Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic by Catherine Gibson (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Balticby Catherine Gibson Charlotte Henze Gibson, Catherine. Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic. Oxford Studies in Modern European History. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2022. xvii + 267 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £75.00: $100.00. W ithinthe vibrant field of scholarship that has explored East Central European imperial borderlands and their transition to nation-states, the history of what were known in the nineteenth century as the Russian Empire's Baltic provinces (Estonia, Livland, Kurland) has languished in comparative obscurity. While these provinces remain only tangentially discussed in the broader literature on European history, historians of Russia in the post-Soviet period, much informed by historiographical trends of the twentieth century, have placed renewed emphasis on national perspectives for studying the region's history, as it emerged as the independent state of Estonia and part of present-day western Latvia. Primarily concerned with construing the historical development of these two states as distinct from the rest of the Russian Empire, scholarship to date has in effect tended to overlook the complex entanglements between imperial Russia's Baltic provinces and their eastern neighbour, thus obfuscating the region's status as an Eastern European imperial borderland. Catherine Gibson takes on the great challenge of rethinking the history of the Baltic littoral and does so with aplomb. Equipped with formidable linguistic skills (in addition to English, Russian and German the Tartu-based historian also commands Estonian and Latvian), she presents a sophisticated, state-of-the-art book, which makes a compelling case for repositioning the Baltic provinces at the crossroads of several imperial and nation-building projects by telling the region's history through the lens of ethnographic cartography and mapmaking. Untroubled by the sheer breadth of her research, which took her across libraries, archives and map collections from Estonia, Latvia, Russia, Belarus, Finland, Lithuania, Poland, to Germany and Britain, Gibson builds up her argument with admirable conceptual clarity in five case studies, structuring each around successive moments of political crisis, when ideas of belonging and territory were challenged. As she gradually reveals the shifting international, imperial and local influences, changing socioeconomic circumstances, motivations, purposes, as well as means and ways that led and enabled ethnographic mapmakers to explore vastly divergent and often conflicting possibilities of imagining human collectives and organizing space, she uncovers a region of dazzling complexity, questioning many of our assumptions about the role and place of the Baltic provinces both within the Russian Empire and in Eastern Europe. [End Page 175] It is impossible to do justice to all five chapters within the scope of this review. Gibson opens her study with a fine analysis of the first major ethnographic map of the western part of the Russian Empire, the Ethnographic Map of European Russia(published in 1851). Tracing the biography, career and work of its main protagonist, Peter von Köppen, she reveals a small circle of leading academicians in the Empire's central scientific institutions (the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences and the Imperial Geographical Society), who were, not least by their own German background, tightly embedded into a closely-knit network of scholars, writers and philologists, which spanned the territories of the German Confederation and the Habsburg and Russian Empires. While in conversation with the ideas about ethnographic mapmaking circulating across Central Europe at the time, Köppen's approach to ethnographic mapping, Gibson shows, was deeply rooted in a distinct eighteenth-century Russian ethnographic tradition with its primary focus on studying the Empire's Finno-Ugric populations in the Grand Duchy of Finland and the Baltic provinces in order to depict and understand multidiversity. Moving away from the imperial metropole, Gibson then takes a detailed look at the Ethnographic Map of Vitebsk Province(1869–72), a map that was commissioned by the Governor-General of the North-Western territory himself in order to provide him with sufficient statistical and cartographic knowledge for the very purpose of governing. Scrutinizing in detail the processes of mapmaking, from gathering, recording and managing vast amounts of data and knowledge, to counting, categorizing, mapping...