The Russian-American Company: Private or Government Enterprise?

Abstract

IN THE HISTORY Of colonial expansion enterprise played no small part and through initiative both England and Russia stumbled into empires, one expanding across the vast seas, the other across the immense Eurasian continent reaching out to Alaska. While one was pursuing her imperial ambitions through such well-known organizations as the East India Company, the other used a similar weapon, the Russian-American Company, though it was not as private as it is usually assumed to have been or as effective as the English enterprise. By a strange coincidence, both companies, after having served their purpose, terminated their existence within the same decade, the 'sixties of the past century; but one left in the English imperial crown a jewel-India-the other, only historical memories of a grand effort with a most prosaic finale. Strictly speaking, the name Russian-American Company is a misnomer since it conveys the idea of a organization. Because of this idea historians have often been puzzled to explain how it happened that a strictly enterprise, such as they assumed the Russian-American Company to be, could have arisen within the confines of the Russian Empire. In England, it was argued, where there was a middle class with considerable political influence backed by peculiar political institutions favoring individual initiative, an East India Company was a logical growth; but in tsarist Russia, where serfdom was at its height, where monarchical government was uncurbed by a middle class, and where a semifeudal aristocracy ruled supreme, such a phenomenon was inconceivable.2 Such arguments are based on surface judgment. A perusal of the documents pertaining to the history of this company reveals a totally different picture. Let us first take a glance at such a document as the instruction issued to the company on July 8, 1799 (old style), which already reveals a symbiosis of government and organization. According to Provision XII of this document the administration was obligated to report everything concerning the affairs of the Company, its orders as well as achievements, directly to His Im-