The Russian Empire, 1450-1801

Oxford History of Early Modern Europe

by Nancy Shields Kollmann

Modern Russian identity and historical experience has been largely shaped by Russia's imperial past: an empire that was founded in the early modern era and endures in large part today. The Russian Empire 1450-1801 surveys how the areas that made up the empire were conquered and how they were 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 - with control over defense, criminal law, taxation, and mobilization of resources - 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 didn't allow horizontal connections across nobilities, townsmen, or other groups potentially with common interests to coalesce. Thus, the Russian empire was multi-ethnic and multi-religious; Nancy Kollmann gives detailed attention to the major ethnic and religious groups, and surveys the government's strategies of governance - centralized bureaucracy, military reform, and a changed judicial system. The volume pays particular attention to the dissemination of a supranational ideology of political legitimacy in a variety of media - written sources and primarily public ritual, painting, and particularly architecture. Beginning with foundational features, such as geography, climate, demography, and geopolitical situation, The Russian Empire 1450-1801 explores the empire's primarily agrarian economy, serfdom, towns and trade, as well as the many religious groups - primarily Orthodoxy, Islam, and Buddhism. 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.

Genres: History, Russia, Russian History, European History, Nonfiction, Rus, Historical

512 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

Nancy Kollmann has taught early modern Russian history at Stanford University since 1982. Her research has focused on the problem of how politics worked in an autocratic state; she has studied how the great men of the Moscow court received and enhanced their political positions through marriage and kinship, how the tsar's government supported litigations over personal honor for all social groups as a means of social integration and how criminal law was applied in practice. She has also focused on the image of Russia conveyed to Europeans in contemporary engravings, maps, and books.

Reviews

[Karen E Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book, and it will be extremely useful as I integrate Russian history into my European history courses. I just wish Oxford had priced it more appropriately. At $110, I’ll just have to use a library copy. I probably would have bought it at half the price.

[Kbullock · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll start with the positive. The author presents an enormous amount of information, and she does it without footnotes. The bibliographical notes after each chapter are a great innovation. If you are already well versed in Russian history, you can gain much from this book. That is, if you're willing to invest some time and deal with the difficulties I will explain below. If you do not already have some working knowledge of Russian history, you should avoid this book

The positives end there. My best single-word summary for this book is "dense." It is printed in a small font (either 8 or 9, I'm not sure). For entire chapters, the author discards the quaint tradition of topic sentences for each paragraph. I'm not sure what writing teachers are promoting these days, but the absence of topic sentences makes navigation difficult. The text of the first five chapters includes much discussion of geography, but the maps are woefully inadequate. A book that retails for $120 should not require readers to acquire an atlas of Russian history to fully understand its first few chapters.

The publisher needed to assign a continuity editor. The author repeatedly introduces terms and concepts without explaining what they mean. For example, the term "Old Believers" appears early and often in the first 300 pages of the book, but the author does not bother to explain what the Old Believers were until page 416.

Substantively, the author tries hard to counter the conventional narrative that imperial Russia was "despotic," but she does not quite succeed. The author does a great job of explaining how serfdom worked in 18th Century Russia, but she does not explain why serfdom still prevailed in Russia in 1800 after it had faded out in western Europe by that time. Disappointing.