Taming the wild field : colonization and empire on the Russian steppe / Willard Sunderland.

Taming the Wild Field; Contents; List of Maps; Preface; List of Abbreviations; Introduction: Steppe Building; 1. Frontier Colonization; The Rus' Land and the Field; The Wild Field and the Tsardom; The Empire and the Steppe; 2. Enlightened Colonization; Reason's Territory; Reason's Process; 3. Bureaucratic Colonization; The Vastness and the Nation; The Bureaucrats and the Settlers; 4. Reformist Colonization; The System and the Peasants; The Pioneers and the Public; 5. "Correct Colonization"; Colonizing Capacities and the Russian Element; The Dwindling Prairie and the Growing Borderland.

Conclusion: Steppe Building and Steppe DestroyingNote on Archival Sources; Index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"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."--Jacket.

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