Isaac Scarborough is Assistant Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Institute for History.

More information about Isaac Scarborough

Fields of interest

I am an economic and social historian of the post-war Soviet and post-Soviet space with particular interests in Central Asia, Russia, and Ukraine.  My work encompasses a variety of geographies and subdisciplines, but I am generally focused on embedding Soviet and post-Soviet history in global histories and removing the divisions between the history of socialism and the history of capitalism, which I understand as intertwined and mutually supervenient.

Research

I am currently pursuing two large research projects related to the economic and social history of the 20th-century socialism.

First, the history of Soviet peripheral finance as an example of imperial (and colonial) economic development.  Rather than viewing the Soviet financial system as an outlier from global norms in the 20th century, I evaluate the monetary relationship between Moscow and the peripheral Soviet republics in Central Asia through the lens of an imperial colonial core.  This reframes the expenditures provided to Central Asian republics and the value of materials collected from the same territories in a way that is aligned with other 20th century empires and suggests a much more extractive and less developmental model of economics than has often been suggested in the literature.

To further this comparative study, I am currently working on two subprojects: first, to compare Soviet financial practices with those of other non-capitalist empires, including the Roman Empire (as part of Leiden University’s ‘Reevaluting Conceptions of Imperial Monetary Flow’ Startersbeurs project), and to develop a larger model of imperial finance deriving from these examples.  In addition, I am currently beginning a comparative study of Surinamese finance and economic development in the 20th century, using this case study of a lesser-known and less-developed imperial economy to test the model developed in Central Asia for application across colonial empires.  This last subproject has been generously funded by a recent NWO XS grant.

Second, I am also pursuing a long-term study of Soviet gerontology.  The science behind the study of ageing, gerontology overlaps with elements of geriatric medicine, cytology, developmental biology and demographics.  In the USSR, research into gerontology was largely based out of the Institute of Gerontology in Kyiv, Ukraine – but was also deeply embedded in the global development of the science over the 20th century.  Together with colleagues working on Leiden University’s ‘Human Development and its Outliers’ Startersbeurs project, I am working to consider how gerontology and the science of ageing in the USSR intersected with and influenced gerontology across the world.  

Publications

Activities