Keywords

1 Introduction

The global turn in the history of science is a welcome development, enabling us to account for the non-Western and transcultural origins of modern science, and to consider seriously nonscientific or Indigenous knowledge systems. But too often, global science is bounded by the footprint of European empire and thus becomes a means of doing British or French history by another name. Historians of global science such as Kapil Raj (2007) and Sujit Sivasundaram (2010) have called for the field to move away from the previous eurocentrism of science and empire studies and for studies of natural knowledge in non-European empires, noting in particular the understudied entanglement of science and imperial rule in the Persian, Ottoman, and Chinese empires. One should add to this list the Russian Empire.

A major world and imperial power since the mid-sixteenth century, the Russian Empire nevertheless has been the subject of few histories of science and technology. Recent work in the history of medicine and botany (Griffin 2022; Romaniello 2016a, b; Koroloff 2018), as well as studies of intellectual life at the early modern court (Collis 2012; Chrissidis 2016) and of natural historical and imperial intelligence (Jones 2014), have made crucial advances in filling this lacuna, but knowledge of the earth, the subject of this volume, in imperial Russia is terra incognita in the English-language literature of global science. That this gap exists is particularly surprising given Russia’s dominance in early modern Eurasian metallurgy: For most of the eighteenth century, the Ural Mountains were Eurasia’s most productive iron and copper mining and metallurgical zones, and the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia yielded more silver than any other region of Eurasia at a time when South American silver production was depressed. These mountain ranges were not only industrial zones: They were theaters in which mining officials and plant owners leveraged multiple mining traditions, governing practices, and knowledges of the earth to subjugate resource-rich, multiethnic borderlands, in the process forging the modern Russian empire.

While the English-language literature of Russian earth knowledges is limited, mining science and technology has played an important role in Russian-language narratives of the empire’s transition to modernity. This is especially true for the period under investigation in this chapter, the early seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries, in which most historians place the rise, boom, and relative decline of the mining industry. The question of the role of artisanal versus state-backed institutional expertise in the development of this industry, which was linked to the larger issue of the existence or absence of a native metallurgical and scientific tradition (as opposed to the view of the empire as the recipient of science and technologies diffused from the West), has held important implications for Russia and the Soviet Union’s fitness as a modern state, ability to compete with capitalist nations, and ultimately the legitimacy (in Marxist terms) of the Bolshevik Revolution.

After the revolution, the Soviet historiography of science and technology developed apart from the English-language historiography with its own commitments, methodologies, and preferences in genre. The principal concern of the field has been the positivist (and often propagandistic) identification of past Russian scientists, advances in scientific theory, and technological innovations, developed largely through biographical studies of individual scientists. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian scholars of mining and earth science have forged deeper connections with historians based in Scandinavia, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, resulting in scholarship that has begun the project of placing Russia’s mining and earth knowledges in European, if not global, history. The future of these connections, however, is unassured due to Russia’s isolation from European and North American academia following the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

It is the goal of this chapter to continue this project of placing Russian histories of earth science and technology within global context, and to bring together two literatures—the history of Russian mining and the global history of earth science and mining technology—that are not often in conversation with one another. This requires some careful reading of the Russian-language scholarship on mining history for, while earth knowledge and metallurgical expertise has long been an important topic within this literature, the most important works in the field have been written by economic and social historians rather than historians of science and technology. One of the aims of this chapter is to translate this largely Soviet historiography for contemporary historians of the earth sciences, as these studies of Russian mining history have much of interest to offer our field. As Jarrod Hore reminds us elsewhere in this volume, the earth sciences are field sciences, which necessitates close attention to the disparate geographies of earth knowledges (including the still little-studied northern half of Eurasia) in history. Soviet historians of technology have argued since the 1930s that the chemistry of iron and especially of copper ores requires adaptation to local conditions even when using established, foreign technologies (Baklanov 1935). Recent work investigating the environmental history of mining likewise uncovers the ways in which geographical specificities of Russia’s mining regions encouraged the development of globally unique mining technologies and organization (Evtuhof 2023).

The Russian industry will be of interest to historians studying the interaction of the earth sciences and empire for the particular dynamics of colonial science at mines and metallurgical plants. Never colonized by a foreign power, Russia and it earth knowledges do not fit into the schemas of colonial and postcolonial science developed for societies of the Global South. But neither were Russian scientists and technical experts free of a (real or perceived) intellectual dependence on Europe, which Russia was both culturally and geopolitically a part of although situated at the margins of scientific society. A complex dynamic between European and Russian knowledge traditions—if these traditions can ever be disentangled enough to be considered separate—was further complicated in Russia’s Asian colonies, where imperial agents encountered and mobilized Indigenous knowledge systems as they established indirect and then direct imperial rule. This is particularly true of Russia’s most important metallurgical zone, the Urals, which boasted an ancient, non-Slavic mining tradition and a diverse body of prospectors. The Urals and to a lesser extent the silver-bearing Altai Mountains and the Nerchinsk region in southeastern Siberia on the Qing border were geocontact zones in which the science and technology of multiple European cultures interacted with Russian artisanal tradition and the knowledges of Siberian and Uralian peoples. Recent work—including my own—on Russian mining administrators as imperial agents is beginning to consider the dynamics of knowledge regimes and hierarchies at Russian mines and to elucidate what should be an important case study in the global history of science.

2 Artisanal or Institutional? Knowledge and Expertise in Imperial Mining

“Russia,” declared the historian and liberal politician Pavel Miliukov in 1896, was a country “without capital, without workers, without entrepreneurs, and without a market,” when Tsar (from 1721 Emperor) Peter I (r. 1682–1725) established a host of industries, including flourishing iron and copper industries, in the opening decades of the eighteenth century (1:80; unless stated otherwise, all translations are my own). With these words, Miliukov opened a century-long debate on the role of the state in Russian industry, and historians in both the Soviet Union and abroad have since examined this question with particular focus on the mining and metallurgical industries. While economic and social issues were central preoccupations for this literature (i.e., studies of the origins of industrial capital, the use of compulsory labor in the industry, the formation of a proletariat, the estate and class identity of mine owners, and above all many attempts at identifying Russia’s transition from a feudal to a capitalist economy and society), knowledges of the earth and especially of how to work its products were also key subjects for historians invested in this debate. Did the industry have its intellectual origins in the country’s blacksmithing tradition, or did it owe its success in the eighteenth century to a network of state mining institutions—most importantly the College of Mines (Berg-kollegiia), in operation 1719–1736, 1742–1783, and 1796–1807—modeled on German and Swedish institutions, and deploying central and northern European management practices, metallurgical technologies, and academic mineral science? In asking these questions, both Soviet historians and those working in Miliukov’s classically liberal tradition debated whether Russian industry—and hence, for Marxist historians, civilization—organically developed from folk sources or was a foreign institution imposed by the state. This led into even larger questions of whether modern Russian history conformed to or deviated from either liberal or Marxist models built on studies of Western and Central European history. Though the fall of the Soviet Union has taken the urgency out of this debate, recent additions to this literature offer historians of global earth knowledges approaches to moving between and beyond dichotomous narratives of scientific nationalism in non-Western countries versus models of scientific and technological diffusion from and dependence on the West.

Scholars seeking to understand the traditions that the metallurgical boom of the eighteenth century emerged from have looked to the small but dynamic seventeenth-century iron industry for antecedents of Russia’s industrialization. There were three centers of early modern artisanal iron production: the oldest near Tula to the south of Moscow; another centered in Olonets in Karelia far to the north, where Old Believers, members of a persecuted, exiled schismatic Russian Orthodox sect, fled in the mid-seventeenth century to poor lands ill-suited to agriculture and so took up bog iron working; and third in the Ural Mountains, where a regional trade developed in iron produced in smithies and at monasteries. At these sites, smiths worked near-surface or bog ores mined in the vicinity and purified them in bloomery furnaces.

These early iron mining and working centers, in particular Tula and Olonets, figure prominently in the work of Soviet scholars committed to a native, Russian metallurgical industry with medieval roots. Early Soviet scholarship of mining and other heavy industry arose from turn-of-the-century debates among leftist groups (agrarian socialists, Mensheviks, and Bolsheviks) as to the maturity of Russian industry and capitalism and the empire’s readiness for socialist revolution. For historians after 1917, to emphasize state involvement in industrialization or foreign sources of metallurgical technology was to open oneself to the charge of doubting the organic development of Russian capitalism and ultimately of suggesting that Russian history did not align with Marxist doctrine (Griffiths 1986, 2). By the 1930s, a group of historians led by Stanislav Strumilin argued against what they termed the “Milukov thesis” that industry had been imposed by Peter I’s state in the early eighteenth century and instead sought the origin of Russian industry in artisanal activity in the seventeenth century (Strumilin 1932, 10; Kafengauz 1949; Zaozerskaia 1970). This group produced regional studies of industry, like A. P. Glagoleva’s The Olonets Factories in the First Quarter of the Eighteenth Century (1957). In this work, Glagoleva examines the extent of the northern bog iron trade in the seventeenth century, which she characterizes as a peasant-led, flourishing regional industry that showed early features of capitalism. In her view, the Olonets region was a cradle of national mining and metallurgical expertise, as bog miners and smiths contributed their local knowledge of their ores (which were of low quality and difficult to smelt), charcoal preparation, and dam construction to the first large, foreign-built water-powered iron factories of northwestern Russia, factories which in turn served as a training ground for the first generation of Russian-speaking skilled labor in the later developing but more important Urals mining region.

Strumilin himself, in his History of Iron Metallurgy in the USSR (1954), argues that the mining boom of the eighteenth century grew “from a base” of thousands of bloomeries which served local needs (all subsequent citations to the 1967 edition, 153). Elena Zaozerskaia likewise emphasizes the blacksmithing and artisanal origins of the first generation of water-powered factory owners in the first quarter of the eighteenth century in her Manufacturing in the Reign of Peter I (1947). The key region for both these historians was Tula, which by the end of the seventeenth century was home to a small but bustling iron mining, smithing, and weapons-making industry using limonite mined by Cossacks at a riverside mine 30 km southeast of the city. Their artisanal manufacturing, though modest in output, featured well-constructed bloomery furnaces that operated efficiently (Zavyalov 2018). By running small workshops, entrepreneurial smiths became versed in every step of the small arms manufacturing process, a knowledge which members of seven smithing families were able to translate into much larger, water-powered enterprises both in central Russia and, from the eighteenth century, the iron-rich Ural Mountains (Pavlenko 1962, 71–162). This literature describes an entangled cluster of knowledges—artisanal, metallurgical, and embodied, but also entrepreneurial, managerial, and even mineralogical—that makes it impossible to separate the history of mining and metallurgy from the history of earth knowledges in Russia.

Whereas Soviet scholars labored to demonstrate the profundity of native Russian metallurgical expertise at the dawn of the eighteenth century, foreign historians examining the Tula and Olonets industries dated the origins of Russian heavy industry to Europeans’ entry into the industry, with their construction of the first water-powered plants in the country. In the St. Petersburg-born West German historian Eric Amburger’s The Marselis Family: Studies in Russian Economic History (1957), the subjects are the small Dutch-Danish-German family groups that received patents from Tsar Michael (r. 1613–1645) to build Russia’s first four lasting water-powered iron plants near Tula in 1629–1632. Though Amburger acknowledges the blacksmithing and mining tradition of the region, his work emphasizes the foreign, external character of these water-powered plants: The Marselis, Witsen, and Akkema families he studies had been recruited from abroad by Tsar Michael’s court to produce wrought iron for court consumption and to cast iron cannon and small arms for the army using German methods and technologies. These arms, he says, were superior to the simple firearms crafted by Tula smiths in what he terms “primitive” Russian smelting ovens (Amburger 1957, 94). In his study of the seventeenth-century iron industry as a capitalist enterprise, American historian Joseph Furhmann (1972) likewise considers the water-powered iron plants to be a foreign institution, the result of the native economy not being able to compete technologically or militarily with its western neighbors. In these studies as well as the later work of American historian Hugh Hudson, Jr. on the Tula smithing and entrepreneurial family the Demidovs, these European-built factories were important as sites of technology transfer and of the “breaking” of technological barriers: Russian miners and smiths were already skilled enough to be able to follow plans for the construction of water-powered factories and so learned of German innovations like the blast furnace and water-turned hammers through their participation in factory construction (Amburger 1957, 99; Hudson 1986, 34). It is only under a 60-year period of tutelage, in this model of technology diffusion, that Russians learned how to build the water-powered factories needed to arm the navy and the army and become a European great power. As the European metallurgical enterprises deploying water-based technologies were sponsored by and produced arms specifically for the imperial court, historians emphasizing the role of the state in the advancement of Russian knowledge likewise have taken the construction of the Marselis iron plants or court-sponsored prospecting expeditions undertaken in the fifteenth century as the beginning of Russian industry (Pavlenko 1962, 9; Portal 1950, 25).

3 Artisanal and Institutional Knowledges in the Urals

Studies of the seventeenth century set the dominant narratives of state-sponsored technological diffusion versus artisanal and entrepreneurial innovation that continue in work on the eighteenth-century golden age of the Russian iron, copper, and silver industries. Historians writing on this period have also found success, however, in escaping these dichotomous narratives. In addition, their work has examined the links between mining and the production of scientific knowledge of the earth, with a number of studies published after the fall of the Soviet Union on the scientific culture of the upper stratum of mine owners. This endeavor is linked in turn to an at first nationalistic (during the Soviet period), and then regionalist (since 1991), positivist project celebrating the intellectual world of Russia’s industrial zones through the identification of scientists, engineers, inventors, writers, and scholars connected to the mining industry.

Iron production expanded rapidly at Tula and Olonets from the end of the seventeenth century as Tsar Peter I granted concessions to foreign and Russian entrepreneurs to build water-powered factories and produce small firearms, cannon, and anchors for his reformed army and newly founded navy (for statistics showing a tripling in iron works construction and a fivefold increase in cast iron production across Peter’s reign, see Zaozerskaia 1947, 154–164 and Strumilin 1967, 153). The production of war materiel became essential as Peter launched the Great Northern War (1700–1721) against Sweden, the erstwhile supplier of the majority of Russia’s iron and arms. Cut off from European arms markets and with most of his artillery captured in an early loss to Sweden, Peter was obliged to develop his own defense industries, initially in the preexisting centers of Olonets and Tula which were convenient to both the fronts and the capitals (Moscow and the new capital of St. Petersburg, founded 1703).

The war won, in the 1720s metallurgical activity shifted eastward to the Urals. Iron and copper ores there were of far higher quality than those of central and northwestern Russia, with some experimental smelts yielding 25% pure iron. This iron was also much easier to work with than the brittle bog iron of the Olonets region, and ores lay near the surface in massive nests accessible by picks and crowbars (de-Gennin 1937, 70, available in English translation: de Hennin 1992). The region was also abundant in forests, huge reserves of which were necessary for charcoal production, and featured swift, powerful, predictable mountain rivers to power bellows and hammers. The principal rivers also flowed westward into the Volga-Kama system, and hence to Moscow and via canals to St. Petersburg and the Baltic Sea, offering cost-effective transportation to domestic and international markets. From the 1720s, cheap Russian iron flooded European markets, and by 1740 the Urals were the most important metallurgical zone in Eurasia as Russia surpassed English and Swedish iron production. From 1750, over half of all Russian iron was sent to the export market, with England and Scotland, followed by Sweden, as the principal destinations—Urals iron was a key material in England’s Industrial Revolution (Strumilin 1967, 173, 177–202; Evans et al. 2002; Evans and Rydén 2007).

Adherents of the antistatist, nativist school of mining history stress the role of Russian artisanal expertise in the success of the Urals industry. Strumilin and Zaozerskaia’s colleague B. B. Kafengauz takes the entrepreneurial activity of the Demidov family, the most successful of the eighteenth-century private mine owners, as a case study in the development of Russian capitalism (one of the central objects of study of economic historians in the Soviet Union) in his monumental History of the Demidovs’ Enterprise (1949). Like his colleagues, he argues against the Miliukov thesis that mining and metallurgy were a state-directed transplantation of European skill, technology, and capital to Russia. Instead, he argues that the Urals industry had its origins in the seventeenth-century expertise and capital of Tula. The Demidov family patriarch, Nikita Demidov, was an arms maker who built one of the first Russian-owned water-powered factories in Tula. He was no mere blacksmith, Kafengauz argues, but among the wealthiest stratum of an already diversified group of Tula arms makers, metallurgists, and smiths. When Demidov was granted by Peter I the patent to a state-owned iron factory in the Urals in 1702, he brought with him his Tula masters, metallurgists, and other skilled labor. This is the kind of knowledge transfer that Soviet economic historians who saw water-powered heavy industry as an organic development of Russian history described: a transfer of skill from one area of Russia to another, rather than of European knowledge to Russia.

But the shift of mining and metallurgical activity from European Russia to the Urals was also the result of the new institutionalization of mining knowledge. The first persisting state institution regulating mining and metallurgy, the College of Mines, was founded in St. Petersburg in 1719 as part of Peter I’s reform of central state administration into a Swedish-system collegiate system. The stated aim of this college was to order the mining industry and bring it into a “diligent arrangement” according to “mining art” (gornoe isskustvo) (Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii 1830, 5: December 10, 1719, no. 3464). This term encompassed the administration of mine and factory systems according to the practices developed in early modern Germany, especially Saxony, undergirded by a mathematized and mechanized understanding of nature. This approach to mining administration was brought to the Urals by a pair of early College of Mines officials, Vasilii Tatishchev and the Nassau-born metallurgist Georg Wilhelm de Hennin, as they established a Siberian Head Mining Office (located on the grounds of a large iron and copper industrial complex they founded in 1723–1724 in the new city of Ekaterinburg), initiated prospecting surveys, developed cadres of skilled labor, reoriented iron production from domestic weaponry to the export market, and oversaw the construction of 21 iron and copper factories in the Urals between 1720 and 1739 (Portal 1950, 67).

From the 1940s, some historians criticized the antistatist position of Kafengauz and Strumilin and attempted to bring state institutions back into the historiography of Russian industry. The most influential figure in this group was the economic and social historian Nikolai Pavlenko, who contends in a series of books and articles on the origins of Russian capitalism that early industry was the creation of the state (Pavlenko 1953; Pavlenko et al. 1969). In a monograph on the formation of an industrial bourgeoisie in the Urals, Pavlenko emphasizes the role that state policy had in shaping the growth and eventual retardation of this industry (1962). He details how the mining administration resolved disputes among owners, permitted or blocked mine and factory construction, managed forest reserves, and provided technical expertise to private factory owners. Additionally, Pavlenko finds the mining administration a far more competent actor in the industry than the high aristocrats who received privatized state factories in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. This work set the stage for a new generation of Soviet historians active in the 1960s who wished to reconsider the role of the state in the empire’s mining boom.

In the wake of Pavlenko’s rehabilitation of the state as an actor in the mining industry, historians began writing biographies of individual mining administrators as progressive (that is, supporting science, education, and state building) figures in Russian history. The figure who attracted the most detailed biographical study was the aristocrat, historian, and first head of the Siberian Mining Office, Vasilii Tatishchev (Iukht 1985; Kuz’min 1981; Shakinko 1986; Daniels 1973 is an English-language biography). Conrad Grau, a graduate of East Germany’s Institute for History of the Peoples of the USSR, examines Tatishchev’s role as a “developer” of Russia in his The Economic Promoter, Statesman, and Scholar Vasilii N. Tatishchev (1963). He argues that Tatishchev developed the country economically through his work as an early leader of the College of Mines to shift the locus of mining activity from European Russia to the Urals, cofounding the city of Ekaterinburg in the process; and that Tatishchev contributed to the ideological development of Russia as an elaborator of enlightened absolutism. In Grau’s account, Tatishchev is a progressive figure struggling against feudal elements (i.e., the widespread use of serf labor, and factory owners who vociferously, even violently, objected to any government interference in the management of their plants) to rationalize private production according to universalized mining sciences and to oversee correct, sustainable use of the Urals’ natural resources (28–41, 66–82). Underlying the narratives of Grau, Pavlenko, and other postwar historians who cast state actors as industrial modernizers is a belief that the knowledge tradition these figures mobilized in their construction and management of the mining industry, the “mining sciences” (gornye nauki, Bergwissenschaften; understood by members of the College of Mines as those aspects of mineralogy, chemistry, physics, mechanics, surveying, architecture, and hydraulics that could be applied to mining and metallurgy), were universalizable sciences that, though originating abroad, were effective and unproblematic guides to economic, social, and even civilizational development. This narrative of the progressive, even liberating power of science was shared by postcolonial science promoters globally in this period.

4 Industry Leaders as Scientific Figures

With the increasing importance of science and science education to Soviet ideology in the Cold War, historians cast state actors not only as developers of Russia, but also as scientists, inventors, and educators, in the process exploring the connections between daily work in the mines and factories and the generation of scientific knowledge (Kozlov 1981). Tatishchev was here again an important figure, as historians detailed his establishment of a system of schools of reading and arithmetic at state factories, including a higher school in Ekaterinburg in which students were taught physics, mechanics, German, and Latin (Nechaev 1944). Tatishchev also pursued scholarly interests in history, science promotion, and in the fossil curiosities he encountered and collected during his service in the Urals, even publishing some of Russia’s first scholarship on mammoths (1725, 1979). He assembled one of the largest libraries in provincial Russia, which he left at the Head Siberian Mining Office when he was recalled from the Urals in 1737 (Safranova et al. 2005). He was far from the only mining official to be studied as a scientist: As Steven Usitalo has argued, scientific biography was the preferred genre of Soviet historians of science, as a country promoting science education needed past role models for students to look up to and to demonstrate the centuries-old roots of Russian science (2013, 14). Naum Raskin was particularly prolific in this genre, writing biographies of mining officer Aleksandr Karamyshev, a Linnaeus student who wrote on the geology of eastern Siberia and on the state of the Nerchinsk lead and silver mines (Raskin and Shafranovskii 1975), and of a Swedish naturalist and mining expert in Russian service, Erik Laxmann (Raskin and Shafranovskii 1978). He also wrote on A. A. Musin-Pushkin, a Vice President of the College of Mines and metallurgical chemist (Raskin 1981). Musin-Pushkin contributed to scholarly chemical journals and witnessed early replications of Lavoisier’s experiments on oxygen, and his work on platinum’s salts and experimental alloys aided in the chemical identification of this metal as a new element. These biographies limn a network in place by the 1770s of officers of the College of Mines who exchanged mineralogical observations, mineral and other natural curiosities, and regional natural historical and prospecting descriptions with each other across mining centers in Siberia and with college leaders in Moscow and St. Petersburg (Graber 2016, 47–56, 97–137).

With the fall of the Soviet Union, historians embraced new approaches and topics in regional history, business history, and cultural history, often building on formations laid by late Soviet scholars. In a new free market economy, the question of the origin of Russian capitalism morphed into the origin of Russian entrepreneurialism. Now that it was politically permissible to study the culture of elites, a particularly productive area was the study of the rise, management style, and scientific contributions of the great mining families of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the Stroganovs, the Turchaninovs, and especially the Demidovs (Nekliudov 2004). The substantial 1994 edited volume The Demidov Chronicle: A Historical Almanac is emblematic of this trend (Cherkasova 1994a). In a sprawling collection devoted to the Demidov family, editors and contributors seek to move beyond Soviet-era economic histories of metallurgical output (such as Kafengauz’s work) and instead prosopographically place the members of the family and their circle in focus (Cherkasova 1994a, 7). Akinfii Demidov, of the family’s second generation, in particular emerges in this volume as the model mining entrepreneur, who had the technical and mineralogical knowledge to effectively oversee every aspect of the industry from ore prosecting to smelting—an exemplar of the Urals’ past to be emulated in post-Soviet economic conditions.

For post-Soviet historians of the Urals, the knowledge and skill of the Demidov family extended beyond their own business interests to increase the cultural and intellectual sophistication of the region and even the empire. Historian of science I. N. Iurkin, for example, has devoted much of his career to the study of the intellectual world of the Demidov family, who he approaches as “scholars, engineers, and organizers of science and industry” (2001). In a country with few universities or research institutes to support science, Iurkin argues, it was mine owners who advanced science in Russia in the eighteenth century (2001, 35). He describes in detail the Demidov family’s support of and engagement in natural historical scholarship—Grigorii Akinf’evich Demidov, a member of the third generation of Demidov magnates, planted a botanical garden at his estate in the western Urals that served as an essential repository of local flora and also of exotic East Asian plants collected by academic naturalist members of the Second Kamchatka Expedition to Alaska, who stopped at his home multiple times as they crossed the empire (Iurkin 2001, 114–120). Grigorii Demidov exchanged seeds with Carl Linnaeus and sent his sons to Uppsala to study with him (Pobedimova 2006), while his brother Prokofii created the largest botanical garden in Moscow (Koroloff 2014; Elina 2018). Pavel Demidov, Grigorii’s son, amassed one of the largest mineralogical and natural collections in the empire. It became the basis of the Moscow University natural collection when he donated it to that institution in 1806, and it included 2000 Siberian mineral specimens and a library of 3000 titles (Iurkin 2001, 176–182; Fischer 1806, 2). Other chroniclers of the cultural interests of magnate families similarly document how, from the 1760s, the great mine owners assembled mineralogical collections from their mines, invited traveling academicians to tour their plants and mines, and shared specimens with scholarly correspondents (Pirogova et al. 2008; Hudson 1986). Taken together, the literature of the two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union treats mine owners as skilled entrepreneurs and major cultural and even scientific figures that must be reinserted into Russian history and history of science.

5 Mining and Metallurgical Technologies: Beyond Diffusion

The development of Russian industrial technology, especially as compared to Saxon, Swedish, and British mining and metallurgical technologies, has been a particular concern of both Soviet and more recent historians of the mining industry. Historians of the industry have had to explain why Russia, despite having the most productive mining industry of eighteenth-century Eurasia, did not experience the rapid industrialization of late eighteenth-century England’s Industrial Revolution until the 1880s. Still, the place of Russia in the literature on the “great divergence” between European and Chinese economies in the eighteenth and nineteenth century is ambiguous and underexamined—the central authors of the literature, such as Kenneth Pomeranz, have little to say on Russia. Pomeranz at times includes Russia as part of Europe, at other points it is a periphery that supplies useful, but not by any means essential, timber, grain, and iron to industrializing Britain (Pomeranz 2000; Turchin 2013; Rönnback 2010). Others consider Russia “poor and underdeveloped” on the eve of World War I in comparison to the major Western economies (Clark and Feenstra 2003, 294).

Though infrequently discussed by global economic historians, Russia specialists have proposed many reasons for the mining industry’s relative decline—reliance on enserfed labor, strangling state control over industry, a late and inefficient transition from charcoal to coal as a fuel source, and the lack of a bourgeoisie or a middle class—but the one most relevant to historians of earth and mining science is that Russia failed to compete technologically with the major Western economies. The consensus among both American and Soviet historians throughout the twentieth century was that private mine owners, especially those of aristocratic origin, clung doggedly and conservatively in the nineteenth century to charcoal as an energy source and resisted new advances in steel making (Blackwell 1968, 56–62, 1970; Pipes 1974, 191–220; Strumilin, 1967; for more on this historiographical position see Blanchard 2005). To counter this argument, more recent historians of Russian mining and metallurgical technology have searched for innovations within the industry. In doing so, some scholars have uncovered ways of escaping the old narratives described above of technological diffusion from the West or of purely native innovation, through work that examines the unique environmental factors and transnational collaborations that shaped Russian technological development.

The foundational work in the history of Russian mining technology is N. B. Baklanov’s Technology of Metallurgical Production in the Urals in the Eighteenth Century (1935). A sweeping study of every aspect of the mining industry from ore extraction to shipment for export, Baklanov finds innovation arising from how mining officers, assayers, and skilled metallurgists dealt with the chemical and physical makeup of the Urals and its ores. Copper metallurgy, he notes, is highly dependent on the chemistry of local ores, meaning that recipes for copper alloys could not simply be transferred from Sweden or Germany to the Urals, but were developed on site, especially in the chief state plant in Ekaterinburg, over years of experimental smelts. In her work on Akinfii Demidov’s experimental iron smelts and tests of what Demidov called “German boasts,” Aleksandra Cherkasova continues this argument, writing that, due to variation in local ores and fuel sources, all metallurgy is experimental and thus metallurgical knowledge always local (Cherkasova 1994b, 20).

Water technologies were another area where local climate and ecological conditions resulted in unique techniques and machinery being developed: Baklanov cites in particular the development of a highly efficient system of water wheels used to pump several bellows simultaneously (1935, 178–179). As described in Catherine Evtuhof’s recent essay on the environmental history of the Urals industry, the water resources of the Urals differed greatly from those of Saxony and therefore required innovative means to manage them. The canal system used to store water needed to turn hammers and pump bellows in Saxony would freeze through for half the year in the Urals. To maintain the necessary year-round water supply to operate factories, factory managers situated plants immediately next to large reservoirs created by damming rivers. These large “factory ponds” were unique features of the Urals industry, and Russian engineers constructed strings of reservoirs behind particularly high dams which could power multiple factories year-round along a single river (Evtuhof 2023, 52–56). With such reliable water power, Malcom Hill argues in an article-length history of Urals iron, Russia faced far less need for coal or steam technologies, two key markers of the Industrial Revolution, than the United Kingdom did (2006). The Urals’ abundant timber resources, plus innovations in charcoal making, and the Demidov-led adaptation of the puddling process to charcoal-fueled iron production, Ian Blanchard argues, allowed iron production to rise in productivity and efficiency across the nineteenth century and meet domestic demand without switching to coal fuel (2005). Similarly, compulsory labor, especially for support tasks like timber felling, charcoal production, carting, road building, and shipping, lessoned the need for labor-saving technologies as found in British industry (a discussion of the historiography of the mining industry’s workforce, which included such compulsory laborers as serfs attached to factories, state peasants working part of the year in lieu of cash payment of the poll tax, and convicts and prisoners of war, is beyond the scope of this chapter. For more on bonded labor in the mining industry and its historiography, see Griffiths 1986 and Hudson, DeHart, and Griffiths 1995). Instead of being deficient when compared to British technology, Russian technology was simply different.

Consideration of the environment was one way for historians like Baklanov, Evtuhof, and Hill to evaluate Urals technologies without falling into narratives of either diffusion or of development straight from artisanal, early modern Tula, or Olonets techniques. The work of Andrei Keller studying German and Russian collaboration in metallurgy and arms making offers another way of escaping the diffusion or native innovation dichotomy. Keller compares small-scale weapons production in both western Germany and the Urals to understand the impact of foreign experts in Russian industrial history. He takes as his main case study the early nineteenth-century enterprise of the German metallurgical and weapons-making entrepreneur Andrei Knauf, who recruited two dozen German, Danish, and Swedish metallurgists to the iron plant he acquired at Zlatoust in the southern Urals, as well as over 100 German and Alsatian weapons-making masters for an arms workshop. Russian masters also worked for Knauf, and Russian and foreign masters exchanged ideas, experimented together, and developed both artisanally and industrially scaled technologies of weapons production that complimented each other and satisfied market demand—even through World War I—until exigent state demands for mass-produced weapons in the 1920s–1930s collectivized artisans and ended the craft weapons-making tradition (Keller 2015, 2000, 2022).

These narratives of Russian innovation born of engagement with local ores, the specificities of regional climate and geography, and cross-cultural collaboration do not ignore the fact that Russian metallurgical production did fall behind western European production in the nineteenth century and place some blame for this fact on Urals technologies. While Baklanov stresses areas of innovation, he also finds stagnation in technological development: He argues that mining administrator Georg Wilhelm de Hennin established such an advanced, efficient, and profitable state iron and copper factory in Ekaterinburg in 1723 that for the rest of the century all new factories were but copies of the original, which itself was outmoded in comparison to European plants by the end of the century (Baklanov 1935, 162, 178). Themes found in Baklanov—that there were a number of innovative technologies, especially earlier in the eighteenth century, and that toward the end of the century there was a lag in comparison with the West—have been further developed by subsequent authors. In his study of Russia’s silver industry, Ian Blanchard notes technological successes, like the introduction of the Saiger process in the Altai Mountains, in which the local argentiferous copper ores were mixed with the argentiferous lead of the Nerchinsk region in special hearths, that made the Siberian silver industry highly productive from the mid-1740s to mid-1770s. But he also frequently underlines the technological limitations of the Nerchinsk silver industry in southeastern Siberia, where it was economical only to refine extremely pure ores of 12.5 ounces of silver per ton, which caused the Nerchinsk industry to sputter in and out of production (Blanchard 1989, 61–86). V. L. Stepanov (2008–2009), writing on the Ministry of Finance’s mining policies, finds inadequate application of Western technologies (the puddling process, cupola shaft furnaces, and rolling equipment) in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, but to him this was a symptom rather than a cause of the industry’s decline. He continues by detailing how the industry was revitalized by a new generation of highly educated mining engineers active in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. These men modernized factories, experimented with metallurgical processes, sponsored research into foreign technologies, and produced scholarship in mining science (Stepanov 2008–2009, 28–31). All this activity however, could not compensate for the fundamental brake on Russia’s industrialization, the reliance on serf labor (Stepanov 2008–2009, 31). The concern at the root of the literature on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century technology is that Russia’s delayed heavy industrialization was the result of technological backwardness. These authors, however, describe an intellectually vibrant industry whose leaders monitored and adapted foreign technologies, and that also, because of regional ecological and social conditions, evolved in its own, innovative way.

6 The Science of Empire

With an increasingly aggressive and centralizing state under President Vladimir Putin, the state has reentered the historiography in the past 15 years as the central actor in the imperial mining industry. Sidestepping the old debates over whether the state helped or hindered industrial development, current historians examine the mining industry as a site of experimentation in governing styles, bureaucratic sciences, and imperial rule in Russia’s transformative eighteenth century. Instead of studying the impact of state policy on industrial development, these historians, drawing at times on the scholarship of German, Swedish, and Habsburg mining administration discussed in Sebastian Felten’s contribution to this volume, consider how the rapidly expanding mining industry shaped the development of the imperial state.

In a biography of the Russian-born Dutchman Andrei Vinius, Kees Boterbloem (2013) studies this governor of Siberia active early in Peter I’s reign as both a conduit of foreign technology (as the son of one of the first foreigners to found a water-powered ironworks in Russia) and governing practices and as the chief bureaucrat overseeing the transition of Siberia’s economy from one founded on fur harvesting to mining. In a series of articles, Mikhail Kiselev charts experimentation, evolution, and ultimately instances of effective state building in the mining administration of the Urals in the first half of the eighteenth century (2015, 2019a, b). Nikolai Petrukhintsev (2014) details the interrelation of politics at the court of Empress Anna (r. 1730–1740) and questions of privatization and reform in the Urals iron industry in his magisterial study of Anna’s reign. Chechesh Kudachinova (2019a, b) explores gold, silver, and Indigenous metal objects and tales of precious metals in the imperial imagination of the Altai. E. G. Nekliudov (2018) examines mine administration and reform in the nineteenth century, in particular the privatization of mines as part of Emperor Alexander II’s (r. 1855–1881) Great Reforms, in an effort to understand how the major reforms of the 1860s and 1870s were implemented on the ground in the provinces. This new wave of historians, in which I include myself, argues that the mining industry and the Russian Empire coforged each other (Graber 2016).

This imperial turn in the historiography of mining has become especially salient since the 2014 seizure of the Donets Coal Basin (Donbass) by Russia from Ukraine. With ample forest cover in the main eighteenth-century metallurgical zones (the Urals and the Altai), Russians faced nowhere near the pressure of the English to find alternatives to charcoal. Still, from at least the 1760s scholars and mining administrators studied coal, pondered its chemistry and origins, and promoted its use, initially more as an alternative to wood in domestic settings than as a new fuel in industry (Shlatter 1760; Lomonosov 1763; Güldenstädt 1776, 52; L’vov 1799). To speed the exploitation of anthracite discovered in geological expeditions to the Donets Basin in 1838, in 1840 the Ministry of Finance seized Cossack-owned lands containing fuel reserves. Over the course of the following decade, coal production quadrupled, to 3,540,000 poods (57,988 metric tons) a year in 1850 (Stepanov 2008–2009, 22). Further development of the region, especially with the 1869 founding of Welshman John Hughes’ massive coal and iron complex, the largest in the empire, drew in laborers and settlers from across the empire (Wynn 1992; Kuromiya 1998; Hill 2019; McQuillen 2023). While the history of the Donbass has been studied in detail by Soviet scholars, the contribution of mining to the incorporation of a region that had been until 1764 the Ottoman and Cossack frontier into the industrial heartland of the empire and Soviet Union can be further explored (Novik et al.1960; Shcherban 1969; Bakulev 1955; Nestrenko 1954).

Another aspect of science, empire, and mining in Russia very much worth further development is the study of the multiethnic character of mining and its knowledges in the Urals and Siberia. The favored methodology in the historiography of imperial Russian mining and metallurgy has been comparative, and it has been consistently motivated by a desire to measure Russian industrial performance against that of the West. Even studies of cross-cultural knowledge creation, like Kees’ work on Vinius and Keller’s on Knauf, are concerned only with the interaction of Russian and European knowledges. Missing from this discussion are the earth knowledges and mining practices of the Urals’ and Siberia’s Indigenous populations. Bashkirs, a Turkic, Muslim, seminomadic people, served as prospectors in the eighteenth century in the southern Urals and the neighboring copper-rich Orenburg Steppe, and the Demidovs relied on Voguls (now known as Mansi, a seminomadic people speaking an Ugric language) to aid in prospecting work in the western Urals. The richest mines in the Urals and the Altai—Gumashevskii copper mine and a mountain of magnetic iron (magnitaia gora, developed by the Soviets into the steel complex of Magnitogorsk) in the Urals, and Zmeiagorsk/Schlangenberg silver mine in the Altai—all originated from veins discovered for the Russians by Indigenous prospectors or from abandoned mines predating Russian settlement. Nikolai Petrukhintsev, Catherine Evtuhof, and I separately have begun studying the interactions of Indigenous (in particular Bashkir) and official knowledges of minerals and geography using mostly Russian- and European-language sources, and these interactions will be an important part of my book manuscript in progress (Graber 2024). But the question of Indigenous contributions to the mining industry’s eighteenth-century success is unresolved, and little historical work has been done on their earth knowledges, cosmologies, and mining practices. The field needs speakers of Turkic, Ugric, or Altaic languages to contribute to this project using sources in these languages, and to do the kind of philological recovery of Indigenous earth and metal knowledges that Alison Bigelow (2020) has done for Spanish America.

7 Conclusion

The history of earth sciences and of mining, as subfields in the history of science and technology, have been written overwhelmingly in the traditions of western and central European national and imperial histories. By bringing the historiography of imperial Russian mining into conversation with earth and mining history, I aim to join historians of the Global South and of non-European empire in uncovering the global history of modern science and technology. As historians of an empire that was independent yet deeply engaged with the earth and mining sciences of a variety of Wests, Russianists offer novel approaches to the some of the shared issues facing scholars of postcolonial science. This chapter suggests two topics in the literature that will be of particular interest to historians of the global earth sciences and technologies. First, there is the Soviet-era work of historians engaging with opposing narratives of Russia as either the recipient and beneficiary of western science and technology or as the home of an independent, long-standing artisanal knowledge tradition that developed into Eurasia’s first modern metallurgical power. Russianists focusing on the environmental, climate, and chemical specificities of the Urals and its ores offer one way to move beyond ideas of native versus foreign science: The physical conditions of each region demanded that metallurgists and technicians experiment and adapt inherited knowledge traditions to fit local circumstances. Second, Russianists’ (admittedly still unfinished) study of the dynamics of knowledge creation in such a uniquely ethnically, religiously, nationally, and intellectually diverse mining regions as the Urals and the Altai complicates narratives of colonial science written for European empire. As a land empire with a long history of engagement, cooperation, and conflict with the Indigenous peoples of the steppes, the Urals, and Siberia, the case of Russian Empire and its cooption of Indigenous miners and mineral knowledges differs fundamentally from those of the better studied European maritime empires. As mine administrators and owners were embedded in trans-Eurasian epistolary networks, the results of cross-cultural mineral knowledge exchange did not remain locked away in the Urals and Siberia, and work on the circulation of imperial Russian earth knowledges to Europe and beyond will aid historians of earth science in arriving at a more accurate, complex history of global knowledge of the earth and its products.