Taming the Wild Field , livre ebook

258

pages

English

Ebooks

2016

Écrit par
Willard Sunderland

Publié par
Cornell University Press

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258

pages

English

Ebooks

2016

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Cornell University Press

Date de parution

10 mars 2016

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9781501703256

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

21 Mo

Stretching from the tributaries of the Danube to the Urals and from the Russian forests to the Black and Caspian seas, the vast European steppe has for centuries played very different roles in the Russian imagination. To the Grand Princes of Kiev and Muscovy, it was the "wild field," a region inhabited by nomadic Turko-Mongolic peoples who repeatedly threatened the fragile Slavic settlements to the north. For the emperors and empresses of imperial Russia, it was a land of boundless economic promise and a marker of national cultural prowess. By the mid-nineteenth century the steppe, once so alien and threatening, had emerged as an essential, if complicated, symbol of Russia itself.Traversing a thousand years of the region's history, Willard Sunderland recounts the complex process of Russian expansion and colonization, stressing the way outsider settlement at once created the steppe as a region of empire and was itself constantly changing. The story is populated by a colorful array of administrators, Cossack adventurers, Orthodox missionaries, geographers, foreign entrepreneurs, peasants, and (by the late nineteenth century) tourists and conservationists. Sunderland's approach to history is comparative throughout, and his comparisons of the steppe with the North American case are especially telling.Taming the Wild Field eloquently expresses concern with the fate of the world's great grasslands, and the book ends at the beginning of the twentieth century with the initiation of a conservation movement in Russia by those appalled at the high environmental cost of expansion.

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Publié par

Cornell University Press

Date de parution

10 mars 2016

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9781501703256

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

21 Mo

Taming the Wild Field

Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe

Willard Sunderland

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2004 by Cornell University Press

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sunderland, Willard, 1965– Taming the wild ﬁeld : colonization and empire on the Russian steppe / Willard Sunderland. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8014-4209-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Russia—History—1613–1917. 2. Russia—Territorial expansion. 3. Imperialism. I. Title. DK113.S86 2004 947—dc22 2004001132

Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood ﬁbers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Cloth printing

Our carts, when we started, were in an awful ﬁx. The Handcart Pioneers, Report of the Second Handcart Company, 1856

To GM and GP

Contents

List of Maps Preface List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Steppe Building

1. Frontier Colonization The Rus' Land and the Field The Wild Field and the Tsardom The Empire and the Steppe

2. Enlightened Colonization Reason’s Territory Reason’s Process 3. Bureaucratic Colonization The Vastness and the Nation The Bureaucrats and the Settlers 4. Reformist Colonization The System and the Peasants The Pioneers and the Public

vii

ix xi xiii 1

11 11 15 35

55 55 73 97 97 113 137 137 160

Contents “Correct Colonization” Colonizing Capacities and the Russian Element The Dwindling Prairie and the Growing Borderland Conclusion: Steppe Building and Steppe Destroying Note on Archival Sources Index

viii

177 177 196

223 229 233

Maps

1. 2.

3. 4.

Natural Zones of Northern Eurasia Russia and the Steppe Region, Late Seventeenth Century The Steppe Region of European Russia, ca. 1800 The Steppe Region of European Russia, ca. 1900

33 109 198

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