Beyond the Amur
Frontier Encounters between China and Russia, 1850–1930
Format:Paperback
Publisher:University of British Columbia Press
Published:1st Oct '17
Should be back in stock very soon
Beyond the Amur charts the pivotal role that an overlooked frontier river region and its environment played in Qing China’s politics and Sino-Russian relations.
Beyond the Amur describes the distinctive frontier society that developed in the Amur, a river region that shifted between Qing China and Imperial Russia as the two empires competed for natural resources. Although official imperial histories depict the Amur as a distant battleground between rival empires, this colourful history of a region and its people tells a different story.
Drawing on both Russian and Chinese sources, Victor Zatsepine shows that both empires struggled to maintain the border. But much to the chagrin of imperial administrators, various peoples – Chinese, Russian, Indigenous, Japanese, Korean, Manchu, and Mongol – moved freely across it in pursuit of work and trade, exchanging ideas and knowledge as they adapted to the harsh physical environment.
By viewing the Amur as a unified natural economy caught between two empires, Zatsepine highlights the often-overlooked influence of regional developments on imperial policies and the importance of climate and geography to local, state, and imperial histories.
For those interested in Sino-Russian relations or Northeast Asia generally, Beyond the Amur provides considerable background on a huge, yet still largely undocumented, region. More generally, it serves as a reminder that our current world of highly securitised borders, with strict control of passage, is relatively recent and perhaps anomalous.
-- Peter Gordon * Asian Review of Books *Beyond the Amur is an enjoyable read, with stories of informal networks across the border, of the individuals whose life stories usually remain outside official narratives… The book will be of interest of historians of border zones and to historians of Russia and China as well as to the general reader.
-- Anna Belogurova, Freie Universität * Pacific Affairs, Volume 91, No. 4 *By employing a cross-border perspective, Zatsepine's monograph is refreshing, as most previous studies have limited their scope to one side of the river.
-- Sören Urbansky, German Historical Institute * Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian HistoISBN: 9780774834100
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 340g
240 pages