Gates for Freedom, Bastions for Geopolitics: Port Cities of Russia’s Empire

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel addresses the global, national, and local workings of tsarist port cities on the Arctic, Black, and Caspian Seas. The recent food crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine demonstrates that Black Sea ports remain lynchpins in the world market of grain. It also illustrates how debates about and conflicts over small places can have a global impact. This panel looks to historical precedents to ask how tsarist predecessors struggled to maintain grain flow in Black Sea regions afflicted by wars from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Seaports were Russia's windows to the world, ones that shaped not only the trajectories of empire-building but also Russia's national self-image. The panel also considers what the development of maritime gateways in the North meant to the continental empire. Furthermore, port cities were meeting places of people and ideas, bringing together a kaleidoscopic mixture of multiethnic individuals and groups that formed horizontal networks that often defied and subverted authorities' vertical interventions. The panel explores whether port cities on the Caspian Sea could thus be considered asylums for freedom. Through these three papers, our panel invites scholars to play with different scales in writing transnational histories of seaborne Russia.

Sub Unit

• History: 1800-1900

Chair

• Kelly O'Neill, Harvard U

Papers

• 'Maritime Gateways to the World': Nationalism and the Politics of Northern Ports in Late Imperial Russia - Elena I Campbell, U of Washington

• History as Policy in the Construction and Promotion of the Kerch Bridge - Mara Veronica Kozelsky, U of South Alabama

• Between Freedom and Sectarianism: Muslim Astrakhan at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century - Norihiro Naganawa, Hokkaido U (Japan)

Discussant

• Nicole Eaton, Boston College