This book set out to offer a fresh look at state–society relations in post-reform Russia. To do so, it followed the spread of a rapidly expanding court system beyond the empire’s metropolitan centers, into the open steppe of southern Russia and the Black Sea littoral and into the fields and woodlands of the Volga-Kama region. This analysis was not designed as a new chapter to an institutional history, and it was much more than a collection of unrelated episodes tied to the new courts in one way or another. Far from it, it traced channels and forms of communication between individuals, rural communities, and local, regional, and central authorities; it explored the evolving roles of formerly alien territories in the imperial imagination; it highlighted changes in governance and socioeconomic conditions and a variety of reactions to these changes “on the ground”; and it looked into everyday life at the local level.