Description:
A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia, 600-1700proposes a new language for studying and conceptualizing the spaces, societies, and institutions that existed on the territory of today's Northern Eurasia. This is not the story of a certain present-day state or people evolving through consecutive historical stages. Rather, the book is a modern analytical approach to the problem of human diversity as a fundamental social condition. Through cooperation and confrontation, various attempts to manage diversity fostered processes of societal self-organization, as new ideas, practices, and institutions were developed virtually from scratch or radically altered. Essentially, this is the story of individuals and societies creatively responding to their natural and social environments in unique historical circumstances.
This volume explores how the mutual interactions of several local socio-political arrangements, and attempts to integrate with one of the universal cultures of the time, caused a string of unintended consequences. As a result, the enormous landmass from the Carpathian Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east, from the Polar Circle in the north to the steppe belt in the south was divided among several regional powers. Ultimately unable to overtake each other by military force, they were locked in a zero-sum game until the uneven development of modern state institutions tilted the balance in favor of one of them - Russia.
Brief description: Sergey Glebov is Associate Professor of History at Smith College, USA and Amherst College, USA. He is the author of From Empire to Eurasia: Politics, Scholarship and Ideology in Russian Eurasianism, 1920s-1930s (2017) and the co-editor of Between Europe and Asia: The Origins, Theories and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism (2015).
Review Quotes: "One of the greatest strengths of A New Imperial History is the fact, that even for those deeply engaged with a specific aspect of Russian imperial history, the book offers new perspectives ... [it] leaves the reader with a sense of completeness, yet of openness: it creates a space in which old narratives can be re-examined and new, unfamiliar questions can be asked." --CEU Review of Books