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Course: World History Project AP® > Unit 3
Lesson 3: 3.2—Administration of Empires and Belief SystemsREAD: Legitimizing and Consolidating Power
Early modern emperors developed many strategies to keep and exercise power. Some were unique, but several patterns across empires can help us understand this period.
The article below uses “Three Close Reads”. If you want to learn more about this strategy, click here.
First read: preview and skimming for gist
Before you read the article, you should skim it first. The skim should be very quick and give you the gist (general idea) of what the article is about. You should be looking at the title, author, headings, pictures, and opening sentences of paragraphs for the gist.
Second read: key ideas and understanding content
Now that you’ve skimmed the article, you should preview the questions you will be answering. These questions will help you get a better understanding of the concepts and arguments that are presented in the article. Keep in mind that when you read the article, it is a good idea to write down any vocab you see in the article that is unfamiliar to you.
By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:
- According to the essay, how did the empire of Ming China raise funds, and what was one big problem with this system?
- Besides taxing land and production, what other ways could the states in this article collect revenue?
- What did taking the title of caliph mean for rulers in the Ottoman Empire and why was this title important?
- Why did Mughal rulers—who ruled much of South Asia—have to be sensitive about making religious claims?
- What were some strategies highlighted in this article in which empires used bureaucracies and different sectors of society to help rule?
Third read: evaluating and corroborating
Finally, here are some questions that will help you focus on why this article matters and how it connects to other content you’ve studied.
At the end of the third read, you should be able to respond to these questions:
- To what extent does this article explain how and why various land-based empires developed and expanded from 1450 to 1750?
- Based on the information from this article, how did different rulers in different states use culture and religion to enhance their legitimacy in the eyes of their subjects?
Now that you know what to look for, it’s time to read! Remember to return to these questions once you’ve finished reading.
Legitimizing and Consolidating Power
By Trevor Getz
Early modern emperors developed many strategies to keep and exercise power. Some were unique, but several patterns across empires can help us understand this period.
Okay, so you built an early modern empire. Now you have to run it, and keep it together. It’s Monday, and you’ve made this list of the problems needing attention:
- Aristocrats or other local authorities want to run their little piece of the empire for their own benefit, even though they depend on you to keep stability and to encourage trade so they can have luxury goods.
- Different religious and linguistic groups want to preserve their culture, or perhaps impose it on other parts of the empire.
- Outsiders are invading.
- Really expensive infrastructure like roads and walls, and services like armies and bureaucrats are needed to keep the empire from falling apart.
- Finally, peasants, farmers, herders, fisherfolk, and city-dwellers—who pay most of the taxes and provide almost all of the food for the empire—will be unhappy if they also have to pay huge taxes to maintain the infrastructure you need.
What are you going to do now?
Funding the state
Each early modern empire faced a unique set of problems, but many of those problems often shared a lot of particular features. Similarly, empires came up with a unique set of strategies for dealing with their challenges, but some of those strategies looked very similar to each other, and in many cases they were actually learned from neighboring empires and states.
One of the principal ongoing questions for those ruling early modern empires was how to fund their armies, roads, and palaces. In general, they developed two main strategies for acquiring the funds they needed. The first was to tax agriculture. The Ming emperors of China had perhaps the most sophisticated system for agricultural taxation. They developed a special government bureau that took a census of peasant families. (Try not to think of peasants as poor—they were farming families. Some were wealthier than others.) This bureau collected taxes directly for the central administration. Taxes were low at first, but went up within a couple of hundred years. At the same time, the emperors came to rely on local land-owners to help collect those taxes. These local authorities siphoned off some of the money. So taxes went up, but government revenues went down. The result was both unhappy peasants and less money for defense and other imperial needs. These problems were a direct cause of the weakness of the Ming emperors, and why they were replaced by the Qing Dynasty. Under the Qing, at least initially, taxes on peasants were very low
The Ottoman Sultans, as well, relied pretty heavily on taxes on agriculture. Within the timars, which were estates granted by the Sultans to owners, peasant farmers in this period generally were expected to give up 15-25 percent of what they produced as a tax. This tax was paid to the local landlord or aristocrat, who paid a portion to the central government. But taxes were also very uneven and complex. Different religious groups often had special taxes, either higher or lower than the general population. Some communities paid their taxes by contributing soldiers rather than money, and some families had special exemptions. And taxes fluctuated over time. In periods of special need, the Sultans would increase the tax rate. This could lead to protest or rebellion.
Aside from taxing production, many early modern states collected revenue by imposing tariffs—taxes on incoming trade goods—or otherwise finding ways to tax trade. For example, while the Mughal Sultans taxed land (and hence agriculture), they also charged a customs duty on imported goods, often about 2.5 percent. The Safavid Emperors had a direct tax system for agricultural products, but it did not always raise enough money. Eventually, they just gave local leaders the right to collect taxes and keep a portion for their trouble, causing revenues to decrease even further. Later Safavid rulers found interesting ways to tax trade, including putting tolls on caravans travelling on imperial roads. They even “sold” certain trade routes to particular merchants. The Romanov Tsars of Russia also had close alliances with merchant families, in particular the Stroganov family. The Stroganovs supported Russian expansion into Siberia, including hiring mercenaries to help the Russian army, and in return the Tsars granted them special rights to trade in the region.
Cultural legitimization
Money was one of the most important tools for funding the expenses of early modern empires, just as it is for any state today. But culture also played an important role in maintaining the empire. Rulers needed to be seen as legitimate—having the right to rule. They constantly sought to demonstrate that the people should support their government for cultural reasons.
The Russian Romanov Tsars, for example, claimed a right to rule through several justifications. First, they claimed a connection to the ancient Byzantine empire. In fact, the title Tsar is just a version of the Roman Caesar, emperors who had died out 1100 years or so previously. The Ming Emperors also claimed a right to rule by connections to past glories. The first Ming Emperor, Zhu Yanzhang, initially claimed to be restoring the earlier Song Dynasty, which the Mongols had destroyed.
Religion also played a large role in the search forlegitimacy. The Romanovs claimed a religious right to rule Russia due to the support of the Russian Orthodox church, which was based in Moscow. The Ottoman Sultans claimed to be representing all of Islam. Sultan Selim I, for example, took the title caliph, which means that he was claiming to be a successor to the Prophet Muhammad. Not all Muslims accepted this claim, but the fact that the Ottomans controlled the holy city of Mecca helped a lot.
Of course, not every emperor could make such claims. For example, the Qing Dynasty who replaced the Ming in China could not claim to have inherited an earlier dynasty, as they were outsiders from the north. However, even they were careful to offer ritual ceremonies at the tombs of the Ming Emperors they followed. Similarly, the Mughal Emperors had to be very careful when making religious claims, since they were Muslim rulers who relied heavily on Sikh and Hindu aristocrats as well as other Muslims. For that reason, the Mughal Emperor Akbar asked his followers—no matter what their faith—to pledge to support him personally, rather than the empire as a whole.
Bureaucracy and sectoral alliances
In order to run these complex empires, rulers had to develop centralized bureaucracies, or people whose primary job was to be state officials and to carry out the orders and do the planning that the empire needed. In general, however, these bureaucracies were still quite small (although growing) during the early modern period. As a result, rulers often depended on agreements made with people in the religious, aristocratic, commercial, or other sectors of society. In some cases, religious officials played a pretty big role in government. The fact that they were literate made them especially useful. Similarly, governments that relied on merchants for revenue often had to let them play a big role in decision-making in return.
In the Mughal and Ottoman Empires, religious officials were particularly important. They played important roles as judges, or ulamâ. In the Ottoman system, Muslim clergy ran the state’s legal system, although some religious communities were exempt from their orders. Both empires also relied heavily on a class of land-owning military leaders, the Ottoman sipâhî and the Mughal mandsabdari.
The Ming emperors in China also relied on powerful land-owners, but these families were not generally military leaders. That’s a contrast to the Ottoman and Mughal empires, where the two roles were often found in the same people. Also, more than any other empire, they made use of formally-trained imperial bureaucrats to run the country. These bureaucrats often came from land-owning families, but not necessarily the most powerful ones. They were trained in Confucian ideals and had to pass examinations based largely on Confucian texts that focused on how to act virtuously. This system was so effective that it was retained by the Qing emperors, although their bureaucrats answered to military generals, who were related or otherwise tied to the emperors.
Conclusions
There seems to have been a wide variety of systems and strategies used by early modern empires to maintain and consolidate their control over their vast empires. Looking closely, however, you can find many commonalities. This may have been partly because these empires did, to some degree, learn from each other. It may also have been partly because they all had roughly similar levels of technology. Finally, they all—to various degrees—shared a common past as subjects of (or on the edge of) the Mongol Empire of the twelfth and thirteenth century. But their strategies were also unique, and suited to their own situations. By looking closely at each state, and then looking at them together, we can get a sense of both the wider patterns common to land-based empires in this period, and the individual tools and techniques used in each empire. Switching between these scales may help us to get some sense of the relationship between the global and the local in this period.
Author bio
Trevor Getz is a professor of African and world history at San Francisco State University. He has been the author or editor of 11 books, including the award-winning graphic history Abina and the Important Men, and has coproduced several prize-winning documentaries. Trevor is also the author of A Primer for Teaching African History, which explores questions about how we should teach the history of Africa in high school and university classes.