A Public Empire

The Anglo-Saxon literature of Russia and Eastern Europe has proven rather apathetic towards problems related to the political economy of the region, or, more broadly, its economic practices and institutions. It was only recently that a spate of works dealing with the economic field has started to emerge, while graduate programmes are increasingly channelling their efforts in this direction. Ekaterina Pravilova’s book appeared within a changing historiographical context as one of the most important contributions to this shift. At first sight, the focus of the book seems straightforward: the work traces the nineteenth-century emergence of a new mode of conceiving property relations in imperial Russia. The new liberal concept of ‘public property’ (which the volume analyses) designated an intermediary space, outside the private versus state dichotomy. It meant a realm of ownership administered by the state, but only on behalf of a new social subject and bearer of property rights, the ‘public’—a central concept for fin-de-siècle liberalism. The book traces the practices which shaped this new social subject which, although never fully integrated within Russia’s judicial infrastructure, greatly influenced the political and legal debates of the period. Its importance is obvious when one notices its ubiquitous presence across so many social spheres: debates about the public ownership of forests and natural resources were paralleled by similar discussion regarding artistic patrimony, intellectual property rights or the public management of waterways. The book easily shifts between these diverse social spaces, tackling the modulations, contrasting stakes and similarities between these diverse manifestations of the ‘public domain’ and of the ‘public’. There is an important analytical gain from this focus on a particular economic and social technology. For anyone interested in the intertwining relationship between economic and political practices, it provides a careful analysis of the global transformations of liberalism and the way in which it reimagined state and economic institutions during the long nineteenth century

Archaeology · Context (archaeology · Empire · Historiography · Law and economics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Private property · Property rights · Sociology · State (computer science · Subject (documents · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Law · Soviet and Russian History