Class 10. Global Empires (1)
- Okay, greetings. Happy Thursday.
Welcome. You guys have an exam a week from today.
We've been talking about the TAs,
about the kinds of things that are going to be on the exam.
It'll be very straightforward.
Some IDs, some dates, some short answers, some essays.
You'll have a choice among questions.
You should think about, like...
Think about what question you would ask.
One way to study is think about what question you would ask.
Like, what sorts of things are the big themes?
And then practice answering it.
Maybe, like, pair up.
Have three people. Divide.
Think about what the big questions are so far.
I'm not going to ask you about the first few lectures.
The first few lectures are to help you think
about what it is like to be involved in history.
The subject of the exam are the events
from roughly the ninth century
to roughly the seventh century.
So the thing we're doing today
is we're taking a deep breath.
We're taking a deep breath. Yeah.
I mean, at this point in this semester,
maybe we should all physically take a deep breath,
a few deep breaths.
I'm not going to do that because I'm very conscious
about how that's going to look.
Professor leads cult at Yale. (students laughing)
Makes students perform breathing exercises.
But what we're doing is, to change metaphors,
what we're doing is we're going to zoom back today
and we're going to think about empire in general
and empire in the world.
And the reason why there's no handout today
is that this lecture is really much more
about situating the events in Ukraine in world history,
because without world history,
it doesn't make a lot of sense,
and let me just give you three reasons
why I think this is true.
Number one is the point that we have reached
in the class chronologically, where we are now working
in the period of 1500, 1600,
where we are really in the Age of Exploration, right?
We're in the Age of Discovery,
which coincides with the Renaissance in European history.
We are in the period where Europeans are looking
for trade routes, finding lands that are new to them,
discovering them, from their point of view, of course,
making claims on them, setting up these new trade routes,
destroying states that already exist,
doing all these very important things
which for the first time make of the world a single unit.
So obviously the world is always a single unit.
There's always weather.
People are always moving.
But somewhere around the age of 15 or around the year 1500,
the pace of this picks up, right?
The pace of this picks up so that events
on one side of the world can affect people
on the other side of the world,
not on the scale of thousands of years or hundreds of years,
but on the scale of, let's say, one year.
So in your lifetime, multiple things that happened
on the other side of the world could actually affect
what happened to you, right?
So there's a change in pace.
There's another change in pace in the 19th century,
another change in pace in the 21st.
But this is a very important thing,
a kind of first globalization, if you'll indulge that.
And I'll give you some examples of what I'm talking about
from our own little corner.
When we think about, for example,
the British trying to find a passage to China,
to the East, through the Arctic Ocean,
which, let's face it, shows creativity if nothing else...
And there isn't one yet.
I mean, you know, in you guys' lifetime,
there are going to be plenty of passages
through the Arctic that there aren't now.
But in 1555, there wasn't,
and the British then stumbled upon Muscovy,
and that opens up a trade route
where suddenly Muscovy is trading with Britain,
which means trading with the world in a westerly direction.
And then by 1647 or so,
the Muscovites have reached the Pacific Ocean.
So in that century, suddenly, Muscovy,
which is becoming Russia, of course,
Muscovy is connected to both the Atlantic Ocean
and the Pacific Ocean, and that's one of the reasons
why Russia becomes the state that it becomes,
is that Russia manages
to have an Atlantic and a Pacific connection
as the world is becoming connected, right?
And that's one of the ways that Russia is distinct from,
let's say, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
or the Kazakh state that we'll be talking about on Tuesday.
By the way, on Tuesday,
I'm going to pick up where we left off, roughly 1648,
and we are going to talk about the Crimean Tatars.
We're going to talk about the Ottoman Empire.
We're going to bring that into encounter with Russia. Okay.
So the timeline that we are on is coinciding
with a much bigger timeline.
If we think of 1648 as the moment of the Kazakh rebellion,
1648 is also roughly the moment when a Muscovite explorer,
this guy Dezhnev, gets to the Pacific Ocean
and actually crosses into North America
as the first person to do so in that direction,
at least in the modern period.
Obviously it'd been done before
or there wouldn't be people in North America,
but that's a different story.
So we are thinking about how our events connect
to world history, and we don't really have a choice, right?
It's not that I'm trying to be cool and avant garde
with this global history thing, which is, by the way,
it's not cool and avant garde anymore.
It's that these events don't actually make sense.
So in the next lecture, for example,
in 1721, Russia is going to be,
Muscovy is going to be renamed the Russian Empire
at almost exactly the same time that Moscow bans Ukrainians
from selling grain except through Muscovite ports, right?
Those two events are connected, right? They're connected.
The fact that it is Moscow
that's controlling the world trade of grain
from the most fertile part of Europe,
namely Ukraine, is very important.
The myth of what Russia is,
which we're also contending with,
has to do not just with claiming the name Russia.
It also has to do with controlling the land.
And I'm sure you can see the connection to the present war.
It's 2022,
and those two things are still very much connected.
If it's Russia, then of course
there's nothing wrong with Russia controlling the land
and controlling the export of grain.
Okay, so the first reason is that we can't really make sense
of what's happening unless we connect it,
at least in a very preliminary way, to world history.
The second reason is that this is also a time
of the intellectual reconfiguration
of how people see themselves in the world,
which I realize is a very, very big notion,
and I'm going to have to give it to you very briefly.
But thus far, when we think about geography,
we've been thinking about geography
in terms of what classical authors knew
and how classical authors described the world
and how land explorers in our part
of the world describe the world.
But basically, the framework of the people who, you know,
who we're talking about is an ancient Greco-Roman framework,
and the maps of Ukraine, such as they were,
were from, you know, Ptolemy or Herodotus.
And if you remember,
the ancient Greeks had this nice habit
of projecting things onto Ukraine,
like, so griffins and fields of gold and so on,
which weren't, like...
They had some basis in reality.
The Scythians actually did make beautiful things
out of gold, which are currently being plundered.
But the notion is that the Greeks projected,
you know, a lot of things that sort of happened
onto the territories that they didn't know.
The Age of Exploration is also a time
when the Poles are mapping Ukraine.
We're going to get...
So we've talked about Polish colonization.
You can't separate colonization from mapping.
The Poles and other people are mapping Ukraine
in the 16th and 17th centuries.
And by the way, the word they use for it is Ukraine.
The Poles say Ukraine.
The whole idea of Ukraine is not a new idea at all,
as I'm sure you've already understood.
But in this mapping which the Poles do,
they are going beyond classical knowledge,
going beyond classical knowledge,
which is a very important thing locally but also globally,
because classical knowledge did not include something
which is very important about the world
and which Copernicus, you know,
was the person to actually get clear,
which is that our world
is actually not especially interesting.
I mean, okay, it's interesting from our point of view,
because here we are, right?
But it's not interesting in the sense
that it's the center of anything.
The sun doesn't orbit around it.
Everything doesn't orbit around it.
It turns out we're not the center of the world,
which is a discovery, frankly, that's still sinking in,
you know, many centuries later.
But the age of discovery of the world is also the age
of discovery that the world is not the center of everything.
So there are major intellectual transformation
happening at the same time, right?
There's a kind of loss of innocence.
The same moment when Europeans are discovering in the world,
they're also discovering or trying to take in the reality
that the world that they're discovering is not the center
of the universe.
So that's a lot to happen, right?
That's a lot to happen, and I think it's just,
it's worth bearing in mind.
The third reason why I'm going
to give you this very general introduction
to empire as world history is that a thought
that we're meant to be having
over the course of this class is how Ukraine
might bridge European history and global history.
A major theme of European history
and global history is the theme of colonialism,
and in this story, it's the Europeans who are colonizing
and it's the rest of the world who is being colonized.
But do we want it to be that simple,
or should we look closely about
and see who is colonizing who in an empirical way?
It's hard to get away from the impression that,
both in the early modern and,
as we'll see, the modern periods,
the idea of being colonized applies pretty well to Ukraine,
although it's sitting there in the middle of Europe.
When the Russian Empire becomes the Russian Empire,
when it defines itself as an empire,
well, what's the center, and what is the periphery?
But of course,
there are some interesting twists to all this too,
which, again, are relevant to the present situation.
What does it mean to become an empire
and to colonize Europe, right?
What does that mean?
There's a lot of ambiguity in that.
So there's no question from the point of view
of the 18th century or, for that matter,
the 21st, that Moscow's perspective
on Ukraine is in some way colonial.
But what does it mean to colonize a place
which you also recognize came before you
in some important sense?
What does it mean to colonize a place which you recognize
as being more European than yourself?
That is not so common, right?
That is not so common.
And if you grasp that, then it's a little bit easier
to get your mind around the weird ambiguities
and ambivalences that are involved even in the discussion
of Ukraine on Russian television in 2022.
And then the final thing is that when we get
to the modern period, or the 20th century, the 21st century,
which we will get to, I promise,
a major question of world history is,
and American history, for that matter,
is what do you do after empire, right?
What do you do after empire?
And one way to look at this conflict
