Empire in Boris Mironov's 'Sotsialnaya istoriya Rossii'

A forum on Boris Mironov's Russian and English editions of The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917 (2000) offers the comments of four scholars on different aspects of Mironov's work. Willard Sunderland comments on the use of the concept of empire in Mironov's book, calling attention to the assertion that imperial Russia was a "normal" European state and that it was not a "true colonial state." The focus of the book he argues, remains Russian society within the space of the empire, not the society of the empire as a whole.