About

By the late nineteenth century, the Romanov Empire stretched half-way across the globe, turning inhabitants of the land mass reaching from today’s Tallinn to Vladivostok into subjects of the same empire. Yet, how far did the inhabitants’ geographical horizons of sympathy extend? Did people living at opposite ends of the empire feel any emotional connection or impulse to help one another in times of need? If so, how were these solidarities expressed and enacted through ideas, emotions, and lived experiences? 

EMPSOLID seeks to redefine conventional centre-periphery approaches to studying empires by recovering horizontal threads connecting regions traditionally studied separately from one another. By analysing little-known cases of intra-imperial aid, the project investigates how solidarities were both shaped by, and could also overcome, confessional and ethnolinguistic differences.

In doing so, the project contributes a long-overdue, decentring perspective to critical approaches to East European and Eurasian studies and imperial history, which has become especially urgent following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The project aspires to open and intensify cross-regional networks and partnerships between various sub-fields of scholars working on regional histories of the Romanov Empire (Baltic Studies, Ukrainian Studies, Caucasus Studies, Central Asian Studies) to generate new narratives about the empire’s history based on entanglements between its border regions. It approaches solidarity as not only a research topic, but also as a scholarly working practice through modelling new, collaborative ways of writing histories that transcend the traditional confines of national and regional borders.