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Eurasianism has proved to be an unexpectedly diverse and highly self-reflexive concept. By transforming the way we describe the Eurasian landmass, it also resignifies our field of studies and its disciplinary boundaries. In this process, Eurasianism itself is subject to a constant resignification. The present volume builds on this notion while pursuing an innovative approach to Eurasianism. The authors advance the well-established positions that view Eurasianism as a historical intellectual movement or as an ideology of Russian neo-Imperialism, and proceed to unpack an innovative vision of Eurasianism as a process of renegotiating cultural values and identity narratives—in and beyond Russia. This procedural approach provides deeper insight into the operationality of the identity narratives and shifting semantics of Eurasianism in its relation to the Russian World.
Traditionally, Germany has been considered a minor player in Pacific history: its presence there was more limited than that of other European nations, and whereas its European rivals established themselves as imperial forces beginning in the early modern era, Germany did not seriously pursue colonialism until the nineteenth century. Yet thanks to recent advances in the field emphasizing transoceanic networks and cultural encounters, it is now possible to develop a more nuanced understanding of the history of Germans in the Pacific. The studies gathered here offer fascinating research into German missionary, commercial, scientific, and imperial activity against the backdrop of the Pacific’s overlapping cultural circuits and complex oceanic transits.
Imperial Russia, is was said, had two capital cities because it had two identities: St. Petersburg was Russia's "window to Europe," whereas Moscow preserved the nation's proud historical traditions. Enlightened Metropolis challenges this myth by exploring how the tsarist regime actually tried to turn Moscow into a bridgehead of Europe in the heartland of Russia. Moscow in the eighteenth century was widely scorned as backward and "Asiatic." The tsars thought it a benighted place that endangered their state's internal security and their effort to make Russia European. Beginning with Catherine the Great, they sought to construct a new Moscow, with European buildings and institutions, a Westerni...
In Russia during the second half of the eighteenth century, a public conversation emerged that altered perceptions of pregnancy, birth, and early childhood. Children began to be viewed as a national resource, and childbirth heralded new members of the body politic. The exclusively female world of mothers, midwives, and nannies came under the scrutiny of male physicians, state institutions, a host of zealous reformers, and even Empress Catherine the Great. Making innovative use of obstetrical manuals, belles lettres, children’s primers, and other primary documents from the era, Anna Kuxhausen draws together many discourses—medical, pedagogical, and political—to show the scope and audaci...
Based on the rare diary of an 18th-century Russian provincial merchant, A Russian Merchant's Tale presents a revealing portrait of Russia's little-known commercial class. By recording his daily contacts with a wide array of individuals from lords to laborers for more than 40 years, Ivan Alekseevich Tolchënov opened a window onto the education, work, birth, death, marriage, business, civic, holiday, and religious practices of a social group about which little has been known. Using the tools of microhistory to interpret the diary, David L. Ransel vividly brings to life Tolchënov's self-construction, his relations with family and society, and his entire world of aspirations, achievements, and failures. Challenging prevailing stereotypes of Russian merchants as tradition-bound and narrow-minded, A Russian Merchant's Tale offers important new insights into the social history of imperial Russia.
The fascinating story of The History of the Rus', one of the most influential historical texts of the modern era.
This book is the first full-length study in English on the St. Petersburg Free Economic Society, Imperial Russia's most prestigious non-governmental association. It examines the society from a wide variety of perspectives of the men and women who took part in its work--the St. Petersburg aristocrats and academics who established it in the 1760s, the budding intelligentsia, Catherine the Great and her court, its correspondents in Western Europe and the Russian provinces, and the wider Russian public.
Lindsey Hughes (1949-2007) made her reputation as one of the foremost historians of the age of Peter the Great by revealing the more freakish aspects of the tsar's complex mind and reconstructing the various physical environments in which he lived. Contributors to Personality and Place in Russian Culture were encouraged to develop any of the approaches featured in Hughes's work: pointillist and panoramic, playful and morbid, quotidian and bizarre. The result is a rich and original collection, ranging from the sixteenth century to the present day, in which a group of leading international scholars explore the role of the individual in Russian culture, the myriad variety of individual lives, and the changing meanings invested in particular places. The editor, Simon Dixon, is Sir Bernard Pares Professor of Russian History at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
Historians habitually write about empires that expand, wage wars, and collapse, as if empires were self-evident and self-conscious entities with a distinct and clear sense of purpose. The stories of empires are told in the language of modern nation-centred social sciences: multi-cultural and heterogeneous empires of the past appear either as huge “nations” with a common language, culture, and territory, or as amalgamations of would-be nations striving to gain independence. Empire Speaks Out reconstructs the historical encounter of the Russian Empire of the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries with the complex challenge of modernity. It does so by taking the self-awareness of...
Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- ONE: Searching for Enlightenment -- PART I: Wisdom and Wickedness, 1500-1689 -- TWO: God and Politics in Muscovy -- THREE: A Question of Legitimacy -- FOUR: Visions of the State at Mid-Century -- FIVE: Church and Politics in Late Muscovy -- PART II: Ways of Virtue, 1689-1762 -- SIX: Church, State, and Society under Peter -- SEVEN: Virtue and Politics after Peter -- PART III: Straining toward Light, 1762-1801 -- EIGHT: Catherine II and Enlightenment -- NINE: Nikita Panin and Imperial Power