Imperial Meaning-Making of Central Asian Social Spaces: A Study of Geographical Imaginations in Travel Writing for the Russian Empire (1839-1905).

• Applicant: Sofia Lopatina
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 551530936

The imperial enlargement required imagination. In the nineteenth century, most of the world came under the rule of a small number of states: in 1914, 84% of the world's surface belonged to empires. Great powers such as Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and the United States competed for dominance by acquiring larger and larger territories. However, the ability to conquer and claim vast domains did not easily translate into the aptitude for fully integrating or exploiting lands and peoples. How did the newly conquered space become a part of the imperial imagination? The basic premise of this study is that meaning-making was fundamental for empire-building. Recent historiography has shown a growing interest in studying diverse geographical imaginations of the expanding empires. While this scholarship has extensively discussed the master structures of imperial discourse, the mechanism of its production has not received enough attention yet. The main aim of this project is to reconstruct the processes of meaning-making during the imperial enlargement, tracing the production of geographical imaginations for the Russian Empire during the conquest and colonization (1839-1905) of Central Asia. This project explores the process of "creating" Central Asia in travel writing for Russian-speaking audiences of the 19th-century Russian Empire. I will analyze conventions of the travel writing genre and common tropes across gender, ethnic, and status differences. I will also examine travel writing as part of complex social communication: I will reconstruct the networks and hierarchies involved in text creation. I will approach it as a multi-actor interaction process that includes authors, publishers, readers, and others. Therefore, I intend to create a methodology to study travel writing that focuses not only on the discursive strategies and biases of the authors but also on the complex background of the text creation and circulation. I argue that geographical imaginations in travel writing were inextricably linked to the process of text production. My second thesis is that the geographical imaginations of Central Asia evolved and changed due to transformations in ideological currents, developments in science and industry, and others. By examining geographical imaginations and the processes behind their creation, I aim to shed light on empire-building and the imaginative processes behind it. This study will also contribute to the broader field of research on travel writing and give new insights into the everyday functioning of an empire. I will also contribute to Russian imperial history by focusing on previously "forgotten" actors and their voices, not limited to elites or political stakeholders.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position