90 Orientalism and Empirekazhdomu zashchitu zakona).^6 This was long before the advent of the
Great Reforms brought new attention to matters of legality and gov-
ernment among educated society and regime officials. Only the
Russians, emphasized A. Lilov, a Tbilisi gymnasium director, ethnogra-
pher, and student of mountaineer customary law in the late nineteenth
century, were set upon establishing the conditions for “peaceful, civil
[grazhdanskoi] life” in the region, in contrast to the many imperial pow-
ers of the past. “That which the Greeks and Romans never did,” he
wrote, “has been left to the Russians to accomplish.”^7
On the other hand, regime officials in the Caucasus and other
Russian frontier regions throughout the nineteenth century were far
less absorbed with matters of the economy and the promotion of
trade and industrial production than the Western colonial powers.
Also in contrast to the Western experience, Russia’s rapid expansion
in the eastern and southern borderlands very quickly created a con-
tiguous colonial empire and hence a multi-ethnic state.^8 The colo-
nized peoples lived not in “colonies,” as in the rest of the non-
Western world, but in peculiarly Russian “borderlands.” Russia itself
had historically expanded in a similar fashion. As they considered
matters of legality and customary law in the North Caucasus,
Russian colonial officials were again sensitive to questions of ethnic-
ity and its historical evolution, or more precisely the question of nar-
odnost’ and the relationship of the Russian Empire to its historical
evolution. The ideas of Russian officials and members of educated so-
ciety about customary law were again an outgrowth of uniquely
Russian concerns with custom and tradition. From our perspective,
customary law can best be viewed for the insight it allows into impe-
rial identity and ideology.
law in russia and the borderlands
By the time Russian officials began seriously to contemplate the ad-
ministration of justice in the North Caucasus in the mid-nineteenth
century, several different traditions of thinking about law vied for
their attention. The first corresponded to the growth in power of the
state itself. Legal codification in Russia, as in Europe, was first initi-
ated directly by the rulers of the old-regime state. Law was under-
stood by Russia’s rulers as a means to increase the effectiveness of
their rule. Peter the Great attempted to introduce the study of juris-
prudence to military cadets, and Catherine eventually made law part
of the curriculum at Moscow University.^9 The collection of laws initi-
ated in the eighteenth century accelerated in the early nineteenth cen-
tury, when Mikhail Speransky led the work that resulted in the