Urbansky, Soeren (Author)
Princeton University Press
Physical Details: 377
Language: English
The Sino-Russian border, once the world’s longest land border, has received scant attention in histories about the margins of empires. Beyond the Steppe Frontier rectifies this by exploring the demarcation’s remarkable transformation—from a vaguely marked frontier in the seventeenth century to its twentieth-century incarnation as a tightly patrolled barrier girded by watchtowers, barbed wire, and border guards. Through the perspectives of locals, including railroad employees, herdsmen, and smugglers from both sides, Sören Urbansky explores the daily life of communities and their entanglements with transnational and global flows of people, commodities, and ideas. Urbansky challenges top-down interpretations by stressing the significance of the local population in supporting, and undermining, border making.Because Russian, Chinese, and native worlds are intricately interwoven, national separations largely remained invisible at the border between the two largest Eurasian empires. This overlapping and mingling came to an end only when the border gained geopolitical significance during the twentieth century. Relying on a wealth of sources culled from little-known archives from across Eurasia, Urbansky demonstrates how states succeeded in suppressing traditional borderland cultures by cutting kin, cultural, economic, and religious connections across the state perimeter, through laws, physical force, deportation, reeducation, forced assimilation, and propaganda.Beyond the Steppe Frontier sheds critical new light on a pivotal geographical periphery and expands our understanding of how borders are determined.
...MoreReview Martin T. Fromm (2022) Review of "Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border". Agricultural History (pp. 310-312).
Similar Citations
Book
Kyle E. Harvey;
(2024)
In Place of Mobility: Railroads, Rebels, and Migrants in an Argentine-Chilean Borderland
Article
Mackenzie Cooley;
(2021)
The Giant Remains: Mesoamerican Natural History, Medicine, and Cycles of Empire
Book
Richard McMahon;
(2019)
National Races: Transnational Power Struggles in the Sciences and Politics of Human Diversity, 1840-1945
Book
Ana Grgić;
(2021)
Early Cinema, Modernity and Visual Culture: The Imaginary of the Balkans
Book
Stephen V. Bittner;
(2021)
Whites and Reds: A History of Wine in the Lands of Tsar and Commissar
Article
Jan Zofka;
(2018)
China as a role model? The ‘Economic Leap’ campaign in Bulgaria (1958-1960)
Article
Jan Zofka;
Vámos, Péter;
Sören Urbansky;
(2018)
Beyond the Kremlin’s reach? Eastern Europe and China in the Cold War Era
Article
Dimitri Bayuk;
Françoise Le Guet Tully;
(2022)
La visite de Pierre le Grand à Paris en 1717, ou la science au service du pouvoir
Book
David A. Bello;
(2016)
Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain: Environment, Identity, and Empire in Qing China's Borderlands
Book
Joseph A. Seeley;
Albert L. Park;
(2024)
Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan's Empire in Korea and Manchuria
Book
Gregory Afinogenov;
(2020)
Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power
Article
Yuda Yang;
Nanny Kim;
(2019)
Texts and Technologies in Chinese Silver Metallurgy, Twelfth to Nineteenth Centuries
Book
Janet Martin-Nielsen;
(2023)
A Few Acres of Ice: Environment, Sovereignty, and "Grandeur" in the French Antarctic
Book
Guadalupe Pinzón Ríos;
Raquel E. Güereca Durán;
(2023)
Construcción de un espacio marítimo, El Pacífico y su evolución a partir de sus redes transoceánicas e interamericanas, 1521-1821
Book
Di Lu;
(2023)
The Global Circulation of Chinese Materia Medica, 1700–1949: A Microhistory of the Caterpillar Fungus
Article
Lukas Rieppel;
Eugenia Lean;
William Deringer;
(2018)
Introduction: The Entangled Histories of Science and Capitalism
Book
Deborah R. Coen;
(2018)
Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale
Book
Malcolm F. Purinton;
(2023)
Globalization in a Glass: The Rise of Pilsner Beer through Technology, Taste and Empire
Article
Kiri Paramore;
(2017)
Chinese Medicine, Western Medicine and Confucianism: Japanese State Medicine and the Knowledge Cosmopolis of Early Modern East Asia
Book
Zhao, Gang;
(2013)
The Qing Opening to the Ocean: Chinese Maritime Policies, 1684--1757
Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences
East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine
Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Journal of Early Modern History
Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Be the first to comment!