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A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia, 600-1700 proposes a new language for studying and conceptualizing the spaces, societies, and institutions that existed on the territory of today's Northern Eurasia. This is not the story of a certain present-day state or people evolving through consecutive historical stages. Rather, the book is a modern analytical approach to the problem of human diversity as a fundamental social condition. Through cooperation and confrontation, various attempts to manage diversity fostered processes of societal self-organization, as new ideas, practices, and institutions were developed virtually from scratch or radically altered. Essentially, this is the story of individuals and societies creatively responding to their natural and social environments in unique historical circumstances.
This volume explores how the mutual interactions of several local socio-political arrangements, and attempts to integrate with one of the universal cultures of the time, caused a string of unintended consequences. As a result, the enormous landmass from the Carpathian Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east, from the Polar Circle in the north to the steppe belt in the south was divided among several regional powers. Ultimately unable to overtake each other by military force, they were locked in a zero-sum game until the uneven development of modern state institutions tilted the balance in favor of one of them - Russia.
List of contents
Foreword
1. Political Ecology: The Formation of the Northern Eurasia Region
2. Mechanisms of Political and Cultural Self-Organization of Northern Eurasia’s First Polities
3. Consolidation of New Political Systems: State-Building in Northern Eurasia, 1000-1300
4. From a Local Political Space to Hierarchical Statehood: Interaction and Entanglement of Local Scenarios of Power, 1200-1400
5. New Times: The Problem of Substantiating Sovereignty and Its Boundaries in the Grand Duchy of Moscow, 1400-1600
6. The Transformation of Social Imagination in 17th-Century Northern Eurasian Societies
7. The Tsardom of Muscovy in Search of an ‘Assembly Point’
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Marina B. Mogilner is Edward and Marianna Thaden Chair in Russian and East European Intellectual History and Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA. She is the author of Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia (2013).Ilya V. Gerasimov is Executive Editor of the Ab Imperio journal. His publications include Modernism and Public Reform in Late Imperial Russia: Rural Professionals and Self-Organization, 1905–30 (2009) and Plebeian Modernity: Social Practices, Illegality, and the Urban Poor in Russia 1906–1916 (2018).Sergey Glebov is Associate Professor of History at Smith College, USA and Amherst College, USA. He is the author of From Empire to Eurasia: Politics, Scholarship and Ideology in Russian Eurasianism, 1920s–1930s (2017) and the co-editor of Between Europe and Asia: The Origins, Theories and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism (2015).Alexander Semyonov is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, Russia. He is the co-editor of Empire Speaks Out: Languages of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire (2009) and The Empire and Nationalism at War (2014).
Summary
A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia, 600-1700 proposes a new language for studying and conceptualizing the spaces, societies, and institutions that existed on the territory of today’s Northern Eurasia. This is not the story of a certain present-day state or people evolving through consecutive historical stages. Rather, the book is a modern analytical approach to the problem of human diversity as a fundamental social condition. Through cooperation and confrontation, various attempts to manage diversity fostered processes of societal self-organization, as new ideas, practices, and institutions were developed virtually from scratch or radically altered. Essentially, this is the story of individuals and societies creatively responding to their natural and social environments in unique historical circumstances.
This volume explores how the mutual interactions of several local socio-political arrangements, and attempts to integrate with one of the universal cultures of the time, caused a string of unintended consequences. As a result, the enormous landmass from the Carpathian Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east, from the Polar Circle in the north to the steppe belt in the south was divided among several regional powers. Ultimately unable to overtake each other by military force, they were locked in a zero-sum game until the uneven development of modern state institutions tilted the balance in favor of one of them – Russia.
Foreword
A millennium-long historical exploration of the Northern Eurasian region which was characterized by the coexistence of several local sociopolitical arrangements that competed and counterbalanced until the emergence of Russian dominion.
