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.

How Russia transformed itself from a relatively small principality on the steppe frontier in 1450 to a major Eurasian empire by 1800 is one of the fundamental questions of Russian historical study. The two main views posit a central role for Peter I (1682–1725) in that transformation either by singled-handedly “changing everything” and bringing Muscovy into the modern age through embracing contact with Europe and with the western enlightenment or by accelerating the pace of changes already occurring. In this article, Donald Ostrowski proposes that Russia's transition during this period can be better explained by examining the general trends of historical development and influences across Afro-Eurasia. This essay also raises questions about the use of the term modernization and examines eight categories of historical development: contact with the world; establishment of an empire; court politics; military; society and economics; governmental administration; church relations; and culture and education. Ostrowski concludes that in the early modern period one finds no turning points in Russian history, only more or less continuous trends, and that only roughly around 1800 do fundamental changes begin to occur within these eight categories.