Event Date: March 19, 2026
Biweekly research colloquium, organised by the Institute for Social and Cultural Studies at Ilia State University, on March 19, 7 pm Tbilisi time.
We will be hosting Geoffrey Durham with a talk on his research: “Georgian in Form, Tsarist in Content: Colonial Weights, Measures, and Money in the South Caucasus, 1801-45”.
Please register here if you would like to attend online.
Abstract:
As tsarist agents consolidated the empire’s hold over the South Caucasus in the first half of the nineteenth century, regional diversity in weights, measures, and money confounded the officials and soldiers on the ground. Unfamiliar units of exchange and value complicated how the army paid its soldiers and extracted grain from local populations to feed the occupying forces. This diversity mediated how the tsars’ representatives engaged with the peoples of the South Caucasus, as well as how the peoples of the South Caucasus related to one another. Beyond these immediate material factors, imperial thinking about the various currencies and measurement units reflected a larger debate about how the region and its peoples would relate to the rest of the Russian empire. Would the Southern Caucasus become a province, with standard administrative structures and laws? Or would the region constitute a unique space with its own rules and accommodations, more in line with longstanding customs? This talk will explore these dynamics and illustrate how the encounter between colonial and local powers generated a peculiar response from administrators: the standardization of local weights, measures, and money rather than the immediate imposition of imperial Russian forms. It shows that social conflict and competing conceptions of sovereignty conditioned how imperial subjects and authorities related to the standards of evaluation.
Bio:
Geoffrey Durham is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is presently a visiting scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, where he is completing a draft of his manuscript, tentatively titled, Imperial Russia and the Global Standardization of Weights, Measures, and Money. He has also begun work on a second book-length project on the history of platinum.