Charlotte Henze1; 1 University of Basel, Switzerland
Discussion
When Peter I conquered Sweden’s provinces around the Eastern Baltic, he subordinated a region with long-standing foreign administrative institutions as well as pre-existing juridical rules of governance. The paper focuses on the lands on the Karelian isthmus and explores how the tsarist government regulated its relationship to this newly acquired region, how it defined local communities’ status of dependency on the new dominant power, and managed the way this region allied with the rising Russian Empire. Central to the topic are questions such as how forms of local governance were both imposed and drawn into the centralizing polity; how representatives of central and local government were appointed; how competencies between imperial and local authorities were distributed; and how and to what degree the imperial government intervened in local affairs and decision making. The paper argues that it was by encouraging local forms of rulership that tsarist authorities could take over local rule and tie the region into the build up of the new imperial polity.
