In return the Don Cossacks preserved their most important autonomies: independent military regiments, local self-government (with Russian oversight), tax-free status, and exclusive landholding. They became an exclusive, territorially bound group that called itself already in the eighteenth century a "people" (narod). The highest among them became a wealthy landholding class with enserfed Russian or Ukrainian peasants; the ataman position become de facto hereditary in a few families. Social inequities between the wealthy elite and impoverished lesser Cossacks sharpened over the century. In 1775 after the Don Cossacks had served loyally in the Pugachev rebellion, Governor-General G. A. Potemkin reorganized Don Cossack government, paralleling in some ways the 1775 administrative reforms but different enough to perpetuate the Host's autonomous status. Potem- kin introduced a Host Civilian government in the form of a collegial chancery, much like those at the gubernia level elsewhere. It was composed of the ataman and six Cossack members, paid by state salary, and subordinate to the governor-general, who also de facto oversaw the military deployment of the Host under the ataman's putative authority. St. Petersburg retained significant oversight, but the provision of elected assessors from the Don Cossack elders maintained some autonomy. Potemkin both introduced mechanisms to regularize access to office status and also moved to equate the Don Cossack officer elite with the Russian nobility, paralleling the 1775 reform's reliance on noble officials. In 1796 all Don Cossack officers were given noble rank.
In many ways the Don Cossacks were the most successful of the many Cossack Hosts under Russian control since they preserved culture and territory across generations. Catherine II founded a Guards Regiment of Don Cossacks to reward those who had stayed loyal during the Pugachev rebellion and by the next generation, educated Don Cossacks were writing histories extolling the Don Cossacks' long devotion to tsar and empire. They maintained their military autonomies and fought prominently in the tsar's service to the end of the empire, becoming identified with fervent Russian nationalism and devotion to the tsar. But they had also evolved significantly from their original autonomies and military esprit de corps. Over the eighteenth century, the starshina elite became wealthy on Russian favor, noble status, landed wealth, and living the life ofcountry gentlemen; the rank and file was falling into poverty, unable to carry out military service. Reforms in the 1830s were needed to reorganize the Don economy and redesign military training so that the Host could maintain its privileged status as honored irregulars in the tsar's service.
Russia's imperial expansion eastward and into the steppe required "middle ground" intermediaries to accomplish the task of control. Local tribes were conquered and co-opted, Cossacks were recruited and granted degrees of autonomy, native communities retained economic and political privileges. In the eighteenth century the state tried to move Cossack Hosts under more direct military control, but they remained irregular regiments in the overall army, with enduring autonomies. At the same time Russia encouraged, or directly participated in, the movement of East Slavs into these borderlands. Over the eighteenth century these lands were still highly diverse in strategies of imperial control, but becoming more integrated into the whole.
For population statistics see B. N. Mironov and Ben Eklof, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000). V. M. Kabuzan has published in Russian a series of demographic studies from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries; they include studies of Novorossiia, the Far East, and Crimea, as well as studies of German and Moldavian settlements. His most general works survey all the peoples of the empire: Narody Rossii v XVIII veke. Chislennost' i etnicheskii sostav (Moscow: Nauka, 1990) and Emigratsiia i reemigratsiia v Rossii v XXVIII—nachale XXX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1998).
Broad approaches to Russia's multi-ethnic empire: Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History, trans. Alfred Clayton (Harlow: Longman, 2001); John W. Slocum, "Who, and When, Were the Inorodtsy? The Evolution of the Category of 'Aliens' in Imperial Russia," Russian Review 57 (1998): 173-90; Judith Pallot and Denis J. B. Shaw, Landscape and Settlement in Romanov Russia, 1613—1917 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
On Russia's foreign policy and expansion: John LeDonne, The Russian Empire and the World, 1700—1917: The Geopolitics of Expansion and Containment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) and The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 1650—1831 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). On expansion into Urals and Caspian steppe: Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500—1800 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002); Yuriy Malikov, Tsars, Cossacks, and Nomads: The Formation of a Borderland Culture in Northern Kazakhstan in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Berlin: KS, Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2011); Martha Brill Olcott, The Kazakhs (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 1986); Alton Donnelly, "The Mobile Steppe Frontier: The Russian Conquest and Colonization of Bashkiria and Kazakhstan to 1850," in Michael Rywkin, ed., Russian Colonial Expansion to 1917 (London: Mansell, 1988), 189-207; Alton S. Donnelly, The Russian Conquest of Bashkiria, 1552—1740 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968). A Russian account provides great detail on the conquest of Bashkiria: N. N. Petrukhintsev, Vnutrennaia politika Anny Ioannovny (1730—1740) (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2014). Scientific travel account: Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin, Astrakhan Anno 1770: Its History, Geography, Population, Trade, Flora, Fauna and Fisheries, trans. and ed. Willem M. Floor (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2013). The third volume of Sergei Aksakov's Family Chronicle trilogy (1856-8), entitled "Childhood Years of Grandson Bagrov," is a memoir of Russian settlement in Bashkiria. On the Islamic renaissance of late eighteenth century, see Allen J. Frank, "Russia and the Peoples of the Volga-Ural region: 1600-1850," in