Threads of Empire: Loyalty and Tsarist Authority in Bashkiria, 1552–1917 - Hardcover

Steinwedel, Charles R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253019265 ISBN 13: 9780253019264

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2016

Synopsis

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-16th 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 20th 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Charles Steinwedel is Associate Professor of History at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago.

Review:

Charles Steinwedel’s Threads of Empire brings the qualities of a local history and world history together and is highly valuable reading for a wide range of scholars.

(Ab Imperio)

[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)

Highly recommended. (Choice)

Threads of Empire is essential reading for students of both Russian imperial history and the history of empires more broadly.

(Kritika)

Based on outstanding research, Charles Steinwedel’s impressive new book offers a study of the
history of Bashkiria in the context of the Russian Empire. (The Russian Review)

Charles Steinwedel has written a well-researched study which makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the way the Russian empire functioned. (European History Quarterly)

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)

Charles Steinwedel has produced an engaging and thoroughly documented history of both the Bashkirs and the multiethnic territory of Bashkiria. (Canadian-American Slavic Studies)

About this edition

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0253019265
• ISBN 13: 9780253019264
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384