Information and Empire

Simon Franklin, Katherine Bowers

Description

From the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century Russia was transformed from a moderate-sized, land-locked principality into the largest empire on earth. How did systems of information and communication shape and reflect this extraordinary change?

Information and Mechanisms of Communication in Russia, 1600-1850 brings together a range of contributions to shed some light on this complex question. Communication networks such as the postal service and the gathering and circulation of news are examined alongside the growth of a bureaucratic apparatus that informed the government about its country and its people. The inscription of space is considered from the point of view of mapping and the changing public ‘graphosphere’ of signs and monuments. More than a series of institutional histories, this book is concerned with the way Russia discovered itself, envisioned itself and represented itself to its people.

Innovative and scholarly, this collection breaks new ground in its approach to communication and information as a field of study in Russia. More broadly, it is an accessible contribution to pre-modern information studies, taking as its basis a country whose history often serves to challenge habitual Western models of development. It is important reading not only for specialists in Russian Studies, but also for students and non-Russianists who are interested in the history of information and communications.

Sujets

• Russian Empire
• Maps & Atlases
• History of communication
• The Postal Service
• Information
• Communication

Informations

• Publié par: Open Book Publishers
• Date de parution: 27 novembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783743766
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

INFORMATION AND EMPIRE


Information and Empire
Mechanisms of Communication in Russia,1600–1850
Edited by Simon Franklin and Katherine Bowers






https://www.openbookpublishers.com
© 2017 Simon Franklin and Katherine Bowers.
Copyright of each chapter is maintained by the author.


This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:
Simon Franklin and Katherine Bowers, Information and Empire: Mechanisms of Communication in Russia , 1600–1850. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2017, http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0122
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All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web
Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/636#resources
Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher.
ISBN Paperback: 978–1-78374–373–5
ISBN Hardback: 978–1-78374–374–2
ISBN Digital (PDF): 978–1-78374–375–9
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978–1-78374–376–6
ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978–1-78374–377–3
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0122
Cover image: Top: Clement Cruttwell, Map of the Russian Empire , in Atlas to Cruttwell’s Gazetteer , 1799, image by Geographicus Fine Antique Maps ( https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1799_Clement_Cruttwell_Map_of_Russian_Empire_-_Geographicus_-_Russia-cruttwell-1799.jpg ). Bottom: image from the first Italian edition of Sigismund von Herberstein’s description of Muscovy (Venice, 1550), private collection.
Cover design by Katherine Bowers and Corin Throsby.
All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) and Forest Stewardship Council(r)(FSC(r) certified.
Printed in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK)


Contents
Acknowledgments
1
Notes on Contributors
3
Introduction
Simon Franklin
7
I. MAP-MAKING
1.
Early Mapping: The Tsardom in Manuscript
Valerie Kivelson
23
2.
New Technology and the Mapping of Empire: The Adoption of the Astrolabe
Aleksei Golubinskii
59
II. INTERNATIONAL NEWS AND POST
3.
Muscovy and the European Information Revolution: Creating the Mechanisms for Obtaining Foreign News
Daniel C. Waugh and Ingrid Maier
77
4.
How Was Western Europe Informed about Muscovy? The Razin Rebellion in Focus
Ingrid Maier
113
III. NEWS AND POST IN RUSSIA
5.
Communication and Obligation: The Postal System of the Russian Empire, 1700–1850
John Randolph
155
6.
Information and Efficiency: Russian Newspapers, ca. 1700–1850
Alison K. Smith
185
7.
What Was News and How Was It Communicated in Pre-Modern Russia?
Daniel C. Waugh
213
IV. INSTITUTIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND COMMUNICATION
8.
Bureaucracy and Knowledge Creation: The Apothecary Chancery
Clare Griffin
255
9.
What Could the Empress Know About Her Money? Russian Poll Tax Revenues in the Eighteenth Century
Elena Korchmina
287
10.
Communication and Official Enlightenment: The Journal of the Ministry of Public Education , 1834–1855
Ekaterina Basargina
311
V. INFORMATION AND PUBLIC DISPLAY
11.
Information in Plain Sight: The Formation of the Public Graphosphere
Simon Franklin
341
12.
Experiencing Information: An Early Nineteenth-Century Stroll Along Nevskii Prospekt
Katherine Bowers
369
Selected Further Reading
409
List of Figures
417
Index
423


Acknowledgments
This volume had its genesis in the project “Information Technologies in Russia, 1450–1850”, led by Simon Franklin. We are grateful to Cambridge University and the Leverhulme Trust for their generous support of the project.
The volume grew out of the discussions at the symposium “Information Technologies and Transfer, 1450–1850”, co-organised by Katherine Bowers and Simon Franklin, and held at Darwin College, Cambridge in September 2014. The symposium was made possible by a Research Network Workshop Grant from the Centre for East European Language-Based Area Studies, and funding from the Dame Elizabeth Hill Fund and the Department of Slavonic Studies at Cambridge University. We thank all of the symposium participants for facilitating such a vibrant discussion.
We wish to particularly thank Professor Don Ostrowski of Harvard University for his sage comments as we began to plan the volume, as well as the comments of the three anonymous readers who reviewed the manuscript and provided valuable feedback.
Last, but not least, we are grateful to our editor, Alessandra Tosi, who has supported this volume from its earliest stages, and her team at Open Book Publishers.


Notes on Contributors
Ekaterina Basargina is a Senior Researcher in the St Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Her research mainly focusses on the history of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Her publications include: The Imperial Academy of Sciences at the Turn of the 19 th and 20 th Centuries (in Russian, 2008), The Russian Academician G. H. Langsdorff and his Travels to Brazil, 1803–29 (in Russian, 2016, ed.), The Department of Russian Language and Literature of the Imperial Academy of Sciences During the First 50 Years of its Activities, 1841–91 (in Russian, 2017, with O. Kirikova). She won the Macarius Prize in 2004.
Katherine Bowers is an Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her research interest is nineteenth-century Russian literature and cultural history, and she is currently working on a book about the influence of gothic fiction on Russian realism. Other publications include Russian Writers at the Fin de Siècle: The Twilight of Realism (2015, ed., with A. Kokobobo) and A Dostoevskii Companion: Texts and Contexts (forthcoming 2018, eds., with C. Doak and K. Holland). From 2012–14 she was Research Associate on the project, “Information Technologies in Russia, 1450–1850”, led by Simon Franklin, and a Research Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge.
Simon Franklin is Professor of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. He has written widely on the history and culture of early Rus, Muscovy and Russia. Books include The Emergence of Rus 700–1200 (1996, with Jonathan Shepard), Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950–1300 (2002), and National Identity in Russian Culture: an Introduction (2004, ed., with Emma Widdis). His recent research has focussed on the social and cultural history of technologies of the word in Russia in the late medieval and early modern periods (ca.1450–1850).
Aleksei Golubinskii is a Lead Researcher in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents (since 2007) and a Junior Researcher at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences (since 2016). A specialist in eighteenth – century history, his research interests include the General Land Survey, GIS, peasant literacy, and cartography. He recently collaborated on the project Cities of the Russian Empire from the Economic Notes of the General Land Survey (in Russian, 2016, eds., with D. A. Chernenko and D. A. Khitrov). Currently he is a participant in the project “16th- and 17th-century Drawings of the Russian State”. He also created and maintains the website of the Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents.
Clare Griffin is an Assistant Professor of the History of Science and Technology at Nazarbayev University (Astana, Kazakhstan). She is the author of ‘In Search of an Audience: Popular Pharmacies and the Limits of Literate Medicine in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Russia’, Bulletin for the History of Medicine , 89 (2015), and ‘Russia and the Medical Drug Trade in the Seventeenth Century’, Social History of Medicine , forthcoming. Her current research considers the role of the Russian Empire in early modern commodity and knowledge exchanges relating to medicaments.
Valerie Kivelson is Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth Century Russia (2006), Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (2013), and most recently, with Ronald G. Suny, Russia’s Empires (2016). With Joan Neuberger, she edited Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (2008)