Introduction: the problem

We should not take for granted that remnants of ‘Western’ imperial tradition are the only ones on display today. It is true that Europe and its settler states dominated the world economically and politically in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That does not necessarily mean, however, that the broad European imperial tradition succeeded in eradicating other imperial traditions. There is, furthermore, the possibility that the European tradition was itself indebted to other traditions. In this chapter, we will make the case for the relevance of what we call the Eurasian steppe tradition. We will focus on its lingering importance, and only touch on its historical role as the main other in early European state formation. We first chart the 1,500-year-long history of the steppe tradition and try to capture it by way of an ideal type, and contrast it not with an ideal type of contemporary ‘Western’ polities, but of nineteenth-century-style European empires. The second section is a brief discussion of how the imperial steppe tradition was obfuscated by the European political tradition on the level of discourse. We then trace the continuing importance of the steppe tradition in three areas, namely Central Asia, Turkey and Russia.

A nomadic imperial tradition

Although the pre-history of the imperial steppe tradition in Eurasia stretches back at least to the eighth century BC, and includes some predominantly Iranic-speaking polities, the first documented Eurasian steppe empire, that of the Hsiung-Nu, hails from 209 BC (Di Cosmo 2004).