In Heretics and Colonizers, Nicholas B. Breyfogle explores the dynamic intersection of Russian borderland colonization and popular religious culture. He reconstructs the story of the religious sectarians (Dukhobors, Molokans, and Subbotniks) who settled, either voluntarily or by force, in the newly conquered lands of Transcaucasia in the nineteenth century. By ordering this migration in 1830, Nicholas I attempted at once to cleanse Russian Orthodoxy of heresies and to populate the newly annexed lands with ethnic Slavs who would shoulder the burden of imperial construction. Breyfogle focuses throughout on the lives of the peasant settlers, their interactions with the peoples and environment of the South Caucasus, and their evolving relations with Russian state power. He draws on a wide variety of archival sources, including a large collection of previously unexamined letters, memoirs, and other documents produced by the sectarians that allow him unprecedented insight into the experiences of colonization and religious life. Although the settlers suffered greatly in their early years in hostile surroundings, they in time proved to be not only model Russian colonists but also among the most prosperous of the Empire's peasants. Banished to the empire's periphery, the sectarians ironically came to play indispensable roles in the tsarist imperial agenda. The book culminates with the dramatic events of the Dukhobor pacifist rebellion, a movement that shocked the tsarist government and received international attention. In the early twentieth century, as the Russian state sought to replace the sectarians with Orthodox settlers, thousands of Molokans and Dukhobors immigrated to North America, where their descendants remain to this day.

Through a series of essays, Eurasian Environments prompts us to rethink our understanding of tsarist and Soviet history by placing the human experience within the larger environmental context of flora, fauna, geology, and climate. This book is a broad look at the environmental history of Eurasia, specifically examining steppe environments, hydraulic engineering, soil and forestry, water pollution, fishing, and the interaction of the environment and disease vectors. Throughout, the authors place the history of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in a trans-chronological, comparative context, seamlessly linking the local and the global. The chapters are rooted in the ecological and geological specificities of place and community while unveiling the broad patterns of human-nature relationships across the planet. Eurasian Environments brings together an international group scholars working on issues of tsarist/Soviet environmental history in an effort to showcase the wave of fascinating and field-changing research currently being written.

The first comparative history of European settlers’ trading, pirating, and colonizing activities in the Caribbean. Brimming with new perspectives and cutting-edge research, the essays collected in The TorridZone explore colonization and cultural interaction in the Caribbean from the late 1600s to the early 1800s—a period known as the “long” seventeenth century—a time when these encounters varied widely and the diverse actors were not yet fully enmeshed in the culture and power dynamics of master-slave relations. The events of this era would profoundly affect the social and political development both of the colonies that Europeans established in the Caribbean and the wider world. This book is the first to offer comparative treatments of Danish, Dutch, English, and French trading, pirating, and colonizing activities in the Caribbean and analysis of the corresponding interactions among people of African, European, and Native origin. The contributions range from an investigation of the indigenous colonization of the Lesser Antilles by the Kalinago to a look at how the Anglo-Dutch wars in Europe affected relations between the English inhabitants and the Dutch government of Suriname. Among the other essays are incisive examinations of the often-neglected history of Danish settlement in the Virgin Islands, attempts to establish French colonial authority over the pirates of Saint-Domingue, and how the Caribbean blueprint for colonization manifested itself in South Carolina through enslavement of Amerindians and the establishment of plantation agriculture. The extensive geographic, demographic, and thematic concerns of this collection shed a clear light on the socioeconomic character of the “Torrid Zone” before and during the emergence and extension of the sugar-and-slaves complex that came to define this region. The book is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the social, political, and economic sensibilities to which the operators around the Caribbean subscribed as well as to our understanding of what they did, offering in turn a better comprehension of the consequences of their behavior. “Covering a variety of undertakings, especially English but also Dutch, Danish, French and indigenous, this collection makes a welcome contribution to our understanding of a pivotal period in the history of the West Indies.” —Carla Gardina Pestana, University of California, Los Angeles “This illuminating collection of essays brings the Caribbean squarely into the frame of analysis strongly making the case that the experiences and developments of the Caribbean colonies remained crucial to the history of colonial America. The contributions cover the centrality of enslaved people’s labor and the actions of Indigenous and peoples of African descent who shaped the history of the region through their resistance, accommodation, and engagement.” —Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Bryn Mawr College

Few aspects of the history of modern empires are of such significance as their economics and politics. These factors are inextricably linked in many analyses, have generated extensive historiographical debate and are currently the subject of some of the freshest and liveliest scholarship. The articles and chapters which are brought together in this volume relate not only to the European colonial empires, but also to the Napoleonic, Russian and Japanese empires. The collection is strongly comparative in approach with the articles arranged into thematic sections on: the place of politics and economics in the rise and fall of modern empires; the causal relationship between modern empires and colonial, global, and metropolitan economic transformations; and the ’technologies of rule’ which provided the frameworks through which colonial economies were managed, and rights defined. The collection reflects new approaches, as well as the continuing importance of issues addressed in an older historiography, and the thematic arrangement produces useful juxtapositions of older and newer literatures. The substantial introduction explores the themes and identifies key historiographical trends in relation to each.

Historians of Russia were relative latecomers to the field of environmental history. Yet, in the past decade, the exploration of Russian environmental history has burgeoned. Thinking Russia’s History Environmentally showcases collaboration amongst an international set of scholars who focus on the contribution that the study of Russian environments makes to the global environmental field. Through discerning analysis of natural resources, the environment as a factor in historical processes such as industrialization, and more recent human-animal interactions, this volume challenges stereotypes of Russian history and in so doing, highlights the unexpected importance of Russian environments across a time frame well beyond the ecological catastrophes of the Soviet period.

Stretching from the tributaries of the Danube to the Urals and from the Russian forests to the Black and Caspian seas, the vast European steppe has for centuries played very different roles in the Russian imagination. To the Grand Princes of Kiev and Muscovy, it was the "wild field," a region inhabited by nomadic Turko-Mongolic peoples who repeatedly threatened the fragile Slavic settlements to the north. For the emperors and empresses of imperial Russia, it was a land of boundless economic promise and a marker of national cultural prowess. By the mid-nineteenth century the steppe, once so alien and threatening, had emerged as an essential, if complicated, symbol of Russia itself.Traversing a thousand years of the region's history, Willard Sunderland recounts the complex process of Russian expansion and colonization, stressing the way outsider settlement at once created the steppe as a region of empire and was itself constantly changing. The story is populated by a colorful array of administrators, Cossack adventurers, Orthodox missionaries, geographers, foreign entrepreneurs, peasants, and (by the late nineteenth century) tourists and conservationists. Sunderland's approach to history is comparative throughout, and his comparisons of the steppe with the North American case are especially telling.Taming the Wild Field eloquently expresses concern with the fate of the world's great grasslands, and the book ends at the beginning of the twentieth century with the initiation of a conservation movement in Russia by those appalled at the high environmental cost of expansion.

The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism examines the global history of settler colonialism as a distinct mode of domination from ancient times to the present day. It explores the ways in which new polities were established in freshly discovered ‘New Worlds’, and covers the history of many countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, South Africa, Liberia, Algeria, Canada, and the USA. Chronologically as well as geographically wide-reaching, this volume focuses on an extensive array of topics and regions ranging from settler colonialism in the Neo-Assyrian and Roman empires, to relationships between indigenes and newcomers in New Spain and the early Mexican republic, to the settler-dominated polities of Africa during the twentieth century. Its twenty-nine inter-disciplinary chapters focus on single colonies or on regional developments that straddle the borders of present-day states, on successful settlements that would go on to become powerful settler nations, on failed settler colonies, and on the historiographies of these experiences. Taking a fundamentally international approach to the topic, this book analyses the varied experiences of settler colonialism in countries around the world. With a synthesizing yet original introduction, this is a landmark contribution to the emerging field of settler colonial studies and will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in the global history of imperialism and colonialism.

The present study fills a gap in the study of the evangelical movement in Russia by presenting a comprehensive picture of their compassionate ministry during their longest stretch of relative freedom before the 1980s. Better known for their energetic preaching and literature work, Russian evangelicals also gave attention to compassionate ministry, although it was never extensive because of their marginal status. They established assistance funds, organized charitable institutions, practiced urban rescue ministry, participated in the Russian temperance movement, and established economic communities. Each area is distinct, yet all were supported by the same set of theological convictions. The Russian evangelicals were convinced that their witness should consist of good works as well as words, and that the gospel had the power to undo human suffering. While intentionally cultivating an attitude of concern for the needs of others, they taught that compassion was the concern of all members of the community, regardless of economic status or age. In their publications evangelicals devoted a good deal of teaching to the proper Christian attitude toward money and giving. They drew on Western models, but also their indigenous sectarian roots.

Though usually forgotten in general surveys of European colonization, the Russians were among the greatest colonizers of the Old World, eventually settling across most of the immense expanse of Northern Europe and Asia, from the Baltic and the Pacific, and from the Arctic Ocean to Central Asia. This book makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the Eurasian past by examining the policies, practices, cultural representations, and daily-life experiences of Slavic settlement in non-Russian regions of Eurasia from the time of Ivan the Terrible to the nuclear era. The movement of tens of millions of Slavic settlers was a central component of Russian empire-building, and of the everyday life of numerous social and ethnic groups and remains a crucial regional security issue today, yet it remains relatively understudied. Peopling the Russian Periphery redresses this omission through a detailed exploration of the varied meanings and dynamics of Slavic settlement from the sixteenth century to the 1960s. Providing an account of the different approaches of settlement and expansion that were adopted in different periods of history, it includes detailed case studies of particular episodes of migration. Written by upcoming and established experts in Russian history, with exceptional geographical and chronological breadth, this book provides a thorough examination of the history of Slavic settlement and migration from the Muscovite to the Soviet era. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of Russian history, comparative history of colonization, migration, interethnic contact, environmental history and European Imperialism.