The Russian Empire 1450-1801
Nancy Shields Kollmann (Author)
"Modern Russian identity and historical experience has been largely shaped by Russia's imperial past: an empire that was founded in the early modern era and endures in large part today. The Russian Empire 1450-1801 surveys how the areas that made up the empire were conquered and how they were governed. It considers the Russian empire a 'Eurasian empire', characterized by a 'politics of difference': the rulers and their elites at the center defined the state's needs minimally - with control over defense, criminal law, taxation, and mobilization of resources - and otherwise tolerated local religions, languages, cultures, elites, and institutions. The center related to communities and religions vertically, according each a modicum of rights and autonomies, but didn't allow horizontal connections across nobilities, townsmen, or other groups potentially with common interests to coalesce. Thus, the Russian empire was multi-ethnic and multi-religious; Nancy Kollmann gives detailed attention to the major ethnic and religious groups, and surveys the government's strategies of governance - centralized bureaucracy, military reform, and a changed judicial system. The volume pays particular attention to the dissemination of a supranational ideology of political legitimacy in a variety of media - written sources and primarily public ritual, painting, and particularly architecture. Beginning with foundational features, such as geography, climate, demography, and geopolitical situation, The Russian Empire 1450-1801 explores the empire's primarily agrarian economy, serfdom, towns and trade, as well as the many religious groups - primarily Orthodoxy, Islam, and Buddhism. It tracks the emergence of an 'Imperial nobility' and a national self-consciousness that was, by the end of the eighteenth century, distinctly imperial, embracing the diversity of the empire's many peoples and cultures." -- Publisher's description
Print Book, English, 2017
First edition View all formats and editions
Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2017
History
xii, 497 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.
9780199280513, 0199280517
969962873
Introduction: The Russian empire 1450-1801
Prologue: The chronological arc
Part I. Assembling the empire
Land, people, and global context
De facto empire: The rise of Moscow
Assembling empire: The first centuries
Eighteenth-century expansion: Siberia and Steppe
Western borderlands in the eighteenth century
Part II. The Muscovite empire through the seventeenth century
Broadcasting legitimacy
The state wields its power
Trade, tax, and production
Co-optation: Creating an elite
Rural taxpayers: Peasants and beyond
Towns and townsmen
Varieties of orthodoxy
Part III. The century of empire: Russia in the eighteenth century
Imperial imaginary and the political center
Army and administration
Fiscal policy and trade
Surveillance and control in imperial expansion
Soslovie, serfs, and society on the move
Towns, townsmen, and urban reform
Confessionalization in a multi-ethnic empire
Maintaining orthodoxy
Nobility, culture, and intellectual life
Conclusion: Constructing and envisioning empire
Includes index