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240 PERIOD 2 • The Early Modern World, 1450–1750

The fragility of empire that these revolts disclosed provided incentives for
developing various techniques for maintaining imperial rule beyond the use
of force. One was bureaucracy, a more or less coherent system for adjudicating
disputes, collecting taxes, and enforcing imperial policy. The Chinese Qing dynasty
administered their recently acquired Central Asian territories through a separate
Court of Colonial Affairs, which was an extension of the famed Chinese civil
service system. At least initially it was staffed only by officials of Manchurian or
Mongolian background while incorporating at the local level Mongol aristocrats,
Muslim officials, and prominent Buddhists. The Ottoman Empire used the distinc-
tive devshirme system of recruiting young Christian boys into training for military
and civilian administrative positions while converting them to Islam. In the Mughal
Empire, the imperial court relied on zamindars to collect imperial taxes on the
large estates that these elite landowners controlled.
Beyond bureaucracy, imperial rulers sought to legitimate their empires in various
ways, many of them religious. European and Russian rulers claimed that they were
governing by “divine right.” In a similar fashion, Ottoman rulers claimed the title of
“caliph,” which meant they were the civil and religious successors of Muhammad
himself. The rulers of Spain’s American empire strongly supported missionary
efforts at conversion in the hope of generating a common Christian culture that
would link rulers and ruled. The Safavid Empire sought a similar religious unity in
Persia by imposing a Shia version of Islam.
In other cases, cultural accommodation rather than cultural uniformity provided
a mechanism of imperial integration. Ottoman tolerance for Christians in the
Balkans, Mughal willingness to accommodate Hinduism, and the Songhay Empire’s
refusal to impose Islam on its rural subjects illustrate this kind of practice. Likewise,
the Chinese Qing dynasty did not seek to incorporate Central Asian peoples into
mainstream Chinese culture.
In terms of their wider impact, the early modern empires differed signifi-
cantly. The Chinese, Mughal, and Songhay empires continued older patterns of
cultural interaction, while those of Europe represented something wholly new in
human history — an interacting Atlantic world of Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
Furthermore, the European empires had a far greater impact on the peoples they
incorporated than did other empires. With the exception of parts of Russian Siberia,
nowhere else did empire building generate such a catastrophic population collapse as
in the Americas. Nor did Asian empires foster societies based on enslaved labor and
a transcontinental trade in enslaved people like that of Europe’s American colonies.
Finally, Europe was enriched and transformed by its American possessions far more
than China and the Ottomans were by their territorial acquisitions. Europeans gained
enormous new biological resources from their empires — corn, potatoes, tomatoes,
chocolate, tobacco, timber, furs, and much more — as well as great wealth in the form of
gold, silver, and land. The wealth of empire propelled Europe to a dominant position in
the world by the nineteenth century. Here again Russia’s experience paralleled that of

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