discourses and models of governing and cultural life. We explore how the official
discourse of empire was renewed, how governing strategies adjusted to new
conquests and new ideas, how social categories and roles proliferated. We end
with the imaginings of rulers and writers about what empire and identity meant in
Russia by 1801.
*****
Some excellent studies of the Russian empire are shaped around implicit European or
modernist comparisons: Dominic Lieven,Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals
(London: J. Murray, 2000); Geoffrey Hosking,Russia: People and Empire, 1552– 1917
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). Among those urging a value-
neutral approach are Seymour Becker,“Russia and the Concept of Empire,”Ab Imperio
3 – 4 (2000): 329–42 and Aleksei Miller,“The Value and the Limits of a Comparative
Approach to the History of Contiguous Empires on the European Periphery,”in
Kimitaka Matsuzato, ed.,Imperiology: From Empirical Knowledge to Discussing the Russian
Empire(Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2007), 19–32 andThe
Romanov Empire and Nationalism: Essays in the Methodology of Historical Research, English
edn. rev. and enl. (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), particularly“The
Empire and Nation in the Imagination of Russian Nationalism,” 161 – 79. Alfred Rieber’s
The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End
of the First World War(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) is notable for
breadth and synthesis.
On the trope of“despotism”: Marshall Poe,“A People Born to Slavery”: Russia in Early
Modern European Ethnography, 1476– 1748 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000);
N. S. Kollmann,“The Concept of Political Culture in Russian History,”inA Companion
to Russian History, ed. Abbott T. Gleason (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 89–104.
A synthesis of the views of newer scholarship on court politics is in the debate between
Valerie Kivelson and Marshall Poe:Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3
(2002): 473–99. On the“Third Rome”theory: Marshall Poe,“Moscow, the Third
Rome: The Origins and Transformations of a‘Pivotal Moment,’”Jahrbücher für
Geschichte Osteuropas49 (2001): 412–29.
On theory of empire: Karen Barkey,Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative
Perspective(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Jane Burbank and Frederick
Cooper,Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2010); Jane Burbank,“An Imperial Rights Regime: Law
and Citizenship in the Russian Empire,”Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian
History7 (2006): 397–431; Alessandro Stanziani,Bâtisseurs d’empires: Russie, Chine et
Inde à la croisée des mondes, XVe–XIXe siècle(Paris: Raisons d’agir, 2012). Niccolò
Machiavelli is quoted fromThe Prince, trans. and ed. Thomas G. Bergin (Arlington
Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1947).
Thomas T. Allsen on early empires:“Pre-modern empires,”in Jerry H. Bentley, ed.,The
Oxford Handbook of World History(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 361–78.
Prasenjit Duara considers modern empires fundamentally different from early modern
(“Modern Imperialism,”in Bentley, ed.,The Oxford Handbook of World History,379–95),
but Burbank and Cooper (Empires in World History) argue for essential continuity into
the era of nation-states.
On Muscovy’s capacious concept of empire: Valerie A. Kivelson,Cartographies of Tsardom:
The Land and its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia(Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityIntroduction 7