Russia in World History: A Transnational Approach

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Russia in World History uses a comparative framework to understand Russian history in a global context. The book challenges the idea of Russia as an outlier of European civilization by examining select themes in modern Russian history alongside cases drawn from the British Empire. Choi Chatterjee analyzes the concepts of nation and empire, selfhood and subjectivity, socialism and capitalism, and revolution and the world order in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. In doing so she rethinks many historical narratives that bluntly posit a liberal West against a repressive, authoritarian Russia. Instead Chatterjee argues for a wider perspective which reveals that imperial practices relating to the appropriation of human and natural resources were shared across European empires, both East and West. Incorporating the stories of famous thinkers, such as Leo Tolstoy, Emma Goldman, Wangari Maathai, Arundhati Roy, among others. This unique interpretation of modern Russia is knitted together from the varied lives and experiences of those individuals who challenged the status quo and promoted a different way of thinking. This is a ground-breaking book with big and provocative ideas about the history of the modern world, and will be vital reading for students of both modern Russian and world history.

Reviews

This book is hugely ambitious. Chatterjee manages to pull off this remarkable intellectual experiment (and the book is novel enough to be called so) with remarkable lucidity. The book is a masterclass in identifying the base elements of thinking about the big questions - nationalism, ethnicity, race relations, class as they relate to different countries continents, even and distilling these intellectual concerns and concepts down to their shared essence. * Zoe Knox, Associate Professor of Modern Russia History, University of Leicester, UK *
Meticulously researched and passionately written Choi Chatterjees Russia in World History destabilizes insular narratives of the liberal West and autocratic Russia as well as rigid typologies of western and eastern empires and opens up new perspectives on violence, modernizing ideologies, alternative political and social imaginaries, and history writing in the global imperial context. The book takes the reader on a fascinating journey with pairs of intellectuals from allegedly incomparable British and Russian/Soviet empires and masterfully shows potential and limits of comparative and trans-national history. The biographic approach not only makes the text usable in a history classroom, but also helps elucidate larger-than-life questions of political history through a human scale. * Alexander Semyonov, Professor, Chair, Department of History, National Research University-Higher School of Economics, Russia *
Choi Chatterjee masterfully brings together global imperial worlds. Sorting through definitions of internal and external colonies, she focuses on racialized concepts of victimization to examine how western pundits overlooked brutal treatment of colonial subjects in India and Africa while spotlighting Tsarist and Soviet crimes against their own people. Thus was born the image of the Russian carceral state. * Kate Brown, Professor in History of Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA *
This exciting and provocative book demands a significant reorientation in our understandings of global history. Rather than relying on lazy bifurcations of east and west, despotism and liberalism, Chatterjee asks us to critically evaluate the relationships and comparisons between the Empires of Britain and Russia. She draws together a rich tapestry of intellectual frameworks, firmly grounded in individual experience. This richly imagined and deeply personal piece of scholarship will reward readers from a wide range of disciplines. * Sarah Badcock, Professor of Modern History, University of Nottingham, UK *

Author Bio

Choi Chatterjee is Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles, USA. She is the author of Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910-1939 (2002) and the co-author of Russia in the Long Twentieth Century (2016) and The Twentieth Century: A Retrospective (2002). She is also the co-editor of Everyday Life in Russia Past and Present (2015), The Russian Experience: Americans Encountering the Enigma, 1890 to the Present (2012), and The Wider Arc of Revolution (2019). Chatterjee, a passionate advocate of everyday environmentalism, is the co-creator of the project, https://www.livingbackyardtotable.com/.