A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia, 600-1700

From Russian to Global History

Marina B. Mogilner, Ilya V. Gerasimov, Sergey Glebov, Alexander Semyonov

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781350196797
• eBook ISBN: 9781350196827
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia, 600-1700 proposes 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Note on the Text
• Introduction
• 1 Political Ecology: The Formation of the Northern Eurasia Region
• 2 Mechanisms of Political and Cultural Self-Organization of Northern Eurasia’s First Polities: The Formation of the Rous’ Lands
• 3 Consolidation of New Political Systems: State-Building in Northern Eurasia (Eleventh–Thirteenth Centuries)
• 4 From Local Polities to Hierarchical Statehood: Interaction and Entanglement of Competing Scenarios of Power (Thirteenth–Fourteenth Centuries)
• 5 New Times: The Problem of Substantiating Sovereignty and Its Boundaries in the Grand Principality of Moscow (Fifteenth–Sixteenth Centuries)
• 6 The Transformation of Social Imagination: The Seventeenth Century
• 7 The Tsardom of Muscovy in Search of an “Assembly Point”
• Index
• Copyright