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1 Imperial Space: Territorial Thought and Practice in the Eighteenth Century Willard Sunderland In 1647, Tsar Aleksei learned from his of¤cials in northeastern Siberia that a large island called New Land (Novaia Zemlia) had been discovered in the Arctic Ocean near the mouth of the Kolyma river. The tsar promptly ordered his servitors to determine whether the island contained any walrushunting peoples and, if it did, they were to be brought “under the tsar’s high hand” and forced to submit hostages and tribute. Beyond that, Aleksei showed no interest in the new territory.1 He said nothing about laying claim to the island à la Columbus (“by proclamation and with the royal standard unfurled”2 ) nor did he issue any instructions to rename, survey, map, or describe it. By 1724, however, the world had changed—or at least the way in which the world was perceived. In that year, Aleksei’s son, Peter the Great, ordered Vitus Bering to the Arctic with the express purpose of charting a sea passage to North America. A second “Great Northern Expedition ” was then dispatched in the mid-1730s, followed in turn by a series of state-sponsored voyages over the rest of the century, and in all of these voyages matters of territory were a central, if not the central, concern. New walrus-hunters, wherever possible, still needed to be found and turned into subjects, but now the lands of the walrus-hunters were themselves to be possessed, mapped, and described.3 In fact, by the early 1700s even lands without people or walruses seemed important enough to require the fullest sort of claiming and accounting. The difference between Tsar Aleksei’s concerns and those of the eighteenth -century rulers who followed him was a difference in degrees of territoriality . Muscovite tsars ruled over territory and cared about it enough to try to keep track of it, but they did not view acquiring territorial knowledge as an intrinsically valuable pursuit, nor did they have the means or the ambition to manage territory in anything close to total fashion. By contrast, Peter and his successors saw the world differently and their inclination and expectation for knowing and shaping territory were much more pronounced. This heightened territorial consciousness was re®ected in a range of ideas and practices, which in turn both in®uenced and were in®uenced by far-reaching changes in Russian techniques of governance and in the national and imperial imaginings of the Russian elite. In the course of Russia’s Westernizing century, geography became a scienti¤c discipline ; external borders became increasingly de¤ned; internal lands and resources became increasingly surveyed, catalogued, and managed; and members of the Russian establishment became increasingly likely to think of their country in territorial terms. There were continuities with older ways, but there was also great innovation, foreign borrowing, and native adaptation, and the net result was the creation of a new territorial order that underscored as much as anything else the palpable differences between “medieval Muscovy” and “modern Russia.”4 Of course, new orders always come with ironies and complexities, and the making of the new territoriality of eighteenth-century Russia was no exception. The present chapter charts the unfolding of this process, emphasizing the ways in which new ideas and practices of territory in®uenced both the nature and the aspirations of state power and the national/imperial belonging of state elites, from late Muscovy to the age of Catherine the Great. Late Muscovy and the Petrine Transition By comparison with the Petrine state that replaced it,the Muscovite state was markedly less territorial, though this was not for lack of territory. In the late 1600s, Muscovy was by far the largest contiguous state in the world, with lands extending from the “Frozen Sea” in the north to the edges of “the wild ¤eld”in the south and from Poland in the west to China in the east.5 But while the Muscovites claimed to rule an immense area, they lacked coherent territorial organization or even a clear idea of the shape and resources of their realm. Moscow’s domain was organized into an uncoordinated patchwork of over 200 districts (uezds) that coexisted alongside a smaller number of larger units, such as regional groupings of towns (Novgorodskie goroda, Ponizovye goroda, etc.), frontier military districts (razriady), and other regional entities (Zamoskovnyi krai, Pomor’e, Belaia Rossiia, etc.), some of which had their own chancelleries (viz. the Siberian prikaz, the Kazan prikaz, etc.) but...

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