Valerie Kivelson. Desperate Magic

In an essay on the place of early modern Russian history in the broader historiography of European and world history, noted historian Donald Ostrowski poignantly asks, “How well is early modern Russian history integrated into world-history constructs?” The glum answer he offers is “not well integrated at all.” On the one hand, the authors of “big-picture schemas and world-history textbooks” either make “little or no reference to early modern Russia” or, when they do, they present an uninformed, and therefore largely inaccurate, “caricature” of it. On the other hand, there is reason to lament the apparent “tendency of Russian history specialists to approach their field as though it were not interconnected with the rest of the world but an entity unto itself.” Either way, the result is that Russia often gets presented in general treatments as “sui generis”—as “not really an integral part of world history” (Donald Ostrowski, “Towards the Integration of Early Modern Russia into World History,” in The Russian Empire, Slavery, and Liberation: Integrating Multi-cultural Eurasia 1551–1800 [forthcoming]).

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