Willard Sunderland and Peter Holquist find in the same cohort of imperial officials—the “technocrats” in the Resettlement Administration—a key moment in the history of Russian statecraft (gosudarstvennost’), linked in turn to the Russian state's career as a “modern colonial empire.” Thus, each historian seeks to ensconce within a larger institutional historical framework the burgeoning discussion occasioned over the last two decades by the “imperial turn” in Russian and European historiographies.

However, each article situates the resettlement administration in very different developmental narratives, reaching equally distinctive conclusions. guided by the foucauldian notion of “governmentality” and james scott's insights on statecraft, sunderland presents the resettlement administration as a proto-ministry of asiatic russia, whose “experts“ would impose in asiatic russia the institutionalization of “difference“ between metropolis and periphery—defined and explained by the new hilfsiuissenschaften—that european empire-builders had applied in civilizing their own overseas colonies.