Imperial Designs, Postimperial Extremes

Studies in Interdisciplinary and Comparative History of Russia and Eastern Europe

Buch | Hardcover

294 Seiten

2023
Central European University Press (Verlag)
978-963-386-626-9 (ISBN)

Artikel merken

Anchored in the Russian Empire, but not limited to it, the eight studies in this volume explore the nineteenth-century imperial responses to the challenge of modernity, the dramatic disruptions of World War I, the radical scenarios of the interwar period and post-communist endgames at the different edges of Eurasia. The book continues and amplifies the historiographic momentum created by Alfred J. Rieber’s long and fruitful scholarly career.

First, the volume addresses the attempts of Russian imperial rulers and elites to overcome the economic backwardness of the empire with respect to the West. The ensuing rivalry of several interest groups (entrepreneurs, engineers, economists) created new social forms in the subsequent rounds of modernization. The studies explore the dynamics of the metamorphoses of what Rieber famously conceptualized as a “sedimentary society” in the pre-revolutionary and early Soviet settings.

Second, the volume also expands and dwells on the concept of frontier zones as dynamic, mutable, shifting areas, characterized by multi-ethnicity, religious diversity, unstable loyalties, overlapping and contradictory models of governance, and an uneasy balance between peaceful co-existence and bloody military clashes. In this connection, studies pay special attention to forced and spontaneous migrations, and population politics in modern Eurasia.

Andrei Cusco is Director of the Center for Empire Studies at the Department of History and Philosophy within Moldova State University. Victor Taki is Sessional lecturer at Concordia University of Edmonton. His first book Tsar and Sultan: Russian Encounters with the Ottoman Empire was published by IB Tauris. His research interests include Imperial Russia’s Balkan entanglements and the intellectual history of the eighteenth and the nineteenth century.

List of Tables

Introduction: The Rieber Momentum in Historiography

Andrei Cușco and Victor Taki

Chapter 1. Forests, Navies, and Entangled Empires: Timber Export and Territorial Governance in Russia in the Eighteenth to Early Nineteenth Century

Marina Loskutova

Chapter 2. The Projects of Cossack Reform in the Russian Empire (1810s–1840s): Unification versus Flexibility

Andriy Posunko

Chapter 3. The Russian Army and the Ottoman Empire: Military Reform and Eastern Crisis

Victor Taki

Chapter 4. Wartime Mobilization of Ethnicity, Shifting Loyalties, and Population Politics in the Borderlands of Nationalizing Empires: Reshaping Bessarabia and Bukovina, 1914–1919

Andrei Cușco

Chapter 5. Painting Dogs into Racoons: Entertainment and Culture in the Gulag

Oksana Ermolaeva

Chapter 6. The Jewish Exodus to the Balkans, 1933–1938

Bojan Aleksov

Chapter 7. Weathering the Storm, Toppled by the Storm: North Korea’s Non-Transition Compared with the Transition of Romania and Albania, 1989–1991

Balazs Szalontai

About the Contributors

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	16.11.2023
Verlagsort	Budapest
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	563 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
ISBN-10	963-386-626-X / 963386626X
ISBN-13	978-963-386-626-9 / 9789633866269
Zustand	Neuware