Russian Empire Space, People, Power, 1700-1930 [Paperback]

Russian Empire offers new perspectives on the strategies of imperial rule pursued by rulers, officials, scholars, and subjects of the Russian empire. An international team of scholars explores the connections between Russias expansion over vast territories occupied by people of many ethnicities, religions, and political experiences and the evolution of imperial administration and vision. The fresh research reflected in this innovative volume reveals the ways in which the realities of sustaining imperial power in a multiethnic, multiconfessional, scattered, and diffuse environment inspired political imaginaries and set limits on what the state could accomplish. Taken together, these rich essays provide important new frameworks for understanding Russias imperial geography of power.

Contents<\>
List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments
Coming into the Territory: Uncertainty and Empire Jane Burbank and Mark von Hagen
Part I: Space
1. Imperial Space: Territorial Thought and Practice in the Eighteenth Century Willard Sunderland

2. The Great Circle of Interior Russia: Representations of the Imperial Center in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Leonid Gorizontov
3. How Bashkiria Became Part of European Russia, 1762-1881 Charles Steinwedel
4. Mapping the Empire's Economic Regions from the Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century Nailya Tagirova
5. State and Evolution: Ethnographic Knowledge, Economic Expediency, and the Making of the USSR, 1917-1924 Francine Hirsch
Part II: People
6. Changing Conceptions of Difference, Assimilation, and Faith in the Volga-Kama Region, 1740-1870 Paul Werth
7. Thinking Like an Empire: Estate, Law and Rights in the Early Twentieth Century Jane Burbank
8. From Region to Nation: The Don Cossacks 1870-1920 Shane O'Rourke
9. Bandits and the State: Designing a Traditional Culture of Violence in the Russian Caucasus Vladimir Bobrovnikov
10. RepresentilÃ