As different forms of imperial governance, culture and economy succeeded and replaced each other, the history of Georgia and the Caucasus unfolded at the intersection of empires. Starting with the establishment of tsarist Russian rule in the 19th century and continuing with the Georgian SSR in the Soviet Union, the empire became – albeit often unacknowledged or even repressed in the collective political consciousness – the framework within which visions of Georgian and Caucasian nationalities developed and took hold. It is within the latticework of empire that Georgia encountered various projects of modernity. As a core research area, Imperial Paradigms is devoted to untangling connections between imperial modes of knowledge, forms of power and civilizational perspectives that shaped trajectories of social and economic development within imperial and Soviet modernization projects, as well as the cultural determinants of the complex process of turning people into imperial subjects and even the general organization of space and time. Theories of empire and colonialism, as well as national, cultural and economic policies of tsarist Russia and the USSR are all primary areas of inquiry.