This is a colorful overview of life on the southern frontier of the Russian empire. Leonard Friesen persuasively articulates the challenges faced by settlers to New Russia, including the harsh ecological environment of the steppe and the administrative constraints imposed by imperial authorities, as well as the challenges faced by the imperial regime itself in its attempts to attract new settlers to the territory and to govern an increasingly heterogeneous population. Friesen's book is a regional study, though not quite in the sense made famous by Goubert or Le Roy Ladurie. It is not so much an attempt to characterize underlying “immobile” structures of the region —whether cultural, economic, or geographical—with empirical precision, but, rather, a broad qualitative survey of southern Ukraine over the course of the long nineteenth century.

The regional economy plays a central role in this survey, with five of eight chapters devoted to economic issues, including agriculture, trade, and labor relations. Friesen outlines broader shifts in the macroeconomic landscape, from the rise of sheep farming and the wool trade in the earlier period to the emphasis on grain production in the later nineteenth century. But the lack of detail—especially the lack of quantitative data—is bound to frustrate the economic historian. Where Friesen might have employed wage and price data to understand the choices faced by estate owners and peasants in this region, he falls back instead on the conventional characterization of peasants as risk averse (“safety first,” pp. 70–78, 153–61) and landlords as irrational (“estate owners refused to innovate,” p. 92) and incompetent (“they simply did not know how to manage their estates,” p. 120).

Some province-level data related to grain production are provided in chapter 6, but only for the period after 1861. There are puzzling inconsistencies in the general narrative, which raise additional questions about local conditions. For example, in chapter four, Friesen portrays landlords as determined to wring all they could from their serf laborers, with some imposing labor obligations so onerous that serfs could barely find time to work their own allotments. In some cases, he notes, serfs were even denied the land required to sustain themselves (pp. 108–09). In preceding chapters, however, chronic labor shortages are emphasized repeatedly, and it is noted that landlords offered rather generous terms to induce peasants to settle on their estates (pp. 31–32). It is certainly possible, given peasants' lack of formal legal rights, that they were persuaded to settle and subsequently enserfed without recourse (as on the Buzin estate, discussed on pp. 29–30). But one wonders just how well mobility restrictions were enforced on the frontier. Why didn't serfs leave? A few pages later, we learn that, in fact, they did—in numbers large enough for the state to refer to serf vagrancy as a “crisis” (p. 110). The picture is further complicated in the next section when we are told of “the ready availability of supplemental forms of income for most peasants” (p. 119). That serfs could (and did) flee and were able to find alternative sources of income makes one wonder how representative the abusive landlords described on pp. 108–09 could have been. Such contradictions can also be found in Friesen's account of peasant agriculture, with peasants portrayed as conservative and risk-averse in the “moral economy” sense, but at the same time innovative and responsive to incentives (chapters 3 and 6).

One of the most fascinating aspects of this study concerns the variation in economic outcomes across ethnic communities. Friesen highlights these differences, noting, for instance, that Balkan colonists adapted quickly to New Russia and achieved economic success in the beginning, but fell behind Mennonites and Germans by the end of the period (pp. 49–59). In another interesting twist, noble estate owners apparently found hired labor too expensive and unreliable, while German and Mennonite colonists used labor markets quite successfully to cultivate their lands (pp. 106–07). Specialization among colonist groups was evident: Mennonites were garden farmers, Bulgarians planted vineyards, and Crimean Tatars cultivated tobacco. How can we account for such substantial variation across groups? New Russia, it appears, may well be a fertile testing ground for questions related to institutions, culture, and economic outcomes. Although this study does not address these issues explicitly, it provides some tantalizing hints. Friesen indicates, for instance, that conditions for settlement offered by the Russian state varied across colonist groups. These conditions in some cases included explicit regulations on the transfer of land (for instance, impartible inheritance was mandated among German and Mennonite settlers). In chapter 7, Friesen notes that communal land tenure practices of former serfs and state peasants affected their willingness to undertake agricultural improvements. Such differences in local institutional arrangements are especially intriguing against the backdrop of large-scale institutional change which occurred with Russian imperial expansion. While specialists will probably be disappointed by the lack of detail, this volume is effective as an overview: it is readable, at times entertaining, and raises a number of interesting questions for future research.