Offers a reconstruction of the social, cultural and legal history of the Middle Horde Kazakh steppe in the 19th century using largely untapped archival records from Kazakhstan and Russia and contemporary reports. It explores the cross-cultural encounter of laws, customs and judicial practices in the process of Russian empire-building at the local level.

Offers a reconstruction of the social, cultural and legal history of the Middle Horde Kazakh steppe in the 19th century using largely untapped archival records from Kazakhstan and Russia and contemporary reports. It explores the cross-cultural encounter of laws, customs and judicial practices in the process of Russian empire-building at the local level.

The Hungry Steppe examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime: the Kazakh famine of 1930–33. More than 1.5 million people, a quarter of Kazakhstan's population, perished. Yet the story of this famine has remained mostly hidden from view. Sarah Cameron reveals this brutal story and its devastating consequences for Kazakh society. Through extremely violent means, the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan, a stable territory with clear boundaries that was an integral part of the Soviet economy; and it forged a new Kazakh national identity. But ultimately, Cameron finds, neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves integrated into Soviet society the way Moscow intended. The experience of the famine scarred the republic and shaped its transformation into an independent nation in 1991. Cameron examines the Kazakh famine to overturn several assumptions about violence, modernization, and nation-making under Stalin, highlighting the creation of a new Kazakh national identity and how environmental factors shaped Soviet development. Ultimately, The Hungry Steppe depicts the Soviet regime and its disastrous policies in a new and unusual light.

Originally published in 1953, this book records the Customary Law of the Sukuma tribe and discusses the differences in law whcih grew up in the various local federations, with the aim of unifying Customary Law for both the Tanzanians and European colonial authorities. The material is presented in short paragraphs which are connected logically to each other, but each of which can stand by itself if it should be necessary to quote it in a judgment.

The Russian Empire presented itself to its subjects and the world as an Orthodox state, a patron and defender of Eastern Christianity. Yet the tsarist regime also lauded itself for granting religious freedoms to its many heterodox subjects, making 'religious toleration' a core attribute of the state's identity. The Tsar's Foreign Faiths shows that the resulting tensions between the autocracy's commitments to Orthodoxy and its claims to toleration became a defining feature of the empire's religious order. In this panoramic account, Paul W. Werth explores the scope and character of religious freedom for Russia's diverse non-Orthodox religions, from Lutheranism and Catholicism to Islam and Buddhism. Considering both rhetoric and practice, he examines discourses of religious toleration and the role of confessional institutions in the empire's governance. He reveals the paradoxical status of Russia's heterodox faiths as both established and 'foreign', and explains the dynamics that shaped the fate of newer conceptions of religious liberty after the mid-nineteenth century. If intellectual change and the shifting character of religious life in Russia gradually pushed the regime towards the acceptance of freedom of conscience, then statesmen's nationalist sentiments and their fears of 'politicized' religion impeded this development. Russia's religious order thus remained beset by contradiction on the eve of the Great War. Based on archival research in five countries and a vast scholarly literature, The Tsar's Foreign Faiths represents a major contribution to the history of empire and religion in Russia, and to the study of toleration and religious diversity in Europe.

An analysis of law and imperial rule reveals that Tsarist Russia was far more 'lawful' than generally assumed.