The Jordan Center's Colloquium Series serves to introduce the most recent work of scholars within the Slavic field. Participants come from universities across the country and abroad and work in disciplines ranging from history, political science and anthropology to literature and film. In the first session of the Spring 2014 Colloquium Series, Charles Steinwedel will join us from NEIU to speak on "Bashkiria’s Imperial World: Tsarist Rule on European Russia’s Eastern Borderland, 1552-1917".
Charles Steinwedel is Associate Professor of History at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. His articles have appeared in The Russian Review, Ab Imperio, and in volumes published by Macmillan, Princeton University Press, Indiana University Press, and Moscow’s Vostochnaia Literatura. This talk highlights themes his book “Threads of Empire:“ Making the Russian Empire in Bashkiria, 1552-1917,” which is under contract with Indiana University Press.
Paper Abstract:
Turkic language speaking, Muslim, and semi-nomadic Bashkir elites began to swear allegiance to Ivan IV in the 1550s. This began the Bashkirs’ engagement with the Russian Empire that lasted over 250 years. Examining the Russian Empire in one place over the long durée, this paper explores the roles of violence, estate status, religion, and nationality in the integration of the Bashkirs, and the region to which they give their name, into the empire’s European core. I place Bashkiria in the context of changing Russian conceptions of empire from the time of its rivalry with Chinese and Ottoman Empires on the steppe, to the creation of European maritime empires, to the formation of European national states. The case of Bashkiria illuminates changing strategies of imperial rule, the persistence of differentiated governance, as well as how national identities formed within the institutions of empire.
