Land Limits is an environmental history project that explores the ecological impact of population growth in northern Eurasia, from the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 to the close of the ‘Russian’ civil war in the early 1920s: a period of unprecedented mobility and demographic flux. Challenging assumptions that in the sparsely-populated Russian empire that stretched across a sixth of the world’s surface, population pressures occurred only in the agrarian provinces of what was then ‘European Russia’, we propose relocating to the empire’s borderlands, and conceptualizing the empire as multiple geographically-disparate but ecologically-interconnected regions. Our research is situated within three overlaid contexts of the mid-to-late nineteenth century: the expansion and consolidation of the Russian empire; the multifarious impacts of the Great Reforms; and the new interdependencies of the world economy in the ‘first age of globalisation’. These macro entanglements, manifested in rapid population growth, labour migration and colonial resettlement, and the development of an increasingly centralised and industrialised economy in imperial Russia, fundamentally re-shaped people’s relationship with the land on multiple scales, across vast expanses of northern Eurasia. Our interests lie in examining exactly how these human-nature relations were changing in the age of empire and its collapse, from the 1860s to the 1920s, and consequently, in understanding their social, economic and political implications.
The geographical scope of the project necessitates a research team with core linguistic and regional expertise in a variety of late imperial and early Soviet contexts. Within each of our case study sites, we aim firstly to understand how environments were changing (or not changing) in this period of entangled colonisation, industrialisation and modernisation (considering species introductions and modifications; conversion of rangeland to cropland; changing planting patterns; enclosure; deforestation; mining; new water and land management practices and technologies, and so on), and to understand the ways in which this was connected to market growth and economic development in the period. But proceeding from the widely acknowledged premise that ecological shifts have the capacity to reshape social relations, we’re equally interested in tracing how new forms of adaption, cooperation, inequality and conflict arose from these environmental transformations, and what that meant for relations within local communities and between people, business and the state. We take seriously rural places, everyday labour practices and people who are sometimes overlooked in histories of modernisation, commodity production and political conflict, and prioritise fine-grained, localised research to understand how a variety of multiethnic communities made use of complex landscapes.
As these studies evolve in parallel and are assembled together, the Land Limits project therefore aims to trace various types of connected history: the complex relations between anthropogenic environmental change, economic growth and socio-political conflict in each site; more macro-level ecological and economic connections between/across the case study regions and their role (if any) in the violent collapse of empire and its aftermath; and still-larger consideration of the emplacement of these histories within the planetary Anthropocene, which we still know comparatively little about in Eurasian context. Ultimately, as well as producing new environmental histories of imperial ‘patches’, Land Limits asks what the implications of attaching importance to small-scale, place-specific ecological shifts are for more conventional meta-narratives of economy, political power and conflict in the transitional decades from the late imperial to the early Soviet state.
