Political Order in Pre-Modern Eurasia: Imperial Incorporation and the Hereditary Divisional System LHAMSUREN MUNKH-ERDENE1 Abstract Comparing the Liao, the Chinggisid and the Qing successive incorporations of Inner Asia, this article is prepared to argue that the hereditary divisional system that these Inner Asian empires employed to incorporate and administer their nomadic population was the engine that generated what scholars see either as ‘tribes’ or ‘aristocratic order’. This divisional system, because of its hereditary membership and rulership, invariably tended to produce autonomous lordships with distinct names and identities unless the central government took measures to curb the tendency. Whenever the central power waned, these divisions emerged as independent powers in themselves and their lords as contenders for the central power. The Chinggisid power structure did not destroy any tribal order; instead, it destroyed and incorporated a variety of former Liao politico-administrative divisions into its own decimally organized minqans and transformed the former Liao divisions into quasi-political named categories of populace, the irgens, stripping them of their own politico-administrative structures. In turn, the Qing, in incorporating Mongolia, divided the remains of the Chinggisid divisions, the tumens¨ and otogs,intokhoshuu and transformed them into quasi-political ayimaqs. Thus, it was the logic of the imperial incorporation and the hereditary divisional system that produced multiple politico-administrative divisions and quasi- political identity categories. Introduction Although many scholars consider the emergence of the Chinggisid power structure to have been a watershed in Eurasian political and social transformation because it appeared to have replaced the region’s ‘tribal’ order with a highly centralised state, some still regard it as a ‘supercomplex chiefdom’.2 Indeed, with the collapse of the Mongol Empire, Eurasia 1Lhamsuren Munkh-Erdene is currently a Humboldt Research Fellow at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Earlier versions of the article were presented at a conference entitled Mongolia in Anthropological Research: Recent Decades in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, 19–22 July 2012 and at a roundtable held at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Princeton, New Jersey, USA, 5–8 December, 2012. The article in its present form was drafted when the author was a George Kennan Member at the IAS. The author owes a depth of gratitude to the IAS for its generous support. 2N. Kradin and T. Skrynnikova, “Stateless head: notes on revisionism in the studies of nomadic societies”, Ab Imperio,IV(2009), pp. 117–128. JRAS, Series 3, 26, 4 (2016), pp. 633–655 C The Royal Asiatic Society 2016 doi:10.1017/S1356186316000237 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 27 Sep 2021 at 06:56:53, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1356186316000237 634 Lhamsuren Munkh-Erdene is believed by many to have reverted to a ‘tribal’-based social and political order.3 Thus, according to this paradigm, the existence of centralised state remained transient in pre- modern Eurasia, if not entirely elusive, and the ‘tribal’ order remained resilient, if not always dominant. However, David Sneath rejects this paradigm as “colonial-era misrepresentations, rooted in nineteenth century Eurocentric evolutionist theory” and argues that: in Inner Asia many of the forms of power thought to be characteristic of states actually existed independently of the degree of overarching political centralization . The local power relations that since ancient times have made the Inner Asian state possible were reproduced with or without an overarching ruler or central ‘head’ ...Itwasnot‘kinshipsociety’butaristocraticpowerand state-like processes of administration that emerged as the more significant features of the wider organizationoflifeonthesteppe...Thepoliticalrelations of aristocrats determined the size, scale, and degree of centralization of political power . The centralized ‘state’, then, appears as one variant of aristocracy.4 Furthermore, Sneath argues “the recognition that stratification and the state relation are not dependent upon a centralised bureaucratic structure makes it easier to discern the substrata of power, the aristocratic order that lay at the base”.5 Thus, according to Sneath, pre-modern Inner Asian societies were not tribal but aristocratic and, their ‘states’, whether centralised or de-centralised or even ‘headless’, were aristocratic political structures. Thus, Sneath views what many scholars see as the state or the centralised state (such as a Chinggisid political structure) “as a variant of aristocracy”, that is, an aristocratic, probably centralised, state. Although Sneath elaborates very little on the origin, nature and transformation of his aristocratic order, his scheme leaves an impression that aristocracy was always present and it is the aristocracy that produces the centralised state rather than the other way round. However, more conventional scholarship maintains that the “medieval Eurasian nomadic tribe was a political organism open to all who were willing to subordinate themselves to its chief and who shared interests with its tribesmen”.6 Scholars of medieval Mongolia mostly subscribe to this view and Thomas Allsen for instance, writes that: though defined in genealogical terms, the lineage and the tribe were essentially political entities composed of individuals whose ties of blood were more often fictive than real. In the steppe, common political interest was typically translated into the idiom of kinship. Thus, the genealogies 3See for example T. J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 bc to ad 1757, (Oxford, 1989), and I. Togan, Flexibility and Limitation in Steppe Formations: The Kerait Khanate and Chinggis Khan (Leiden, 1998). 4D. Sneath, The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and the Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia (New York, 2007). pp. 1–5. 5Ibid., p. 197. 6R. P. Lindner, “What was a nomadic tribe?”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, XXIV, 4 (1982) pp. 689–711. Rudi Lindner extended or rather elaborated Morton Fried’s concept of ‘secondary tribe’ into the world of ‘nomads’. In fact, Fried himself ‘found’ his ‘secondary tribes’ among Eurasian nomads during much of their history, starting from Xiongnu down to the Qing Empire. See M. Fried, The Notion of Tribe.(MenloPark, 1975). p. 72. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 27 Sep 2021 at 06:56:53, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1356186316000237 Political Order in Pre-Modern Eurasia 635 of the medieval Mongols (and other tribal peoples) were ideological statements designed to enhance political unity, not authentic descriptions of biological relationships.7 Similarly, Peter Golden emphatically confirms that “Much of the modern scholarship on the Eurasian nomads long ago recognized that ‘tribe’ and ‘clan’ were complex phenomena, involving the political integration, often unstable, of heterogeneous elements”8, while Thomas Barfield asserts that contrary to his [Sneath’s] assertion that anthropologists remain wedded to a genealogical conical clan model, the more common view is that such Inner Asian confederations were the products of reorganization enforced by division from the top down rather than alliance from the bottom up. It has long been accepted that ‘actual’ kinship relations (based on principles of descent, marriage, or adoption) were evident mostly within smaller units: nuclear families, extended household.9 However,Goldenstillbelievesthat“kinship...clanandtribe...musthavebeenthe building blocks on which later expanded and no longer stricto senso kinship-based political structures were constructed” and maintains “that Sneath’s thesis may be feasible for the late Chinggisid Mongol world”.10 Yet, he does “not find it a useful tool for assessing the pre-Chinggisid steppe polities”.11 Similarly, Barfield not only finds Sneath’s model ‘problematic’ for projection onto the pre-Qing period but also maintains that such “hierarchy was much weaker or non-existent among nomadic pastoral societies” outside of Inner Asia.12 In Barfield’s scheme, the tribal order is indigenous, intrinsic or essential to Eurasia while the state is an exception.13 Thus, Barfield boldly claims that: “The tribal organization never disappeared at the local level”.14 Indeed, scholars who subscribe to the ‘tribal paradigm’ seem to take ‘tribe’ as an essential or natural political organisation of pre-modern nomads, although many still see ‘tribe’ as an extension of kinship organisation. ‘Tribe’ for them is a higher level of kinship incorporation, albeit more complex and more abstract, involving many fictive elements.15 Thus, there was no need to look at the origin or genesis of ‘tribes’. The ‘tribes’ were the essential socio- political units of nomadic Eurasia. Thus, we have two different interpretations of pre-modern Eurasian political structure: tribal non-state and aristocratic state. In this article, however, I would like to look at the origin or genesis of the named categories, that is, the ‘tribes’ or the “aristocracy-led named groups”, as Golden puts it, in order to see whether pre-modern Eurasia’s political order was tribal or aristocratic.16 Thus, 7T. Allsen, “The Rise of the Mongolian Empire and