Empire and ethnicity have been among the most powerful forces that have shaped the modern world. Yet, as I shall try to suggest, their highly ambivalent relationship has so far not been explored systematically – or, insofar as it has, with unsatisfactory results. This is a bold claim to make. Let us see first where the argument stands at the moment.

Where they have imagined the encounter between empire and ethnicity, historians and social scientists have typically seen it as overbearing, aggressive, or simply exploitative. Empire is usually perceived (despite much contrary evidence) as an administrative monolith, a leviathan that was capable of repressing all opposition (and certainly of suppressing any ethnic assertion) – until, that is, its own strength gave way. Faced with “indigenous” cultures and identities (the elements of ethnicity), empires in this view reacted in four ways. The first response was to subjugate: to destroy the capacity for autonomous political action or force it into channels and molds that imperial agents could control. That might mean the removal or crushing of “traditional” leaders and the confiscation of their wealth. It might mean the banning of external forms of identity, as the tartan was banned in the Scottish Highlands after 1746. It invariably meant the systematic disarming of a conquered community, rooting out the old status of arms and arms-bearing or restricting it tightly to a tiny favored minority. The second response followed quickly behind. The act of conquest required justification to opinion both at home (however narrow in practice the “political class”) and abroad (to appease rivals enraged by successful predation). It was natural enough to disparage the conquered as barbarians or worse. Their “disorders” were a threat to the industrious and peaceful. Their customs affronted those of a higher morality. Their modes of production were stagnant and wasteful at best. Their religious beliefs were mere superstition.