The Urge to the Sea

The Urge to the Sea by Robert J. Kerner offers a sweeping reinterpretation of Russian expansion by centering the humbler infrastructures—rivers, portages, ostrogs (frontier forts), monasteries, and the fur trade—that powered a continental “urge to the sea.” Moving across the long durée from the earliest chronicles to the Muscovite and imperial frontiers, Kerner shows how waterways and portage chains linked interior heartlands to distant seas, how monastic networks anchored colonization, and how fur economies financed and incentivized movement across Eurasia. Geography, economy, religion, and statecraft emerge not as siloed explanations but as interlocking mechanisms of mobility and control. Written as a focused monograph within a larger research program on eastward expansion, the book advances a clear thesis: these material and institutional vectors formed the mechanics of empire-building, steering Russian society from river sources to ocean outlets.

Kerner situates his argument within, and against, classic historiography—acknowledging Z. Khodakovskii’s early study of communication routes, N. P. Barsov’s chronicle-based geographic insights, and S. M. Solov’ev’s seminal reflections—while probing V. O. Kliuchevskii’s notion of a self-evolving “colonization” for evidence of deliberate “river policy.” The result is both synthetic and provocative, inviting readers to reconsider causality in Russian state formation: not only grand strategy, but also the routinized labor of portaging, the siting of forts and cloisters, and the commercial magnetism of sable and sea otter pelts. With extensive notes pointing to underused sources and avenues for new research, The Urge to the Sea will engage historians of Russia and empire, historical geographers, and social scientists interested in how infrastructures and ecologies shape expansion. This is a model of rigorous, agenda-setting scholarship—concise in scope, ambitious in implication.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1942.