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A Public Empire: Property and the Quest for the Common Good in Imperial Russia
Ekaterina Pravilova
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A Public Empire refutes the general image of Russian as a nation of insecurity of private ownership and defenselessness in the face of the state and analyzes the emergence of Russian property regimes from the time of Catherine the Great through World War I and the revolutions of 1917. Most importantly, A Public Empire shows the emergence of the new practices of owning "public things" in imperial Russia and the attempts of Russian intellectuals to reconcile the security of property with the ideals of the common good. The book analyzes how the belief that certain objects—rivers, forests, minerals, historical monuments, icons, and Russian literary classics—should accede to some kind of public status developed in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. Professional experts and liberal politicians advocated for a property reform that aimed at exempting public things from private ownership, while the tsars and the imperial government employed the rhetoric of protecting the sanctity of private property and resisted attempts at its limitation. Exploring the Russian ways of thinking about property, A Public Empire looks at problems of state reform and the formation of civil society, which, as the book argues, should be rethought as a process of constructing "the public" through the reform of property rights.
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Cover Page
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Title Page
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Copyright Page
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Contents
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Acknowledgments
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Abbreviations
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Introduction: Res Publica in the Imperial State
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PART I: Whose Nature? Environmentalism, Industrialization, and the Politics of Property
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1. The Meanings of Property
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2. Forests, Minerals, and the Controversy over Property in Post-Emancipation Russia
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3. Nationalizing Rivers, Expropriating Lands
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PART II: The Treasures of the Fatherland
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4. Inventing National Patrimony
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5. Private Possessions and National Art
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PART III: “Estates on Parnassus”: Literary Property and Cultural Reform
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6. Writers and the Audience: Legal Provisions and Public Discourse
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7. The Private Letters of National Literature
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Epilogue
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Notes
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Index
Citable Link
Published: 2014
Publisher: Princeton University Press
- 978-1-4008-5026-6 (ebook)
- 978-0-691-18071-7 (paper)