Today it is hard to trace who first formulated the well-received thought that the modern normative model of nation-state crystallized together with the concept of national history in the works of French historians of the Romantic epoch of the 1830s, if not as a result of writing the national history itself. Indeed, in Introduction à l’histoire universelle, Jules Michelet suggested an archetypical model of any national history by way of historicizing the metaphysical vision of Hegel’s philosophy of history. In this model Michelet replaced the gradual rise and unfolding of the Absolute Spirit with the development of “national soul” (as well as the “national body”). This allowed Michelet to portray France after the revolution of 1830 as the pinnacle of historical development. In Hegelian logic this mystical and pre-given national essence is brought to the surface and reinforced in the process of coming to knowledge of itself by way of Aufhebung and through the overcoming of multiple “subjectivities:” of natural determinants and adversaries in the form of other nations and their rulers. Since the formation of this modular matrix there was a proliferation of national narratives based on foundational myths, stories of the conquest of a country’s nature, and the struggle to maintain national unity.
One hundred and fifty years after the Romantic epoch, another outstanding French historian, Fernand Braudel, started his last book with a statement that seemed to undermine the foundations of national history both in the sense of the national narrative of France’s past and the very method of such history writing:

“So this patchwork France, rich in color, is where any “sincere” history of France should begin. Throughout its history, this underlying “plural” France has been contradicting the “one” France which has dominated it, controlled it, sought to blur its individualities while unfairly monopolizing the limelight and the attention of traditional history. Whereas France is not one, but many: indeed there is not “one” Brittany even, but many Brittanies; not “one” Provence, but as Giono insisted, many Provences – and many Burgundies, Lorraines, Franche-Comtes, Alsaces, and so on …”^[1]
“Every nation is divided, and thrives on division. But France illustrates the rule rather too well… division is within the house and unity is no more than a façade, a superstructure, a shout in the wind. So many differences result in lack of cohesion… The trouble is that all the divisions – physical, cultural, religious, political and social – are piled one on top of another…”^[2]

The epistemological situation that serves as a point of departure for new imperial history is quite logically characterized by Braudel as “trouble,” for this “imperial situation” undermines the foundations of national historical narrative. The acknowledgment of anteriority, persistence, and the plurality of “differences” unsettles the myth of a historically evolving single and eternal “national mind” (or “national body”). Having entered this relativizing statement, Braudel immediately proceeds to disavow this perspective in hesitation and cognizance of its potential disruptive impact on the modern canon and tradition (compare with the language of the next quote):

“…France may have found it difficult to be one, but could not, and never has been able to resign itself to being several. French cultural and political unity was one of the first examples of its kind in Europe, if not the very first. To this end, thousands of obscure and unconscious forces have been at work, their full measure not always taken by history… for if distance divides, by the same token it also unites, division itself being the constant creator of complementary needs. Between cereal-growing and animal-raising areas for instance, or between grain-producers and winegrowers, contact is virtually essential.”^[3]

“At the ground level, the settlement patterns of villages and bourgs formed the living base on which everything would depend. …villages would be grouped in a circle round the bourg (where the market was held), like little planets around a sun. The whole unit, bourg plus villages, was about the size of the present-day canton. Such “cantons,” basic population units, were in turn positioned around a town of some activity, greater or smaller. …And the pays, with greater or lesser success or determination, provided they were in touch with a town dynamic enough to play a leading role… were thus drawn into the orbit of a region or province. The architecture would be completed by the construction sooner or later, perfect or not so perfect – of a national market, and of a nation.”^[4]

The “invisible hand” of the market or objectified socioeconomic processes are always readily available fixes in moments of the historical deconstruction of myths about the invisible “national mind.” Still, Braudel’s analysis is anteceded by the conception of Lorraine and Alsace being indivisible parts of nothing but France, while his analysis crowns the pyramid of self-organizing communities with the edifice of “nation.” The fact that Braudel was not able to overcome the dictate of the nation-centered perspective should not surprise the reader too much. What is truly remarkable about these intellectual detours is the fact that he attempted at all to relativize the nation-centered perspective in the course of his reflection on personal and scholarly experience. Despite his reputation as a student of global structures and world system analysis, Braudel kept his version of total history consistent with the broad context of social life that today may be called the “ecology of human agency.” In this respect, the panoramic view of Braudel’s total history is not so different from Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s thick description of the village of Montaillou in which political, social, and cultural history are woven into the context of the natural and climatic conditions of the social landscape. The anthropological predisposition of the Annales School of different generations has ultimately led to the undermining of the dogma of “national history” from within the historical craft. In this case, the impetus behind the paradigmatic shift is encapsulated not in consistent methodological revisionism, but in the very focus of historic gaze directed from the bottom up, from a particular historical phenomenon embedded in the interwoven fabric of historical conditions to the general historical structures and trends of development.
The point of departure for Le Roy Ladurie’s story about Montaillou is the syncretic unity of “environment and authority” (this is the title of the book’s first chapter).^[5] The historian describes the environment of Montaillou as a particular “habitat.” It is his focus on local micro-systems that undermines the alleged self-evidence and homology of nation-centered historical narrative and unveils the intrinsic connection between “human-nature relationships” and “politics.” This connection takes center stage in the presidential address of Douglas R. Weiner to the 2005 annual conference of the American Society for Environmental History, which opens the Methodology and Theory section of the present issue. Weiner surveys the history of the development of the field and points out the direct link between the analysis of environmental history and a civic and truly democratic attitude to social landscape and society writ large. According to Weiner, environmental history is not about the isolated analysis of natural complexes or biological types. It is rather a “situational” historical analysis of the world. In this perspective, society is seen as reflected in the practices of uses of nature and therefore these practices appear to be the most adequate and revealing modalities of society’s self-description.
Remarkably, the rhetorical tropes of imperial powers often recount the stories of conquest of “unused,” “empty,” or “wild” spaces and “uncivilized” and “close-to-nature” populations. In the History section, Julia Obertreis explores this modality of empire’s perception of the world on the basis of a case study of projects for development of the cotton industry and ameliorative agriculture in Central Asia. In a similar way, other contributors to the present issue base their reflections and explorations on the view of practices of social control over nature as derivative of the habitus and political and scientific discourses in a given society.
Viktor Taki’s article in the History section explores the attempts of the Russian imperial authorities to control the spread of epidemic diseases on the territories of occupied Romanian principalities. This exploration reveals a picture of everyday culture and political authoritative visions and also of the conflict between different versions of “local knowledge” and “science.” Pursuant to the medical theme, Anna Afanasyeva’s article portrays the gradual spread of medical assistance in the Kazakh steppe in the nineteenth century. The peculiarity of the imperial context is enveloped in the fact that physicians who mold the discourse on steppe inhabitants (including hygienic, ethnographic, and political discourses) do not speak on behalf of some homogeneous “national body” or even metropole. They appear as mediators between the imperial authorities and the Kazakhs, equally distancing themselves from both sides by their claim to represent universalist scientific knowledge and the culture of modernity. The political ecosystem of the steppe turns out to be almost an ideal mirror on relations between power and knowledge in empire.
Another set of articles in the History section focuses on the perception of space and policies of its transformation. Jan Kusber demonstrates how the discourse of “the Siberian space” enveloped different visions of the social and political dimensions of Russian colonization of territories to the North and East of the Urals. Alla Sal’nikova traces the transformation of the “ecology” of a provincial late imperial city to an early Soviet city. Her case study of Kazan demonstrates the gap between the ideological designs and practices of social transformation and adaptation to new social and political conditions. This gap invited efforts to bridge it with the help of ideological, symbolic, and literal violence directed to the multifaceted and complex milieu of an imperial city. In the Newest Mythologies section, Harriet Murav explores the cultural and ideological codes of the central character of Boris Polevoi’s Story of a Real Man. Behind the story of replacement of a natural limb with a prosthesis she uncovers the problem of violent intrusion into nature and the key to understanding post–World War II society as based on overcoming natural limitations with the help of technology and ideology. In her article in the Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science section, Tatyana Safonova explores the problem of environmental politics. She offers a comparative analysis of formally identical European and Russian institutions of natural parks in their discursive, institutional, and cultural dimensions. This analysis reveals fundamental differences in the structures and functioning of these institutions. The practice of control over resources again appears to be an informative narration about social policy and social culture as compared with discourses of self-representation.
The Archive section of the present issue features the materials of the international workshop “Russia and Islam in Eurasian Archives” that took place at the Harriman Institute of Columbia University (New York) on December 1, 2007. The editors are grateful to Sean Pollock for his contribution as a guest editor. Part of this forum is informative in nature. These materials help to familiarize researchers with the diversity of archival holdings reflecting the historical experience of Muslim communities in the Ottoman and Russian empires and the policies of these empires toward the Muslim communities. The other part of the forum provides a critical perspective on whether the documentation produced by the imperial authorities is capable of reflecting this historical experience given the minimal encounter between the Muslim communities and the regulative impact of the state, including the modernized and titular Muslim state formations.
Contributions to this forum offer reflections on the problems of translating a historical text from one cultural context to another as well as on the necessity of taking into account the double-edged nature of archival documents as instruments for wielding imperial authority and for manipulation of imperial authorities by Muslim communities. In a certain sense this forum may be read as refracting the problem of the “ecology” of historical craft, that is, the historian’s encounter with the past as mediated by archival collections bearing the imprint of institutional logic and political, social, and cultural structures.
Finally, the ABC: Empire and Nationalism Studies section features another forum on the book series The Borderlands of the Russian Empire, published by the Moscow New Literary Review Publishing House in 2006–2008. Despite the fact that separate volumes have been reviewed in different scholarly periodicals, a discussion of the overall design of the series has not taken place. How fruitful was the attempt to rethink empire as a horizontal space of “borderlands,” a vision that in many ways agrees with Fernand Braudel’s conception of “unity in diversity?” This question is answered not only by reviewers but also by editors of the series and the individual volumes. Based on the experience of this ambitious and unique project, these editorial “afterthoughts” illuminate the difficulties of the historical representation of empire as a multitude of more or less clearly demarcated regions. The editors of Ab Imperio are grateful to the series editors for so kindly opening their own research laboratory and sharing with readers their reflections on the difficulties of relating the history of empire as a system of rule to the history of empire as a heterogeneous social and cultural space. The editors of Ab Imperio are also grateful to the reviewers for addressing a number of important questions, in particular, the question of relating different disciplinary and methodological traditions to each other. The balance between these traditions appears to be different in each individual case of imperial experience and each individual demarcation of this experience with the help of alternating categories of confession, ethnicity, national imagination, or the discourse of Orientalism.

* * *

Richard White has remarked that the turn of the twenty-first century is characterized by the exhaustion of natural resources, systems of resource protection and conservation, and also by global ecological change. These turn-of-the-century manifestations are characterized by an incongruence between scale and perspective. Environmental history in its fundamental premises presupposes a global perspective with the concomitant broadening of analytic horizons. However, this perspective is not accompanied by broadening of the temporal framework of analysis. The environmental discourse turns either to the contemporary timeframe with its attendant challenges of environmental disasters or to the prehistoric past of humankind. Environmental history is much less concerned with the history of the seventeenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.^[6] Uncovering the affinity between and homology of discourses about society and nature, the present issue of the journal maps a promising direction for the development of environmental history toward a dialogue with the history of production of knowledge and reproduction of social practices in the heterogeneous context of empire. The materials in this issue demonstrate that from the standpoint of historiography, the “environment” appears to be the middle ground where societal discourses and political ideologies directed toward “nature” are refracted not through the frames of nationalizing histories of Russian (or Tatar, Ukrainian, or American) landscapes, but through the context of their production. In contrast to discourses about social and cultural groupness, discourses about nature do not immediately meet the resistance of the silent opponent. These discourses do not feel obliged to mask themselves or defend against competing claims. Even more informative are practices of the uses of nature and transformations of the social landscape. They permit the discovery of differences where homogeneity and affinity are rhetorically cast (for example, the natural parks or ideologies of frontier in different countries). The reverse is also true. The ideological stipulation of differences and cultural distance may mask identical practices. As Peter Perdue emphasizes, the practices of control and ordering of territory in nation-state and empire are identical despite the rhetoric sacralization of “land” by nation-states in their cults of “soil and blood” as opposed to the proverbial imperial alienation of conquered lands.^[7] Attending to differences and peculiarities in the vein of environmental history helps to deconstruct any myth about the “natural” givenness of political borders, cultural stereotypes, or regimes of power. Overwhelmed by the democratizing potential of the micro-history of local communities, French historians all but undermined the sacred frame of national history that owes so much to the French historical tradition. Environmental history encourages historians to refuse to service one or another political project (national or imperial) and to do what a historian should do, namely, write about humans in time and space.

Editors of Ab Imperio:

I. Gerasimov
S. Glebov
A. Kaplunovski
M. Mogilner
A. Semyonov