Ian W. Campbell. Knowledge and the Ends of Empire

Ian W. Campbell’s Knowledge and the Ends of Empire: Kazak Intermediaries and Russian Rule on the Steppe, 1731–1917 starts with a description of an 1870 episode when local authorities in southern Siberia requested the Russian War Ministry provide funds to a Cossack picket located somewhere in the southern Altai. The picket was expected to guard an international border with China. The ministry replied that it was not sure whether this post was actually located on the Russian-Chinese border. This episode revealed how little the Russian imperial government knew about its vast borderland areas, which at one point encompassed Finland and Poland in the west along with Alaska and California in the east. Paraphrasing the title of the classic Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998) by James Scott, Campbell has referred to the slim colonial presence of the Russian Empire as seeing like a half-blind state.

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