The project explores the vital encounters among Russians, Finns, Swedes and Germans in the Russian Empire's Finnish borderland over the course of the 18th century. Looking at Russia's and Sweden's struggle for control over the Finnish lands - the culmination of an already centuries-old European conflict over political and economic dominance of the Baltic Sea - she strives to uncover the essential background to Russia's transformation into an empire and Finland's development as a modern nation-state. More broadly, it investigates ideas of national territory and identity as they evolved within the ascendent Russian empire, thus revisiting the nature of early Imperial Russia and its relationship with Western Europe.