ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a wide net over the history of the Russian empire and focus on the last two decades before the Revolution of 1905. It explains the role that geography, imperialism, and competitive modernization played in accelerating social, political, and economic changes. By the late nineteenth century, a new world system was coming into effect, one in which the rate of industrialization was going to determine the wealth and military might of empires, in addition to the possession of land, natural resources, gold, and exploitative systems of labor. From the middle of the nineteenth century, access to education determined much of the social mobility in the Russian empire. According to Dominic Lieven, the Russian nobility, a cosmopolitan, polyglot, multiethnic elite that included representatives from both the Russian upper classes and those from the colonized areas, had a vested interest in imperial expansion.
