This item has FREE SHIPPING to any address in NZ

NOTE: Item will ship from our Australian warehouse. A handling time of 2-4 business days applies for all orders. Delivery will then take 3-7 working days.

A Public Empire

Condition: BRAND NEW ISBN: 9780691159058 Author(s): Ekaterina Pravilova Format: Hardcover Year: 2014 Publisher: Princeton University Press Dimensions: 152 x 33 x 229 (w x l x h) Pages: 448

BUYER OFFERS: We are a retail store with set pricing and unfortunately we can't fulfil any requests to sell items for less than the listed price.

Description: 'Property rights' and 'Russia' do not usually belong in the same sentence. Rather, our general image of the nation is of insecurity of private ownership and defenselessness in the face of the state. Many scholars have attributed Russia's long-term development problems to a failure to advance property rights for the modern age and blamed Russian intellectuals for their indifference to the issues of ownership. A Public Empire refutes this widely shared conventional wisdom and analyzes the emergence of Russian property regimes from the time of Catherine the Great through World War I and the revolutions of 1917. Most importantly, A Public Empire shows the emergence of the new practices of owning 'public things' in imperial Russia and the attempts of Russian intellectuals to reconcile the security of property with the ideals of the common good. The book analyzes how the belief that certain objects--rivers, forests, minerals, historical monuments, icons, and Russian literary classics--should accede to some kind of public status developed in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. Professional experts and liberal politicians advocated for a property reform that aimed at exempting public things from private ownership, while the tsars and the imperial government employed the rhetoric of protecting the sanctity of private property and resisted attempts at its limitation. Exploring the Russian ways of thinking about property, A Public Empire l