<>1796:1801; Death of Catherine II followed by brief (5-year) and most curious reign of Paul I
*--Paul took strenuous measures to reverse much of his mother's legacy. Aleksandr Radishchev and Nikolai Novikov were pardoned. Radishchev returned to state service, but never ventured again anything as bold as his optimistic writings in the time of Catherine II. Fearing a repeat of his earlier prosecution, he committed suicide in 1802. Novikov lived on to 1818, but never returned to his earlier active professional life
\\
*--Florinsky,1(24)

<>1796de12:Emperor Paul decreed serfs in southern Russia (Ukraine) could not move freely from village to village [VSB,2:473-4]

<>1797mr24:Russian decree reduced peasant serf work-week [DIR2:126-7 | DIR3:141-2]
*--Edict forbad Sunday Labor by serfs [VSB,2:474 | KRR:294-5]
*--Newspaper ads offered serfs for sale [DIR2:127 | DIR3:142]
*--Serfdom had reached its nadir point and seemed now to slacken its grip on the throat of Russian peasants. Piecemeal measures mounted over the next half century toward emancipation in 1861
*--1797au07:Russia moved to restrict expansion of government owned and administered property in the provinces, followed by move to allot state lands to certain state serfs. More piecemeal reform [VSB,2:474-6]
*--Some of the same tendency toward emancipation can be seen in the evolution of European slavery. In 1794, the revolutionary French National Convention abolished slavery in all French territories, though Napoleon was soon (1802) to repeal that law
*--In the 30 years between 1784-1814, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Argentina, and Columbia all adopted laws providing for the gradual emancipation of slaves. About unfree labor, a global reform attitude intensified
\\
*--Hoch, Stephen L. Serfdom and Social Control in Russia: Petrovskoe, a Village in Tambov
*--Kolchin, Peter. Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom
*--Blum:326-44 (on Russian agriculture in the century before serf emancipation)

<>1797ap05:Uchrezhdeniia ob imperatorskoi familii [Institutions of the Imperial Family] Emperor Paul and Empress Maria issued decree on succession to the Imperial Throne [VSB,2:473 | DIR3:137-9]
*--Exclusive and heritable udel prerogatives of the royal family were thus certified 700 years after the institutionalization of an early, broader, more feudal definition of udel [ID]
*--Noteworthy statistic = by 1857 the number of udel serfs (serfs "owned" by the royal family) = 838,000

<>1798:Indonesia, a group of islands stretching over 2000 miles west to east, cluttering the sea routes between the Indian and Pacific oceans, came under Dutch (Nederland; the Netherlands) governmental administration when the Dutch East India Company was liquidated and its assets "nationalized" by the Dutch government. This Company and the British East India Company were the two most powerful and classical mercantilist enterprises, combining governmental and insider-private interests in a huge state-managed corporation
*--The Dutch East India Company (1602-1798) managed to defeat the ambitions of the British East India Company in Indonesia, "limiting" the great English international imperialist corporation to the Indian subcontinent. But by the 1780s the Company had rotted away at its core as a result of corruption and unchecked exploitation of the region
*--The Dutch crown took direct imperial control over, and began to colonize Indonesia, what would for over a century and a half be called the Netherlands East Indies, centered in Indonesia. Here at the birth of European liberal reformism, and in one of the nations that so much prospered through international free-market commerce, imperialism came increasingly to seem both contradictory and unavoidable
*--The Russian state moved in the same direction and at about the same time as the Dutch with respect to government control of overseas corporate enterprise
*--The British East India Company held a monarchical charter which guaranteed it a monopoly on trade in the East Indies. By 1740, the Company had control of only three centers of trade in India: Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, but the great imperialist and industrial age was just then about to dawn. The Company proclaimed itself the ruler of Bengal in 1765. The company not only benefited from trade revenue, it was authorized also to impose steep land taxes on all regions it conquered. Bengal territories were reduced to famine and economic collapse as the Company extracted greatest possible wealth from the region. In 1770, famine resulted in the death of about 1/3 of the Bengal population, but the area still produced opium for yet another income-producing project = the Company's international trade with other regions (most notably in China). The British Company was a rival of the Dutch Company when it came to one of the biggest items of early 19th-century overseas commerce = opium
*--The English monarchy replaced the Company's "entrepreneurial" directors with officially appointed state administrators in a "Board of Control" not long after the tragic Bengal famine. The Company thus became a hybrid "free-market" and "bureaucratic" institution, satisfying the interests of a small number of insider "privateers" and the British crown in the earliest years of the great era of steam powered industrialization. By 1815, the East India Company had managed to seize the greater part of India. Its "private" corporate army had grown to 150,000 and was regularly supplemented with detachments of the regular British army and navy.. This was the situation until the Company was abolished [ID]
*--British rule in India, among other things, represented an imperialistic form of "primitive accumulation of capital", the first stage of economic modernization in the industrial era. English behavior in India and China in these decades might be compared with a similar era of "primitive accumulation of capital" in Russian history, Stalinist industrial modernization
*--Modern European ("Western"?) imperialist internationalism or globalism began to show its outlines clearly, even at the dawn of the great industrial age [ID], domestic "free-market" economics [ID] and liberal reformism

<>1798:Etorofu Island, off the eastern shore of Hokkaido at the southern end of the Kuril Islands | Russians landed, planted Orthodox cross, claim stakes with Russian inscriptions, and other indications of possession
*--Shortly thereafter, samurai Kondo Morishige(1757:1815) explored these territories, tore down the Russian crosses and other claim stakes, put up Japanese posts saying Dai-Nippon-Etoru [Etoru is a part of Greater Japan]. Returned to Tokyo [Edo] an urged Ezo [Hokkaido] be put under bugyo reign, direct Bakufu rule. This happened slowly over the next two decades
*1800:Hokkaido and southern Kuril Islands | Japanese surveyor Mamiya Rinzo (1775:1844) at work. In this year Matsumae authority established over whole of Hokkaido Island, after 3 great Ainu rebellions (1643, 1669 & 1789) against the Japanese
\\
*--KEJ,2:238
*--PH&G:305-6

<>1799:Hokkaido | Takataya Kahei (1769:1827) volunteered as aid to Kondo Juzo, Tokyo's agent there, to explore and survey Etorofu Island and check on Russians
*--Takataya sought to establish for himself a monopoly on regional trade in the north. He was from a poor family but had by now become a wealthy merchant who had founded his own shipping firm, transporting clothing, tobacco, and salt to northeastern Japan. Soon he set up his own headquarters in Hakodate
*--Compare Takataya's relationship to Japanese National Seclusion policy with Shelikhov and Rezanov's relationship to Russian mercantilism
\\
*--KEJ, 7:319

<>1799my08:Siberia | Irkutsk was the first headquarters of the Russian-America Company
*--Earlier action in Irkutsk connected with merchants Myl'nikov; Golikov and Shelikhov. The Company was founded to build on Shelikhov's grand ambitions, now with a royal monopoly to promote entrepreneurial exploitation of Alaska resources
*1799de15:Emperor Paul granted special privileges to the Company for a period of twenty years [DIR3:326-8]
*--Within a year Russian-America Co. headquarters moved from Irkutsk back to Saint Petersburg. Company gathered under distant state control all private trade ventures in Siberia and Alaska. Russian overseas corporate mercantilism took a lot of the steam out of frontier expansion
*--Serious rivals arose against Russian presence in the northern Pacific Rim. First, England (in the person of Captain Vancouver and eventually the Hudson's Bay Company) and then USA (in the person of John Jacob Astor and his American Fur Company, and other commercial companies often called "Bostonians") began to bring pressure on the Russian-America Co. USA financed Tlingit [Koloshi] indigenous hostility to Russia, supplying native insurgents with arms and ammunition against Russia in Alaska. England, Russia and the fledgling USA now entered into rivalry, via different forms of vast corporate enterprise, for exploitation of the natural resources of the western North American territories and the Pacific shores. Spanish imperial ambitions waned
*--Russia now solidly in the north Pacific, even if it provoked some hostility with other expansionist nations. Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov had been Shelikhov’s main contact with the imperial Russian state in Catherine's time. In Irkutsk, Rezanov fell in love with Shelikhov’s daughter-in-law and they were soon wed. Before long, the fate of the Russian-America Company would be in his hands
*--Documents covering period until sale of Alaska to USA in 1867 [DC&V,3]
\\
*--Saul,1:42-8
*--P. A. Tikhmenev, A History of the Russian-American Company
*--Howard Irvin Kushner, American-Russian rivalry in the Pacific Northwest, 1790-1867
*--Lensen,Eastward:65-70
*--Clarence Manning, Russian Influence on Early America:27-38
*--SIE,12:207

<>1799:Russian/Ukrainian statesman Prince Bezborodko memo on reform [Raeff2:70-74]

<>1799no09 (NS; 18 Brumaire according to French Revolutionary calendar): Revolutionary France now ruled by Napoleon as First Consul. He soon declared self Emperor and reigned for fifteen years, until 1814, and again briefly in 1815. Historians still argue, was Napoleon the child of the Revolution or the nemesis of it?
*--The French overseas mercantilist empire had so far failed [EG]. Napoleon was prepared to look closer to home, to take Europe as his "colony", and more. His ambitions stretched across the Mediterranean Sea to Egypt, though France did not have the strength to hold Egypt on its own
*1800je04(NS):[NW Italy] Battle of Marengo pitted 60,000 French and Austrian troops against one another. Compare that with =
*1812je:Napoleon invaded Russia with 600,000 French and other allied troops, breaking earlier truce with Russian Emperor Alexander I [ID]
*--Napoleon came a cropper on the east-European steppes and was driven back to France and defeat, but on the way back =
*1813oc16:oc19(NS): [Germany] Battle of Leipzig, or "The Battle of the Nations" involved 500,000 troops from a coalition of Russia, Austria, and Prussia against France
*--The militarist/revolutionist acts of Napoleon represent a big epoch in European history [W], and more locally in Russian historical development. The Napoleonic era encouraged Russian frontier and imperial expansion to shift from the New World to its southern frontiers with the Ottoman Empire
*--Yet there was another side of Napoleon, one in which he gave some appearance of being, indeed, the "child of the Revolution". As the European revolutionary era opened, the notion of La carrière ouverte aux talents [careers open to talent (rather than privilege)] served to undermine the grip of old European notions of title by inheritance and privilege by birth or establishmentarian assignment [See Pellicani below]
\\
*--David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It | The argument here is that modern "total war" had its origins in French Revolutionary politics [example] and in the Napoleonic style of warfare (see the statistics on growth in the numbers of troops accounted above). Oddly, the Revolutionary passion for absolute peace and liberty created an exterminationist logic, in domestic as well as international politics. The presumption was that political or military conflict had to be interpreted as a massive clash between absolute principles. Napoleon's 1799 coup d'état was a logical culmination of a gradual militarization of Revolutionary politics. Napoleon's Grande Armée was a great democratic mobilization of the whole nation. Military virtue was becoming the very embodiment of civic virtue. Critics accuse Bell of exaggerating the ruthless militarism of the Revolution. They ask how Bell might explain the curious century of relative peace in Europe that followed the Napoleonic era, 1814-1914, the century that preceded the first mechanized total wars [ID] [2007no23:TLS:13]. The Napoleonic era [beginning in 1797] might not have equaled the qualities of "total war" demonstrated by WW1, but it did hint at the 20th century to come
*--Luciano Pellicani (The Genesis of Capitalism and the Origins of Modernity:84) discovered that the notion of “careers open to talent” dates from the beginning of history and over the long haul has been a prominent presumption in global human culture. The Western Roman Empire (Rome) and its successor states in "The West" were something of an exception to this rule. Twelfth-century historian Giovanni Cinnamo was surprised to discover that birth gave privileged status in the Latin kingdoms of western Europe [EG], while the socially more open Eastern Empire (Byzantium) tended more often to reward merit. Among the many medieval states that were successors to the destroyed Western Roman Empire, feudal privilege and exemption by birth predominated. From the classical through the medieval periods, the social/economic presumption of status by birth distinguished “The West” from eastern Europe. It was always a serious obstacle to modernization or any sort of adaptation to social/economic change. After the French Revolution, that all began to change in "The West"
*--The notion of careers open to talent was not original with the Enlightenment, but it was expressed with special force beginning then (for example, Thomas Paine [ID]). The notion spread far and wide in the French Revolutionary epoch and was carried on by Napoleon and his army.  But by the early 1800s, a powerful and largely successful assault on the notion of privilege by birth was under way [EG]. From this point forward, a shockwave ran through 19th-century establishmentarian Europe. Eventually, the assault on privilege and status by birth became the social/economic cornerstone of modernization there
*--By the 21st century, counter-attacks against the idea of careers open to talent (often given the derisive label “meritocracy”) became more frequent [EG]. The critique of "meritocracy" has often been little more than a thinly disguised assault on the concept of “careers open to talent”, an assault on one of the pillars of European modernization over the past two centuries

<>1800:Scotland, New Lanark | Robert Owen (1771-1858) came from Manchester, England, to purchase local cotton mills. Owen had worked his way up from laborer to owner of Manchester cotton mills. He was now a wealthy, self-made industrial entrepreneur on his way toward founding modern European social democratic movement, or socialism. He was determined to establish a practical functioning cooperative community of working people. He reorganized his New Lanark enterprise into a model industrial town in which public services were delivered on a cooperative basis -- housing, public sanitation, schools, retail outlets (stores). The fame of New Lanark spread. Often with Owen's support, experimental agricultural/industrial communities were founded
*1819:English Factory Acts grew out of Parliamentary inquiries into conditions of labor in the new factory environment [ID] but they were also inspired in part by Owen
*1825:USA, Indiana, New Harmony utopian community established with direct participation of Robert Owen [pix]
*--Owen created National Equitable Labour Exchange and encouraged organization of wage-labor unions and advised unions to unite with cooperative associations. He fell afoul of English authorities who suppressed wage-labor organizations
\\
*1994ap01:TLS:29, Ian Harris review of Selected Works of Robert Owen [TXT]

<>1801ja18:Caucasus Mountains southern slopes | Georgia [Gruziia] made a protectorate as Russian frontier and imperialist expansion reached ever more boldly southward, without hindering expansion to the east
\\
*--D.M. Lang,. A Modern History of Georgia. London:1962

<>1801:1825; Russian Emperor Alexander I reigned for a quarter of a century
*--Twenty-four-year-old Alexander came to the throne as a result of a palace coup d'état. He was not unaware of this conspiracy which led to the murder of his father, Emperor Paul. At Alexander's coronation, the Austrian Minister described in his report how the new young Emperor marched in the procession "preceded by the murderers of his grandfather [ID], surrounded by the assassins of his father and followed by his own future killers" [that last was a prediction unrealized]
*--Alexander's early letters expressed concern about conditions under his father's rule [VSB,2:477]
*--Polish statesman in Russian service, Adam Czartoryski memoirs about this troubled situation [VSB,2:478-81 | DIR2:128-39 | [DIR3:153-64] See his Memoirs [more excerpts: WRH3:224f]
\\
*--Allen McConnell, Tsar Alexander I: Paternalistic Reformer (NYC:1970)
*--Marian Kukiel, Czartoryski and European unity, 1770-1861 (1955) [DK435.5.C83k8]

<>1801ap02:Alexander I manifesto abolished Secret Chancery [rudimentary secret police created even before Catherine's reign] and transferred its authority to the Senate [VSB,2:481-2]

<>1801je05:Alexander I rescript directed a Commission to draft a new reformed code of laws [VSB,2:482-3]

<>1801se27:Alexander I abolished torture in criminal trials as reform spirit mounted [VSB,2:483]

<>1801de12:Alexander I decreed all free persons can purchase and own land, not just aristocrats [VSB,2:483]
*--These first months show how Alexander I hit the ground running with his plans for reform

<>1802jy:USA Delaware | Brandywine powder works constructed by French émigré Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours and his son. The Du Ponts helped consolidate the Hamiltonian vision [ID] of a strong US economy independent of other national economies but closely coordinated with US national goals and supported by governmental acts
*--Pierre had made a name for himself as a leading political-economic theorists of the new era (the "Physiocrats", close cousins to the English-language "classical economists" [ID]). The Du Ponts had fled the French Revolution as it became too radical for them. Pierre returned briefly in the more congenial militaristic Napoleonic times, but returned to USA before his death
*--The company thrived on military-industrial contracting during the War of 1812
*1822:Bank of America selected Pierre's son, Eleuthere Du Pont, as its head

<>1802se:Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin (-1826), "The Book Trade and the Love of Reading in Russia" and other essays [Raeff3:107-16 | KRR:412-14 | DIR3:165-74]

<>1802se08:Russian statute established Ministries and laid out ambitious plan for Senate [VSB,2:483-5 | KRR:256]
*--In these months Alexander I created, and was much influenced by, the Unofficial Committee made up of Adam Czartoryski, Pavel Stroganov, Viktor Kochubey, and Nikolai Novosil'tsev. These believed in reform, but they meant "reform from above". They were not sympathetic to "grass roots" movements, particularly among the aristocratic elites who sought something like social participation in legislation, perhaps through an augmented Senate. Alexander's greatest reforming statesman, Mikhail Speranskii, made the last effort to elevate the Senate, created by Peter I, into an authentic position of governmental authority. However, statist reformers prevailed in Alexander's councils
*--The old "colleges" of Peter I were juggled and renamed as eight "ministries" = Foreign Affairs, War, Navy, Finance, Interior, Justice, Commerce (soon abolished), and (altogether new) Education
*--Over the next few years five new universities were founded = Vilnius (Polish-language), Dorpat (German), Khar'kov, Kazan and, finally (1819), Saint-Petersburg University
*--The Unofficial Committee submitted several position papers, e.g., "Essay on the System to Be Followed in Restructuring the Administration of the Empire", "On the State of Our Constitution", and "General Plan for Work with the Emperor on Reform" [Raeff2:86-91]
*--In the first year of Alexander's reign, Adam Czartoryski composed a "Project for a Most Graciously Granted Charter to the People of Russia" [Raeff2:76-84]
*1802:The vigorous reformer Mikhail Speranskii submitted a memorandum to Emperor Alexander I in which he targeted imperial institutions and social classes for sharp criticism. Speranskii was himself born into the social class [soslovie] "clergy", worked his way out of that natal category and rose to a high position as close adviser to the crown. His memorandum criticized old and "useless" governmental institutions, but also the much compromised Russian social/service hierarchies [ID] = "let us ask what is the nobility itself, when its person, property, honor, indeed everything, depends not on the law but on a single autocratic will.... I should like someone to point out the difference between the dependence of the peasants on the landlords and the dependence of the nobles on the sovereign. I should like someone to discover whether in fact the sovereign does not have the same right over the landlords as the landlords have over the peasants. Thus, instead of all the splendid divisions of a free Russian people into the very free classes [sosloviia (ID)] of nobility, merchants, and the rest, I find in Russia two classes: The slaves of the sovereign and the slaves of the landowners. The first are called free only in relation to the second, but there are no truly free persons in Russia, except beggars and philosophers." Speranskii went on to say that this situation made subordination and harsh exploitation of the peasant a necessity for serf owners, and reliance on absolutist state control over serf owners a necessity for peasants. The mechanisms of the system naturally reinforced one another and compounded their harmful effects
*--Yet Speranskii himself worked to limit the privileges of the aristocracy (skipping ranks) as they sought to advance on the Table of Ranks
*--Much reform followed, but reform plans were grander than reform accomplishments
\\
*--Raeff, Marc. Michael Speransky: Statesman of Imperial Russia, 1772-1839. The Hague:1957. DK201.R3

<>1803:1808; Martha and Catherine Wilmot give women’s view on travel and everyday life in Russia, in their Russian Journals [Excerpts = WRH3:232f]
*--Anna Evdokimovna Labzina, Days of a Russian noblewoman : The memories of Anna Labzina, 1758-1821 [Excerpts = KRR:370-6]
*--More everyday life in the memoirs of F. F. Vigel' [VSB,2:510-13]

<>1803ja26:Alexander I issued preliminary directive on reform of public education [VSB,2:485-6]

<>1803fe20:Russian law created a new social estate, Free Agriculturists, and seemed to promise easing of serfdom, as well as other social reform [VSB,2:486-7 | DIR2:140-1]

<>1803ap30:USA doubled in size as result of "Louisiana Purchase" [W] from France
*--France had been stumbling in the New World for a half century, since the Seven Years War [ID], and now Napoleon needed cash to finance his grand army of European conquest
*--"Lewis and Clark Expedition" -- formally "The Corps of Discovery" -- was dispatched to explore this territory, which can be described briefly as that territory from the left bank of the Mississippi River to the Rockies, including the watersheds of all the tributaries to the Mississippi flowing from the west [W#1] [W#2] NB! that the Ohio River basin to the east was already within USA jurisdiction, and the Rio Grande and Colorado river basins were still firmly held within Spanish colonial territory
*--Corps of Discovery continued westward beyond the presumed limits of the Louisiana Purchase, over the Rockies, down the Snake and Columbia rivers to the Pacific Ocean. This might be taken as the beginning of the "Oregon question" since that vast north-western Pacific slope of the great continental divide along the Rockies with its various indigenous inhabitants (current day Oregon, Washington, Idaho and southern British Columbia) were not firmly under the authority of any one sovereign European state. A five-way shuffle for advantage was now under way between Native American, Russian, Spanish (then Mexican), English and USA interests. Another taxonomy of forces at work would show the sovereign empires (as listed above), several great overseas corporations (e.g., Russian-America Co., Hudson's Bay Co., the North West Co.), hitherto independent tribes, and ambitious individuals and groups maneuvering for advantage
*--Oregon Territory was defined as all the territory west of the Rockies, north of Spanish New World colonial possessions (California, Nevada, Utah) and south of Russian America (what is today a coastal panhandle of the state of Alaska, but stretching ambiguously much further south in the days of the Russian America Co.). Increasingly throughout the region the English mercantilist Hudson's Bay Company was putting down roots, operating often in seeming independence of any governmental control. Soon there would be a new company in Oregon Territory
*--USA citizens, "pioneers", moved in great numbers from east to west in the first half of the 19th century. Notice the western N.American urban enclaves of US settlers in Santa Fe, Salt Lake City, Portland, San Francisco, Monterey and Los Angeles  [MAP]

<>1804:1806; Russian Emperor Alexander I correspondence with Thomas Jefferson [TXT letter #1]
\\
*--Saul,1:38-42

<>1804:Russian thinker Ivan Pnin, "Essay on Enlightenment...." [Raeff3:126-58]. The Enlightenment guttered still against the rising darkness

<>1804oc07:Nagasaki | Rezanov arrived on the ship Nadezhda, captained by Ivan Fedorovich Kruzenshtern [Krusenstern, Adam Johann von] In the previous year, 1803, Alexander I dispatched as official envoy Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov (1764:1807) who sailed from Kronstadt in Gulf of Finland, via Cape Horn of Africa, to Kamchatka in northeastern Siberia. Rezanov planned to take up the permit given years before to Laksman to visit Japan, misinterpreting that permit to allow trade w/Japan. Rezanov was son-in-law of Russian-America Co. founder Shelikhov [PH&G:783] and a majority stockholder in RAC. He believed Japan would become the supplier to Russian outposts on Kurils, Aleutian Islands and in Alaska
*--Rezanov returned Japanese castaways and gave gifts. Japan put them all under close guard
*1805:Sea of Japan and south. Kruzenshtern explored under Russian flag
*1805ap04:Nagasaki. Only now was Rezanov granted meeting w/shogun envoy, who refused gifts and ignored requests for trade. This despite R's careful observation of Japanese etiquette, removing shoes, sitting on tatami mats. Rezanov was personally affronted [KEJ,6:307]
*1806:Kronstadt (island protecting inlet to Saint Petersburg) to Kamchatka-Kurils | Captain Vasilii Mikhailovich Golovnin sailed aboard the frigate Diana on an around-the-world expedition, a peaceful expedition complicated by the difficulties associated with Rezanov's corporate politics [BBL/Fraerman. Ivashchenko]
*1806:1807; Hokkaido waters, Kurils (Etorofu), and Sakhalin (Karafuto) | On Rezanov's orders, two captains who served the Russian-America Co., Nikolai Aleksandrovich Khvostov and Gavriil Ivanovich Davydov, repeatedly raided Japanese settlements and shipping, drove off Japanese settlers [KEJ,6:341. PH&G:774, 783] and looted, leaving letter on their own corporate authority saying they would return unless Japan came to terms with Russia. Purpose was to force Japan to abandon national seclusion [KEJ,3:45, 6:307] This is an early example of "gun-boat diplomacy" exercised by an overseas corporation and taken up more successfully by USA a half century later
*--Japanese officials stiffened defenses and wrote a defiant reply [SHJ,3:203-4]
*--Mamiya fought Russians and was wounded
*1806ap:Rezanov seemed a "loose cannon" as he acted like a sovereign in the northern Pacific Rim. He left Japan, now on another grand mission to the San Francisco Presidio, the seat of Spanish administrative authority in Alta California. He won the heart and hand of 16-year-old daughter of the Spanish commandant, Concepcíon (Conchita) Argüello. He seemed to think "nuptial diplomacy" might unite the ambitions of Russia (or maybe he thought he represented only his own Russian-America Company) and Spain in the Pacific
*1807:Siberia, Krasnoyarsk | Rezanov died while on his way to Europe seeking Papal permission for a Russian Orthodox widower to marry the young Catholic. Rezanov kept diary and other descriptions of his trip, now in the library of the Russian Academy of Sciences. His exciting eight-year career on the Pacific Rim frontier ended. His Spanish fiancée became first nun in California
*1807:Hirata, a great Shinto scholar (1776:1843) [PH&G:159], wrote Chishima shiranami [White Waves of the Kurils] as a guide on how to restrain barbarians (for example, Rezanov) and a manual of modern coastal defense [Sansom,WWJ:244]
*1808:1809; Sakhalin (Karafuto) explored by Mamiya w/ Matsuda Denjuro. On his own initiative Mamiya followed the west coast of Siberia to discover Tatar Strait, then up Amur River 100 miles or so to Deren (Te-jen), a Manchurian post established for the collection of tribute, a further sign that active international economic relations were maintained despite various mercantilist or statist efforts to control them
*--Mamiya published Kita Ezo zusetsu [an illustrated account of northern Ezo (i.e., Sakhalin)] and Todatsu kiko [Travels in Tatary] which contained significant geographic and ethnographic information
*--Russian/Japanese relations seemed promising over previous decades, when largely limited to "private" commercial ties. Now commerce was in the hands of statist overseas corporate monopoly-holders, and two strutting states seemed ready to square off against one another
*--Events to the west again complicated Russian imperialist expansion
\\
*--Japanese ruling Bakufu felt they "had no need of foreign goods, to permit trade relations would merely deprive her of useful commodities and risk the entry of foreign religious doctrine" [Sansom,WWJ:244] Serious confusion and error within the Bakufu explained in SHJ,3:202-3. Shinto scholar/statesmen were beginning to see the need for radical modernization, rather than seclusion. Russia played a role in the coming of the "Meiji Restoration"
*--Russian poet Andrei Voznesenskii has written an interesting historical fiction about the remarkable career of Rezanov, Story under Full Sail
*--Chevigny, Lost Empire
*--Voenskii"Russkoe"
*--SIE,11:988
*--BrE,51:475
*--PH&G:776

<>1804de09:Alexander I decree reaffirmed Jewish "Pale of Settlement" created by Catherine II after the annexation of Polish territories and now added other measures, some reformist, some not [VSB,2:487-8]

<>1805de02:Austrian town Austerlitz the site of a great Napoleonic military victory over Russia and Austria
*--Coalition of England, Russia and Austria having little success against Napoleon

<>1806:England imposed "Continental Blockade" on Napoleon's Europe and, step by step, all Napoleon's allies. Wars were becoming "global" because national economies were becoming global

<>1806:Holy Roman Empire (after a 1000 years of stuttered existence) destroyed by Napoleon. His next big target would be yet further east in Europe = the Russian Empire
*--The Holy Roman Empire was later thought of as the first German “Reich” [imperial regime], as in the name of the German-speaking nation-state translated as “Austria” = Osterreich or Eastern Reich, indicating the eastern European edge of the great empire. But what of the vigorous, developing power of northern German folk?
*--Two paths to modernity followed for the German-speaking peoples of Europe, Prussian in the north of "middle-Europe" and Austrian in the southeast =
(1) In the north the German-speaking territories, most notably Prussia, drifted yet further from the dominance of Vienna. The Protestant Reformation [ID] and the Thirty-Years War [ID] had already destroyed any possibility of unity among the German-speaking peoples of middle-Europe. The Lutheran north and the Catholic south were spiritually at great distance from one another. Prussia began its fretted development toward “nationhood”, many years later than the geo-political units known as France and England
(2) In the south, Austria desperately clung to its notions of grandeur while its actual power eroded. Between 1867 and 1918, it glowed brightly for one last time as the Austro-Hungarian Empire [ID], then expired at the end of WW1
\\
*--Heinrich August Winkler, Germany: The Long Road West. Volume 1, 1789-1933 and volume 2, 1933-1990| Notice that Winkler presumes that “The Westernization” of Germany is a vital topic. He argues that the old pre-1806 dream of the holy “Reich” [imperial regime] continued to inspire the northern German-speaking peoples. The myth of the Reich postponed German nationhood in the north and squelched evolution of democracy there. Furthermore, Lutheranism promoted authoritarian and “caesoro-papist” tendencies in government. In the era of the Revolution of 1848 [ID] the central contradiction of European liberalism [ID] expressed itself with special sharpness in Prussia = national unity and liberty could not be combined. Two decades later, Bismarck solved this contradiction by creating a “Second Reich”, a parliamentary, authoritarian, statist and militaristic German nation-state "Deutschland"
*--At the end of WW1, “democracy” was first tried under circumstances of humiliating defeat and economic collapse [ID]. The Nazi movement inherited this legacy when, in 1933, it created the “Third Reich” [ID] based on broad popular (if not technically democratic) assent. WW2 destroyed the myth of the Reich, and Germany was divided between contending partners, USA at the head of “The West” and the USSR at the head of world-ambitious proletarian internationalism [ID]. Then in the 1990s, the divided Germanies were united, not as Reich but as a recognizable democratic state [ID]. In other words, national unity and liberty were now combined. The great modern European contradiction was finally resolved in the German Federal Republic
*--As of 1806, all that was far in the future. Prussia still had a perilous half century ahead of itself as a German-speaking monarchy, guided by the interests of a landowning aristocratic elite (Junkers) who in many cases in the eastern regions depended, as from days of yore, on the bound labor of Slavic villagers (Poles). In the German-speaking world, the chances for traditional conservative or new liberal political outcome were slim

<>1807je25:Russian Emperor Alexander I and French Emperor Napoleon signed alliance at Tilsit [VSB,2:488-90 | DIR2:142-52 | DIR3:175-83]
*--The two emperors played at the possibility of creating anew the great Roman Empire in West and East. Yet Alexander succeeded in protecting the integrity of the Prussian monarchy and its homelands. Alexander told Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm III, "Be patient. We will get it all back. He will break his neck."
*--The demands of the great Napoleonic wars now shaped Russian imperialist and frontier expansion
*--As so often in time of war, anytime and anywhere, Emperor Alexander felt it necessary to re-create the national secret police administration he had largely disbanded six years earlier
*1807oc09(NS):Prussia emancipated its serfs, but the remains of the old German-speaking Teutonic and Livonian knights within the Russian Empire at the eastern border of Prussia -- the now Russianized "Baltic Barons" -- clung tightly to their authority over serf labor in the villages

<>1808:+; French political theorist Charles Fourier (1772-1837) published Théorie des quatre mouvements. This and later works made Fourier one of the most influential radical thinkers of his epoch. He was of the bourgeois class (like the English visionary Robert Owen [ID]), and his family did well, but he dreamt of a future far more egalitarian than that produced by the French Revolution. He believed in the liberating but also unifying power of natural human passions. He felt, as did Rousseau, that modern society was to be blamed for most of humanity's woes. He felt that "civilization" hindered the realization of "harmony"
*--Seeking to free humans for a fully emotional and passionate life, he conceived of a highly rational economic unit called the "phalanx". He supplied a very precise number = 1620 people working together equaled one phalanx. He thought of the phalanx as something like the basic cellular unit of his ideal self-sufficient social-economic system. The community that formed the phalanx was called a phalanstery
*--Fourier ran ads in newspapers inviting wealthy financiers to bankroll his transformational organization. No bankers responded, but many followers later made efforts to create such utopian communities, many of them in USA (e.g., Brooks Farm)
*--Fourier and Saint-Simon were very different figures, but together they were thought of as founders of what a later generation (mainly opponents) called "utopian socialism"

<>1808:1832; Weimar Germany |  Writer and cultural impresario Johann Wolfgang von Goethe publish his most famous work, Faust [PWT2:115-17]
*1798:1717; Johann Sebastian Bach had been court organist in Weimar, the capital city of the German Duchy Saxe-Weimar. The city had become the cultural capital of an emerging north German civilization and a European literary mecca during the time of Goethe's residence there (1775:1832)

<>1808:USA and Russia initiated formal diplomatic relations
*--In that same year, German-born but now USA citizen and NYC resident John Jacob Astor (1763-1848) formed American Fur Company, including a Great Lakes subsidiary and a Pacific Fur Company with its provincial headquarters in the Oregon Territory city named after him, Astoria
*1808ap09:Russian-America Co. directors complained about incursions of "Bostonians" into seas and territories claimed by Russia [DIR3:328-32]
*--By the 1820s, Astor's companies exercised a virtual monopoly on the fur trade in USA territories. At his death he was the wealthiest individual in the USA. This "capitalist" corporation was an active rival to the old mercantilist overseas corporations in North America and the Pacific region. While not a mercantilist enterprise, the Astor companies worked to exclude "foreign" companies and develop the middle and western regions of North America under USA dominance. The company was active in the development of Mississippi riverboat transportation. As an early example of a "trust" corporation, it also worked to crush all competition, whether "foreign" or not
\\
*--Saul,1:27-55 & 64-69

<>1809mr23:Finland fully absorbed into Imperial Russia [VSB,2:490]
*--Finland was granted its own constitution, suggesting that the Emperor might be open to the thought of constitutional reform in Russia itself
*--Frontier and imperialist expansion was now mainly shaped by Napoleonic contingencies

<>1809oc:Russian minister Mikhail Speranskii issued his bold project [Raeff2:93-109 | VSB,2:490-3 | DIR2:153-7 | DIR3:184-90]
*--Over the next year, the State Council [Gosudarstvennyi sovet] was established and the ministries reorganized [VSB,2:493-4 | KRR:256-7] The State Council was appointed from among old and experienced statesmen, and its role was to consult with the Emperor, at his pleasure
*--This was the greatest period of Alexandrine reform

<>1810:USA CA Fort Ross founded by 95 Russian colonists who were expected to help supply the Russian Pacific-rim enterprises of the Russian-America Company
*1812:Russian-America Co. signed an agreement with Spanish officials to lease territory around Bodega Bay, not far north of San Francisco Bay
*--USA-Russian economic relations intensified in the heat of the Napoleon wars [Saul,1:25-27, 111-32] US vessels carried 20% of all exports out of Saint-Petersburg

<>1811:Nikolai M. Karamzin published Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia: A Translation and Analysis [Excerpts: RRC2,2#23 | VSB,2:495-7]
*--Russian TXT
*--Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1789-1790: An Account of a Young Russian Gentleman's Tour through Germany, Switzerland, France and England
\\
*--J. L. Black, Nicholas Karamzin and Russian Society in the 19th Century (1975)

<>1811:1815; Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia) occupied by English, one of many examples of how Napoleonic wars were not unlike the "world wars" of the 20th century

<>1811jy11:Japan, Kunashiri Island | Vasilii Golovnin landed to make amends for 1807:raids [Golovnin memoirs excerpted in Lensen,Eastward:61-5]
*--Japanese lured, then captured Lieutenant Commander Golovnin and crew who were surveying Kurils. G had put a man ashore further out to sea, on Etorofu Island, and had gone ashore himself to join conversations with Japanese officers who gathered there. Then Golovnin anchored for night off Kunashiri near "strongly garrisoned fortress". Went ashore again w/some men, was surrounded, bound, rough handled and packed off to Hakodate for two years [SHJ, 3:204] Tradition says this was in retaliation for Khvostov attacks on Japanese territories. Golovnin later published his memoirs of his time in Japan, quickly published and republished in English to satisfy deepening European curiosity about the fabulous Asian Island civilization = Narrative of My Captivity...
*1812:Kuril Islands | In retaliation for Golovnin kidnap, Lieut. Commander Petr Ivanovich Rikord seized the powerful frontier merchant Takataya and took him to Kamchatka
*1813:Takataya persuaded Russians to let him return to Japan. Okhotsk commandant gave written assurance that Khvostov raids were without the authorization or knowledge of tsarist authorities. [Beasley,MHJ:40 said written assurance from Irkutsk provincial governor]
*--Yet Golovnin managed to repair Japanese-Russian relations
\\
*--KEJ,3:45

<>1812jy06:Russian Emperor Alexander I issued proclamation of war with French Emperor Napoleon [DIR2:158-9 | DIR3:191-2 | WRH3:249-56]
*--MAP = Napoleon's central European empire on eve of war with Russia

<>1812au26:Russians defeated by Napoleon at the Battle of Borodino. Russian retreat left Moscow open for French occupation [Eye:278-80]
*1812se04:Russian Field Marshal Kutuzov reported to Alexander I about retreat from Borodino in the face of the French invasion [VSB,2:497-8 | DIR3:192-3] Napoleon occupied Moscow which burned for over two weeks. Napoleon awaited for Alexander I to capitulate, but he did not
*--Borodino Battle museum
*--Borodino "virtual battlefield"
*--MAP = Napoleon's Russian attack and retreat
*1812no03:Alexander I issued a manifesto on the retreat of Napoleon from Russia [VSB,2:498-9]
*1813ja01:Moscow scene [DIR2:160 | DIR3:194]
*1813de25:Alexander's orders to the advancing Russian armies: "Your courage and valor have brought you from the Oka River to the Rhine" [VSB,2:499]
*1813:1814; Russian-led military campaign drove the French out of middle Europe and pursued Napoleon into the heart of France
*--Phillippe-Paul Ségur, Defeat: Napoleon's Russian Campaign [earlier edition of this personal account]
*--General Armand de Caulaincourt, With Napoleon in Russia
*--The pertinent section of the great French writer Stendhal's published diary account of his experience on the Russian campaign
*1836:Nadezhda Durova’s memoirs described how, during the Napoleonic wars, she, a woman, masqueraded as a man so that she could join the cavalry [KRR:376-9]
*--Statistics on Russian losses in these wars [DIR3:194]
*--Russian imperial expansion had now taken a dramatic step westward, but only very briefly
\\
*--Saul,1:55-91
*--Kutuzov vs. Napoleon at Borodino featured in St.Petersburg Hermitage Museum [W]
*--Jane Hartley article on invasion [TXT]
*--J. David Markham essay on novelist Stendhal in the Napoleonic army that invaded Russia. FIND "Russia" and read to end here = [W]
*--E. V. Tarle, Napoleon's Invasion of Russia in 1812
*--Michael Adams, Napoleon and Russia offers a good military history of the campaign that drove Napoleon out Russia and all the way to Paris  (though readers should be wary of Adams' weak grasp of the larger historical issues)
*--Jon Latimer, 1812: War with America is especially good on the international context of the north American episode

<>1813se:Battle of the Thames in Upper Canada during the War of 1812. Tecumseh [W], a brilliant Shawnee Indian chief, orator, and warrior at the Battle of Tippecanoe, shown above being fatally shot by Colonel Johnson


Death of Tecumseh
[Rotunda Frieze of the US Capitol, Washington DC]

<>1813:Japan | Golovnin released with help of Takataya. Much mutual information exchanged in this tense but salutary confrontation [KEJ,6:341]. Takataya regained monopoly in Hokkaido trade which he had managed for nearly 15 years [KEJ,7:319, 3:45] Golovnin cooperated with Japanese interrogators, but exaggerated Russian strength, contributing to Japanese fears of Russian threat
*--Mamiya, already an accomplished explorer over the previous decade and a half, exchanged surveying and astronomical navigation findings with Golovnin [KEJ, 5:88]
*--Adachi Sannai(1769:1845) conversed with Golovnin about math
*--Baba Sajuro (1787:1822) revised Russian-Japanese dictionary w/G's help
*--"Golovnin had gained the esteem and affection of his captors, and when he left there was a festive farewell gathering in which Russians and Japanese took part in great harmony. The Japanese crowded round their one-time prisoners with gifts and kind words, and some were on the verge of tears at partying. As the Diana was towed out, the Japanese and Russians exchanged thunderous cheers. Such behavior was typical of the intercourse between Japanese and Russians, which combined fear and attraction. Golovnin's was the last important attempt to establish good relations with the Japanese in the Kurils. This intercourse, like a love affair with its quarrels and embraces, played an important part in revealing to the Japanese their own weakness and in opening a breach in the policy of seclusion." [SHJ,3:204]
*1816:Saint Petersburg | Golovnin published memoirs of his adventure in Japan. "Remarkably objective and sympathetic, Golovnin praised the high level of Japanese education, the concern of the Japanese government for its subjects, the sensibility, astuteness, honesty, hospitality, and cleanliness of the Japanese people. He portrayed the Japanese as fiery patriots, conscious not only of the harm that foreign actions had brought in years past, but confident of their own superiority. He felt that the Japanese lagged behind Europe in many respects, but he noted that their capabilities were tremendous and predicted that they would catch up with the Europeans and become potential rivals in the future." [KEJ,3:45] Golovnin did much to encourage positive relations, BUT =
*--By 1821, Ezo [Hokkaido] came under direct reign of Japanese shogun for the first time, as a counter to Russian pressures there and as a restraint on the evolution of independent relations between Japanese and Russian frontier agents and adventurers

<>1813:Azerbaijan, Daghestan and Georgian territories taken from Iran (Persia) and absorbed into the Russian Empire according to the stipulations of the Treaty of Gulistan [MAP]
*--Baku, an important Azery port city on the western shores of the land-locked Caspian Sea, later a world-significant oil depot, came under Russian authority [W]

<>1814mr30 (NS):Paris | Russia led allied forces into the French capital. Emperor Alexander astride his white stallion signified his key role in the liberation of Europe from Napoleon
*--Which of the two Napoleons did Alexander liberate Europe from: "The child of the French Revolution" or "the nemesis of the French Revolution"?
*--And another question arose about whether the previous decade of war was simply about the French Revolution and Napoleon or perhaps about a whole lot more here in the early years of the 19th century =
*1814au24(NS):English burned Washington DC as the Napoleonic wars expanded onto the global stage even after Napoleon was defeated. In the New World, that expansion was called the "War of 1812". Note that both Moscow [above] and WDC burned in this era
*--The "European Revolution" slackened only briefly as statesmen in the various nations who claimed victory over Napoleon prepared to meet in Vienna with the conservative and sometimes reactionary goal to restore the old pre-Napoleonic Europe and, wherever possible, to restore the pre-revolutionary old regime ("ancient regime") =

<>1814no01:1815je09 (NS); Austria | The Congress of Vienna met for over six months in an attempt to set Europe straight after the disruptions caused by French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic imperialism within Europe itself. All European powers of any considerable size were invited to participate, including "defeated" France. Mercurial French statesman Talleyrand, ex-priest, ex-revolutionary, ex-official under Napoleon, and in all regards a powerful representative of the French nation, was allowed a serious role in this Congress. [Contrast this generous-minded moment in European diplomacy with a moment of equal profound impact on the fate of Europe one century later, the far less generous-minded Paris Peace Conference]
*1815mr01:je18(NS); Even as the great Congress met, Napoleon escaped captivity on the island Elba and gathered a small armed force in a futile three-month effort to retake France. Allied troops commanded by Prussian and English officers apprehended Napoleon this second time at Waterloo
*--Back in Vienna, Austrian minister Prince Clemens von Metternich played the key role. His conservative actions and views (perhaps better to say reactionary actions and views [ID]) made him the most powerful European continental spokesmen of post-French Revolutionary "far-right" conservatism
*--Irishman and British parliamentary figure Edmund Burke was the chief representative of English conservatism in this epoch.  Edmund Burke's views can be contrasted every bit as much as they can be compared with the ideas of the continental conservative Metternich
*--Among other things, the Congress of Vienna sought to ease European imperialist competition in Europe itself. On the whole the Congress approached its tasks with a very practical and sober-minded set of expectations. However =
*--Russian Emperor Alexander I inspired a universalistic or pan-European Christian reconciliation. His lofty pietistic pan-Europeanism seemed quaint in an era of emerging nationalistic divisiveness
*--For Alexander, visionary global schemes gradually replaced domestic reform back in Russia. Alexander had fallen to some degree under the political influence of the reactionary French émigré Joseph de Maistre.  However visionary and however global Alexander's scheming, actual Russian frontier and imperial expansion slackened in the last decade of his reign
\\
*--Florovsky,5:162-238 surveys Russian spiritual life in the Alexandrine era of the "Bible Society"

<>1814:1825de14; Russian activists, many of them ex-officers in Alexander's armies that occupied Paris, took inspiration from the role of "liberator" that Russia had just played and, on the other side of the ledger, grew increasingly alarmed as Alexander I and his government lost its reforming zeal. They dreamt of European-style liberalization or even revolutionary change in Russia and set about mobilizing themselves and others within a surprising network of voluntary action societies that culminated eleven years later in an ill-fated insurrection against Emperor Nicholas I at the moment he prepared to ascend the throne [DIR3:207-29]
*--This long decade of diverse and complex activism has been conventionally packaged in the all-too-simple phrase "Decembrist movement". The calendrical phrase is abrupt, singular and misleading but mainly artificial. The phrase was never used prior to December, 1825. That coincidental month in which the final futile act took place has been fastened onto a long-term, complex, original and dramatic epoch in the history of modern Russian political culture
*1813:1814; Almost all leading figures participated in the campaign through the western provinces of war-ravaged Russia and into western Europe, all the way to Paris. Life in occupied Paris was a "school in politics" [SIE]. Schooling touched on more than politics, it also taught a good deal about the public culture of an emerging general European civil society
*1816:1819; Mikhail Lunin (1787-1845), lived in Paris, grew close to Saint-Simon and left a powerful impression on him. Lunin was a person of unusual integrity and reckless daring, traits that appealed to Saint-Simon. Lunin was a dashing and wealthy gentry landowner who served as an officer in the Russian army of liberation and was preparing to devote his life to public service. Soon Lunin drew close to other "Decembrists"
*1814:Two original organizations formed = The Order of Russian Knights [Orden russkikh rytsarei] [NDD,1:132-9] and Sacred Workshop [Sviashchennaia artel’] [NDD,1:124-30]. The Workshop existed until 1817
*1816:1817; Union of Salvation [Soiuz spaseniia] or Society of True and Faithful Sons of the Fatherland [Obshchestvo istinnykh i vernykh synov otechestva] lasted one year and had thirty members, including =
  Aleksandr Murav'ev, a Lieut.colonel in the Imperial General Staff was the founder
  S. Trubetskoi
  I.D. Yakushkin
  Sergei Murav'ev-Apostol
  Matvei Murav’ev-Apostol
  Nikita Murav'ev
  Pavel Pestel' and others soon became active
*--Eventually four substantial societies -- Union of Salvation, Union of Welfare, Northern Society and Southern Society -- represented the beginnings of organized political opposition (as opposed to great uprisings or smaller conspiracies or isolated dissent) [SIO:11]
*--Let's bow to convention and designate these years as "the Decembrist Movement"

<>1815:Nikolai Karamzin, History of the Russian State (12 vols.) began to appear [Raeff3:117-24]
*--Karamzin had been a dominant figure in Russian cultural life for more than a decade, but his influence was being superseded by a more radical form of progressive patriotism as represented by "Decembrists", a love of Russia that insisted on moving "forward" rather than venerating the past
\\
*--Wagar on Karamzin [TXT]

<>1815ja:1817my08; Hawaii, Kauai Island, Waimea River | Russian Fort Elizabeth established
*--Hawaiian King Kamehameha refused cooperation with Russian America Co. and demanded it leave; which it did
*1817au05:Russian-America Co. administrator reported to Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Karl Nesselrode about the Hawaiian Islands [DIR3:332-4]
*--Russian expansion to the east, into the Pacific Basin and the New World, which began over two centuries earlier, was winding down as new difficulties and complexities arose to the south, in Central Asia =
*--A century-long epoch opened often called "The Eastern Question" or, more broadly and more playfully, "The Great Game", a largely English-Russian competitive struggle for imperialist expansion, first in Central Asia and eventually on a global scale

<>1815se14(26):Paris | Austrian Emperor Francis, Prussian King Frederick Wilhelm, and Russian Emperor Alexander I signed agreement creating the "Holy Alliance" [VSB,2:499-500 | DIR2:161-2 | ORW:66-7]
*--Inspired mainly by Emperor Alexander's Bible-centered piety, the three monarchies committed themselves -- "sincerely" or with mendacity of forethought -- to guide their "nations" in harmony with time-honored Christian principles. They felt the need to augment the very hard-headed or practical-minded or solidly diplomatic Vienna settlements [ID] with spiritual verities, to add "values" to politics. The Quadruple Alliance (England, Russia, Austria and Prussia -- later erstwhile enemy France was admitted) seemed to these righteous monarchs too purely political, too Machiavellian [ID], and thus lacking in moral substance
*--Not wanting to seem sacrilegious, all the great princes of Europe eventually signed on, except for three = English King George IV (spared the embarrassment by laws barring the king from any significant political acts), the Pope in Rome (whose religious obligation was to shun secular acts of this sort), and the Turkish Sultan (he simply was not a Christian -- no room was provided for an Islamic presence within the alliance here called "holy")
*--The "Holy Alliance" became an instrument in the hands of reactionary Prince Metternich of Austria and stirred revulsion, even direct opposition, within the British Foreign Office. The US Monroe Doctrine [ID] was in part inspired as a check against the aggressive reactionary policies supposedly justified by Christian virtues
*1820:Austrian minister Metternich, "Confession of Faith" [TXT]. Over the next two years he offered views on Russia and the Greek revolt against Turkey [VSB,2:508-10]

<>1815no15:Poland received constitution from Russia (i.e., those territories of old Poland taken by Russia in the three partitions) [VSB,2:500-2 | DIR2:164-73 | DIR3:196-9 | ORW:70-1]
*--Poland was thus the scene an early experiment in "devolution" of political power, in which political authority over domestic affairs moved downward from the imperialist metropol to the regional periphery
*--Russia sought to ease imperialist tensions in the westward direction, to avoid the dangers of direct European imperialist competition in Europe itself
*--As he did this, Alexander I again inspired hopes among many of his subjects that a constitution  might be possible in Russia itself. But it is hard to escape the impression that Alexander's fifteen years of zealous reform were largely at an end
*--Arakcheev replaced Speranskii as the symbol of Alexander I's political programs =

<>1816:1821; Russian military leader and loyalist General Aleksei Arakcheev administered "military settlements" [voennye poseleniia] in the Russian countryside. Created in 1810 as a way of integrating the military with productive work, particularly agricultural, these settlements also made peasant life like barracks life, agriculture like a military mission. Settlements grew to about 400,000 members in 1825 and constituted 1/4 of the Russian army [VSB,2:503-4]
*--There is a sense in which these measures can be seen as a part of a larger effort to extend state tutelage over society. Village agricultural life was not recognized in the Petrine Table of Ranks, but military ranks were. Military settlements opened the possibility that peasant plowmen could be organized in rational rank and file (just like peasant "soldaty")
*--These settlements also served to extend the reach of state authority into distant rural districts where the authority of gentry landowners needed to be checked and balanced. Thus the settlements can be viewed as a statist move to undermine that independent gentry authority implied in Catherine II's Charter 30 years earlier
*--So far as peasant disorder in the French Revolution inspired dread in every European monarchical heart, the settlements can also be thought of as early examples of change introduced as a restraint on change, or "change vs. change"
*--Military settlements represent an end of an epoch of "progressive" reform and the beginning of an epoch of "reactionary" reform
*--The settlements were not abolished until 1857 at the beginning of the "Era of Great Reforms"
*--"Decembrist" I.D. Yakushkin identified "military settlements" as one source of social opposition to autocracy [VSB,2:522]
\\
*--Jenkins, Michael. Arakcheev: Grand Vizier of the Russian Empire

<>1816:English Parliament formed a committee to look into the national scandal of child labor and related social abuses caused by rapid industrialization. An era of English reform opened
*1815:Eyewitness accounts of working conditions in English factories [Eye:295-8 | PWT2:142-50]
*--Scene from the English mines illustrated need for reforms [pix]
*1819:English Factory Acts grew out of Parliamentary inquiries into conditions of wage-labor in the new factory environment. Robert Owen [ID] inspired some part of this progressive movement, though results produced by a less reform-oriented Parliament disappointed some English liberals

<>1817:England | James Mill published The History of British India which gained him a permanent appointment with the India House, the managerial headquarters of the East India Company. Mill held that position until the company and its authority in India were abolished and replaced by direct English imperialist rule [ID]
*--Much influenced by the Utilitiarian social critic Jeremy Bentham [ID] and the philosopher David Hume, Mill went on to write many influential studies [ID] in philosophy, government and political economy. He contributed to the growing influence of a public movement of "liberal economic theorists" or "philosophical radicals". They were advocates of "progressive" reform in England, better to rid the land of medieval obstacles to industrialization and promote economic, social and institutional changes better to accommodate modernization
*--James Mill's son, John Stuart Mill, extended the "classical economic" legacy into even more radical scholarly and political positions. Significant variations among "political-economic" theorists"
\\
*--Joseph Hamburger, James Mill and the Art of Revolution
*---------------------, Intellectuals in Politics: John Stuart Mill and the Philosophical Radicals
*--Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand

<>1817:1832; Alaska | Colonial Russian America: Kyrill T. Khlebnikov's Reports
*--These were the years of increasing hardship for the Russian colonies and the Russian-America Company

<>1817:1819; USA FL | Seminole wars
*--Major documents relating to USA foreign affairs prior to 1898, including many treaties signed between USA and Native Americans peoples [W]

<>1818:1872; Pacific deeps now crossed by USA whalers sailing out of New Bedford CN and Nantucket MA, around the southern tip of the South American continent, and out into the great South Sea. This was the third and grandest phase of the global US whaling industry, lasting 54 years
*1823oc07:Nantucket newspaper, The Inquirer, reported = “there are employed in the Southern Whale Fishery from the port of Nantucket alone nearly twice as many ships as are engaged in that fishery from all the ports of France and England, and that most of the whaling ships belonging to both these countries are commanded by persons from Nantucket and New Bedford” [Stackpole:382]
*--Early in this half-century phase, the Pacific Rim came under USA influence in a new way, and this some decades before over-land frontier expansion reached westward beyond the Ohio Valley. The efforts of William Rotch, Sr., the vision of John Ledyard, the far-western extension of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and the enterprise of Astor’s American Fur Co. leapt over the vast North American interior. US “Manifest Destiny” was guaranteed by the east-coast/west-coast sea embrace of the North American mainland, and the whalers played a central role
*--Melville wrote in ch. 111 of Moby Dick: “To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the mid-most waters of the world, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic being but its arms. The same waves wash the moles of the new-built California towns, but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham, while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the whole world’s bulk about, makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth.”
*1823:ships in the hunt=203
*1835:ships in the hunt=421
*1846:ships in the hunt=736
*1847:USA sent out individual whaling ventures from 34 ports. New Bedford sent out three times as many ships as the second busiest whaling port, Nantucket. By now San Francisco CA was engaged in the international whaling industry and was soon the principle importing point for whale products
*1840:USA | Socially conscious lawyer and pundit Richard Henry Dana published Two Years Before the Mast. This fictional but realistic account, based on personal experience, exposed maltreatment of sailors and promoted labor reform in the whale fisheries
*1840s:US whalers pushed through the Kuril Island chain which suspends like a necklace south from the Kamchatka Peninsula. They entered the icy northern waters of the Sea of Okhotsk [G]. They also fished the Bering Sea and passed through the Bering Strait, past the Diomede islands and Russian Alaska to the east, into the Arctic Sea, hunting northern Siberian coastal waters. In these years, US whalers frequently dropped anchor in Russian ports and met with Siberian Russian commanders and officials on friendly terms. The Russians never thought in these years to enter the whaling business in any serious way
*--Whaling was a USA frontier experience fundamentally unknown to Eurasia

<>1818:English writer Mary Shelley published Frankenstein. The fantasy can be taken as the original work of “science fiction”. The growth in the numbers of cheap penny-press publishers, magazines and other forms of popular entertainment created just the right market for these “fables of a technological age” [a phrase from Brian Aldiss’ introduction to his anthology, A Science Fiction Ominbus]
*1826:Shelley further contributed to the genre, and helped launch the pop-arts era, when she published The Last Man, which portrayed the suffering of the only surviving representative of human kind after a global pandemic
\\
*2008fe01:TLS:19 | Dinah Birch emphasized the dominant tone of solitude in science fiction, as in all varieties of Romantic literature [ID]. “Loneliness shadows science faction.” It allows “subtle ways of exploring cultural anxiety and desire”

<>1818mr15:Warsaw meeting of the Polish Sejm heard Russian Emperor Alexander I suggest that the whole Russian Empire might soon be ruled by constitutional law, perhaps on the model of the constitution he had granted Poland three years earlier
*1818:1820; Russian political thinker and state servitor, earlier a member of the Unofficial Committee, Nikolai Novosil'tsev, composed a constitutional Charter of the Russian Empire. He suggested true federalist relationships between the Russian metropol and the imperial peripheries [Raeff2:111-20 | VSB,2:504-6]
*--Mikhail Lunin remembered that the newly mobilized but narrow and elite "public" close to "Decembrists" circles welcomed Alexander's speech as a "political pledge" to the nation. They presumed Alexander I intended to encourage them; perhaps he was "blessing" them and their aims. "The Society gathered and intensified its forces to ensure that this promise should be independent of the temporary will of an individual, and taught the nation to understand and appreciate the benefits of liberty and merit them" [FBF:14]
*1818:1821; Russian voluntary society, Union of Welfare [or Union of Prosperity = Soiuz blagodenstviia] (Decembrists) formed with about 200 members when the Union of Salvation disbanded. Pavel Pestel wrote that the central directorate [Korenaia uprava] unanimously voted to work for a Russian republic in harmony with general European political trends, several degrees more "radical" than Alexander's promise or Novosil'tsev's constitutional project (above)
*--Union of Welfare bylaws [Raeff3:117-24] Rules and constitution [Raeff1:69-99]
*1818:Society of United Slavs [Obshchestvo soedinennykh slavian] formed independently and went through many changes. Petr Borisov was an active member [Raeff1:157-61]. A very moralistic society, it required on "Oath" of all its members [MFR:282-3] Life on the SW borders of the Russian Empire showed members how they were all harmed by needless divisions among "Slavic brothers" (religious, linguistic, ethnic, etc.) [Georges Luciani, La société des Slaves Unis 1823-1825 (Bordeaux:1963)]
*1818:1826; Free Society of Amateurs of Russian Letters [Vol'noe obx liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti]
*1819:Free Society to Found Schools of Mutual Instruction [Vol'noe obshchestvo uchrezhdeniia uchilishch vzaimnogo obucheniia]
 *1820:A spontaneous military mutiny, involving the elite Semevsky Regiment [Semevskii polk], convinced certain Decembrists that the military was ripe for revolt.  They positioned themselves within the military establishment in order to avoid the horrors of destructive and uncoordinated disorder among the people, and to assure their own rightful and prominent place in the event of an uprising
*--"Decembrists" were gaining momentum and seemed at first in some harmony with larger state-sponsored trends. But with time the societies became more oppositional

<>1819:French "public intellectual" Claude Henri, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825),"First Extract from the 'Organizer'"
*--Saint-Simon was the original "socialist" theorist. He fought with French forces against England during the USA colonial wars. Back in France he surrendered his noble title ("derogated" his title) and supported the French Revolution. Through various speculations he amassed a fortune, but contributed it all to the support of scientific and scholarly research. Until his death he lived in extreme poverty, supported only by his servant
*--He developed a view of the future which placed great responsibilities on what he called "savants", trained specialists, an intellectual and technocratic elite from all realms of business, productive, scientific, artistic and professional life. These would be the leaders of the peaceful and productive industrial future, supplanting the old destructive and war-like feudal elites -- priests, warriors, kings and seigneurs -- and abolishing the medieval legacy of privilege or position by birth, rather than merit and contributions to modernizing society. Saint-Simon's socialism shared much with the liberalism of the industrializing, modernizing, rationalistic bourgeoisie, but went a stop beyond standard European liberalism
*--Saint-Simon's legacy became entangled with that of Charles Fourier [ID]. Together they exerted considerable influence as European politics evolved so energetically in the years after the French Revolution
*--Saint-Simon's life and legacy fit the experience of the emerging elite Russian civil society especially closely, for example, Mikhail Lunin, Alexander Herzen [EG] and the Petrashevtsy [EG]
*--Auguste Comte served as assistant to Saint-Simon in his later years
*--By the 1830s, the followers of Saint-Simon had evolved into something like a cult, adopting habits and outlook that could be called "religious", though one might argue that was the last thing he would have wanted to be his legacy

<>1819:German Carlsbad Decrees, inspired by a Metternich-style conservative/reactionary outlook, sought to censor all expressions of liberal and nationalistic dissent and to crush all voluntary (spontaneous) social organizations, particularly university student organizations [the Burschenschaften] [SPE2:472-3]
*--German liberal Ernst Moritz Arndt described how the Napoleonic wars in northern Germany set loose a powerful nationalistic and liberal political movement [PWT2:124-5; more on this era, 125-7]

<>1820:USA New York State political boss and future President Martin Van Buren (1837-41) created "the Albany Regency", something new in politics: a political party machine sustained by the "spoils system" and control over nominations and, thus, selection of officeholders in an otherwise democratic electoral system. This sort of "political machine" has been called a "cadre party" within which large numbers of relatively passive adherents are guided by a minority of professional party activists

<>1821:Central America | Wide-spread revolt against Spanish imperial power and colonial authority
*--Separate states formed out of the old colonial departments: Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Costa Rica. These tried a "Republic of United States of Central America" or "Central American Union" but fragmented as the decades wore on
*1823:Mexico achieved independence from Spain, after more than a decade of revolutionary struggle against European imperialist dominion, but soon began to disintegrate under internal and external pressure

<>1821:Ezo [Hokkaido] now no longer under direct shogun rule

<>1821:French reactionary political philosopher and advisor to Russian Emperor Alexander I, Joseph de Maistre wrote The Pope
*1810:de Maistre wrote "Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions" [W]
*1822:de Maistre wrote "On the Spanish Inquisition" [W]

<>1821:Moscow meetings of the Union of Welfare [Soiuz blagodenstviia] spawned two new and more politically oriented societies =  
(1) Southern Society [Yuzhnoe obshchestvo] formed in Ukrainian regions where the Second Army was quartered. Pavel Pestel' organized the society on the basis of ideas he formulated in a document that later came to be known as "Russkaia pravda" [TXT]
(2) Northern Society [Severnoe obshchestvo] formed in Petersburg
  Nikita Murav'ev was the founder [G/BBL]
  Nikolai Turgenev
  Mikhail Lunin
  Sergei Petrovich Trubetskoi
  Evgenii Obolenskii
*--The society grew significantly.  It favored constitutional rule, but felt that only a Constituent Assembly had the authority to formulate a constitution.  Nikita Murav'ev offered his "Konstitutsiia" as one that might serve as a model [TXT]
*--The following Northern Society members strengthened its republican tendencies =

Kondratii Ryleev
Obolenskii
Nikolai Bestuzhev (baron)
Aleksandr Bestuzhev
Mikhail Bestuzhev
*1822au01:Russian Decree prohibited Masonic lodges and all secret societies (the definition of which was "societies not formally approved by the tsarist state"). The decree was provoked, in part, by the growing intensity of the "Decembrist movement" [VSB,2:508]
*1823:Moscow | Despite decree, the Society of Wisdom-Lovers flourished with V. F. Odoevskii at its head and future Slavophile philosopher Ivan Kireevskii and radical "westernizer" Petr Chaadaev as members
\\
*--Wagar on Odoevskii [TXT]

<>1822:Russia introduced elaborate protectionist and tariff regulations that remained in force for nearly a quarter of a century
*--German economist Friedrich List praised this act [TXT], but market economists generally criticized it

<>1822:1831; German philosopher of eventual world influence George W. F. Hegel [W#1] [W#2], Lectures on the Philosophy of History
*1821:Philosophy of Right [TXT#1] [TXT#2]

<>1822jy22:Speranskii, now maneuvered from the center of power, crafted a Statute for the administrative organization of Siberia, to make it more systematically a part of Russia and to promote entrepreneurial freedom, thus reforming old mercantilist practices [VSB,2:506-8]
*--His policies included regulations governing how Siberia natives were to be treated [DIR3:230-4]
\\
*--Raeff4:65-7

<>1823:1832; Russia suffered cholera epidemics
\\
*--McGrew, R. E. Russia and the Cholera, 1823-1832. Madison WI:1965

<>1823au16:Alexander I issued secret order concerning succession to the throne [VSB,2:510]

<>1823de02:USA President Monroe sent to Congress a message which declared opposition to any new European colonies in the Americas (the western hemisphere) and warned against any further interference in the affairs of the hemisphere. The message (composed mainly by John Quincy Adams) came to be called the Monroe Doctrine [TXT]
*--This "Doctrine" aimed in part to check Russian imperialist ambitions along NE shores of the Pacific down to California. [MAP] Some of the background to this is shown in the following =
*1818, Oregon Territory was taken under "joint occupancy" by treaty agreement between England and USA
*1821, Russia decreed that its New World territories stretched southward to the 51st parallel (at the northern tip of Vancouver Island). The New World Pacific Coast was in a state of flux. The fall of Spanish rule and the establishment of new but weak Mexican rule in the northern reaches of the old Spanish imperialist domains, "El Norte", opened a new set of possibilities. The Monroe Doctrine was designed to help limit those possibilities
*--There was in this connection an imaginary threat from the Holy Alliance which seemed ready to support New World Spanish imperialism, eroding each day. USA was flexing its young muscle for the edification of the Old World European imperialists. It turned a cold shoulder to England, refusing to issue the document as a joint USA/English resolution
*--By 1825, Russia, USA and England were able to agree that 54 degrees, 40 minutes latitude would mark the southern border of Russian power (and thus the northern border of Oregon Territory)
*--As the century wore on, the Doctrine came explicitly to imply a "corollary" right of the USA to intervene in hemispheric affairs in reaction to the fear of possible European intervention -- or, as first in the case of Mexico, to correct perceived self-mismanagement on the part of western hemispheric neighbors -- or simply to further US national interests
*--Opponents of growing US power were quick to say that the Monroe Doctrine had in a sense reversed itself by the time of Teddy Roosevelt. It now seemed, especially in Latin America, to justify and protect USA imperialism rather than hemispheric independence
\\
*--Saul,1:92-110, 126-34
*--Russell Bartley, Imperial Russia and the Struggle for Latin American Independence, 1808-1828

<>1824:USA PA Beaver Co., Ambridge, north of Pittsburgh in the upper Ohio R. valley | The Harmonists, religious refugees from Germany, finally settled
*--George Rapp (1757-1847), a young weaver, was their leader, so the group was also known as Rappists. In 1804, the Harmonists originally migrated to America from Iptingen (near Stuttgart) in southwest Germany. They came seeking religious and economic freedom. Nearly 800 farmers and craftsmen followed Rapp, first to Butler County, Pennsylvania, and then to Posey County, Indiana. They stayed 10 years in each state, building and naming their towns Harmony. The towns were designed by Frederick Rapp (1775-1834), the adopted son of the Founder. The son would have to be adopted because the commune was a celibate society. Still, the Harmonists were one of America's most successful Christian communal groups. And Oekonomie was its third and final home in USA
*--The "utopian" and pacifist community built Old Economy [Oekonomie] Village on their 3,000 acres in Ambridge. Excellent carpenters and craftsmen, they built beautiful shops, homes, and a house of worship. They cultivated well-planned herb, vegetable and flower gardens, and managed grape vines [pix]. The Society gained worldwide recognition for its religious devotion and economic prosperity [W]
*--Despite the Society's economic success, time and certain events brought its decline. In 1832, one third of the members left Economy under the leadership of Count de Leon, a self-proclaimed prophet. [How often are prophets not self-proclaimed?] And, in 1847, Father Rapp died. By the end of the century only a few Harmonists remained. In 1905 the Society was dissolved

<>1824:Penza described in official report [BL&T:23f]

<>1824:"Decembrist" Southern Society joined with United Slavs. It now planned for a huge Slavic federation, including Russian, Poles, Czechs, Moravians, Transylvanians, Serbs, Moldavians, Walachians, Dalmatians, Croats. Hungarians were considered Slavs for this purpose
*--Ambitions of post-Napoleonic political thinking was as obvious here as at the Congress of Vienna, except these “Decembrists” were planning "from the bottom up" rather than from on high in the manner of the Vienna diplomats. The United Slavs were in favor of mass revolution directed against domestic economic and political oppressors and national revolution against foreign or imperialist oppressors. [NB! Pavel Pestel’s Russian nationalistic reluctance to consider federalist independence for peripheral regions of the Russian Empire, for example, in the Caucasus and Central Asia.]
*1824:Saint Petersburg | Something like a unity congress of these various societies gathered. Northern Society met in HQ of the Russian-America Co. The congress received the full version of Pavel Pestel's Russia Truth [Russkaia prava] which projected a future, more decisive meeting of various related societies in 1826. Then differences would be worked out and a general constitution agreed upon. Circumstances, as we will see, prevented this great convocation of  Decembrist societies
\\
*--SIE,12:209 says Decembrists were closely associated with "incipient Russian bourgeoisie" who wanted to shift the Russian America Co. to capitalist methods and therefore were sympathetic to the Decembrists’ "antifeudal" outlook

<>1825:USA NY | Erie Canal completed connecting Hudson R. with Lake Erie. The Canal ran west from above Albany, through Lake Oneida, past Rochester, and into the waterway above Niagara Falls, between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Its significance was that Atlantic seagoing transport now extended deeply into the N. American continent via the Great Lakes
*--The Erie Canal project was financed entirely by NY State tax revenues, then sustained in part by tolls. The people paid, and business thrived
*--The Canal guaranteed that NYC would become the principle US financial center, the American "metropol", but it also contributed to the rise of the great inland metropolis Chicago. The growth of regional metropols represented a variation on the traditional European relationship between the domestic metropol and its peripheries. In the US tradition of federated union, several US metropols grew in economic power in 19th and into the middle of the 20th century. After the US Civil War and especially after WW2 a process of metropolitan centralization gained headway

<>1825no:Siberia | Alexander I died unexpectedly, even mysteriously. Popular legend had it that he lost interest in being Emperor and chose instead to become a simple itinerant monk, Fedor Kuzmich, begging and blessing the folk in villages throughout the Russian eastern frontier [pix]
*--The previously established line of succession had already, in 1822, excluded brother Konstantin. Grandmother Catherine (the Great) had nurtured Konstantin and Alexander I to high power, but Konstantin little taste for the job [DIR3:202-3]
*--That left only brother Nicholas, a much hated martinet and barracks hound
*--In this way, without much plan or expressed desire, revolution became the order of the day. A meeting at Kondratyi Ryleev's decided on an uprising that would take the form of a refusal to take the oath of allegiance to the new Emperor. If necessary, military force had a place in the plan in order to compel the Senate to sign their revolutionary proclamation intended for circulation among the Russian people. The proclamation announced the overthrow of the Russian monarchy, changes in serfdom, abolition of conscription, civil rights, convocation of a Constituent Assembly to settle once and for all the question of constitution and the form of government in the Empire
*--Sergei Trubetskoi, an experienced military leader, participant in the 1812 campaign, and well known to guards regiments, was designated Dictatorial leader of the uprising
*1825de13:Trubetskoi's Manifesto of mutiny against the accession of Nicholas I [VSB,2:518 | DIR2:195-6]

<>1825de14:Decembrist uprising occasioned by a succession crisis as the dreaded martinet Nicholas I ascended the Russian Imperial throne  [DPH:278-81]
*--The coincidence of December 14, however, had roots in a prior decade of social activism and political deliberations within several volunteer organizations that promoted radical reform, even revolution, in Russia
*--On this fateful day, the long years of organized effort came down to this = About 3000 soldiers under the command of 30 officers gathered under the banner of revolution on Senate square, boxed between the St. Isaac’s Cathedral (under construction), the Senate Building, the Admiralty and the Neva River in Petersburg [pix]. Many soldiers (peasants in uniform) thought the formula they shouted -- “Konstantin i konstitutsiia!” -- referred to Konstantin and his wife. This tale should work less to reinforce possible regrettable disdain for common folk than to underscore the incompetence and disorganization of the so-called Decembrist leadership. Trubetskoi even failed to show. Brief skirmishes broke out between loyal and insurrectionary troops.  Decembrist P.G. Kakhovskii killed Governor-General Miloradovich.  All too late, prince Obolenskii was selected to replace Trubetskoi in the role of "leader". Chaos ensued. Units fleeing the scattered struggle broke through the ice of the Neva, many drowned. But the immediate crisis was over
*--“Decembrist Uprising” (Anatole Mazour unfortunately called it “the first Russian revolution”) was no more than an abortive armed insurrection, perhaps only a coup d'état aimed against the despised new Emperor Nicholas I. Events followed from an unusual and unexpected succession crisis
*1825de20:News of the failed uprising reached the Southern Society, but Pestel was already under arrest (1825de13 NB!). Military resistance to Nicholas continued =
*1825de29:Sergei Murav'ev-Apostol and M. Bestuzhev-Riumin led the Chernigov regiment against Nicholas I, and composed a revolutionary proclamation, Katekhizis, which freed soldiers from military service to Nicholas I and promised a republic for Russia
*1826ja03:Ukrainian regions where the Southern Society was active were pacified
*1826jy13:Five Decembrists were hanged =
  Pavel Pestel,
  Sergei Murave'ev-Apostol
  Matvei Bestuzhev-Riumin
  Kondratyi Ryleev
  Kakhovskii
*--One-hundred and twenty one were sent into Siberian exile, hard labor
*--579 persons were questioned in connection with the uprising
*--The common folk were not directly involved in the populist movement. An educated elite was forming into something like a self-conscious activist leadership for national political action. They addressed the plight of the folk, and even allowed that the folk might at some future date play a role in shaping their own better future [WRH3:256-62 | DIR2:174-8 | DPH:278-81]
*--Raeff1
*--First Breath of Freedom [>FBF, an anthology of translated primary documents]
*--Mazour,First:273-9
*--Decembrist memoirs of M.A. Fonvizin, A.E. Rozen, I.I. Gorbachevskii (on Society of United Slavs) [VSB,2:522-8]
*--Over the next twenty years of Siberian exile, Mikhail Lunin continued to struggle against the tsarist state, and he composed reflections on the Decembrist epoch that were reprinted and read in later decades of political activism, "A Look at the Secret Society in Russia (1816-1826)" [TXT]
\\
*--Saul,1:149-65 describes how Decembrists were influenced by USA constitutional ideas
*--N. Eidel'man, Conspiracy Against the Tsar: A Portrait of the Decembrists
*--Anatole Mazour, The First Russian Revolution, 1825:The Decembrist Movement; Its Origins, Development, and Significance
*----------. Women in Exile: Wives of the Decembrists. Tallahassee:1975
*--Patrick O'Meara, K. F. Ryleev: A Political Biography of the Decembrist Poet
*--M. Zetlin, The Decembrists

<>1825de:On the eve of the “Decembrist” rebellion, Aleksandr Pushkin finished his “Comedy about Tsar Boris and Grishka Otrepiev” [The Uncensored Boris Godunov: The Case for Pushkin’s Original Comedy]. Pushkin was scheduled to be in SPb on the day of the rebellion, but turned back from the imperial capital and thus perhaps prevented arrest with other conspirators
*--Pushkin reworked the poetic historical account of Tsar Boris and, six years later, published it as a “tragedy” [ID]. The project was first a comedy then a tragedy, suggesting a certain historical (rather than simply literary) sense of human experience as “tragicomic”. Clearly, Pushkin had in mind the need for a Russian equivalent of Shakespeare’s great English-historical plays
*--On the very day of the rebellion, Pushkin completed his poem “Count Nulin”, a parody of Shakespeare’s “Rape of Lucrece” (and possibly of history). Pushkin raised a “counter-factual” question, always dangerous for the historian = What might have happened if Lucrece had slapped the would-be rapist Tarquin, turning him back. “Lucrece would not have stabbed herself, Publius would not have become enraged, Brutus would not have driven out the Ceasars.... And so we owe the republic, the consuls, the dictators, the Catos, the Casears, to a seduction similar to the one that took place recently in our neighborhood”
*--Andrei Siniavskii (Abraham Tertz) [ID] wrote, in Strolls with Pushkin, that the fictional character “Count Nulin” absorbed energy from three actual historical episodes = the Decembrist rebellion, Pushkin’s own escape from arrest, and the rape of Lucrece. As in all complex moments of contingency, said Siniavskii, history can turn in any direction
\\
*2006je30:TLS:7, Rachel Polonsky review of Uncensored... (above)

<>1825de14:1855; Russian Emperor Nicholas I reigned for thirty years, an epoch that seemed to some to be reactionary in the extreme, a panicked retreat from the Decembrist uprising and all the progressive implications of the era of European revolution
*--Decembrists were transported to distant Siberian exile. Within a few years a stream of Polish "freedom fighters" followed them into what was to become a combination of removal, concentration and frontier development = Siberian exile
*--Yet Nicholas and his ministers paid close attention to the voluminous testimony they gathered in interrogations of Decembrists and associates [VSB,2:528-30]
*--Read through 1827oc:below, then follow "reform" hypertext hops to see how measures taken in the time of Nicholas I combined "reactionary" and "progressive" motives
\\
*--Curtiss, John Shelton. The Russian Army Under Nicholas I, 1825-1855. Durham, N.C.:1965
*--Lincoln, W. Bruce. Nicholas I
*--Lobanov-Rostovsky, Andrei. Russia and Europe, 1825-1878. Ann Arbor:1954

<>1826:1879; Russian state institutions were supplemented by a set of "His Majesty’s Own Chanceries". Nicholas created a new parallel set of institutions through which he could exert his autocratic authority, free from the complex ministerial mechanisms created in the time of Alexander I.
*--The Third Section [secret state police] was formed out of functions and bureaus that Speranskii had earlier attached to the Interior Ministry. The Third Section became a symbol of Nicholas-style unlimited autocracy, and it survived the longest (until 1879) [KRR:257 | VSB,2:533]
*--Read to 1827oc for reform style of Nicholas I
\\
*--Sydney Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society under Nicholas I (1961)
*--Peter S. Squire, The Third Department (1968)

<>1826:Kazan University [W] Professor of Mathematics Nikolai Lobachevskii [W] published his path-breaking studies in non-Euclidian geometry. The next twenty years witnessed a provincial cultural and intellectual renaissance in the Russian/Tatar city Kazan, but officials soon removed Lobachevskii from his academic posts

<>1826ap22:Russian censorship statute tightened control over the printed word [VSB,2:533-4]
*1826de12:Admiral A. S. Shishkov sent memo to Nicholas I about censorship [DIR3:235-7]

<>1826my12:au09; Russian manifestos on peasant serf disturbances [VSB,2:541-2 | DIR2:197-8(ap20?)]

<>1827oc:Russian Emperor Nicholas I issued a decree on the education of peasant serfs [BL&T:120]
*1827de12:Educational opportunities for non-privileged sosloviia were restricted [DIR3:237]
*--Nicholas I continued the innovations of earlier autocrats, but the policy of Nicholas I might best be called "frightened absolutism" (rather than enlightened absolutism). His reforms were "reactionary reforms"

<>1827:1829:Caucasus Mountain, northern slopes | Daghestan Muslim movement arose against Russian imperial control. First Daghestan imam Hazi-Mohamed [Hazi-Mulla] preached Islamic holy war against Russia

<>1828:Armenian river valley of the middle Kura reached by Russian imperial forces, carving away from Iranian (Persian) imperial power an old Christian nation south of the Caucasus. The "Great Game" seemed to go Russia's way, particularly in the Caucasus Mt. region
\\
*--Gillard, David. The Struggle for Asia, 1828-1914: A Study in British and Russian Imperialism

<>1829se02:Ottoman Turks and Russia signed Adrianople treaty, acknowledging Russian control over the northern 2/3 of the Black Sea coast, and independence for two Orthodox Christian peoples, Serbs (Yugoslavs) and Greeks [VSB,2:537-8 | DIR2:199-207 | DIR3:239-43]

<>1830fe04:Caucasus Mountains, northern slope, Chechnya and Daghestan | First significant victory of expanding Muslim holy war against Russian dominion
*--This was not directly a European imperial conflict, it was local revolutionary resistance to one great power. Indirectly, other great powers helped the rebels, less in the interest of local self-determination than in the interest of weakening a competitor, Russia. Much the same can be said about growing international support of Polish rebellion against Russian power
*--Russia knew this tactic; it had itself earlier taken steps to help USA rebels against Great Britain
*--Divisions of indigenous warriors were led by imams, one of whom was Shamil

Daghestani resistance to Russian rule was led
in the first half of the 19th century
by Muslim holy warriors, such as the fabled
imam Shamil [Shamyl]

Shamil was gifted spiritual and military leader, trained in Arabic scholarship and committed to salvation of his native land and customary ways in the face of powerful Russian armies. Shamil soon became imam. [pix] [pix]
*--War of liberation lasted 29 years until 1859ap [BrE,77:125-32]
*--Russian imperialist expansion bogged down
\\
*--Lesley Blanch, The Sabres of Paradise (LND:1978) DK511.c3855
*--Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan (LND:1994) DK511.c2 G28
*--Smirnov,Nikolai Aleskandrovich, Miuridizm na Kavkaze (Moscow: 1963) BP189.S5

<>1830:USA NY Fayette | Joseph Smith (1805-1844) founded the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints (most widely known as the Mormon Church). Born in Vermont, Smith's family migrated westward to NY Palmyra. Young Smith was always bothered by the multiplicity of religious creeds he saw around him. Just a teenager, he reported a vision of two angelic figures who warned him not to join any of these denominations because god was about to restore the one true faith. In another vision he learned that the second coming of Christ was imminent. Here he learned also the location of certain plates of gold recording hitherto hidden sacred truths. Much later, in 1827, Smith dictated  to Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris and others his translation of the unique language and script of the golden plates. In 1829 Smith and Cowdery announced that an angel appeared to them and ordained them as priests of Aaron in a renovated faith. They were authorized to baptize one another by immersion. The translation of the new gospel was published as Book of Mormon (1830). This was nothing less than a "newest testament", an extension of the word of god beyond the old and new testaments, building on the Mosaic revelations and the synoptic gospels. It described how the original native peoples of the New World were the lost tribe of Israel, dispersed hither at the time of the Tower of Babel.  The original gold plates subsequently disappeared from this earth. A new church, however, began to set down strong roots in the New World
*1831:1839; USA OH Kirtland | Smith relocated the church. and the religious community prospered with large business developments. Various complications forced the congregation to migrate to MO briefly. They were then driven from MO to IL
*1839:1844; USA IL, on E bank of the Mississippi R | Smith renamed the town Commerce "Nauvoo", which prospered under Mormon settlement, just as earlier. But political embroilment and conflict with surrounding communities led to Smith's downfall. For one thing, Smith experienced another heavenly revelation in 1843 which sanctioned plural marriage (polygamy, defined in this community as one husband, several wives). This did not jibe with the practice of neighboring frontier settlers who, for the most part, took guidance in these and other matters from the two previous divine testaments (i.e., the Old and the New testaments). Smith was commander of a city militia, the Navou Legion, which was created to enhance the security of the eccentric Mormon community but which other Mormon leaders condemned. Smith destroyed the printing press of the Expositor, through which the opposition expressed itself. Smith appealed to the Legion to support him, but he and his brother were jailed in IL Carthage
*1844je:USA IL | Carthage mob murdered Smith and his brother
*1846:A large part of the Mormon community pulled out of IL Nauvoo (and other locations) and headed for the high desert west, under the leadership of Brigham Young, President of the Council of Twelve. Not all Mormons left for the west. They stayed and created a Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints. Three years later, the largely abandoned city Nauvoo was occupied by a French utopian community, the Icarians, led by E'tienne Cabet. Seven years later, in 1856, the Icarians split up and abandoned the town.

<>1830:Europe-wide revolution was felt with special intensity in France. A broad assault was launched on the remains of the old-regime, this in the name of a new "liberal" order. "The July Revolution" toppled the French king, so recently restored to his throne after the Congress of Vienna [ID]. A restricted monarchy, known as "The July Monarchy" reigned, 1830-1848, under the authority of what must be called a liberal or moderate "bourgeois" power, a power based on wealth and financial prominence rather than older heritable, aristocratic, or royal claims. The last hopes of restoring the old regime -- of reconstructing "The West" as it was prior to the 1789 French Revolution [ID] -- were crushed

<>1830se13:French liberal leader François Guizot (1787-1874) delivered a report to the legislative chambers. A professor of history at the University of Paris, Guizot was drawn into politics by the hope that a moderately liberal monarchical government could pass progressive educational reform, so as to elevate citizens to a level sufficient to sustain representative democracy. Literacy had reached sufficient levels to sustain a newly emerging profession, vital to the future of European civilization = journalism
*--Over the next eighteen years, Guizot thrived as liberal minister and politician, but as time went on he grew less certain of the natural political alliance of the well-to-do with the laboring poor. Not all "commoners", not all members of "The Third Estate", prospered quite like those "bourgeoisie" with whom Guizot increasingly identified. One of the great contradictions built into the liberal doctrine -- that between poor commoners and increasingly rich commoners [ID] -- was about to bring down Guizot

<>1830:1842; French socialist theorist and originator of "sociology" Auguste Comte, Course of Positive Philosophy
*--Comte was an acolyte of Saint-Simon and the systematizer of that powerful trend of European thought called "Positivism"
\\
*--Wagar on Positivism [TXT]

<>1830de20:1832; Polish Revolt declared independence and worked to strengthen independence of Sejm (or Seim; Polish parliament) [VSB,2:534 | DIR3:199]. Struggle for national independence in Poland lasted almost two years in an era of Europe-wide insurrection against the vestiges of various "old regimes"
*1832:Russian Emperor Nicholas I revoked the Polish constitution which dated from the Alexandrine epoch. Thus an early European experiment in "devolution" came to an end [ORW:92] Reactionary reform continued
*1835oc:Nicholas I issued statement to representatives of the subdued Polish nation [DIR3:200]
*--Poetry of Adam Mickiewicz inspired his Polish nation [KMM:74-83]. Ethno-cultural nationalism was a characteristic feature of the Romantic era
*--Polish sentiment was inspired by liberalism and nationalism, but these two inspirations were sometimes contradictory [ID]
\\
*--Andrzej Walicki, Russia, Poland, and Universal Regeneration: Studies on Russian and Polish Thought of the Romantic Epoch (1991)
*--Jerzy Jan Lerski, A Polish chapter in Jacksonian America; the United States and the Polish exiles of 1831 (1958)

<>1831:1833; USA ambassador to Russia was James Buchanan. His papers have been published = James Buchanan's Mission to Russia, 1831-33

<>1831:Italy | Giuseppe Mazzini founded "Young Italy" to struggle for liberal republican national unity among the many divided and competing political and administrative regions. He sought to bring together all Italian-speaking peoples who lived along the southern slopes of the Alps, south of Switzerland, all along the Italian boot, and on the Sicilian island, to dissolve the old independent feudal authorities and city-states, and to create one nation-state = Italy [DPH:170-9 | PWT2:127-9]
*1831oc31:England | Bristol the site of popular disorders in support of reform. The disorder was put down sharply [pix], but in the next years the first English reform bill went through. The winds of liberal change blew even in Burke's stable and conservative England [ID]

<>1831:Russia’s greatest poet, Aleksandr Pushkin wrote "Boris Godunov" (tragic historical play) and "Evgenyi Onegin" (poetic drama)
*1827:Orest Kiprenskii portrait of Pushkin in Olga's Gallery [pix]
*--The Ardis Anthology of Russian Romanticism. Was Pushkin a representative poet of the Romantic era? This has been much debated, with the edge going to those who point out Pushkin's clear debt to neo-classical traditions and his particular "Russian" way of blending the two great esthetic traditions. As the 19th century reached its middle, the long Romantic era was on the wain
*--In the 1830s Pushkin went to Orenburg to study the Pugachev rebellion
\\
*--Wagar on the Pushkin era [TXT]

<>1831:USA Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Marshall delivered his opinion on the legal cases dealing with indigenous Native American peoples, the Cherokee Nation vs. the USA [TXT]
*--Over the next few years, forced removal and concentration of Native American nations was observed by French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville and described in his famous book on Democracy in America [TXT]
\\
[W devoted to Seminole Nation] = In 1832, the Payne's Landing Treaty took away all Florida land claims from the tribe, and provided for removal to Indian Territory. Ratification of that treaty in 1834 allowed the Seminole three years before the removal was to take place. But under the U.S. government's interpretation, 1835 (not 1837) ended the three year period prior to removal. The Seminole disagreed, and their bitter opposition resulted in the second, or Great Seminole War. Among the worst chapters in the history of Indian Removal, the war lasted almost seven years and cost thousands of lives. It finally ended in 1842 with the agreement that several hundred members of the tribe could remain in Florida. They stayed in the Florida swamps but never surrendered. Their descendants are the Seminole in Florida today

<>1831:USA VA | Nat Turner's rebellion
\\
*--Kolchin:251

<>1831:USA inventor Cyrus McCormick (22 years old)  successfully introduced mechanical reaper into the grain production process [pix]
*1834:John Deere marketed a steel moldboard plow
*1840:USA ports began use of large steam powered shovels to load and unload grain from large sea-going transports
*--Industrial technology beginning to transform traditional agricultural economies =
*1837:USA average = 148 man-hours/acre to cultivate, plant and harvest grain
*1890:USA average =   37 man-hours/acre to cultivate, plant and harvest grain
*--Industrialization caused rise of international trade in grain

<>1831:1864; French-born engineer and entrepreneur Isambard Kingdom Brunel made his career in England after his family fled from the French Revolution [W]
*--He designed and built remarkable Clifton Bridge [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix]

<>1831fe18:Russian decree limited foreign education for Russian subjects; counter-reform mounted [VSB,2:543-4]

<>1831de06:Nicholas I refined the structure of the Noble Assembly (created originally by Catherine II) in another reactionary reform measure [VSB,2:543-4]

<>1832 and 1834:USA trapper and explorer Nathaniel Wyeth kept journals of two expeditions to Oregon Territory

<>1832:England passed its first reform bill which addressed a series of political/institutional problems caused by industrial modernization. Until this time, only one in sixty "subjects" of the English throne could participate in Parliamentary electoral politics, as voters or as members of Parliament (representatives, legislators). Many boroughs (electoral districts) were under the control of the crown or of insider aristocratic elites. Many boroughs had almost no population in them ("rotten boroughs"), yet they sent two members to Parliament. The great industrial cities Manchester and Birmingham sent no members to Parliament. Certainly the wage-laboring "people" were excluded from formal political life, but so also were the new financial elites, earlier simply "commoners", now "bourgeoisie" created by industrialization. These new elites were ready now to "step up" to political as well as increasing social and economic dominance in English life
*--Over the next century, four more liberal reform bills were put through expanding the franchise and gradually democratizing Parliamentary representation

<>1832:German liberal activist Paul Pfizer on liberalism and nationalism. Here are two related samples [MDF:99-100] =
    "Freedom within and independence from without, a personal liberty and nationality -- these are the two poles toward which all the life of the century is directed"
    "It is, of course, foolish to demand that Germans wholly forget about freedom within until they have secured independence from without; but it is just as wrong, if not more so, to wish to sacrifice nationalism to personal liberty" [emphasis mine]
*--The German political-economist Friedrich List was aware of this contradiction at the heart of modern European liberalism
*--Irish movement for national independence showed another face of this dilemma

<>1832:Russian laws gathered and systematically indexed. Digest of Russia Law, the first since 1649
*--Only now, in the reign of reactionary Nicholas, was this small portion of Speranskii's ambitious reform project complete [VSB,2:534-5 | WRH3:272-3]
*--The ground-work was being laid for the great legal reforms of the 1860s

<>1832:USA and Russia sign first treaty of Navigation and Commerce, in force until 1911
\\
*--Saul,1:111-32
*--Walther Kirchner, Studies in Russian-American Commerce, 1820-1860 (1975) HF3628.U5k57
*--Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., America, Russia, Hemp and Napoleon: American Trade with Russia and the Baltic, 1783-1812 (1965)

<>1832:USA MA | Ralph Waldo Emerson resigned as Unitarian minister and founded Transcendentalist tradition
*1837au31: -----, "The American Scholar" [TXT]
*1842: ----- , "The Transcendentalist" [TXT]
\\
*--Wagar on Transcendentalism [TXT]

<>1833mr21:Russian Education Minister Sergei Uvarov announced doctrine of "Official Nationality". For more than ten years, Uvarov enforced it as something much like a modern state ideology. The ideology rested on a three-part foundation: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and narodnost' [nationalist spirit] [VSB,2:564-6 | BL&T:192]
*1816:Orest Kiprenskii portrait of Uvarov in Olga's Gallery
*--The Uvarov doctrine seemed to overturn the Enlightenment spirit of the previous century and the universalism of Alexander I. It represented a novelty and was in this sense very much in keeping with the reactionary reformist reign of Nicholas I
*--Intellectuals resisted this official doctrine and sought to define their very own "unofficial nationality"
*--Some of these intelligents were called "Slavophiles". For example = Konstantin Aksakov (heir of Russian family that settled the Bashkir steppes) and Aleksei Khomiakov [VSB,2:577-82]
*--Ivan Kireevskii was possibly the most gifted philosopher and theological historian among them
*--Ivan Aksakov, (Konstantin's brother) lived a long, active life and experienced the transition of Slavophilism and panslavism from cultural opposition and dissent to sympathetic support of Russian imperial expansion
*--The Slavophiles' opponents were called "Westernizers". For example, Moscow University History Professor Timofei Granovskii was a leading influence on this trend [VSB,2:574-5 | LDH:168-78]
*--Petr Chaadaev was an extreme "westernizer" [See his 1829:Letters on the philosophy of history in  LDH:67-78 | DIR3:246-52]. More on idea of "The West"
*--A central bone of contention between Slavophiles and Westernizers was the question of "native" village culture
*--Alexander Herzen seemed to reconcile the views of Westernizers and Slavophiles, but with a radical socialist, extremely "unofficial" brand of nationalism. [TXT on early chapters of Herzen's memoirs which deal with the 1830s]
*--Together, Slavophiles and Westernizers were the first significant and numerous representatives of what would in thirty years be called the "intelligentsia"
\\
*--Florovsky,5:238-68 describes "Church and State under Nicholas I", then in vol. 6:1-101 he describes the vibrant new secular culture that arose in that era
*--Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825-1855 (1959)
*----------------------, A Parting of the Ways: Government and the Educated Public in Russia, 1801-1855 (1976)
*----------------------, Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles (1952)
*--E. C. Thaden, Conservative Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Russia (1964)
*--Cynthia H. Whittaker, The Origins of Modern Russian Education: An Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, 1786-1855 (1984)
*--Edward J. Brown, Stankevich and His Moscow Circle, 1830-1840 (1966)
*--Peter Christoff, An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Russian Slavophilism (4 volumes)
*---------------------. The Third Heart: Some Intellectual-Ideological Currents in Russia, 1800-1830 (1970)
*---------------------, K. S. Aksakov: A Study in Ideas (1982) v.3 of Introduction
*--Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-century Russian Thought (1975)

<>1833je26:Ottoman Turks and Russia signed Unkiar-Skelessi Treaty, creating an alliance and mutual defense arrangement [VSB,2:538 | DIR2:207-9 | DIR3:243-45]
*--England and other players in the "Great Game" were as much disturbed by Russian "friendship" with the Sublime Porte as they were by successful Russian imperialist expansion

<>1833je28(NS):French Minister of Education François Guizot passed law reforming primary education [DPH:230-2]
*--The democratization of culture required public education, but it also fed the growth of journalism and the popular arts, and it raised the problem of "popularization" of high civilization in the minds of traditional elites

<>1833oc03:Berlin Convention granted Russia special responsibility for Poland, Hungary, and the Balkans [VSB,2:535]

<>1834se19:Caucasus (Daghestan) leader Shamil became imam after death of old imam, and after Shamil killed only competitor for Avar throne

<>1835:1840; French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville searched for the roots of USA political life, Democracy in America. [I recommend the concluding chapter to volume one [TXT], with particular attention to the CONCLUSION which provides a fuller than usual context for thinking about the famous "prescient" words about Russia and America]  [Full TXT]

<>1835:1842; USA FL | Seminole wars pitted US army against resolute Native Americans
\\
*--Kolchin:250

<>1835: English economic historian Edward Baines published his explanation for English preeminence in the development of the "factory system", The History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain , with emphasis on the entrepreneurial energies and skills of figures like Richard Cartwright [Excerpts = PWT2:136-42] 

<>1835:1842; Russian railroad construction got under way. USA specialists involved
*--Nicholas I decree in 1842 [VSB,2:551]
*--Introduction of the greatest and most advanced industrial technology seemed in stark contrast to the continued plight of serfs, and yet it was further evidence that "reform" was possible, even if mainly "reactionary reform"
\\
*--Saul,1:134-47
*--Haywood, Richard Mowbray. The Beginnings of Railway Development in Russia and the Reign of Nicholas I, 1835-1842. Durham NC:1969
*--Westwood, J. N. A History of Russian Railways. London:1964

<>1835jy26:Russian universities came under new restrictive counter-reform regulations [VSB,2:562-4]
*--In this year, Russian Committee for Investigating Ways and Means of Improving the Condition of Peasants of Various Classification issued memo of its chairman I.V. Vasil'chikov. The Committee attacked a widespread idea among serfs that, while they might be property of the gentry, the land belonged to them [VSB,2:544]
*--Yet plans were being laid in secret for significant rural reform, perhaps not reactionary at all

<>1836:Russian thinker Petr Chaadaev (-1856) published "Philosophical Letters" [TXT] [Raeff3:160-73 | KMM:38-46 | Edie,1 | RRC2,2#25 | VSB,2:566]
*--Censors ordered psychiatric treatment and condemned the author, forcing him to publish in 1837 "Apology of a Madman" [KMM:50-7]
*--Philosophical Letters and Apology of a Madman
*--The Major Works of Peter Chaadaev
\\
*--R. T. McNally, Chaadayev and His Friends: An Intellectual History of Peter Chaadaev and His Russian Contemporaries (1971) ORBIS
*--Wagar on Chaadaev [TXT]

<>1836fe04:Ireland | Daniel O'Connell, "Justice for Ireland" [W], attacked English imperialist rule in the name of national independence

<>1836sp:Texas Republic in military struggle for independence from Mexico, itself only a dozen years free from Spanish imperial dominion [MAP]

<>1836ap:1836jy:Caucasus, the Chechen region | The Russian Imperial army retreated
*--Rumors of local resistance leader Shamil’s strength spread all along the northern slopes of the Caucasus

<>1836oc19:Aleksandr Pushkin wrote a letter to Chaadaev about his book Philosophical Letters., in which he expressed his astonishment that it was published. Pushkin didn’t agree with all of Chaadaev’s ideas. Yes, Schism separated Russia from Europe [e.g., 1054:Great Schism in European Christian Church, splitting East from West]. But Pushkin asserted that Russians have "our own special mission" [e.g., P. supported Russian imperialist expansion]. Russia absorbed the blow delivered by Mongol conquest; thus Christian civilization was saved. Byzantine tradition not such a fetid well as Chaadaev suggested. Up to Feofan [Prokopovich] the Russian clergy was respectable. Pushkin praised the great moments, even grandeur of the Time of Troubles. Pushkin conceded that Chaadaev was right about the Russian public = "absence of public opinion, the indifference toward all duty, justice, and truth...." [780] [Letters of P...:778-81,796-8]
*1836:Russian journal Sovremennik [Contemporary] published article by Aleksandr Pushkin about John Tanner, a USA white man raised by Native Americans. Pushkin's grandfather was a black African servant in the court of Peter the Great, so the poet had a great personal interest in "multi-culturalism"
*--Pushkin also wrote a critique of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. He discussed this critique in a letter to Petr Chaadaev [Ibid.:798, notes 9 and 10]

<>1837:Chaadaev,"Apology of a Madman" [KMM:50-7]

<>1837:Russian historian of peasant serf stock Mikhail Pogodin, "Letter on Russian History" [KMM:60-8]

<>1837:USA MA | Horace Mann became secretary of the MA State Board of Education

<>1837ja28:Petersburg | Aleksandr Pushkin died as a consequence of a duel
*--Traumatic event inspired Mikhail Lermontov to a brilliant four years of poetic creation, which included his 1839 novella A Hero of Our Time

<>1837je:Caucasus battles as Russia advanced against Shamil’s mountain retreats. Russia struck deeper into his high fastness than ever before, but Shamil eluded capture

<>1837je03:Nicholas I issued instructions on the functions to be performed by provincial governors, a counter-reform measure [VSB,2:535-6] CF: reform act of Catherine II
*1837:1841; Russian minister Pavel Kiselev carried out emancipation of state serfs, working as head of a separate and new Ministry of State Domains. He sought to center local self-administration in the hands of the village assembly [mirskoi skhod] on state domains and to promote private farm ownership [VSB,2:544-8, 550-1 (Zablotskii-Desiatovskii memo)]
*--Before 1861 emancipation, Kiselev's measures were the most sweeping reforms of serfdom ever attempted in Russia. Kiselev might be said to have revived a reform idea from a half century earlier
*1842mr30:Russian Emperor Nicholas I in speech to the State Council acknowledged that the problem of serfdom was far larger than the scope of the Kiselev reforms. (There were, after all, well over 22 million "privately owned" serfs untouched by the Kiselev reforms.) Nicholas said, "There is no question that serfdom in its present state in our country is an evil, palpable and obvious to everyone. However, to attack it now would be, of course, an even more disastrous evil" [VSB,2:552-3 | KRR:295-6]
*--A decree did encourage expansion of potato planting among Russian serfs [VSB,2:551-2] And a new category of serf, called "obligated peasants" was tried as a way to move gently toward reform of village life [VSB,2:553 | see related documents from a few years later:559-62]
*--Counter-reform continued, but it is obvious that some of Nicholas' "reactionary reforms" were indistinguishable from just plain "reform"
*1847:Russian Interior Ministry report on serf disorders [KRR:296]
\\
*--Blum:475-503 (conditions among state serfs and other categories of non-serf peasants)
*--Blum:536-51 (serf reform in the time of Alexander I and Nicholas I)
*--Steven Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control in Russia: Petrovskoe, a Village in Tambov (1986)

<>1838:England | First Chartist Petition gathered in support of a written constitution
*--In this same year, England abolished slavery in its colonial possessions, but stepped up its aggressive imperialist expansion in China
*--The rising demands of modern imperialism exacerbated the contradiction between state sovereignty and the rights of citizens which so often slowed the process of liberal reform

<>1838:USA indigenous Cherokee lands, mainly in NC GA TN, seized by US Army, under the command of General Winfield Scott, with the avid support of an associated mob of "settlers". Native Americans of the Cherokee Nation were then "removed" to OK and western AR. As elders of the tribe gathered for the last time on their ancestral land, they adopted a resolution on Native American land =

The title of the Cherokee people to their lands is the most ancient, pure and absolute known to man; its date is beyond the reach of human record.... The free consent of the Cherokee people is indispensable to a valid transfer of the Cherokee title. The Cherokee people have neither by themselves or their representatives given such consent. It follows that the original title and ownership of lands still rests in the Cherokee Nation, unimpaired and absolute. The Cherokee people have existed as a distinct national community for a period extending into antiquity beyond the dates and records and memory of man. These atributes have never been relinquished by the Cherokee people and cannot be dissolved by the expulsion of the Nation from its territory by the power of the United States Government. [Collier,Indians:124-5]

The US Army forcibly transported indigenous American farmers to "Indian territory" and confined or concentrated them on what were thought to be wastelands, the sites of the future states Arkansas and Oklahoma. Removal, reconcentration and frontier development have long combined histories. "Indian Removal" was the policy of the 1830s:
*--NB! Clash of two concepts of property =: tribal-property and "fee simple" individual ownership

Artistic rendition of the 1838 "Trail of Tears"
[source blocked]

*--More on Native Americans

<>1839:Alaska | Russian-America Co. agreed on lease to the Hudsons' Bay Co. giving them access to the sea from inland Canadian territories down the Stikhine River. In exchange the Russians were promised much needed supplies for Russian posts further north. For example =
*1838:1846; USA Sauvie Island (12 m. north of current Portland OR) site of Hudson's Bay Co. dairies, one at old Fort Williams on western side of the Island on Multnomah Channel of the Willamette River (ran by Laurent Sauvé whose name became attached to the Island), the other dairy on the eastern side near the Columbia River. These dairies were contracted to provide eight tons of butter a year to the Russians up in Sitka, but they never managed more than 2-3 tons
*1841:Hudson's Bay Co. administrator Sir George Simpson visited the eastern dairy and reported 100 milk cows producing an average of 60 lbs. of butter/year. (By the 1950s, the modern minimum norm butter production per cow was 350 lbs.). Simpson also reported troublesome signs of US citizen incursions into these territories. (He did not know that Lewis and Clark visited and much admired Sauvie Island on their great excursion). The question of Oregon Territory had become a serious USA/English struggle. The English claimed territory down to the Columbia River; USA claimed territory to the southern limit of Russian Alaska = "54-40 or fight!"
*1841:Fort Ross in California had became less critical to the Russian-America Co., in part because of Sauvie Island butter, and was sold to John Sutter. A few years later, Sutter's saw mill on the old Russian lease was the site of significant gold discoveries. The gold rush was on, and even though the Russian presence continued to be important in the San Francisco area (Russians saw to the construction of the first steamboat on the San Francisco Bay in 1846), they were sidelined in the unfolding struggle for ascendancy in California
*1846:Oregon Territory issue, after 40 years of uncertainty, was settled when the current-day borders were accepted by USA and England
\\
*--Omar Spencer, The Story of Sauvies Island (1950)

<>1839:1842; China took steps to prohibit English importation of the debilitating drug opium. Opium was produced in India by the East India Company and sold in China in order to finance English imperialist expansion. In response to the Chinese effort to end the opium trade, the English attacked several Chinese ports. A 3-year Opium War followed. In the end, the English took possession of the vital Chinese port cities Shanghai and Hong Kong [SWH:289-300]
*1843:John Elliot Bingham, Narrative of the Expedition to China
*1842:1859; All major European states jumped in to impose on China what was called the "Treaty System", which amounted to "Western" control of all Chinese sea ports. This was China's route to European imperialist domination [1914:MAP of Asia]

<>1839:1842; Afghanistan | Ceaseless military clash between England and Russia. The "Great Game" heated up. England checked Russian imperialist expansion in SE Afghanistan but suffered massacre in the central city, Kabul

<>1839je05:1839oc22; French aristocrat Astolphe, marquis de Custine, visited Russia seeking inspiration from what he hoped would be a vibrant aristocratic monarchy, but recorded his deep disappointment in The Empire of the Czar: or, Observations of the Social, Political, and Religious State and Prospects of Russia, made during a Journey through that Empire [Excerpt: VSB,2:548-50]
*--Here is an example of his account
*--Long celebrated as a brilliant first-hand vision of Imperial Russia which foretold Soviet Russia, recent scholarship suggests Custine relied as much on ordinary Parisian newspaper accounts of Russian life and on rumors heard from his friend Baron de Barante, the French ambassador to Russia [2000:CMR#41,1]
*--Translation of "La Russie en 1839". 3 volumes. LND:1843; reprint, Ann Arbor:1978 [DK25.C98 1843a]
*--Journey for Our Time: The Russian Journals of the Marquis de Custine. Edited [abridged] and translated by Phyllis Penn Kohler. Introduction by General Walter Bedell Smith [thus signaling the Cold War significance of the 19th century critic of Russia]. Chicago:1951
\\
*--Kennan, George Frost. The Marquis de Custine and His Russia in 1839 (1971). The great American diplomat of the early Cold War period was struck by the profound similarities in Custine’s 19th century impressions and his own 20th century impressions

<>1839au:Caucasus | Another horrible siege finally succeeded against Shamil, but he again fled

<>1840:French anarchist theorist and political activist, Pierre Proudhon, published What is Property? His answer, "THEFT", made him famous. He wrote many later influential pieces [JANUS]=
*1846:System of Economic Contradictions, or, the Philosophy of Poverty
*1848:Proudon was elected to the French National Assembly in the midst of the Revolution of 1848, fighting for establishment of national banks to support the economic interests of the common folk
*1858:De la justice dans la révolution et dans l'église [On justice in the revolution and in the Church]
*--Proudhon was not an extreme anarchist in the sense that he was in favor of government, even participated in it. But he thought governmental institutions should always be adjusted downward to the lowest level. Bring those who govern as physically (geographically) close as possible to the people governed. He believed in checks and balances within a federated political structure and social security within an egalitarian economic structure. His moral belief was that individuals with time will evolve toward personal responsibility for their own behavior, thus reducing external authority to near nothing
*1865:Proudhon died, but his followers, called "federalists", continued to play a role in opposition to the "statist" Marx and his followers within the First International

<>1841:1844; German political economist Friedrich List published his National System of Political Economy (NYC: 1904). See also List’s Natural System of Political Economy, 1837 [TXT of chapters 8-10, dealing with Russia, USA and general historical significance of his system]
*--List was Saxon by birth, but had been deported to USA after becoming involved in liberal politics. He returned as US Ambassador to the Saxon court in Leipzig. He was one of the most powerful European voices for protective measures, tariffs, for example, as in the Zollverein [a customs union, one of the early efforts at German unification]
*--His macro-economics argued against "laissez-faire" policies in late-blooming industrializing or marketizing economies. In his view, "laissez-faire" significantly advantaged foreign economic interests in competition with the home-grown enterprise. "Emerging" nations must be protectionist so long as they are threatened by foreign incursions. Perhaps among equally developed economies, free trade might work. Here are List's central paragraphs on that matter
*--Yet he insisted that the political or institutional liberalization had to precede economic modernization. He did not confuse political freedom and democracy with market economic prosperity, and he insisted that the former created the latter, rather than the other way around
*--Consider how these two paragraphs of List [TXT] might be thought to describe "the Westernization" of England
*--Critics pointed out that List's brand of liberalism accepted laissez faire "within" (in domestic life), even as it caused the owning class to rise above and exploit the working class. He was ready to abandon laissez faire "from without" (in international relations) in order to protect the domestic owning class from superior owning classes abroad. Nationalism gave rise to contradictions [ID] in European liberalism
*--List influenced Russian Finance Minister Sergei Witte
*--Cf. 1765
*--GO 1861:Turkey

<>1841:England, France, Russia, Prussia, and Austria agree to use force to terminate the slave trade on the high seas

<>1842:Hawaiian Islands coveted by England. USA warned England off.

<>1842:Russian writer Nikolai Gogol (1809:1852) [W] published his magnum opus, Dead Souls [TXT], marking the beginning of what Pavel Annenkov called The Extraordinary Decade: Literary Memoirs [cf. KRR:414-17]
*--Gogol earlier (1836) published a famous satirical play "Inspector General" [TXT] which was taken as a sharp critique of Tsarist officialdom and the backwardness of provincial life
*--Belinskii wrote a critique of Gogol that shocked Russian culture

<>1842:Paris became home of first modern political/cultural émigré from Russian imperial power, Ivan Golovin, who soon wrote a scathing expose of Russia Under the Autocrat Nicholas the First (LND:1846)

<>1843:1844; Prussian [German] conservative landowner August, Baron von Haxthausen-Abbenburg traveled to Russia; published Studies on the Russian Interior, translated under several different titles [Excerpts: VSB,2:554-8 | WRH3:273-86]
*--Haxthausen was appalled by modernizing trends in "The West", especially in his native Prussia. He went to Russia seeking confirmation of his firm faith in European old-regime tradition. He resented governmental intrusion into established relations among rural aristocratic elites and village laborers. He was therefore an inspiration to many traditionalist Russians. Like Haxthausen, these Russians were resentful of post-Petrine statist reforms [ID], which they considered artificial and "foreign". All these traditionalist Europeans sought support for nativist, non-statist visions of the good life. Such ideas about Russian rural life had been discussed in Russia before Haxthausen, and they grew from the same anxiety about how modern market economics and post-French Revolutionary politics were undermining traditional values and social relations. These discussions could not be broadcast as widely in Russia as in the German-language press. For example, Kiselev and his reform associates [ID] were compelled to work in secret
*--Haxthausen's insights intensified the Russian debate on the virtues (or lack thereof) of village life, a debate that had as its broader quest the discovery of essentially what it meant to be "Russian". Slavophiles and Westernizers [ID] explored the implications of an unexpectedly independent village assembly [mirskoi skhod] and the curious survival among many peasants of periodic land redistribution and other community-centered concepts of property in land and "mutual assurance" [krugovaia poruka]. These issues arose again with a new political urgency thirty years later

<>1843:Russian Emperor Nicholas I reacted to English efforts to undermine the 1689:Nerchinsk and 1727:Kiakhta treaty privileges of Russia in China
*--Nicholas I wanted to send Admiral Efimii Vasil’evich Putiatin (1803-1884) on mission to Japan and China, but Russian Finance Minister and Chancellor opposed, thus delaying for over a decade the establishment of official relations with Japan
*--By the time Russia re-engaged with China, the possibility of reinforcing the long amiable relations between the two countries was overwhelmed by the possibility that Russia might best strive to carve out of the hide of China some modern imperialist advantages, as the other "Western" states were doing
*--The "Great Game" phase of European imperialist expansion spread into Asia. Russian imperialist expansion looked eastward again
\\
*--Mark Bassin, Imperial visions: Nationalist imagination and geographical expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840-1865

<>1843au28:Caucasus Mountains | Shamil delivered RUS solid defeat, forcing RUS temporarily out of Daghestan. For two or three years, Shamil’s power reigned over large areas of CAU. By year’s end, Shamil in full control of Chechnya and Daghestan

<>1844:USA, Boston to New York City | Margaret Fuller, author of the pioneer feminist essay “Women in the Nineteenth Century”, moved from the old northeastern USA cultural center, Boston, to the big city, New York, where she built on her commitment to women's issues outward into a wider public sphere. She represented a further expansion on the pioneer career of Mary Wollstonecraft [ID]. She became an editor of Horace Greeley’s liberal newspaper, New York Tribune. She had been relatively happy in Boston, but now sought a wider audience for her favorite literary/cultural activity = conversation. She sought to break out of the narrow salon culture of Boston and set about on a quest for a vast “American” landscape of meaning. She believed that “newspaper writing is next door to conversation, and should be conducted on the same principles”. Those principles derived from a high ethical sense of what it meant when people talked with one another. Talking was the most refined of all human interactions, one in which “souls” touched. In the young democracy, everyone should be brought into contact with quality communication. Her embracement of conversation also derived from a rare dialectic sense of truth. In her view, truth was revealed only in discourse. Truth was not simply discovered out there somewhere; it was not even the special realm of experts; truth was forged and re-forged in the furnace of direct verbal interaction among people
*1845:1848; Fuller began to change her views on USA, under the impact of the annexation of Texas and the war with Mexico [ID]. She had been for years an ardent American (US) patriot, one who disdained “bankrupt Europe”. She wrote once that a great artist like Titian could never “float the heart on a boundless sea of feeling, like the starry night on our Western Prairie”. But her patriotism for the “country”, for the “land”, did not carry over into an acceptance of US expansionism. To her, the American Eagle was beginning to look like a vulture = “her eyes fixed, not on the stars, but on the possession of other men”. So, she left USA and sailed for Europe and settled in Rome, one of the great capitals of cultural emigration, a haven for those fleeing many different homelands, a most wide arena for her philosophically defined "truth in conversation"
*1848:1849; Fuller deplored the violence and destruction of the Revolution of 1848 [ID], but she accepted the need for her new homeland Italy to become “modern”. Unlike the growing number of tourists who flocked with their simple guidebooks to stare at Roman antiquities, she mastered the Italian language, immersed herself in Italian life and championed a new Italy. She understood and acquiesced to the radical intent of Italian nationalistic leaders like Giuseppe Mazzini [ID]
*1850:Fuller, her partner, Count Ossoli (perhaps they were married), and their 2-year-old son, Angelino, sailed for USA. Smallpox broke out on board. Angelino fell ill. The captain died. But that was not the end of misery. The ship ran aground only 300 yards from shore, where crowds gathered but would not or could not do anything. “For nearly twelve hours the passengers and crew were left hanging on to the rapidly disintegrating ship. Eventually, one of the crew attempted to swim to shore with little Angelino -- and they were both drowned. A few minutes later Ossoli was washed off the ship by a wave.” A survivor wrote, “Margaret sat with her back braced against the fallen foremast, still in her white nightdress, her hair loose on her shoulders and her hands on her knees”. Then she too was swept off the ship and drowned. [*2007de21 & de28:TLS:12, article by Clare Pettit]
\\
*--Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life

<>1845je11:Nicholas I issued manifesto which took the edge off the Petrine Table of Ranks by making it more difficult for commoners to become aristocrats on the basis of successful state service, an example of social counter-reform [VSB,2:5558-9]

<>1845au15:Russia issued new Criminal Law Code [VSB,2:536-7]
*--As waves of European unrest spread to Russia, officials reacted with more vigorous reactionary reform

<>1846:1848; Mexican-American War [W] brought USA firm title to TX and territories that would become the states AZ CA NV NM and UT
*1845wi:USA annexed recently independent Texas
*1845no:USA President James Polk offered Mexico $5 million for New Mexico and $25,000,000 for California. Mexico refused
*1846my09:USA learned that Mexican forces had attacked USA troops and declared war. USA forces commanded by Zachary Taylor
*1847mr27:USA General Winfield Scott laid siege of Vera Cruz after commanding first large-scale amphibious operation when he landed near Vera Cruz, Mexico. Within days he moved toward Mexico City
*1848fe02:USA and Mexico signed Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending the Mexican-American War. TX became part of the USA, plus over 500,000 square miles of territory (including seven future western states CA, NV, and UT, almost all of NM and AZ, and parts of CO and WY)
*--Twenty-seven years of Mexican independence from Spain were now to be followed by growing subordination to expanding USA power
\\
*1996sp:WWQ:96ff, Robert W. Johannsen, "America’s Forgotten War"
*--Gary Clayton Anderson, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820-1875

<>1846:Russia | Cyril-Methodios Society formulated bylaws [DIR2:229-32] Ukrainian intellectuals formed the group, influenced by USA federalist political ideas and Russian Decembrist constitutional ideas [see also DIR3:261-6]
*--Manning, Clarence A. Europe’s Freedom Fighter: Taras Shevchenko, 1814-1861: A Documentary Biography of Ukraine’s Poet Laureate and National Hero (1960)
\\
*--Luckyj, George S. N. Young Ukraine: The Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Kiev, 1845-1847 (1991)

<>1846:Czechoslovakia | Karel Havlícek "Panslavistic" editorial in his newspaper, Prague News [KMM:83-90]

<>1846:English Corn Laws repealed. These laws restricted import and export of cereal grain to the advantage of certain landowners and to the disadvantage of the "consuming public". As the old land-owning aristocratic elite fought to protect its economic foundations it supported tariff measures that allowed them a near monopoly to sell their agricultural product at prices higher than world-trade prices
*--Finally the liberal "Anti-Corn-Law League" prevailed [pix]. Old feudal/agrarian England was now nearly completely transformed into modern industrial England. The old agricultural economy and all the social-economic relations that grew up to support it were being absorbed into the general market economy. Nothing more dramatically illustrates the reason technical innovations in machine manufacturing caused a broad revolutionary change in human life. Traditional agrarian ways withered away, greatly traumatizing some and greatly benefiting others. Should we be tempted to say that England was being "westernized"?
*--This dramatic, long-term struggle underscored one of the most profound changes caused by industrialization = most urbanized manufacturing economies with burgeoning new populations clustered around factory workplaces could no longer feed themselves from within national borders. World trade in grain was becoming a necessity like never before
*1845:+; Ireland suffered years of failed harvests as a result of fungal growth on potato crops. The Irish suffered deadly famine. About a million died, and another million set sail for the new world. Liberals in parliament did very little to aid Ireland, in harmony with the same "hands-off" or free-market principles that had guided them in the struggle against the corn laws

<>1847jy15:Russian journalist, critic and all-round pundit, Vissarion Belinskii published Letter to Gogol [Edie,1:312-320 | Excerpts: Raeff3:253-61 | KMM:135-7 | DIR2:221-8 | DIR3:252-61 | RRC2,2#26], a scathing critique of Nikolai Gogol’s emotional and religious Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. See also Gogol’s Selected Letters...
*--More Belinskii [VSB,2:567-]
*--More Gogol

<>1848fe:France felt the first shocks of what quickly became a Europe-wide "1848 Revolution", spreading from Paris, to Berlin, etc [DPH:81-131] (All "1848" events are here dated NS) [DPH:81-131]
*1848fe22:+; Paris gripped by rioting citizens, many discontented representatives of the growing wage-labor force. Republican Provisional Government tried to take control of events
*--The events of 1848 shared one distinct tendency, they often expressed a democratic egalitarianism that went significantly beyond what European liberals had grown comfortable with over the previous half century. The liberal era was in transition toward the social-democratic era
*1848ja:fe; Italy | Sicilian revolt spread to Naples, leading to constitution. Other regions of Italy were up in arms [DPH:179-86]
*1848mr12:mr15; Vienna revolts spread after university student uprising. Powerful Austrian minister Metternich was forced to resign and flee into English exile, ending his long and fateful career
*1848mr15:Budapest | Hungary declared itself independent but under the monarchical authority of the Austrian Emperor
*1848mr17:+; Berlin in revolt. Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV agreed to grant constitution. Carl Schurz described [PWT2:131-5]
*1848mr18:mr22; Milan revolt against Austrian imperial control. Austrians driven out until late summer
*1848fe:London | German theorist Karl Marx and wealthy German industrialist (his holdings largely in England) Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto, originally in German but within a few years in all  major European languages [TXT]. After a few lines of revolutionary flourish about the specter of communism haunting all Europe, the first extended section, "Bourgeois and Proletarians", laid out a surprisingly vigorous account of the progressive revolutionary accomplishments of the capitalist bourgeoisie in the age of industrial revolution. Then the Manifesto called for yet further progressive change in the direction of what was coming to be called "socialism", an economic egalitarianism that went far beyond the social and political egalitarianism supported by liberals
*--Because of involvement in events of the German 1848 Revolution, Karl Marx was expelled from Prussia to Paris, from which he was soon expelled in the last days of the liberal-monarchist regime of Guizot. After a while Marx found his way to liberal England. He withdrew from active politics to immerse himself in the library of the British Museum in London for ten years
*1848mr31:ap04; Frankfurt | German Pre-parliament [Vorparlement] lasted only four days
*1848ap10:London, Kennington Commons | The "Chartist Movement" gathered in a massive demonstration in support of their "People's Charter". After more than a decade of feeble attempts to create a progressive British written constitution ("charter"), the movement had now collected thousands of signatures in their support. But the movement broke apart and became -- fairly or not -- the object of establishmentarian ridicule. One of the world's first "news-photos" captured the demonstration [pix]
*1848ap25:my15; Austria under a constitution for three weeks
*1848my04:Paris | French National Assembly came to order with a moderate liberal majority
*1848my17:Vienna mass uprising forced Emperor Ferdinand I to flee to Innsbruck
*1848my18:1849ap; Germany | For almost a year, the Frankfurt Assembly [parliament] worked unsuccessfully to unite Germany under constitutional rule
*1848je17:Prague | Austrian troops, provoked in part by the bold meeting in Prague of the First Slav Congress [ID], crushed Czech independence movement
*1848je23:+; Paris | "June Days" a time of military suppression of mass political mobilization with thousands killed. French "July Monarchy" toppled (the last Bourbon king Louis Philippe abdicated). Liberal Guizot also fell from power. Tocqueville description [PWT2:129-31]. Briefly thereafter Tocqueville served as French Foreign Minister, but soon fell from power. Tocqueville had one more gift for European political culture
*1848:France abolished slavery in its colonial possessions, but progressive politics of France were declining, slipping toward the rule of Louis Napoleon
*1848jy:Ottoman Turkey invited Russia to intervene in Danubian provinces [Moldova] to quell disorders
*1848jy22:+; Vienna | Austrian Reichstag [elected representative parliament] met
*1848se24:Budapest | Louis Kossuth proclaimed president of Hungarian committee for national defense. The Austrian Empire seemed to be coming apart
*1849mr:Frankfurt Assembly issued a Federal Constitution of the German States (excluding Austria). Prussian and Austrian jealousies [ID] combined to prevent either union of all German-speaking peoples or union just of northern German-speaking peoples. The March constitution failed, and soon there was no parliament at all
*1849my:Dresden experienced a late and brief eruption of 1848 revolutionary disorders [ID]. Mikhail Bakunin was fresh from the excitement of the Slav Congress [ID] held in Prague and now played a visible and dramatic role on the barricades. The young composer Richard Wagner [ID] saw Bakunin there and carried the inspiration of titanic operatic struggle into his later musical career. Until this time, Bakunin's "political experience" was largely intellectual and confined to the famous Russian intellectual kruzhok [discussion circle]. The Slav Congress and now action in Dresden gave him a taste of real-life revolutionary politics, but it led immediately to his arrest, condemnation to death, commutation eventually, after transfer to Russian authorities, into Siberian exile and imprisonment. Bakunin made a deep impression on another creative artist, Ivan Turgenev [ID]. In 1861, Bakunin escaped and fled to west Europe where he struggled to revive himself as a dominant force in European (including Russian) revolutionary politics
*1849au01:Hungary surrendered to invading Russian army which had been invited in May to come to the aid of the crumbling Austrian Empire
*--For the Russian experience in this time of European-wide political turmoil, GO 1849
\\
*--Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848-1851

<>1848:1896; Persia(Iran) ruled for 48 years by Naser-e-Din Shah [ID]
*--In these years European science, technology, and educational methods were introduced and economic modernization got under way, but this potentially great era suffered from internal irresolution but mainly from constant intervention by Russia and England. An early period of self-sustained modernization in Iran (Persia) quickly passed

<>1848:England | John Stuart Mill published Principles of Political Economy, with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy
*--The son of James Mill and heir to the traditions of the "classical economists" [ID], John Stuart Mill pushed the boundaries of English (and European) political-economic thought in the direction of what was coming to be known as "socialism". He came under the influence of the widely held "positivist" views of Auguste Comte [ID] and tempered the harsh and static utilitarianism of earlier figures [EG] with a progress-based humanitarianism and egalitarianism. John Stuart Mill placed individual liberty at the center of his world view

<>1848je:Prague | First Slav Congress, chaired by František Palacký, was a central moment in the history of Panslavism as a cultural doctrine. Provoked suppression by Austrian imperial authorities
\\
*--Lawrence D. Orton, The Prague Slav Congress of 1848 (Boulder:1978) [d377.3.o7]
*--Jelena Milojkovic-Djuric, Panslavism and National Identify in Russia and in the Balkans, 1830-1880: Images of the self and others (Boulder:1994) [d377.3.m54]

<>1848jy:Caucasus Mountains in grip of Russian counter attack against Shamil

<>1848jy19:USA, NY, Seneca Falls | Elizabeth Cady Stanton composed early women’s rights pamphlet, modeled on the "Declaration of Independence" and titled "The Seneca Falls Declaration" [TXT] [W]
*--Feminism was becoming a world-wide phenomenon [SWH:315-39]

<>1848:USA offered to buy Cuba from Spanish Monarchy

<>1849:1899; The half century in which six dominant trans-national or global grain-trade corporations came into their own
*1849:1877; CA attracted Isaac Friedlander on the fabulous gold rush, then he turned to international trade in grain, arranging shipment to ENG (14,000 mile haul). Finally he went bankrupt
*1850:Belgium | Antwerp became headquarters of the Bunge family grain-trade business. Business family formed up in the 1600s and branches went in different directions, one to Russia, one to Prussia, and one to the Netherlands. Now concentrated, they put out feelers to the New World = Argentina
*1850:Switzerland, Basel | Leopold Louis-Dreyfus began grain trade, making flour in Hungarian mills, at that time the world’s best
*1860s:MN Minneapolis | Pillsbury & Washburn families established milling and grain trade
*--Louis Dreyfus opened business in Odessa, and over the next decade created the Odessa-Marseilles (France) grain trade route
*--Global grain trade continued to expand
\\
*--Morgan, ch2:53-74, presents the early history of world grain trade

<>1849:Hawaiian Islands coveted by France. USA warned France off

<>1849:Paris | Fedor Tiutchev, tsarist diplomat and poet, wrote article "La Russie et la Révolution" [KMM:94-103] Tiutchev equated opposition to Russian imperialist expansion with an insidious global revolutionary movement, and he elevated the struggle to the highest spiritual level. In eastern Europe, the 1848 Revolution had inspired Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, and many others against all forms of imperial dominion, including Russian. Tiutchev sensed "progressive politics" anywhere of being in essence "anti-Russian". Russia was in the world as a servant of God. All who contested Russian power were agents of a diabolical power threatening all that was holy in European civilization
*--Website containing translations of Tiutchev's poetry
*--Poems & political letters of F. I. Tyutchev
\\
*--Roger Conant, The Political Poetry and Ideology of F. I. Tiutchev

<>1849:Russian political debating society, known as the Petrashevskii circle, arrested and exiled to Siberia [VSB,2:571-3]
*--Now all reform, reactionary or otherwise, waned, and the combined policy of removal and Siberian frontier development waxed
*--The most famous Petrashevets was the novelist Fedor Dostoevsky. See Dostoevsky as Reformer: The Petrashevsky Case. Here we read the official conclusion of the case:

The Military Court finds the defendant Dostoevskii guilty of, upon receiving in March of this year from Moscow, from the nobleman Pleshcheev (a defendant), a copy of the criminal letter by Belinskii, having read this letter at meetings: first, at the home of the defendant Durov and then at the home of the defendant Petrashevskii, eventually giving it to the defendant Mombelli to be copied. Dostoevskii was at the home of the defendant Speshnev when the subversive work by the lieutenant Grigor'ev entitled "Soldiers' Conversation" was read. Hence the Military Court has sentenced him, the retired engineer-lieutenant Dostoevskii, for the failure to report the dissemination of the litterateur  Belinskii's letter that constitutes criminal offense against church and government and of the pernicious work of the lieutenant Grigor'ev--to be deprived, on the basis of the Code of Military Decrees, Pt. V, Bk. 1, art. 142, 144, 169, 170, 172, 174, 176, 177 and 178, of ranks, of all rights concomitant to his social estate and to be subjected to the death penalty by shooting.
\\
 *--Alan Kimball, "Who Were the Petrashevtsy?" [TXT]
*--John L. Evans, The Petrasevskij Circle, 1845-1849 (1974)
*--Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution (1960) ch.3

<>1849my26(NS):Germany | Prussia, Saxony and Hanover signed Erfurt Union Treaty [DPH:133-5]

<>1850:1864; China | Taiping [great peace] Rebellion carried out by native insurgents who sought to overthrow the feeble Manchu dynasty under the thumb of European imperial powers. "The West" reacted with alarm to see the compliant Manchu threatened by a mobilized native political force. English armies were "invited" in to crush revolt and preserve the dynasty until 1912
*--The era of Russian frontier and imperialist expansion that began with the victory over the Kazan Tatars and the opening of Siberia was coming to a close
*--A new, half-century era of mounting imperialist conflict among European states opened at mid-century. The Great Game intensified, ending catastrophically in World War One
*--In this era, Russian ambitions concentrated on two directions of possible expansion =
  Expansion eastward (particularly growing hostility with Japan)
  Expansion southward (vs. Ottoman power in various Islamic regions of the "Near East", the main arena in the Great Game)

<>1850:USA | Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

<>1850ja31(NS):Germany | Prussian Constitution [DPH:136-9]

<>1850mr15(NS):French progressive laws on education, passed by Guizot in the years prior to his 1848 fall from power [ID], suffered reactionary setback. Now the Falloux law put church schools on an equal footing with secular educational institutions and gave the Catholic church hierarchy greater control over what was taught, even in public schools [DPH:232-3]
*--The modern European liberal cause required broadly democratic and secular education of the whole population, including wage-laborers. Reactionary reform of education predicted the future of French politics. Guizot-style civilian liberalism, which dominated French politics since the revolutionary events of 1830 [ID], was about to be replaced by a swift transition from liberalism to imperialist statism [ID] under Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III)
*--Domestic politics in France, as in Russia, were falling under the grip of innovative reactionary reform. Against optimistic liberal expectations, industrialization and economic modernization rendered reactionary reform far more practical than earlier reactionary policies (e.g., Congress of Vienna [ID]). Thus we might observe that at mid-century, the liberal era was giving way to the social-democratic era in Europe, but also that the earliest beginnings of 20th-century statism [ID] appeared on the scene. This modern statism represented a negation of earlier conservative and liberal trends, and it took aim at the newly emerging social-democratic trends
*--We see here in France more clearly than anywhere else, quite yet, the central role of militarist-imperialist-nationalism or "Chauvinism" (named after the zealous French politician and Napoleonic veteran, Nicholas Chauvin) in contradiction to the previous half-century of liberal ascendancy. France was dominated for the next two decades by  "the man on horseback", Louis Napoleon or Napoleon III
\\
*--Peter Baehr and Melvin Richter, Dictatorship in History and Theory: Bonapartism, Caesarism, and Totalitarianism (2004) [SUMMIT]

<>1851:London Great Exhibition (first world's fair or exposition) was housed in the stunning Crystal Palace, a massive structure of decorative steel girders which were surprisingly visible from inside or out and bearing walls, ceilings and roofs of glass. Joseph Paxton designed the structure [pix~]. The structure was moved after the fair. It burned in 1936, and in 1941 it was fully demolished because it served as a navigational landmark for yet a later demonstration of industrial power, German Luftwaffe aerial bombing [ID]
*--In anticipation of an unprecedented number of visitors to an urban event of this vast proportion, 10,000 extra troops were stationed around London. One-thousand new men were added to the urban police force. [*1828:English Police Act created this novel modern institution] Six million visitors were counted through the turnstiles, but only 25 offenses were charged in connection with misbehavior at the fair. For the first time, public toilets were provided. A special office was charged with the dispensation of the profits from the fair, in the amount of 186,000 pounds sterling, in support of scientific and artistic education
*--The Great Exhibition was the "coming out" or public debut of the fast expanding industrial revolution. It was a celebration of the startling and altogether novel distinctions arising between modernized political economies and traditional agrarian civilizations. It was an apologia for imperialism. It was a score-card for The Great Game
*--Fourteen "world's fairs" followed over the next decades, into the time of WW1 =
*1855:Paris
*1862:London
*1867:Paris
*1871:London
*1873:Vienna
*1876:Philadelphia "Centennial Exposition"
*1878:Paris
*1884:New Orleans "Cotton Exposition"
*1889:Paris
*1900:Paris
*1893:Chicago "World's Columbian Exposition"
*1901:Buffalo "Pan-American Exposition"
*1904:St. Louis "Louisiana Purchase Exposition"
*1915:San Francisco "Panama-Pacific Exposition"
*--It wasn't until after WW1 that a "world's" fair was held anywhere but in west Europe or N.America

<>1851:Saint Petersburg-Moscow Railroad opened

<>1851:USA.Herman Melville published his "great American novel" Moby Dick, an adventure of the open seas, while in the same year a great adventure of the wide-open US West was under way =
*1851:Salt Lake City | Brigham Young summoned all Mormons still in IL and MO to the new "stake of Zion" in the shadow of the Wasatch Mts. Mormons had some intention to create an independent and theocratic "State of Deseret". At the end of the Mexican War, USA Federal action forestalled that when it assumed administrative authority in a newly designated Territory of Utah. Still, the limits of church and secular authority were blurred like nowhere else in USA since colonial days. In 1852, Brigham Young further distinguished Utah Territory from others when he declared polygamy a church doctrine. Continued controversy within the church and beyond, including constant federal governmental effort to outlaw the practice, led church President Woodruff in 1890 to issued a manifesto asking Latter-day Saints to respect standard USA marriage law
*--The Mormon Church grew in size and financial strength as a result of world-wide missionary activities and a strict policy of tithing among believers (gift of 10% of income to the church)

<>1851ja23:Russian universities fell under tighter restriction [VSB,2:573-4]
*--In the Russia of Nicholas I, reaction, pure and simple, came to replace reactionary reform spirit of the previous 26 years
*--Nicholas I was not the only European leader for whom "reactionary reform" worked = G/51de02 below

<>1851de02(NS):French National Assembly dissolved by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's Decree, followed immediately by his Proclamation and Decree on a Plebiscite. "Plebiscite" is a variation on mass participation in government, a variation designed to reduce functioning democracy or republican rule to a minimum. Plebiscite asks for a simple "yes/no" response to a proposal crafted by authorities and presented to the whole people for up or down vote (bypassing open debate among the many factions and within regular institutions of representative government). As time wore on, authoritarian governments that felt the need to appear "democratic" -- and from the middle of the 19th century on, the need to at least appear democratic became almost universal in Europe -- resorted increasingly to such plebiscite or sham forms of "representative government"
*--A Resolution in protest by members of the National Assembly against  Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's Decree on a Plebiscite had no effect [DPH:158-62]

<>1852:Petersburg | Nicholas I got news of USA plan to force Japan out of its official "national seclusion". The tsar now moved finally to send Putiatin on that same mission
*--Nikolai Nikolaevich Murav'ev had for years emphasized the necessity for Russia to control the Amur River basin  [DIR3:334-6]
*--Murav'ev warned that USA and England threatened Russia’s good standing in Asia. Russia must establish strong ties with Japan as well as with China [BBL/Putiatin]
\\
*--George Lensen, Russia's Japan expedition of 1852 to 1855 (1955)
*--R. C. Ashton, "Nikolai Nikolaevich Muraviev-Amurskii...", M.A. Thesis, University of Oregon, September, 1971
*--KEJ,6:341

<>1852:Russian Slavophile Ivan Kireevskii (-1856),"On...European Culture..." [Raeff3:175-207 | excerpt TXT]
*1856:Kireevskii died, leaving "On the Necessity and Possibility of New Principles in Philosophy" [Edie,1:180-213]
*--Other writings [VSB,2:576-7 | LDH:79-88]
\\
Peter Christoff, Introduction

<>1852:USA and Russia | Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, esp. chs. 30 & 31, consider also chs. 1, 4, 14 [TXT]
*--Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev's Sportsman's Sketches occupied a similar place in Russian literary/social history.  F/serf in [TXT]. On peasant life, see especially "The Singers"
*--Stowe's and Turgenev's works were fiction, but they were not examples of "art for art's sake", nor can they properly be called "propaganda". Their fictional worlds influenced the actual worlds of their readers. They struggled against the deplorable conditions of bound labor in their countries, Stowe against slavery and Turgenev against serfdom
*--In 1860, Russian officials reacted with alarm when a publicly supported elementary school (a "Sunday School") had its pupils read Uncle Tom's Cabin [BXO/Obolenskii,D]

<>1852ja14(NS):France given new constitution, prefaced with along proclamation written by Louis Napoleon defending this action [DPH:162-5]

<>1852fa:Caucasus Mountain bands of Shamil forced into guerilla warfare tactics against Russian imperial troops

<>1852oc09:French Emperor Napoleon III delivered address at Bordeaux [Stearns:553-4]

<>1852no:1870se; France fashioned into a Napoleonic Empire for second time [DPH:165-6] Louis Napoleon reigned as Napoleon III for 18 years
*--This episode in 19th century statism more nearly predicted the 20th century than it imitated either the Roman or great Napoleonic empires. Some call the Second Empire in France Europe’s first fascist-style rule. Karl Marx said, "History does indeed repeat itself -- first as tragedy, second as farce."
*--1856:Alexis de Tocqueville wrote L'Ancien Régime et la révolution [The Old Regime and the Revolution], ostensibly about the Great French Revolution [ID] but very much inspired by the author's great distress over the direction of French political life under Napoleon III. Tocqueville's 20-year career as political observer, pundit and activist was at an end
*--Napoleon III's reign was not without recognizable European-style liberal moments [DPH:166-9]

<>1853jy08:Tokyo harbor | USA Commodore Matthew Perry anchored and threatened bombardment if Japan did not abandon its "national seclusion"
*1853au21:Nagasaki (the harbor sanctioned by national seclusion policy) = Russian ambassador Putiatin arrived aboard his flagship Pallada, plus 4 other vessels, for diplomatic parley
*--Perry declined Putiatin offer to join forces to open Japan, but Russian squadron helped persuade shogun to drop policy of national seclusion
*--In these months, the Siberian far east was coming under more ambitious Russia control. Russian authorities occupied Sakhalin Island and Korean Peninsula
\\
*--KEJ,6:341
*--Sansom,WWJ:245, seems on the mark when he wrote, "American and English historians sometimes overlook the important part played by Russia in bringing about the opening of Japan by revealing to the Japanese their own weaknesses". Therefore =
*--Beasley,MHJ:61, seems off the mark when he wrote that Putiatin was sent from Russia "to keep an eye on American activities" and to say he was not "interested primarily in trade" because "immediate preoccupation" was Crimean War. That war came later =

<>1853oc20:Crimean War erupted (and dragged on for 2 1/2 years) when Russia declared war on Ottoman Turkey in response to a Turkish declaration of war on Russia [Various documents = DIR3:286-93]
*--Russia demanded better treatment of Orthodox subjects (mainly in Greece), but it also sought control over Moldavia and Wallachia [VSB,2:538-9]
*--Eventually France, England and their allies entered the war on the side of the Turks
*--Russian declaration of war with England, and English Parliamentary debates [VSB,2:539-41]
*--English nurse Florence Nightingale observed inhumanity of modern war first hand, and did what she could to treat it [W#1]
*1856 treaty that ended the war
*--The writings of Karl Marx about the Russian and Ottoman empires revealed his deep antagonism toward Russia =
*----------. The Eastern Question:...Letters Written 1853-1856 Dealing with the Events of the Crimean War
*----------. Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century and the Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston
*--USA became involved in "Eastern Question" (i.e., Russian-English rivalry in Central Asia, the Caucasus Mountains, and north-western frontiers of the Ottoman Empire)
*--Closeness between Russia and USA continued through the 1861:1865; USA Civil War, perhaps complicated by the issue of Alaska, but the relationship reached an apex with the selling of Alaska, and continued into the 1877:1878; Russo-Turkish War
*--The Crimean War signaled the beginning of a half-century decline of the Ottoman Empire, often called the "Sublime Porte" or "the sick man of Europe", and the  beginning of the final and tragic half-century of "Great Game" imperialism, leading to WW1
\\
*--Saul,1:166-267
*--Saul,2:92-131
*--John Shelton Curtiss, Russia's Crimean War (Durham NC:1979)

<>1854:1867; Ezo [Hokkaido] under direct shogun rule for the second and last time, for 13 years, in order to protect the large northern island from Russia

<>1854:USA | Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods
\\
*--Wagar on Thoreau [TXT]

<>1854au10:Japan, Nagasaki then Shimoda on Izu Peninsula | Russian Admiral Putiatin met with Kawaji Toshiakira (1801:1867) and Tsutsui Masanori (1778:1859). Kawaji was a major influence on the Japanese decision to end the 200-plus-year Seclusion policy. He was influenced by his teacher Sato Issai [PH&G:547-8. Hayashi school related to the disputes between Confucian and emerging Shinto schools] and associated with Fujita Toko, Egawa Tarozaemon, and Watanabe Kazan [KEJ] and other learned specialists on international relations

<>1854se:Japan, Nagasaki |  English Rear-Admiral Stirling had been pursuing Putiatin and his small diplomatic squadron through Japanese waters (fighting the Crimean War [ID] on its natural Pacific front). He now made port in order to persuade Japan not to give harbor to Putiatin. Japan however refused to cooperate with England in this European fray
\\
*--Alan Kimball, "Russia and Japan Expand to Their Pacific Frontiers..." [TXT part three]
*--Beasley,MHJ:61

 

Return to top
Next SAC

|

|

|

|

|

|

|