Overview
After a humiliating defeat in the Crimean War, the Russian Empire struggled to reassert its position as a global power. A small noble family returned from the siege of Sevastopol and joined the rulers' efforts to advance Russian standing in the decades until 1917. Intimate Empire tells the story of the Mansurovs, who were known to nineteenth-century observers as resourceful imperial agents and staunch supporters of Orthodoxy. In close interplay with scholarship and the media, they built churches and pilgrim hostels to increase Russian dominance within its borders and in the Ottoman Empire. Some of the family's achievements stand to this day: the Russian complex in Jerusalem and an impressive Orthodox Convent in Riga. When the Revolution came, they faced stigmatization as former nobles, believers, and monarchists. Impoverishment and arrests became part of their daily lives in Soviet Russia.Intimate Empire is a study of the momentous role played by elite families in Russia's international involvement in the age of empire. It shows how three generations of a mobile noble family advanced the intertwined causes of the Russian Empire and Orthodoxy, using family resources and tools of intimacy. Women were crucial for the family's efforts, both behind the scenes and in public. It is the first monograph to examine the interplay between family and empire building in Russian history-a topic that has proven extraordinarily prolific for British imperial history yet remains virtually unexplored for the Russian case. Russia, Orthodoxy, and noble family life emerge as part of the European trans-imperial scene.
Full Product Details
Author: Alexa von Winning (Lecturer, Lecturer, Institute for Eastern European History and Area Studies, Tuebingen University)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 16.30cm
, Height: 1.80cm
, Length: 24.10cm
Weight: 0.506kg
ISBN: 9780192844415
ISBN 10: 0192844415
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 29 April 2022
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Reviews
The book makes an original contribution to our understanding of the private networks of elite families in imperial Russia, while reminding us that transnational individuals served as potent agents and powerful tools of empire. * Lucien Frary, The Russian Review * With Intimate Empire, Alexa von Winning has achieved a great success. The book adds many innovative thoughts to the genre of historical family biographies. It demonstrates the complex, by no means frictionless relationship between Church and autocracy in the late Tsarist Empire, and repeatedly broadens the perspective beyond the russian-imperial scope. * H-Soz-Kult von, Benedikt Tondera, Institute for History, Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg * Alexa von Winning's Intimate Empire: The Mansurov Family in Russia and the Orthodox East, 1855-1936 is...an impressive work of scholarship. * Russell E. Martin, The Kritika *
The book makes an original contribution to our understanding of the private networks of elite families in imperial Russia, while reminding us that transnational individuals served as potent agents and powerful tools of empire. * Lucien Frary, The Russian Review *
Author Information
Alexa von Winning is a Lecturer in Eastern European and Modern History at Tuebingen University. She obtained a master's degree in history (2010) and a PhD (2018) at Tuebingen University. During her graduate studies, she was a Short-Term Scholar at the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and at the German Historical Institute in Moscow.
