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Acknowledgments In the spring of 2005 I was teaching a seminar on the Muscovite Empire at Hamilton College. On the last day of class, my students discussed the various problems and challenges Muscovy’s tsars faced in managing their empire. After we covered a broad span of issues, I asked them a final question—considering all the problems, why did the empire work? No one, including me, had an answer. This book is my answer to that question, a few years too late, but I suspect other parts of the empire will inspire other ideas. The project began more than a decade ago at Ohio State University. The advice and guidance of Eve Levin has been essential at every stage of the process. David Hoffman, Nick Breyfogle, and Geoffrey Parker pushed me to expand my ideas into a comparative framework that has continued to influence my ideas about empires. Beyond the faculty, my fellow students provided inspiration and support throughout the process. This included my original writing group with Aaron Retish, Matt Masur, and Jenn Walton; and my fellow Russian and East European graduate students—Jen Anderson, Lorraine Abraham, Kate Heilman, Sean Martin, Basia Nowak, Bill Risch, and Tricia Starks. My colleagues at various stages of my career since Ohio State have provided both insight and guidance. This includes Shoshanna Keller; the kruzhok of Steve Barnes, Steve Harris, Chuck Lipp, Claudia Verhoeven, and Rex Wade; and Mills Kelly, Kelly Schrum, and the Center for History and New Media. Since arriving here at Hawai‘i, I am grateful for the rich academic community in the history department. Without the “faculty-housing writing group,” I am not sure there would have been an “elusive” empire. This began with our original group of Njoroge Njoroge, Suzanna Reiss, and Becky Puljos in 2008; and expanded to include Ned Bertz, Shana Brown, Marcus Daniel, Matt Lauzon, Vina Lanzona, Kieko Matteson, Saundra Schwartz, and Wensheng Wang. In addition, I have benefited along the way from fruitful discussions at conferences and on research trips with my colleagues xi in Muscovite history, including Val Kivelson, Ann Kleimola, Don Ostrowski, Kira Stevens, the late Ben Uroff, Brian Boeck, Alexandra Haugh, and Erika Monahan. Along the way, research for this book was made possible by grants and fellowships from the Hilandar Research Library; the Department of History, the Graduate School, and the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Ohio State University; the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center of the University of Illinois; George Mason University; the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; and the Ella Wiswell Fund for the Promotion of Russian Studies at the University of Hawai‘i. No part of this project would have been possible without the support of the staffs at numerous libraries and archives. I have benefited greatly from the assistance of Predrag Matejic and the staff of the Hilandar Research Library at Ohio State University, and Pat Polansky, here at UH. In addition, I must thank the staffs at the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, the Russian State Library, and the State Public Historical Library, all in Moscow; the National Archives in Kew, Great Britain; the European Reading Room and the Law Library of the Library of Congress; and the Slavic and East European Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Material from the following articles has been included with permission from the publishers: “The Profit Motive: Regional Economic Development in Muscovy after the Conquest of Kazan’,” Journal of European Economic History 33, no. 3 (2004): 663–85 in chapter 3; and “Grant, Settle, Negotiate: Military Service in the Middle Volga Region,” in Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History, edited by Nicholas Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland (Routledge, 2007), 61–77 in chapter 4. Most of the images in the book are courtesy of Lynn Davis and the Preservation Department of Hamilton Library, here at the University of Hawai‘i. All of the maps were produced by Ev Wingert of the Department of Geography. Having such generous colleagues has made the process far more enjoyable. Finally, I would like to thank David Goldfrank and the anonymous reviewer for the University of Wisconsin Press, as well as my exceptional editors, Gwen Walker and Sheila McMahon, for their advice and guidance throughout the project. The final version of this monograph is much stronger for their recommendations. If problems remain, they are my fault alone. None of this would have...

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