Oxford University Press, USA
The Ruble: A Political History
Key Metrics
- Ekaterina Pravilova
- Oxford University Press, USA
- Hardcover
- 9780197663714
- -
- -
- History > Russia & the Former Soviet Union
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Money seems passive, a silent witness to the deeds and misdeeds of its holders, but through its history intimate dramas and grand historical processes can be told. So argues this sweeping narrative of the ruble's story from the time of Catherine the Great to Lenin.
The Russian ruble did not enjoy a particularly reputable place among European currencies. Across two hundred years, long periods of financial turmoil were followed by energetic and pragmatic reforms that invariably ended with another collapse. Why did a country with an industrializing economy, solid private property rights, and (until 1918) a near perfect reputation as a rock-solid repayer of its debts stick for such a prolonged period with an inconvertible currency? Why did the Russian gold standard differ from the European model? In answering these questions, Ekaterina Pravilova argues that politics and culture must be considered alongside economic factors. The history of the Russian ruble offers an opportunity to explore the political reasons behind the preservation of a supposedly backward financial system and to show how politicians used monetary reforms to block or enact political transformations.
The Ruble is a history of Russia written in the language of money. It shows how economists, landowners, merchants, and peasants understood, perceived, and used financial mechanisms. In her sweeping account, Pravilova interprets the well-known political events of the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries--wars, attempts at constitutional transformations, revolutions--through the ideas and politics of currency reforms and offers a new history of Russia's imperial expansion and collapse.
Author Bio
A native of St. Petersburg (Russia), Professor Ekaterina Pravilova received her Ph.D. from the Russian Academy of Sciences. She was a research scholar at the Academy of Sciences, and taught history at the European University at St. Petersburg from 2002 to 2006. She joined the faculty at Princeton in the fall of 2006. Her research interests vary greatly, ranging from the development of Russian law, economy and governance, to the study of imperial art and historiography.
Pravilova’s first book Legality and Individual Rights: Administrative Justice in Russia, (2000, in Russian) explores the regimes of governance in the Russian Empire, with a special emphasis on legal relationship between the individual and the Russian absolutist state. Her second book Finances of Empire: Money and Power in Russia’s National Borderlands (2006, in Russian) analyzes budgetary and monetary relations between Russian imperial core and its borderland regions - Poland, Finland, Turkestan and Transcaucasia.
Pravilova’s third book A Public Empire: Property and the Quest for the Common Good in Imperial Russia (2014) traces the development of Russian property regimes from the time of Catherine the Great through World War I and the revolutions of 1917. This work demonstrates the emergence of a liberal (though not individualistic) vision of society joined to new practices of owning “public things” – rivers, forests, historical monuments, the objects of art and literary masterpieces.
This inquiry spotlights a phenomenon that was never fully institutionalized in Russian law but nevertheless existed in rhetoric, politics, and popular imagination – namely, the concept of “public property,” the “res publica,” a world of things to be owned by the public yet managed by the state on the public’s behalf. A Public Empire received several awards, including George L. Mosse Prize (American Historical Association), Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize (Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies), Historia Nova Prize (Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation and Academic Studies Press).
Pravilova is currently working on two projects. One of them, Imperial epistemology. Knowledge, power and authenticity in Russian politics and culture focuses on the problems of knowledge in Russian social sciences and humanities. Second project Political Money. A history of the Russian ruble (1768-1917) explores the use of money as a means of effecting or blocking fundamental political transformation, first of all - the reform of autocratic political system and the introduction of political representation. This project has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
Source: Princeton University
Photo Credit: Sameer Khan/Fotobuddy LLC.
Videos
No Videos
Community reviews
Write a ReviewNo Community reviews