This article is taken from the December/January 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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No hagiography of empire is offered by Dominic Lieven, but the level of wisdom offered about the vital human aspects of imperial rulership make this a quietly devastating rebuttal of some of the cruder anti-imperialist critiques of our superficially revolutionary times. He acknowledges the flaws of a system of government which struggled in the face of contemporary challenges. But empire is still “the most prevalent type of polity in history”, with perhaps no enduring successor in sight.

His themes are stated as “geography, sovereignty and leadership”. Biography, however, plays a bigger role than the discussion of political structures. Attention focuses on the people who rule and the challenges, constraints and opportunities facing them. A succession of subtle and penetrating profiles illuminates the book. The qualities needed for a dynasty to continue always loom large. The character of imperial rulership also emerges with his examination of the role of advisers, tutors, brothers, heirs and especially women — whose influence could be immense and fateful. The long index entry for women has eleven detailed sub-entries which include “conceptual”, “concubines and mistresses”, “governesses”, “mothers”, “regents”, “reproduction”, and “rulers and wives”.

The range of advice offered by a ruler to a likely heir is closely scrutinised. Despite his splendour, Louis XIV emphasised the need for modesty, self-discipline and a degree of inner calm. Lieven notes that “Of all the emperors in history, [Kaiser] William II was least likely to follow this advice.” He describes the dilemmas faced by a prudent ancestor who served Paul I of Russia. This court official took to his bed upon realising that a ruler who had spurned his advice faced destruction.

Lieven is elusive on what defines an empire other than the exercise of power from a geographical heartland over peripheral areas. The role of geography in shaping the character of an imperial realm is underscored. He writes that any state which emerged in the bare Muscovite heartland, far from trade and cultural centres, “was unlikely to be a model of liberty and benevolence”. He judiciously evaluates the roles of impersonal forces and human agency in shaping the fate of empires. Climactic shifts often play decisive roles.

Most ruling houses are alliances between the dynasty, the aristocracy and the landholding elite. It is noted that in the lower reaches of society, a formidable autocrat such as the Ottoman ruler Selim the Grim, “who disciplined the elites and kept taxes down” was “generally welcomed”. Unmitigated terror, aggression and expansion were usually fatal in the long run.

The shape and influence of the religious systems in various imperial epochs is considered, not least the fateful outcome of the alliance between Turkic military nomadism and the Islamic faith. More generally, the philosophical discourses of figures such as Marcus Aurelius, al-Mansur and Taizong provoke a discussion on the challenges and pitfalls of rulership.

The pharaoh Akhenaten’s assault on the core principles of rulership, exemplified by his repudiation of the religious establishment, is a recurring theme and, according to Lieven, unlikely to succeed. He dwells on Joseph II, whose attempt to govern the Habsburg Empire by appealing to “abstract principles of natural law, utility and reason” seriously weakened it prior to the French Revolution. By contrast, Lieven doesn’t hesitate to describe Catherine the Great as an intellectual tyro whose genius is rightly celebrated.

Hammurabi of Babylon portrayed himself less as a conqueror than as a just ruler. The Chinese emperor Kangxi, who reigned from 1661 to 1719, was the epitome of “wise and benevolent rulership”, prepared to publicly admit errors, a trait “rare among mere politicians, let alone emperors”. But it was the much earlier Tang dynasty which was the apogee of Chinese imperial success.

Much attention is given to its rulers, not least “the exceptionally gifted” Empress Wu (725-806, right), who initiated “an extraordinary half-century female dominance of Chinese government”. She advanced Buddhism, in which women had a less subordinate ranking than other religions. Dynastic machinations surpassed Game of Thrones, but without the treachery and gore, since at key junctures rival claimants showed clemency.

The demise of the Tang resulted in China being pushed out of Inner Asia, which “became irrevocably part of the Islamic world”. Court politics features even more strongly in the chapters on the caliphates ruled from Istanbul and the Mughal empire — in each of which women played important political roles. Traces of Ottoman meritocracy emerge: Suleiman the Magnificent married his favourite daughter to a court official who had started out as a Balkan swineherd.

But Lieven admits his limitations when surveying the sanguinary Ottomans: “It is difficult to put oneself in the mindset of a father who knew that his sons were almost bound to kill one another some day.”

This reader marvels at the survival for over half a millennium of a dynasty that seemed to be possessed by a death wish as early as the 17th century, thanks to the destructive manner in which the succession was arranged. More broadly, Lieven shows how structural weakness hastens imperial demise, often stemming from succession disputes, tensions over allegiance and territorial overstretch. He speculates the onset of the Little Ice Age finished off the lacklustre Ming Dynasty.

Illiterate and dyslexic, his astonishing memory made Akbar charismatic

The comparison of Charles V and Philip II, the first “world emperors ruling huge territories and diverse peoples”, is engrossing. Lieven warms to their contemporary, the Mughal emperor Akbar. Illiterate and dyslexic, his astonishing memory and great intelligence made him a charismatic ruler.

Lieven imparts knowledge with effortless ease, and is never lost for a memorable turn of phrase: by the end of the 18th century, “the Janissary corps had largely turned into a strange combination of welfare system, an investment fund and a tax evasion scam”. Intriguing comparisons are widely dispersed across time, between for example the intelligent and arrogant Trotsky and Dara Shukoh, failed claimant to Shah Jehan’s throne. Chronological contrasts are offered between the India of Ashoka and that of Narendra Modi.

Lieven opens with a preface about how his family was affected by imperial retreat that dwells on his peripatetic life from Ireland to Cambridge and Japan, and the role of his Baltic ancestors in various imperial undertakings. He concludes with an appeal not to disdain all the traditional elements shaping imperial rulership — those that reinforce solidarity and community will surely be needed as turbulent times close in.

Jeffrey Mankoff’s accessible and scholarly account of post-imperial powerplays in vast and shifting borderlands is usually Delphic in his description of a set of restless Eurasian rulers. He sees Russia, Turkey, Iran and China as unlikely to ever become nation states occupying a sharply delineated territory. Instead, they are entangled with their peripheries in ways that facilitate cross-border power projection.

The basis for the projection of influence is the personalities of ambitious and restless rulers who are nearly all aged over 60. Vladimir Putin, at 69, is the oldest. His management of centre-periphery relations has plenty of the hallmarks of an uninspired holding operation. Russia has failed to perpetuate or expand the influence acquired in the Soviet era and the attachment of younger generations in borderlands to Russian culture is fading. There is no coherent strategy for developing hinterlands, which may escape Moscow’s control if the post-Putin succession is handled as badly as recent events have been.

The Eurasian integration preached by Putin is rhetoric without substance, and the idea of a Greater Turkey has also struggled to gain traction beyond the country’s borders. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan rules a medium-sized state with limited capabilities that has a volatile political order and a heavily indebted economy.

As for revolutionary Shi’ism, it is a tool to engender backing in the Middle East for Iran. Tehran’s strongest foe is not so much the West but a population immune to the lure of imperial grandeur, which is stubbornly nationalist and increasingly less religious in outlook. Finally, there is the Community of Common Destiny unfurled by Xi Jinping through schemes such as the Belt and Road Initiative, meant to “transform the international system to reflect Chinese interests”.

At root, China’s offensive is based on cultural themes denoting a superior civilisation. It has gone far beyond other Eurasian states in the methods used to control its volatile borderlands: the technological capabilities China commands leap out. Facial recognition software and mobile tracking apps are tools of conquest that Stalin or Ataturk could only dream of.

Mankoff fills an important scholarly gap. Caution is briefly set aside when he speculates about the possibility of a world being made safe for empires thanks to the “onset of Eurasia’s new imperial age”. But none of these regimes seem to have the potential to measure up to Lieven’s formula for enduring emperorship, even though they are each disruptive and, arguably, highly dangerous.