Syllabus
1. Introduction to the Course
2. A Question of Definition and Comparison
3. Politics of War and Peace: European Law of Nations versus Geopolitics in the Treaty of Paris 1856 and Berlin 1878
4. Moral Economy versus Political Economy: The Russian Empire
5. Moral Economy versus Political Economy: The Ottoman Empire
6. Constitutionalism as External Deflection?
7. Nationalist Empires
8. Imperial Pan-Slavism
9. The Rise of Pan-Islamism and Pan-Turkism
10. Constitutional Empires on the Edge
11. The Rise of Social Question in Russia
12. Last Encounters
Annotation
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Why would these two multiethnic and multi-confessional land empires not survive the dawn of the twentieth century? Reluctantly yet repeatedly both Russian and Ottoman empires – each other’s most unrelenting foes – similarly embarked on reform during the nineteenth century. In the European inter-state realm, this entailed opting for military alliances as opposed to international isolation, and even as in the case of Russia reforming that inter-state order. Meanwhile, in the domestic realm it meant the exaltation for reform projects such as permanent laws and new institutions, political economy and political representation. The course will provide a reading to these contested concepts as the nationalistic and social revolutionary fever engulfs the respective imperial societies in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century.