Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe - Hardcover

Willard Sunderland

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801442095 ISBN 13: 9780801442094

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2004

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Willard Sunderland is Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati.

Review

"Covering nine centuries and using evidence as varied as chronicles, travellers―accounts, folklore, state documents, and settlers―testimony, Willard Sunderland painstakingly reconstructs the process by which the 'wild field,' whose nomadic inhabitants depredated the eastern Slavs, gradually became an archetypally Russian space. This book follows this centuries-long process in an absorbing narrative that combines the latest perspectives on problems of encounter, settlement, and empire with a fine appreciation for the contingencies and ironies that punctuated the 'domestication' of the steppe."

(David McDonald, University of Wisconsin–Madison)

"Taming the Wild Field is a brilliant study of the colonization process in Russia that unpacks the complex cluster of meanings and perceptions embedded in the standard image of a country 'colonizing itself.' Willard Sunderland makes an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the dynamic interplay of geography, resettlement, and national identity in imperial Russia."

(Mark Bassin, author of The Gumilev Mystique)

"Willard Sunderland's Taming the Wild Field is a much needed survey of the one thousand-year-long process by which the nomadic steppes north of the Black Sea were slowly turned into a land of Russian peasant farmers. Sunderland writes with elegance and wit. His research is thorough and wide-ranging, both within the central and provincial archives of Russia and Ukraine and in the broader comparative literature on imperialism and colonization."

(David Christian, author of A History of Russia, Central Asia, and Mongolia)

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0801442095
• ISBN 13: 9780801442094
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264