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.
Preface
Introduction: The Russian Empire 1450-1801
Prologue: The Chronological Arc
PART I: ASSEMBLING THE EMPIRE
1. Land, People, and Global Context
2. De Facto Empire: The Rise of Moscow
3. Assembling Empire: The First Two Centuries
4. Eighteenth-Century
Expansion: Siberia and Steppe
5. Western Borderlands in the Eighteenth Century
PART II: THE MUSCOVITE EMPIRE THROUGH THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
6. Broadcasting Legitimacy
7. The State Wields its Power
8. Trade, Tax, and Production
9. Cooptation - Creating an Elite
10.
Rural Taxpayers - Peasants and Beyond
11. Towns and Townsmen
12. Varieties of Orthodoxy
PART III: THE CENTURY OF EMPIRE: RUSSIA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
13. Imperial Imaginary and the Political Center
14. Army and Administration
15. Fiscal Policy and Trade
16.
Surveillance and Control in Imperial Expansion
17. Soslovie, Serfdom, and Society on the Move
18. Towns, Townsmen, and Urban Reform
19. Confessionalization in a Multiethnic Empire
20. Maintaining Orthodoxy
21. Nobility, Culture, and Intellectual Life
Conclusion: Constructing
and Envisioning Empire
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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.
