In Claiming Crimea, Kelly O'Neill traces the contours between the imagined garden landscapes of artistic provenance and the social, cultural, political, and environmental realities of the Russian annexation of the Crimean peninsula from 1783 through the onset of the Crimean War in 1853. To chart the “transition from khanate to Russian province” (2), O'Neill has deftly gathered all manner of travel descriptions, memoirs, charts, maps, illustrations, judicial documents, trade accounts, clan histories, and imperial correspondence and decrees, teasing from the sources a vivid portrait of a resilient Crimean society wrestling with the processes of Russian empire building in its first seventy years under tsarist rule. This is a gracefully written study and an important addition to the growing literature on Russian imperial borderlands. It asks critical questions about the experience of empire: How did Crimeans wield influence on the ground for policies drafted in St. Petersburg? What limitations (and opportunities) did the unique natural environment of the region pose for imperial rule? In what ways did imperial power penetrate the day-to-day lives of native Crimeans governed by their separate cultural norms and customs—in this case largely Islamic and Tatar, but also Greek, Armenian, and Karaite? Throughout, O'Neill maintains a focus on “the crucial binary of empire: preservation and transformation” (29).

The book's five lengthy chapters focus on issues of imperial authority, “elite integration” (84), military service, landownership, and trade and commerce. Russian rulers, governors, and events move to the background in the narrative as the transformations of the physical space and the complex and layered interactions between Crimean natives, Russian officials, settlers, and traders come to the fore. In O'Neill's telling of it, the imperial process was one of continual improvisation within constantly shifting parameters. She demonstrates that the smallest units of development and interaction provide the basis for understanding the larger picture: metrical registers, a Muslim shrine, “micro-landscapes,” (166), and local coasting vessels. Crucially, O'Neill's scholarship rests upon material from the local archive in Crimea; here is where the stories are, where the day-to-day challenges come into focus. Her sensitivity to the human stories behind the history and landscape of Crimea, and to the instrumentality of these stories to her arguments, brings her impressive scholarly analysis to life.

Larger arguments include the profound role that the Crimean Tatars had on their own fate under Russian rule. To impose institutions of imperial authority in Tavrida province, Russian governors had to recognize Crimean traditions and gain the cooperation and allegiance of the local hereditary elites, the mirzas (52). To formalize local noble status, Russian officials depended on the documentation that the mirzas could provide, ensuring a general continuity of the structure of Crimean elite society on the peninsula from the pre-annexation period (101–9). The irregular, voluntary Crimean Tatar military regiments had an impact on the structure of Crimean society that far outweighed the insignificant number of those who served; military service was the most effective path toward rank, wealth, and local power (155–56). Most interesting for this reader was the fourth chapter on landownership, which became a tangle of contested boundaries as the imperial government handed out land parcels (dachas) in only approximate locations. The lack of precise surveys of the region yielded chaos on the ground with overlapping jurisdictions, unwritten customary ownership, and multiple parties claiming rights in over six hundred filed property disputes by 1803 (189). The General Land Survey of Crimea was not complete until 1843, and even then provided little headway in “untangling the snarl of legal, cultural, ethnic, and geographic variables” (213). Finally, economic activity was enormously difficult for the empire to track and control, with local coasting and cabotage trade profiting stupendously from even the smallest items of contraband, such as Turkish buttons or copper rings (237–38). Overall, the Crimean peninsula in the imagination of Russian rulers, travelers, mapmakers, and policy-makers rarely conformed to the reality on the ground.

The world described in Claiming Crimea ceased to exist when two-thirds of the Tatar population left their homeland following the devastation of the Crimean War. After seventy years, they had decided that their “ambiguous relationship” with the Russian Empire was no longer worth the effort (276). O'Neill leaves the reader with a poignant mention of Russia's reannexation of Crimea in 2014—the most recent reconfiguration of this “contested and all-too-often imagined space” (291). A must read by all who want to further understand the intricate workings of Russian empire building, this book will also serve as a model for recreating imperial spaces from multifaceted sources and perspectives.