Chapter 7 discusses the scope conditions of the theory proposed in Chapter 2. It describes the specific characteristics of the Habsburg military frontier that make it a unique case. To illustrate the ways in which other states managed their peripheries, I examine the contemporaneous case of the Russian colonies which were created to defend the Russian empire against attacks by Poland-Lithuania and the Ottoman Empires. The oldest colonies are the Cossacks who lived in their self-governing lands. They had well-defined rights and duties and were known for their loyalty to the tsar and their brutality in battle. The Habsburgs and the Russians constituted a model that the French Empire tried to emulate in their territories in Africa in the early nineteenth century. Similar to the European colonies, the French also forced military colonists to live in designated areas, recruited additional indigenous forces, and created specific laws defining their obligations, their property, and the types of activities they could be involved in. The French military colonies consisted of both French and indigenous people and represented the main way of ensuring the security of their civilian settlements.

Imperial Russia combined elements of the European early modern military‒fiscal state with features familiar to historians of Eurasian empires. The core of Russian international power was a professional, regular army organised and trained on European lines, sustained by effective administrative and fiscal institutions, and rooted in the tight alliance between a strong monarchy and a hereditary landowning and service nobility which took Europe as its model. To these sources of power Russia’s Eurasian imperial heritage added strategic depth and enormous natural resources. Russia’s Cossack irregular cavalry, heirs to an old tradition of Eurasian steppe warfare, played a major role in Napoleon’s defeat in 1812‒14. Even more important was the fact that the Russian Empire stood first in the world as regards horsepower in an era when the horse was vital to success in war. Together with these structural elements of Russian power the ability of the Russian army to learn and apply the lessons of Revolutionary and Napoleonic era warfare made a crucial contribution to its triumph in 1812‒14.