Sublime

On Europe’s Inner Asian frontier, demographic expansion long seemed as hobbled as it was in mainland North America until the 1750s.

To Russian historians of the later nineteenth century, like Solov’ev or Kliuchevskii, the whole history of Russia was bound up with its colonizing endeavour and its heroic transformation into a great imperial state equal to the greatest powers of Central or Western Europe. To many West European observers, on the other hand, Russia often seemed a

If in Israel Jews were ungovernable, in the Diaspora they were unconquerable.

Far from imagining a common supremacy over the rest of Eurasia, European statecraft was obsessed with intramural conflicts. Symptomatically, the wealth of the New World was used to finance the dynastic ambitions of the Old.