“The early 21st century,” Jeffrey Mankoff writes in his new book, “is shaping up to be a new age of empire in Eurasia” (2). Events since the book's publication in 2022 have only lent this observation both greater evidence and greater urgency. With Russians invoking imperial precedents while invading Ukraine, Iranians running military operations outside their borders all throughout the Middle East, Turks carrying out military strikes in Iraq and Syria while celebrating the Ottoman dynasty, and China reaffirming its right and intention to reabsorb Taiwan by force if necessary, the vision of a stable world order consisting of sovereign, clearly delimited, and mutually respectful nation-states engaging in trade and addressing common challenges through multilateral institutions under the benevolent hegemony of the United States continues to fade. Empires and imperial ambitions, it seems, are again all the rage.
The theme of empire has received an enormous amount of scholarly attention over the past three decades. Whereas for most of the twentieth century empire was seen as an atavistic and morally deplorable form of political organization, the Yugoslav wars spurred many to reconsider empire. In contrast to the modern nation state that ineluctably pursued ethnonational homogeneity and centralized rule, empires were now celebrated as cosmopolitan structures that accommodated difference while facilitating economic and cultural interaction among their diverse parts. The field of international relations, however, has notably lagged in generating analyses of empire. Born in the wake of World War I, that misnamed discipline took as its subject matter the interactions among sovereign states, not nations. Disciplinary preferences for theoretical parsimony and nomothetic approaches incentivized scholars in international relations and its offshoot security studies to take for granted that the entities whose interactions they study are indeed nations or sufficiently similar to them functionally.
Mankoff, a professor at the US National Defense University, therefore makes a conceptually as well as empirically important contribution with Empires of Eurasia. The book provides an intelligent and well-informed exploration of the legacy of empire in four key states: Russia, Turkey, Iran, and China. As the book's subtitle suggests, Mankoff's central argument is that “these four states and their geopolitical ambitions remain indelibly shaped by their imperial pasts” (3). The book's organization is straightforward, consisting of an introduction, case studies of the four states each comprising three chapters, and a conclusion. The case studies follow a standard template whereby the three chapters address in order the historical formation of imperial identity and legacy in each given state, how those identities and legacies have shaped the internal politics of each state, and how they influence the state's external ambitions. This standardization assists the author in drawing parallels and connections between the cases where appropriate and prevents the manuscript from devolving into a collection of four separate case studies.
Presenting the imperial histories and contemporary foreign policies of four quite different and complex states in a single volume is a tall order. Each of the case studies could merit multiple books. Yet Mankoff has succeeded in producing a substantial but concise study. He brings to bear an impressive amount of research and combines that with thoughtful analysis, managing to go beyond the mere assemblage of facts. The book persuasively argues that imperial patterns of politics are hardwired in Eurasia and will persist into the future. That may seem a simple point, but Eurasian dynamics routinely confound the assumptions of Americans. For example, where many presuppose that ethnicity is fundamental to Eurasian politics, the reality can be quite different. For example, as Mankoff observes, the Safavid and Qajar dynasties of Iran were founded by Turks and China's Qing dynasty by Manchus. Likewise, today's Russian Federation successfully mobilizes Chechens and Dagestanis to fight for it while some ethnonationalist Russians have opted to join their Ukrainian brethren for the sake of Slavic racial purity. Mankoff's message echoes that of East Asian Studies scholar Kent Calder not to apply Westphalian assumptions to Eurasian politics (Kent E. Calder, Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration [2019], 23).
Mankoff's circumspect and fine-grained approach is especially welcome given two persisting predilections of American foreign policy thinkers. One is to reduce international affairs to a simple but ideologically (and emotionally) gratifying narrative of liberal democracy against authoritarianism. The second is to personalize the behaviors of authoritarian states, often on the assumption that the exit of the head of state will resolve a myriad of political and social tensions. It is not a coincidence that in recent decades the subjects of Mankoff's book—Russia, Iran, China, and Turkey—have posed persistent and increasingly difficult challenges to Washington. Mankoff's sound insights into Eurasia's empires might just help Washington better manage its own.
