Authors

Discussion

The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars demonstrated the power of the concept of popular sovereignty and its myriad system-disruptive ripple effects on the political stage. In their aftermath, monarchs had to legitimate their rule in ways and on a scale never seen before.

The late Romanov and Ottoman states, two neighboring autocratic Eurasian land empires, experienced simultaneous periods of profound vulnerability. The Decembrist Revolt against Nicholas I in 1825 and Sultan Mahmud II’s dissolution of the Janissary corps in 1826 called for urgent reforms in all spheres of public life, beginning with the public image and popular symbolic functions of the sovereign. In each case, measures were taken towards systematic pan-imperial secular public ruler celebrations which had a widely felt impact at least until the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, respectively. Reinforced by technological improvements and the advancement of print media, these proliferating and escalating ceremonial events ushered in a new era of ruler visibility, facilitating the emergence of a modern public space/sphere and forging credible direct vertical ties of subject loyalty, irrespective of language, location, creed or class. This sort of mental centralization paralleled, by design, other ongoing forms of centralization – fiscal, administrative, infrastructural and so on.

Neither the end of the Ottoman and Russian Empires in the aftermath of World War I, nor the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 put an end to this style of autocratic symbolic politics.  On the contrary, national authoritarian regimes of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries first adopted the power choreography and propaganda apparatuses of their imperial predecessors wholesale and then harnessed them in a reinvigorated push for the ever-elusive nation.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new conceptual framework and a new methodology that open up a wide range of un(der)utilized sources in the study of central power embodied by the ruler (monarch/state leader), the changing patterns of his/her public staging, and the consequent cycles of cultural integration at the popular level from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. 

Although this thirteen-point model for the advent, nature, and evolution of modernity as a mindset among sedentary (especially peasant) populations, was first derived from the Ottoman imperial experience, and then tested in Russia, in reality it can be profitably applied to most other imperial and other states across the globe (Meiji Japan, Qajar Iran, Qing China, Brazil, British India, Siam, etc.).