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174 Комментарии / Comments Martin W. LEWIS The spatial categories through which history is investigated have emerged as a focal point of scholarly inquiry in recent years.Although national histories still predominate, alternative regional formations are being increasingly embraced by innovative scholars. At the same time, the so-called crisis of area studies has encouraged a rethinking of the supra-national agglomerations (South Asia, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and so on) that have organized international scholarly inquiry since the end of the Second World War. Nowhere are such trends more pronounced than in the former Soviet Union and its one-time sphere of influence. As the USSR and its system of associated states vanished, scholars had no option but to reconceptualize this part of the world. As Mark von Hagen deftly demonstrates, the initial results of such rethinking have been highly promising.Anumber of ground-breaking works, in a variety of historical subdisciplines and focusing on a large array of places, have emerged in “post-Soviet studies” over the past decade and a half. By eschewing the paradigms (or “metanarratives”) that formerly gave intellectual coherence to accounts of the Russian/Soviet past, such studies stake out new conceptual grounds in historical as well as geographical analysis. This new turn, argues von Hagen, is best represented by the term “Eurasia.” While one can only applaud the opening of a Eurasian conceptual space as well as the post-paradigmatic turn, I am not convinced that “Eurasia” is the most appropriate label. As a blankly geographical category, “Eurasia” remains open to metanarrative inscription, as von Hagen himself clearly shows. I would suggest that the conceptual glue connecting studies examined by von Hagen is rather that of geography itself. (By “geography” I refer to the entire spatial dimension of human history, rather than narrow concerns with the physical landscape.) Von Hagen’s conceptualization of Eurasian history is profoundly geographical, offering a fresh and powerful understanding of the region’s development. Similar arguments, moreover, can be made in regard to Haupt’s examination of European comparative studies. In the remainder of this I response, I will outline some of the signal elements of the richly geographical approach of these authors, contrasting 175 Ab Imperio, 1/2004 them with the anemic geography often found in the more conservative forms of history. In a trivial sense, all history is necessarily geographical, inasmuch as it focuses on particular places. But most conventional history has relied on unexamined spatial categories, typically portraying political territories as uniform stages on which national dramas are enacted. In the deeply geographical history entailed by von Hagen’s approach, on the other hand, investigations of both differences and connections among places inform the larger stories, while key geographical concepts propel the analysis. The first requirement of a geographically rich history is that it question how basic spatial categories are defined and bounded, exposing in the process the ideological baggage that toponyms may carry. In naïvely geographical accounts, such metageographically constructed categories as “Asia” and “the Orient” – like Europe and the Occident – are treated as timeless entities , unproblematic reflections of the physical landscape that mold the flow human history. In geographically sophisticated accounts, to the contrary, all such constructs are examined critically, historically, and contextually. Such an approach, evident in Haupt’s discussion of Europe and in von Hagen’s investigation of a variety of spatial labels, helps dissolve the ideological concretions that have long encumbered all stand-by spatial containers of historical development. Comparative analysis demands a geographical framework, as it is specific places that must be compared. In most attempts, the typical unit of contrast remains at the level of the national state. Such a tactic is indeed often appropriate – but not always. Scale is often problematic; in comparing, for example, France to Russia, one must jump an order of magnitude in spatial extent. (World historians are thus careful not to juxtapose England to China in studies of proto-industrialization, for example, but rather to compare England to such a place as the greater Yangtze Delta.1 ) For large areas, moreover, the common but never warranted assumption of spatial uniformity often thwarts analysis. But by carefully weighing scale when considering units of analysis...