Though many would say that the age of empires is over, it has surely left an indelible mark on the way many of us think about the past, on the way we conceptualize space, and on the way we define the boundaries between the familiar and the exotic. After all, empires may have been ruled from some of the world’s most celebrated cities but they were often forged along distant, forbidding frontiers. Because of this they proved to be surprisingly flexible entities capable of covering vast portions of the globe and transforming unknown territories – often described as wild or savage – into 'conquered' lands. Understanding how empires work therefore requires us to think carefully about space and mobility, knowledge and power, and to challenge the idea that empires were dominated by their capital cities. This will be our task. In simplest terms, we will ask what we can learn about empires by studying their peripheries.

In this course we will focus on a part of the world that might be as unfamiliar to you as it was to those who 'discovered' it: Siberia and the north Pacific. For over 300 years this region captured the imagination of some of history's greatest explorers, including Vitus Bering and James Cook, and it is not hard to see why. Siberia alone constitutes one twelfth of the earth’s landmass and is (or was) home to seemingly endless supplies of furs, walrus tusks, oil, and gold. It is home to the world’s largest forest, and its Arctic waters are a fabled passageway between Europe and China.

For much of this time Siberia was formally part of the Russian empire, though the tsars knew little of its topography or culture. That began to change during the reign of Peter the Great, when mariners, missionaries, and men of science began streaming into the Pacific from all over the world, ready to discover, explore, and conquer everything they found. In this course we will study a series of encounters between agents of empire (explorers), indigenous peoples, and the environments they inhabited. Happily, many of the men (and women) who traveled to Siberia and the north Pacific documented their experiences in fascinating detail. Instead of reading histories of their voyages, you will therefore pore over their first-hand accounts, as well as the maps and visual representations meant to package this world for consumption by distant audiences. Much of this material is archived in a virtual library maintained by the Library of Congress and in the second half of the course you will have the opportunity to work with some of the many digital tools (GIS, data visualization software, etc.) that are transforming the way we study the past. Throughout the course we will mine our sources for insights into the politics of science and technology, the logistics of imperial rule, and the ability of explorers to transform terra incognita into terra imperia.