| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Siberia is an immense territory that stretches for over 12.4 million square kilometers from the eastern slopes of the Urals to the Pacific Ocean. It took Russia more than four hundred years to develop this land in what proved to be the most ambitious colonization effort in history, during which one European people inhabited an area spanning from the eastern edge of Europe to the middle of North America's Pacific coast. Today Siberia's territory is large enough to easily accommodate any contemporary country. At the peak of the expansion (including Russian Alaska) this "European offshoot" (a term coined by Angus Maddison to denote territories occupied by European powers and subsequently inhabited mostly by descendants from Europe) was larger than the New World's Spanish colonies from Cape Horn to California and Texas, and could incorporate British territories in Asia three times over.
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