The nineteenth-century connections between changing imperialism, the environment and farming shaped Russia’s path to become one of the world’s largest agricultural producers. In order to understand what role livestock played in the imperial Russian conecption of agricultural modernisation between 1861 and 1905, this paper compares the agrarian transformation in two peripheral regions: Livland on the Baltic coast and Ufa (Bashkiria) near the Kazakh steppe. The agrarian transformations in these regions have been dicussed from classic political, legal and economic perspectives. But drawing on New Political and New Imperial Histories, I see land use itself as political and argue that the politics of livestock production were not equal across the empire. These depended on local political constellations, socioeconomic differences and the position of those handling livestock in imperial cultural hierarchies.
The governorates of Ufa and Livland had always been in the margins of the margins of the imperial core, one ‘Eastern’ and the other ‘European’ from a Russian point of view; and each province had served as ‘testing grounds’ for imperial rule. By the middle of the nineteenth century, both provinces were in the process of significant polical-administrative changes, the outcomes of which were by no means clear. Unlike many other groups within the Russian empire, the traditional non-Russian landowners in both Ufa and Livland had acquired a strong position with regardd to landholding. But when the empire sought to integrate the rule and economies of its various territories and increase control over its subjects, the landholding elites of Ufa and Livland were not equally able to engage with Russia’s modernising polices, leading to very different results for agriculture and livestock production between these regions. Using statistical reports, scientific publications and journals of societies for agricultural modernisation and for animal welfare, the paper illustrates how Livland and Ufa, while both experienciing similar ‘rationalising’ interventions of the imperial centre, displayed opposite trends in livestock production as a result of the reshuffling of the empire’s order and which simultaneously further impacted the direction of these political changes.