Project description
Understanding population growth and environmental change in northern Eurasia
The territory of the former Russian empire in northern Eurasia experienced rapid population growth and mobility from the 1860s to the 1920s. Funded by the European Research Council, the Land Limits project will explore the complex relationship between this population growth and various types of environmental change during that period. Through extensive historical research across five present-day nations, the project seeks to elucidate the far-reaching impacts of increased populations on land use and resource exploitation across climate zones from sub-arctic to sub-tropical. In doing so, it will highlight the connections between ecological change, economic development, and the emergence of conflict, aiming to redefine our understanding of the late imperial economy and of community and state violence during this transformative period of political transition.
Objective
Land Limits is a ground-breaking environmental history that explores the ecological impact of population growth in Eurasia, from the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 to the close of the civil war in the early 1920s: a period of unprecedented mobility and demographic flux. It redefines the field of late imperial Russian and early Soviet history by challenging assumptions that in a sparsely populated political territory stretching across a sixth of the world’s surface, population pressures occurred only in the agrarian provinces of what was then ‘European Russia’. Instead, it proposes relocating to the empire’s borderlands, and conceptualizing the empire as multiple geographically-disparate but ecologically-interconnected regions: an innovative method of analysing a political entity that usually resists holistic critical enquiry. Via a programme of nuanced, critical historical research conducted in libraries and archives across five nation states, the project seeks to understand both intellectual and material dimensions of the relationship between population pressure and anthropogenic environmental change, and then interrogates the implications of these ecological shifts. It suggests that as increased populations created changes in land use and resource exploitation, so these new patterns became both the motor of economic growth via local, national and global networks of labour, capital and commodities, and the fulcrum around which various forms of conflict emerged, as land and resources became limited, contested and politicised. These were vital forces that transformed borderlands and became key factors in the violent collapse of the empire and the evolution of the early Soviet state. In doing so, the project redefines scholarly debates on the nature of economic growth and of state and community violence in the late imperial period, by restoring the environment as a vital category in exposing the complex causalities that connected migration, capital and conflict.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
4 Dublin
Ireland