Sources

Anyone who has spent time in the archives in St. Petersburg or Moscow knows that the imperial ministries operated according to a deeply ingrained spatial logic. The most obvious manifestation of which was the administrative geography according to which officials defined authority, ascribed duties, allocated resources, and categorized documents. For a long while I made the mistake of conflating that administrative geography with the spatial logic of the empire, but one of the fundamental arguments of this paper is that the two are not coterminous - that the ubiquitous administrative units (namestnichesva, provintsii, gubernii, uezdy, volosti) that constitute the former reflect but do not fully express the constantly evolving structures, relations, and mobilities inherent in the latter.

There are innumerable ways to try to excavate the empire's spatial logic; in fact, the growing number of monographs and edited volumes that treat space as an object of analysis demonstrates the range of available approaches. This paper, which is little more than a methodological experiment, attempts to reconstruct the economic infrastructure of the empire in the mid-19th century by putting a set of statistical and spatial data into a shared interpretive space. While future iterations of the project will draw on a wider range of sources, those deployed here were generated by men involved in some capacity with statecraft: members of the Central Statistical Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Foreign Trade, the General Staff of the Russian Army, and the Imperial Geographical Society. The following pages provide brief descriptions of the structure and content of the material.