S1422 The Conquest of the Ocean – the Transfer of European Marine Harvesting Technologies and the Idea of Russian maritime Power in the Eighteenth Century

The conquest of the Ocean – the transfer of European marine harvesting technologies and the idea of Russian maritime power in the eighteenth century.

Russian expansion throughout the world’s oceans marks one of the most important geopolitical developments of the last three centuries. Once almost a completely landlocked power, Russia now has staked its claim to large parts of the Pacific, Arctic, Antarctic, and Baltic. An important reason for oceanic expansion has been Russian and Soviet conceptions of what it means to be a Great Power. As scholars have noted, since at least the time of Peter the Great, Russians have equated oceanic power with success on the world stage. As with other maritime powers, Russia’s oceanic expansion has included military force, trade, research, fishing, and other means of projecting power. The course proposed will look at an understudied, but extremely important aspect of this expansion – Russia’s long and difficult history of modernizing marine harvesting.

The history of Russian marine harvesting has attracted relatively little attention from scholars, despite the fact that Russia has been one of the most active fishing, sealing and whaling nations over the last 300 years. The literature on Russian maritime dominion has been written from the perspective of trade, research and military force while Russian leaders have always considered the development of maritime resource to be one of most important aspects of their relationship with the sea. While there were persuasive economic motives for Russia’s interest in the ocean, the symbolic conquest of the sea’s creatures has been equally important. Thus, it is impossible to understand Russia’s oceanic expansion without looking at the development of whaling and other European methods of marine harvesting. It is in this light that this course will examine 100 years of Russia’s pursuit of whales, herring and cod, marked by notable failures, nearly unprecedented efforts and expenses, destruction of the social and natural world in order to spread the Russian power throughout the world’s oceans.  

The story will be put into several. Those contexts are: the colonization of Russia’s maritime frontiers, the modernization and westernization of Russia in the eighteenth century; the development, transfer and global dissemination of European technologies in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the scientific and general perception of the sea and marine environment in the eighteenth century; the role of marine natural resources in the Russian and European economy and culture.

The Conquest of the Ocean is an interdisciplinary course that lies on the juxtaposition of maritime economic history and marine environmental history. The marine environment is not only an object of economic activities, but also can be considered as active participant. In dealing with the sea people had to use the suitable technologies to get the required result. But our case is more complicated. It includes interrelations between technology and the environment, and the adaptation of European technologies to rather specific conditions.

The course will include lectures, workshops and field trips.
During the necessary lectures I will acquaint the audience to the general problems of the Russian and European eighteenth century history connected to the course topic. The students will get understanding of links between the environmental conditions, economic situation and political decisions. More specific problems will be studied during workshops.
The workshops will be based on three major methods:
 Discussion of important relevant papers and books.
 Student presentations.
 Practical work with historical sources.
During the field trip we will explore the maritime heritage of Venice with two major purposes. On the one hand we will try to reconstruct the impressions the Russian visitors got in the early 18th c. when visiting La Serenissima – then one of the leading maritime countries in Europe. On the other hand we will try to explore how to use the maritime heritage as historical source for comparative research.
The evaluation will be based on:

-Students work on the seminars;
-Work on the field trips;
-Participation in the final workshop;

Learning outcomes
My course will give new and unexpected answers for the old questions and will provide new perspectives and directions for the research in the Russian and also Global maritime and marine environmental history. The results will be important for the history of Russian reforms and for the history of circulation of European ideas and technologies in the modernizing world of the eighteenth century.