scholarly journals Caravan trade of Central Asian merchants with Russia in the first quarter of the 19th century

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-410
Author(s):  
Konstantin A. Abdrakhmanov

The article analyzes the everyday business activity of Asian entrepreneurs who participated in caravan trade with the Russian Empire through the cities of Orenburg region in the first quarter of the 19th century. The specifics of foreign trade operations of merchants from Bukhara, Khiva and Kokand during this period were almost completely ignored by Russian historians in the pre-revolutionary, Soviet and modern periods. The source base of this article consists of unpublished archival documents that shed light on the details of the business activities of merchants from Asia. Letters to the regional and Imperial administration made by Asian entrepreneurs, as well as personal letters from foreign merchants are particularly valuable in this regard. Traders had to deal with a long list of tasks. Before the caravan could go along the required route, it was necessary to hire responsible guides, which was not always possible (guides often turned out to be unreliable, which led to additional expenses for the cargo owners), acquire pack animals, take care of security and prepare a considerable amount of money for various road tolls for travelling through the Kazakh steppe. The merchants who were successful in the caravan trade were characterized by moral and psychological stability, the ability to restrain themselves, not succumbing to momentary desires, and even the skills of using cold weapons and firearms. To resolve issues that were exclusively within the competence of representatives of the Russian regional or central administration, Asian merchants had to possess certain communication skills.

2020 ◽  
pp. 1201-1214
Author(s):  
Anastasia V. Tikhonova ◽  

The article reviews decisions of the city government regarding foreigners: consideration of petitions to be ascribed to burgers or merchants (of those who had already taken citizenship of the Russian Empire); evaluation of urban real estate; collection of taxes. The study is based on documents of the fond of the Smolensk City Duma from the State Archive of the Smolensk Region. Despite some losses (materials prior 1812 are not preserved in the fond), the archival documents highlight various issues of provincial city life. The author gives instances of the former prisoners of 1812 war or the so-called “immigrants from abroad” (those who had taken citizenship of the Russian Empire) being ascribed to Smolensk burgers. The law exempted former prisoners of war from all burger taxes and duties for 10 years and “immigrants from abroad” for 6 years. Materials of the Smolensk City Duma name foreigners among Smolensk artisans and merchants, doctors and pharmacists of gubernia level. They had property in the city and paid taxes. Some were well respected and were elected to city Duma or administration. Documents of the archival fond allow the researcher to learn family circumstances that influenced the fates of foreigners living in Smolensk in the first half of the 19th century. The number of foreigners in the provincial city was insignificant and tended to decrease. However, the author points out that statistics included only those who retained citizenship of their native country, not taking into account foreigners who accepted Russian citizenship. Documents of the Smolensk City Duma show that they were quite numerous. However, presence of foreign-born individuals in the daily life of the gubernia city became commonplace.


2020 ◽  
pp. 17-27
Author(s):  
D. Meshkov

The article presents some of the author’s research results that has got while elaboration of the theme “Everyday life in the mirror of conflicts: Germans and their neighbors on the Southern and South-West periphery of the Russian Empire 1861–1914”. The relationship between Germans and Jews is studied in the context of the growing confrontation in Southern cities that resulted in a wave of pogroms. Sources are information provided by the police and court archival funds. The German colonists Ludwig Koenig and Alexandra Kirchner (the resident of Odessa) were involved into Odessa pogrom (1871), in particular. While Koenig with other rioters was arrested by the police, Kirchner led a crowd of rioters to the shop of her Jewish neighbor, whom she had a conflict with. The second part of the article is devoted to the analyses of unty-Jewish violence causes and history in Ak-Kerman at the second half of the 19th and early years of 20th centuries. Akkerman was one of the southern Bessarabia cities, where multiethnic population, including the Jews, grew rapidly. It was one of the reasons of the pogroms in 1865 and 1905. The author uses criminal cases` papers to analyze the reasons of the Germans participation in the civilian squads that had been organized to protect the population and their property in Ackerman and Shabo in 1905.


2020 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 293-317
Author(s):  
Protopriest Alexander Romanchuk

The article studies the system of pre-conditions that caused the onset of the uniat clergy’s movement towards Orthodoxy in the Russian Empire in the beginning of the 19th century. The author comes to the conclusion that the tendency of the uniat clergy going back to Orthodoxy was the result of certain historic conditions, such as: 1) constant changes in the government policy during the reign of Emperor Pavel I and Emperor Alexander I; 2) increasing latinization of the uniat church service after 1797 and Latin proselytism that were the result of the distrust of the uniats on the part of Roman curia and representatives of Polish Catholic Church of Latin church service; 3) ecclesiastical contradictions made at the Brest Church Union conclusion; 4) division of the uniat clergy into discordant groups and the increase of their opposition to each other on the issue of latinization in the first decades of the 19th century. The combination of those conditions was a unique phenomenon that never repeated itself anywhere.


2020 ◽  
pp. 83-105
Author(s):  
Boris V. Nosov ◽  
Lyudmila P. Marney

The article is devoted to the problems of the regional policy of the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 19th century discussed in the latest Russian historiography, to the peculiarities of the state-legal status and administrative practice of the Kingdom of Poland. It was the time when basic principles and a special structure of management at the outlying regions of the empire were developed, and when special (historical, national, and cultural) regions were formed on the periphery of the Empire. The policy of the Russian government in relation to the Kingdom of Poland depended both on the fundamental trends in the international relations in Central and Eastern Europe (as reflected in international treaties), as well as on the internal political development of the empire, and the peculiarities of political, legal, social, economic, cultural processes in the Kingdom and on Polish lands in Austria and Prussia. All these aspects have an impact on the debate that historians and legal experts are conducting on the state and legal status of parts of the lands of the former Principality of Warsaw that were included in the Russian Empire in 1815 by the decision of the Congress of Vienna. The fundamental political principles of the Russian Empire in the Kingdom of Poland in the first half of the 19th century were a combination of autocracy (with individual elements of enlightened absolutism), based on centralized bureaucratic control, and relatively decentralized political, administrative and estate structures, which assumed the presence of local self-government.


Author(s):  
K.Yu. Anders-Namzhilova

The article describes the problem of searching for unknown manuscripts in the study of new spiritual literature that occurred in the Russian Empire at the turn of 18th century. The documents of Moscow Ecclesiastical Censor’s Archive are the main information source of church and religious materials written during that period. The Moscow Ecclesiastical Censor was the first specialized authority established by Synod in 1799 for considering the religious compositions. Compositions which were banned by censors couldn’t be printed and for this reason they become unknown even for modern scientific society. However, a lot of these compositions weren’t lost: they are kept in manuscripts which are dispersed throughout different archive and library funds, that’s why they cannot be attributed without the engagement of the censor committee’s archive documents.


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