Towards a connected history of population, environmental change, capital and conflict in Russian Eurasia, 1860s-1920s

ongoing

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.