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The Imperiia Project: a spatial history of the Russian Empire

What is spatial history?

The concepts of "space" and "place" have always been essential to the work of writing history. In fact, historians spent much of the past century wrangling with the concepts (and very messy realities) of borders and borderlands, nations and empires, territories and landscapes. But histories about even the most compelling spaces are not necessarily spatial histories.

So, what is spatial history?

Spatial history - a term that describes a way of thinking and working as a historian - has three hallmarks. First, practitioners of spatial history apply the methods of spatial analysis to the study of the human past. They reconstruct spatial relations. They study concentrations and scarcity, distance and proximity, access and isolation. They do these things not in order to make pretty pictures, but in order to generate new knowledge and new insights. (Click here to read Richard White's straightforward and beautifully brief explanatory document.) Second, spatial histories contextualize and interpret, but they are different from most other works of history in that they use visualization as the primary language of narration and argumentation. Third, spatial history is often the result of collaboration among scholars, and often across disciplines.

Doing spatial history therefore means asking a different set of questions. It encourages us to define units of analysis beyond the nation state and city, and to do so at a range of scales. It allows us to assemble information in new configurations. To put qualitative and quantitative information in dialogue. To expose patterns and structures too deeply embedded in our sources to be retrieved by other historical methods. Spatial history requires us to read deeply and critically, with a thirst for context, an eye for data, and the humanist's devotion to the search for meaning.

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MapStories Maps do not tell stories in the same way books do.

The stories maps tell seem - to the untrained eye - to lack beginnings and endings. Characters. Plot lines. Some people even say that maps are just descriptions of places - that they do not tell stories at all.

But the truth is that within the neatline of any good map there is intrigue and drama and nuance and, sometimes, even a grandiose, sweeping view of the world. You just have to know where to look.

Learn more about spatial history and "mapstories."

Or just dig in!
Why Imperiia Matters
Why do we need a spatial history of the Russian Empire?
Historians have been studying Russia for centuries; mapmakers have been mapping it even longer.

But despite the archives and library collections, there remain significant gaps in our understanding of how the empire functioned. How, for example, did people, goods, ideas, and animate and inanimate objects of all kinds move from one location to another? How did patterns of mobility differ across regions and up and down the rungs of the social hierarchy? What was the scale of daily life? To what extent did administrative boundaries create meaningful spaces? Did proximity to roads link villages to sprawling commercial networks? Is there a correlation between the number of ice-free days and the value of goods carried along a given river? Is there a correlation between distance from the provincial town and the frequency of episodes of social or political unrest in a given district?

The list goes on and on, but it all comes down to this: we need a spatial history of the Russian Empire because we need to understand the empire from the perspective of those who inhabited it. We need to know whether they prized accessibility over isolation, proximity over distance. We need to understand when spatial relations were incapacitating and when they facilitated social, political, and cultural change.

Moreover, we need to recover the geospatial context of the past because it would be irresponsible not to do so. There are tools and methods at our disposal that allow us to recover that context. Wielding those tools and methods allows us – Russian historians – to participate in crucial conversations about global and international history, comparative and entangled history, big data, and the future of history itself in the digital age.