A Tale of Three Empires: Mughals, Ottomans, and Habsburgs in a Comparative Context

The recent spate of writings about empire—following on the emergence of the unipolar American system at the end of the Cold War, and further stimulated by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after September 2001—has left those of us who have long worked on empires somewhat bemused. Or perhaps this new literature has produced a perverse form of "imperial trauma." It is not easy for specialists to correct the myriad errors and dissect the outlandish theses of relative novices, then watch them laugh nonetheless all the way to the bank. I believe that we have by now spilled too much futile ink, whether on the ostensibly left-wing speculations of Messrs. Hardt and Negri or on the definitively right-wing suggestions of Niall Ferguson.¹ We have surely heard enough of such propositions as that the British empire was a "force for good" given that Hitler and his allies could never have been defeated in the 1940s without the Indian troops recruited by the British.² Ferguson's argument could be redeployed in justification of Stalin and the gulag, for without that excellent invention of the Soviets', how could Hitler have been defeated either?

My purpose in this admittedly diffuse and ambitious essay differs from those of these recent forays. I wish to discuss three early modern empires—which between them covered an impressive swathe of more or less contiguous territory (with a small gap from east to west equivalent to the width of the Safavid domains), extending from the northern fringes of Burma in the east to the Atlantic and Morocco in the west of Eurasia—and which in a wider sense had global coverage and reach around the year 1600. None of these three empires, generally speaking, has been written into the happy history of modernity, and all of them are definitely seen as losers in the eighteenth-century redistribution of cards that characterizes the rise of the "second British empire."³ Yet these three are very significant in terms of the diversity of the political, institutional, and cultural arrangements and processes that they embody. For though Mughals, Ottomans, and Habsburgs were rivals who possessed some characteristics in common, they were also, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, quite different from one another, and continue to differ in the longer-term trajectories of the political institutions that they produced. They moreover occasioned different sorts or degrees of imperial trauma, wielded or lacked different sorts or degrees of power—and it is important to bear these finer distinctions in mind.

I

It is convenient to begin in 1580–81, when the three empires saw themselves as locked into a tight grid of interimperial rivalry. The already complex contest between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs became still more intricate, and the Mughals too entered the scene in a substantial way. This was the year when Philip II, as a consequence of a convoluted train of events, gained joint control over the Spanish and Portuguese empires after the death of the Portuguese king, Dom Sebastião, in 1578 and the demise, less than two years later, of the aged Dom Henrique. Philip notoriously could mobilize not only legal arguments based on his kinship ties with the Portuguese House of Avis but the force of his battle-hardened armies and his New World silver to smooth over the transition.⁴ As a consequence, the Habsburgs—which is to say, Philip II, his son, and his grandson—came for a relatively brief period of sixty years to rule over an empire that included not only a part of the Low Countries and Naples but also Mexico, Peru, the Philippines, Brazil, Angola, the lower Zambezi valley, and a part of lowland Sri Lanka.⁵ This Habsburg world-empire was supposed in theory to be ruled in two autonomous sections, but in East Asia, as well as the Río de la Plata, the boundaries between the "Portuguese" and "Spanish" sections of the empire proved quite permeable. Moreover, the events of the time brought the Ottomans into a situation...