When Russia acquired Siberia, its leaders possessed little knowledge about the geography and peoples of the longest land frontier in the world. This book examines the process by which they sought to acquire that knowledge from the seventeenth throughout much of the nineteenth century. The narrative is constructed on the theoretical frame of “the knowledge regimes” developed by John L. Campbell and Ove Kay Pederson in The National Origins of Policy Ideas: Knowledge Regimes in the United States, France, Germany, and Denmark (Princeton, 2014).
A knowledge regime is a mechanism drawing its energy from a variety of sources ranging from institutions to individuals and shifting its practical application over time to accommodate new requirements for those in power. The advantage of adopting such a mode of analysis is that despite its origins in contemporary politics and anthropology, it makes sense out of a highly diversified and often confusing set of...