Sören Urbansky makes a critical contribution to conceptions of China and Russia's shared border in this study, which brings together key debates and methods of both China studies/Sinology and Russian studies with the interdisciplinary analysis of how groups and individuals deal with the borders imposed upon them.1 Urbansky focuses on the history of political, economic, and social contact in the Argun River region to substantiate his broader argument that both people and states jointly created the Sino-Russian border (p. 2).
The body of this monograph consists of eight chapters presenting a centuries-long narrative of how people who had “Russian” and “Chinese” identities, or were considered neither Chinese nor Russian, maintained economic and social relationships in all types of political weather. Chapter 1 introduces how Russian and Chinese imperial subjects interacted from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century, such as Cossacks and Qing bannermen who worked against and with...
