CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2007
| Author | Taki, Victor Valentine |
|---|---|
| Title | Russia on the Danube: Imperial Expansion and Political Reform in Moldavia and Wallachia, 1812-1834 |
| Summary | This study examines the policy of the Russian Empire in Moldavia and Wallachia in the early 19th century at the moment of their transformation from medieval principalities into a modern Romanian nation-state. Originally, parts of the Danubian frontier zone defined by the Ottoman conquest, the Romanian principalities at the beginning of modern period became the object of policies of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Russian Empire, concerned with political stability and seeking to establish control over the cross-border movement of population, diseases and ideas. Frequently influenced by the agendas of various local elites, who sought to use imperial expansion for self-promotion, Russian authorities eventually embraced the course of reform of Moldavian and Wallachian institutions as a means of acquiring hegemony and solving the perennial problem of permeability of imperial frontiers. At the same time, the policies of Russian administration in the principalities in 1828-1834 were conditioned by contemporary institutional development of the Russian Empire, which reflected changing role of the nobility in the course of imitation of the institutions and practices of the Central European well-ordered police state. Outlining the prerogatives of the princely authorities and the boyar assemblies, regulating the relationships between landlords and peasants, consolidating public service, administration and general police, the Organic Statutes of Moldavia and Wallachia produced in an uneasy collaboration between Russian authorities and Romanian boyars, contributed to progressing distancing of Romanian principalities from the Ottoman Empire. Serving the instruments of Russian imperial expansion, the institutions and practices of well-ordered police state introduced by the Organic Statutes, at the same time, can be viewed as the realization of the 18th territorial state centralization and therefore represent an important stage of early political modernization of Moldavia and Wallachia. |
| Supervisor | Rieber, Alfred J. |
| Department | History PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2007/hphtav01.pdf |
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