Negotiating Imperial Rule Colonists and Marriage in the Nineteenth-century Black Sea Steppe

Abstract: After falling under the power of the Russian Crown, the Northern Black Sea steppe from the end of eighteenth century crystallized as the Russian government’s prime venue for socioeconomic and sociocultural reinvention and colonization. Vast ethnic, sociocultural and even ecological changes followed.  Present study is preoccupied with the marriage of the immigrant population from the German lands who came to the region in the course of its state orchestrated colonization, and was officially categorized as “German colonists.” The book illuminates the multiple ways in which marriage and household formation among the colonists was instrumentalized by the imperial politics in the Northern Black Sea steppe, and conditioned by socioeconomic rationality of its colonization. Marriage formation and dissolution among the colonists were gradually absorbed into the competencies of the colonial vertical power. Intending to control colonist marriage and household formation through the introduced marriage regime, the Russian government and its regional representatives lacked the actual means to exert this control at the local level. On the ground, however, imperial politics was mediated by the people it targeted, and by the functionaries tasked with its implementation. As the study reveals, the paramount importance was given to functional households and sustainable farms based on non-conflictual relations between parties. Situated on the crossroads of state, church, community, and personal interests, colonist marriage engendered clashes between secular and ecclesiastical bodies over the supremacy over it. The interplay of colonization as politics, and colonization as an imperial situation with respect to the marriage of the German colonists is explored in this book by concentrating on both norms and practices. Another important consideration is the ways gender and colonization constructed and determined one another reciprocally, both in legal norms and in actual practices. Secret divorces and unauthorized marriages, open and hidden defiance, imitations and unruliness, refashioning of rituals and discourses, and desertions – a number of strategies and performances which challenged and negotiated the marriage regime in the region, were scholarly examined for the first time in this book.