Being an empire is inseparable from modern Russian identity and historical experience: the Russian empire was founded in the early modern era and endures in large part today. The Russian Empire 1450–1801 surveys how Russia’s many subject areas were conquered and how the empire was governed. It considers the Russian empire a “Eurasian empire,” characterized by a “politics of difference”: the rulers and their elites at the center defined the state’s needs minimally (control over defense, taxation and mobilization of resources, criminal law) and otherwise tolerated local religions, languages, cul ... More

Being an empire is inseparable from modern Russian identity and historical experience: the Russian empire was founded in the early modern era and endures in large part today. The Russian Empire 1450–1801 surveys how Russia’s many subject areas were conquered and how the empire was governed. It considers the Russian empire a “Eurasian empire,” characterized by a “politics of difference”: the rulers and their elites at the center defined the state’s needs minimally (control over defense, taxation and mobilization of resources, criminal law) and otherwise tolerated local religions, languages, cultures, elites, and institutions. The center related to communities and religions vertically, according each a modicum of rights and autonomies but not allowing “horizontal” connections across social, ethnic, confessional, or other groups potentially with common interest. This book gives detailed attention to the major ethnic and religious groups as it surveys strategies of governance—centralized bureaucracy, military reform, judicial system, tolerance of difference. It pays particular attention to the dissemination of a supranational ideology of political legitimacy in a variety of media, particularly symbolic, such as public ritual, painting, architecture, and urban planning. Beginning with foundational features, such as geography, climate, demography, and geopolitical situation, the book explores the empire’s primarily agrarian economy, serfdom, towns and trade, religions, nobility, and high culture. It tracks the emergence of an “Imperial nobility” and a national self-consciousness that was, by the end of the eighteenth century, distinctly imperial, embracing the diversity of the empire’s many peoples and cultures.