1/2010 Ascribing Stance: Making Friends and Enemies in Imperial Contexts

Россия без границ: исторические контексты и вызов глобализма

Роберт Круз

1/2010

FORUM AI
ИМПЕРСКИЙ ПОВОРОТ В РУСИСТИКЕ: ДЕСЯТЬ ЛЕТ СПУСТЯ

Материал публикуется на английском (на английской части сайта)

SUMMARY:

Рассуждения Роберта Круза отталкиваются от судьбы Емельяна Костерлицкого, который родился в Москве в 1853 году, дезертировал из российского флота, став пограничным офицером в Мексике и США, и сыграл важную роль в захвате знаменитого индейского вождя Херонимо. Круз утверждает, что за последние два десятилетия историки Российской империи оценили перспективы изучения российского участия в ранней глобализации. Реконструкция космополитичных биографий имперских подданных проливает свет на то, как Российская империя участвовала в глобальном обмене людьми, товарами и идеями. Наименее включены в этот процесс историки советского периода, которые, за редкими исключениями (сравнение СССР и фашистской Германии), рассматривают Советский Союз как феномен sui generis, как глубоко локальный случай, непереводимый на язык мировой историографии. Круз предлагает релевантные сравнительные контексты, такие как расовый террор на юге США или массовые депортации мексиканцев в 1930-е годы. Подобное сравнение может помочь критически рассмотреть дихотомию либеральных и нелиберальных режимов и производимого ими насилия. Не отрицая необходимости исследовать традиционные темы советского прошлого, Круз отмечает потенциал имперской истории к включению в диалог с другими историографиями в глобальном контексте. В то же время историки имперского периода, изучающие прошлое новых независимых государств, иногда переносят национализирующую перспективу на свой исторический материал. По мнению Круза, основная задача историков России нового времени – как имперского, так и советского периодов – состоит в пересмотре традиционных (в основном совпадающих с государственными) границ объекта исследования и в создании такой истории России, которая отражает ее роль в глобализирующемся мире.

1.Samuel Truett. Transnational Warrior: Emilio Kosterlitzky and the Transformation of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1873-1928 // Samuel Truett, Elliott Young (Eds.). Continental Crossroads. Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History. Durham and London, 2004. Pp. 241-270.↩

2.On the transnational lives of Russia’s Muslims, see Selçuk Esenbel. Japan’s Global Claim to Asia and the World of Islam // American Historical Review. 2004. Vol. 109. No. 4. Pp. 1140-1170; Eileen M. Kane. Pilgrims, Holy Places, and the Multi-Confessional Empire: Russian Policy toward the Ottoman Empire under Tsar Nicholas I, 1825-1855 / Ph.D. dissertation; Princeton University, 2005; and James Meyer. Immigration, Return, and the Politics of Citizenship: Russian Muslims in the Ottoman Empire: 1860-1914 // International Journal of Middle East Studies 2007. Vol. 38. No. 1. Pp. 15-32. For an excellent treatment of the nineteenth century as a globalizing age, see Jürgen Osterhammel. Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. München, 2009.↩

3.For valuable overviews, see Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Mara (Eds.). Comparison and History. Europe in Cross-National Perspective. New York, 2004; and Thomas Bender (Ed.). Rethinking American History in a Global Age. Berkeley, 2002.↩

4.See Stephen Kotkin. Armageddon Averted. The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000. Oxford, 2001; Marshall T. Poe. The Russian Moment in World History. Princeton and Oxford, 2003; Yuri Slezkine. The Jewish Century. Princeton and Oxford, 2004; Georgi M. Derluguian. Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus. A World-System Biography. Chicago, 2005; and Odd Arne Westad. The Global Cold War. Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge, 2006. See also, Jane Burbank and Fred Cooper. Empires in World History. Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, 2010, esp. chapter 9.↩

5.There are, of course, important exceptions. Laura Engelstein’s “The Keys to Happiness”, and Slezkine’s “The Jewish Century” are among the two most influential books to find a broad readership outside the Russian field. Engelstein was my primary Ph.D. thesis adviser at Princeton University.↩

6.Yuri Slezkine. The USSR as a Communal Apartment, Or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism // Slavic Review. 1994. Vol. 53. No. 2. Pp. 414-452; Adrienne Lynn Edgar. Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan. Princeton, 2004; Terry Martin. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939. Ithaca, 2001; Francine Hirsch. Empire of Nations : Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, 2005.↩

7.See the insightful analysis of this historiography in Ilya Gerasimov, Sergey Glebov, Jan Kusber, Marina Mogilner, and Alexander Semyonov. New Imperial History and the Challenges of Empire / Ilya Gerasimov, Jan Kusber and Alexander Semyonov (Eds.). Empire Speaks Out. Languages of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire. Leiden and Boston, 2009. Pp. 3-32.↩

8.See ibid. on this historiographic moment. See also Andreas Kappeler. Russland als Vielvölkerreich: Entstehung – Geschichte – Zerfall. Munich, 1992; Dominic Lieven. Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals. New Haven and London, 2000; Kimitaka Matsuzato (Ed.). Imperiology. From Empirical Knowledge to Discussing the Russian Empire. Sapporo, 2007; and, on geopolitics, the important work of John P. LeDonne. The Russian Empire and the World, 1700-1917. The Geopolitics of Expansion and Containment. New York and Oxford, 1997.↩

9.See the literature cited in Gerasimov et al. New Imperial History, as well as Willard Sunderland. Taming the Wild Field. Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe. Ithaca, 2004; and Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland (Eds.). Peopling the Russian Periphery. Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History. London and New York, 2007. One should also note John Randolph’s imaginative work, which, though not narrowly related to the problem of empire, opened up new ways of approaching classic questions about Russian intellectual history. See The House in the Garden. The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism. Ithaca, 2007.↩

10.Richard S. Wortman. Scenarios of Power. Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy. 2 Vols. Princeton, 1995 and 2000.↩

11.Peter Holquist. “Information Is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work”: Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Perspective // Journal of Modern History. 1997. Vol. 69. No. 3. Pp. 415-450; Michael Kemper. Sufis und Gelehrte: in Tatarien und Baschkirien, 1789-1889: Der islamische Diskurs unter russischer Herrschaft. Berlin, 1998; and Idem Herrschaft, Recht und Islam in Daghestan: Von den Khanaten und Gemeindebünden zum ğihad-Staat. Wiesbaden, 2005. Among Stéphane Dudoignon’s many publications, see especially, Qu’est-ce que la ‘qadîmiya’? Éléments pour une sociologie du traditionalisme musulman, en Islam de Russie et en Transoxiane (au tournant des XIXe et XXe siècles) // Dudoignon, Dämir Is’haqov, and Räfyq Möhämmätshin (Eds.). L’Islam de Russie: Conscience communautaire et autonomie politique chez les Tatars de la Volga et de l’Oural depuis le XVIIIe siècle. Paris, 1997. Pp. 207-225; and La question scolaire à Boukhara et au Turkestan russe, du ‘premier renouveau’ à la soviétisation (fin du XVIIIe siècle–1937) // Cahiers du Monde russe. 1996. Vol. 37. Nos. 1-2. Pp. 133-210.↩

12.Despite this exposure (sometimes superficial, in practice) to other literatures, a few historians of Russia remained resistant to applying these methods, insofar as they understood them, to tsarist archives; and a vaguely articulated critique of empire often served as a defense of older ideological positions about Russia, likening, for example, work that presented alternative views of the empire based on archival sources to Stalin- and Putin-era propaganda. They continued to argue that we recognize the a priori opposition of groups to the empire – and prioritize their suffering at its hands in our analysis – rather than investigate how communities understood their relationship to the imperial state on their own terms, even when this meant that subjects participated in constructing, rather than simply resisting, the empire. For an example of this Manichean view, see, for example, Michael Khodarkovsky. Review of For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia. American Historical Review. 2007. Vol. 112. No. 5. Pp. 1491-1493. For alternatives, see Rogers Brubaker. Ethnicity without Groups. Cambridge, MA, 2004; and, among others, Brian P. Owensby. Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, 2008.↩

13.Here, too, there are special cases. Stephen Kotkin’s work has demonstrated the value of thinking about the USSR and post-Soviet politics in a global frame. See, especially Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture // Kritika. 2001. Vol. 2. No. 1. Pp. 111-164; Mongol Commonwealth? Exchange and Governance across the Post-Mongol Space // Kritika. 2007. Vol. 8. No. 3. Pp. 487-531; and Armageddon Averted. He also advised me at Princeton.↩

14.Insightful departures from this pattern may be found in Adeeb Khalid. Backwardness and the Quest for Civilization: Early Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective; Adrienne Edgar. Bolshevism, Patriarchy, and the Nation: The Soviet “Emancipation” of Muslim Women in Pan-Islamic Perspective; and Peter A. Blitstein. Cultural Diversity and the Interwar Conjuncture: Soviet Nationality Policy in Its Comparative Context; in the forum on the Multiethnic Soviet Union in Comparative Perspective // Slavic Review. 2006. Vol. 65. No. 2. Pp. 231-293.↩

15.See the thoughtful critique in Mark Mazower. Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century // American Historical Review. 2002. Vol. 107. No. 4. Pp. 1158-1178.↩

16.See especially, Amy Louise Wood. Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940. Chapel Hill, 2009. I am grateful to Alysson Hobbs for recommending this book.↩

17.Bruce Cumings. Dominion from Sea to Sea. Pacific Ascendancy and American Power. New Haven and London, 2009. P. 210. For an earlier period, see Ned Blackhawk. Violence over the Land. Indians and Empires in the Early American West. Cambridge, MA and London, 2006.↩

18.See Cumings, “Dominion from Sea to Sea” for a valuable survey. My own university was founded by an entrepreneur whose railroad forever transformed the American West by displacing Indian populations. Today it houses institutions where Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld are affiliates.↩

19.Bureau of Justice Statistics for 2008, http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/corr2.cfm.↩

20.The dilemma resembles that identified by Charles Bright and Michael Geyer. Where in the World Is America? The History of the United States in the Global Age // Bender (Ed.). Rethinking American History in a Global Age. Pp. 63-99.↩

21.Ann Laura Stoler. Imperial Formations and the Opacities of Rule / Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, and Ken W. Moore (Eds.). Lessons of Empire. Imperial Histories and American Power. New York and London, 2006. Pp. 48-60.↩

22.See, for example, the excellent books by Richard Tapper. Frontier Nomads of Iran: A Political and Social History of the Shahsevan. Cambridge, 1997; and Scott C. Levi. The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and its Trade, 1550-1900. Leiden, 2002. In this connection, classic studies such as Firuz Kazemzadeh. Russia and Britain in Persia, 1864-1914. A Study in Imperialism. New Haven, 1968, remain useful. See, also Michael Reynolds’s forthcoming book Shattering Empires. The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918.↩

23.Yet comparison for its own sake is no panacea, as Deborah Cohen has shown. See her Comparative History: Buyer Beware // Cohen and O’Mara (Eds.). Comparison and History. Pp. 57-69. Comparisons that are structured in ways that prejudge the evidence distort more than they reveal, as in Alexander Morrison. Russian Rule in Samarkand. A Comparison with British India. Oxford, 2008.↩

24.The Caucasus is rich terrain for the study of such exchanges. In addition to Charles King’s book (The Ghost of Freedom. A History of the Caucasus. Oxford and New York, 2008), which has opened up new perspectives on thinking about space in terms of regional rather than national frameworks, on transimperial diaspora groups, see Houri Berberian. “The Love for Freedom Has No Fatherland”. Armenians and the Iranian Constituional Revolution of 1905-1911. Boulder, 2001; and Nizam ‘Ali Dihnavi. Iraniyan-i muhajir dar Qafqaz. Tehran, 1383 (2004). Siberia and the American West form another type of comparison: see Andrei A. Znamenski. The Beauty of the Primitive. Shamanism and the Western Imagination. Oxford and New York, 2007.↩

25.Attention to circulation and mobility is crucial. See Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (Eds.). Society and Circulation. Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia. Delhi, 2003; and, from a somewhat different perspective, Sushil Chaudhury and Michael Morineau (Eds.). Merchants, Companies and Trade. Europe and Asia in the Early Modern Era. Cambridge, 1999. For Russia, see the project organized by John Randolph and Eugene M. Avrutin. Russia’s Role in Human Mobility: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/jwr/www/mobility2009/index.html.↩

Ab Imperio

Ab Imperio

Россия без границ: исторические контексты и вызов глобализма

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