I use the comparison of both Russian and Qing imperial rule in their shared Central Asian frontier to investigate the nature of both empires and the concept of empire in general. The Yili- Balkhash region, the geographical focus of this work, was divided between Russia and Qing in the mid-nineteenth century into two contiguous administrative units: the Tsarist Semirech'e Province (1867--1917) and the Qing Yili-Tarbaghatai Circuit (1884--1912). The administrative systems of these two units and their reforms, the imperial education policy and the trans-regional trade in this region between the two empires are the thematic focuses.

The Russian Empire exerted direct control over its Yili-Balkhash frontier since its conquest of this region in the 1860s. The administrative system of Semirech'e Province from its beginning extended to the county level and attempted to infiltrate the local communities via native administration based on a supervised electoral system. Waves of reforms further integrated Semirech'e frontier into the imperial administrative system. In contrast, the Qing elite similarly attempted to consolidate its control in Xinjiang by applying the more centralized administrative system of China Proper. Such efforts were obstructed by both the perennial financial constraints and the bureaucratic rivalries between Yili and Urumqi, the power centers of the Bannermen and the Hunanese clique in Xinjiang respectively. By balancing these two elite groups, the Qing court was still able to maintain control over the frontier affairs in the last three decades of the empire.

From the financial perspective, both Tsarist Semirech'e and Qing Yili-Tarbaghatai heavily relied upon the subsidies from the central government. The Semirech'e administration was able to extract more local resources to support the frontier government than its counterpart in Yili-Tarbaghatai. But in general, civilian projects such as infrastructure and schooling were poorly funded in contrast to the basic expenditures of the military and the bureaucracy. Despite the limited investment in the education sector, the Semirech'e administration showed astonishingly strong commitment to spreading Russian language among the native communities, as is demonstrated in their efforts to establish schools among Dungans and Taranchis, the Qing immigrants resettled in Semirech'e around the 1880s. Oppositely, in Qing Xinjiang, the shortage of financial resources rendered similar large-scale schooling projects ineffective. Only until mid- 1900s did the Qing frontier elite in both Urumqi and Yili launch a new wave of education campaign.

Additionally, the delineation of Yili-Balkhash region and the subsequent diplomatic settlements between Russia and Qing contributed to the re-emergence of trans-regional trade between European Russia and Qing northwestern frontier. The comparatively peaceful environment, the communication and transportation infrastructure and the trans-imperial commercial privileges undergirded by empires facilitated its prosperity, a phenomenon reminiscent of the recent scholarly debates over the Silk Road. In a nutshell, albeit both Russia and Qing maintained the imperial elements such as the limited autonomy for heterogeneous ethnicities on the grassroots level and porous frontier convenient for travel and transportation, the reforms of administration system, the financial management and the education policies on both sides of the border indicated a transition to a more centralized and direct way of frontier administration, and thus I refer to Tsarist Russia and Qing in this process "nationalizing empires."