<>1680:1730; Southern New World colonies (future USA) | In this half century, black slaves became the backbone of agricultural economy (in connection with growing world market for tobacco and an expanding global slave trade over the previous century)
*--Of near equal importance in the earlier history of labor in the New World were indentured, or bonded, servants. These were European immigrants who, in return for passage to America, bound themselves to work there for a number of years, after which time they were to be freed. Some have said that the practice was closely related to the tradition of apprenticeship, in which a youth was assigned to work for a master in a certain trade and in return was taught the skills of the trade. But a better relationship is to slavery or serfdom. Indentured servitude was a form of bound labor in which the time duration of the condition was clearer and generally briefer. In much the same way, convicts were an important source of colonial labor; thousands of English "criminals" were sentenced to labor in the colonies for a specified period, after which time they might be freed
*--Gottlieb Mittelberger came to Pennsylvania from Germany in 1750. He later published a description of his experience as indentured servant [TXT]. Mittelberger fared better than most. His "serfdom" was as schoolmaster and organist in Philadelphia. He returned to Germany in 1754
*--"Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, and English colonists resorted to varying forms of peonage and indentured servitude before settling on slavery as the institution most suitable to developing the economic potential of newly acquired lands in the Americas" [Kolchin:2]
*--Slavery and other forms of bound labor in colonial possessions partially filled the needs of an increasingly serf-free western and central Europe
*--Eastern Europe was another matter. In Russia serfdom and the power of noble "serf owners" flourished in this half century (1680-1730). Serfdom waxed in Russia in just those decades when it was disappearing in the domestic life of the rest of Europe
*--The 17th century was the century in which there was a thriving global market for bound human labor, and not just in USA and Russia. North Africa in that century held nearly one million Europeans in slavery [2004no16:TLS:33]
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*--Kolchin, 1-17 provides the best brief combined account of the origins of slavery and serfdom
*--Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974), chapter one "The International Context of U.S. Slavery":13-37
*--George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American & South African History (1981):3-28

<>1682ja12: Mestnichestvo [ancestral hierarchy among noble state servitors to the tsarist throne in Moscow] was abolished [VSB,1:238-40]. Muscovite mestnichestvo was related to, but not to be confused with, Kievan mestnichestvo before the Mongol invasion. This much older Kievan mestnichestvo system regulated relationships among several main fortress and trade cities and their "contract" princes
*--As Moscow power and procedures evolved, the word "mestnichestvo" had taken on a different meaning, one that signified a hierarchy among noble votchinniki [patrimonial princes], especially the boyar elite in the deliberative assembly known as the "Boyar Duma" [ID]. Muscovite mestnichestvo measured and acknowledged prestige and precedence at the court of the Moscow grand prince
*--Abolition of Muscovite mestnichestvo strengthening the hand of the tsar as he sought to appoint noble government servitors as he wished, according to his needs and interests rather than in accordance with rank among aristocratic elites. It also foretold the demise of the  Boyar Duma. Indeed, the decline of votchinniki served the interests of pomeshchiki, but the larger trend was toward the eventual abolition of this two-tiered medieval elite formation
*--GO 1722ja24:Table of Ranks
\\
*--Kliuchevskii,4(4) reviews the Muscovite social/service class structure
*--Blum:137-8 describes the mestnichestvo system

<>1682:Moscow Slavonic-Greko-Latin Academy founded, representing spread of a Church renaissance, the Orthodox experience of the "great spiritual re-armament" that gripped all Europe and which, for Slavs, began at the Kiev Academy [VSB,1:248]

<>1682ap14:Old-Ritualist Archpriest Avvakum burned at stake on orders of Church
*--His autobiography became a classic of early Russian cultural history = The Archpriest Avvakum, the Life Written by Himself [Excerpts: FTS:134-181 | ZMR2:399-448 | RRC2,1:128-40 | VSB,1:259f | DMR2:322-31 | DMR3:479-88 | ZMR1:320-70| BL&T:90f]
*--The most intense years of Old-Ritualist resistance and dissent were over. They were defeated. But the effects of this great cultural rift, the Raskol [Schism], resonated on down the centuries

<>1682ap27:Russian tsar Fedor died. Several weeks of disorder followed before Sofiia was proclaimed Regent, ruling in the place of the two young heirs, Peter and Ivan
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*--Bushkovitch:80-125 (on era of Fedor)

<>1682my15:my19; Strel'tsy [Musketeers] [ID] rebelled [VSB,1:240-1]
*--The great Boyar diplomat Artamon Matveev was killed in this rebellion
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*--Bushkovitch:49-80 (on Matveev and the rebellion)

<>1682je:1689se; Sofiia reigned as Regent for youthful co-tsars Ivan V (her brother) & Peter I (her half-brother) for seven years
*--Vasilii Golitsyn a powerful influence on Sofiia (some want to call him a "Westernizer") and an ambitious but unsuccessful military leader against the Ottoman Turks in the Pontic steppes
*1723:Prince B. I. Kurakin remembered young Peter [VSB,2:311-13]
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*--Florinsky,1(12)
*--Kliuchevskii,4(1)
*--Bushkovitch:127-70 (on era of Sofiia); 170-213 (on co-tsar Peter's first years)
*--Hughes:1-21 (Sofiia)
*--Lindsey Hughes, Russia and the west : the life of a seventeenth-century westernizer, Prince Vasily Vasilevich Golitsyn (1643-1714)
*--Aleksei N. Tolstoy, Peter the Great [a novel about Peter's early life]

<>1683:Vienna, capital city of the diminished Austrian Empire, survived Ottoman Turkish siege with difficulty

<>1685:Siberian Amur River valley | Albazin ostrog [frontier fortress] created
*--Tensions between the Chinese Empire and Russia mounted in SE Siberia

<>1686:Poland and Russia (with Vasilii Golitsyn playing key role) settled long conflict. Kiev & Smolensk now formally within the boundaries of Russian tsarist authority
*--Russia sought quiet along two of its three main imperialist frontiers (westward [a European empire] and eastward [a north Asian and new-world empire]) in order to concentrate on the third (southward [a Central Asian empire])
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Main Periods of [Polish] History [in Polish]

<>1687:England | Isaac Newton published Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica. Newtonian discoveries & theories (e.g., gravity, calculus) were fundamental contributions to the "scientific revolution" and the broader and startling shifts in world view subsumed under the term "the Enlightenment" (the age of rationalism and empiricism)
*--A few years later, on a wild tour through western European capitals [ID], Russian tsar Peter I arrived in London and went straight to a meeting, not with English royalty or other grandees of the British realm, but with Isaac Newton
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*--Wagar on rationalism in the Enlightenment [TXT]

<>1687:Andrei Bezobrazov's wife wrote him letters, revealing aspects of everyday life and the experiences of an educated Russian woman [KRR:213-6]

<>1689ja:1689fe; English Convention Parliament declared "That king James II, having endeavored to subvert the constitution of the kingdom by breaking the original contract between king and people, and by the advice of Jesuits and other wicked persons having violated the fundamental laws, and having withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, has abdicated the government, and that the throne is vacant"
*--The Declaration of Rights established the "true, ancient, and indubitable rights of the people of this realm", especially that any law issued or suspended without the consent of Parliament was henceforth illegal [TXT]
*--Together, these two main events constitute what the English like to call "The Glorious Revolution"

<>1689au27:Siberia | Nerchinsk Treaty signed by Russia & China. Chinese power extended into Outer Mongolia. Russia conceded to China the left and right bank watersheds of the Amur River basin [g] and the Ili River system in Central Asia (modern-day Kazakhstan) [g]
*--Event described by Jesuit translator in Chinese service, Thomas Pereira [Lensen,Eastward:47-9 quotes from Sebes, Jesuits] Fedor Alekseevich Golovin was the Russian ambassador [DMR2:331-3]
*--Nerchinsk Treaty honored until 1843
*--Until now, Siberian expansion met no serious resistance. Now Russia came against a powerful third party, China. The indigenous, contiguous or continental phase of Russian expansion temporarily came to an end in far SE Siberia
*--"Bouncing" off China, Russia now looked harder at NE Siberia and across the North Pacific, but very tentatively, with no urgent plans. Urgency seemed to come from the south. Russia would not for a century become involved in anything like the other contemporary European overseas corporations, but its southern ambitions were a natural extension of long term trends of frontier and imperialist expansion
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*--Bushkovitch:213-55 (on Golovin and other early favorites of youthful Peter I)
*--Mark Mancall, Russia and China: Their Diplomatic Relations to 1728 (1971)

<>1689se:1695; Regency of Sofiia replaced by regency of Peter I’s mother

<>1690mr17:Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Joachim issued testament [VSB,2:361-3]

<>1692:New World colonies (future USA) MA Salem witch trials targeted certain women accused of being in league with Satan; result: a score of "witches" executed

<>1694:1696; tsar Peter I and Ivan V co-tsars for two years under regency of Peter’s mother
*1694:Peter began Russian navy [W] He was looking south toward the dominions of the Ottoman Turks and their allies, the Crimean Tatars
*1695:1696; Azov, port at the mouth of Don River [g], captured in two campaigns against Ottoman Turks, but navy weak and success very unstable
*--Folksong celebrated the event [WAL:176-7]
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*--B. H. Sumner, Peter the Great and the Ottoman Empire
*--Hughes:22-6

<>1696:1725; tsar Peter I assumed sole authority upon death of Ivan V and reigned for 29 years
*--Beginnings of Petrine transformation of old Russia [NB! avoid the term "Westernization" prior to the 19th century]
*--Peter and his vigorous plans for Russian modernization did not appear out of nowhere =
    (1) the reign of tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich (1645-1676)
    (2) the 14 years immediately preceding 1696
*--Patrick Gordon, a Scot military leader who went into Russian service, Passages from the Diary…in the Years 1635-1699
*--Early 20th-century Russian historian Pavel Miliukov [ID] assessed the legacy of Peter I [TXT]
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*--Mironov,2:366-380  compares Russia with Europe, 1700-1917, to illustrate a shared transition from "tradition" to "modernity"
*--Lindsey Hughes, Peter the Great: A Biography (2002). A series of highly readable brief essays on the leading issues and moments
*--See also his Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (1998)
*--Raeff:69-76 compares Peter I's and Catherine II's institutional reforms
*--Kliuchevskii,4(2) describes Peter's character
*--Some notes on the Vladimir Petrov movie about "Peter I"

<>1697:Siberia | Russian frontier/imperialist expansion to Kamchatka Peninsula [g] [DC&V,2 (documents cover 1700:1797)]
*--Vladimir Vasilievich Atlasov [Volodimer Otlasov], a Cossack or Ukrainian of Ustiug peasant origins, set out for Siberia where he became one of Russia's toughest and most resolute explorers. In Yakutsk [Sakha] [g] he registered to serve with the Cossacks until he was 50 years old
*1695 he was named prikashchik [overseer, technical administrator, officer of a Prikaz] of Anadyr ostrog [frontier fortress] with credentials of broad and loose implication. On the basis of information from a Cossack named Luk Morozko, Atlasov led a hundred or so indigenous yasak natives against Koriak ostrozhki [little ostrogs] and set the Russian Orthodox cross on Kanuch R. banks [BrE,3:432] "Because this venture was richly rewarding, beyond anyone’s expectations, the government sanctioned it immediately. Thus there was created a solid link between private and national interests. While at time these interests were at odds, for the most part they cooperated very closely, not only in the Russian drive across northern Asia, but also in the North Pacific and in North America" [Dmytryshyn"Russian Expansion:7]
*1700:Siberia, Yakutsk | Atlasov reported to Moscow on Kuril Islands [g] and their proximity to Japan [SIE,1:926] Atlasov had come across Japanese sailor-adventurer Dembei whose vessel was cast ashore [KEJ,6:340| SHJ,3:201-2| Beasley,MHJ:39-40] This is 1st of at least sixteen ships cast upon Russian shores [by accident or design] over the next century & half, and a source of quickening contact and understanding between Russia and Japan
*1711:Kamchatka | Atlasov was killed by workers fed up with his cruelties. Atlasov might stand for the hundreds of nameless Cossack peasant adventurers, active for a century, since the time of Yermak, a "motley band of restless riffraff", Muscovite and non-Muscovite, who crossed the Urals, defeated the forces of Siberian khan Kuchum, Imposed payment of yasak [tribute; sometimes "iasak"] on the indigenous peoples they encountered, and laid Muscovy's claim to their territories in Siberia
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*--SIE,1:926
*--Kisaki Tyohei, Eiju-maru Rosia Hyoryu Ki (TOK:1982):20-25, cited in Togawa,"Russian and Slavic":4. BBL/Plummer]

<>1697mr:1698su; Russia sent a large delegation, "the Grand Embassy", to visit west European capitals [g], led by Lefort and including tsar Peter as lowly ensign. They toured the German, Dutch and English speaking capitals of northern Europe in pursuit of allies against the Ottoman Turks, but also to observe, learn, and recruit. [CF: second great tour of Europe]
*--Peter began construction of a navy intended in future for securing the Black Sea and Crimea [map]. He ordered thousands of workers to begin construction of a canal linking the Volga and Don rivers
*--Peter's own 1717 version of this sojourn [VSB,2:313]
*--Sophia of Hanover described Peter's visit [VSB,2:313-]
*--In Vienna, about to head south to Venice, tsar Peter got word of yet another Strel’tsy revolt and dashed home to Moscow [G/1698su]
*--To the east, expansion slackened while more peaceful trade-related relationships flourished. Russian attention shifted to the southern and western frontiers. These two directions of Russian imperialist expansion (south and west) still closely entangled. Russian ambitions or defense needs to the south required peace and cooperation along western borders, but "The West" was not going to grant that to Russia

<>1698su: Strel'tsy [Musketeers] rebelled [DIR2:1-12 | DIR3:1-13] causing Peter to respond in a decisive and cruel fashion, a heavy blow against the old guard of the Muscovite military
*--Peter's most trusted associate Fedor Yur'evich Romodanovskii became the main policeman and executioner, moving into a more or less permanent role as "assistant tsar" and head of security. Patrick Gordon's diary chronicled his central role in military suppression of the Strel'tsy revolt  [TXT]
*1698se05:1699fe04; Austrian imperial envoy to Moscow Johann George Korb described Strel'tsy suppression and other court events [VSB,2:314-16]
*--The institution of elite Strel'tsy palace guards, after 150 years of existence, faded from the scene

<>1699:tsar Peter I gave Nev'ianskii zavod [factory] in Urals to Nikita Demidov. Demidov was a famous Tula area blacksmith, a commoner whose talents appealed to Peter. Demidov took Peter's grants of mines and metallurgical factories in Siberia, developed them, became rich, and was ennobled by Peter

<>1699:1700; First intense period of Peter's radical "dress code" and grooming laws. He personally and publicly sheared old-fashioned beards. Romodanovskii was subjected to this humiliation. Peter ordered everyone to remove the old long-sleeved Russian costumes and to dress in the Hungarian or German fashion. He himself wore "French" clothes
*--In these years Russian subjects were fascinated and appalled by this outrageous side of tsar Peter. Street-sheets portrayed the shaving of beards. These sheets were called Lubki [lubok in singular, meaning a broadside, chapbook, print, or advertisement based on popular imagery] [pix]
*--Peter's dress-code and grooming laws threatened traditional identity as it forced leading figures to change their whole appearance. Note that Peter lacked any interest in how merchants, peasants, or other lesser urbanites dressed or groomed themselves. These laws aimed at state-servitor elites. So, another effect followed = The extreme gap between elites and the great majority of the population was exacerbated, and the great majority interpreted Peter's secular modernization as sacrilege
*--The wide-spread rumor that the real tsar Peter had been murdered while in Europe on the Grand Embassy [ID], and that the anti-Christ or Devil had replaced him, seemed confirmed in these superficial but shocking policies. Peter was toying with appearances, yes, but this was a highly ritualistic environment, made more explosive by the corrosive effects of the now 40-year-old Raskol [Schism] and the anti-modernist fears of bearded and traditionally dressed Old-Ritualists. The groundwork was laid for the broadly held Russian cultural presumption that, while Moscow was the seat of holy Russia, the new seat of ruling power, St. Petersburg, which was founded by Peter I in the next few years, was not Russian; it was an alien or foreign city filled with alien or foreign folk
*--Peter's reforms had a definite "everyday" quality to them, but their effects were profound even when they involved the apparent superficialities of dress and grooming
*--Documents relating to attitudes and measures connected with Petrine transformation [VSB,2:363-8]
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*--Hughes:248-98 (monarchical every day life), 357-90 (Peter's personality)
*--Florinsky,1(14) deals with Peter's administrative reforms
*--Claes Peterson, Peter the Great's Administrative and Judicial Reforms: Swedish Antecedents and the Process of Reception
*--Marc Raeff, ed., Peter the Great: Reformer or Revolutionary?
*--B. H. Sumner, Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia [DK131.59]
*--Kazimierz Waliszewski, Peter the Great

<>1700:Moscow | At the death of Adrian, Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, tsar Peter refused to allow appointment of replacement
*--In this year tsar Peter did reform the Russian calendar, replacing the old Orthodox calendar with the Julian Calendar [DIR3:14]. Now secular Russia was at least in the same century and almost always in the same year as the other European nations. While the Julian Calendar was more in line with European norms, Europe was at this time moving away from the Julian Calendar in favor of the Gregorian. Every century the Julian Calendar fell one day behind the Gregorian, and as of 1700 it was eleven days behind [more on Russian calendar]

<>1700:1721; Sweden and Russia fought the "Great Northern war" for 21 years. Two young monarchs, Charles XII & Peter I, and their whole nations wasted themselves in a struggle that was to compromise the ambitions of each nation. More broadly the struggle embittered Russian-west European relations for decades and hindered modernizing reforms in both regions. Sweden suffered the most severe damage
*--Poland was caught between and declined [g]
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*--Kliuchevskii,4(3) summarized the diplomatic and military situation as a result of "Western" aggression = "Peter found himself in an awkward situation. His work at Voronezh had been completely destroyed; the fleet which had cost so much in money and effort, and which had been intended for the Black Sea, was left to rot in the ports of Azov. He had been unable to acquire Kerch, and was not firmly established in the Crimea. The canal which was to have linked the Volga with the Don, and which had been started by thousands of workmen, was abandoned [not to be completed until 1952, nearly 160 years later!]; the newly awakened aspirations of the Balkan Christians were ignored [and this situation festered for more than a century and played its role in causing WW1]; the security of southern Russia, which was menaced by the Turks, was neglected. Peter had suddenly to change fronts and move from the south to the Baltic, where a coalition against Sweden had been formed. The latest combination of events in Europe threw him, like a skittle in a game of bowls [a pin struck by a bowling ball], from the mouth of the Don to Narva and the Neva, where absolutely nothing had been organized" [61, see 151 for detail on the Volga-Don Canal project and 152 for information on the Neva-Volga project]. Kliuchevskii helps us see just how the Great Northern War undermined Russian hopes in the south and distracted Russian imperialist expansion from its opportunities to the east
*--Hughes:26-57
*--Christopher Duffy, Russia's Military Way to the West: Origins and Nature of Russia's Military power, 1700-1800
*--English-language website of the Russian Navy explains the role of sea power in the Great Northern War and the naval legacy of Peter I [W]

<>1702:Moscow | Japanese castaway Dembei met tsar Peter, who greeted and hired him to teach Japanese. Peter ordered collection of information on Japan for purposes of expanded trade. For the next quarter-century, Cossacks, hunters and government agents searched Kuril Islands looking for Japan [KEJ,6:340] Increased frequency of Russian-Japanese ventures [SHJ,3:202]
*--No doubt the full story of Russian/Japanese interaction was not recorded in surviving documents because the stingy Russian mercantilist approach to Siberian expansion made unofficial acts of exploration and trade illegal. In the same way, Japanese "National Seclusion" policy, their own form of mercantilist control over international commerce, restricted independent Japanese adventurers. These two national policies punished individual efforts to profit from an opening frontier in far eastern Siberia. Russian and Japanese entrepreneurs had to be cagey and secretive [Bychkov lecture]

<>1702de16:Saint Petersburg Vedomosti [News] became first Russian newspaper [BL&T:50f]. Russia took its place among other European peoples entering the era of print-media =
*1556:+; Italy, Venetian city officials posted Notizie scritte which were later printed and sold for a small coin called gazzetta. An early forerunning of the newspaper
*1622:1641; English writer Nathaniel Butter published Weekly Newes, but it was suppressed in times of trouble [ID]
*1702:+; England | First daily newspaper, Daily Courant
*1709:1712; England | Joseph Addison and Richard Steele published popular and controversial newspapers Tatler and Spectator. From the very beginning journalism was associated either with official propaganda or, more characteristically, with the rise of independent public opinion. The printing press was the natal technology behind the creation of modern civil society. Addison and Steele gathered associates and engaged in various forms of publicly relevant sociability, not in churches or chanceries, but in taverns and clubs. They were active in a volunteer association that called itself the Kit-Cat Club (Kit-Kat Club) [ID] Addison was the son of an Anglican clergyman, but he now set off on a very modern and secular career
 

SPB birj.jpg (19462 bytes)

<>1703:Saint Petersburg declared the new city to be the new capital of a new Empire [W] VIDEOTAPE
*--Tsar Peter I shifted from the old heartland capital Moscow to the shores of the Gulf of Finland and fast by the Baltic Sea [g]. Peter opened his "window to the West", and the Petrine transformation was in full swing [DIR2:12-21]
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Hughes:203-48

<>1705:+; Bashkir steppes again animated by a movement to promote Muslim grandeur. A Bashkir leader declared self Holy Sultan. Visited Istanbul and got support of Caucasus peoples (EG: Chechens)
*--Cossacks & Old-Ritualists joined with these Bashkir insurgents. Fortress outposts Ufa, Samara, etc. under siege. Islamic forces approached Kazan. Russia was occupied with the Great Northern War
*--Buddhist Kalmyks played an ambiguous role in this era
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*--Michael Khodarkovsky, Where two worlds met: the Russian state and the Kalmyk nomads, 1600-1771

<>1707mr25:Russian decree against peasant serfs fleeing their villages and obligations [DIR2:125 | DIR3:139]
*--On military recruitment in villages [VSB,2:327-8]
*--Peter endorsed the most severe serfdom in all of Europe, that found on the estates where Germanic Baltic baronial power lorded over indigenous Estonian and Latvian villagers. Peter sought to lure these colonial feudal lords away from Sweden or Poland [VSB,2:334]
*--There is some reason to believe that Peter did not intend to build his new empire on the basis of serf labor. As the Great Northern War wound down, he sought to limit noble abuse of peasants [VSB,2:354] However, Petrine transformation required mobilization of limited resources, and that forced harsh measures. Conditions worsened for serfs

<>1709je27:Russia, on the southern frontier (Ukraine), 200 miles SE from Kiev (!!) [g], near the city Poltava | Russia delivered decisive military defeat to invading Swedish armies. Charles XII fled to Turkey
*--Russian-Ukrainian relations with Ukrainian cossacks strained. Old ally of Russia, Cossack Ivan Mazepa, Hetman from 1687-1708, defected to Turkey. So, Russian-Turkish relationship heated up [VSB,2:330-6]
*--Wasteful war of imperialist expansion was not settled for another 12 years
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*--Ukrainian encyclopedia entry on Mazepa [W]

<>1710:English envoy Charles Whitworth described Peter [VSB,2:316]. Other first-hand accounts [321-6]

<>1711:London | "South Sea Co." was chartered. This corporation was capitalized with massive shareholding initiative and governmental subsidies. Managers of the company took the capital and invested in whaling ships. Over the next half century, they failed as whalers, but they did help extend British imperial authority over the globe. Huge mercantilist overseas corporate organizational design did not seem to suit the needs of the whaling industry, here at the dawn of the age of energy politics. However, the corporation was to play some role in the international struggle for dominance in the whale-oil era

 <>1711fe22:Russian tsar Peter I, setting off to the south on a campaign against Swedish King Charles XII and his new Turkish ally, issued a short ukaz. "WE appoint the governing Senate to administer in OUR absence" [VSB,2:336-7 | Russian TXT PiB 11,1:100 | DIR3:15]
*--This government reform ended the 250-year institutional life of the old Boyar Duma. The ukaz seemed almost ironic when it ordered the following: "Discover all unnecessary government activities, and put a stop to them"
*--Petrine transformation had distinct institutional face
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*--Bushkovitch:293-339
*--Hughes:92-134
*--Kliuchevskii,4:200-06 discusses whether Senate was "decentralization" of political authority

<>1713:1714; Kuril Islands (stretching out to sea from the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula toward the NE corner of the Japanese island Hokkaido [g]) explored by Russian adventurers. They made land fall on Sakhalin Island [Sansom,WWJ:212]

<>1713:Russian political-economist Fedor Saltykov wrote Propozitsii [Proposition]. Then in 1714: Iz"iavleniia pribytochnye gosudarstvu [Profitable Testimony to the State]. Saltykov was alert to the benefits England had reaped from its mercantilist and imperialist policies. He urged Russia to develop its southern and eastern markets and take advantage of its Eurasian location
*--Russia had earlier been the target of one of the earliest examples of organized mercantilist aggression, now Saltykov recommended that Russia itself take charge of that eastward mercantilist mission
*--Very little could be done to realize Saltykov's recommendations. Russia was still "once-burned-twice-shy" about China. And an expedition to discover Japan at first yielded no results. An important treaty with China followed soon
*--Petrine "domestic" economic development of manufactures bore some resemblance to mercantilist corporatism, but it was not until after the Russian trans-Pacific discovery of Alaska that The Russian-America Co. was created, a Russian version of the overseas mercantilist corporation for exploitation of imperial dominions.

<>1714:Saint Petersburg | Peter I decrees on building of new capital [BL&T:16]

<>1714fe14:By decree, Peter I made education compulsory for the Russian nobility [DIR3:15]
*1714mr23::Decree on primogeniture [DIR3:16]. Owners of heritable property in land had to pass it on to a single heir designated by the owner. In other words, Peter sought to bring an end to ruinous inheritance practices among landed gentry which divided estates among all heirs, slowly whittling them down below a size that could support the nobility. Inheritance by the oldest son (rarely, oldest daughter) is called "primogeniture", a practice common among European landed elites, but extremely rare in the Russian tradition [EG], at least until tsar Peter I
*--He sought also to encourage "second sons" ( or daughters, for that matter) to seek their fortune elsewhere than on the rural estate, perhaps in the technical fields and other useful pursuits so much needed in a modernizing Russian empire (e.g., navigation [DIR3:18])
*1715fa:1716wi; Peter corresponded with his own reluctant son Aleksei, calling on him to show more resolve to learn the martial and other arts and skills necessary for the modern monarch. Son Aleksei continued to drag his feet, and this at just the time Peter was gearing up for his second European tour and preparing a new round of extensive change [DIR3:24-28]
*--Petrine transformation reached into the Russian social structure, but no clear Petrine economic policy yet emerged, aside from those designed to meet the pressing contingencies of war

<>1716fe:1717oc; tsar Peter I made his second European tour (CF: first great trip abroad)
*--Tour lasted one year and nine months! The first months were in German-speaking central Europe, the winter of 1716-1717 in The Netherlands and surrounding lowlands, and the spring in France

<>1716:London | John Perry published The State of Russia under the Present Czar [sic] covering events and personalities between 1689-1712, including information on the Volga-Don Canal project [VSB,2:316-20 | RRC2]

<>1717:Russian Vice-Chancellor (high diplomatic post) Petr Shafirov, who was a close confidant of Peter I, published Discourse Concerning the First Causes of the War between Sweden and Russia

<>1717de11:tsar Peter I, fresh from his second European tour, decreed new imperial administrative reforms, restructuring government under nine colleges (colleges in this case meant something like "ministries", suggesting systematic definition of governmental functions and distribution of responsibilities out to various appropriate departments) [VSB,2:337-8] The colleges were =
    Foreign Affairs
    State Revenues
    Justice
    State Accounting
    Military
    Admiralty
    Commerce
    State Expenses
    Mines and Manufacture
*--Detailed webpage

<>1718je::tsar Peter I authorized (and probably took part in) torture and death of his son Aleksei [DIR2:25-30 | DIR3:28-33]. More of the correspondence of Peter and Aleksei, etc. [VSB,2:338-41]
*--A Russian folk legend had it that son Aleksei died when he failed to respond properly to Peter's efforts to make him an accomplished ship carpenter. Peter wanted him to continue the building of wooden ships for Russia. But this was not his talent. He just couldn't get the beams square. In a rage, Peter broke his skull with a hammer. Of course, the legend is not "accurate", but at some level of cultural significance, it was right on the mark.
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*--Nikolai Ge's painting of Peter I interrogating his son Aleksei
*--Bushkovitch:339-426
*--Dmitrii Merezhkovskii’s novel Peter and Alexis

<>1718:Neva River-Volga River canal project which stretched along the banks of Lake Ladoga [g] (begun in 1702), moved into final phase. Menshikov was put in charge with the usual meager results. After 1721, the project was handed over to Burkhard von Münnich who completed the task, but not until after Peter's death

<>1719de10:Peter I issued decree on College of Mining. Others followed in which state chartered private enterprise in heavy industrial sector. Economic as well as institutional modernization were all a part of the Petrine plan, but every action was under the pressure of war-time crisis [VSB,2:354-5 and 357-8]
*--As the Great Northern War wound down, the Petrine transformation was able to extend its reach into neglected areas of "civilian" or non-military need
\\
*--Hughes:135-59
*--Florinsky,1(13) deals with the war and the economy under Peter
*--Raeff:89-92 summarizes Peter I's economic policies

<>1720:1722; Siberia, SE slopes of the Ural Mountains, at edge of Bashkir steppes | Governmental official, Vasilii Tatishchev, founded & directed factories and mines. Set up Uktusskii zavod [factory], moved it to site of future Ekaterinburg, a frontier fortress city [g]. Delegated merchants to the tasks of establishing a market and building roads. Established two mining schools and legal courts. He introduced regulations on forestry
*1721ja18:Decree authorized factories to buy villages of serfs [DIR3:18]
*1720:Bashkir people signed treaty with Russia. Bashkirs still independent, but must repatriate (send back) all Russians who flee into Bashkir lands & accept no more refugees. Over the next 2 years, 4965 families (ca.20,000 persons) were sent back to Russia [Russian BrE]
*--Tatishchev clashed with the entrepreneur Nikita Demidov on the question of what role the state should play in the frontier economy. Demidov depended on Peter's royal favor to get his start, but wished thereafter to operate without restraint. Tatishchev wished to impose state regulations on free-wheeling exploitation of the regions natural resources and labor. Genik was sent from Saint Petersburg to settle the dispute and found in Tatishchev’s favor
*--By the middle of the 18th century, the Demidov factories produced 40% of all Russia's iron. Western Siberia was becoming a vital component of Russian national economic security. Something like a coherent Petrine economic policy was emerging
*--The following persons were leading supporters of mercantilist policy in Russia’s Eastward expansion, following after Tatishchev:

Ostermann,A.I.
Sukin,FI(Ober-scy SNT)
Nepliuev,I.I.
    Also industrialists and merchants:
Bazhenov,F.I.
Korzhavin,V.N.
Tverdyshev,I.B.

  \\
*--MERSH,9:46-54
*--Hugh Hudson, Jr., Rise of the Demidov Family and the Russian Iron Industry in the Eighteenth Century (1986)
*--Thomas Owen, Russian Corporate Capitalism, chapter 3: "Corporations in the Russian Empire, 1700-1914" (pp. 16-49)

<>1720:Saint Petersburg described [BL&T:17-18]

<>1720fe28:tsar Peter I issued the General Regulation which reformed government procedure. Peter denied himself and his Senate the authority to issue verbal laws. Only written laws recognized

<>1721:Siberian port city Okhotsk [g] was the point of departure for a Russian expedition to find Japan via Kuril Islands [SHJ, 3:202]
*--In these years, 1719-1721, Ivan Evreinov and F. Luzhin completed a geological and cartographic exploration of Kamchatka and the Kuril islands at the furthest NE extreme of Siberia

<>1721ja16:Peter I decree on municipal administration. This reform built on early efforts that had slackened during wartime. Peter returned again to this important institutional/administrative project again before his death [VSB,2:346 and 355-7]

<>1721ja25:Peter I issued "The Spiritual Regulation" for the administration of the Russian Orthodox Church [Excerpts = VSB,2:370-1 | KRR:334-6 | DIR3:34-42]. Orthodox Church Patriarch henceforward was not to be appointed. [Thus the 1700 act could now been given permanent legal sanction.] The Holy Synod was created to assume the role of bureaucratic administration over the Church. This ended the first period in the history of the Russian Patriarchate, the most elevated church institution (132 years). Very soon, Petrine policy went so far as to overturn the 1000-year tradition of symphonia in the relation of princely to clerical authority. Peter was redesigning the relationship of Church and state in Russia
*--This event might be taken to mark the end of the first epoch (1632-1721) of the Raskol [Schism]. The general European evolution of secular culture in the early-modern epoch was reflected also in "Holy Russia". For Russia there would be almost two centuries of ruinous cultural fissure, pitting supposed spiritual traditionalists against evident secularist modernizers. Old-Ritualist alarm peaked in this time. The "Spiritual Regulation" was taken to confirm their belief that Satan and the Anti-Christ were subverting the True Faith (so clearly announced, to their way of thinking, in the astonishing, bigger-than-life person of tsar Peter I)
*--No further significant legislative action was to be taken with respect to the Orthodox Church until after the fall of the Romanov Dynasty and the establishment of Soviet power, when on the one hand the Patriarchate was restored but, on the other, the Petrine secularist legacy (to speak colloquially) was put on steroids
*1723:1729; Thomas Consett described the present state and regulations of the Church of Russia, For God and Peter the Great: The Works of Thomas Consett...
\\
*--Hughes:332-57 (on religion under Peter I)
*--Florovsky,5:116-22
*--Raeff:123-30 summarizes church history, 1682-1825
*--Florinsky,1(15) deals with school and church
*--Serge Bolshakov, Russian Nonconformity: The Story of Unofficial Religion in Russia
*--James Cracraft, The Church Reform of Peter the Great
*--John Shelton Curtiss, Church and State in Russia: The Last Years of the Empire, 1900-1917 (NYC:1940)
*--Gregory L. Freeze, The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform (Princeton:1983)

<>1721au20:Sweden and Russia ended the "Great Northern War" with Nystadt Treaty [VSB,2:342| ORW:11]
*--The war was over, but the bills were not yet fully paid. Heavy war-time taxation continued to be a burden [VSB,2:345-53]
*--Sweden lost its bid for status as world power
*--Russian imperialist and frontier expansion, for two decades bogged down in the west and for the time being stymied in the south, made slow recovery in the east

<>1721oc22:Petersburg Trinity Cathedral | Russia commenced formal celebration of the Nystadt Treaty and victory over Sweden. Senate bestowed on tsar Peter I the titles "Emperor", "the Great" and "Father of the Fatherland" [VSB,2:342-3]
*--Peter delivered carefully composed and broadly significant statement of thanks to the nation. He warned against complacency after victory. Byzantium fell for that reason. Russia must now move beyond those praiseworthy accomplishments that brought military victory. Russia must now take up those areas of need neglected in time of war. He outlined a comprehensive plan for post-war transformation of Russian institutional and social life in the direction of relief for the people and quickening of broad economic ties with other nations, a goal he summarized as "utility and gain for all" [pol'za i pribytok obshchii] [N.A.Voskresenskii, Zakonodatel'nye akty...:213-14]. This statement was widely distributed throughout Europe. Peter had only four more years of life, but he here clearly projected another great time of change ahead

<>1722:Russian theologian and imperial political advisor Feofan Prokopovich, "Sermon on Royal Authority.... [Raeff3:14-30 | VSB,2:342-3]
*--Peter the Great's reforms brought the Russian Orthodox Church under direct state administration, in imitation of certain northern European trends and reaching far beyond anything implied in the Byzantine concept of church-state symphonia and thus in direct contradiction with Pope Gelasius's "Letter" which had sought twelve-hundred years earlier to distinguish sharply between the institutions of church and state
*1725:Sermon at funeral of Peter I [TXT]
\\
*--Florovsky,5:122-48 presents harsh portrait of Prokopovich and his legacy in Russian spiritual life

<>1722ja24:Russian social/service hierarchy was reformed. Ranks of civilian, military, church and royal court service were now more systematically set by a Table of Ranks [VSB,2:328-9 | DSD,2:4-14 | KRR:228-9 | DSD,1:4-14 | DIR2:17-19 | DIR3:19]
*--Peter strove to open service careers to people of talent and ability, rather than status. His Table of Ranks, by implication, established a new rational system for rewarding talent (as exercised within state service) and linking it with social status
*--But he failed to disassemble the old soslovie system with its hierarchical compartmentalization of clergy, aristocracy, merchants, petty-burghers and peasants. Thus he created a tense and contradictory relationship between civil service rank ("assigned" identity) and these inherited social estates [sosloviia or "natal" identity (ID)]. Tension and contradiction compromised the integrity of an already compromised social hierarchy
*--From the time of Peter I, the Russian social hierarchy (singular) should be thought of as a clumsy amalgam of social/service hierarchies (plural). And while Peter I tried to open things up so that talent could thrive, he refused to grant any broader or spontaneous opening in the stiffly enforced social/service hierarchies. Contradiction between "insider advantage" and "careers open to talent" was palpable in the lives of many. This dysfunctional amalgam of natal and assigned identity shaped Russian political and social history to the very end of the Russian old regime [EG]
*--Forty years after the Table of Ranks was put in place, Peter III and then Catherine II addressed the social/political plight of the two-tiered medieval social formation of aristocratic elites, but with limited success
*--One outstanding example of Petrine "democracy" was the career of Petr Shafirov, the son of a commoner, a converted Jew. Shafirov met Peter I in the famous "German [foreign] quarter" of Moscow. In his early years, Peter met many in the "German quarter" who later became close advisers and powerful figures in his reign, including Menshikov. Some were "Russian" some where not. That distinction was not very important to Peter. He sought ability and experience. Shafirov joined Peter on the Grand Embassy [ID] as a trained and talented diplomatic translator. He rose quickly to become Privy Secretary to Peter, then Director of the Foreign Office, then Vice-Chancellor with the noble title "Baron". Shafirov was a close associate of Menshikov. In 1722, Shafirov was condemned to death by beheading after Menshikov accused him of corruption [in a classic example of the pot calling the kettle black!], In the end, Shafirov was sent to Siberia rather than to the scaffold
*--As the Great Northern War came to an end and Peter turned his energies again to neglected "civilian" projects, the Petrine transformation took on new life. Popular reaction intensified
\\
*--Hughes:159-203
*--Raeff:103-122 summarizes social history, 1682-1825
*--Kliuchevskii,4:101-2
*--Blum:463-8 describes the notorious Petrine "soul tax", in which every adult male peasant was responsible, through his village assembly, to pay a set amount to the state. Privileged social estates [ID] were exempt from this tax

<>1724:Russian political-economist and state servitor (of peasant origins) Ivan Pososhkov (1652-1726) wrote a critical analysis of Russian problems and submitted it to Peter I = Book on Poverty and Wealth (not published until 1842). The book criticized raw mercantilist policy [VSB,2:326-7 and 358-61 | KRR:312-18 | DIR2:31-6 | DIR3:42-49]. It does not appear that Peter ever saw Pososhkov's book. The Emperor died in the next year. Pososhkov himself was arrested and, in 1726, died in the Peter-Paul Fortress prison
*--Peter's economic policies had exhausted Russia. Near constant warfare shaped the developing Russian economy. Somewhere between 75% and 80% of all government revenue was spent on war. Taxes rose 100% between 1682 and the outbreak of the Great Northern War
*1724:After a seven-year effort to gather population figures, a primitive census, and a series of "revisions" of those early faulty efforts, Peter introduced the Poll Tax [Head Tax, Soul Tax, podushnaia podat'], the most "regressive" of all taxes, levied equally on all male "souls" [a term that shocked Pososhkov] of the lower or "non-privileged" sosloviia [formal social estates] without regard for ability to pay. Clergy, nobility and merchants were exempted. On the basis of the Poll Tax, state revenue jumped to nearly six times the revenue collected in 1680
*--Mining industry got its start, and iron mills began production. In 1695, there were 17 iron works in Muscovy. At Peter's death, there were 52, and 13 of these were in the Urals, an indication of the importance of frontier expansion to modernization policies. At this time, coal production equaled that of England and iron production was greater. By the reign of Catherine the Great Russia was the world leader in coal production
*--But modernization was largely for weapons, naval fittings, sails and uniforms. Peter laid the foundations of a modernizing industrial economy, but he did so in the form of military mobilization
*--Canals were dug. Foreign trade increased four-fold and exhibited a great favorable balance. But much of this made possible by a military procurement system which emphasized state budgeting, state purchase of production, and outright state ownership of productive enterprises. Between 200 and 300 industries were established in Peter's time, and 43% of them were owned by the government
*--The workforce was pressed into even more severe conditions of unfree labor, of serfdom
*--Alexander Gerschenkron, in Economic Backwardness:17 (a chapter written in 1952), defined a "peculiar series of sequences" which seemed to characterize every attempt to modernize the Russian economy. (1) The state, moved by military needs, assumed the role of propelling agent of economic progress. (2) Therefore, economic development was always linked to military needs. Economic development mirrored the irregular rhythms of war rather than the smoother pace of productive and distributive growth. Economic policy vibrated between panicked wartime crisis and peacetime torpor. (3) Movement in fits and starts meant that great economic burdens were placed on the unfortunate generation which had to "modernize" to support the military needs of their time. (4) In order to assure that this unfortunate generation responded properly to these state needs, severe measures of oppression were necessary to prevent shirking or escape. (5) The long periods of stagnation between military needs were made even deeper and more abysmal since the sacrifices of the crisis period were always so devastating. Gerschenkron doesn't mention it, but it might also be said that this "peculiar series of sequences" suppressed the evolution of a spontaneous cooperation and exchange between state, society and the economy (what some call "civil society" [ID]) and promoted the evolution of social atomization, isolation, and hostility. Especially this last deficiency inspired Ivan Pososhkov's remarkable analysis [above]
*--A weak glimmering of a coherent Petrine economic policy can be seen in the final ten years of his reign, but little was firmly accomplished here at the heart of the great "riddle of backwardness"
\\
*--Hughes:63-92 (on Peter's military/industrial policies)
*--Blum:277-307 (general survey of economic development from Peter I to Alexander II)

<>1725:Bashkir lands contained state zavody [factories] worked by 5422 male serfs. Russia exploited Bashkir steppes in support of economic modernization

<>1725:Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences founded after Peter’s death, but on a plan he ordered [VSB,2:368-9 | DIR2:19-20 | DIR3:21-2 | BL&T:108]
*--Here too, the Petrine transformation was "top heavy"
\\
*--Hughes:298-332 (on education)

<>1725ja28:1762je28; Russia entered a 37-year ERA BETWEEN "GREATS" from the death of Emperor Peter I "the Great" until Empress Catherine II "the Great"

<>1726fe08: Supreme Privy Council [Verkhovnyi tainyi sovet] for a short while became the central autocratic authority [VSB,2:377]
*--Prince Dmitrii Golitsyn (1665:1737) was a major figure in the new Council. Educated in Italy, he served as an ambassador to Turkey in 1701. Between 1711 and 1721, he was governor of the Kievan region (and drew close to the scholarly monks at the spiritual academy there). He was extremely learned, having amassed a personal library of over 6000 books. From 1722 he was a prominent figure in the Petrine Senate (representing a small faction of progressive-minded old boyar nobles). At the death of Peter I, he conspired without success to bring the infant son (also named Peter) to the throne, with the mother, Catherine and the Senate acting as regents
*--A.D. Menshikov joined Golitsyn in the Supreme Privy Council, even though he was a quintessential representative of the new Petrine service elite and in stark contrast to Golitsyn. Legend had it that Peter met Menshikov in Moscow in the time of their youth. Menshikov was a footloose waif who sold pies on Moscow streets. He was a hell-raiser, and that suited Peter exactly. Menshikov in a sense never left Peter's side. Peter appointed him to various high and responsible posts, but he was a notorious thief, embezzler and organized crook. Many times Peter had to slap him down. Once Peter fined him half his whole fortune, which had grown immense through procurement fraud (e.g., pocketing half the budget for military uniforms). Still he remained a millionaire and always able to work his way back from exile into Peter's favor. Now Menshikov conspired with success to have Catherine crowned Empress and thus to avoid a new ascendancy of  Dmitrii Golitsyn's associates behind Peter's infant son on the throne. In this he was supported by certain officers ready to use force if they did not get their way
*--The Council thus combined an unlikely team of old and new elites, with their base in the Senate but with no desire to elevate the Senate to a central position. Rather they preferred an irregular institution through which they could wield personal influence. And Catherine, a serious alcoholic and in all other ways unsuited to the responsibilities of rule, presented them no obstacle. They sought to reverse certain Petrine reforms, to build down some of the unwieldy Petrine institutions. However, they did not want to end the reforms altogether: Continue the modernization, but at a slower pace, an elitist "Senatorial" pace
*--The Petrine transformation, now nearly thirty years under way, was in for some hard years, but the Supreme Privy Council did not last long
\\
*--Hughes:416-45 (on Menshikov and other "new men" elevated to positions under Peter I); 445-71 (legacy of Peter I)
*--Isabella De Madariaga, Politics and Culture in Eighteenth-century Russia:57-77 on Dmitrii Golitsyn
*--Bushkovitch:426:45 (summary of Peter's reign)

<>1727:Siberia | Kiakhta Treaty between Russia and China continued cooperative relations among these two powers on theSiberian frontier, but China moved with vigor on its own southern frontier =
*1727:TIBET in grip of struggle between secular and religious authorities. The Chinese Emperor imposed his military authority over region
*1764:Dublin. John Bell's travel account describes some of these events [excerpt in Lensen,Eastward:49-51]

<>1728:Moscow | Bashkir delegation led by Yarnei Yanchurin. Bashkir steppe brought under more regular Russian administrationwhen Ufa guberniia was separated from Kazan. Ufa region called "provintsiia" under authority of Senate. Population there not required to render military service

<>1730ja19:Russian Senatorial party, led by Dmitrii Golitsyn, imposed "Conditions" on Empress Anna [TXT] [Raeff2:44-52 | VSB,2:378 | DIR2:36-43 | DIR3:49-56]
*--The Conditions imposed the following restrictions on Anna's power. Each prohibition implied a concluding phrase "...on her own arbitrary authority" =
    1. Not to start war with anyone
    2. Not to conclude peace
    3. Not to burden loyal subjects with new taxes
    4a. Not to promote individuals to the sixth or higher rungs of the Table of Ranks, and
    4b. To hand over command of Guard and other elite regiments to the Supreme Privy Council
    5. Not to deprive nobles of life, property or honor without trial
    6. Not to grant patrimonial estates [votchiny] and villages [in serf bondage]
    7. Not to promote individuals to court service positions
    8. Not to spend state revenue
*1730fe28:1740; Russian Empress Anna assumed the throne, tore up "Conditions", abolished the Supreme Privy Council, restored the Governing Senate, and decreed autocracy restored. She reigned for ten years
*--Favorites Bühren [Biron], Ostermann, & Münnich [Mennikh] [all spelled here in the Germanic way to emphasize their family origins] were much resented among Russian noble elite. These figures made some Russians nostalgic for Golitsyn and Menshikov. Menshikov's long career as Peter's graft ridden crony was now balanced in some minds with the fact that he was "Russian" and that the Petrine legacy was evaporating altogether in an era of national slump and opportunistic elitism. A further factional division widened between those, like Golitsyn, who represented the civilian face of the Petrine legacy, and those, like Münnich, who represented the military face
*--Anna introduced many measures to ease the plight of grandee nobles (without much improving the status of rural gentry) [VSB,2:378-81] The statist quality of this "noble renaissance" is shown by the following = In 1736,  Dmitrii Golitsyn was arrested for malfeasance in office. In prison he soon died. His great library was confiscated and parceled out
*--Russian statesman V.N. Tatishchev published "...Assembled Russian Nobility about the State Government" [DSD,1:15-27]
\\
*--Florinsky,1(16) deals with the eras of Empresses Anna and Elizabeth
*--Miner Curtis, A Forgotten Empress: Anna Ivanovna and Her Era, 1730-1740. NYC:1974
*--Philip Longworth, Autocracy and Aristocracy: The Russian Service Elite of 1730

<>1730:Bashkir lands in western Siberian steppes [g] administered by A.P. Volynskii who opposed the idea of an independent territory. He was antagonistic toward the Muslim faith, but his concept was at heart imperialist rather than religious. He built more fortresses, refurbished old. Mapped the region. Exploited Bashkir territory, claiming the right of a superior civilization over the civilization of Islamic "infidels"
\\
*--Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800

<>1730c:Siberia, Kamchatka Peninsula [g] | Russian Academy of Sciences explorer Stepan Krasheninnikov described indigenous rebellion observed during the first Kamchatka expedition  [Lensen,Eastward:30-3]
*--Stepan Krasheninikov, Explorations of Kamchatka, North Pacific scimitar; report of a journey made to explore eastern Siberia in 1735-1741, by order of the Russian Imperial Government
*1731:1733; Ivan Kirilov organized second Kamchatka expedition, revived Petrine mercantilist concept. Closer to home =
*1731:Petersburg-Lake Ladoga canal, started by Peter I, was finally completed

<>1732:Russian government ordered Vitus Bering to explore Siberian waters for Japan. It was now clear that Asia terminated in the far NE at the shores of the straits now called "Bering Straits" [DIR3:143-7]

<>1734:1737; Siberia, southern Ural Mountains [g] | Vasilii Tatishchev dispatched to create more zavody [factory strong points]. Much success. Used authority to restrict zavody run by individual "entrepreneurs"
*--The mercantilist state needed metals from these mines and found it best if it ran the mines and zavody itself
*--Shifted administration of yasak [tax tribute] from yasak officials to Bashkir elders. For over 400 years, since Mongol times, yasak taxation was characteristic
*1734:Siberia, southern Ural Mountains| The Orenburg expedition created, extending Russian power further into Bashkir lands. Orenburg situated at confluence of Ori & Ural rivers [g]. Ivan Kirilov led expedition [Demikova,NF in SIE,10:608 lists no particular scholar attached to this expedition]. Fortress settlements founded as strong point for Cossack and Kalmyk allies
*--Orenburg received many exemptions from usual imperial restrictions. Other nationalities could live there. Christians, Muslims and other faiths were not excluded. These forts were to serve as strong points and retreats for Cossack, Kalmyk and other allies in the struggle against the Kazakh Tatars [the KIR-Kaisets] who roamed the region from the Altai highlands to Bukhara south of the Aral Sea
*--This was an era of near constant war with the Bashkirs, but also a time of growing contact with them. Bashkirs no longer sought to create Islamic unity in their regions, but they still feared for their land. All the Russian concessions, including a degree of self-government, left the land question open. Indeed the land surrounding Orenburg was taken from them. Russian factories spread into the Ekaterinburg region. All forests fell under imperial control. The official goal may have been trade, but the military ways from the Peter-I era influenced Russian behavior and put the Bashkirs on an oppositional footing

<>1735:1736; Bashkir leader Kil'miak-Abyz led a rebellion in an effort to protect Bashkir lands from Russian expansion
*--Aleksandr Rumiantsev was sent to put down the rebellion with Russian troops mustered from Perm and other Siberian factories under Tatishchev's management
*1736:The rebellion was crushed. The lands of rebels were taken. Other native peoples who had not rebelled were invited to share in the spoils, e.g., the Meshcheriaki who had earlier rented lands from the Bashkirs. All those who came over to the Russian side and became pioneers along the line of Russian forts were officially designated "peasants". This was the bottom of the formal imperial social hierarchy [sosloviia] but it was a form of social generosity unusual among European colonial powers in their dealings with indigenous peoples. And the door was left open for Bashkirs to accept a similar offer

<>1736:Persian (Iranian) Safavid dynasty at an end

<>1736ap25:Russian decree against fleeing peasant serfs [DIR2:125-6 | DIR3:140]

<>1737:Siberian Department established to administer imperialist expansion to the Pacific Ocean
*--Bering and Steller charted the northern Siberian coastline

<>1737ap14:Siberia, Orenburg | Kirilov dismissed. Later directors of the Orenburg Expedition in Bashkir territory =
*1737:1739; Vasilii Tatishchev
*1739:1742; V.A. Urusov [noBrE]
*1742:1744; I.I. Nepliuev (44:60; Governor)

<>1738:Russian ballet school founded in Petersburg

<>1738:Bering's first expedition into Siberian waters in search of Japan. It was slow going, but then =
*1739je27:Japan, Amatsu village, Awa Province (Chiba Prefecture) | Second expedition of Vitus Bering disembarked from its Siberian port, led by Martin Petrovich Spanberg (Danish by birth), William Walton, and Aleksei Il'ich Chirikov. They located Japan & went ashore briefly. Spanberg, Walton & Chirikov reported, but they were not believed back home
*--The expedition was sighted by the Japanese off Shimoda (later one of USA Commodore Matthew Perry's ports) [Sansom,WWJ:213]
*--Behind and just out of sight of all this official exploration, an on-going unofficial Russian contact had been established and kept up with the Ainu (indigenous peoples, now driven to the northernmost extreme by Japanese frontier expansion in the Kuril Islands) & with Japanese in Kurils [ibid:213]
\\
Lensen,Russian Push:50-5

<>1738:1739; Russian-Turkish war, ending in the Treaty of Beograd [Serbia, Belgrade]. Russia gained dominion over the northern Black Sea coastline

<>1741:1745; Lower reaches of the Volga River, at the western edge of the Bashkir steppes, near Tsaritsyn (Volgograd; Stalingrad] [g]) | Astrakhan Governor Vasilii Tatishchev "pacified" Kalmyk people. Tatishchev was a severe but able Siberian frontier administrator whose career spanned two decades

<>1741:1762; Russian Empress Elizabeth [Elizaveta] [VSB,2:381-8 | DIR2:44-50 | DIR3:57-63] reigned for 21 years
*--Survey SAC chronology of her reign for indications of great imperialist expansion and cultural accomplishment, a certain grandee splendor centered on the isolated "gated community" of the capital city Petersburg, but perhaps deserving of the label "Enlightened"
\\
James F. Brennan, Enlightened Despotism in Russia: The Reign of Elisabeth, 1741-1762 (1987)

<>1741jy:Russian expedition [I], commanded by Vitus Bering, made Alaskan "new world" landing on small island within sight of Mt. St. Elias. Two centuries of Siberian expansion and ten years of exploration by Bering were now crowned by a remarkable "discovery" of North America from Asia. The leap over the north Pacific opened a new era for Siberia [MAP] [MAP]
*--On this expedition, naturalist Steller confirmed sighting New World beyond Siberian waters, from northern Pacific. Presence there of a certain blue jay--now called the Steller's Jay--reinforced his conclusion
*--For the next 125 years, Russia & America both experienced new-world frontier expansion. Alaska became the great Russian/American shared imperialist/colonial adventure
\\
READINGS ON RUSSIAN/US PACIFIC RIM FRONTIER:
*--Decent narrative, with excellently clear maps and fine photos, describe Russia in the New World [W]
*--Howard I. Kushner, Conflict on the Northwest Coast: American-Russian Rivalry in the Pacific Northwest, 1790-1867  See ch.6:"The Oregon Question and Russian-America."
*--John J. Stephan & V. P. Chichkanov, eds., Soviet-American Horizons on the Pacific
*--Hector Chevigny, Russian America: The Great Alaskan Venture, 1741-1867
*--George V.Lantzeff  and R. A. Pierce, Eastward to Empire: Exploration and Conquest on the Russian Open Frontier to 1750
*--Glynn Barratt, Russian Shadows on the British Northwest Coast of North America, 1810-1890: A Study of Rejection of Defence Responsibilities (1983) F1088.B25)
*--Foster Rhea Dulles, Russia and America: Pacific Neighbors (1946) 327.7347 D888r
*--Stuart Ramsay Tompkins, Alaska: Promyshlennik and Sourdough (1945)
*--S. B. Okun, The Russian American Company (Cambridge MA:1951)
*--Starr, ed., Russia's American Colony

Alaska: A shared frontier

1895:Alaska, Sitka | St. Michael's Russian Orthodox Church
[source]

<>1742ja02:Russian Senate issued decree appointing missionaries to Kamchatka to convert the Kamchadal people to Orthodox Christianity [DIR3:147-8]
*1742:Siberia, southern piedmont of the Ural Mountains | Orenburg fortress moved to today's location where it quickly became the command center for Russian SE military frontier and imperialist expansion

<>1744:ORN gbx fnd on basis of ORN.xpd. Nepliuev,IvIv (x.ORN.xpd dtr) now 1st gbxor. Main authority over BSH & KZX [KIR] steppe. Nepliuev sought mfg & skz clnists "no pri etom on vstreqal prepyatstviya, gluboko korenivwiyasya v togdawnem obwwestvennom i gosudarstvennom stroe Rossii. Kolonizatsiya rus. okrain vsegda wla pomimo pravitel'stva i daje v razrez s ustanovlennymi im poryadkami....". clnists usually were "gulyawwie lyudi" IE:fugitives, beglye frm srfom txx mlt.srv & rlg. gbxor cldn't condone this. SO 1st sought friendly TTR or Xtx.Kalmyks. KZN TTR~ better bcs of INX in trd. Built water mills, cotton & plant soroqinskoe pweno. cldn't attract RUS (merchant)--too bdn, but also RUS grd.pbl buduqi obyazany otpravlyat' raznye povinnosti i slujby, kotorye oni nesli vsem mirom, vsyaqeski protivilis' vyxodu iz sredy svoei soqlenov, tak kak vyxodom odnix neminuemo uveliqivalis' tyagoty ostal'nyx. ?Parallel w krp in oxo?. gtx more sig., but "eto byli elementy, ves'ma maloprigodnye dlya vneseniya v dikii krai naqal grajdanstvennosti i promywlennosti" [?very best? Australia?] Ttw wanted to welcome fugitives but not allowed to do so; only UKR fugitives allowed but 1742:SPB TSR ElizPetr stopped acceptance of UKR fugitives [BrE, 5:228??]

<>1746ja13:Ukz motivated by Nepliuev=All nepomnyawwix rodstva & gnt allowed gt.ORN to rcv lnd & 3y xmt frm txx & mlt.srv. Nepliuev tried to free grn frm stt, but to prevent monopolies (!?) These bought srf~ to wrk zvd~:
Miasnikov (merchant)
Tveryshev (merchant)
Sivers (merchant)
Shuvalov graf
Stroganov
Demidov,N
Mosolov
Osokin

<>1749:1754; ORN Menovoi dvor & Gostinyi dvor fnd. txx.trf.tUt there for trd w/KZX & CAS

<>1747:French provincial political theorist Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu [W] published his most important political tract, De l'esprit des lois [The Spirit of Laws] [W] [excerpts]. This was a comparative study of politics, almost "social-scientific" in its presumption of the need for empirical data. The book was thus a good example of new ways of thinking in the European "Enlightenment". It described three forms of government, republic ["res" "publica", the instrument of the public], aristocracy [the rule of the well-born], and despotism [rule of the single towering individual]
*--Montesquieu had a great talent for political theory, and his study continued from this time forward to have a powerful influence on world opinion. But he also had considerable executive experience within his own regional version of that peculiar French institution of local aristocratic self-government, the  parlement of Bordeaux, located in the far south-western regions of the French kingdom, remote in so many ways from Paris [ID#1] [ID#2]. Theory and experience mixed well in his brilliant essay on the "spirit" of laws. No surprise, among the three forms of government, Montesquieu preferred aristocracy

<>1751:TIBET under Chinese imperialist authority. Secular government of Tibet abolished in favor of reign of the Dali Llama and his spiritual council.

<>1753oc13:Russian Senate Ukaz supported 1746ja13:Ukaz in support of Nepliuev's effort to protect the Islamic Bashkir indigenous votchina [patrimony] and its native peoples from imposition of Russian military obligations and Orthodox Christianization [PSZ#10141 |  1871:RAr#4-5. Nepliuev zapiski]
*1754:1757; Bashkir rebellion could not be prevented. Meshcheriak Batyrsh [Batarma in BrE BXO/Nepliuev] Aleev, talented organizer & Muslim scholar and mullah was finally defeated and arrested (further fate unknown). Fifty thousand Bashkir fled into Kazakh/Kirghiz steppe wilderness to the south [g]
*1755:Orenburg Cossack militia created [Orenburgskoe kazach'e voisko]. This new frontier militia was made up of Samara, Alekseevsk, Ufa, & Isetsk Cossacks. These were supplemented with soldiers in the frontier military, peasant Bashkir/Meshcher, Kalmyk, Ukrainian and Don River Cossacks
*--The Russian state was moving to bring some control over Cossack military units and to move them all in a SE direction into frontier territories, further from the imperialist "metropol" (the urban, managerial center of expansionist policy) and deeper into the Russian "periphery" (the remote territories managed from the metropol). Like the USA cavalry, the Orenburg militia was the forceful "cutting edge" of frontier advancement into indigenous people's territories
*--By 1768 the Orenburg Cossacks numbered 13,700, of whom 4,700 served in the new tsarist Cossack military
*--Russian imperialist frontier in the SE was consolidated, but in the west complications again intervened
\\
SIE minimizes Aleev role

<>1755:Moscow University established according to Ivan Shuvalov proposal [VSB,2:388-9; BL&T:112f]
*--In these years "Russian" high culture -- a Russian secular civilization -- was born
\\
*--Raeff:131-58 summarizes intellectual life, 1682-1825
*--J. L. Black, Citizens for the Fatherland: Education, Educators, and Pedagogical Ideals in Eighteenth Century Russia (East European Monographs no. 53, 1979)
*----------. G. F. Muller and the Imperial Russian Academy (1986)
*--J. L. Black, ed. Essays on Karamzin: Russian Men of Letters, Political Thinkers, Historians, 1766-1826 (1975)
*--Marc Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Nobility (NYC:1966) [HT647.R3]
*--Hans Rogger, National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia. Cambridge MA:1960

<>1755:Russian scholar Mikhail Lomonosov (-1765), Russian Grammar. Lomonosov sometimes called the Russian Benjamin Franklin (just as the Russians might call Franklin the American Lomonosov). Here are some Lomonosov writings =
*--"Panegyric...." [Raeff3:32-48]
*--Refutation of "Normanist" historical theory which claimed that in 862:Vikings founded Russian state [DIR2:52-5 | DIR3:64-8]
*--More [BL&T:109f]
*1753my10:SPB. Letter on poor poets [GPR:618-20]
*1753my31:SPB. Letter on electrical experiments [GPR:620-23]
\\
*--Wagar on Lomonosov [TXT]
*--Kudriavtsev, The Life and Work of Lomonosov (MVA:1954) [UO]
*--B. N. Menshutkin, Russia's Lomonosov: Chemist, Courtier, Physicist, Poet (Princeton NJ:1952)

<>1755:Saint Petersburg | In the face of increasingly complex budgetary needs of an expanding empire, a new tax structure [Tamozhennyi ustav] introduced, replacing Ordyn-Nashchokin’s 1667:Novotorg.ustav [ID]

<>1756:1763; New World English and French colonial holdings (future USA and Canada) | Armies of England and France fought the "Old War" in the "New World" (often called the French-Indian War)
*1759se13:French Canadian stronghold Quebec fell to English armies. The days of French imperialist dominion over the New World were numbered, but none imagined at this time that a new and independent nation, rather than England, would succeed France in all of its vast territories in the southern and central region of North America, the Mississippi River basin
*1761:Governor Glen, "The Role of the Indians in the rivalry Between France, Spain and England" [W]
*1762:Native American indigenous religious/military prophet and leader Neolin was of the Delaware tribe. He called on mystic powers to defeat the modern armies of imperialist Europe. His actions prefigured later Ghost Dance [ID]
*1763ap27:New World colonies (future USA & Canada), French Canada, Detroit [French for "the narrows"] of Lake Superior | Great meeting of indigenous American tribes that formed up the Iroquois confederacy. Pontiac emerged as military leader
*1763my:Detroit Fort | After France surrendered fort to England, the indigenous American tribes demanded supplies, as promised by their ally England. War broke out, at first going the way of the tribes. Native Americans captured the fort. England supplied natives with small-pox infested blankets
*1763au:Battle of Bushy Run | England defeated indigenous leader Pontiac
*1763fa:War against Pontiac ended. Pontiac fled into IL. He was later assassinated
*--UO website maps: 1783:Native American tribes and 1783:European possessions bordering rebellious colonies
*--More on Native Americans
\\
*--An assessment of the role of indigenous Native Americans [W] in this struggle
*--USA Boston historian Francis Parkman devoted much of his scholarly life to an explanation of why England prevailed in North America. Is it English capitalist culture (plus Parkman’s Boston-style sense of racial superiority) vs. French mercantilism (plus Parkman’s presumption of Latino laxity)? How does this relate to Parkman’s 1846:trip to the KS, WY, & CO prairies, which he commemorated in the grandly and deceptively titled The California and Oregon Trail
*--Parkman account influenced by novelist James Fenimore Cooper & by Augustin Thierry, a historian of the 1066:Norman conquest of England. It is a story of the victory of a superior race over a lesser race, as Parkman described it in his autobiographical novel Vassal Morton (CF.Jacobs,Parkman:46f)

<>1756:1763; In Europe the "French-Indian War" in the New World was but one front in a vast imperialist war, at first fought among native peoples in imperialized lands. It now boomeranged and embroiled Europe in what is called the Seven Years War, a struggle between conflicting principles of old mercantilism and novel capitalism)
*--In this war, dynastic rivalries of limited significance quickly ignited conflict of vast implication. The British East India Co. (as it eventually came to be known) was able to neutralize the French East India Co. and limit its schemes to the Mississippi Valley. French imperialist colonialism in the New World was doomed
*--This war bore hints of European catastrophes to come. Imperialist rivalry in distant lands threatened war in the European homeland. Brutal policies and practices overseas were coming home. Certain proud European states that seemed to be losing out in the overseas imperialist scramble sought advantages closer at hand [e.g., France after 1799 and Germany in 1914; perhaps Russia after 1945]

<>1760oc:Russian armies captured Berlin [g] as Seven Years War intensified
*1762:New Russian Emperor Peter III signed Treaty of Saint Petersburg with the new waxing power in Central Europe, Prussia. The new Emperor was an infamous Prussophile
*--The larger geo-political significance of this war lay in the fact that Russian and Prussian power waxed stronger while the overseas imperial powers, England, France and Spain grabbed at one another's throats. Spain was already an empire in precipitous decline. France was about to be forced to sell a big chunk of its New World empire in order to finance a newly exploding European continental empire [ID]
*--Hostility was settled and friendship restored between the two ascendant powers, Russia and Prussia; this over the bodies of the now immobilized but once powerful Sweden and soon-to-be partitioned Poland
*--Blunders of other European imperialist powers thus encouraged Russian imperialist ambition
\\
*--Herbert H. Kaplan, Russia at the Outbreak of the Seven Years' War (Berkeley CA:1968) [DD411.5.K3]
*--Florinsky,1(17):especially 474-80

<>1760de13:Russian gentry landlords empowered by decree to exile troublesome serfs to Siberia [VSB,2:391]

<>1762:Swiss-born French-language philosopher, social theorist and musician Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712:1778) published his most mature and influential piece of political analysis, Contrat social [The Social Contract]
*1749:Earlier, the Dijon Academy brought first fame to Rousseau when it awarded its prize to his essay on how civilization always corrupts the natural goodness of humanity. Five years later =
*1754:Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité des hommes [Discourse on the origin of inequality among humans] made an extended and more complex (maybe even occasionally contradictory) statement on his prize-winning theme. Eight years passed =
*1762:Contrat social pulled it all together. What is popularly called "the noble savage" was just naturally good. High civilization made him bad. "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains" was an oft-quoted Rousseau phrase. Ancient agricultural civilization was as much at fault as later industrialization and universal concepts of private property. So Rousseau did not seek to "return to nature". He was not in essence "reactionary". He was "radical" in the sense that he looked forward to a new way of life that would as nearly as possible recapture the human birthright of simplicity and goodness. The most radical idea was that all political and social sovereignty had to reside with the people. However, the people had to commit themselves to a "social contract", had to bind themselves to an elusive thing he called "The General Will".
*--Rousseau is thought of as an originator of European "Romanticism", with its emphasis on free expression of spontaneous, essential, "natural" and largely emotional truths of human consciousness, unspoiled by artificial "high-brow" rationalized sophistication
*--The complete and complex Rousseau legacy is suggested in the 10+ volume English-language edition of his Works

<>1762fe07:Peter III began "emancipation" of gentry [pomeshchik noble landowners] from obligatory state service [VSB,2:391-2 | DIR2:55-8 | DIR3:69-72]
*--Manifesto on freedom of nobility [KRR:230-2 | DSD,1:28-35]
*--Twenty years later, Catherine II took bolder and more elaborate steps to address the problems of the service-shackled nobility [ID]

<>1762je28:1796; CATHERINE II "THE GREAT" [Ekaterina Velikaia]
She reigned for 34 years through one of the most dramatic epochs in European history =
     EUROPEAN ENLIGHTENMENT and FRENCH REVOLUTION
*1762jy12:English ambassador reported on the coup d'état that resulted in Peter III's murder and brought Catherine to the Russian throne [WRH]
*1762au:Russian Empress Catherine II described the coup in a letter to Poniatowski [WRH | DIR2:59-64 | DIR3:73-8]
*--Manifesto on ascending throne [WRH]
*--Catherine II, Empress of Russia. The Memoirs of Catherine the Great
*--William Tooke, View of the Russian Empire...(1799) [Excerpts:VSB,2:428-31; WRH3:206] One of the first "professional Russian experts"; also a source of first-hand information on everyday life in Catherine's time
*--Erich Donnert, Russia in the Age of Enlightenment (1985)
*--Sources on everyday life of Catherine and in her court in the early years [VSB,2:395-403]
*--William F. Reddaway, ed., Documents of Catherine the Great (1931) [ORBIS OSU]
\\
*--Florinsky,1(19)&(23)
*--John T. Alexander, Catherine the Great: Life and Legend ["ACG" hereafter]
*--Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great
*--Marc Raeff, ed. Catherine the Great: A Profile (1972) [ORBIS OSU]
*--Raeff:69-76 compares Peter I's and Catherine II's institutional reforms
*--David Ransel, The politics of Catherinian Russia: the Panin Party
*--Kazimierz Waliszewski, The Romance of an Empress: Catherine Second of Russia (reprint of famous anti-Russian, misogynist  biography)

<>1762jy03:Catherine's first official act was against the wide-spread peasant presumption that Peter III's emancipation of nobles from state service meant that peasants need no longer serve their landlords. She decreed "that each and every person be protected in the enjoyment of his well-earned property and his rights, and, conversely, that no one step beyond the bounds of his rank and his office, we therefore intend to protect the landlords in their estates and possessions inviolably and to keep the peasants in their proper submission to them". Three months later, a second such decree followed, further binding serfs [VSB,2:449-50]
*--Twenty-three years later, Catherine took bolder steps than Peter III. She seemed to grant even greater independence to noble gentry landlords

<>1762de28:Russian statesman Count Nikita Panin penned influential memos on imperial governance [Raeff2:54-68]
*--Catherine II waged a struggle against corruption [VSB,2:451-2]

<>1763jy22:Catherine II invited foreigners (largely German-speaking Mennonites) to settle in Russia north of the Black Sea (the Pontic steppes) and along the middle Volga [W#1] [W#2]
*--Volga Germans [W]
*--Mennonites [W] [VSB,2:450-1]
*--Germans from Russia genealogical website [W] Germans from Russia Heritage Society [W] Kansas Historical Society site [W]
*--Sidney Heitman Germans from Russia in Colorado Study Project [W]
\\
*1974:Norman Saul four-part internet article on Mennonites in Kansas [W#1] [W#2] [W#3] [W#4]

<>1764:Catherine II confiscated Russian Orthodox Church lands

<>1764:Fedor Emin published his Moral Fables

<>1764:Russian Empress Catherine II, instructions on functions of Prokurator-General [DSD,1:36-43]
*--In this same year, she purchased a fabulous collection of art and created a museum connected with the recently completed Winter Palace in Petersburg. She named the museum the "Hermitage" [W]

<>1765:English ambassador described Catherine II [WRH]

<>1765:Russian Free Economic Society [VEO] founded
*--Sponsored essay contests on questions like serfdom [VSB,2:461-2] VEO once awarded a prize to an essay which recommended emancipation of serfs
*--Statistics about the Russian rural economy of the 18th century [KRR:268-72]
\\
*--Arcadius Kahan, The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout: An Economic History of Eighteenth-century Russia (1985)

<>1765ja17:Russian decree on exile & hard labor for peasant serfs [VSB,2:453 | DIR2:126 | DIR3:141]
*--This year the Senate gave instructions on potato growing [VSB,2:452-3]

<>1766de14:Catherine II decree established the Legislative Commission [VSB,2:405-6]
*--Catherine then issued her Nakaz [Instructions] to the Commission and invited certain others to do the same
*--Catherine's own account of the Commission [VSB,2:403]
*--The Commission met with little concrete results until 1774, in the months after the rise of the Pugachev Rebellion
\\
*--Florinsky,1(21)
*--19th c. historical description of Commission by Sergei Solov'ev, RRC2,2:256f

<>1767:Honda Toshiaki(1744:1821; ) orx'd scl which reflected his interest in sea nvy mth NED lng, esp.problems of Hokkaido. Went to sea in North, in command of small coastal vessel. pst on shipping, zpd conditions, natural resources. \Keisei Hisaku\(Secret Plan of Government) proposed stt control of mfg, trd, shipping. Also MPR plan, colonization. Opposed JPN closed ekn, favored irx.trd, esp. w/RUS. Supported construction of sea-going merchant marine [Sansom, WWJ:232] A "zpdik" so to speak

<>1767:Russian Orthodox Church’s monastic property nationalized and clergy became civil servants

<>1767jy19:Russian Empress Catherine II issued her Nakaz [Instructions] to Legislative Commission [TXT] [DSD,2 | Briefer in RRC2,2:252f | VSB,2:403 | DIR2:64-88 | DIR3:79-94]
*--Catherine also invited certain social groups to draft "instructions" and to select delegates to the Commission. Those invited can be classified as nobles, merchants, certain clergy, Cossacks and smattering of "free" townspeople and other servile social groups directly attached to state institutions. About one half of all Russian serfs -- about half the whole Russian population -- were attached to institutions rather than to individual gentry aristocrats. Catherine did not invite delegates from the other half the population of the Empire, "privately owned" ("gentry owned") serfs. However, many not invited joined those who were. See the 20 examples of "instructions" submitted to the Commission, translated in FFS:17-84; also see VSB,2:431-41
*1768:The Legislative Commission addressed sensitive issues. Russian government, according to S.E. Desnitskii, should be structured in Legislative, Judicial & Executive branches. A. Ya. Polenov expressed his opinion on serfs [DSD,1:44-88]
*--Catherine did not encourage any specific tinkering with established social/service hierarchies. Serfdom might be a topic, but the enforced categorization of the overwhelming majority of the population in the social estate "peasantry" was not. Nor was there any serious attention to the stiff service categories of the Table of Ranks. However "enlightened" her Nakaz, it still favored the privileged sosloviia [formal social classes or estates]. The three privileged sosloviia were the most important of those invited to send delegates to participate in deliberations of the Legislative Commission =
*--Traditional Russian law formally recognized three privileged social estates [sosloviia] =

Clergy [dukhovenstvo]
Nobility [dvorianstvo]
Merchantry [kupechestvo]
 And two "common" sosloviia =
Petty urbanites [meshchanstvo, sometimes posadniki]
Peasants [krest'ianstvo = (a) "privately owned": serfs, (b) "state owned" serfs and (c) a smattering of "free" villagers]

Traditional law sought to distinguish and control the relationships among and between these sosloviia, and to enforce privileges, exemptions, and duties among them, especially those that regulated their relationships to state power. While these were in a sense "natal" or inherited social estates, they had, by the late medieval period, become creatures of state definition and maintenance [EG]. Then Peter the Great's Table of Ranks [ID] positioned state power more firmly than ever over the social structure and further compromised the practical significance of natal identity within the sosloviia
\\
*1986fe:AHR#91,1:11-36| Gregory L. Freeze, "The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History"
*1961de:SlR:565-582|  Cyril E. Black, "The Nature of Imperial Russian Society" [reprinted in TDU:173-208 (with full discussion) and in RRC2,2#43]

<>1767au22:Catherine II's Senate issued decree prohibiting complaints by serfs [VSB,2:453-4]
*--In these years Russian serf-owning gentry aristocrats issued instructions on management of everyday life on their estates [VSB,2:441-9 | KRR:292-4 | DSD,1:89-110] =
  Petr Rumiantsev
  P. B. Sheremetev
  Ivan Shuvalov
  Vladimir Orlov
  P. I. Rychkov
  A. T. Bolotov
*--Catherine's au22 decree is sometimes taken to represent the lowest point in the history of serf legislation
\\
*--Blum:442-74 describes the various forms of serf obligation owed officials and gentry elites, including barshchina (labor dues) and obrok (quit-rent, a monetary obligation, sometimes satisfied with a portion of village agricultural production)
*--Robinson,ch1 (Serfdom and peasant wars) & ch2 ("The triumph of the servile system")

<>1768:1774; Ottoman Turks and Russia at war
\\
*--Florinsky,1:514-26

<>1769:1772; Russian publisher Nikolai Novikov wrote satirical pieces for his journals, Truten' [The Drone] and Zhivopisets [The Artist] [VSB,2:462-4]
*1769je06:SPB. Novikov wrote a clever letter to the publisher [whom the small "reading public" knew to be Catherine II] of popular satirical journal [GPR:625-7 | DIR3:94-6] Catherine seemed to enjoy the game of journalistic polemics, seemed to encourage bold and clever expression of opinion. She took this to be a characteristic of enlightened public opinion
*1770ja:Novikov's thoughts on the nature of Russian society [DIR3:96-9]
\\
*--W. Gareth Jones, Nikolay Novikov: Enlightener of Russia (1984)
*--Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700-1800 (1985)

<>1770:1771; Kamchatka Peninsula | Moritz Alader Benyowsky (various spellings) Hungarian political refugee, fled by sea, put in at Ryukyu Island. He wrote a letter to a Dutch captain at Nagasaki in which he falsely reported that Russians had fortress on Kurils, amunition, artillery, magazine in readiness. Russia, he said, planned attack Matsumae (Hokkaido) and near-by islands. The letter was translated & sent to Tokugawa government
*--At this time Japanese specialists on the Netherlands expanded their studies to include Russian language
\\
*--Togawa"Russian and Slavic":2
*--PH&G:767
*--Sansom,WWJ:213

<>1771:Moscow urban disorder in connection with the plague [KRR:318-21]

<>1772:England decided that slavery at home was not supported by English law. Soon England's 15,000 slaves would be free
*--It was another half century [ID] before England backed away from its own, and took a hostile position against others', lucrative "off shore" slavery

<>1772:Paris | Encyclopédie; ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers, [Encyclopedia; or Rational Dictionary of Scholarship, Science, Arts and Crafts], the great publication project of the European Enlightenment came to completion in 28 volumes (soon supplemental volumes and an index were issued), under editor Denis Diderot
*--Catherine II supported Diderot's publication and corresponded with major Enlightenment figures [VSB,2:408-10], including the senior and greatest philosophe of them all, Voltaire. In his "English Letters" he acknowledged the profound influence exerted by Isaac Newton and the emerging scientific revolution in thought [W with biography & link to "English Letters"] [W] [W] [W] [W] [W] [W] [W]
*--Voltaire and Catherine the Great: Selected Correspondence (1974)
*--Voltaire wrote an ambitious study of Russia Under Peter the Great
*--Jean-Jacques Rousseau was another enduring influence on the age of Enlightenment, and thereafter
\\
*-- Wagar defines Enlightenment [TXT], then the Russian Enlightenment in particular [6-paragraph TXT]

<>1772:1775; Poland experienced the first of three partitions at the hands of Prussia, Austria and Russia [DIR2:89-93 | DIR3:100-103]
*1795:Polish territories absorbed into Russia by the end of this two-decade process included a population of Jews larger than anything Russia had hitherto experienced. The Jewish "Pale of Settlement" restricted this population to designated locations, except when state permission was granted to live elsewhere. This represented a variation on recognizable European imperialist policies of population concentration and frontier development (without the "removal")
\\
*--Salo W. Baron, The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets (1964)
*--S. M. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland (1916-20) Consult Dubnow's index
*--Herbert H. Kaplan, The First Partition of Poland (1962)
*--Heinz-Dietrich Löwe, The Tsars and the Jews ... 1772-1917 (1993)
*--Jerzy Lukowski, Liberty's Folly: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Eighteenth Century, 1697-1795 (1991)
*--Iw. Pogonowski, Poland: A Historical Atlas ()
*--P. S. Wandycz. The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795-1918 (1974)

<>1773mr02:USA Boston | Lamps fueled by whale oil for the first time illuminated streets. Tallow candles made of Sperm Whale oil by this time lighted many public places and homes
*--The earliest squeaks of the Industrial Revolution were stilled by whale oil, and urban darkness was first pushed back by the same. From this time until the second half of the 19th century we have the first oil age, a whale-oil age. This first age of energy politics, 1712-1872 (160 years), can be divided into three “whale-oil” phases =
*1712:1780; Nantucket Island the center of first phase of the “whale-oil age” for 68 years. This age centered on the American whaling industry and concentrated on the Sperm Whale. The Sperm whale was, pound for pound, the most profitable of the great “fishes” (actually mammals), with their rich oil, spermaceti and ambergris (used in fine perfumes and costing up to $400/ounce in the 19th c.)
*--The New World [USA] whale fisheries were in the hands of a nearly independent “city-state” or, more precisely, “island-state”, Nantucket. The little, low, sandy island just south of Cape Cod was managed by Quaker seamen whose domain stretched around the global high seas and whose “loyalties” were oriented there rather than toward the mainland colonial states
*--The Revolutionary War destroyed the USA whaling industry, even though Nantucket whalers worked hard to protect their neutrality throughout the hostilities. The whalers sought neutrality, but they were largely “Tory” = They remained gently loyal to English colonial authority and did not support the American Revolution. The brief second phase of the “whale-oil age” altered that picture

<>1773oc05:1774mr23; Siberian frontier fortress Orenburg under siege by rebel army commanded by Russian Old Ritualist Cossack Emeliano Pugachev
*--This rebellion was soon named after its leading figure, Pugachev, who was soon issuing decrees and other official acts [TXTs] [VSB,2:454-5]
*--Pugachev claimed to be Peter III, miraculously  alive eleven years after conspirators murdered him and elevated the "German woman" Catherine to the throne [DSD,1:111-35]
*--The rebellion expanded and swept up all elements of discontent on the Kalmyk, Kazakh & Bashkir steppes
*--Gaining support from discontented peasants, especially those threatened by serfdom, the movement expanded up the Volga drainage toward the heart of Russia
*--Pugachev received petitions that described popular discontent [FFS:84-86]
*--Krest'ianskaia voina [...] na territorii Bashkirii: Sbornik dokumentov
\\
*--Florinsky,1(22)
*--Kolchin:246-50
*--Aleksandr S. Pushkin, The History of Pugachev (1983)
*--John T. Alexander, Autocratic Politics in a National Crisis (1969)
*----------. Emperor of the Cossacks: Pugachev and the Frontier Jacquerie of 1773-1775 (1973)
*--Blum:551-60 describes frequent peasant rebellions

<>1773de12:Russian imperial decree against Pugachev [WRH| DIR2:94-6 | DIR3:104-106]

<>1774jy10:Ottoman Turks and Russia signed Kuchuk Kainardji treaty [VSB,2:406-7| DIR2:97-107 | DIR3:107-113]
*--Imperial Russia’s hand was forced by the Pugachev rebellion. Military force had to be diverted from the Ottoman front and sent against Pugachev along the Volga frontier. Catherine II had to accept a settlement with Turkey less favorable than she might have expected if there had been no Pugachev
*--Frontier or imperial policy was now becoming a domestic political problem, ruling was becoming confused with governing, and vice-versa. Problems of domestic administration were interfering with imperialist ambitions

<>1774jy20:Pugachev issued an "Emancipation Decree" [DIR2:96 | DIR3:106]

<>1774au01:Nizhnii-Novgorod region | Local serf described disturbance [VSB,2:456-7]

<>1774au23:Tambov provincial official report on Pugachev uprising [VSB,2:457-8]

<>1774se05:oc26(NS); Philadelphia | Beginning of American Revolution. Representatives of twelve colonial states (Georgia did not participate) organized nearly two-month long Continental Congress to protest English mistreatment. Sought redress of grievances from England, but revolutionary war broke out before the Second Continental Congress could hold its scheduled meeting (below)
*--In the 1830s, German economist Friedrich List emphasized the desire for "national liberation" from an exploitative imperialist overlord, England, the desire for economic independence from the "mother country", as a central factor causing the American Revolution [TXT]
*1775mr22:English parliamentarian Edmund Burke delivered his "Speech on Conciliation with America" [TXT], arguing for less harsh dealings with the rebellious colonies. He sought to avoid American Revolution
*1775ap19:Lexington and Concord battles marked opening of military phase of American Revolution. Hopes for conciliation were now a thing of the past
*1775my10:Philadelphia | Second Continental Congress met as American Revolutionary crisis deepened

<>1774se15:Pugachev captured. His officers' testimony [VSB,2:458]

<>1774de19:Catherine II issued manifesto "concerning the crimes of the Cossack Pugachev" [VSB,2:458-9]
*--Pugachev was dispatched, but the fear of Pugachev (the pugachevshchina) persisted

<>1775au03:Catherine II abolished the Zaporozhian Sech' [VSB,2:459-60] Russian state cracked down on Cossacks. Cossack autonomy was a victim of Pugachev rebellion. An exciting 200-years of precarious independence on the southern Russian Ukraine was an an end

<>1775no07:Russian reform of provincial administration created the "guberniia" [province] system [VSB,2:410-11| KRR:242-4| DSD,1:136-57] Catherine abolished the harsh and corrupt voevody (for three centuries, voevody had been largely responsible for military-style government in frontier provinces) in favor of what appeared to be a more rational system of civilian government. It still might be said however that her goal was to place more responsibility for public order on provincial officials, thus to overcome her weak position beyond the capitals, as shown by early successes of Pugachev rebellion
*--Pugachev taught at least this = The closest imperial or frontier domains had to be "governed" as part of the Empire, not just "ruled" as colonial possessions. Russian foreign policy had to become more subtle and complex

<>1776:1871; Era of "European Revolution" (95 years)

<>1776:Scotland (Great Britain) | Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, [TXT1] [TXT2] [TXT3] [TXT4]. In the domestic economy, Smith extolled market-driven production and distribution of commodities, placing accent on freedom of exchange or laissez-faire [hands-off] role of government or other officials
*--Smith meant to contrast his free-market "wealth of nations" with mercantilist "wealth of ruling powers".  This was the first systematic critique of the economic system that had dominated European political/economic life over the past century and a half = Mercantilism
*--Smith was confident that a natural, rational self-regulation ("invisible hand") rather than the very visible governmental and bureaucratic hand of state authority would bring order as well as prosperity for the whole nation. Here are his words from Book 4, ch. 2 = The individual engaged in personal market economy decisions need have no broader social benefit in mind, just his own interests. The economically active person "neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. ... [H]e intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it."
*--The views of Adam Smith can be thought of as the foundational economic theory behind the great liberal social and political revolution that was about to sweep over the European world. Adam Smith was the original so-called "classical economist"
*--English-born American radical Thomas Paine published Common Sense [TXT] [TXT], an early expression of social egalitarianism and democracy. Paine questioned the natural relationship between laissez faire and democracy, a relationship many followers of Adam Smith casually took for granted
*--From the beginning Smith-style market economics and Paine-style democracy existed side by side in a tense relationship. The contradictions between "capitalism" and "egalitarianism" were as important as the harmonies
*--We also note tensions between laissez faire at home and imperialist expansionism in the wider world. In non-European areas, mercantilism was being replaced by direct European imperialist rule, rather than by the new market economy which Adam Smith recommended. In revolutionary USA, a mixed economy, involving central authority in dynamic relationship with private enterprise, also reflected the US fear of imperialist aggression, military or economic [ID]. And a half-century later =
*1841:1844; German economic Friedrich List made significant adjustments to Smithian principles, better to conform them to the needs of late-blooming industrial modernization
*1895:+; Among the several powerful 19th and 20th-century institutional/economic trends that Smith did not foresee, none was more important than the "managerial revolution"
*--150 years after Adam Smith, in the 1930s, a time of global crisis of the free-market system, the English economist John Maynard Keynes offered a neo-liberal model of national wealth which conceded a vital role to government
 \\
*2008ja18:TLS:7-8| Richard Bourke reviewed Gavin Kennedy’s Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy and other recent related scholarship. According to Bourke, Kennedy resolved three related problems or questions that arise from Smith’s laissez-faire or free-market choice theory =
(1) Can Smith’s thought about personal communitarian obligation in the social and political spheres be reconciled with self-interested individual freedom of choice in a free-market economic sphere?
(2) Is civil society, in all its spheres [ID], compatible with unbridled self-interest?
(3) Can commercial contractual arrangements harness self-interest?
*--Kennedy found the answers to these questions in the complex relationship between two books by Adam Smith, the first neglected and the second more famous but by now only vaguely understood =
*1759:The Theory of Moral Sentiments, then seventeen years later, Wealth of Nations [above, at top of entry]
*--By bringing these two texts together, Kennedy identified Smith's concept of “impartiality” as the solution to the problems raised in the three questions above. Impartiality is a human trait that surmounts the “partiality” of self-interest. Smith in this way becomes, for Kennedy, a theorist of social justice as well as of the free market. For Smith, the central motivational ethical complex called “self-regard” included a component of “selfishness”, but it contained much more than that. Social cohesion grows out of a natural human “identification” with others, which in turn allows “impartiality” to thrive within the larger complex called “self-regard”. Smith thus with his generously conceived “self-regard” dissolved the opposition between egoism and altruism. (Compare this with Harold Lasswell’s concept of “perceived interests” [TXT].)
*--But what mechanism within the “body politic” patrols and disciplines the boundaries of sociability and self-interest? There was that evasive almost mythic idea of “the invisible hand” that spontaneously and naturally regulates a large polity, that assures sociability where self-interest reigns. This dreamy and strangely anarchistic idea has never been satisfactorily defined, nor has the hand itself ever been described. It has never been subjected, so to speak, to field identification. Kennedy’s link between the two Smith texts, Moral Sentiments and Wealth, went only part way toward a solution of this problem
*--Bourke intervened at this point in his review to suggest a third and even earlier text = Smith’s 1751 lectures on rhetoric and criticism. This earliest text was first delivered at Edinburgh and Glasgow universities but was destroyed at Smith’s death. In 1958 the lectures were teased out from student notes [See McKenna just below]. These lectures underpinned Smith’s 1759 study of morality which in turn underpinned his famous 1776 study of economics
*--Stephen J. McKenna, Adam Smith: The Rhetoric of Propriety [Summit]
*--Bourke explained how the two Smith texts emphasized by Kennedy were founded on these lectures = The rhetorical basis of human behavior in company with others was, for Smith, “propriety” (to prepon in Greek, decorum in Latin). Smith leaned hard on his sense of appropriateness. Humans possessed a disposition not found in any other “race of animals”. Humans were naturally disposed to coordinate behavior without any intended direct benefit or explicit collaboration
*--What about all those who extol the virtues of unfettered free-market choice and unregulated entrepreneurial freedom, and attribute all this to Adam Smith? Bourke argued, in a tone we might call haughty, that his ascending three-step explanation of the evolution of Smith’s thought -- from rhetoric to morals to economics -- is just too complicated and subtle for all those who in the early 21st century seek, largely for partisan political reasons, “to retrieve Smith from the deforming clutches of Hayekian economic dogma” [ID]
*--But, still, what do we make of Bourke’s eye-opening observation that we need to identify a mechanism within the body politic -- an institution -- to protect the boundaries of community propriety and individual self-interest? This is not an economic or moral or rhetorical question. It is a political/institutional question. Immediately after raising the question and with his own rhetorical head fake, Bourke dodged back into the misty shade of rhetorical theory, avoiding the implied next step demanded by his own observation, a step into the political-institutional sphere of the body-politic [ID]
*--D. P. O'Brien, The Classical Economists Revisited, summarizes in chapter one the theoretical, political and industrial economic setting out of which “classical economics” or “political economy” arose, from Smith, through David Ricardo, James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill

<>1776jy04(NS):1791de15; English New-World colonies | Fifteen most intense years of revolution began with the Declaration of Independence
*--Previous two years of negotiation and conciliation between the colonial corporations and the English home country had failed
*1778:France entered colonial revolutionary war on side of rebels and against the British
*1779:Spain entered colonial revolutionary war on side of rebels and against the British. England besieged Gibraltar and Minorca. Minorca fell. Spain and France threatened English power in Ireland or maybe even south-coast England with invasion
*1781:1789; A new constitutional order created under the Articles of Confederation, but they were found deficient from the beginning of the eight-year infancy of revolutionary independence
*--Revolutionary War with England raged almost from the moment of the convocation of the first Continental Congress in 1774 [ID]
*--After 200 years of "Old World" colonial exploitation of the "New World", the New World was beginning to take its destiny into its own hands
*1786:International war was followed by what might be called "internal war", a critical civilian political/institutional phase in which struggle between anti-colonial rebels and the English (British) Empire was accompanied by internal domestic rebellion against colonial elites. Only now was the American revolution fully under way
\\
*--John Ferling, Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence argues that international imperialist competition and intervention contributed a great deal to the heroic victory of overmatched colonial freedom fighters
*--N. N. Bolkhovitinov, Russia and the American Revolution (1976)

<>1777se:Russian publisher Nikolai Novikov wrote editorial in the first issue of his Masonic journal Utrennii svet [Morning Light] & an essay on education [Raeff3:62-86| More Novikov in BL&T:59,117f]
\\
*--Isabella De Madariaga, Politics and Culture in Eighteenth-century Russia:150-67 on Russian Masonic movement
*--Florovsky,5:148-56,170-5 critique of Freemasonry

<>1778:1779; English cleric William Coxe traveled in Russia and described his observations of everyday life [VSB,2:423-8]

<>1778:1779; Swiss-born scholar, philosopher and theologian Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) published Stimmen der Völker in Liedern [The Peoples' Voices in Their Songs], an anthology of various national folksongs, mainly German-language but also Baltic- and Slavic-language songs, gathered in part during his university years in Königsberg [modern-day Kaliningrad, Russia, a port city on the far eastern Baltic seacoast] and teaching years in Riga. Herder was an influential early voice of protest against the neo-classical trends of the Enlightenment and an early influence on the movement called "Romanticism". He was a leading figure in the German-language cultural movement called Sturm und Drang [storm and strife]
*--...On Social and Political Culture
\\
*--Wagar on the era of Romanticism [TXT]

<>1778:Hokkaido, Notkome (Nokkamapu, E of Nemuro) was the point where Russians landed on Hokkaido, met with Matsumae servitor Araida Daihachi, gave gifts, and requested establishment of trade relations. The daimyo of Matsumae behaved according to the Japanese policy of national seclusion, a variation on state-centered mercantilism, and insisted that Russians not come again to Hokkaido, Kunashiri or Etorofu (the two larger islands off the eastern coast of Hokkaido; Russians had been on Etorofu at least since 1760)
*--Trade was possible only in the centrally controlled trade point, far to the south at Nagasaki
*--If Russians needed food and wine, they were instructed to send Ainu agents from Uruppu Island (the next island east from Etorofu in the lower Kuril chain, held then by Russians)
*--Russian/Japanese relations grew tense off the eastern coastline of Hokkaido not far from the southern-most of the Kuril Islands
\\
*--[W] A Japanese website gives  history of the post World War II "four islands" controversy [Kunashiri, Etorofu, Shikotan and Habomai islands] between Japan and Russia
*--KEJ,6:340
*--Togawa"Russian and Slavic:3
*--SHJ,3:181-2

<>1779:Russian writer Mikhail Kheraskov published epic poem "The Rossiad" [KRR:401-5]

<>1779my:Russian thinker Denis Fonvizen, "Ta Hsüeh: Or that Great Learning which Comprises Higher Chinese Philosophy" & other political essays [Raeff3:88-105]. Fonvizen sought to teach Chinese moral philosophy to Russians, especially to instill timeless habits of virtue in those who would govern justly

<>1780:Russian Empress Catherine II (the Great) sponsored "League of Armed Neutrality" to mediate the English-French war & protect American Revolution from European powers. Beginnings of a century of amiability between Russia & USA
\\
*--Saul,1:1-25
*--Clarence Manning, Russian Influence on Early America
*--N. N. Bolkhovitinov, The Beginnings of Russian-American Relations, 1775-1815

<>1780s:1840s; For more than a half century, Central Asian territories -- the Caucasus Mountains & Turkestan -- were the goals of Russian imperialist expansion

<>1781:Prussian [German-speaking] university city Königsberg [ID] was the academic home of Professor Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) who in this year published his monumental philosophical work Kritik der reinen Vernunft [Critique of Pure Reason]. Kant's core argument was that the truth of our "ideas" is not dependent on conformity with the actual external world (as insisted in empiricist philosophies). Instead, the truth of ideas, including ideas about the external world itself, is dependent on conformity with the knowing structures of the mind itself. Ideas either conform to the logical structures of the mind or they are unknowable. Ideas that do not fit in the mind are incomprehensible, much as FM radio signals are incomprehensible to the AM receiver. Humans experience and shape ideas about phenomena, and these ideas can be very elaborate and precise. Science is possible for that reason. Also for this reason, one need not be a skeptic about knowledge in general. But the thing we can know -- the phenomenon -- is not a "thing in itself" [Ding an sich]. A "thing in itself" would be an unknowable noumenon. It may well be out there, but the brain is not equipped to deal with it in any satisfactory way of thinking. Serious human thought requires substance, dimension, weight, position, and susceptibility to cause and effect. It has to "make sense" according to all the truth tests built into the logical structures of the human mind, not according to the intrinsic Ding an sich, not according to the essential noumenal essence of the "thing in itself"
*--Kant conceded, however, that humans receive powerful impressions of the noumenal world. This is the world of esthetics, ethics, religion and spiritualism. This is not the world of knowledge, strictly speaking. Kant defined a set of "antinomies of the mind" that simply cannot be resolved (the nature of time, space, gods, the freedom of the human will, etc.). Any logical attempt to penetrate the realm of the noumenon or to resolve the antinomies of the mind was bound to fail. The brain simply does not have the capacity to succeed in these tasks. Humans had to fall back on esthetic and ethical ways of dealing with these obdurate problems
*--Kant's concept of ethics troubled many. It has been labeled "the categorical imperative". Two statements explain =
(1) "Act as if by your action you set a universal rule for all humanity", and
(2) "Always act in such a way that you and anyone else affected by your actions are treated as ends in themselves, not as means to other ends"
*--Two implications of Kant's thought of broadest cultural significance were
(1) his definition of the proper realm of reason, of science, of empiricism and logic, where esthetics and ethics (e.g., religion) had no intellectually defensible authority, and
(2) his definition of the proper realm of esthetics and ethics, where science (reason and empiricism) had no intellectually defensible authority
*--Nonetheless, the Catholic Church put the works of Kant on its proscription list. Similarly, Communist ideology in the 20th century condemned "Kantianism"

<>1782:USA. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer [TXT] See especially Letter #11 from "A Russian Gentleman". The hearty yeoman farmer was much extolled on these pages in a time of colonial rebellion in the name of independence from mercantilist exploitation

<>1782:1783; Aleutian Island Amchitaka | Daikokuya Kodayu (1751:1828) and crew of 17 thrown off course transporting rice from Ise to Tokyo. They drifted 8 months before being cast ashore and transported by Russians to Siberia
*--They taught Japanese language in Irkutsk at what might be the world's first international studies center, founded by Professor Kiril (Erik was his Finnish name) Laksman
*--Laksman facilitated trip to Saint Petersburg where Daikokuya spend six months in the court of Catherine II
*1783:Kudo Heisuke(1783-1800) wrote Aka Ezo Fusetsu Ko [Account of Reports about Red Hokkaidans (i.e., Russians)]. Kudo learned about Russia from Russian adventurers he met on Hokkaido, plus Dutch associates and Dutch books, e.g., Oude en nieuwe staat van't Russische of Moskovsische Keizerryk; behelzende eene uitvoerige historie van Rusland en deszelfs Groot-Vorsten, 2v (Utrecht:1744). Kudo ignored exaggerated fears and cunning Dutch warnings. He recommended closer commercial ties with Russia
*--At this time Matsumae daimyo secretly approved trade with Russia around Kunashiri Island (nearest of "the four islands" to Hokkaido). Kudo suggested trade openly and influenced Bakufu shogun Tanuma Okitsugu to promote development of Hokkaido in order to promote Japanese/Russian trade
*1785:Tanuma sent 2 Japanese missions under Finance Commissioner to explore the Kurils (Chishima) & Sakhalin. Resulted in 1786:Plan for economic development of this region
*--No positive Russian governmental policy at work in these years, "only a somewhat indifferent support given to the projects of officials and merchants in Siberia" [Sansom, WWJ:213]. Japanese policy in this region was also slow to emerge. "Informal" ways were found to loosen Russian mercantilist and Japanese national-seclusion control over Japanese/Russian frontier relationships

<>1783:Russian law on independent press created the possibility for Nikolai Novikov to become a great publisher. Since 1779, Novikov lived in Moscow and managed the official presses of Moscow University, now he was able to strike out on his own
*--He became a central figure in a Moscow social and intellectual renaissance that resulted in the formation of voluntary societies of the freemasonic lodge type
*--Aleksandr Radishchev, in his infamous publication Journey..., touched on the question of press freedom and the need to abolish censorship

<>1783ap08:Russian annexation of Crimean Peninsula represented further incursions into territory under authority of Ottoman Turks and brought Crimean Tatars under Russian control, after nearly 350 years of semi-independent existence in alliance with the Ottomans [VSB,2:412-13]
*--Big 1200-year LOOP on "Crimea"
*--For success in the south, Russia still needed peace in the west. Catherine had for three years worked to establish a closer relationship with Austrian Emperor Joseph. She drew up a "Greek Project" which visualized a reconstitution of the great Roman Empire with its dual capitals in Rome and Constantinople [Istanbul], now relocated to Vienna and St.Petersburg
*--Potemkin for years urged annexation of large portions of the Balkan Peninsula [VSB,2:411-12] Such dreams of Russian imperialist expansion darkened relations with the Ottomans, but also made Austrians suspicious, since much of their vulnerable land-locked empire depended on their control of certain Balkan territories. Far NW European powers, especially England, became increasingly alarmed that Russia (rather than England) might prosper most from the decline of Ottoman power
\\
*--A. W. Fisher, The Russian Annexation of the Crimea, 1772-1783
*--On the era of the Greek Project, see ACG:235-55

<>1783my03:Catherine II extended serfdom into Ukrainian territories [VSB,2:460]

<>1784:Alaska, Kodiak Island | Grigorii Shelikhov, great Siberian fur trader, established first Russian new-world colony. He was a poor merchant from Kursk who made it big on the frontier. He displayed many of the wildly independent ways of frontier entrepreneurs, establishing his own fortress port in the Kuril Islands in order to facilitate trade with the Japanese in the north. He drew up plans for vast Pacific-rim trade system, including exploration and development of SE Siberian Amur River basin. Shipping to and from China and USA, to sell Pacific-rim products and supply that area. With state backing, Shelikhov brought several enterprises together [VSB,2:477-8] Alaska might have become the hub of an energetic Russian presence in the New World, but that was not to be the case
*--His desire for monopoly control over Russian business on the Pacific Rim was not realized in his time, but he may be thought of as a Russian precursor to USA entrepreneur John Jacob Astor
*1795jy20:Shelikhov died and in the next year, Catherine II as well. Now the obstacle to monopoly was removed, and the most significant Russian version of the European overseas corporation could be founded, The Russian-America Company 

<>1785:1812; Second phase of the “whale-oil age” [first], like all subsequent ages of global “energy politics”, involved fierce competition between those nations capable of projecting their power beyond national borders. It was a quarter-century struggle to control energy sources and all markets essential to modern industrialization. In this instance, the principle competitors were England, France, The Netherlands, and USA
*1785:France, Paris | John Ledyard approached the US Ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson, with an outline of a surprising plan to open up the Pacific Northwest for USA. Ledyard had sailed on Cook’s legendary last voyage in Pacific waters. He was now teamed with famous naval officer John Paul Jones to launch this bold venture
*1785:London | First US Ambassador to England, John Adams, encouraged English Prime Minister William Pitt to purchase whale oil from New World firms. Adams insisted that “the fat of the spermaceti-whale gives the clearest and most beautiful flame of any substance that is known in nature, and we are surprised that you prefer darkness, and consequent robberies, burglaries, and murders in your streets, to the receiving, as a remittance, our spermaceti oil”. [Stackpole,Whales:19-20]
*--England courted the Nantucket whalers, tried to woo them away from the brash new USA, and the whalers were willing to consider English proposals. British authority could no longer be maintained off MA shores, so England tried to convince Yankee whalers as individual companies to relocate in certain English ports. The English understood that the Nantucket whalers as a unit would have driven English companies out of business. The English sought to divide and conquer
*1786sp:London negotiations between Charles Jenkinson (Lord Hawkesbury) and Nantucket whaler, William Rotch, Sr.
*--Jenkinson was the leading figure in Pitt’s Board of Trade, a cabinet-level governmental institution newly created to promote English imperialist commerce, to make necessary adjustments in view of recent loss of the American colonies. In this connection, Jenkinson was closely invested in the future success of the English overseas corporations, the East India Co. and the South Sea Co. Nantucket whalers provided a possible guarantee for success of Jenkinson’s neo-mercantilist objectives, if he could woo them to the English flag. If he failed, Nantucket was a major threat to his success. His method was haughty intimidation. He employed the English overseas corporations to exclude outsiders from the Indian Ocean and even the Pacific. Cook’s science, British naval power, and the financial clout of the English overseas corporations could be manipulated together to give Jenkinson that possibility. It goes without saying that this was not a market-economic or laissez faire moment in the establishment of English imperial or global financial dominance
*1786je07:English Parliament, guided by Pitt and Jenkinson, passed the “Act for the Encouragement of the Southern Whale Fishery”. England in the years after the Revolutionary War sought to displace New World whale fishermen with English, and thus to gain control over the whale-oil era
*--William Rotch, Sr., represented Quaker Nantucket whalers and was impervious to Jenkinson’s aristocratic arrogance. He was also inspired by a very different vision of global commerce. He thought of the high seas as international waters, and the products harvested there in some sense a possession to which the whole world, rather than one nation, ought to have access. He was one of the first, certainly the first active and crucial, example of an international businessman and a consistent advocate of free markets
*--He saw how the English intended to break up the Nantucket whalers, force them to leave their homes, and blend them into Jenkinson’s neo-mercantilist corporation. He understood that he was not without devices of his own. He could play one power against the other. He thus set out for France where he opened the Dunkirk port (and thus the whole European market) to Nantucket whalers
*--Jefferson and Adams began to see the importance of restoring US dominance in this global commerce
*1791:Philadelphia | Thomas Jefferson, Report of the Secretary of State on the Subject of the Cod and Whale Fisheries  [Stackpole:9]
*1793:Nantucket whalers were recovered from Revolutionary War losses and competing successfully with the English neo-mercantile corporations. Nantucket bottoms often carried Russian hemp homeward for manufacture into cordage for the growing fleet
*--In these years, an occasional Russian whaling adventure might be launched, as was that of Count Aleksandr R. Vorontsov
*1786de:Count Vorontsov and Count Aleksandr A. Bezborodko composed a memo affirming Russia's claim to the islands and coasts of North America [DIR3:149-51]
*1787je21:Lieutenant General Ivan Yakobii, Governor General of Siberia, issued secret instructions to agents of Grigorii Shelikhov to establish Russian claim to newly discovered parts of  Alaska [DIR3:151-2]
*--But Russia made no persistent effort to enter the fisheries. When Count Rumiantsev financed and launched a whaler into the North Sea, an English ship, disguised under a French flag, seized and burned it [BrE,29:230-1] Companies of brief existence made shy effort at the high seas hunt; the Russian-America Co. smothered any initiatives in that direction. Whatever Peter the Great’s hopes and more recent ambitions like those of Shelikhov, it was clear that Russia was not yet ready to launch itself on global seaways
*--The War of 1812 again brought ruin to the American whaling industry, but soon a third and most grand phase of the whale-oil age followed
*--Global market in slaves, spices and other valuables created the sea-going capability that allowed the harvesting of whales from the great oceans, and that same market brought the whole world -- not just those who were among the early "industrializing" peoples -- more or less simultaneously into the process called the industrial revolution
\\
*--Stackpole,Whales [noUO]

<>1785ap20:Russian Empress Catherine II issued her Charter for the nobility and Charter for the towns
*--Charter for the nobility loosened state authority in the lives of gentry landowners, serfowners and aristocrats, granting them the right to meet regularly in their own local and provincial assemblies [VSB,2:413-15 | KRR:244-6 | DSD,1:158-70 | DIR2:108-111 | DIR3:113-17]
*--Catherine expanded upon and moved in different directions from Peter III's concessions to nobles [ID]. This moment marked the legal demise of the functional distinction between pomeshchik [ID] and votchinnik [ID]. Henceforward, all land-owning nobles may be called "gentry" or pomeshchiki. Russian aristocrats were now granted privileges, exemptions and only vaguely presumed duties, and, most of all, freed from the LEGAL obligation to serve the state (though not often free of the ECONOMIC obligation to serve the state)
*--Perhaps her greatest innovation was the granting of an institutional home for regional nobles, the gentry assembly. But even here, the assembly was licensed by the state and given no real independent authority beyond certain local issues of gentry concern. The historical test of gentry political vitality in their assemblies came a half-century later, in 1856-1861, and they failed
*--Some have thought of this as the "emancipation of the Russian nobility", but Mikhail Speranskii, a reforming minister one generation later, did not see it that way. Some have claimed to see a historical parallel between the two great 18th-century aristocratic resurgences, one in France [EG] and the other in Russia. However, the institutional and social qualities of the parlement of Paris and the many Russian provincial gentry assemblies were of entirely different orders of historical experience
*--The 300-year-old two-tiered formation of medieval Russian social elites was now de facto dead and buried, though titles of feudal rank were retained = prince, count, baron. The memory of feudal grandeur never died among the old aristocratic families and the aspirations for it never weakened among pomeshchiki. Yet the old titles were increasingly little more than honorific natal appelations, signifying no real political, social or economic independence. To be an aristocrat mainly vouchsafed a significant "insider advantage" in life, but an advantage defined, protected and controlled by the autocratic state
*--Russian text
*--Charter for the towns [VSB,2:4415-18| KRR:321-4] set out to define in formal legal terms the six categories of urbanites. It authorized formation of an institution of urban governance (or at least self-administration) though a City Duma [gorodskaia duma]. Catherine II gave every appearance of wanting to free cities to some degree from prevailing Russian social/service hierarchies and to nudge them in the direction of general European urban vitality. The City Duma did set down institutional roots in Petersburg and Moscow. And there it did serve to provide an institutional arena in which urbanized nobles and civic-minded merchants could develop habits of mutual and productive political sociability. The City Duma, however, but not flourish in many other Imperial towns, and the institution suffered from official neglect for almost a century
*--Griffiths, David, and George Munro, eds., Catherine II's Charters of 1785 to the Nobility and the Towns (1991) Includes text of charter to state peasants which was not promulgated. Fifty years would pass before state peasant reform was attempted
\\
 ABOUT NOBILITY =
*--Blum:345-66 (on noble ascendancy) [NB! phrase "feminine illogic" (350)]
*--Jones, Emancipation [BYD]
 ABOUT URBANITES =
*--J. Michael Hittle, The Service City: State and Townsmen in Russia, 1600-1800 [Excerpted TXT]
*--V. T. Bill, The Forgotten Class: The Russian Bourgeoisie from the Earliest Beginnings to 1900

<>1786:1791; English New-World colonial Revolution moved out of its more famous military phase and through the crucial 5-year civilian political and institutional phase. The United States of America [USA] created itself as a new sovereign (independent) but federated state (with coordinated central and provincial power). This process was not without serious internal factional conflict =
*1786:1787; USA Shays rebellion against economic hardships suffered by small-holding farmers in the first years of rebellion against English power. Was this an American revolution within the American Revolution?
*1787se17(NS):Philadelphia | New Constitution to replace Articles of Confederation signed and submitted for ratification by the people of the thirteen states
*--Problem of slavery vexed American freedom fighters, but the "founding fathers" discovered a way to design a liberal constitution to govern over free and bound citizens (for certain purposes, a slave was counted as 3/5 a citizen). In these years Vermont and Massachusetts abolished slavery, and Pennsylvania adopted a policy of gradual emancipation
*1787fa:1788sp; Debate on new USA Constitution was joined by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay in "The Federalist Papers" [W] [Section of essay on Federalist]
*--"Anti-federalists" joined the debate. Be careful about the natural confusions in the use of the terms "federalist" and "anti-federalist"
*1788je21:New Hampshire became ninth state to ratify, thus the Constitution can be said to be in effect. However, the new Union would not come into effect without further ratification and election of a new government under the new Constitution
*1789:USA | The first national government was elected and took office
*1789:USA Tariff and Tonnage Acts secured a measure of privilege and advantage for USA ships and traders, warding off the vigorous naval commercial powers France and, mainly, England. After revolutionary success, the union now had to be consolidated. The newly formed central government felt nothing would consolidate its position better than direct aid to the developing American economy
*--"Founding father" Alexander Hamilton was a vigorous proponent of industrial economic development, and he was thinking less of yeomen farmers than of bankers, manufacturers, and commercial traders
*--Hamilton promoted development of internal economic ties, e.g., north with south, and advised against dependence on overseas economic ties. He was alert to the nature of imperialist competition for markets, opportunities for expansion in undeveloped territories, and the dangers of foreign intrusion into the new and weakened US domestic economy. His statist views on standing militias and navies, on taxes and the general problem of raising government revenue to support vital centralized national functions, were clearly stated in "The Federalist Papers", particularly in numbers 30-36 [excerpts]
*1790:Hamilton summarized his views in A Report on Manufactures [Excerpt#1 | Excerpt#2 | Excerpt#3]. His short term goal was to protect independence in time of war. He proposed that government factories produce essential naval, artillery and other military hardware. Soon Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours & Son and Eli Whitney [ID] answered the call for an independent military manufacture. Rather then support direct government factories, they laid the foundations for a compromise between private and government involvement, a compromise that foreshadowed the 20th-century "military-industrial complex". However, Hamilton's long-term and central goal was not "military-industrial" at all. He sought transformation of agricultural-plantationist USA into a modern industrial economy
*--Hamilton was influenced by a political opponent, the old Tory economic thinker Tench Coxe, whose publication, A View of the Manufactures of the United States (1790), urged that rapid industrialization was "the means of the POLITICAL SALVATION" of the revolutionary new union. Hamilton thus concluded that revolutionary political innovation had to be joined with economic innovation if the revolution were to survive. This was a novelty of world-wide significance = a dash of old mercantilism to fortify the new Adam-Smithian market economy. A revolutionary, federated but centralized and democratic republic might still find use in governmental protection of homeland enterprise from outside dominance, but with an eye to strengthening the union and contributing to the wealth of the whole nation, rather than to the grandeur of the centralized state. Hamilton's system shifted emphasis from the state to private enterprise. Government should promote, support and protect a vigorous national economy, rather than vice versa, in the traditional mercantilist formula. How else was a fledgling "underdeveloped" country to protect itself against more economically developed, powerful and aggressive competing nations?
*--One-half century earlier, Russian Emperor Peter I became the original economic modernizer in a vulnerable, primitive, agricultural nation. He had only the smallest inkling of Hamilton's developmental economics, and he had no instinct for social independence (LOOP on "Petrine economic policy"). A half century later, German economist Friedrich List insisted on social freedom and what we might call the "Hamiltonian" economic insight. List did this after first considering the experience of Russia and USA
*1791fe:USA House of Representatives created the Bank of the United States. The Bank represented a compromise between private financial interests and state control, all aimed at promoting and protecting USA economic development
*--The political issue of the day was not whether there should be strict adherence to the principle of laissez faire or not. Almost all agreed, compromise between political power and economic development was essential. The issue was how broadly the benefits of state supported economic modernization could be distributed throughout the whole nation [thus the importance of Shays Rebellion (above) and the challenge posed by Thomas Paine's ideas]
*--It soon became clear that the new constitutional system was not complete without a Bill of Rights (first ten amendments to the new constitution required before the document would "work" and the American Revolution would be complete)
\\
*--Alan Kimball on the "Federalist Papers" and the revolutionary ideology of James Madison [TXT]
*--Wagar on the intellectual climate in early revolutionary USA [TXT]
*--John C. Miller, Alexander Hamilton
*--Thomas Govan, Nicholas Biddle, Nationalist and Public Banker
*--A LITTLE REBELLION NOW AND THEN, a 30-minute dramatization of the American Revolution, culminating in Shays' Rebellion and the framing of the Constitution

<>1786au05:Catherine II decreed ambitious educational reform [VSB,2:464-5 | DIR3:118-121, with 1782:1800; Statistics on Russian education]

<>1787:1788; Siberian & Russian travels of John Ledyard = John Ledyard's Journey…, 1787-1788: The Journal and Selected Letters (1966). In Paris Ledyard approached USA Ambassador to France Thomas Jefferson with a proposal that he and his partner, the famous Revolutionary War commander John Paul Jones, be chartered as a company to develop USA posts in the Vancouver Island area of Oregon Territory. He got no support, so he turned to Russian Empress Catherine II. Without clear permission from her, he set out on foot for the Siberian Pacific Rim. Grand but vague ambitions drove him. He was detained in Yakutsk and eventually escorted out of Russia back to Europe

<>1787:1792; Russian imperialist expansion southward provoked war with Ottoman Turks

<>1787:Mikhail Shcherbatov, "Petition..." and "Pace of Russia's Modernization" [Raeff3 :50-60]. The essay on modernization [56-60] represented a pioneer effort to identify the main elements of the powerful concept. Notice how Shcherbatov was free of the concept "Westernization"; in fact he warned against paths toward modernization that imitated the paths of other nations
*--Shcherbatov is most famous for his On the Deterioration of Russian Morals [English-Russian text; Excerpts= VSB,2:465-7]

<>1787:Russian bride Avdot’ia Bogdanova's dowry expressed qualities of a noble woman's everyday life [KRR:354-6]
*1796:Varvara Bakunina accompanied her husband, a commander in the Persian campaigns, and wrote valuable memoirs of the campaign [DRW:216-20]
*--Description of everyday life of Russian court in these years [VSB,2:418-21]

<>1788ja19:Australia at Botany Bay | First English fleet landed, "transporting" political and civil criminals to "assignment" [forced labor]. Settlement of Australia began. "Transport" was English policy over the next 80 years (to 1868 when the last convoy deposited its load of Irish rebels against English imperial dominion). In all 825 shiploads carried an average "payload" of ca. 200 prisoners and a grand total of approximately 165,000 exiles. Over these 80 years, Australia was the "English Siberia". Here is a brief legal history =
*1597:English "Acte for Punyshment of Rogues, Vagabonds and Sturdy Beggars" declared that criminals "shall...be banished out of this Realm ... and shall be conveyed to such parts beyond the seas as shall be ...assigned by the Privy Council". If they returned, these rogues would be hanged. New World America was just such a site "beyond the seas".
*1717:English policy of criminal "transportation" intensified by new royal acts
*1776: "Hulks Act" added forced convict labor clause to the emerging English system of political and criminal exile. This was a form of slavery called "assignment". American Revolution forced English to find a new New World
   Four phases =
(1) 1787:1810; Intense 23-year period in which England worked to meet (a) domestic and (b) international political/economic goals =
  (a) Clear itself of the most dangerous representatives of the "criminal class" (deracinated villagers [ID] and economically ruined urban wage-laborers)
  (b) Establish a British imperial strategic presence in the SE Pacific basin. Then =
(2) 1811:1830; Siphon off growing labor discontent and supply growing labor needs of Australia where there was "a ravenous demand for convict labor"
(3) 1831:1840; System came under anti-slavery pressure in England and in Australia, though it still worked as part of the English struggle to suppress and disperse opposition to its imperial dominion in Ireland. Then =
(4) 1841:1868; Value of slave labor declined
\\
*--Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore:40-1, 63-7, 143-4, 161-2, 181-202. English criminal transport is shown to be a rough draft or "sketches for the immense [Soviet] Gulags of the twentieth century". Hughes could have placed English "transport" in an even broader historical context of prior examples and later examples of removal, concentration, forced labor and frontier development, repeating itself on many occasions prior to the infamous 20th-century Nazi and Soviet systems

<>1789:1815; 26-year ERA OF FRENCH REVOLUTION and NAPOLEONIC WARS
*1789au26:"Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" [TXT] laid out a revolutionary social vision that severely pared the privileges and exemptions of the two ascendent Old-Regime social estates (Clergy and Aristocracy) in favor of empowering the "Third Estate", the vast majority of "commoners"
*--On French Revolutionary "terror"
*--English writer on agricultural themes, Arthur Young (1741-1820), traveled in France on the eve and during the early phases of the French Revolution. He left a fascinating and detailed account of daily life, Travels During the Years 1787, 1788, 1789, and 1790 [TXT] [Excerpt TXT]
*--A decade earlier Young published an equally detailed account of his Tour in Ireland, concentrating on the NW border territories of Protestant Northern Ireland [TXT]
\\
*--Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky, Russia and Europe, 1789-1825

<>1789:English scholar and powerful social theorist Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals & Legislation [TXT]
*--Bentham originated the influential doctrines of "Utilitarianism" in which the final arbiter of "truth" and "significance" was the utility, the usefulness, or the practical workability for the person or groups of persons affirming "truth" and "significance". Bentham elaborated a universal, dual motive force at work in human behavior, "pleasure" and "pain". Humans strive to maximize pleasure and minimize pain in everything they do. Becoming very meticulous, Bentham measured pleasure and pain according to their intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity [proximity or closeness to the person experiencing the sensation], fecundity [fertility, ability to produce consequences], purity and extent. The public criterion of morality and ethics should be the greatest good for the greatest number.

<>1789:Japan, Ezo [Hokkaido] | Last great Ainu rebellion. Matsumae authority extending over island
\\
*--KEJ,2:238

<>1789je08:USA Revolutionary leader James Madison's speech proposed amendment of the constitution by the addition of a "Bill of Rights"  [TXT] [W]
*1789jy14:Paris the scene of the storming of the Bastille. The French Revolution was fully under way
*1791de15:USA | First ten amendments ratified, the culminating moment in the seventeen year history of the American Revolution

<>1790:English politician and political theorist Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [W], became perhaps the most important statement of English conservative political ideology
*--Burke’s book-length letter to a young Frenchman dealt, in order, with two big historical issues. First, he interpreted the meaning of English political tradition in order to show how inappropriate revolutionary politics were there. Yes, there had been revolutionary disorders (the Puritan Revolution [ID] and the “Glorious Revolution” [ID]), yet Burke explained how these times of seeming change were in fact in perfect harmony with the historical character of the English people and sacred political customs of the British nation. Only after stating his key political positions and nesting them in actual English political practice -- and that took up nearly half his text -- did he then offer his specific and detailed critique of French revolutionary events and institutions, judging them in relationship to  his conservative sense of English superiority
*--Here are four quotes from the first half of his book that epitomize his conservative political philosophy =

  • “When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us; nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer.”
  • “One of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated” is this = If “temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters”, and they presume themselves capable of “changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions”, the result will be “the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.”
  • “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”
  • “A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.”

<>1790se04:Catherine II issued decree punishing Russian state servitor and political theorist Aleksandr Radishchev (-1802) for his Journey from Saint Petersburg to Moscow [partial TXT] [Excerpts: RRC2,2:261f | VSB,2:467-8 | DIR2:112-24 | DIR3:122-35]
*1792:Radishchev, "On Man, His Morality & Immorality" [Edie,1:77-100]
*--More Radishchev [LDH:17-31]
\\
*--Blum:560-74 chronicles the mounting tide of criticism aimed against the shameful institution of serfdom
*--Allen McConnell, A Russian "Philosophe" Alexander Radishchev, 1749-1802 (1964)
*--2007 "Person of the Year", according to the magazine TIME, was Vladimir Putin. The article devoted attention to Radishchev's Journey [TXT]

<>1791de29:Ottoman Turks ceded northern shore of Black Sea to Russia in Jassy Treaty, ending five years of war. Russian imperialist expansion showing success in the south and west

<>1792:English writer, Mary Wollstonecraft, inspired by the French Revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen [ID], published her pioneering assertion of women's rights, Vindication of the Rights of Women [PWT2:180-4]
*--Wollstonecraft later married English radical anarchist William Godwin. She was an early representative of the new era's typical self-supporting writing professional, and she left a large body of published work [ID]

<>1792:Tibetan Dali Llama now appointed by Chinese authorities. Independence of Tibet now and for the next 200+ years compromised by several great powers

<>1792ap13:Catherine II ordered police to search the Moscow home and rural estate of Nikolai Novikov. She also launched investigation of Novikov's extraordinary wealth (and entrepreneurial independence)
*--Zealous officials quickly turned this into a witch hunt for participants in vaguely defined "Martinist" or Freemasonic conspiracies of "Illuminati". Catherine despised the mystic and secret qualities of the Freemasonic movement. Mysticism offended her enlightened "this-worldliness". Secrecy was not objectionable, in principle. Imperial rule relied on secrecy. But secrecy among her subjects threatened state control and suggested that something like independence might exist in the social realm, something like "civil society". She nurtured little buds of public activism, but she wanted her Enlightenment securely in a hot-house, under the control of the master gardener
*--Catherine feared that a conspiracy was basing itself on her detested son Paul, who would succeed her on the throne. This fear combined with events in Paris where the French Revolution now was toppling the king
*--Novikov was subjected to horrifying interrogation in the Schluesselburg fortress, then sent into Siberian exile

<>1792su:1793sp; Okhotsk Sea down Kuril Islands to Hokkaido at Nemuro, then to Hakodate by sea, then overland to Matsumae headquarters |  Russian explorer and diplomat, Lieutenant Adam Kirillovich Laksman (1766-1796?) led an expedition organized by Laksman's father and supported by Catherine the Great. One purpose was to take home two Japanese "castaways" (one was Daikokuya [ID]). Main purpose = to explore possibility of laying foundation for Russian-Japanese commercial relations
*--Laksman was Russia's first envoy to Japan. Although Japanese officials had him escorted under heavy armed guard, he was received with hospitality. Laksman conferred with shogun's representatives Ishikawa Shogen & Murakami Daigaku. Laksman asked daimyo of Matsumae to inform the Japanese government that Russians were headed for Tokyo as "neighboring allies" and not as "antagonistic and infidel adversaries"
*--Russians were allowed to winter at Akkeshi in a settlement they built near a Japanese frontier or colonial village [SIE,8:382| KEJ,6:341]
*--Japanese officials accepted the returned castaways, but L was restrained from going to Tokyo. Officials returned Laksman’s credentials & refused to discuss trade unless L went to the main open port, Nagasaki, with only one of his ships [KEJ,6:341] They issued him a permit to go to Nagasaki, but Laksman did not go. He returned to Russia with his permit. Over next couple of years, plans to use permit lapsed with the death of Laksman and others initially interested in the project
*1791:Hayashi Shihei [as named in SHJ,3. Name = Rin Shihei in Sansom,WWJ:213] did much to heighten awareness in Tokyo of the significance of Russians in the north. He published theoretical work about the problems of a maritime state, Kaikoku Heidan. He criticized the policy of the ruling Tokugawa which did not allow construction of large vessels. Regent Sadanobu who understood the justice of Hayashi's warning nonetheless arrested him. Russians were everywhere. They were settled on Uruppu Island by this time. Also, the Ainu on Kunashiri were rebellious
*1793:Hayashi Shihei published Sangoku tsuran zusetsu [Illustrated Survey of 3 Countries] which showed Hokkaido territory stretching from the lower regions of the Amur River to Kamchatka. But generally Hokkaido territory was described somewhat less ambitiously =
     1. Matsumae (southern tip where the powerful Japanese family ruled)
     2. Higashi Ezo (East Hokkaido, or Pacific littoral)
     3. Nishi Ezo (Okhotsk Sea coast)
     4. Kita Ezo (Northern Hokkaido) or Oku Ezo (Upper Hokkaido), meaning Sakhalin Island [Karafuto]
     5. Ezo ga Chishima (Ezo's 1000 islands), meaning Kuril Islands
*1793:Sadanobu ordered coastal defenses, inspected Izu and Sagami coasts
*--Appearance of Laksman caused much alarm in Tokyo; hastened 1794:Sadanobu's resignation [SHJ, 3:202] The unfortunate castaway Daikokuya was arrested. Japanese-Russian relations shifted from commerce to frontier competition
\\
*--Alan Kimball, "Russia and Japan Expand to Their Pacific Frontiers..." [TXT part two]
*--KEJ,2:238, 3:45, 4:327
*--PH&G:776
*--Lensen,Push
*--Sansom, WWJ:214

<>1793:English theorist Bentham, Manual of Political Economy

<>1793ja10:Catherine II first learned of execution of French King Louis XVI [Eye:250]
*--Empress Catherine soon issued a decree severing relations with France [VSB,2:422]

<>1793mr27:Russian decree announced second partition of Poland (cooperatively with Prussia) [VSB,2:422-3]

<>1794:1925; Persia was ruled by the Qajar Dynasty
*1794:1896; The first century of Qajar Dynasty [TXT] preceded the era of Iranian modernization [SAC LOOP picks up in early 20th-c Iran]

<>1794:Tokyo. Katsuragawa Hoshu interrogated castaway Daikokuya (793jy:GO). Daikokuya a bright person, praised by FRN navigator Lesseps, uncle of Ferdinand, so had much to say. Wrote Kratkie... (Hokusa)[pdg] [Togawa"Russian and Slavic:4-5]. K=mdx (6th mmb of K fmy appointed mdx to shogun), tgt at Tokugawa mdx.scl Igakukan, & svt of zpd, esp.Dutch. ~~Dejima factory mdx Peter Thunberg & trade commissioner Izaak Titsingh. K interviewed NED~~ bfr interrogation, so had knowledge. K~~Maeno Ryotaku & Sugita Gempaku, 1st trans. of anatomy kng, Kulmus, Johann Adam a Dutch version of Anatomische Tabellen, Ontleedkundige Tafelen (1793) = Kaitai shinsho (1774) [KEJ, 4:173. PH&G:265]

<>1794:USA CN New Haven | Eli Whitney and his partner, a plantation manager from GA, began manufacture of the first practical cotton gin, bringing industrial methods to the great international cash crop of the slave south. Look at an animation of the cotton gin at work [W]
*1798:Whitney built a firearms factory nearby. Muskets could now be "mass produced" with standardized and interchangeable parts. Whitney thus helped consolidate the Hamiltonian vision of a strong US manufacturing economy independent of other national economies but closely coordinated with, and in defense of, US national goals

<>1794:Russian/Ukrainian spiritual philosopher Grigorii Skovoroda died at 72, leaving fascinating manuscripts [Edie,1:17-62]
\\
The introduction to the several selections in Edie says that Skovoroda "taught an epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical dualism which he nevertheless attempted to unify within a 'pantheistic' conception of the invisible and necessary law of Nature which is God. It is clear that, even though he was a profoundly religious thinker whose chief inspiration was the Bible, his philosophy is highly 'unorthodox' in the several senses of that word. According to his biographer, V. Ern, he spent his life in 'mute, unconscious opposition' to the official Church. Zenkovsky says his thought shows a sympathy for paganism (and for Plato's 'erotic' anthropology) which is not found in any other thinker of his day. When Skovoroda puts the 'soul's peace' above every other consideration, he means to include the ecclesiastical as well as the secular institutions of his time"

<>1794fe05 (NS):Paris | Leader of the French Revolutionary Committee of Public Safety, Maximilien Robespierre (1758­ 1794), delivered a speech explaining and defending its "reign of terror" [W]

<>1795:Poland suffered third and final partition, despite vigorous military-revolutionary resistance of Polish forces commanded by General Tadeusz Kosciuszko, fighting on two fronts against Prussian and Russian forces
*--Kosciuszko had earned "his revolutionary spurs" in 1777-1780 as a commander of rebel colonial troops against English imperialism in North America
*--Poland did not reappear as an independent nation-state for 123 years, at the end of World War One, in November 1918
*--Russian imperialist or frontier expansion now with greater ease pointed east again
\\
Miecislaus Haiman, Kosciuszko in the American revolution

<>1795:1834; English "Speenhamland Law" obstructed creation of a free wage-labor market, even as industrialization rushed ahead
*--As the old manorial and village-based economic systems came under pressure from aristocratic but entrepreneurial English landlords, "inclosure laws" [sometimes "enclosure"] transferred authority of common lands from villagers to various elites more attuned to the opportunities of modern market practices and more closely associated with the ambitions of increasingly powerful centralized nation-states. This was nothing less than a slow historical expropriation of customary medieval peasant village authority over certain pastures and plow-lands, and it had been going on for more than two centuries [EG]
*1700:1760; English inclosures of village lands =    300,000 acres
*1761:1801; English inclosures of village lands = 3,000,000 acres
*--Inclosure was widespread in early modern Europe, and it intensified in the 17th and 18th centuries. By the late 19th century, rural populations dwindled to to a fraction of the over-all population, now largely urbanized
[MAPS of English inclosures]
[MAP of English inclosures, closeup]
[MAP of Swedish open-field village]
[MAP of peasant status and early industrialization in post-French Revolutionary Europe]
[MAP illustrating 1851-1911 migrations of English people from rural to urban industrialized areas]
[Recent decline of rural population, "farmers", in USA]
*--Along with inclosures, practices of wage-labor spread into the countryside
\\
*--Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, took the forty year history of the "Speenhamland Law" (1795-1834) as the major illustration of his main arguments

<>1796se16:Russia | Nearing the end of her 34-year reign, one of Catherine II's last acts was a decree on censorship [VSB,2:469]
*--Censorship was a major target of Aleksandr Radishchev's critical-reformist book Journey [TXT]

 

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