Abstract:
My dissertation A Sweet History in Bitter Times: Refining Sugar in the Transnistrian Borderlands (1898-2015) traces the ground-level impacts that repeated changes of borders and political regimes had on the social, economic, and technological conditions at the Rybnitsa Sugar Factory in the Transnistrian region of the Republic of Moldova. This carefully chosen location offers a different kind of transnational history. From its founding in 1898, the Rybnitsa Sugar Factory never moved, but found itself consecutively subject to the authority of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union’s Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the World War II Romanian occupation regime, the post-war Soviet Union’s Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, and today’s contested Transnistrian region in the independent Republic of Moldova.
