The western provinces can be divided into two zones according to their relationship to Rome, the center of power: a Mediterranean zone in which contacts via the sea prevailed, and a continental and oceanic zone separated by the Alps from Italy. In a few provincial areas, the density of cities comes close to those of the regions of Italy and of the east that had long since been urbanized. Like the city, the villa can be seen as a factor of economic development or as a parasitic structure expressing the elites' domination of the countryside. In the role division of city and country, the political functions are carried out by the city; the productive functions are divided between villa for agricultural production, and the vicus for most craft production. Centuriated, divided, distributed or rented out, these new lands considerably increased the size of the ager (the cultivated territory within the Roman empire).

Almost from its inception, Russia has been a multinational state. Long before anyone spoke of the Russian Empire, a designation that dates from the latter part of Peter I's reign, a variety of ethnic groups lived in territories claimed by the Muscovite tsar. However, the very concepts of nations and nationality, now considered a central element of human identity, were largely absent in Imperial Russia, at least until the later nineteenth century. Tsar Nicholas I is perhaps best known for the tripartite formula Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality thought up by his minister of education, Sergei Uvarov. Tsarist policy in the post-1863 decades would aim to secure the Russian position in the Kingdom of Poland, or as it was now officially called, the Vistula Land, while limiting Catholic and Polish influences in the Western Provinces. This policy, both in this region and throughout the empire, has been described as Russification. The First World War in the east was fought in non-Russian regions.

The Roman empire produced a lot of movement of people, and it was this that gave scope to the spread of so-called mystery religions, almost all cults derived from the ancient cultures of the Near East. The heart of Roman religion continued to be the traditional ceremonies of the ancestral religion as practised at Rome. Under the Flavians, the process by which each province acquired a provincial assembly and festivals of the imperial cult was completed in the western provinces. The importance of the so-called oriental or mystery cults is greater than the numerical strength of their followers, perhaps never more than a small fraction of the population. This is because these cults, despite the comparatively small numbers and relatively modest social level of their membership, did express, if in different ways and to different degrees, 'the new mood' which was to dominate the religion of the empire through to the triumph of Christianity.