Beyond the Amur describes the distinctive frontier society that emerged in the Amur, a river region that shifted between Qing China and Imperial Russia as the two empires competed for resources. Official histories depict the Amur as a distant battleground caught between rival empires. Zatsepine, by contrast, views it as a unified natural economy populated by Chinese, Russian, Indigenous, Japanese, Korean, Manchu, and Mongol people who crossed the border in search of work or trade and who came together to survive a harsh physical environment. This colourful account of a region and its people highlights the often-overlooked influence of frontier developments on state politics and imperial policies and histories.

Victor Zatsepine's profile page

Victor Zatsepine is an assistant professor of modern Chinese history at the University of Connecticut and the co-editor of Harbin to Hanoi: The Colonial Built Environment in Asia, 1840 to 1940.

For those interested in Sino-Russian relations or Northeast Asia generally, Beyond the Amur provides considerable background on a huge, yet still largely undocumented, region. More generally, it serves as a reminder that our current world of highly securitised borders, with strict control of passage, is relatively recent and perhaps anomalous.

Asian Review of Books