude ( d. I 835), politician 354 Bevin, Ernest ( 1881 - 1951), British foreign secretary 4 18 Bey le, Marie-Henri ( d. 1842), author 344n I Beyts, Frarn,ois Joseph, 354 Bible, the 242. Bihar (lndia) 38ln91 Black Sea Jill. Blackwood, Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple ( I 826- 1902), first marquess ofDufferin and Ava, viceroy of India 364, 364n I Blathwayt, William (d. 1717) 334 Bohemia ilQ. ~ 228, 229n28, 230 society 24 1 Bolivia ~96 Bologna (Italy) 350, 354, 355 Bolton, John, treasurer of Ireland 277 Bombay (lndia) 372, 372n45, 379, 385nll8 Bonaparte, family ~ 354 Bonapaite, Joseph (d. 1844) ~ 293, 354 Bonapatte, Louis (d. 1846) 354 Bonapaite, Napoleon, see Napoleon ! Boniface VHI (1294-1303), pope 264, 270 Bonneville (France) 359 Bordeaux (France) 2ITT,215n96, 2 18, 2 19, 263, ~ 275, 27511127, 282 archbishop of ill constable of 276 Bose, Hriday Nath ill,. fil ~ 387nl26,388, 389 Bos nia, kingdom of ill Bourbon, dynasty 293 294n 14, 295, 314, 1-!2,_ 3 17,347 Brazil 3 12n ll 6 Brazzaville (Republic of the Congo) .4ill. Bretigny, treaty of (1360) 262, 282 Brinton, Thomas (d. 1389), bishop of Rochester 25.5. Briouze, W illiam de (d. 1211) ~ 220 Britain .fQ, ~ ~ 206n4 I, 253, 254, M ~ M 275,277, 279, 112, 321 , 321 n5, .J1.i, fil .D.b. ill 335, IB .HQ,H_Lfil 37 1n36, fil 372n45, 398 407 413 i!.1,_ 4 15, 41 7, 41 8, 419, ~ 423 424 426, 427, 428 429 1lQ., 43 I, 432

m

m

and the Colonial Office 26, 1H,_ 415, 417, 418, 420, 421 , 422, 423 , 425, 427, 429, 1.lQ,432 and the Commonwealth 419, 43 I and the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference ( 1952) 427 and the Dominions Office ill and the Foreign Office 42.& and Her Majesty's overseas civil service (HMOCS) 428 and the home civil service 42.& and the India Office (London) .184 and the War Office 410_ British empire, the .2.. M, ~ l§, ~ 253, 254nl6, 3 13, l_lb 318nl, 319, 32 1,324, 325, 338, 338n40, 342 ~ in Africa l1_. J__IB, 32 1, 392, 393, 394, 395, 12.§_,_ 407,412, 41 3, 415,4 16, 421 , 425, fil 429, 43 1, 432 and the Board of Trade 1ll cross-cutting nature of bureaucracy of 2 1 in India l.lli, 320, 364, 368, 369, 369n23, 370, ill fil 374, 376, 377 in North America (after 1707) 19, 266, ~ 112, 320, 321 , 322, 328,334 and the Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940 396, 4 17, 420, 421,424 and the Colonial Research Committee 421 British Isles 253, 279 Brittany (France) 203 , 203n27, 266n80 Bruce, Scottish royal dynasty, see David II Bruce; Robert ! Bruce Brussels (Belgium) 291 Buenos Aires (Argentina) 3 10, 312, 3 13nl27, .3.H Bulgaria, kingdom of I 03 bureaucracy as concept in sociology 8 as dysfunctional 17 and ' feedback loop' 149 weberian ideal type of 16-17, 28, 105, 106, 115, 195, 229n29, 234,257, 3 12, 345, 4 12, 437- 8 working definition of 17- 18 Burgh, Thomas, treasurer of Ireland 277 Burgos, laws of ( I 512) 296 Burgundians 263 Burgundy (France) 223, lli,. 247 Burke, Edmund (d. 1797) 27, H.L 342, 342n47 Burke, William (d. I 798) 327, 339 Bush, George W., US pres ident 5 Buwayhid (Biiyid), dynasty 68, 79

m~

m

460

Index

Byzantine empire 2, _!_128, 46n44, 55 , 55n4, 56, 63, §1,_lQl, ~ l 12n30, l!.2,_Hl, l 49n2, llQ, _lg l 52n6, ill .!.TI, ll2., l§Q, 1.§.L lM, lfil.,_ I 65 n25, lfil,_ .lfil, l 69n36, fil fil .!fil_, ~ ~ HlL_ 248n l47, 447n36 Cadiz (Spain) 3.09. Caen (France) 209n55, 2 l 2n79, 263 , 269 Caernarfon (Wales) 26 1, 265,269, 269n93, 274 Calais (France) 250, 262, 266n80, 274, 275, 277nl38- siege of(1347) 262 Calcutta (India) 375n65, 381n9 1, ~ 385nl 18 caliphate, see c Abbas id caliphate Cambaceres, Jean Jacques Regis 346 Cambridge, university of 3 72, 372n40, 416,422 Campan, Madame 36 1 Campbe ll, John 324, .3.25. Campillo, Jose (d. 1743) lli Canada llQ, 4 14 Cape Breton, British colony 3J..Q Capetians, French roya l dynasty (987-1328) ~ Ni, 206n39, ill 22.Q Caracas company 309 Cardigan castle (Wales) ill Caria (Anatolia) 134 Caribbean 291, 3 10, 395 Carlisle (England) 2fil Carlow (Ireland), town 274, 276 Carmarthen (Wales) 265, 274, 275 castle 2.6.l Carolina, British colony 3.2.Q Carolingian dynasty I 60n I 3, .11.Q,_ ill., .lll., 172n 15, i l l l 77n37, ill.,1..fil!., fil l 82n58, .!fil_, .!!I,~~ .!.2Q,_ 193n 12 1, 196, 223, ~ 228n25, 456 as 'mayors of the palace' .!.2Z see also Charlemagne; Charles Martel; Franks, kingdom of the Carpente,; David, historian 2 11 , 2 I 3n8 I Carthage 112,_ 444 Carvajal y Lancastre, Jose (d. 1754) 31 lnl 11 Casas, Bartolome de las ( d. 1566) 296 Cassiodorus (d. c.585 C E) 140 Cassius Dio (d. 235 CE) 145 Castile (Spain) 293, 297, 298, 300, .105. Catalonia (Spain) 180, 354 and late-medievaloverseas 'empire' 252 Central African Federation 426, 430 C hanca (Peru), ethnic group JU Channel Islands l.Q§,_ 259 264 265n72, 270n l01

Charlemagne (d. 8 14) lJ., ~ .!.lQ, ll!,_ J1b ll1. l 73n20, l 74n24, fill.Th. i l l l 77n37, ill., 1..fil!.,fil l 82n62, .!fil_, 184, 185, ~ l.lU., l.lIB, I 88n90, .!2Q, 191 , 19lnl04, 192, 193, 193n l 19, 194, ~ 196,223, 247, 248n l44, ~ 363, 447 Charles 11 (r. 1660-85), kg of England 326, 34 1 Charles Martel (d. 74 I), kg of the Franks i l l ill., 184n68 Charles V I (r. 1380- 1422), kg offrance 263 Charles VII (r. 1429- 70), kg of France 263 Charles the Bald (d. 877), emperor 193n ll 9 Charles IV (r. 1346- 78), emperor 225, 227, 228,228n24, 229, 229n28, 230, 230n32,23 1, 23ln37,232n44,234, 234n59, ill., 235n68, 236, 236n76, 237,238,238n87,239, 240,24 1, 243nl22, 245, 246, 248n l46 Charles V (r. 15 19- 56), emperor 248n 144 Charles II ( d. 1700), kg of Spain 306, 308 Charles Ill (d. 1788), kg of Spain l!..Q Charles IV (abdicated 1808) 3 15 Charter of the Forest 2 19n 12 1 Chatte,jee, Partha, historian 368 Chaudhuri, Gyanendra Nath, deputy magistrate 384, ~ 388 Cherson (Crimea) ill Chesapeake, the (United States) .12.0. Chester (England) ill Child, Josiah (d. 1699), merchant and politician 3.20 Chile 82, 96, .llL 3 l 3n 126 China 3 I, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 47, 48, 49, 50, 5 1, 52, 53, 56, 64, IO I n55, 130, .lfil, 441 , 442, 450,45 1, 452 bureaucracy 11 , 24, 37, 47 frontier 24 Great Wall of 34, 44 1 governm ent 11, 47 language 32 rulers 144 warring states period (475- 221 BCE) 33, 34,40 Weber' s writings on 3 1 see also Han dynasty; Ming dynasty; Qing dynasty; Song dynasty; Tang dynasty; Yuan dynasty Chinon (France) 2 14, 2 l 4n93 Chu (China) 35 Churchill, Winston (d. 1965), UK prime minister l.[, 427 C icero (d. 43 BCE) 346 Cieza de Le6n, Pedro de (d. 1554) 85, 86, 87, 90, 97

Index

Clanchy, Michael, historian 2 11, 2 11n73 Claudius (d. 5.4. CE), Roman emperor ill Cleopatra (d. 30 BCE) ill Clive, Robert (d. 1774), 1st baron Clive 256 Clovis (d. 5 I I CE) , kg of the Franks fil ll.§,_

filllll Cobo, Bernabe (d. 1657), Jesuit priest 85, 87, 22.., 21,_ 26. Cochabamba (Bolivia) 85, 85n I 0 Coggeshall, Ralph (JI. I 207- 26), English chronicler 2 18n I I 9 Cologne (Germany) 2301135 Cornunero revolt ( I 78 I) lL4_ Condom (France) 207,2 14 Connecticut, British colony 322, 328 Conrad IV, see Konrad IV Constance, council of(J414- 18) 245nl29 Constantine the Great (d. 337 CE), Roman emperor 138, 170, 175, I 86n80 ' donation of' 1.8.!l Constantinople, city ~~~~~ JR ..!..§1, .!..§2, 1§. ill, ill conquest of ( 1453) .!..Q1 .!.Q2, ~ I 67 see also Byzantium; Istanbul Constantius II (d. 36 1 CE), Roman emperor 142 Conwy (Wales) 269n93 Cornwallis, Charles (d. 1805), governor general of India 370n28 Cortes, Hernan (d. 1547) I 00 Cote d ' Ivoire 394, 396, 396nl 5, 397,408 Cressingham, Hugh (d. 1297) 28 1, 28 1nl 63 Crete 252n7 Cripps, Stafford (d. 1993) 41 9 Ctesiphon (capital of Sasanian empire), city 64 Cuba 3 13, ill Curzon, George (d. 1925), viceroy of India 37 1n38,373 Cusco (now in Peru), capital of Inca empire Jg, 82nl , M,.~.81.,.8.8..89, 90, 92, 93, 9.!I., ~22.,cn.,99.,...441 Cyrenius (d. 21 CE), gov. of Syria _11± Dafy dd ap Gruffudd (d. 1283) ill Dagobert! (d. 639 CE), kg of the Franks ill Dakar (Senegal) 393, ~ 122, 399n20, 40 I Dalrymple, Alexander (d. 1808) 338 Danes 18.Q Danube, river _lliQ Dar es Salaam .412 Darien (Panama), attempted Scottish colonization of 308 Davenant, Charles (d. 17 14), politician 320 David II Bruce (r. I 329-7 I), kg of Scots 268 David, Jacques-Louis (d. 1825), artist 345

461 Davies, R.R., historian .!.TI.., l.Q1,. 253, ~ 11.'l,_ 280 Delavignette, Robert (d. 1976) 393 Delaware, British colony 320, 328 -Delhi (India) 3751165 Dempster, George (d. 18 18) ~ Diceto, Ralph de ( d. 11 99/1200), dean of St Paul 's, London l.Q1,. 2031125, 204 Diocletian (r. 284-305), Roman emperor 446, 452 Disraeli, Benjamin (d. 188 1), UK prime minister 25.Q Domesday Book (1086) -24 Dominica (Caribbean) 328, 33 1 Dublin (Ireland) 267, ll1, 275, 276 Dufferin, Lord, see Blackwood, Frederick Dumfries (Scotland) 262n56 Dumont, Madame 12_2_, 360, 360n34 Dunk, George Montagu ( 176 1- 7 1), 2nd earl of Halifax, president of the Board of Trade 335 Durand, Raoul 405 Durham, palatinate of 266n 78 Dutch empire l!2, 444 East Anglia (England) ~ East Florida, B ritish colony 3 18, 328, 33 I East India Company, the English ~ ll.., 205, 256, 32 1, fil 340, 369, ±.Ll, 4 13n4, lli Ebro, river _lliQ Ecuador ~ 26. Edinburgh (Scotland) 262n56 Edward ! (r. 1272- 1307), kg o f England 206, 259, 26 1,262, 264, 264n67, 265n72, 266,267, 269, 270, 270n l01 , 27 1, 'll'l,_ 28 1,28 1n 166 Edward II (r. 1307- 27), kg of England ~ 270, 27 1, 279 Edward Ill (r. 1327-77), kg of England 262, 263, 2641167, 266, 266n80, M 282, 286 Edward IV (r. 146 1- 83), kg of England 257n33 , 267, 275 Edward Balliol (d. 1364), claimant to Scottish throne 262 Edward ' the Black Prince' (d. 1376), son of Edward IIl, kg of England 282 Egypt 68, .!..Q1 11 9, fil ll.§,_ 447, 450, 454 pharaonic 449 Ptolemaic ill 450 Elbe, river I 7 1, lZi, 1.8.!l Eleanor of Aquitaine (d. 1204), queen of England 202, 2 15, 2 17 Eleanor of Castile (d. 1290), queen of England 262

462

Index

Ely (England), diocese o f 284 'empire' as defined by Michael Doyle 293 as defined by Stephen Howe ~202 as defined by Susan Reynolds 202n20 as distinct from ' state' .ll, 279 historical idea of 12- 15, 222- 5, 255 proposal for a new ideal type of441 - 3 working defi nition of± Empi re (Reich), the medieval German J_Q,1.lQ_,_ 2 11 n70, 22 1n I, m_, ill, ill., 225n 12, ~ 226n 15, 228, 229n25, 233, 234, 236, fil~ 241 , Hb 244, 245, 246, fil~ 248nl44, 249 empi res, historical and archi val destruction lQ and communications i, ll., 22- 3, 2§., 18 1- 90, n2-, HQ, 244, fil 273- 8, :H1_ 449- 53 and gender 25- 6, 358- 62, 364, 366, l'Z5. and the ' Goldilocks Paradox' 5, 27-8 and indirect rule 23--4, 24n95, lQb .411 ' kinetic' 11 and ' modernity' 19 and negotiated authori ty n, 24, 4.8., ~ !_!_§_,_ filfil 3 13, 3 13n 13 1, 338, 338n40 and nomenclature ll., 32., 255 as ' nurseries of bureaucracy' 21. 199 and rule of difference L 11,.11, 37. .5.3. fil 280- 6, 368 and state formation 2Q,. J-1,_ ill 122, 259 and violence 24- 5, 286, 353, 364-90 see also Angevin empire; British empi re; French empire; Inca empire; Napoleonic empire; Ottoman empire; Song dynasty; Spanish empire; Raj, the British; Roman empire England, kingdom of .2±.. _22, .!1±, lli,_ .!.!!., .!.22,~ 203n24, 204, ~ 206, 207, 207n44, ~ 208n54, 2 1On6 I, ill ill, £.!Q., fil ll2, llQ, 220n 127, nI, lli,_ 252n7, 253, ~ fil 256, 256n27, 259, 262, IB... ill..M 267, lll, 275, 278, 279, 280, ~ 285, ~ 3 13nl31 , 320, 32 1, ill, 323 , 324, Bi, 326, 328, 336, 337, 339, ~ 38 1,445 and English attitudes towards Irish, Scots and Welsh 203n26 chancellor of ill crown of 250, fil 252n4 Danish invasion of ( IO16) ill dominions outside Britain 28.0. and the English 203 exchequer of 276, 277, 286 government of 204, 2 18, 256, 44 7n36

kings of .!.22.,_ 205, 206n4 1, 2 18, 248, 257, 258, 269, 287 and English law 3 19, 323, 335, 45 1 liberties of 266n78 and its medieval empire 9, ~filIB 274, ll2..,286 Norman Conquest of( l 066) ill parliament of 284, 332 po1ts 275 and its post-medieval empire (to 1707) 9, IB, 2661178, 3 18n I, ill, 323, 324, 325, lli,_ 327, 328, 338n40, 444, 45 1 Privy Council of ill, 325 and English settlers in France 274nl 20 and English settlers in Ireland 203 see also British empire; Plantagenet dynasty English Channel ill Eritrea l.il2 Euphrates, river 64 Europe 82, 98, IOI, 10 ln55, l.Qb_ 120, 122, 124, lli,_ 180, 198, l.Ql, 2 10n68, 218, 241 , Hb 244, fil 253, 256, 262, 279nl49, 324,344,346, 351 , 352, 353, 356, 357, 358, 359, 362 European Commission 11, 11 n28 European Union 11 , I ln28 Evagrius Ponticus, theologian 139 Falaise (France) 2 15 treaty of( ll 74) 203 FarabT, al- (d. 950) 69n4 l , 78 Fauquier, Francis (d. 1768), governor of Virginia 340 Ferdinand VI (d. 1759), kg of Spain 309 Ferdinand VII (d. 1833), kg of Spain 3 15, 3 17 First Punic War _{l1Q BCE) 130 First World War, see World War 1 Flanders, Spanish rule of 29 1, 295, 297, 300, 301n51,302, 305, 308 Fleische,; Come/I, historian 108, 11 3, 114 Fl intshire (within medieval principality of North Wales) 26 1 Florence (Italy) 358, 358n29 Florida, see East Florida, British colony; West Florida, British colony Fontevraud (France) 205n33 Foucault, M ichel, philosopher 8, .!..2, 19n65, 367, 368n1 9, 392 Frame, Robin, historian 255 France .i6, 124, 17 1, 180, ~ ~ 206n4 l , ill 2 14n87, ill 2 18, llQ,_ fil ~ 259, 263, 267, 282, ~ 294, 3 15, 32 1, 337, 339,346, 346n6, 348, 350, 35 1, 352, 354, 355, 358, 362, 393, 394,396, 397, 398, 400, 40 1, 403, 405, 407

Index Anglo-French wars 262, 263 civil service l ln28 - crown 24ll English rule in 2&3. expulsion of English from ( 1453) 250 kings of lQi, lQ§, IB 259 264n67 2.@, 2S2

kingdom of~ 264n67 parliament 402 Franconia 228, 23.2 Franco-Roman aristocracy l.1.6 Frankfu rt (Germa ny), c ity as centre of adminis tration (1 5th cent.) 241 churches in 244 council held at (794) ill Franks, kingdom of the (regnum Francorwn) l.§., llL ll1, ill, I 78 n3 8, ill,_ ill., 1M,_lli2_,l2_L_l_2Q and aristocracy J.11 and commercial activity ill and Iberian peninsula ~ and population size I 76n33 see also Carolingian empire; Charlemagne; Charles Martel; Merovingian dynasty Frederick II (r. 12 11-50), emperor 225, ~ 238n96, 240nl05, 242nl1 7, 247 Frederick lll (r. 1452- 93), emperor 231,233, 241 , 246 -Frederick ' the Fair ' (r. 13 14- 30), kg of the Rom ans lli French empire .2.. .1.6... 24, 25, l!2.,_ 399n20 in A frica 20, 392, 393, 394, 395, 396, 396n 14, 397n 15, .J..2]_, 400, fil 402. iQ1, 407, 408, 409 and the Ecole de la France d 'Outre-Mer 40..1 and Inspection du Travail 392, 393 , 121,_ 396n 15, 397n 16, ;l.22, 400, 402, 406, 1Q.2,il0. and the Office des Etudes Psychotech11iques 405 French language 178, 202nl 9, 282, 282n l 70 Fris ians 2.42 --Frontinus, Roman senator 186 Furse , Ralph (d. 1973), civil servant 422, 427 dacfar n Gahi?, al- (d. 868) 15._ GahsiyiirT, a l- (d. 942) 54, TI Gaius Popilius Laenas, Roman consul 131 Galbraith, VH. , historian !2Jl. Galvez, Jose de ( d. 1787), secretary of state for the Indies .3..Q2. Gambia 426 Garonne, river ill

463 Gascony, duchy of __l_2l, 193n 119, 202, 2021123, lQl, 203n25, Mm 259, 282, 287 and the Gascon language 282 and the Gascon ' register ' 2n and the Rotuli vasconie ('Gascon rolls ') 267 Gascony (France) 122., lQl,_ 203n25, ~ 204n32, l.QQ, 208n49, 2 14n87, lli, 2 t 5n96, ~M IB ~~ ~ ~ 268n86, 270n IO I , 276, 277n 136, 2&2 seneschal of21.5. Gassanid (c. 490- 636), dynasty l.Q Gaul 134 l..iQ_, 11.!.., .!.fl,_ 173n20, .!11,_ .!12,_ 11§,_ 176n33, .!11. ill., 239, 362 and Gallo-Roman aristocracy 11§,_ fil and Gallo-Roman society 11§,_ l 76n33 Gavaghan, Terence ( d. 20 I I) 26, 422 Genet, Jean-Philippe, historian 205, 258 Genoa (Ita ly) 45 1n42 -Geoffrey (d. 11 5 1), count of Anjou ~ 202n2 I , 204n32 George, David Lloyd (d. 194 5), UK prime minister 372 Georgia (United States) 32 1, 328,333, 338, 341 Gerhard, archbishop of Mainz 235

m

Germania 11l Germanic lang uage 244 laws I 76n32 people .!1§_ Germany 18, 176, 180,2 11,220, 235, 237, 242, 248, 346, 347, 352, 353, 396, 446 army 248 society 241 Ghana 407 Glahn, Richard van, historian 48 Glanvill, Ranulf 2 16n I 08 Glen, James (d. 1777), governor of South Carolina 340 Goebel, Julius, historian 253, 254 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (d. 1832), writer 22 1 Gold Coast (Ghana) 407, 41 6, 4 18, 423 , 425, 426, 427 Golden Bull, the (1 356) 226, 228,236, 239, 242, 243, 243n 11 8 Gooch, W illiam (d. 175 1), governor of Virginia 340 Gopalswami, R.A., civil servant 374n57 Goree (Senegal) 399n20 'Gough tnap' 275,276 Gould, William, historian 367 Gournay, Jean Claude Marie Vincent de ( 17 12-59), economist 147 Granada (Spain) 303

464

Index

Greece 60n 13, M, fil 159, 449 cavalrymen 120 classical period ill culture 144. language 152 literature :M Grenada (Caribbean), British colony 328, 331 Guadaloupe 330 Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe 87, 87111 4, 93 Guangzhou (Guangdong province, China) 33 Guelfi, Madame, chief labour inspector of _ Overseas France 4031130 Guernsey (Channel Islands) 265 Gueye, Lamine (d. 1968), politician 402 Guinea ill Guines (France) 262 Gwynedd (Wales) 220n l27, 2.6..1 Gwynedd Uwch Conwy ('beyond the Conwy) lfil_, 26 1n5 I Habsburg, dynasty H,_ IZ, .!Ql, ~ fil 246, l2l,_ 294n 14, 300n40, 307, 308, l!2,. 352, ~ 355 lands ill Haddington (Scotland) 262n56 Hadrian (d. 13..8. CE), Roman emperor .lA2 Hagia Sophia, see S. Sophia (Hagia Sophia) Hailey, Arthur 41 7 Halberstadt (Germany) ill l:lalid b. Barmak 67, 11 Halifax, earl of, see Dunk, George Montagu, 2nd earl of Halifax Hamburg (Germany) 355, 356 Hamilton, George (d. 1927),secretary of state for India 37 1n38 Han _{1QI BCE- 220 CE), dynasty l!_. 32114, .Jl.,. .H,_ l§,_ 37, 48, .42. .5..0. ~ g 53, 442 southward migration of .15. Hangzhou (China) IZ, .5..1. Hanoverian dynasty l.!.2. Hansa 355 Hardyng, John (d. 1465), English chronicler and forger 270 Harfleur (France) 263,269, 27711138 Harun al-RasTd, 5th 0 Abbasid caliph 67, 71,ill Hastings, Warren (1732- 1818), governor-general o f Bengal 27, 370 - Havana (Cuba) l!Q Hedjaz, the (coastal region in Arabian peninsula) 63, 70 Heidelberg (Germany)2 29 Helie de Malemort, archbishop of Bordeaux ( 11 88- 1207) 2 I 8n 11 9 Helmstatt, Raban von n.1,. 235n65 Helvetic Republic (Switzerland) 346n6

m

Henry V (d. 11 25), emperor 202n2 I He nry VTJ (r. 1308- 1313), emperor 225, 230, 233,238n96, 240nl 05, 247 He nry I (r. I100- 1135), kg of England 202 Henry II (r. 11 54-89), kg of England 122, lQQ,. IQb 202n 19, l.Q1_ 203n25, l.Q1,_ 204n30, Ni, 2.QQ.,_ 206n39, 2Ql,_ 208n49, ~ llQ,_ ill Henry lll (r. 1216-72), kg of England ~ ~ 2.12.. 259 He nry IV (r. 1399- 1413), kg of England 272,277 He m-y V (r. 1413- 22), kg of Engla nd ~ ill 263, 267, 268n84, 2M, fil l.ffi.. 282 He nry VI (r. 1422- 6 1), kg of England 255n24, 263, 268n84 Henry Raspe, landgrave o fThuringia, German anti-king (r. 1246-7) 225, 241 , 241 n I 08 Henry VT(r. 11 90-7), kg of Sicily 247 Henry ' the Young King' (d. 11 83), son of Henry II, kg of England 203n25 Heracleia (Turkey), city of ill Heraclius (d. 64 1 CE), Eastern Roman emperor .lA2 Herod the Great (d. i BCE) .!l! Herodotus 111 Hippodrome (Constantinople) 143 Hisam b. 0 Abd al-Malik, Umayyad caliph 14 Hispaniola (Caribbean) 320 Hitler, Adolf(d. 1945) 345 Hobsbawm, Eric (d. 20 12), historian I 4n46, 28 Hobson, John A. ( d. 1940), economist l 6n52 Hoccleve, Thomas (d. 1426), poet and bureaucrat 258 Hohenstaufen, German royal dynasty (I I 38- 1254) ill, 226, 227,228, n..Q, 239, 240,240nl05, 243nl22, 248 Holland 180, 353, 355 Holmes Commission 423, 428 Holt, JC. (d. 2014), historian 209, 2 17, 21 7n 111 , 220 Ho ly Land, the ill Holy Roman Empire 9, 13, 102, 170, 221,222, 222n6, 223,223n8, 225, 226, 227, 228, n..Q, 23 1, 232, 234, 235, 236, 236n76, 237, 238, 239, 240, 243,244, 245, 246, 247, 248,249,347,454 see also Empire (Reich), the medieval German Horace, poet M Horseheath church (Eng land) 277 Houphouet-Boigny, Felix (d. 1993), 396 Howe, Stephen, historian 56, 202 Huancavelica (Peru) 3041167 Huari, the 95

Index Huascar (r. 1527- 32), Sapa Inca .82.,....8.1, I 00 Huayna Capac (r. c. 1493- 1526), Sapa Inca 82, ~ 85n I 0, 86n 11, 93n35, 91_ Hudson river (United States) 320 Hudson Bay Company fil 443 Huizong, 8th emperor of the Song (r. 11 00- 26) .ll Hungary _!_Qb_ .!..Q1_ .!QZ., l.8.0. Huns 1.40. Hussites 23.2 lbn a l-Furiit 21 Ibn Ijaldiin (Ibn Khaldun, d. 1406), historian-philosopher 73 Ibn al-Muqaffac M, li, 60n l 2, .ll. 11.H.. 75n69, 1L. 77n79, JJl lbn al-Muctazz (d. 908), poet 62 lllyrian provinces 352, 355 fn alcik, Hali/, historian lQZ Inca empire .2., ll fil_, g 82n I, 84, 84n7, ~ ~[L, 88, 90, 9 1, 9 ln27, 22..2.1.24..25. .2§., 97, 97n49, 2.§_, 22., .!.QQ, I 00n54, 300n43 , 304, 447, ~ 450, ill and the quipu 20, 87- 94, 95, ~J_Q__!__._ 447, fil4.5A and the Sapa Inca 84, 88, 90, .'!..!_, 9 1n27, 94, .2§., 21. 2.§_, 22. lilll. and Tahuantinsuyu ('Land of Four Parts') 11. l.Q,_ 24. fil, R 82 n2, fil, Mi .S.S. ~ 87, 88, 90, 9 1, 92, 93, 21, 95,.2§., 97, 98, .22., .l.QQ India 26, 56, IOI n55, 320, 32 1, 364, 364n I , lfill.,_ 368nl9, 369, 369n23, l1Q_,fil 37 1n38, f i l 373, 1Z1,_ 374n53, l&_ 3771175, 379, 379n83 , 1M, 38411108, 385n I I 8, ill.,~ fil 41 8 British army in 2.6. British empire in ~ 296n20 Civil Rights Committee 380 colo nial bureaucracy in 24, 26, 364, 364n I, 365, 369, 37 1, 375,383 and the Government of India Act (1919) 375 and the Government of India Act ( 1937) 3751163 and the Indian Penal Code and Criminal Procedure Codes ( 1860- 1) 377 and the Indian Police Commission ( 1902)378 literature 14 post-colonial state 367 see also East India Company, the English; Mug hal empire; Raj, the British Indian Ocean lfil Indies, the 27411 123 , 293, 295, 296, 297, 298, 298n33, 298n29, 299, 299n36,300,

465 30 I, 302, 303, 303n58, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308,3081191,309,3 10, 311 , 312, 3 13, 314, 315,3 1~3 18, 320,32 1, 324, 327, 341 , 392, 395, 41 6, 41 7, 451 Habsburg Indies 298 and the Recopilaci6n ( I 680) 296, J.2.5. Indochina 5..6. Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique (d. 1867), artist 345 Innis, Harold (d. 1952) 443, 448, 449, 450, 451 , 452, 453 , 455, 456 Iolo Goch, medieval Welsh poet 284 Iran 79 literature of 14 Iraq M, 63 , 65, 79, 11 9, 120, 121 Ireland 203, 206,207, 2 11 , 2 14n89, 2 17, 220, 250,252, 253, 259,262,263, 264, 264n68,265,266,267, 268,269, 271, 275, 276, 277, 279, 285,285nl 86,286, 287, 3 18, 333, 334 chancery 268n86, 276 English administration in 285 English settlers in 220n 126, 249, 287 establishment of English law in 203, 285111 86 exchequer of 276, 277 and the native Irish 203, 2041128, 217, 273, 285, 287 and origins of ' the Pale ' 286 parliament of 332, 333 perceived as barbarous 203 privy council 333 treasurer of 276 lrni (Spa in) 134 Is lamic empire 27, 56, 60, 6 1, 62, 63, 64, 65, 70, IL, 79, .!..Q1_ I 08, I 08n I 3, 120 and Dar al-harb 60, 60n 12 and Dar al-Islam ll,_ 60, 60n 12 and tax system 120 Istanbul (Turkey) Armenian patriarch of 123 patriarch of 123 !stria l.8.0. Italy 129, 130, 146, 152, 178, liQ, 193, 194, 2 11 , 223 , 225, 237, 239, 240, 29 1, 295 , 295nl 5, 297, 299,300, 30ln51 ,302, 305,308, 350, 35 1, 353,354,3 58, 362, 445 city-states 152, 248 language 239, 240 Izmir, city of (Anato lia) 11 6 Jamaica (Caribbean), British colony RQ.,, 322, 326, 328, 330, 33 1, 332 James II (r. I 685-88), kg of England 326, 332

466

Index

James I (r. 1406- 37), kg of Scots 273 Janissaries ll.Q_ Japan 101n55 Jauja (Peru) 90 Jeremias ! of Constantinople (d. 1546), patriarch of Istanbul ill Jersey (Channel Islands) 265 Jerusalem l.8.l patriarchate of ill Jhenida (India) 384 Jin, dynasty 34, 51 , 5.1 Joan of Arc (ci1431) 280n l61 Jobst (r. 1410- 11 ), kg of the Romans 225 John (r. 1199- 1216), kg of England 121. l 97n4, ~ l 98n8, 198n7, l22.,IQ1.IQ±, 204n32, 205, 206, 207n46, 208, 208n49, 11.Q_, 21 On64, 2 I 2n79, ill, 2 I 3n85, 21±. 2 I4n89, fil 11§., 216n I 05, ill lll, llQ, 220n 125, 285 John Balliol (r. 1292- 6), kg of Scots 281 John XXll (1316-24), pope 235 John the Cappadocian, praetorian prefect ll2.,JA6. John of Lancaster (d. 1435), 1st duke of Bedford 255n24, 280n 161 , 283 John of Marmoutier (Tours) 204n32 Jones, Arthur Creech (d. 1964) 419, 420, 423, Q1,_ 426 -Jones, A..H.M.. (d. 1970), historian ll2., llQ_,_ lli, lli,_ .12§ Joseph II (d. 1790), Holy Roman emperor 350, 351 , 352 Josephine (d. 18 14), empress of the French 349 Julian (d. 363 CE) , Roman emperor 142 Julius Caesar (d. 44 BCE) 175, 245, 250, 346 Jurchen, rulers of Jin dynasty .:H,51Justinian ! (r. 527- 65), Roman emperor 1.12., .!.iQ,_ .!±b ill., ~ Kafka, Franz ( 1883- 1924) on bureaucracy I 7, 28. taught by Alfred Weber (c.1905) 454 Kaifeng (China) 37, 49, 51 Kamba, people 425 Kampala (Uganda) 425 Kaolack (Senegal) 398 Kariithi, G.K., head of Kenyan civil service 433 Kazan (Russia) J.Ql Kenya 26. 395, 398, 423, 424, 425, 426, 1lQ,. 411- - - - - - - - - Institute of Administration 432. Kenyan Federation 430 and the Mau Mau 4}{l and Special Branch in 4}{l

Kenyatta, Jomo (d. 1978), I st president of Kenya (1964- 78)4 19, 420, 432, 433 Khitan, rulers of Liao dynasty 33, 34, 49, 50 Kikuyu, people 425 Kildare (Ireland),castle 269n93 Kipling, Rudyard (1 865- 1936) 5, 5n7 Kirchen, Johannes 246 Kirkcudbright (Scotland) 262n56 Klingenberg, Heinrich von 235n68 Konrad IV (r. 1237- 54), kg of the Romans 225 Korea TI, 1§., R 53, 442 Krakow (Poland) 229 Kufa (Iraq) ~ Kurds ill Labourd (France) 199 Labmid (c. 300- c.600), dynasty .N Lahsa .lli La Reole (France) 2 18 La Rochelle (France) ~ 2 141194, ill 21711115, lJl, 2 19 Latin 170, 176, 241 culture 144 language 135, 170nl , 176, 178, 182, 202n l9, 239, 240,244, 258, 450 Lebrun, Charles-Fran9ois (d. 1824), due de Plaisance li§_. 354 Leeward Islands (West Indies), British colony 320,327,328, 329,330, 331 Leinster (province in Ireland) 276 Leman (France) 360 Lemos, conde de, viceroy of Peru 306 Lenin, Vladimir I 6n52 Levant, the 56 Liao, dynasty .:H. .42. .5.ll, 50n6 I, 5 1, 5.1 Libanius (d. c. 392), orator 144 Libya .l.!2 Liguria (Italy) 35 1 Lima (Peru) 301 , 306, 3 1lnl 12,3 13, 3 15 Limnos, island (Greece) 110, 111 Linlithgow (Scotland) 262n56 Lionel of Antwerp (d. 1368), duke of Clarence, lieutenant of Ireland 286 Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (d. 1282), prince of Wales 261 , 266 Lockhart, Sir Charles 427 Loire (France), river 263 Lombardy 183, 192, 193, 194, 232, 240, 249, 351 ,3 54 and title ' king of the Lombards' (rex Langobardorum) 180 London (England) 209n55 , 2 I 2n79, 255, 275, 275nl 25,3 18,322, 333,335,336, 372n45, 395 407 414, 41 5, 41 8, ~ 421 , 422, 423, 424, 426, 430,443

Index Lorraine (France) 356 Lotharingia 193n 119,223 Lothian (Scotland) 262n56 Louis V III (r. 1223- 6), kg of France 212. Louis IX (r. 1226- 70), kg of France 259 Louis XVIII (r. 18 14-24) 361 Low Countries (Flanders) ~ 295, ~ 300 Liibeck (Germany) 229, 352 Ludwig IV (r. I 3 14-47), emperor 225, ~ 211., fil 237, 238,243, 244, 244n 123, 245nl 29 Lugard, Frederick (d. 1945) ~ !!i,. 415, 41 6, 419, 422 Luhmann, Nik/as , sociologist 16n54, 149 Luke the evangelist, St 13± Luxembourg, Jacquetta of(d. 1472) 283 Luxembourg, Louis of(d. 1443) 283 , 284 Luxembourg 228, 233n54, 238, 246 Lydus, John, Roman bureaucrat 143, .lM Lytton, Edward Robert Bulwer- (d.189 1), viceroy of India 372 Maanen, Cornelis van (d. 1849) 355 McCluhan, Marshall (d. 1980) 443, 454 MacDonald, Ma lcolm (d. 198 1), colonial secreta ry .411. Mackarness, Frederic (d. 1920) 380 McLean, Colin lli Macmillan, Harold (d. 1986), UK prime minister ill Madog ap Llywelyn (d. 1295) 269,284 Madras (India) 372, 372n45, 373n46, 376, 378, 379, 3 79n83, 38 1, ~ 385n 11 8 Madrid (Spain) 273 , ~ 297, 298n35, 304, 3 13, ill., ill., 3 I 7, 452 Magdeburg (Germany) ill Magna Carta 12 15 issue £!.2., 220n 127 1225 issue 2 19n 12 1 'Magna Charla' 337 Magnesia (Greece) 13 1 Maine (France) 202-:-E9 Maine (United States)D2 Mainz (Germany) l 71,230n35, ~ 237 peace of(l 235) 242 Malaga (Spain) lli Malalas, John, chronicler .l4ll Malawi ill Institution of Public Administration ill Malaya 4 18 Mam luk dynasty .!Q1 llQ,_ ill Ma ' miin, al-, 7th 0 Abbiisid caliph 61 Manchu, rulers ofQing dynasty lb 34 Manchuria (China) 49 Mandalay (Burma) 4 I 8

467 Manila (Philippines) 307, ll.Q Man~iir, al-, caliph 55, 64, 67, 67n34, 1l Mariam bt. Antun a l-Ashshi il6 Marsi li us of Padua 245 Martigny, Eudes de 2 14 Martinique (Caribbean) 400 Marwiin b. Muhammad, Umayyad caliph 2..!. Maryland (United States) 323, ~ l!!_ Mason, Philip (d. 1999) 365 Massachusetts, British colony 322, 33 1 and the Massachusetts Bay Company 323 Matilda o f England (d. I 167), empress ~ 202n2 1 Mauleon, Savari de 214 Maurice (r. 582- 602), emperor lli Maximilian ! (r. 1486-1519), Holy Roman emperor 241 Maximilian Joseph (d. 1825), kg of Bavaria 352 Maximus of Ephesus (d. 372 CE), philosopher ill Mazumdar, Ambika Charan 385 Mboya, Tom ( d. 1969), politician 4 I 9 Mecca, city of 23, 54n 1, 1il, I03 Medina, city of 54n I, 63, J.illMediterranean ~ fil,lQl, .Ll1, .l.21., lfil.,_ 193 lii,_ 445 Megenberg, Konrad von 239 Mehmed II (r. 1444-6; 145 1- 8 1), 7th Ottoman su Itan .1Ql, .!Q2., llQ, fil l 22 Mehmed Ill, (d. 1603), 13th Ottoman sulta n 62nl 8 Me lzi d' Eril, Francesco (d. 18 16), vice-president of Milan 35 1 Mendoza, Don Antonio de (d. 1552), Spanish viceroy fil 299, 302 Mercia (England) 2 1 I Merioneth (Wales) 26 1 Merovingian dynasty 141 , 177, I 77n35, 178, 183 Merton, Robert K., sociologist l 6n54 Mesopotamian empires J]_2_ Metz (France) 17 1 Mexico 100, ~ 299, 301 , 303 , 303n59, 304, 3041167, lQ1, 3 12, 3 1211 11 9, 31511145, 317,342 city 3 12 Middle East ~ 1011155, l[l_ Midnapur (India) 38 11194 Milan (Italy) 141 , 170, 175, 350 Ming ( 1368- 1644), dynasty 3 I, lb 33 Miskawayh, philosopher-historian fil,_ lL 75 Mitchell, Philip (d. 1964), governor of Kenya .1!1,_ 41 5, 422, 423 Moctezuma lI (r. 1502-20) I 00

468

Index

Mohacs, battle o f ( 1526) I 03 Moi, Daniel arap (b. 1924), 2nd president of Kenya (r. 1978- 2002) 433 Moldavia 121 Mombasa (Kenya) ~ 4 17 4 I8 Mongolia .ll,_ .4'l Mongols 32, .ll,_ 16. rulers of Yuan China 2.L 34. tax system of .!1Q Montgelas, Maxmillian von (d. 1838), chief minister of Bava ria 35 1 Moravia 23..& society 241 Morea (Greece) I 03 Morley, John (d. 1923), secretary of state for lndia :1£2. Moutet, Marius (d. 1968) 393 Mucawiya lil Mughal empire I 06, 205 Mu):iammad (d. 632) 54n I , ~ §Q, .§l_, §J, §§_, 70 Mul)ammad b. Ra' iq .6.l!. Mul)assin, al- 72 Miinster (Germany) 172 Muqtadir, al- 67 Murua, Martin de 2I,_ 93 Muscovite army 103 Mutawakkil, al-, 10th c Abbasid caliph fil Mysore (India) 204 Nairobi ~ 426, 43 1 Naldanger, raja of 384, 385 Nanzhao (8th- 9th cent. polity) not incorporated by the Tang 36 Naples (Italy) 299, 300n40, 355 Napo leon ! Bonaparte ( d. 182 1), emperor of the French 11 15n49, .!.§.,_ ll,_ ~ Th .111,_ 344n I , Hl,lli, 346n6, 347, 348, 349, ~ 35 1, 35 1nl 7, 352, ~ 355, 356, llilli, 36 1, 362, 363n37 Napoleon Ill Bonaparte ( d. I 870) 16 Napoleonic empire 9, 206, 295, 344, 345 , 346, liQ,, 352 - - - - - - - - and Code Napoleon 349, ~ 409 Nassau, duchy of3 50 Navarre (Spain) 203n25 , 299 Ne ro (d. 68 CE), Roman emperor 135 , 245,283 Ne umarkt:-Johann von 234, 234n_6_0 _ _ _ Newcastle (England) 275 New England 320, 323, 332 , 34 1 Newfoundland~ itish colony 328, 330 New Granada lQ2.,, 3 12n 11 9 New Haven, British colony 322 New Spain 29 1 12s l22,_ 30 I , 303n59, lQ1, l.!J..,_ 3 I 2n I 18

New York, British colony 331 , 332 - New Zealand ill Nicaea (An atolia) 115. Nicephorus (d. 828 CE), patriarch of Constantinople ill Nigel, Richard fitz (d. 11 98), royal administrator fil 2 I 2n74 Nigeria 415, 41 8, 423, 426, 428, 431 Institute of Administration in 432 Nika riot (532 CE) ill N ile, river .5..6. N1mes (France) 359 Nine Years War ( 1688- 97) 298 21.2. Niort (France) 2 I 7nl 15, Nkrumah, Kwame (d. 1972), president of Ghana 4 19, ~ 426, 427 Normandy (France) 202, 204,205, 207, 208, 208n54, 2 1On64, ll±, lLl_, 2 16, 2 17, 217n 11 2, l12,_ 220, 259, 263, 266n80, 267,277,282, 2.8.l seneschal of 2 16n I 05, 283 under English occupation ( 15th cent.) 278nl48 Normans 201 and empire 202 North America ll.Q, 32 1, 324, 330, 424, 451 British empire in 22, 315, 318, 320 revolution in 3 18, 319, ill and the trans-Appalachian west 320 Northamptonshire (England) 200 North Sea 18 1, 352, 354 Northumbria (England) 2 1 I North Wales, principa lity of 26 1 Notker of St Gall 186 Nova Scotia, British colony 320, 330, 33 1,3 33, --338, ill Nunez Vela, Don Blasco 300 Nuremberg (Gennany) 237 Nyasaland 427, 430, 432 Nyerere, Julius (d. 1999) 4 3 1

m

Obama, Barack, US president 5, 5n8 Occident 447n36 Occitan, language 240 6 Conchobair Failge (O'Conor Faly), Irish lord 269n93 Offa (d. 796), kg of Merci a 18 1 Ohrid patriarchate of 121 O ldmixon, John (d.1742), historian 320 O leron (France) l.Q§., 2 17 O livares, count-duke of (Don Gaspar de Guzman, 1587- 1645) 307 O ' Malley, L.S.S. (d. 1941 ) 365 Orhan (r. 1326-62), 2nd Ottoman sulta n _!_Ql

Index Orissa (India) 38 1n9 l Orthodox Church fil 1.24 Orwell, George ( d. 1950), author 418 Osman, house of .ll, lQl, .lQ§_, ill see also Ottoman empire Osman Gazi (d . 1326), 1st Ottoman sultan ill Osnabriick (Gemiany) J.ll Ostia ( Italy) I 8 I Ostrogothic kingdom _112,_ _!iQ Otto the Great (r. 936-73), emperor .!lQ Ottoman empire .2, I 3, 62n I 8, I 00, I 02, I 03, ill, .!..Q2_, I06n I O, .lQ2,. .lQ§_, ..!.Q2,l l On 19, l!!.. 1111127, l.!1., .!.!1, l l 4n38, .!Q,_ l 16n48, l!l,_ l l 7n49, l_!_ll_, .l!..2,_ 11Q, m.., _ill_,. _m_, _ill, 161. 170,221 and Kanunname (book of law) _l_Q_ll., J_Q2_, ill and Osmanlica, language 11 2 in the Siileymanic era ( 1520- 66) I02, lQl, 12.0. and the Tanzimat refom1s ( 1839-76) _l_!l,

mm

!l112A Ottonians, the, German royal dynasty (9 19- 1024)243nl22 Owain Glyn Dwr (d. c. 14 15), prince of Wales 269n93 , ~ 284 Oxford University (England) 372, 372n40, 41 6, 422 Oxus, river 56 Pachacamac (Peru) 98 Pachacuti (c. 1438- 71), Sapa Inca 8..1.,....8.6. Pacific 2.2.l Paderborn (Germany) J.ll Palatine Hill (Rome) 135 Palestine under the Herodian dynasty ill partition of ( 194 7) 426 Palgrave, Franc is (d. 1861) 269n96 Panama 2.2!2 Parsons, Talcott ( d. 1979), sociologist I 61154 Paris (France), city of 11 n28, 17 1, 206, 206n39, ill,, 229, 255n24, 263 , 283, .H§.,. 346n6, ~~ 360, 36 1, 393, ill,. lli, 4 00 Treaty of ( 1259) 206n40, ~ 259 Patino, Jose ( d. 1736) 309 Patourel, John le (d. 1981), historian 253 Paul the Silentiary, poet 142 Pavia (Italy) 194 Peace of Apamea ~ BCE) ill Pee patriarchate of ill Peebles (Scotland) 262n56 Pelisson, Pierre 400

469 Peloponnese (Greece) 167 Pennsylvania, British colony of 328 Pergamum, kingdom of l3.l Perham, Margery ( d. I982) 429 Perigord (France) 122. Persia ill and invasion of Greece (480 BCE) ill and Persian language _l___!l and sack of Antioch @ CE) .!lZ. see also Achaemenid (Persian) empire; Sasanian (Persian) empire Peru 90, 96, 273 , i l l _ , ~ ~ lQQ,, 30 I, 303, 304, 3041167, lQl,_ lQ2., l!!,_ 111,_ 312nl l 8,3 13n l 26, 3 15n l45, 342 Petrarch, scholar and poet 245 Philip II (r. I 180- 1223), kg ofFrance 204, 204n30, ill,. lli,. 2 l 4n88, ill Philip IV (r. 1285- 1314), kgofFrance 235 Philip VI (r. 1328- 50), kg ofFrance 268 Philip II (d. 1598), kg of Spain l2.!,_ 298n35, lQQ,, 303n58 Philip IV (d. 1665), kg of Spain 297 Philip V (d. 1746), kg of Spain 308, lQ2., l!J. Philippines 274 , 29 1 Phocas (r. 602-10), Eastern Roman emperor ll2,, 145 Piedmont (]taly) 352, 353 Pippin 11 (d. 7 14), duke and prince of the Franks 177 Pippin (d. 768), kg of the Franks 177, 178, l 78n38, 121, 194n 123 Pisac (Peru) 85 Pizarro, Francisco ( d. 1541 ) n, 82, 82n2, I 00 Plait, L., judge 385, 386, 386n I 19, 387, 387nl 26 Plantagenet, dynasty 11, 19, 202n l 9, lli., 254, 255, lli.,_ 262, 270 and empire 205n33 , ~ ~lli., 282,287 Plantagenet, Geoffrey, count of Anjou, see Geoffrey (d. 11 5 1), count of Anjou Pliny the Elder (d. 79 CE) 26 Plymouth (now in the United States), British colony 322 Poitevins 202n23, 203 Poitou (France) 202, 204, 205, 2 14, 2 14n92, 2 15,216, 2 17, 259 seneschal of215,215nl 02 Polybius, historian 13 1 Pons, Eudes de 2 14Ponthieu, 264, 265, 267n8 l , 282 count of262 Popular Front (France) 393, 394, 396, 399 Po,titz, Dietrich von, Bohemian chancellor 2291128

~m

470

Index

Portugal 297, 327 Powicke. Maurice (d. 1963), historian 200.W. Pownall, Thomas 324 'Poynings' law', act of the Irish parliament (1494-5) fil 333 Poynton, Hilton ( d. 1996), undersecretary of state for the colonies fil 414 429 Prague (Bohemia) 228, 229, 229n28, 454 Prussia 445 Ptolemy VI (d. 145 BCE), kg of Egypt 13 1 Punic Wars, see First Punic War Qin dynasty (221- 206 BCE) .11 H,_1Q,lli Qing dynasty (1644-1911) .11+.3.2. 33, H,_ 52 see also Manchu Qingtang, region 5.!l Quebec, British colony 328, 33 1, 333,335 Quechua (the Inca language) ~ ~ Quiroga, Vasco de (d. 1565), bishop of Michoacan 303n60 Quito (Ecuador) 94, 3 14, 3 14n 141 Qurays 63, 70 Ra~1, a l-, 20th c Abbasid caliph 68 Raj, the British 2. 24, 25, 364, 383, 452 see also India, Britishempire in Ravenna (Italy) ill Regensburg (Gem1any) l.Z..!. Re ich, see Empire (Reich), the medieval German Reitzcnstein, Sigismund von (d. 1847), chief minister of Baden 15.0 Remusat, Madame de (d. 182 1) 357,358 Re11/e1; Timothy (d. 2002), historian .!..21., 220 Reynier, Jean (d. I8 14) 356 Reynolds, Susan, historian 11, 1L. 279n 149, 437 Rhine (Germany) J.12...!.l.2,.!Jg, 193, 223, ~ fil 347, 350 Confederation of 346116 Rhineland Palatinate 228, 23 8, 2381188 Rhode Island, British colony 322, .128. Rhodes (Greece) ill battle of ( 1522) .!.Ql Rhodes, Cecil (d. 1902) '21 Rhodesia 403n30, ~ 427 Rhone (France) 357 Ricciardi, Francesco (d. 1842), politician 355 Richard I (r. I 189- 99), kg of England 199, 204n32, 206, 2061139, ~ 208n49, 219n l22 Richard II (r. 1377- 99), kg of Eng land 269 211 submissions from Gaelic Irish lords 211

Richard II (d. 1026), duke of Normandy ill,_ 267 Richard of Cornwall (r. 1257- 72), kg of the Romans 225. Richards, Arthur ( d. 1978), I st baron Milverton and governor of Nigeria 422, 423 Richardson, H..G. (d. 1974), historian 199, 208n54,2 13n83, 259 Rio de la Plata ill Robert I Bruce (r. 1306- 29), kg of Scots ~ 28 1 Roches, Peter des ( d. 1238), bishop of Winchester 2071147 Roches, William des, seneschal of Anjou ll±,_ 2 14n93 Roederer, Antoine (d. 1865), prefect of Umbria ill wife of361 Roederer, Pierre-Louis (d. I 835) 354 Roger of Wendover (d. 1236), English chronicler 2.03. Roman law 144, l.22, 439, 453 Rome, ancient 3., 2.,_ .!..!.,_ _Il,_ ~ 20, 22, 25, 33, 34. Jl, 36, 56, 60n 13, 70. ll2., J]Q, 130n4, ill,.Lll, 134, 135, 136, 137, 140, ill, 142, 146, I 52, 153, 170, fil 174, .!22i 176n32, 177, 178, 178n38, 182, 189, .NQ.,. 2 11, 222,223,248, 255, 3 19, 346,362,364, 442, 444, 445, 446, 447, 447n36,448,452,456 and bureaucracy lL. 67 and conquest of Egypt 449 and the eastern empire 21, 137, 143, 146, 147, 167, 182 and food supply 135 and the imperial idea 170 and the later empire .!.L. 21. .11.2., 129n I, llQ., 137, ill, 147, 149n2, 152n6, 153, 159, 167, 170, .11..L. 172, 173, 174, fil .!22i 1fil, I 86, 187, I 89, _l2Q, 452 and the lex lrnitana (Flavian munic ipal law) 134 and political developments under the Tetrachy (284- 337) 137 provinces of 66, I I 2n30, ill 132, .Ll1, 134,446 republican period 132, 445, 450 and settlement 445 and taxation 153 and the Theodosian Code 143 and the western empire 2 1, 13 7, 178 Rome, c ity of 180, 18 1, 200 223, 223n9, 229, 240nl05,275,35 1, 359,360, 445,446, 450, 452

Index

471

Roosevelt, Theodore (d. 191 9), US president 364 Rouen (France) 264 Roxburgh (Scotland) 262056 Royal African Company 325 Rudolf IV, duke of Austria 245 Rudolf ! (r. 1273- 9 1), kg of the Romans ill., 231 n38, 232n44, 235n68, 237,21& Rufique (Senegal) 399n20 Rumeli (The Balkans) .!.Q2, !lb !.!2 Runciman, W.G., sociologist 7 Rupert ! of the Palatinate (r. 1400- 1410), kg of the Romans ill., 229, TIQ, ill, fil 233n55, fil 235n65, 238, 238n88, 241, 245nl29, 246 Russia 13, 352 Russia11empire J..Q1 I 05 , 124

mm

Safawid (Safavid) dynasty 77, 103, 105,

~

120.

---

Safavid-Ottoman struggle ill St Augustine 76, 144 St Christopher, island 12.Q Saint Emilion (France) ill St John (Caribbean), British colony 328, 331 Saint-Louis (Senegal) 398, 3991120 S. Sophia (Hagia Sophia), church of (Istanbul) Hb lAl St Vincent (Caribbean) .llQ,_ 328 'Saladin tithe ' ( 1188) 204, 208n50 Salamis, battle of(480 BCE) ill Saliai1, German royal dynasty (1024-dynasty 11 25) 223, 243n122, 247 Saliceti, Antoine (d. 1809), politician l5A Siilim Abu-' 1-cAla' 1A Salzburg, archbishop of 244 Samarra' , city of 79 Sancho, Pedro S2 Santa Fe de Bogota (Colombia) 30 1 Santiago (Chile) &2 Sardinia (Italy) 299 Sarker, Kunjo 384, 387 Sarmie nto de Gamboa, Pedro 81. Siisanian (Persian) empire 2-L 3.2, 55, 56, 64, 66 67 ?.Q,. IA.. J..fi. 77 ~ attack on Roman empire .!.1J.. Sassanid Persians l.4.0. Savannah, river (United States) 320 Savoyard monarchy 347, ~ 352 Saxony J 78, 192, 194 Schlick, Kasper l1L 246 Scotland lQ1 203n24, fil 220n 127, ~ fil 257 26 1 262 264 264n67, 266 267, 269 270, 27 1 27 1nl04, 273 275nl25, 277,280, 28 1

and Act of Union ( 1707) 3 18n I and Anglo-Scottish wars 268 and the ' Ragman Rolls' 270 and the Scottish highlands 276 and the Rotuli scotie ('Scotch rolls') 267 English claim of lordsh ip over 270, 272 English rule in 28 1 Scots, 204n30 English and French perceptions of203n26 Seo/I. James C. , anthropologist 36, 108 'Second Sophistic' , the fil -Second World War, see World War 11 Sefcovic, Maros, European Commission vice-president 11 n28 Seine valley (France) 217 Seleucid empire ill Selim ! (r. 15 12- 20), 9th Ottoman sultan 1fil, 120 Selim Ill (r. 1789- 1807), 28th Ottoman sultan 12.4 Seljuk empire !Qb. .!Q1, !.!2 Selkirk (Scotland) 262n56 Sempa, Akalule 425 Senegal 394, 400,403,408 Senegambia 3 18, 331 Senghor, Leopold (d. 200 I), president of Senegal 408 Septimius Severus (d. ll.l1 Roman emperor 145 Serbia, kingdom of ill cavalrymen 12D. Serge (Spain) 358 Seven Years War ( 1754-63) 3 10, 320, 321, 328, 330, 33 1 Seville (Spain) 297, 299, 307, 309 Shaanxi 49 Shan yuan, treaty of 50 Sichuan (China) 49 Si"ite, dynasty 68, TI Sicily 130, 152, 299. Norman kings of 240n I05 Sierra Leone 426 Sigismund (r. 1410/ 11-37), emperor ill., 230, 236n72, 243, 243nl22, 246 Silesia 238, 241 Simeon, Joseph Je rome (d. I 842) 354 Slavic (Czech) 140 language 239, 240 people 180 tax system @ Slovenia 180 Smith, Adam ( 1723- 90) 323, 342 Somodevilla, Zenon de (d. l 78 1), I st marques de la Ensenada 309

4 72

Index

Song dynasty (960-1276) 9, l Q, 2 1, 24, 27, 33, J.§,_ll,_iQ,_ 40n26, 11 4ln28, 1b- 42n30. 43, 45. 46 461144 47, 48. 49,.iQ, 501160, ih g,_ 21, l 30n6, fil 44 l Northern Song R.11 ~ .iQ, .5.1 Southern Song 37 Soult, Jean-de-D ieu (d. l 85 l) 352, 353 South Africa ill South A merica 4.5.J_ Spanish rule in 87, 2l,2.s22,~ 293,295, 296, 2961119. 12]_, lQQ.. 30 l, 303, lQ1,_ 306, 308, l!Q, llb l!_1, fil 3 16, 3 17,

~:152. Southampton (England) 2l6n l 05 South Carol ina, British colony TIQ,. ill l1! Soviet Union .1Ll.., 4 18 Spain, 82, !1.1, 180 193 , 273, 293 , 297, 222.,. 300. 30 I, 302, 303, ill. 306. ill.. 308, JQ2, l!Q, fil 3 l 3n l 31, l!_1, fil 3 I 5n 145, 3 I 7, ill,_EL 327, 337, ll.2.. ~ 352, 353 monarchy ~ ~ ~ 293, 294, ~ 297, 299, 30 1, 302, 304,306, 308, fil see also Spanish em pire Spanish empire 2, J.i, 22, ~ ~ 294n 14, ~ 295n 15, 122, lQQ.. JQbJQ2, 1!b 313, fil 3 I 7, 112,lli and the Junta Central ill see also South A merica, Spanish rule in Spanish successio n, war of the (l 701 - 13/ 14) 308, JQ2, 320 Speyer (Germa ny) 246, 24 7n 139 Spoleto (Italy) 361 Stallard, Peter 428 430 Stanegate fort (Eng land) 134 Stanley, O liver (d. l 950), colonial secretary fil Stapeldon, Walter (d. I 326), bishop of Exeter and treasurer of England ~ Stephen, James F itzjames (d. 1894), lawyer and judge 37 l Stirling Bridge, battle of( l297) 28 1 Strait of Canso (Canada) 320 Suchet, family 361 S uc het, Honorine (d. 1884) 359 S uchet, Louis-Gabriel (d. 1826), Marshal of France 352, 353 Sudan, the British administration in ill Suetonius (d. c. 140 CE), historian 142 Suez canal 26, 426 Sufyan, gov. of Basra 54 Sui dynasty (58 1- 6 18) 34 S uleyman l 'the Magnificant' (r. l 520-66), l 0th O ttoman sultan 103, 105, 107, l 13, 114

m

m

m,

Sumerian empire 449, 450 Swabia (Germany) 237 and Swabian dia lect 237 Swaziland i l l Switzerland l.8.0. Syria 63, 68, 70, I 03, l 33, 134 173 army in Iraq 65 Tagore, Rabindranath (d. l 94 1) 374 Tagore, Satyendranath (d. 1923) 374 Talleyrand-Perigord, Charles Maurice de (d. 1838) 18,346 Tang dynasty (6 18- 907) 3 1, 32, 33, 34, J.§,_ 37, 38, 42, 45, 48, 49, ~ 50n60, g 53, 130n6 Tanganyika 403n30, 425, 426, 428, 430, 431 Tange, Andrew de, notary 272 Tanguts 11 Tansar (Tosa r) 76 Tawl1IdI, al- (d. c. 1023) 75 Tawney, J.J ., 4 12 Theodoric (d. 526 CE), kg of the Ostrogoths 140 Theodosius I (d. 395 CE), Roman emperor 190 Theodosius II (d. 450 CE), Eastern Roman emperor 140, 142 Third Macedonian War ( 167 BCE) 13 1 Tiberius (d. 31_ CE), Roman emperor 130, 142, 146 Tibet 3.3. Tig ris, river 64 Tilsit, peace of( l 807) 352 Tito Livio Frulovisi 278 Tlaxcala (Mexico) 303n59 Tobago 318 328 Toledo, Francisco de ( 15 15- 82), viceroy of Peru 3ili1 Topa Inca (c. 147 1- 93), Sapa Inca, 82, 92 Touraine (France) 202, 259 To urnon, family 36 1 To urnon, Madame 359 Toumon-Simiane, Camille de (d.1833) 357 Tours (France) 17 1, 186 Tout. TF ( 1855- 1929), historian 256, 279 Trebizond I 03 Trclawny, William (d. 1772), governor of Jamaica 340 Troyes, treaty of ( l 420) 263 Tudor period 267 Tunis 119 Tupac Amaru 11, rebell ion of( l 780- c. R2J 3 14 Turkish em pire ill language l l 2 Turks J.3.. 34, 103, ll ln27, 119 Tuscany (Italy) 240, 35 l , 358 Tweed, river (Scotland/England) 262, 262n56, 268n86

Index

473

Uganda 4 25, 426 Uighurs D,34. cumar, caliph .6.3., 65 U mayyad dynasty 54, 62, 63, 65, 70, 7 1, 72,

.H,12.

-------

Umbria (Italy) 358 United Kingdom civ il service of l ln28 parliament of .l!2., !Q privy council fil 335, 340 United States of America lL ll§_, 418, 419,432 and American empire debate 2.,. ill Lend Lease debt 4 18 president of, see Bush, George W.; Obama, Barack cu1man, caliph .6l, 70 Valencia (Spain) 299, 359 Valerian (d. c. 260or264 CE), Roman emperor ill Valla, Lorenzo de (d. 1457) ~ Varus (d. 2 CE), Roman general ill Vega, Garcilaso de la (d. 16 16) 87, 8.8,...9..1~ 92,

21.'l&

-

-

Vegetius, Roman writer, 186 Vener, Job 245n 129 Venezuela lQ2, l!..!_ Venice (Italy) 230n35, 252n7, 35 1, 354, 4511142 Verden (Germany) -122 Verma, Arvind, historian 377, 389 Vespasian (d. 79 CE), Roman emperor 142 Vichy government (France) 396, 398, 399 Viefville des Essars, Jean Lo uis 358 Vietnam ll, 36. 37, 53, 442 Viking raids ill Vincent, Nicholas , historian ~ fil 2 13118 l , 2 15, 217nl 11 Vindolanda tablets l.14. Viracocha (r. c .1410- 38), Sapa Inca 82nl Virg inia. British colony 320, 322, 323, 326, 328, 330, fil ill and the Virg inia Company 322, 325, 326 Virgin Islands 32 1, 325 328 Visconti, Giangaleazzo ( I 35 1-1 402), d uke of Milan and count of Pav ia 237n84 Wace, Norman poet ( d. c . 1 I80) 2 12, 2 13 Waldby, Robert (d. 1397), archbishop of Dublin and chancellor of Ireland 211 Wales 2.Ql, 20 3n2 7, l.Q±,_fil 2 14n89, ill, 250 261 263 264 265 265n74, 266 270n IO I, IB 2 75n 125, 276, 277 277nl38, 280, 284, 285, 285nl 87, 287

and the Act of Union ( 1536) 280 and administrative careers in ill 277n 140 and bardic poetry 284 Edwardian conquest of (I 282- 3) 286 march of266n78 and native law 2.6.l and reputation of the Welsh as ' barbarous' 203n26 re latio ns with Eng lish crown 2 ]_1_ and the Rotuli wallie ('Welsh rolls') 267 Statute of(l 284) 2.6.l and the uchelwyr (native Welsh squirearchy) 284 and the Welsh language ~ 284111 80 and Welsh rebels 2.lill Wallachia 123_ Walter, Hubert (d. 1205), archbishop of Canterbury 211 Weber, Alfred 454 Weber, Max ( 1864- 1920), sociologist l.6, I 6n54, 11, 1-8. I 9n62, I[, 4 7, §b. I 05, 106, 118, 129n2, 147, 14 711! , 149, 167, 229n29, 238n90, 256,278, 279n l49, 41 2, 41 3,4 16, 437, 4 38, 4 38n4,439, 439n7,440, 44 1, 442, 443, 444, 445, 446, 446n32,447, 447n33, 448, 450, 452, 453, lli, 456 Weinsberg, Konrad von 246 Wenceslas (r. 1376- 1400), kg o f the Romans 225, 230, 23 1,234n59,237n84,239, 2 39n96,240,241 , 243 ,246, 246nl36 Weser, river 194 West Florida, colony 318, 328 33 I Western Design, the (1655) 320 Westminster (Eng land) 2 I 4n87, 2 16, 2 16n I 07, 257, 261.265, 268, 269, 274,275, 277, 277nl 38, 43 l , 433 Westphalia (Gennany) 23 1, 352, 355 Wike ford , Robert ( d. 1390), archbisho p o f Dublin and chancellor of Ireland 211 Wild, Ulrich 235 William ' the Lion' (r. 11 65- 12 14), kg o f Scots 2fil W illiam II of Ho lland, German anti-kg (r. 1247- 56) 225, 238, 239n96, 240, 243, 244n l 23, 24 7 W illiam of Newburgh 203n27 William of Ockham 245 Wilson, Monica (d. 1982), anthropologist 4 30 Windward Islands (West Indies), British colony 33 1 Wittelsbach (Gemiany) 237, 246 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, philosopher I 5n4 7 Wolach, /sser, historian 356 World War 1 ( 19 14-18) 372, 375

474

Index

World War 11 (1939- 45) 3.., 9., 20, 22, 375n65, l2.l,_ 392, 394, 4 12, 4 18, 421 , 424, ~ 429, 432,452 Wudi, emperor of Han dynasty (r. 141- 87 BCE) 442 Wi.irttemberg (Germany) 350 Xerxes l of Persia ill Xia (China) 50 Xianbei dynasty 34 Xinjiang (China) 3.1 Xiongnu empire ll, H.,_ 1.6. Yamque Yupanque 92 Yangzi, ri ver (China) iL 5.3. Yanjing (China) ii_

Yemen lQ., .!fil.., ill York (England) 257, 275 Young, Arthur 3 ~ Yuan (1276-1368), dynasty 2 1, 34, 53 see also Mongols - - Yucay valley (Pem) 85 Yunnan (China) 33, 36, 53 Zaragossa (Spain) lli Zeno (r. 474-5; 476-9 1), Eastern Roman emperor l.29. Zhao (China) 49 Zhenzong, 3rd emperor of Song dynasty (r. 997- 1022) l.Q_, .5.1 Zhou dynasty ( I045- 256 BCE) ]l, .Y.. 35, 455 Zurlo, Giuseppe (d. 1828), politician 355