Taming the wild field
Subtitle: colonization and empire on the Russian steppe
By: Willard Sunderland.
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2004
Place of publication: Ithaca
Language: eng
Number of pages: 239
Subjects: Imperialism.; Russia -- History -- 1613-1917.; Russia -- Territorial expansion.
Description: "Traversing a thousand years of the region's history, Willard Sunderland recounts the complex process of Russian expansion and colonization, stressing the way outsider settlement at once created the steppe as a region of empire and was itself constantly changing. The story is populated by an array of administrators, Cossack adventurers, Orthodox missionaries, geographers, foreign entrepreneurs, peasants, and (by the late nineteenth century) tourists and conservationists. Sunderland's approach to history is comparative throughout, and his comparisons of the steppe with the North American case are especially telling. Taming the Wild Field expresses concern with the fate of the world's great grasslands, and the book ends at the beginning of the twentieth century with the initiation of a conservation movement in Russia by those appalled at the high environmental cost of expansion."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.