What is the Meaning of Postin Post-Imperial?

From the vantage point of historical sociology, the theme of Ab Imperio’s current issue, “Making Sense of Imperial and Post-Imperial Conditions in a Global Context,” sounds quite logical. It develops the journal’s 2017 annual theme dedicated to the phenomenon of globality as an attempt to create and expand a universalist worldview, institutions, and living environment. According to this logic, the “age of empires” (Eric Hobsbawm) is naturally superseded by some post-imperial condition as an equally global phenomenon. Despite its seemingly obvious sociological clarity, the proposed scheme proved to be surprisingly difficult to substantiate in the articles intended for this issue. Of course, individual authors writes about their own research, and it is the task of the editors to select contributions for a thematic issue in such a way so that they resonate with each other and the theme of the issue. But when we discovered that out of so many submissions currently in the works, few were compatible with the suggested conceptual framework, we realized that something was wrong with that framework. The abstract scheme failed the test of empirical studies, which, given their topics and research design, should have benefited from the explanatory potential of this general model (by being able to transcend the narrow confines of individual case studies in formulating research questions and interpreting the results). One thing that did not work as expected was the very clear-cut differentiation between imperial and post-imperial, which most research articles cannot unequivocally identify and substantiate. Another shortcoming of the post-imperial approach was the totalizing binary “the age of empires vs. the age of decolonization,” which did not help to explain the phenomenon of non-imperial (or pre-imperial) societies with their own globalizing projects. In addition, we had to remind ourselves that sociological models of historical process themselves need to be deconstructed as retrospective attempts to structure the past through periodization and conceptualization. What we identify as an “empire” (or its post-imperial successor) depends only partially on historical facts and circumstances and to a much greater degree – on contemporary and nonhistorical considerations.

In scholarship, a negative result is still meaningful, as it allows a more complex view of the articles that finally made it to this issue of the journal. Keeping in mind the important reservations mentioned above, we can better appreciate what is explicitly reflected in these articles and what can be discerned from them only if readers have a certain set of research questions in mind.

The “History” section features an article by Aleksandr Korobeinikov that narrates the story of the founding of the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1922, at the beginning of the Soviet policy of “indigenization” (korenizatsiia). We can fully appreciate the significance of this research by refusing to take for granted the meaning of categories such as “empire” or “national autonomy,” or the established periodizations of the Sovietization of Yakutia or Bolshevik national policy. The problematics of global, imperial, and post-imperial are central for the article, but the story told by Korobeinikov is not confined to the conventional understanding of these terms. The story begins in the early nineteenth century, when the regime of Alexander I was trying to extend its universalist imperial project to Siberia (all lands east of the Urals, including Yakut lands). By the advance of the twentieth century, the imperial government had already shown very little interest in integrating Yakuts, and the mission of spreading the universalist project of societal integration was monopolized by the cultural-political community of the Russian educated public (obshchestvennost’). Different motives encouraged the Yakut elites to seek integration with the imperial society in the nineteenth century, and since obshchestvennost’ became the main vehicle of integration. By the late nineteenth century these traditional elites were turning into a national intelligentsia, which was simultaneously Yakut and all-Russian (or rather all-Siberian). The Yakut intelligentsia formulated their visions of the Yakut future in a dialogue with the exiled revolutionaries and Siberian regionalists, borrowing a social language that helped to articulate their own original concerns. The Yakut Autonomous Republic was created only after the...