FRIAS Colloquium - Michel Abesser

Bound by difference. Interethnic economies at the Russian Empire’s southern periphery

My FRIAS-project explores how the Russian Empire reconciled diversity, economic growth and political stability in the long nineteenth century in its southern periphery at the Black Sea coast. By focusing on the lower Don-Region and two neighboring cities within it, the Russian Rostov and Nakhichevan, an Armenian colony, I explore how two distinct ethnic communities in close proximity to each other over time merged into one contested urban space while retaining political administrative independence. Both their location as economic and military hubs to the Black Sea and the Caucasus and as knots of different trade networks spawning Eurasia, provides me with the opportunity to investigate multiethnic economic life through the lenses of cooperation and conflict along fluid borders of faith, language, estate or class between the two communities. The project thus allows me to explore the limits of the autocratic Russian state in planning imperial development, fostering and controlling economic prosperity and managing the effects of nationalism on economic practices at its periphery.

Material for preparation:

Essay: 

An Incomplete Merger. Rostov-on-Don and Nakhichevan as Peculiar Urbanization Projects in the Russian Empire’s South

Documentary:

Youtube-Link

[A Soviet documentary from the 1970s that focusses on the history of the so-called Don-Armenians, their historical roots and current position and culture within the regional Soviet society. Noteworthy is the overall idealistic depiction and narration according to the Soviet dogma of the "friendship between peoples" that stresses how the Soviet Union allowed every national culture to flourish and develop. Even without knowledge of Russian, the episode provides some (visual) insights into the daily life of regional Armenians and the visual - political strategies behind depicting them. Feel free to click through some bits of it!]