Until recently comparative historical research on European empires has been focusing mainly on the question how imperial elites addressed problems of political rule in countries with highly poly-ethnic and multi-religious populations. The question what strategies were developed and deployed to exert control over large and expanding territories has not been analyzed in comparable depth so far. This talk will address the impact of the construction and use of modern infrastructure in the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th century. Striving to overcome traditional narratives of railway history which have been concentrating on problems of technology and economic issues, the talk will reflect on the political impact of the use of modern infrastructure and on changing modes of imperial rule in modern times.
Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, Dr. phil., researcher and Dilthey-fellow at the department of Eastern European and Russian History at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet in Munich, Germany. He is the author of an award-winning monograph on the history of the Alexander-Nevsky-myth in Russia from the 13th to the 20th centuries (Cologne 2004, Russian translation: Moscow 2007) and of a number of articles on issues of spatial history, imagined geography and mental mapping in Eastern Europe and Russia. Currently he works on a research project with the title: "Russia's ride towards modernity. Mobility and social space in the railway age".