Authors

Discussion

Meaning-making  was  fundamental  for  empire-building  and  enlargement. In this presentation, I will focus on the ideological and imaginative processes in the Russian Empire during the annexation of the Ili district (1871-1881). The Ili district was the only place in Central Asia that the Russian Empire captured and returned during its conquest and colonization of the region in the mid-to-late 19th century.

The Ili district is located in the northwestern part of present-day Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China (PRC). In the 1860s, the rebellions against the Qing rule spread across Eastern Turkestan. As a result, the power of the Qing imperial government became almost non-existent in the region, including the Ili district. The Russian Empire occupied the latter 1871 and returned most of it to China in 1881 in exchange for territorial concessions and compensation. That year, the Treaty of St. Petersburg created a stable border between the empires.

How were geographical imaginations of the Ili region created in the Russian Empire? How did they change throughout the decades, from being part of China and the region where the two empires established a trade agreement (1851), to annexation by the Russian Empire and to being reincorporated into China? Travel writing for the Russian Empire are available over a large time span, giving us a unique opportunity to scrutinize the imaginative processes of empire-building. I aim to reconstruct these imaginative processes, analyzing travel writing about the region that aimed at wider Russian-speaking audiences of the empire.

While  the  scholarship  has  extensively  discussed  the  master  structures  of the imperial discourse,  the  mechanisms  of  its  production  have  not  received  enough  attention  yet.  I argue that if  we wish to understand the process of imperial meaning-making better, we need to explore the mechanisms  such  as  actors,  hierarchies,  and  networks,  that  participated  in  its  production. I will focus on agency and power dynamics between authors, publishers, readers, and others in shaping geographical imaginations about the Ili region.