It's springtime, which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4th through June 9th, you can get 50% off nearly every single print, e-book, and audio book from Princeton University Press. Just go to press.prinston.edu to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation and Beyond Belief, how evidence shows what really works. There are so many fantastic books you can get an incredible deal on.
Go to press.prinston.edu and use the code spring50. That's sp-r-i-n-g-50 at press.prinston.edu. This sale only lasts for a month, so go and get some books. Welcome to the new Books Network.
Hello, new books network audience. I am your host today, Eric Ammanahan, and today I am so pleased to host a History Xylo episode with two fantastic scholars. History Xylo, if you're listening to us the first time, is a new Books Network podcast series supported by the scholarly journal Critica, Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. History Xylo is a podcast series intended to create scholarly dialogue across subfields.
That is, to be a place where historians can discuss their work, share their underlying assumptions, explore similarities and differences in both their approach to discovering more about their past and what they found, and most importantly, to step a bit outside of their particular areas of expertise. So much of the work we professional historians do fosters narrow, specific specialization, and this is required. This is by design. Expertise doesn't come easy.
And yet, sometimes we can become kings and queens of our own historical hills. Our specializations make us focus so narrowly that we sometimes leave. We forget to leave our little hills and we can tend to live in scholarly communities that hold much value, but become so narrow that it invokes the image of a silo on a farm stored with all wonderful material, but narrow and separate. And so the point of this podcast project, History Xylo, is to counter that a bit and get us out of our narrow silos, out of our narrow specializations, and talking to other historians across subfields.
And so we're so grateful for all of our historians that come forward to participate. If you are interested in the history of History Xylo, and if you think you might have an idea for an Xylo conversation, please reach out to us. You can subscribe to the podcast series and find our contact information on the Xylo page at the New Books Network. And now on to today's conversation.
I am so pleased to have the opportunity to talk to two distinguished and very erudite historians, who together will talk about their books that discuss law, its practice, and its change over time in overlapping territories and time periods. Now, the two books are crime and punishment in early modern Russia by Nancy Coleman, and visions of justice, Sharia and cultural change in Russian Central Asia. Nancy Coleman is the William Bonsell, historic professor of history at Stanford University. She is the author of several important monographs, beginning with kinship in politics, followed by by honored bound.
This one, crime and punishment in early modern Russia. She's also written a synthesis, Russia's empires, which has been published in both English and Russian. Paolo Soutori is the author of visions of justice, Sharia and cultural change in Russian Central Asia. Paolo is a senior researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.
He is the editor in chief of the excellent journal, Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient, and he is also the editor of the Journal of Central Asian History. Both of our guests, I should also want to write that his visions of justice has also just been translated into Russian, as has other of his translation work. I would take our whole hour if I were to list the many important fruitful articles and contributions that both of these scholars have made. So I will encourage you to if you are not aware of the work already, look them up please, and now we will get right to our conversation with Nancy and Paolo if it's, we'll just go by first names for today's conversation.
Thank you so much for being here, and I wanted to start out Nancy since your book chronologically starts a little bit earlier. I'd like you to start out by just telling us, give us a real paragraph or so summary of crime and punishment in early modern Russia. I'll ask both of you to kind of introduce your book really briefly before we get into the conversation. They started to be brief, but I'll try thank you so much for the introduction and for getting us together I'm so happy to be discussing Paolo's book here but let me tell you about my book.
I published it in 2012. At the time I was, I had a couple of goals in mind. One was that I wanted to do history from the bottom up that is I wanted to work with case studies and do the law in practice because even in early modern European studies, let alone Russian studies. There weren't very many books or articles that I found that actually looked at case law and actually how people use the law that that situation has improved a little bit since 2012 but still, I wanted to, but particularly in Russian history, most of the legal history was about the law codes and not about how people actually apply the law.
So that was my broadest goal but my goal within the field of Russian history was that there at the time, there was still a lot of sort of waning discussion about whether Russia was a sort of despotism, an autocratic state that's a trope that comes from the 16th century and there were people writing at the time like Richard Helle and Marshall Poe and Georg Mieshells about the violence of Russian society and sure you can find incidents of violence but to generalize about it. I found a little excessive but so I thought, look, I'm going to study the criminal law because this is where the state has the right to use the most violence of all. It can use capital punishment and execution. So I'm going to study the practice of the criminal law to sort of address both of these issues, see how they use the death penalty, how they worked with murder cases and trees and cases and things like that, whether this was an arbitrary despotic legal system or whether it had a certain sort of consistency application of the law.
So I collected court cases, 17th century is when they pretty much start and a bunch from the others are which is Islamic peoples I had a bunch from others on mass which included tough our peoples and then I collected anywhere where I could have actually find a complete resolved case with actual punishment regime in it. Several hundred cases and what I read them for procedure and punishment and I what I discovered and concluded with that they did have a consistent judicial system that is the law was pretty simple pretty simplified version of Roman law but they applied it the way the law was written the judges were immature so they were just military and appointed to be local governors but the bureaucrats knew the law and they applied it the way it was supposed to be applied. The only excesses I saw were indeed when they were high high cases of treason the procedure might use more sessions of torture than the law allowed or something like that but by and large it was a consistent judicial pretty simple judicial system I was looking only at the criminal law. So I was also interested in how people engage with the courts is mostly a top down study of how the law was structured who were the judges that kind of thing with the bureaucrats and what was procedure what was punishment but bottom up I was able to look for agency by the communities and I saw a lot of agency of the people in local provinces precisely because this was such a minimal bureaucracy that the governors needed to hire local people to be the posses to the rest people to be the jailers to be the executioners so when you depend upon your community that much the judge has to be sensitive to the communities interests and I found that in several occasions where the community is in a case one way or another.
I've built a change over time in as much as Peter the Great made the punishment capital punished for two things with capital punishment he decreased the use of it in favor of exile to Siberia but when he did apply capital punishment to very high cases of treason he used a much more theatrical European style of punishment but all in all I found a lot of continuity 17th into 18th century and a kind of consistent judicial system. So there you go. Is that a good enough summary? Thank you.
Yeah, that's fantastic. It's such a wonderful read if I would say that about both books and they both are. I mean, yeah, but let's move next. Thank you for that.
Let's move next to Apollo and Apollo please tell us about visions of justice. You know, why you wrote it and what you were what you do in it. Hello everyone and thank you for the opportunity to discuss Nancy's magic homework. It was wonderful to read it.
So why did I write this book? I think it has to do with the fact that I was growing disillusioned with intellectual history. I haven't been trained as a lawyer or a historian and I had the digital experience with social history. So in a way, what would say that this book originates from occasional encounters that is all the readings that I did while I was writing a dissertation which was devoted to a topic far moved from social history, legal history, bottom up history.
So at the time nearly 20 years ago, I wanted to probe the strength of a master narrative about Islam, modern Islam in the real Russia. And so what I wanted to do is to see whether the landscape inhabited by Muslim scholars and experts of law, theology and mathematics was receptive to talk about modernity, progress, nationalism, and so on and so forth. So this led me to venture into genres with which I was very much unfamiliar, one of which was legal theory. And so I discovered that there is this new landscape of culture, that is ethics, morality, and legal theory is limited to its students, which I thought was very much exciting.
And I thought, well, this could be an export. And then I started off into an adventure in the archives. I got it a venture because I was coming. I was approaching Islamic law, the practice of Islamic law in the Russian colony from various, well, you call them oriented as perspectives.
So I was assuming, for example, that there is, that the Muslim world is a more fixed. So, you know, Islamic legal institutions under centralization, the science that is in Bukhara or Ijiva should work pretty much in the same fashion as it used to work in the Ottoman Empire. And I was wrong. At the same time, I thought that the practice of Sharia should work like, and the Mohammedan law in South Asia, that is under the true, because Russians were claiming to be inspired, but more though, and I was wrong again.
I found myself in the archives in Tashkenten Bukhara, realizing that I didn't know anything about this subject, which I had just approached. And it took me, right some time, to realize that I needed much more than the three years, which I had secured with a fellowship in Germany. The book is about legal enlightenment. What I wanted to understand was how morality could have changed or might have changed in a colony among Muslims or within Muslim communities.
And it certainly did. And this book takes you on a journey through my readings of court cases, showing how people, I would say, even mostly non elite people living in a Russian Buddhist town, may use the various legal instruments, which were afforded to them by the Russian Empire and the state formation, which we call economy. And I hope that was a thumbnail. But I wasn't patient enough for some of my book.
Thank you. Thanks to both of you. And now for our audience. Now, the idea of this history, Xylo, is that now our authors ask each other questions and react to each other's books, which they've both, as they noted, have read.
So Nancy, would you like to go first with it? Well, I mean, our books are really quite different. He does civil law and I do criminal law and we're two centuries apart, but they're an awful lot of common themes here. And I, my question, hello, might be the, you know, the biggest, broadest question, but I wonder, your book reminds me of the next book that I wrote, which was called the Russian Empire, where I took Karen and Barkey's model of an empire of difference and said that, you know, these Eurasian empires, she writes about the Ottoman.
And I read about the Russian one, you know, tolerate a lot of difference, you know, they insist on taxation and recruitment. But otherwise, they tolerate difference and allow local customs, religion, law at the misdemeanor level, civil level, in their various places. So in the Russian Empire, German law and the Baltics and tribal law and Siberia and Sharia law in the Tata areas. And I thought that model worked pretty well for, you know, when I was writing about the Russian Empire, doesn't really get encountered in my crime and punishment book because I just didn't have, I didn't see that the Tata's in Ozremasa were treated any differently than the Russians at that, but that but that but that Empire difference model has been on my mind several years.
And here I find you in the 1860s with the Russian administration acting out the Empire of difference and I wonder why you think they were so gradual. It took them the whole half of the century to try to kind of push people to use the Russian courts and that you know they allowed the Sharia courts, they revised them here and there you show but, but they're very, very gradual and I'm wondering why you think they took that gradual approach, where they afraid of backlash did they were, you know, I just wonder how you saw from the state's point of view, I guess. So the short answer would be, they were afraid of backlash as you anticipated, I mean, this is something that one finds repeatedly articulated both at the level of administration at the level of the legal theory. But there are many, of course, one can equally encounter a number of colonial officials on the ground, who are asking for significant reforms, but these calls are usually tempered and in fact deflected by the minister and some people saying that these reforms would be too early today, and I think what informs this good quality of approach to the notion of, well, we could call it acculturation is the idea that there is a great danger of mutiny.
There is a yeah they see, they see the danger of the North Caucasian words repeating itself in the national business and I would say this isn't just something that manifests itself in the writings in the metropolitan, but there are also many good orientalists sitting in touch camp or in Bugha, very well trained, but who nonetheless, they feel surrounded by the by enemies and these other Muslims, therefore, most of them are other matter about the fact that the best way to proceed will be simply to nudge the local population into a direction whereby one day they will just rise and embrace the virtues of rational culture. And these dovetails, they will with stories of information panic, and which is a topic which is now, because which suggests that empires do not need much knowledge when they have to rule over their many people's but maybe we can come back. But information panic that is in spite of the fact, yeah, well, I think that is a yeah well there is a interesting article by Alexander Morison published in Boston present I believe a few years ago, but in the story, you've been interested in juicy, colorful vignette about information panic, the end of the 19th century in the National Tour de Stan and of course Alexander relies on bailies, which is a very important point of view of the language of this fortunate expression for national panic because in spite of the fact that the national impact has been ruling over Muslim communities by them for nearly more than four centuries, it is reluctant in fact to engage with expert knowledge about Islam, Islamic institutions and Muslimness and therefore, the information panic is a becomes a feature of in political administration in in the Caucasus, have recently published the work with publishable on what will become the standard case of an Islamism called the Mansurov affair. There is a it's an interesting story about the Tata Enigre who lives the world region and reinvent himself as a Sufi.
Once English can he he gets acquainted with a Sufi master, an extended influential Sufi master from Bukhara and he gains his discipline and in a decade, this main by the name of Mansurov becomes the command authority over a large network of Kazakhs. At some point, all these stats as attracts the ire of not only Kazakh scholars, Muslim scholars, but also many colonial officers, the Russian colonial officers. And this man will be eventually arrested in prison, branded and exiled to Siberia in the eight sixties and this story will become will will eventually enter into the main walls for missionaries. And so, this is a very interesting story that is printed in Tambov and then which would circulate in the Caucasus and the Russian book is done.
So, information panic isn't a theme that I address in the book as you know, but it's a topic that it's. And something that I think informs the everyday life of Russian administration. And the idea is that they don't really need to know about that. They don't want to get to know Sharia law very well as long as it maintains stability and it's only civil law anyway, you know, this is not the doctrine, the criminal law is Russian law.
And it's, once again, I try to articulate this idea differently, in spite of the fact that an empire could have accumulated knowledge about how to deal with Muslims. And there is nothing better to, there isn't a more forceful instrument than law in order to discipline their lives. And yet they have been blindly forging ahead by ignoring the importance of Sharia. And the best, this is best exemplified by the fact that in Russian to Kestan, which becomes a colony of the Russian Empire by the 1860s, it is only in 1912 that we have the first compendium written by a Russian Orientalist on Islamic law, someone who by the time had lived for more than three decades in the region.
Before that, we have only a translation of a very famous prime Emmanuel of Islamic law called the Al-Iqidaya. And the translation was not from Arabic or Persian, but from English. And so it's kind of, how to say, it's a monument of colonial immigration that the Russians erected inadvertently to praise the virtues of Anglo-Hamadallah. What I'm trying to say is that what I see in the records, which I could access in the archives in Central Asia, is a process of learning by doing a trial and error process whereby colonial officers who are made by men, like many of the people you've described in your book, improvise every day.
They improvise while being called to the side of a matter of personal law about which they didn't know anything. And they had to rely on the expertise of local middle men, knowledge, perhaps, part of translators, or perhaps people who just fly from the neighboring, even in Buhanah, the decorates and reinvent themselves as translators. Well, I thought a really interesting part of your book is that sometimes they ask the Muftis for flakwons, they actually went to the experts for a resolution of some case. And by saying so, I don't mean to say to believe the importance and efficiency of the legal system put in place by the Russians.
In the company, I think in fact it was extremely efficient because it was open-ended. Well, the sovereign instrument was a statutory law, which was revised several times, but which was, I would say, very relaxed in terms of mixing various legal systems in terms of property rights, for example, in terms of family law and so on and so forth. So I have been under the impression while sitting in the archives that by the end of its open-endedness, the Russian legal system or the administration of the legal administration put in place by the Russians, made colonial officers a hard talk. At some point, I came across a memoir saying that this rich legal system turned our life into bureaucraticism because they were wasting them.
In a suspect, what this main main was that colonial officials wasted their time away by sifting through petitions appeals. I'm not sure I answered your question. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It does seem really striking to me that the way you're describing is still that sort of empire of difference.
We're just going to tolerate a lot of what's already there because it's functioning at a time when I think the normal historiography would say, two and a half in the 19th century, reciprocation, homogenization, taking away those individual rights in places like the Baltics and stuff. But here in a new colonial setting, the first thing to do is their instinct is stability, tolerate local institutions. Yeah, which doesn't mean, of course, that by exposing themselves, well, through exposure to every day encounters, either with the Russian administration or the Russian imperial courts, like the local courts, the population would not change their sense of morality or the legal entitlements, well, they did in fact. So there was, as you said, at the very outset, the process whereby Muslims eventually, some of them became a posterated and embraced even the culture was gradual, much more gradual than in the world of the Euro as exemplified by the book of St.
where it shows that how Muslims, how others opted, in fact, more frequently for Russian political courts, well, they didn't have actually much other options because I'm not sure that they could have appealed to the Mohammedan's political assembly in the same fashion in which they made using facts of Sharia courts. And this is something that I'm adamant about inadvertently and willingly, the Russian empire ends up by reinforcing Sharia in the Russian Kurdistan because by the end of the 19th century, there are much more Sharia courts, much more legal experts who fashioned themselves as cardiers, as Muslim judges, then it used to be under the rule of the Bukhar-Dimirs or the human hands. So this is an unintended, one of the unintended consequences, I'd say, of Russian imperialism, and one which could be compared to Dagestan, for example, the North Caucasus. Yeah, I remember reading or thinking, if you talk about an Islamic revival and I thought, well, that's ironic.
I am, well, reading your book, I was repeatedly, I brought back to the notion of the divide between early modern and modern because I speak as you know about most about the 19th century, which should fall for as historians within the rubric of modern times, the modern period. And while reading your book, I find so many commonalities between the 16th century, well, the 17th century, sorry, in the 19th century, by which I mean that expert knowledge is in the hands of bureaucrats, is not in the hands of lawyers. Military men are called, are expected to meet out punishment into what means the justice, but in fact, it is only describes the notaries who can in fact produce legal records. Sorry.
I found that all very fascinating. We are as judicial expertise, I think I've a chapter entitled that and it's the bureaucrats, not the judges and the bureaucrats tell the judge, here's the relevant clause of the law, here's the punishment. But in your world, I thought there are madresas and basically law schools and that these Khadi judges and the Muftis are all rather well educated in the law. I gather, I wanted to ask you whether they were actual lawyers, you talk about trustees or middlemen or some points, but it seems to me there's a lot more formal knowledge of the law.
I wouldn't have called a Khadi judge a bureaucrat. I think what I meant is that the story that I narrate in this book is one in which the local population, the Turkish standards, which is a majority, majority population, can decide every time. I don't appeal to the National Administration or to a Russian court or else to bring their cases to the court. And of course, the men stuck in the National Court lawyers by their training, they all had spent years and years in the madrasas and there is no doubt that they were experts.
What I found fascinating is that the men offering legal service in the Russian administration or else in the Russian law courts were all military men. I haven't encountered a single case whereby these people who were called to deliver sentences could rely on the wrong expertise. In fact, they had either to bank on translators, middlemen, brokers or else lawyers imported from the middle of Russia. It was fascinating because one could almost read our books in parallel and see how the Empire in a way relied on early modern techniques of governance when it expanded the southwards and eastwards.
book you speak of a chronic lack of personnel. Yeah, and this is also what I've seen, what I've perceived when reading records from Central Asia. And this is also one of the reasons why I would say the Russian administration decides to make so much space for Sharia courts. I think at some point there is, they are cognizant, Russians are cognizant of the fact that if they were to disbanned the system of Sharia courts, they would be left only with a solid set of military men who would be patologically unable to deal with all the legal issues coming from.
They did, I think starting in the early 19th century, they were what a handful, five or more Russian universities that had juridical faculties and you begin to get juridical expertise, I guess that's your basic law school in Imperial Russia is the juridical faculties, but still that's only starting in the early 19th century. So there isn't a lot of that legal knowledge. And as I understand it in your world, the governors of a place like Russian Turkasan would be like my 17th century governors, that is they're all purpose military men who collect taxes, keep the peace and do the courts and the judiciary is the least of their attack. Yeah, right.
Sorry, I could just even interject one small moment. So my first book is about Siberia and I went to the archives to read about trade and I was particularly interested in Bukharin merchants. So I would go through all this correspondence to directly to the Vibuud sky at chancellory in order, I'm just mining for what I'm interested in, but as I've read both of your books, it absolutely occurred to me how much of this I've seen, because so often people are bringing these issues to the Vibuuda and I'll stop there. Yeah, I think in my empire book, I call this, you know, this whole empire of difference business kind of empire on the cheap.
That is, you really don't have the manpower for a really thick bureaucracy. And I think we're all enough in various people who study 19th century Russian bureaucracy say her capitol representation, it's a very skeletal bureaucracy, even in the 19th century. They just don't have the manpower to want to give the manpower to have a thick bureaucracy. So then they get the local people to do bureaucratic tasks for them, whether for me in my book, it's higher the local people to be the executioner, or in Turkestan, it's let the Sharia courts continue to do a most of the civil law.
It's empire on the cheap because they don't have the manpower or don't even have that vision. It doesn't, you know, I think it's both, they don't have the vision of needing to homogenize the state until quite, wait, I guess. Yeah, it also builds on the on the consideration that it would be extremely costly not to rely on local communities. Time and again, I come across cases when there's a murder on assault and the the chance of a provincial governor say in Fergana or in Tashkent sends out the bailiff and the bailiff is alone and he has to rely on his government and these are locals or a policeman who used to work for the for the kind of co-count.
And of course, the first question coming tonight would be how could such, as you said, skeletal system offer legal services and how would it be regarded by the local population. And in fact, it was a very efficient, cheap way to administer justice by bringing in local communities. I would say it was an extremely reasonable way to expound the boundaries of an imperial project without making too much of an investment. Do you think from your sources, if there hadn't been the 1917 revolution, that eventually they would have bolded more Muslims into using the Russian courts and closed down.
Like you do say there was a sneer campaign against some of the Sharia courts and not to try to delegitimize that. Do you think that the trend would have been eventually to all Russian courts? I, that is very difficult. But it's a fascinating question because when I've moved out of touch count and I've entered into the archives in Bishkek, I found out that there were many more records of judicial keys heard by Russian lawyers and Russian judges.
That is to say that there is nothing, I, so one of the things that I've tried addressing in this book is the fact that there was nothing prejudicial among Muslims when dealing with imperial law. That is to say, when someone, when an individual or a community recognized that a legal instrument was more resourceful, more powerful, more effective and efficient than another one. I mean, for the wrong purposes of course, there was nothing that would stop them. And so I try to articulate this idea because that was once again one of my assumptions that was informing my approach to the study legal records.
So I thought that at some point, well, the Muslims would throw up on the idea of bringing their cases to a Russian court. This wasn't the case because in fact the archives are flooded with records of locals, petitioning the Russian administration. So there was nothing ideologically or culturally wrong. So a situation eventually could have been the case is not only, I haven't been for the October, which I would say the Russian-Japanese work.
I mean, what really was a landmark was a landslide in terms of chaos and destruction, was the violence that changed public life after 1905 in Russian-Tugestan. There is a completely new infrastructure. There is a new railway system, which was efficient by the time a lot of emigres coming from the Caucasus, of course, many Armenians. There was a lot of anti-Semitism.
And so I think that one of the major factors which could have stopped the functioning of this legal system, which I've described in my book, was the consequences of violence after 1905. And the very fact that there was an idea shared by many that the Empire as a state formation was not there anymore to defend the preserving integrity of people's rights. No interesting. Interesting.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Can I shift to a different question about all those books? I want to ask you what the historiographical stakes of your book are, because I don't know your field. That is, you really are intent by the end talking about the gradual pace of change, a gradual change in legal consciousness.
Other people argue for rupture, but you argue for gradualism. And I just wondered, what's the payoff for you to disagree? My name is Bob Cruz. You mentioned Arby's for rupture or somebody else.
But I think the last line of your book is something like people didn't even realize how much their consciousness had changed since it had been so craduled. Anyway, so I just wonder what's the bigger payoff of your whole project for people who study colonial administration or colonial law, that kind of thing? So if there's a graphical engagement, what I wanted to show this book is that one should first try to familiarize oneself with the regional specifics, which is, in other terms, I advocate or I invite and encourage everyone who wants to be an historian on that part of the world to not to be misinformed by the state of the art in a specific sub-discipline. As I said, I was coming from the angle of Islamic legal studies, a global legal history, a Russian imperial history, and in other words, suddenly there are two books which, in a way, have done major impact on how we have begun all the last decade or so to imagine what was like for the Empire to deal with cultural diversity and diversity.
And the first one was of course Jim Berbong's book, Russian peasants' go-to court and the subsequent article in the imperial rights regime. Yeah, if you're right, actually, I like that a lot. Yeah, and then Bob Cruz, of course. I'm sure that for anyone specializing in a Muslim majority region of the National Empire, Bob's book was a quantum change because it, well, masterfully designed, eloquently written, really a page learner, but it brought home the idea that if you want to do, if you want to do Russian people at least that you want to come to terms with the event that there is this big thing called Islam and the Muslimness and the Muslim population, which is part and parcel of the Russian Empire.
There are so many regions that there is even a significant and deep substantive cultural diversity between Muslim communities within the Russian Empire. To be a Muslim in Kazan, by the end of the 19th century, is not to be a Muslim, in the Middle East, or in Tashqin, or in Bukharah, under the Russian protectorate in the same years. So I found myself in 2015 to deal with all these different historiography of France, and I tried to engage with them the best I could. When it comes to Bob's book, I subscribed, one of the ones I recognized that it opened up new business on how the Empire managed diversity and especially vis-a-vis the Muslims.
At the same time, I subscribed to criticism coming from, for example, from the Deep Khalid or the Muslim which in a nutshell says that Bob ended up by providing too lousy a picture of life among Muslims under the status quo. Which is a time to be a reminder that colonialism, the Russian Empire was a colonial empire and that the Russian colonialism manifests itself also under the rules of the Tsar. When it comes to James' book and there are many studies, it was also a big inspiration for me because it, I read them as a recommendation, as an encouragement to deal with the Russian Empire, as a typical case of legal pluralism. And with all the specifics and the adversities and all the subtleties of a situation of legal pluralism, with lots of hybridity, for example, especially in a place like where Muslims were bringing their cases to a Russian court or to a Russian criminal officer while being adamant about their own legal entitlements, about their own sense of justice.
And so asking Russian, for example, to hear cases on the basis of Sharia, on what they thought was Sharia. So while recognizing, of course, the importance of the notion of imperial rights regime, at the same time, I've been asking myself what was special about the Russian Empire, which we don't find in other empires. I think, I think, well, from my own perspective, from the perspective of the material with which more familiar the Russian Empire isn't as on the vague, isn't anyway more special or less special than any other empire, which administered cultural and therefore legal adversity. The Republic of Venice, the Ottoman Empire, the Polish-Lipanian Commonwealth, or the Chinese Empire.
There are lots of, there is an exciting scholarship now on Xinjiang, and I have in mind, of course, Edich Shrusel's work on, on Islamic law, in a Chinese colony. So my engagement with this biography was one of recognition of the state of the art, the state of the art in disciplines, in fields, which are changing very rapidly. They are still changing rapidly. At the same time, an engagement which was premised on me reminding myself that the Russian Empire was just another global empire, like the French, like the Italian, like the British, like the Dutch, and therefore, I've pumped down, I have to say, the excitement about, when it comes to recognize that the Russian Empire made space for Muslims.
It did so, of course, but it did so like any other state formations in those days. Yeah, but you're not doing the criminal law. That may be where the harshness of colonial control comes in, whether they can afford to let local cases of bucks and land disputes and things like that be locally done, but you might see the harshness of the empire in the criminal law more, so they are a lot of what are they able to do. Well, I think the harshness of colonialism also can manifest itself really in the routine practice of rule.
So, you know, stories of colonial officers writing to their peers and say, oh, you know, I can't stand these locals, these Muslims, because they don't bow in us. They don't bow, they don't bow lower when they say to bow, when they tell them to bow lower, you know, when they meet them in the colonial part of the shunt. So, maybe, well, in fact, I recognize that by default, I refer to Russians in Russian to this time, those historical actors as colonial facials. I haven't dwelled so much to show how much or really they are.
This is perhaps one of the response of my book. There's something that I wanted to to ask you about. There's something that, well, I recognize going over your book that, even if we address very different areas, diverse range of periods, there are lots of, at least several points of contact. And one of them is the fine line that divides a culture of gift giving from a culture of bribery.
And it was very much revealing when reading those speeches in the book, because, well, tell me if I'm wrong, perhaps. I don't recall it correctly. But one of the first, or at least the first accounts about bribery, injustice in the National Empire comes from memoirs, travel docs of European diplomats. So the very famous average line, of course, and I believe for a, say, these bullocrats, they are so easy to be bribed.
And this reminded me that this is something that one finds more often than not when reading Russian orientalists, reflecting upon Sharia law and Khadis. So what I'm trying to say, I believe, is that the deposition of bribery usually comes from people who are alien to the local culture. And at some point you raise this issue and you say, well, there must have been space for bribery, of course. And knowing it's here to deny that in the history of Russian little culture, there were no lawyers or bureaucrats that could be easily bribed.
But at the same time, there was a culture of gift giving that has lived on, at least, that has many afterlives, as we know, that one can find in the Soviet period, for example, even in the post-Soviet period, and everywhere in the world, by the way, right? So I just wanted to ask you how you have approached the dilemma, what is bribery and what is gifts giving? Yeah. Well, yeah, that was really frustrating because the bribery part you can't see.
You can kind of guess sometimes when judgment seems to be lenient for the crime or something like that. But the background of gift, that it is a gift giving economy, so that I think that the judicial system was not more shaped by relationships than just by the letter of the law. So you have a case that seemed very similar to the one that Brian Davies wrote about, which was one time when a community complained to the Moscow that they didn't want that governor, because the governor would not take the gifts that they gave him. When he moved in, they were supposed to give him a house, a carriage, and food, and food every month, and stuff like that.
And they started out with all that stuff and he said, no, no, no, I'm not taking anything from you. And they said, if he won't take our gifts, we can't work with him. So they wanted a different governor, and they got it. So the assumption was, of course, it's a reciprocal relationship.
We're going to give him Conromania. We're going to support him, and he is going to listen to our needs and be flexible and not too harsh, implicitly. And I saw many cases in the law where the judges were responsive to communities, have that wonderful case where a woman admits that she killed her husband, but he'd done a horrendous crime, sexual assault on her daughter. And so, of course, so she admitted she killed him.
And so he said, well, I guess I have to sentence her to death because that's the law. And the community went to him and said, she's a good woman. He was a bad man. He was evil, give her mercy.
And he did. He backed down and he said, okay. And he said, all right, I will just send us her to a vlogging. And then as I speculate in the book, so he sent her to a vlogging.
Well, who's the executioner? It's one of her neighbors. It's a guy from the same village. So how tough is that vlogging going to be?
Because it's all that's not prescribed in a lot. It has to be this many strokes for this kind of a crime. And so she could have gotten off real easy because he understood the whole community is supporting her. And if he executed her, he had the community, uncooperative and angry at him.
And he needs that community to be his, to supplement his garrison, to work in his office and things like that, pay their taxes, so that there's a law to give and take in the community. So the other, so the gift giving turns this into an almost sort of reciprocal or flexible judicial system, at least in the local courts. In my cases, we're local governors. On the flip side of bribery, I didn't see any real cases or even accusations of judges being bribed.
But the law codes, and I think Horace Dewey said this years ago, that one of the main reasons for the 1497 law code and the 1550 law code and chapter 10 of the 1649 law code is to police, officials, is to tell them not to take drugs, you know, is to punish the judges and punish the scribes for taking bribes or for doing the law incorrectly or making a false judgment or something like that. If you read, there's a lot of awareness in those law codes, trying to police people from falsely accusing and using the law, but from the officials as well. So you know, bribery and corruption is on their mind. But I did find many or several cases in which governors who were accused of doing something wrong, like not submitting the case or not hearing a case quickly enough or not resolving it or something like that, they, you know, tripped over themselves and defending this.
Oh, no, no, I did not do anything to obstruct the sovereign's work. No, no, no, I did everything I was supposed to do that. They were really sort of frightened of being found guilty of official misconduct, maybe because it was the only job in town, you know, you're serving that SAR, if you're dismissed as a governor, then where do you go? Don't get a job in, you know, in finance, you know.
So, so I don't know, there were lots of pressures to keep the official dumb. Well, being a law, on the other hand, they were very underpaid, the scribes are very much underpaid. So of course, there's a temptation to bribery and Peter the Great pretty much took away salary and said, no, you're going to, for the book scribes, you can live off of the fees you charge about terrific. That's going to lead to bribery as well.
So, but it's, well, I was hidden in the sources, you know, you can't, you're not going to show you that. Which leads us, of course, to address the emitter issue, which is the notion of the professionalization of legal experts, lawyers, those who have ministered justice, what I'm titled, what I'm suggesting is the justice and the name of the empire. And I've been wondering whether is the very notion of professionalization isn't too much isn't a too high a threshold for major deficiency, or the non despoticness or the non-theoronic nature of political system as the one we've studied in different periods and in different regions, because in fact, well, we have now legal professionals everywhere around the world, but it doesn't mean that they cannot be bribed, they cannot do mistakes that there are those who are less expert than others, there are those who they're not biased. Now, because now, retrospectively, what I have to say, this has to do perhaps with a broader argument or a more difficult issue, to what extent the illegal system is just, and that what extent people perceive or are concerned by the intrinsic quality of a legal system.
I think what I like a lot in your book, and I think it is something that you've written eloquently about it, is the very fact that the legal system in the empire may have been skeletal as you put it. But on the other hand, by the very need of involving local communities, the empire was able to create a fabric of trust. And I think trust is the most important among the features of the legal system, if people don't trust a state formation, for the legal services it can offer, it won't even bother to cultivate legal entitlements, perhaps, a sense of morality. So, beat 19th century, Russian tokistan, or 17th century Azamas.
Once again, I had to recognize that the Russian empire was a significant in the way it's projected that fabric of trust upon its subjects. I think I said something in the book about how maybe they had a little bit easier in doing that in as much as they could create a bureaucracy across the state that was extremely uniform. That is, it was just one law, the 1649 law code, particularly 16, that one, it was published and it was distributed all around the realm. And there weren't already other like, you know, lock-oats for the criminal law anyway that were oppositional words in, I guess, 17th century France, who had Northern France law, and southern French law, and different languages, and that kind of thing.
But here they could create a kind of uniform bureaucracy, and they did send bureaucrats from Moscow with the legal training from the center, so that all around the realm, the documents looked exactly the same, and the law was exactly the same, and it was amazingly uniform for such a huge, a huge empire. And the other thing, you know, to respond to what you were saying, my other book, I have this book on people going to court, first time I ever studied court cases was that book called by Honor Bound, because I was studying people going to court to defend their honor. And I had in mind, well, the big boy hours of the realm had the right to have a kind of precedent system. And then I discovered, to my surprise, that everybody in the realm had the right to go to the court to defend their honor.
And the 1649 law code has a long list of, well, if you're very high status, and you win a court case like that, you get, you know, lots of money and corporal punishment for the other guy. But if you're just a little peasant, you only get five oables. But that's okay, everybody's on that list, all the way down to peasants and even politically, you know, slaves. So, and I found myself thinking, why would the star bother, you know, to tell his judges to take the time to listen to one peasant, complain that his neighbor insulted his wife, you know, what, what a waste of time, what do they get out of that?
And they get what you were just talking about that is they get the message that that's our gives justice to all his people, the judge that's our cares about his people, and that everyone can go to the court for a whole range of judicial issues from personal insult, all the way up to murder and assault. So it, it, it disseminates the ideology of the just judge, which is central to the Russian ideology, to Ottoman ideology, probably to Chinese ideology, these imperial rulers being a just judge is central to, in addition to their ruling, their religious status, that kind of thing. And yeah, okay. We want to thank both of you so much for the conversation for our listeners.
Thank you for listening and the books that we've discussed here are Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia by Nancy Coleman and Visions of Justice, Sharia and Cultural Change in Russian Central Asia by Paolo Sartori. Thank you for these contributions. Thank you for talking about them today. I'm really grateful and I encourage others to pick them up as well and have a look.
Thank you.