American Russia: Fur Seals, Empire, and Conflict in the Northern Pacific after 1867

American Russia: Fur Seals, Empire, and Conflict in the Northern Pacific after 1867* Robert Kindler (bio) SUMMARY What happened after the Russian Empire sold its colony of Alaska to the United States in 1867? Taking this question as a starting point, the article deals with the entangled histories of resource exploitation and contested power on the North Pacific periphery of the Russian Empire. The author argues that after 1867 a new order emerged on Kamchatka and the Commander Islands, which can be described as “fragmented sovereignty.” It was centered around one of the most valuable maritime resources of the region, fur seals. The Alaska Commercial Company played a central role in this story because it not only controlled the global fur seal trade but also became a key political actor on Russia’s North Pacific coast. By examining the conflicts over fur seals and the Russian presence on the remote periphery, the article contributes to the debate on the practices and limits of imperial rule in a transnational perspective. Резюме Статья посвящена переплетенной истории управления и экс-плуатации природных ресурсов в бывших тихоокеанских колониях Российской империи в первые десятилетия после продажи Аляски Со-единенным Штатам в 1867 г. Новый режим администрации на Камчатке и Командорских островах в этот период автор называет “фрагментар-ным суверенитетом”. Главным фактором для его поддержания был контроль над одним из самых ценных ресурсов региона – морскими котиками. Центральную роль в этой истории играла Аляскинская торговая компания (Alaska Commercial Company), которая не только доминировала в мировой торговле морскими котиками, но и стала ключевым политическим игроком на севере тихоокеанского побережья России. Исследуя конфликты из-за морских котиков и присутствие российского государства на этой отдаленной окраине, статья вносит вклад в дискуссию о практиках и пределах имперского управления в транснациональной перспективе. In the autumn of 1870, two representatives of the San Francisco-based company Hutchinson, Kohl & Co. had an appointment with high-ranking officials of the Russian Ministry of the Interior in St. Petersburg. The aim of the Americans was to obtain a twenty-year lease for seal hunting on the Commander Islands. This archipelago in the Northern Pacific was remote enough that officials in the Russian capital initially confused it with the Pribilof Islands, which the empire had sold to the United States three years earlier as part of the Alaska purchase.1 In fact, located 150 kilometers off the coast of Kamchatka, the Commander Islands were discovered by the famous explorer Vitus Bering and his men during the Second Kamchatka Expedition in 1741 and remained the last of the Russian overseas colonies in the Northern Pacific after “Russian America” had been sold to the United States in 1867.2 [End Page 166] The reasons that American businessmen tried to get hold of these islands were basically the same that had triggered the Russian expansion into the Northern Pacific more than a century before: fur-bearing animals. Whereas Russian colonial rule had brought the once ubiquitous sea otters to the brink of extinction, its American successors were mainly interested in fur seals. Every summer hundreds of thousands or even millions of these animals flocked to the shores of both the Commander and Pribilof Islands, where local Aleuts killed them in large numbers.3 Although some contemporary observers described the methods used for the seal hunt as “cruel” or “inhumane,”4 demand for the furs was constantly rising in the last third of the nineteenth century. At the biannual fur auctions in London, the only place in the world where fur seals were traded and global prices were fixed, the pelts of these marine mammals broke record after record.5 At the time, sealskins were nothing less than the most fashionable of all furs. Customers all over the world paid exceedingly high prices to own a sealskin cloak, which became an essential part of any distinguished lady’s attire – and an object of desire for many others.6 Nobody benefited more from the global fur seal boom than the Alaska Commercial Company (ACC), which operated in the Russian Empire under the name Hutchinson, Kohl & Co.7 Within three years after the disintegration of the Russian colony, the ACC ensured the global monopoly in the sealskin business. Its representatives acquired lease contracts with the Russian government over the Commander Islands and with the U.S. government over the Pribilof Islands, the other major fur seal islands in the world, which gave the [End Page 167] ACC the exclusive rights to collect and sell the sealskins for twenty years.8 A historian of the global fur trade has called this situation an entrepreneurial “success to end all successes.”9 But when they signed these contracts, the ACC had acquired more than just a highly profitable deal. To some extent, both leases forced the company to re-create and to administer the colony the Russians had just given up. American economic strength largely replaced Russian imperial structures that had collapsed on...