An Empire of Tsars and Rivers - What Historical GIS Tells Us About the Economic Space of a Continental Empire

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Colloquium

By Kelly O’Neill

Noon - 1:30, Room S050 CGIS South Building

Presentation slides.  View a recording of the presentation. 

Abstract: When the Tsarist Empire collapsed in 1917 it was one of the largest states the world had ever seen. It was famously landlocked and saddled with an agricultural economy dominated by the needs of an elite concentrated in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The exhaustive data collected by the imperial bureaucracy suggests that in practice however, the economic geography of the empire was far more complex, and that the production, movement, and consumption of goods followed a spatial logic easily missed without the aid of historical GIS. This talk will sketch the overarching goals of the Imperiia Project – a GIS of the Russian Empire – before digging into the process of mapping historical economic data and presenting some of the implications for rethinking the significance of space (and mapping) in imperial history.

Bio:  Kelly O’Neill is a historian of Russia. Her research and teaching interests concentrate on the evolution of the tsarist empire, and particularly on the social, cultural, and spatial implications of imperial rule. Her first book, Southern Empire: the Logic and Limits of Russian Rule in Crimea, reconstructs the incorporation of the peoples, places, and institutions of the Crimean Khanate into the Russian system. The book challenges the binary terms in which imperial rule has traditionally been understood - i.e., the language of center and periphery - and reveals a more complex, more flexible spatial framework. Her work on Crimea has engendered an abiding interest in the Black Sea world, leading her to projects on the slave trade, the development of the Russian wine industry, and the management of natural resources - above all, forests – in the 18th and 19th centuries. O’Neill directs the Imperiia Project - a historical GIS of the Russian Empire that examines Russia’s cultural and commercial infrastructure.

Lunch will be served.

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