The Sino-Russian border, once the world’s longest land border, has received scant attention in histories about the margins of empires.
Beyond the Steppe Frontier rectifies this by exploring the demarcation’s remarkable transformation — from a vaguely marked frontier in the 17th century to its 20th century incarnation as a tightly patrolled barrier girded by watchtowers, barbed wire, and border guards.
Through the perspectives of locals, including railroad employees, herdsmen, and smugglers from both sides, Sören Urbansky explores the daily life of communities and their entanglements with transnational and global flows of people, commodities, and ideas, says a review on the Princeton University Press website.
Urbansky challenges top-down interpretations by stressing the significance of the local population in supporting, and undermining, border making.
Because Russian, Chinese, and native worlds are intricately interwoven, national separations largely remained invisible at the border between the two largest Eurasian empires.
