Empires and the Politics of Difference Pathways of Incorporation and Exclusion

Abstract

Empires governed different people differently. At one pole of empires’ repertoires of rule were the Mongols, who treated cultural difference as an ordinary fact, and possibly a useful one. At the other pole were Roman-style empires that insisted on the superiority of their civilization. Empires combined strategies and shifted among them. A polity could move through an imperial phase to more homogeneous composition, but empire-building was also a temptation for relatively uniform polities. Differential incorporation into the social fabric of empire or radical exclusion of certain categories from acceptance and political participation were variants on the politics of difference. This chapter explores issues of race, religion, differential rights, gender, ethnicity, and class as they played out across the vast spaces shaped by empires. Opponents of imperial rulers, coming from different social categories, also acted within and across imperial spaces.