REVIEWS 565 a multitude of phenomena in this or any other part of the globe. Strangely, Austria-Hungary’s rule of Bosnia is excluded from his discussion even though it represents the best case for comparing models of governance and nation building. Finally, in a volume that purports to reinterpret the role of religion, there is remarkably little discussion of religion or religious identity and how they are embraced and enacted. The use of religion as a source of justice and ethics in governance is rightly emphasized but religion is sadly disassociated from other spheres of life, such as economy or warfare. UCL SSEES Bojan Aleksov Pravilova, Elena. A Public Empire: Property and the Quest for the Common Good in Imperial Russia. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2014. xii +436 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $45.00: £30.95. In the historiography of imperial Russia, the concept of property, in most cases framed around the existence and insecurities of private ownership, has been fundamental to our understanding of the social and political mechanisms of change. In this context, Ekaterina Pravilova’s A Public Empire seeks to explore the development of the public sphere in the Russian empire, at the expense of private possessions. She charts the shifting boundaries of property in the long nineteenth century, examining the phenomenon of res publica, ‘a world of things to be owned by the public yet managed by the state on the public’s behalf’ (p. 2). Although this res publica was never institutionalized in law, Pravilova argues for its existence in the Russian imagination, rhetoric and politics, and discusses attempts to implement it in practice and the barriers to its realization. She conceives calls for the ‘nationalization’ or state expropriation of property not as symptomatic of the desire to destroy the private realm, but rather as efforts to change the nature of property itself, from inviolable and absolute to infused with social obligations and commitments. For a book that concerns ostensibly the development of imperial property law, Pravilova’s writing and thematic approach make for a lively text that is readily accessible to those with a non-legal history background. This is a rich, ambitious and complex project, which cuts across any number of traditional cultural and political boundaries; Pravilova switches adeptly from irrigation in Central Asia and Transcaucasia, to the preservation of churches in the Russian north, to the public’s right to read posthumously published correspondence. The breadth and diversity of such topics speak to the scope of this text. Pravilova’s work is much more than an analysis of the intricate debates surrounding property reform, and encompasses many of the ‘big’ issues of the SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 566 day: the development of liberalism in late-nineteenth-century politics, the rise of the idea of the nation, the changing moral and monetary values ascribed to objects, and at its heart, changing conceptions of the place of state and society. Although many of the conditions that had arisen in Europe to prompt the emergence of a public domain were missing in Russia, the idea still gained significant traction, and the text charts the ebb and flow of the arguments both for and against the state acting as manager of the country, rather than owner. The chapters are grouped thematically into three parts that follow parallel campaigns to preserve natural resources, art, buildings and literature by placing them in the public domain. The first chapter discusses Catherine the Great’s introduction of sobstvennost´ into Russia’s legal landscape, and all subsequent chapters readdress the strengths and weaknesses of these laws as the nineteenth century progressed. The first two parts consider reactions to the dilemmas of how to deal with publically important objects that were privately owned — water, forests, minerals, art, icons and buildings — while the final section examines more intangible objects, including the words and ideas contained in literary works and private correspondence. In considering such diverse topics, Pravilova synthesizes a vast amount of information, and deals as deftly with forestry law as she does with the discussion of whether Orthodox icons constituted art. Meticulously detailed, the text makes use of an extremely wide range of archival sources (although a...
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Jan 1, 2017
Emanuel Sorin Bugner 
