Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung

by Anton Kotenko (Düsseldorf)

The workshop ‘Layers of Empire: Romanov Imperial Thematic Cartography’ took place at ZiF from 26-27 May 2025. The event was co-organised by Catherine Gibson (University of Tartu), Anton Kotenko (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf), and Martin Jeske (Berlin State Library), and brought together an interdisciplinary group of anthropologists, geographers, surveyors, historians, and political scientists from Estonia, Germany, the UK, and the USA to critically examine the potential of history of cartography of the Romanov Empire to illuminate understudied aspects of the empire’s past.

The workshop opened with a keynote lecture by Luca Scholz (University of Manchester) on “Density and Dilution: Mapping the Old Reich.” Encouraging participants to think about the workshop’s theme from a comparative perspective, the lecture introduced us to several methodological approaches to working with maps on the example of the Holy Roman Empire.

The first bedrock geology map of the territory of today’s northern Estonia, published in 1858 by Carl Friedrich Schmidt. Source: Carl Friedrich Schmidt, Untersuchungen über die silurische Formation von Ehstland, Nord-Livland und Oesel (Dorpat: Laakmann, 1858). Courtesy of the National Library of Estonia Digital Archive, http://www.digar.ee/id/et/nlib-digar:330247

Over the next two days, participants engaged in in-depth discussions of draft chapters for a planned collaboratively authored book. Spanning the vast continent of Eurasia, the Romanov Empire generated enormous amounts of data, ranging from population statistics and barometric measurements to depths of rivers and heights of mountains. The workshop charted the ways in which mapmakers used cartography to organise and analyse this information. Through mapping, they contributed to different ways of thinking about the empire, by looking at it across various scales (topographic and property maps), thinking relationality about connecting flows and networks (maritime maps and maps of ways of communication), temporalising the empire by looking at stratified layers of data (geological and archaeological maps), overcoming terracentrism by drawing attention to its verticality (maps of elevation and atmosphere), and spatially categorising its inhabitants (ethnographic and urban social statistical maps). Meanwhile, other mapmakers continued to map the world according to different epistemological perspectives and/or subverted emerging cartographic norms to encourage alternative imaginaries (indigenous and anarchist maps).

The workshop provided a stimulating forum for detailed discussions of each of the chapters in progress and for working out a coherent vision for how our texts fit together and speak to one another. The event concluded by planning the next steps to continue our collaboration and brainstorming ideas for other possible chapters that emerged from the discussion. We are deeply grateful to ZiF for their generous support, warm hospitality, and for fostering an inspiring environment for scholarly exchange.