Knowledge and the Ends of Empire: Kazak Intermediaries and Russian Rule on the Steppe, 1731-1917 (Cornell University Press, 2017), by Ian Campbell, assistant professor of history. Hoping to better govern the Kazak steppes, tsarist officials were desperate to obtain reliable information about an unfamiliar environment and population. Drawing on archival materials and a wide range of 19th-century periodicals in Russian and Kazak, Campbell tells how Kazaks at first used local knowledge to negotiate tsarist rule and later to resist it.
Ian Campbell is a historian of pre-Revolutionary Russia with particular interest in the relationship between non-Russian subjects (and territories) and the imperial core. His first book, Knowledge and the Ends of Empire (Cornell, 2017) investigates the relationship between what tsarist bureaucrats knew about one part of the empire, the Kazak steppe, and the policies they actually enacted, with a particular interest in the shifting role of local intermediaries and the expertise they possessed. Based on archival fieldwork in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Almaty, and on Russian- and Kazak-language primary sources, it was shortlisted for the Central Eurasian Studies Society's 2018 Book Prize in History.
His current project, tentatively entitled The Bleeding Edges: Borderlands Violence and Russia's Enduring Empire, 1800-1917, studies violent practices of counterinsugency and conquest across multiple borderlands -- Poland, the Caucasus, and Turkestan. By marrying operational military history to a study of the tsarist army's institutional culture, he hopes to better understand why large-scale retributive violence took place when (and where) it did, and more broadly the repertoire of techniques that allowed the Russian Empire to endure moments of crisis on its fringes.
A native of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, he completed his B.A. (2005) and Ph.D (2011) at the University of Michigan, and a postdoc at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, before joining the faculty at UC-Davis in 2012. He does not miss the cold.
View the book at Cornell University