Steamships removed the message speed limit imposed by horses and sails, and telegraphy made communication almost instantaneous. Top state sizes expanded accordingly. Graphs superimpose the growth–decline curves of major post−1800 Engineer Empires. Britain became the largest empire ever (24% of world dry land area), but it lasted at more than half of its maximum size only for 110 years, comparable to nomad Xiongnu. State collapse in China also made Britain briefly the most populous of the world, due to its control of India. For most of the Engineer period Russia has been the largest and China (Qing and People’s Republic) the most populous. India’s population surpassed China’s in 2023. At the 1925 peak of European domination, 64% of Earth’s dry land area was ruled from Europe. It is now down to 21%, mainly Siberia. But European-stock Russia, USA, Canada, Brazil, and Australia remain part of the top seven, along with China and India. Population proportions differ. Since 1800, six to ten states have held more than 2% of Earth’s dry land area. Every half-century, three to four have entered or exited this category. By this pattern, 2000−2050 has been unusually quiet, up to now.

A graph superimposes the growth–decline curves of major Late Rider Empires, from 1200 to 1800. This was a period of shift from horses to sails. West European feudalism indirectly led to respect for law and a curiosity revolution. Inciting exploration, the latter began to give rise to transoceanic empires, first of all Spanish. But at first, Mongol horsemen seized a record-size area, unsurpassed among land-borne empires. Up to 1750 all truly large empires except Spanish remained land bound: Manchu Qing, Russia, Ottoman, and Mughal. The burgeoning French, Portuguese, and British empires were still modest. Much of the Mongol hold meant sparsely populated superficial tribute area, but by conquering China the Mongol empire also became the world’s most populous. Later on, Ming, Mughal, and Qing shared this eminence. Nomad empires were a phenomenon that rose and ended with the Rider phase. The Inca and Aztec empires retraced from scratch the human self-domestication process that the Old World underwent thirty-five centuries earlier, but they still lacked metals and the wheel.

This chapter covers Russian–Ukrainian relations during pre-Soviet times (ninth century CE until about 1921), the Soviet era (1921–1991), and the period between the fall of the Soviet Union and Ukrainian independence in 1991 and the Euromaidan revolution of 2014. The lands that form present-day Ukraine have been inhabited by independent-minded peoples for centuries. Ukrainian identity began to take on a national character in the 1800s, when writers and activists set up a sprawling network of political movements pursuing an independent Ukraine. The Soviet era was marked by periods of intense suffering: the famines of the 1930s and the slaughters of World War II, during which millions of Ukrainians died as a result of both war and policy. After the Soviet Union came undone in 1991, relations between Russia and independent Ukraine gradually soured after the 2004 Orange Revolution and especially the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution. Over the course of this period, a shift away from ethno-nationalism and towards a civic national identity took place in the country, with especially Russian-speaking Ukrainians ‘shedding’ parts of their ‘Russian-ness’.

This chapter explores a global panorama of settlement projects by French émigrés in the 1790s. These projects – partly realized, planned, or imagined – aimed at transforming the émigré diaspora into defined territories. Situated between the Americas, the Caribbean, North Africa, the Russian Empire, and Australia, these projects allow, on the one hand, for analysis of the émigrés’ political options and spatial imaginaries of exile in relation to political loyalty and the possibility of a return to France. On the other hand, they highlight the émigrés’ strategic and situational relationship toward French, British, and Spanish imperialism and colonial slavery. Such a spatialized perspective on political migration helps in reconsidering the agency of French émigrés. No longer appearing as “absentees” from the revolution, their mobility and awareness about the global impact of the “age of emigrations” provided them with alternative options to the radicalizing revolution in France that also impacted the post-revolutionary order.

The laws of the countries that emerged on the territory of the former Soviet Union show profound similarities due to a number of shared historical experiences. They have all been parts of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union and have all gone, simultaneously albeit not uniformly, down the thorny path of post-socialist transition. The resulting common legacies concern deep-lying features of legal method as well as central structures of substantive law. The codification movement, institutional design, way of functioning and the role of the judiciary, and the extent of the professionalisation of law and the flaws of legal academia as well as the current state of property law and the law of legal persons provide prime examples. Disregarding these continuities results in distorted images based, in particular, on overemphasised formal similarities to the civil law family. Therefore, joint consideration of the formerly Soviet, but also formerly tsarist and formerly post-Soviet countries, remains an indispensable tool of legal comparison.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Russian elite used a plethora of languages, situated in a complex web of shifting social values. This chapter charts the development of this multilingualism. Looking closely at the nature of language hierarchies in imperial Russia through a close study of a variety of archival materials, it questions the oft-repeated narrative of a Russian high society speaking predominantly French, to the detriment of their Russian skills. The chapter also examines whether the Russian case is, as is often claimed, unique, and argues that multilingualism in Russia shared characteristics with elite multilingualism found in other places and times.

This chapter provides a historical analysis of state-building in Chechnya through the lens of law. It gives an account of the formation and development of legal pluralism under the Russian colonial administration and Soviet rule. The chapter shows that the politics of the imperial and Soviet authorities regarding legal pluralism can be explained by state capacity and ideology. The Russian Empire institutionalized legal pluralism as part of a divide and rule strategy, a response to low state capacity, and an orientalist ideology. When the Empire collapsed in 1917, local actors attempted to mobilize Sharia for competing political projects. Even the Bolsheviks initially built a surprising coalition with religious leaders. Upon the consolidation of Soviet rule, the central government attempted to eliminate legal pluralism in the region. The Soviet drive to ensure legal centralism was fueled by the ideology of modernization and increased state capacity. However, the project ultimately failed because of Stalin’s forced deportation of the entire Chechen nation to Central Asia in 1944. State violence strengthened the Chechen national identity and alienated Chechens from state law. After the return to the Caucasus in 1957, Chechens remained marginalized in the Soviet state-building project and preserved customary and religious institutions.

This chapter demonstrates that, before the Revolution, Russia had a vibrant public sphere. The institutionalization of society into dense webs of autonomous or semi-autonomous public and private institutions followed the contours of society. One’s estate continued to matter in the consolidation or extension of social networks. The Bolsheviks decimated segments of the state apparatus, but a large chunk of the autonomous, highly networked, and enterprising society survived the Revolution. The dense ties linking professional organizations like schools, hospitals, and the civic arena, and embracing museums, historical conservation bureaus, and archaeological interest groups, helped cushion and eventually catapult segments of the estatist bourgeoisie into the elite or otherwise comfortably well-off “intelligentsia” substratum of Soviet society. The autonomous agency of these institutions, and of the actors embedded within them, nurtured its own tensions, evasions, and complications in dealing with the Tsarist state and facilitated adaptation and survival under the new regime, something that I conceptualize as one element of the democratic legacy of the educated estates. The chapter describes the social character of the urban bourgeoisie in late imperial Samara; performs systematic social network analysis employing material from pre-revolutionary directories of the white-collar strata and civil society; and provides an account of the bourgeoisie’s post-revolutionary adaptation.

This chapter dissects the institution of estate (sosloviye) as pivotal to understanding long-lasting patterns of social stratification in Russian society and, relatedly, the contours, networks, and divisions within the resultant estatist public and political sphere. It focuses on the legal-policy underpinnings of the estate to understand how it found reflection in modern educational, professional, and governance institutions. First, the chapter outlines peculiarities of old-regime Russia’s semi-feudal order as engendering a wedge– or, worse, a chasm – between the estatist, or estates-derived, relatively privileged social group (and substrata within it) and the unfree peasants. It then reviews and critiques historical and sociological sources concerned with the transition from imperial to Soviet society. It argues that most scholars have assumed a clean break between tsarist and communist societies after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and that a paradigmatic shift in our understanding of the communist and post-communist social structure as rooted in imperial social stratification is warranted. Finally, it charts how the fragmentary knowledge about the reproduction of latent social distinctions and equally submerged institutional sources of autonomy among the more privileged social groups sets the stage for the subsequent chapters’ fine-grained analysis of the persistence of the estatist bourgeoisie as a legacy across regime types.

Russia was an integral part of the modern world’s first historical wave of terrorism, which lasted from the final third of the nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century. Some historians and terrorism experts even consider the Russian Empire to be the ‘birthplace’ of terrorism. Indeed, in Russia, terrorism as a systematic tactic of revolutionary strategy, with its own ideological justification and organisational framework, took shape in 1869–81, is usually dated back to Sergei Nechayev’s ‘Catechism of a Revolutionary’ and was developed and applied in practice by the Narodnaya Volya (‘People’s Will’) organisation. By the start of the twentieth century, terrorist bombings in British India, the Balkans and elsewhere were often referred to as ‘the Russian way’, or ‘the Russian method’. Along with anarchist terrorism in Europe, which started to spread roughly at the same time, and the early resort to terrorist means by some national liberation and anti-colonial movements, Russian revolutionary terrorism of the late nineteenth century was certainly one of the first identifiable forms and clear manifestations of modern terrorism. Placing the Russian case in a global historical context allows us to assess the extent to which its national experience forms, conforms to or deviates from global trends in terrorism.