A comprehensive history of the Sino-Russian border, one of the longest and most important land borders in the world

The Sino-Russian border, once the world's longest land border, has received scant attention in histories about the margins of empires. Beyond the Steppe Frontier rectifies this by exploring the demarcation's remarkable transformation-from a vaguely marked frontier in the seventeenth century to its twentieth-century incarnation as a tightly patrolled barrier girded by watchtowers, barbed wire, and border guards. Through the perspectives of locals, including railroad employees, herdsmen, and smugglers from both sides, Soeren Urbansky explores the daily life of communities and their entanglements with transnational and global flows of people, commodities, and ideas. Urbansky challenges top-down interpretations by stressing the significance of the local population in supporting, and undermining, border making.

Because Russian, Chinese, and native worlds are intricately interwoven, national separations largely remained invisible at the border between the two largest Eurasian empires. This overlapping and mingling came to an end only when the border gained geopolitical significance during the twentieth century. Relying on a wealth of sources culled from little-known archives from across Eurasia, Urbansky demonstrates how states succeeded in suppressing traditional borderland cultures by cutting kin, cultural, economic, and religious connections across the state perimeter, through laws, physical force, deportation, reeducation, forced assimilation, and propaganda.

Beyond the Steppe Frontier sheds critical new light on a pivotal geographical periphery and expands our understanding of how borders are determined.

About the Author
Soeren Urbansky is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. He is the author of Kolonialer Wettstreit: Russland, China, Japan und die Ostchinesische Eisenbahn.

Reviews
"Winner of the Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Award, History & Humanities category"
"This is a rich account of one of the world's longest national borders."---K.E. Stapleton, Choice
"A brilliant cross between a Lonely Planet Guide for the place you never wanted to visit and a serious academic study of life in imperial borderlands. It's an interdisciplinary cocktail of history, politics, economics, sociology and anthropology."---Sergey Radchenko, China Quarterly
"Urbansky's remarkable study manages to embed the history of Sino-Russian international relations into the messy and wavering social reality of a borderland that was also shaped by the cultures, agendas, and material interests of the successive generations of its inhabitants."---N. Pianciola, Slavonic and East European Review
"Beyond the Steppe Frontier is a great read and a very important book for anyone studying Chinese and Russian history, but it is also for students of other border regions. Certain lacunae in presenting a big ger picture are compensated by skill ful reconstruction of the processes on the ground. The book makes one want to read the next study."---Camille Neufville, Ab Imperio Quarterly
"Beyond the Steppe Frontier gives life to the Sino-Russian border. [Urbansky] has brilliantly served students, scholars, and history enthusiasts by presenting a compelling, innovative, and well-researched book on the recent Sino-Russian past that reminds us that human interactions make history. This human dimension, which is so central to the volume, is also responsible for making Urbansky's thought-provoking work such an enjoyable read."---Giulia Sciorati, E-International Relations
"Richly detailed. . . . Beyond the Steppe Frontier sheds new light on the history of the Sino-Russian border by its effort to consider the varied perspectives of its inhabitants."---Elizabeth Wishnick, The Middle Ground Journal



Book Information
ISBN 9780691208947
Author Soeren Urbansky
Format Paperback
Page Count 392
Imprint Princeton University Press
Publisher Princeton University Press