Empire Maker: Aleksandr Baranov and Russian Colonial Expansion into Alaska and Northern California

by Kenneth N. Owens, Alexander Yu. Petrov (With)

Overview

A native of northern Russia, Alexander Baranov was a middle-aged merchant trader with no prior experience in the fur trade when, in 1790, he arrived in North America to assume command over Russia’s highly profitable sea otter business. With the title of chief manager, he strengthened his leadership role after the formation of the Russian American Company in 1799. An adventuresome, dynamic, and charismatic leader, he proved to be something of a commercial genius in Alaska, making huge profits for company partners and shareholders in Irkutsk and St. Petersburg while receiving scandalously little support from the homeland.

Baranov receives long overdue attention in Kenneth Owens’s Empire Maker, the first scholarly biography of Russian America’s virtual imperial viceroy. His eventful life included shipwrecks, battles with Native forces, clashes with rival traders and Russian Orthodox missionaries, and an enduring marriage to a Kodiak Alutiiq woman with whom he had two children. In the process, the book reveals maritime Alaska and northern California during the Baranov era as fascinating cultural borderlands, where Russian, English, Spanish, and New England Yankee traders and indigenous peoples formed complex commercial, political, and domestic relationships that continue to influence these regions today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295741727
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	01/16/2017
Series:	Samuel and Althea Stroum Books
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	355
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Kenneth N. Owens is professor emeritus of history and ethnic studies, California State University, Sacramento.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

1. A Man of the North

2. Siberian Merchant Capitalist

3. Moving to America

4. Taking Command

5. Calamities and Catastrophes

6. The Missionary Monks and the Chief Manager

7. Government Men, Monks, and the Alutiiq Rebellion

8. The Russian-American Company

9. The Sitka Sound War

10. Beyond Alaska

11. Averting Disasters

12. Closing the Baranov Era

Abbreviations: Russian Archival Repositories

Notes

Bibliography

Index

What People are Saying About This

Stephen Haycox

"[Owens provides] full and useful context for every stage of Baranov’s career, and much information which helps the reader appreciate the character of the man and how his experiences contributed to his success as chief manager. An important addition to the growing literature on the history of Russian America."

Albert Hurtado

"Aleksandr Baranov deserves to be known in the same company as John Jacob Astor and other frontier entrepreneurs whose enterprising efforts transformed North America in the age of imperial expansion. He reshaped the Pacific Rim and left an enduring mark on the geography and history of that far flung and diverse quarter of the globe. Exhaustively researched and elegantly written, Kenneth N. Owens’s treatment of this intriguing, colorful, and significant frontier figure will reward readers and reign as the definitive biography for decades to come."

Interviews

Alexander Andreevich Baranov, physically short and stoutly built, became a towering figure in the history of early Russian America. A native of northern Russia, the oldest son in a prosperous merchant family, he was inclined from youth toward a career as a provincial trader and entrepreneur. Ambition and a taste for adventure led him to Siberia in the 1780s, when he was already approaching middle age. There he acquired and then suddenly lost a considerable fortune. His Siberian setbacks persuaded him to strike out for North America, accepting an offer to become the resident general manager for Russia’s most successful firm in the Alaskan maritime sea otter trade. When Emperor Paul I created the Russian-American Company (RAC) in 1799, Baranov stayed as its general manager, with enlarged authority that made him the virtual viceroy of Russia’s overseas empire. Despite his frequent grumblings about retiring and returning to Russia, he remained in this post until his forced removal in 1819 at age 72. This volume focuses on Baranov’s highly eventful American career, setting his life in the context of the development of Russian America. It emphasizes the cultural and social interactions involving Baranov and his men with the North American Native peoples most influenced by the Russian fur business and it imperial outreach. During the Baranov era, Russian America was a cultural borderland that offered striking examples of the “middle ground” phenomenon. Russians and Native peoples met and intermixed under highly variable conditions, with consequences sometimes comparatively equitable and mutually beneficial, and sometimes antagonistic, hostile, or brutally exploitative. Baranov sponsored and exemplified in his own domestic arrangements, with a Kodiak Alutiiq wife and two children, a remarkably enlightened policy of mutual cultural accommodation and social fusion. The result was the formation of a new, well-recognized cultural-ethnic hybrid, the mixed-race Creole population of Russian America. Despite his initial difficulties with a Russian Orthodox spiritual mission, Baranov also respected the role of the missionary monks and generously supported their work in educating and training young Creoles and Alutiiq converts who might enter the RAC’s service. Personally brave, bold, and astoundingly durable, Baranov directed a highly prosperous business operation that made the Russian empire a serious contender in the international competition for Pacific trade and territory during his time. Against great odds, with various calamitous setbacks and inadequate support from his homeland, he endured shipwrecks, military battles, rebellion among disgruntled Russian workers and settlers, a campaign of slander from a few missionaries, and opposition from rival traders: Russian, British, and American. When he learned that Emperor Alexander I had honored him with a grant of a gold medal on a silver ribbon, elevating him and his two well-loved Creole children into the ranks of the nobility, it was the proudest, most emotional moment of his long life. Ever since his death—the victim of yellow fever aboard ship while returning to Russia—the impress of Alexander Baranov’s accomplishments and his strong personality have remained evident. Honored and commemorated today both in Russia and in the widespread territories of Russian America, he merits this scholarly biography, based on exhaustive research, to provide the historical world with a balanced view of his key role in the making of Russian America.

Editorial Reviews

[Empire Maker] transcends the limits of biography through some stellar archival work and by letting Baranov's story recede at key times behind the larger epic of Russian America. The authors have managed to give us both a very useful picture of life as a merchant in nineteenth-century Russia as well as a new, very accessible general history of the colony that nicely complements Lydia Black's and Ilya Vinkovetsky's recent works on the subject. . . . [An] excellent biography.

--Ryan Jones "The Russian Review"

[Aleksandr Baranov] has never been the subject of a full-length scholarly biography. Empire Maker. . . is a praiseworthy effort to remedy that oversight. . . . Owens has woven biographical facts gleaned from widely scattered sources into a cohesive narrative set in historical and cultural context.

--Katherine Arndt "Alaska History"

This is an highly enjoyable book about a part of America that few people in America would even know about. The author does an excellent job of placing Mr. Baranov in his time and the events that would influence him. An excellent book about a man very people know about.

--Kevin Winter "Manhattan Book Review"

This work is not merely the first comprehensive and well-researched biography of Baranov but also a valuable contribution to the multilayered and interdisciplinary study of Russian overseas colonialism. . . . The project is important not only for the academic community but also for politicians, the public, and the media on both sides of the Atlantic.

--Victoria I. Zhuravleva "Journal of American History"

What will surely remain the definitive English-language study of Aleksandr Andreevich Baranov. . . . This deeply researched study is the rare book that historians of Russia and the North American frontier alike will read with great interest and benefit.

--Robert H. Greene "Montana: The Magazine of Western History"

From the Publisher

"This work is not merely the first comprehensive and well-researched biography of Baranov but also a valuable contribution to the multilayered and interdisciplinary study of Russian overseas colonialism. . . . The project is important not only for the academic community but also for politicians, the public, and the media on both sides of the Atlantic."

Journal of American History - Victoria I. Zhuravleva

"[Aleksandr Baranov] has never been the subject of a full-length scholarly biography. Empire Maker. . . is a praiseworthy effort to remedy that oversight. . . . Owens has woven biographical facts gleaned from widely scattered sources into a cohesive narrative set in historical and cultural context."

Alaska History - Katherine Arndt

"This is an highly enjoyable book about a part of America that few people in America would even know about. The author does an excellent job of placing Mr. Baranov in his time and the events that would influence him. An excellent book about a man very people know about."

Manhattan Book Review - Kevin Winter

"[Empire Maker] transcends the limits of biography through some stellar archival work and by letting Baranov’s story recede at key times behind the larger epic of Russian America. The authors have managed to give us both a very useful picture of life as a merchant in nineteenth-century Russia as well as a new, very accessible general history of the colony that nicely complements Lydia Black’s and Ilya Vinkovetsky’s recent works on the subject. . . . [An] excellent biography."

The Russian Review - Ryan Jones