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The Transimperial mobility project examines the Grand Duchy of Finland as a space of transimperial mobility between the end of the Crimean War and the First World War. At that time, Finland’s position as part of the Russian Empire changed significantly, and the Russian Empire and its global position were in transition. The industrializing, bureaucratizing and colonizing empire mobilized people, objects and ideas in an unprecedented manner, thus connecting the Finnish region to transimperial networks.

In this three-year project we analyse the transimperial and cross-border mobility of people, things, and knowledge in the Grand Duchy of Finland. We focus on:

• places and materialities of controlling transimperial mobility
• local and transimperial practices of belonging of diaspora communities in the Grand Duchy of Finland
  
• the role of visual materials (maps, photographs) as producers of transimperial conceptualizations of “Finnish” spaces
  
• the transimperial mobility of knowledge and its adapting and adaptions to Finnish society
  

The project is funded by the Kone Foundation and it is undertaken at the University of Turku and the University of Helsinki in 2024-2026.

Image: Detail from Map of the Russian Empire in Europe, 1894, Dodd, Mead and Company, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons.