Beyond the Amur
Frontier Encounters between China and Russia, 1850–1930
Beyond the Amur charts the pivotal role that an overlooked frontier river region and its environment played in Qing China’s politics and Sino-Russian relations.
Description
Beyond the Amur describes the distinctive frontier society that emerged in the Amur, a river region that shifted between Qing China and Imperial Russia as the two empires competed for resources. Official histories depict the Amur as a distant battleground caught between rival empires. Zatsepine, by contrast, views it as a unified natural economy populated by Chinese, Russian, Indigenous, Japanese, Korean, Manchu, and Mongol people who crossed the border in search of work or trade and who came together to survive a harsh physical environment. This colourful account of a region and its people highlights the often-overlooked influence of frontier developments on state politics and imperial policies and histories.
Reviews
For those interested in Sino-Russian relations or Northeast Asia generally, Beyond the Amur provides considerable background on a huge, yet still largely undocumented, region. More generally, it serves as a reminder that our current world of highly securitised borders, with strict control of passage, is relatively recent and perhaps anomalous.
- Peter Gordon
By employing a cross-border perspective, Zatsepine's monograph is refreshing, as most previous studies have limited their scope to one side of the river.
- Sören Urbansky, German Historical Institute
Beyond the Amur is an enjoyable read, with stories of informal networks across the border, of the individuals whose life stories usually remain outside official narratives… The book will be of interest of historians of border zones and to historians of Russia and China as well as to the general reader.
- Anna Belogurova, Freie Universität