[ASA_PEWS] empires

[Christopher Chase-Dunn]

 review of Tom Barfield’s *Shadow Empires *forthcoming in The Developing
Economies <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/17461049>

*Shadow Empires: An Alternative **Imperial   **History *by Thomas J. Barfield,
Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2023,  xii + 366 pp.



Tom Barfield is an expert on Central Asian steppe nomad polities and their
relations with Chinese agrarian dynasties. His 1992 book *The Perilous
Frontie*r examined and analyzed the Hsiung-nu and Mongol confederacies and
their military, political, and economic relations with Chinese dynasties.[1]
<#_ftn1> Barfield is an anthropologist, ethnographer, and historian who has
also published a fascinating history of Afghanistan. He attended a
Wenner-Gren Foundation conference in 1997 on comparing empires and was
inspired to develop the conceptual typology of that he presents in *Shadow
Empires: An Alternative **Imperial **History**.*

            *Shadow Empires *is very well written and is cogently organized
for both a general audience and for empire scholars. Barfield’s typology of
empires is clearly explained in conceptual terms and is well deployed in
the 30 case studies contained in his book. He compares patterns of rise and
demise, strategies, and organizational structures with strong attention to
interactions in world regions of Afro-Eurasia since the Iron Age. The
primary conceptual distinction in his typology is between large polities
that mainly extract products and taxes from their own populations, which he
names as “endogenous empires,” and large polities that extract resources
and tribute from other polities, which he calls “exogenous (shadow) empires”
because they mainly exploit endogenous empires. These differences in the
sources of social surplus and the strategies and types of power that make
different forms of accumulation possible are often glossed over in other
comparative studies of empires. These differences and the innovations in
the technologies of power that Barfield recounts are very important for
understanding the long-term sequences of changes in size, complexity, and
the evolution of imperialism.

            Barfield specifies the structural and institutional
characteristics that the endogenous empires all have:

·         Large population and territorial sizes

·         Centralized institutions of governance that were separate and
distinct from the rulers

·         Organized to administer and exploit diversity

·         Imperial projects that impose some type of unity throughout the
system

·         A primate imperial center with transportation systems designed to
serve it militarily and economically

·         Monopoly of force within its territories, and military force
projected outward

·         Systems of communications that allowed administration of all
subject areas from the center directly

Exogenous empires do not have, or only partially have, one or more of these
characteristics.

The big insight that Barfield got from his studies of Central Steppe
confederacies and Chinese dynasties is that all empires rise and decline
within interaction networks in which they make war, alliances, and trade
with both adjacent and more distant polities and that these interactions
are strongly linked with both the reproduction and development of
within-empire institutions and strategies. Barfield tells the stories of
both endogenous and exogenous empires, but the uniqueness of his approach
is his focus on the exogenous (shadow) empires. He proposes a structural
typology of exogenous empires but no typology of endogenous empires. But
his comparative descriptions of several endogenous empires point out
important differences among them.

Barfield delineates five main types of exogenous (shadow) empires and one
of these types has two subtypes:

            Type 1: “Maritime empires” employ military power and diplomacy
to derive profits from trade by controlling prices, money, and
transportation. They have distant settler colonies or entrepots that are
strategically placed to control trade. These are quite different from
endogenous
empires that rely mainly on taxation and/or control of local production in
territories that are adjacent to the empire center. And they are also
different from other shadow empires that rely more exclusively on the use
of military power to extract resources. The main early example of a maritime
empire is the Athenian Empire in the Mediterranean Sea but later
maritime empires
include those formed in the “early modern” period by European core states.

            Type 2: “Mirror empires” were nomadic steppe confederacies that
extracted resources from agrarian endogenous Chinese dynasties by employing
large mobile cavalries armed with compound bows with metal-tipped arrows.
Barfield employs the distinction between “outer frontier” and “inner f
rontier” strategies used by these steppe empires that he developed in *The
Perilous Frontier. *The outer frontier strategy involved the raiding of
border settlements and demands for tribute payments against threats of
future raiding and destruction. These raids were conducted with strict
avoidance of occupying Chinese land, and with the expectation that
destroyed cities and towns would be rebuilt. The leader of a steppe
confederacy used the booty from these raids and the tribute payments to
reward current followers and to attract new recruits. The inner frontier
strategy evolved when the weaker party in a conflict among steppe khans
sought an alliance with a local agrarian warlord in China, who was eager to
use “barbarians against barbarians.” The steppe leader used goods from the
warlord to gain followers. Both grew strong together, but the steppe leader
usually either became a non-nomadic agrarian lord or went back to the outer
frontier strategy if he preferred to stay on his horse. These are
mirror empires
because the steppe confederacies rose and fell in tandem with the rise and
fall of Chinese dynasties. The Mongol Empire was a partial exception in
which the outer frontier strategy could not work because of fragmentation
in China and so the Mongols were forced to take over the agrarian empire
and run it—the Yuan dynasty.

            Type 3: “Periphery empires” emerged “when the power balance
between an endogenous empire’s margins and its center were reversed and its
transfrontier enemies or former clients occupied part or all of its former
territories” (p. 4). Barfield distinguishes between two sub-types of periphery
empires: “vulture” and “vanquisher.” Vulture exogenous empires sought to
maintain the institutional structure of a collapsing endogenous empire,
while vanquisher empires were rare events in which a peripheral marcher
state successfully conquered one or more endogenous empires that were not
collapsing. Unlike the vulture empires that sought to preserve the cultures
and institutions of an old collapsing endogenous empire, the vanquishers
sought to impose their own cultures over the endogenous empires they
conquered.

            Type 4: “Nostalgia empires” “exploited the remembrance of
extinct empires and their cultural legacies to foster an appearance of
imperial power that barely existed in any practical terms.” (p. 4)

            Type 5: “Vacuum empires” emerged in forest zones that were
adjacent to steppe empires and important trade routes in which political
control was established to extract forest resources and to profit from
control of trade. This type motivates Barfield’s fascinating telling of the
treacherous “Game of Thrones” story of the rise of the Kievan Rus,
Scandinavian Vikings who produced the beginnings of the Muscovite and
Russian Empires.

            Barfield’s typology of empires is a valuable conceptual tool
for the comparative study of the combined and uneven development that
allows for close studies of strategies and historical sequences that
differentiate the nature and trajectories of the formation and
disintegration of large polities. His overviews of thirty endogenous and
exogenous empires usefully summarize both older and recent studies by
historians. And his anthropological knowledge about different kinds of
kinship institutions leads him to valuable explanations of differences
among empires with different kinship legacies. Barfield also notes that
those exogenous empires that emerged from the noncore and were able to
transition into endogenous empires had advantages over those that emerged
only in the core because they knew more about the world from two very
different angles, and this allowed them to become larger and to last
longer.

Barfield uses the terms center and periphery without ever explicitly saying
what he means by these concepts.  It is reasonable to assume that he means
differences in population density, but he may also be thinking about
spatial differences in the sources of greater or lesser amounts of social
surplus that are related to his distinction between endogenous and shadow
empires.

Barfield never uses the term “evolution” and neither does he mention
capitalism until the last chapter, but the stories he tells regarding the
emergence and “last stands” of empire types and the rise of maritime
empires that rely more on profits from trade than on the extraction of
tribute or taxes strongly suggest that a new logic of accumulation was
rising over the period he studied. Because he focusses only on the largest
polities and does not look at empires in the Bronze Age, he misses the
significance of those city-states that developed maritime profit-based
strategies based on trade before the emergence of the Athenian maritime
empire.

He occludes the Bronze Age history of empires in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and
East Asia, and the emergence of empires in the Americas.  He seems to
justify this for the regions he is studying because the earlier empires
were not that large compared with later Iron Age empires. But what is large
and what is small is a relative issue. Abstracting from scale allows us to
see the structural similarities (and differences) between rise and fall
processes of paramount chiefdoms. And the emergence of states and cities in
Bronze Age Egypt, Mesopotamia, and East Asia are valuable foci that inform
the processes of rise and fall that Barfield is studying. This said,
Barfield’s focus on kinship and his strong awareness of systemic
interactions are huge contributions to our understanding of long-term
social change.

Christopher Chase-Dunn

*U**niversity of **C**alifornia**–R**iverside*

*R**iverside, **CA, **USA*



------------------------------

[1] <#_ftnref1>  Thomas J. Barfield, *The **P**erilous **F**rontier:
**N**omadic
**E**mpires and China* (Cambridge, MA: B. Blackwell, 1992). This title was
republished in Chinese by the Jiangsu People's Publishing House in Nanjing.

-- 
chris chase-dunn   邓宇歌
institute for research on world-systems
university of california-riverside
riverside, ca 92521 USA
mailing address: 2007 mt vernon ave, riverside, ca 92507 usa
Consider using my textbook in your class:
_Social Change: Globalization from the Stone Age to the Present_ Routledge