Race, Nation, Democracy, and State in and after the Russian Empire
Session Abstract
Empires are often approached from an analytically rigid standpoint of sharp core-periphery distinctions. In the proposed panel we would like to show analytical benefits of abandoning these in favour of looking at several “imperial situations” and examining imperial networks that played out in the late Russian Empire. This theoretical focus allows us to bring more analytical clarity to situations of imperial heterogeneity. We address such crucial aspects of empires as race, nation, democracy, and state and define them in terms of “imperial situations.” In analysing those, we seek to answer what made these questions particularly defining of empires in general and the Russian Empire in particular; we show how interlocking notions of race, nation, and state defined imperial situations on the Russian imperial periphery, and what were the consequences of this for the Russian Empire as a whole. As such, the panel will be of interest to scholars of empire, intellectual history, and history of notions of race. The panel will provide them both with theoretical models that can be applied to other imperial and post-imperial contexts, as well as ample material on the Russian Empire as a space of “imperial situations.”