Metropolises of the Periphery: Imperial Visions and Local Dynamics of Urban Modernisation in Vilnius, Tbilisi and Toshkent, 1865–1914

Cities have long attracted the interest of historians as places where social change becomes particularly visible. Especially with regard to the age of urbanisation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cities have been explored as laboratories of modernisation where new visions of social and political order were discussed and put into practice: Social historians studied cities as sites of an emerging modern class society and social conflict; cultural historians have been interested in cities as places of cultural diversity, nation-building, and struggles over representation. More recently, urban historians have increasingly focused on how the material, spatial, and infrastructural dimensions of the city shaped these social and cultural conflicts associated with ‘modernisation’.

In imperial peripheries, urban ‘modernisation’ acquired a particular significance because it shaped relations between imperial administrators and local actors. Imperial administrators could use urban development projects to assert their supposed civilisational superiority and thus to legitimise imperial rule. Local actors, however, could appropriate and reshape such projects, claim their own forms of ‘modernisation’, challenge imperial definitions of civilisation, or reject the concept of ‘modernisation’ altogether.

The project examines these processes in the late Russian Empire by comparing the development of three cities: Vilnius, Tbilisi, and Toshkent. While the three cities were similar in terms of population size, ethnic diversity, and their function as political centres in geopolitically exposed parts of the empire, they represent three imperial peripheries where the relationship between imperial and local actors is often depicted in radically different ways. Russian rule in Central Asia, on the one hand, is commonly understood as a classical case of colonialism: Imperial administrators invoked the idea of a civilising mission and presented urban development as evidence of the legitimacy of imperial rule. In the Western borderlands, on the other hand, Russian imperialism has more often been interpreted as an impediment to processes of ‘modernisation’ that could potentially threaten imperial stability. The South Caucasus, finally, can be characterised as a semicolonial space where both dynamics were present simultaneously. Comparing these three cases makes it possible to examine whether such distinctions remain convincing when the focus shifts from large-scale imperial categories to everyday urban practices and interactions.

Relying on administrative sources, the local press, and contemporary travelogues, the project investigates three interconnected arenas in which claims to urban modernity were articulated and negotiated: urban planning and infrastructural development; urban biopolitics, particularly healthcare and public hygiene; and the emergence of an urban public sphere and associated practices of censorship. Rather than treating imperial and local actors as homogeneous or assuming a one-directional diffusion of ‘modernisation’ from the imperial centre to the periphery, the project traces processes of cooperation and appropriation as well as contestation and conflict.

In doing so, the project reconstructs the emergence of urban modernity in the late Russian Empire’s borderlands as a product of entangled imperial and local practices. It thereby seeks to  reassess the differentiated character of Russian imperial rule and to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the empire’s coloniality across its European and Asian peripheries.