Policing and the creation of an early modern city : Moscow under Catherine the Great, 1762-1796
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Eighteenth-century rulers strove to remake Russia according to their ideas of enlightenment and modernity. Moscow, the country's largest city and traditional capital, served as a particular focus of reform. According to contemporary elites, Moscow's haphazard planning, superstitious populace, and decentralized administration represented the antithesis of the well-ordered capital befitting Russia as a European power. Efforts to remedy these shortcomings culminated in Catherine the Great, who introduced a series of reforms to "Europeanize" the city. This dissertation challenges assumptions that Catherinian policies brought much-needed changes to a city mired in dysfunction and fundamentally backward in comparison to the West. It does so by focusing on the Moscow Police, the institution championed by authorities as the practical means to root out behaviors and practices deemed contrary to enlightened good order. Policing in practice worked to supplant functioning administrative structures and social relationships in favor of imposing alternatives that would be much more transparent and responsive to central authorities. The language of disorder and "Europeanization" thus belies how Russian rulers wielded reforms to achieve goals in Moscow shared by their early modern European counterparts, namely to concentrate authority in central institutions and authorities and to exercise an unprecedented measure of control over the lives of their subjects.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2015 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Martin, Lindsey A |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of History. |
| Primary advisor | Kollmann, Nancy Shields, 1950- |
| Thesis advisor | Kollmann, Nancy Shields, 1950- |
| Thesis advisor | Findlen, Paula |
| Thesis advisor | Stokes, Laura, 1974- |
| Advisor | Findlen, Paula |
| Advisor | Stokes, Laura, 1974- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Lindsey A. Martin. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of History. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2015. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2015 by Lindsey Ann Martin
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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