The first Europeans reached North America from the east, while the first Russians arrived from the west. Did this matter? In each case, the newcomers came by sea. They reconnoitered the coasts and soon found themselves dependent upon, curious about, and in different ways repulsed by the peoples they came across. Yet for all the similarities the two openings of America were also different, not least because the mental maps one makes of new places are inevitably shaped by the old places one comes from. Geographic discovery unfolds in the encounter between the cultural imagination and the physical world. It follows, then, that different cultures discover differently.

Martina Winkler's imaginative study of Russia's engagement with Alaska in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a stimulating exposé of this sort of “new spatial history.” The basic questions she addresses are familiar—how and why did the Russians establish their power in what became Russian America and how did this (for them) unusual overseas territory “fit” with the rest of their country's otherwise continental domain? Yet Winkler's approach to these questions is fresh and original. Despite the talk over the last decade or so about an influential “spatial turn” in historical studies, most historians continue to treat geographical space much as they always have—as a setting for the action rather than the action itself. Winkler's position is just the opposite: for her, space commands the stage as the leading player.

Indeed, the whole thrust of the book is to unpack the history of Russian North American expansion as a spatial exercise. As Winkler notes, the eighteenth century, Russia's own mini Age of Exploration, was “a time not only of accelerating modernization but also of intensive territorialization.” (15) The creation of what would become Russian America was thus part of a broader process of territory-making, which was itself integral to the country's emergence as a modern state. Winkler explores how this territorialization dynamic operated in the Russian American context by delving into a series of discreet yet overlapping themes: the representation of space in maps and textual sources; the politics of claiming people and territory; the significance of the sea as a seemingly distinct spatial realm; changes in the shape and meaning of continental space (America versus Asia); and the problem of geographical distance.

In most of the chapters, Winkler works chronologically, moving from the beginnings of European-style exploration in the Petrine era to the apogee of tsarist power in North America in the mid-1800s. In her final chapter, she then turns to the sale of Alaska, which she argues was as much a spatial decision as an economic or political one. As she notes, “spatial orderings” (Raumordnungen) were always critical to Russian expansion. To Mikhail Lomonosov and other influential Russians of the 1700s, the North Pacific represented a promising imperial “niche”—“a zone of movement and action” (Bewegungs-und Aktionraum)—as well as a bridge to other horizons (309). In the 1800s, however, the perceived dividing line between North America and Asia grew starker, with the former increasingly associated with the US and the latter with Russia. Russian America thus gradually morphed into an “alien body,” a place that seemed out of place, and the new “niche” for empire shifted to the Amur (303).

This is a wonderful scholarly book, a true intellectual feast for readers interested in Russian America in particular and in Russian geography and tsarist expansion more generally. Winkler situates her work at the crossroads between imperial, global, and spatial history, and appears fully at home in all three historiographies. The book abounds with useful interventions—the argument that Russian territorialization was unavoidably shaped by the “inherent dynamism and unevennesses of the empire” (67), for example, or her critique of the long-standing assumption that Russians felt at sea on the sea and were more comfortable with terrestrial expansion. (131–32, 138). In fact, as Winkler suggests, the seemingly natural contrast we draw between visions of land power on the one hand and sea power on the other has to be carefully historicized—the “othering” of maritime space, she contends, is more a story of the nineteenth century than the eighteenth.

Beyond larger arguments of this sort, however, one of the pleasures of reading this book are its bountiful fascinating vignettes and details. Virtually every chapter offers familiar sources opened by Winkler in new and revealing ways. One example: Stepan Krashchennikov's famous Opisanie zemli Kamchatki (1755), which though clearly a showcase text of the “modern” territoriality of the times, nonetheless, Winkler reminds us, has a lot to do with describing rivers, which was itself a much older way of making sense of space. The book thus reflects a continuum of Russian “spatial logic” (Raumlogik) rather than a revolutionary departure. (41–43).

Another is the German-American artist Emanuel Leutze's much-reproduced painting of the signing of the Alaskan Treaty of Cessation (1867), which depicts Russian ambassador to the US Baron Eduard de Stoeckl and US Secretary of State William Seward together with other officials as they deliberate the deal. The painting is chock-a-block with geographical signage—the semiotics of an auspicious territorial moment are hard to miss. Yet Winkler points to a telling detail I had never caught before despite many years of showing the painting in classes. Looking closely, it's clear that Leutze has turned the massive globe at the center of the canvas just enough to have Alaska bask in a luminous glow, while the edges of Siberia and the Bering Sea appear in the margins, almost out of sight, the perfect angle, in effect, for underscoring that Alaska indeed rightfully “belonged” to North America rather than to the worlds of Northeast Asia or the North Pacific (297–98).

Winkler's creative feel for her subject comes through in this small moment and many others besides. She has written a special, thought-provoking work that deserves a wide readership.