Introducing the two regions at the heart of this study, chapter two maps out the geographical, political, economic, and cultural setting of the book. While it focuses on the years around the Great Reforms, it puts this period into broader perspective, tracing continuity and change throughout the nineteenth century. Thus, the chapter combines elements of temporal and spatial comparison, highlighting the distinctiveness of the two regions and their similarities. First, it discusses their dynamic, and diverging, role in the imperial imagination. While both regions were considered to be different from both the empire’s peripheries and traditional heartlands, they were appropriated as part of the imperial core, in discourse and in practice. Second, the chapter reviews the demographic composition of the two territories, their changing institutional landscapes and forms of governance. Finally, it charts the socio-economic conditions under which people lived, while paying close attention to the effects of migration. In all of these questions, the situation of Muslim Tatars is foregrounded.