Different people, equally bound by water? – the lower Don region of the 18th and 19th century as a riparian society

Abstract This paper explores the concept of riparian societies as a framework for interaction between the Don river and different neighbouring communities that emerged at the end of the 18th century, namely the Don-Cossacks, a military estate, and a growing number of Ukrainian peasants that migrated to the region since the late 17th century. While close in proximity, each community was organised by a different set of privileges and a particular socio-economic order, resembling the Russian “empire of difference” in miniature. At the turn of the 19th century, a high density of political, administrative, cultural, and economic boundaries shaped the lower Don area. The paper argues that differing from the artificial administrative imperial creation of the Don-Cossack territory and the governorate of Ekaterinoslav from above that overlapped in this region, the river liquefied social, economic, and political borders set from above, and helped to create a particular region whose diverse inhabitants formed a unique riparian society at its shores. This approach follows the trend in recent research on Eurasian empires, according to which imperial regions are not solely shaped as administrative creations “from above”, but develop from an interplay of trade, migration networks and historical geography. Behind the façade of a contradictory social and ethnic order, the lower Don territory transformed into a genuine region defined less by imperial boundaries but by a shared and often fluid set of challenges and promises of the river to its inhabitants. Thus, the paper argues for stronger attention towards the nexus between ecology and empire that not only defined agricultural production or migration, but peculiar social and ethnic orders on the peripheries of the Empire.