Crimean confusion

Neat and tidy as the empire might appear in these datasets, with their cleanly-drawn lines and points, don't be deceived: it had its fair share of ragged edges, vagaries, and unkempt corners. These can be hard to discern on the pages of the atlas, but they are there.

Here is but one example.

Tavrida was the product of Empress Catherine II's ambition and vision. When she died in 1796 and her son, Paul I, took the throne, he took as much pleasure in dismantling what his mother had built as she had in building it. Almost immediately he reduced Tavrida to the status of an oblast' subsumed within the sprawling mega-province of Novorossia (New Russia). There it remained until 1801, when Alexander I succeeded his father.

Alexander restored several administrative units to their pre-1796 status. As part of that work, in September 1801 he broke Novorossia into the provinces (gubernii) of Nikolaev, Ekaterinoslav, and Tavrida. It wasn't until a year later, in October 1802 (PSZ I, no.20,449), that a decree explained exactly how the provinces would be organized. It stipulated that there would be seven districts in Tavrida. Fair enough.

Now let's have a look at the way Tavrida is presented on the atlas. (Do try the fullscreen view!)

The unintentional message of the map?

40 years after annexation, Tavrida was still a work-in-progress - a place that had not yet been fully incorporated through the system of marking and naming and mapping that lent even the wild, wooly spaces of Siberia a familiar, predictable quality.

More importantly, this is not the only place in the atlas where ambiguity or error is written into the record (and therefore embedded in the spatial data of the project). These deliciously interesting idiosyncrasies are what make the material so compelling. After all, these are the cases that articulate, albeit in halting fashion, one of the most important and underappreciated aspects of imperial space: its evolving, incomplete, and even inscrutable nature.