492 OHQ vol. 117, no. 3 EMPIRE MAKER: ALEXANDER BARANOV AND RUSSIAN COLONIAL EXPANSION INTO ALASKA AND NORTHERN CALIFORNIA by Kenneth N. Owens, with Alexander Yu. Petrov University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 2015. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 354 pages. $50 cloth. Colonial America is much bigger than historians once realized. In the past twenty years, scholars have replaced a narrow focus on New England and the Chesapeake with a broader perspective on Colonial America that encompasses empires other than the British and territories outside the contemporary national boundaries of the United States. Still, much work needs to be done, and with no North American empire is this truer than with that of Russia. The challenge of accessing Russian-language sources remains significant, despite the efforts of individuals and organizations, such as the Oregon Historical Society, to provide English-language translations. Empire Maker helps to shed new light on our understanding of Colonial America through an international collaboration between Kenneth N. Owens and Alexander Yu. Petrov. For the first time, Owens, professor emeritus of California State University, Sacramento, and Petrov, of Moscow State University and the Russian Academy, accessed extensive archival material in Russia to produce a highly readable and useful study of the chief engineer of Russian imperialism in North America: Alexandr Andreevich Baranov. With neither the fame of Captain John Smith, nor the infamy of Hernan Cortés, over the course of twenty-five years Baranov helped to construct an expansive imperial system, which stretched from the Aleutian Islands to Fort Ross on the coast of northern California. Unlike Baranov’s earlier biographers, Owens and Petrov are not celebrating Baranov’s genius (whether good or bad) for empire. Rather, their thorough biography helps to explain the ways in which Baranov’s life experiences and interactions with other people helped to shape the form of Russian America. Baranov was born in the town of Kargopol on the Onega River in northern Russia in 1746, the son of a prosperous merchant. This town was part of a distinctive region in the Russian Empire, characterized by cultural and linguistic diversity, a barter economy, and the hunting of fur-bearing animals (alongside many other economic activities, to be sure). The connection between Baranov’s childhood and his future as the manager of the operations of the fur-trading Russian-American Company is obvious. But, Owens and Petrov are not being teleological. Baranov’s gradual eastward path to the North American West does not follow a straight line from the cradle to his eventual grave. Rather, his business experiences in Irkutsk, surviving his first bitter winter at Unlaska among the Aleuts, and his tutelage under his experienced predecessor Evstratii Delarov at Three Saints Harbor all helped him to acquire the skills and strategies to succeed in the North Pacific fur trade. There are other ways in which Baranov was not the master of his own destiny. He depended on the business influence and political patronage of powerful figures, notably the ambitious merchants Grigoriv Shelikhov and Ivan Golikov, who aspired to build a Russian commercial empire throughout the Pacific Rim. Indeed, Baranov owed his eventual ennoblement and position as de facto viceroy of Russian America to the deft political maneuvering of Grigoriv Shelikhov’s widow, Natalia, in St. Petersburg. Empire Maker is a valuable book, not only for historians of the American West, but for anyone looking to expand their understanding of America’s colonial horizons. If not for the rather hefty price tag of the hardback edition, it would appeal to a more popular audience, too. Nevertheless, Owens and Petrov could have been more ambitious in situating their fine research within the field of colonial history . Empire Maker invites comparisons with other empires at every turn. But Owens and Petrov leave it to their readers to make the 493 Reviews connections for themselves. To be sure, Empire Maker recognizes that Baranov and Russian America existed in an inter-imperial world, and it explores Baranov’s interactions with Native peoples, from Alaska to Hawai‘i, and British and U.S. officials and merchants. But the authors could have chosen to employ a sustained, transnational comparative approach to the study of Baranov that...
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Jul 10, 2021
Ivan Kurilla 
Open Access