The dominant paradigm in European historiography has been linear innovation, that is to say, the sequential elaboration of distinctive political and social forms. A venerable convention in Chinese and Southeast Asian historiography has been the dynastic or administrative cycle, the recurrent alternation of periods of political strength and debility within a conservative institutional framework. I seek to meld these approaches, while liberating both from regional restriction and wedding political to cultural and economic history.

To investigate the intersection of cyclic and linear trends in Europe, I considered surveying the continent, but in the end I decided it was more practical to focus on Russian and French case studies while referring en passant to other realms. To the virtues of these particular examples Chapter 1 already alluded. Russia and France not only boast rich historiographies, but as hegemonic states with different social systems at either end of Europe, they covered a major part of Charles Tilly's continuum between market-intensive and market-deficient states. Moreover, if their precise chronologies were sui generis, Russia and France well illustrate a periodization found in much of Southeast Asia and Europe: late first/early second millennium vigor, 13th- to 14th-century collapse, mid-15th- and 16th-century revival halted by fresh disorders in the late 1500s or early 1600s, followed by accelerating integration to 1830 and beyond. Symptom and cause of political integration, in Russia and France as in Southeast Asia, elite religious systems penetrated to lower levels, capital tongues expanded at the expense of sacred languages above and provincial dialects below, while central ethnicities grew more encompassing, clearly delimited, and politicized.