Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire brings together innovative scholarship on the history of the Russian Empire from the time of Peter the Great to the 1880s. The collection introduces a variety of methodologies to the field, including demography, family and gender studies, legal history, microhistory, and semiotics, and explores neglected topics, such as the reading public, the imperial family, missions and missionaries, educational and scholarly societies, and religion. Essays address the symbolic politics of autocracy, the lived experience of people in both central and outlying regions, the institutional foundations of the empire, and the debates sustained in public discussions of the polity. Broad chronological, methodological, and topical coverage combined with analysis of the possibilities for a more expansive understanding of imperial Russia make this volume an ideal resource for students and scholars working in this field.