A Meeting at the Duc's: On Eighteenth-Century Russian Empire Studies after 2022

This article examines the stakes of the 2023 renaming of the Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies Association to the Eighteenth-Century Russian Empire Studies Association. It argues that this renaming helps us to re-envision the stakes of the field and to conceptualize the Russian Empire as a conceptual space bigger than and not solely connected to modern-day Russia. It does so by looking at the Duc de Richelieu’s role in the history of modern-day Odesa and his reception by Soviet, Ukrainian, and Western scholars, focusing especially on his settler colonial project.