Today’s blog entry is about choices. How do you choose the period you focus on in your historical research, and which regions – in an empire as vast and diverse as the Russian one – do you select as case studies? More than that: What exactly is the case study? Is it the region itself, a particular group of the population in that region, or specific experiences made and shared by this population? In what follows, I would like to show why these questions are important and how they have affected my work over the years.

My research on law and legal practice in the Russian Empire has focused on courts in Crimea and the Middle Volga region around Kazan from the mid-1860s to the mid-1890s (for my recent monograph, look here). The two regions stood out for their cultural diversity and were home to sizable populations of Muslim Tatars. There are both practical and historiographical reasons for this spatial and temporal focus, which I explain below. I will also address the question to which degree my study can be considered a comparison of two regions. But let me start with the temporal focus.