Threads of Empire

Book excerpt: A history and analysis of Bashkiria and its transformation into a Russian imperial region of the course of three and a half centuries. Threads of Empire examines how Russia’s imperial officials and intellectual elites made and maintained their authority among the changing intellectual and political currents in Eurasia from the mid-sixteenth century to the revolution of 1917. The book focuses on a region 750 miles east of Moscow known as Bashkiria. The region was split nearly evenly between Russian and Turkic language speakers, both nomads and farmers. Ufa province at Bashkiria’s core had the largest Muslim population of any province in the empire. The empire’s leading Muslim official, the mufti, was based there, but the region also hosted a Russian Orthodox bishop. Bashkirs and peasants had different legal status, and powerful Russian Orthodox and Muslim nobles dominated the peasant estate. By the twentieth century, industrial mining and rail commerce gave rise to a class structure of workers and managers. Bashkiria thus presents a fascinating case study of empire in all its complexities and of how the tsarist empire’s ideology and categories of rule changed over time. “An original and well-researched study of the incorporation of the Bashkir lands and their transformation into a Russian imperial region over the course of three and a half centuries. Steinwedel argues that the history of Bashkiria exposes a number of the empire’s achievements as a multiethnic society. . . . He draws out both important shifts and abiding continuities in the history of the region [and] by employing a multi-dimensional approach, covering a range of intersecting topics, provides a fuller appreciation for the region. He also does a nice job pointing out the useful commonalities and differences between the Bashkir lands and other parts of the empire, making a compelling case for Bashkiria’s importance for understanding larger processes.” —Willard Sunderland, author of Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe “With its solid grounding in Russian archival and printed sources and its sophisticated comparative approach, Steinwedel’s work will serve as a point of departure for historians of the Russian Empire, and will become a book of reference for any future study of empires in global history.” —American Historical Review “[Steinwedel’s] book is both a skilful exercise in local and regional history, and an important contribution to the history of Imperial Russia as a whole.” —Slavonic and East European Review