George Forbes's 'Account of Russia', 1733-1734

Abstract

DOCUMENT George Forbes's 'Account of Russia', I733- I734 MICHAEL BITTER ANY comprehensivelist of Europeanaccounts of Russiawould be long and varied. One of the most recent cataloguing attempts of such accounts of Muscovy alone includes over six hundred entries of European Muscovitica.1The specificgenre of English-languagetravel accounts has been documented in several works,2and a number of special collections and rare book libraries throughout the West have made an effortto collect early editions of these European accounts of Russia and makethem availableto scholars.3 Many of the descriptions of Russia listed in these works remain obscure and have received little attention from scholars,while others lie in private archives, unavailable for academic study. This article presentssuch an account. It is the account of Russiawrittenby George, Lord Forbes,thirdEarl of Granard.While scholarshave known of the existence of this account for several decades, access to the only survivingmanuscriptof the workwas denied untilrecently.4 MichaelBitterisAssociateProfessorofHistoryattheUniversityofHawai'iat Hilo. I See Marshall Poe, ForeignDescriptionsof Muscovy.An AnalyticBibliography of Primagyand Secondagy Sources, Columbus, OH, 1993. 2 An early attempt to collect and describe these accounts is Harry W. Nerhood, ToRussia andReturn.AnAnnotated Bibliography of Travelers' English-language Accounts ofRussiafromtheNinth Centugy to thePresent,Columbus, OH, I968, which is rather dated and has its difficulties. Recent publications that provide a much more thorough view of the variety of the English language accounts of Russia in this period include Anthony Cross, Peterthe GreatThrough BritishEyes,Cambridge, 2000, as well as By theBanksoftheNeva,Cambridge, I997 (hereafter, Cross, By theBanksoftheNeva),and Janet Hartley, CharlesWhitworth: Diplomatin theAgeofPeter theGreat,Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2002 (hereafter, Hartley, Jlhitworth). I Some of these collections are even available on microfiche. See, for example, the collection catalogued by Professor Anthony Cross and offered through IDC Publishers, Russiathrough theEyesofForeigners, New York and Leiden. 4 The original manuscript is still held in Castle Forbes, County Longford, Republic of Ireland, but photocopies of this manuscript are in the collection of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) in Belfast. The PRONI reference number for the Account is T3765/H/6/ i I/6. The other documents relating to the Account are organized under the reference numbers T3765/H/6/ I I /3-5. The last of these contains a summary of Laurent Lange's journal recounting his embassy to China. MICHAEL BITTER 887 George,LordForbes,the futurethirdEarlof Granard,livedfor a yearasGreatBritain's EnvoyExtraordinary andMinisterPlenipotentiaryat the courtof TsaritsaAnnaIoannovna(ruledI730-40).5 The King, GeorgeII, sent him to the Russiancourtwith instructions to negotiatea newandadvantageous commercial treatyon behalfof the EnglishmerchantstradingwithRussiathroughtheBalticandWhite Seas.The resultof thismissionwas the Anglo-Russian Commercial Treatyof 1734,theeconomicparticulars ofwhichhavebeenadmirably presentedin a thoroughstudyby DouglasK. Reading.6The naval supplies that Britain purchasedfrom Russia hemp, sailcloth, mastage,tarandpitch werevitallyimportant totheoperation ofthe Britishfleet,makingthem,in turn,essentialto the establishment and preservationof Britain'smaritimehegemony.Yet, duringthe final yearsofPetertheGreat'sreign,Russianexpansionalongthecoastsof theBalticSeastrained relations betweentheRussianTsarandthefirst HanoverianKing of England,GeorgeI. This diplomaticanimosity madeit increasingly difficultforEnglishmerchantstradingin Russia to maintaintheirhistorically privilegedpositionwithinthe Russian market. By the late I720s, Prussianmerchantshad successfully captured lucrative contracts, formerly held by the English, for the supply of woollen cloth used to make Russian army uniforms.Due to the immense size of its land army, Russia purchased this 'soldiers' cloth', as it was called, in great quantity. It was one of the few commodities manufacturedin England that could be sold to Russia in such volume, and at such a significantprofit, as to have some impact on the balance of trade between the two nations. Britain's insatiable appetite for naval suppliescombined with energetic Prussiancompetition to produce a significanttrade imbalance between London and St Petersburg.Britishmerchantspurchasedfar more in Russia than they could sell and were forced, therefore, to pay for their purchases with gold and silver.As a resultof this tradedeficit,London merchantssent to Russia f225,ooo annually.A deficit of this proportion, and the loss of specie that it entailed, was entirely opposed to the precepts of eighteenth-century mercantilism. A negotiated improvement in the statusof Britishtradewith Russiaheld the possibilityof decreasingthis annual deficitto some extent. 5 The terms 'tsaritsa' and 'empress' will be used interchangeably in this introduction even though the British court had not yet officially recognized the Russian monarch's claim to the title of empress. Forbes and the British Resident, Claudius Rondeau...