Thesis ID: CBB512838505

Tsardom of Rock: State, Society, and Mineral Science in Enlightenment Russia (2016)

unapi

This dissertation examines the golden age of the Imperial Russian mining industry (1719-1807), during which many of the empire's elites engaged in the production of mineralogical knowledge. This engagement is situated within the broader question of the nature of the Russian Enlightenment: did Russia have an Enlightenment, if so, what was its character, and how far did it reach, both in terms of geography and its permeation into society. The dissertation is composed of five chapters divided into three themes. The first two chapters examine the role of state institutions in mineralogical knowledge production. Chapter 1, "Mineralogy in Institutions: The College of Mines," presents for the first time the College of Mines as a scientific institution, in particular the mineralogical and chemical research that college leaders performed from the 1760s through the end of the century. In chapter 2, "Mineralogy in Institutions: The Academy of Sciences," I investigate the interplay between the court's demand for mining expertise from the 1730s to the 1770s and academic naturalists' mineralogical scholarship, particularly that of Mikhail Lomonosov. Chapter 3, "Useful and Remarkable Discoveries: Mineralogy at Mines and Factories," is a Siberian interlude. I argue in this chapter that Russian factory towns were important provincial centers of education, noble culture, data collection, and independent mineralogical thought, expanding our mental map of the Russian Enlightenment to the easternmost edges of the Russian empire. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the epistemological categories in which mining and mineralogical knowledge fell. In chapters 4 and 5, I study why and when the Russian elite adopted a mineralogical understanding of the earth. In chapter 4, "Peter I and his Mineralogical Fledglings," I examine the mineral collecting of Russia's first three courtly mineralogists, Peter I, James Bruce, and Vasilii Tatishchev. Peter's patronage of natural history, including his personal interest in collecting natural objects, made mineralogical study a part of the cultural reforms of his reign. However, elite interest in mineralogy remained limited during his reign and in the three decades after his death. During this period, the only elites to be seriously interested in mineralogical questions (Bruce, Tatishchev, and a few of their associates) shared an involvement in the mining industry and a politics of defending the autocracy. In chapter 5, "A Noble Science for Practical Ends," I explain how natural history in general, and mineralogy in particular, became an essential part of Russian elite culture in the 1760s. Court patronage of mineralogy was so marked by the 1770s that savvy mine and factory owners belonging to the merchant estate parleyed their mineralogical expertise into imperial patronage for their businesses, social legitimation, and patents of hereditary nobility. Whatever the actual economic benefit of studying mineralogy, it had tremendous social utility. This dissertation contributes to two historiographies. The first is the historiography of eighteenth-century Russian science. The cliché of this historiography is that natural science was a tool of a progressive, modernizing state, which led a reluctant, backward elite in adopting a secular, natural philosophical view of nature. The Western historiography of eighteenth-century Russian science is short, and like the Russian historiography, its main subject is the Academy of Sciences. This dissertation examines the culture of science in a variety of environments–in state institutions like the College of Mines and yes, the Academy of Sciences, but also at the court, in elites' homes, and at Siberian mines and metallurgical plants. By examining mineralogical study in these varied contexts one can understand why leaders of the mining industry and social elites, not entirely the bumpkins that Soviet historians believed them to be, adopted this particular aspect of Westernization. The second historiography is that of the Russian Enlightenment. The central question of this historiography is whether or not Russia participated in the Enlightenment, and above all whether Russia had its own national movement. For Soviet historians wishing to prove the intellectual parity of Russia and the West, the answer to both versions of this question is a resounding yes. Western scholars of the Russian Enlightenment are largely in agreement about the characteristics of the movement: it was a conservative, state-led movement, in which only a small group of elites and officials took part, and resulting in a tightening of relations between the aristocracy and the state. This study of mining and mineral science contributes to the historiography of the Russian Enlightenment by uncovering a socially and geographically wider Enlightenment than previously imagined.

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Authors & Contributors
Varela, Alex Gonçalves
Escamilla-González, Francisco Omar
Morelos-Rodríguez, Lucero
D'Angelo, Fabio
Passetti, Cristina
Zapariy, V. V.
Concepts
Mines and mining
Mineralogy
Earth sciences
Societies; institutions; academies
Science and politics
Natural history
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
Enlightenment
17th century
16th century
20th century, early
Places
Italy
Russia
Europe
Brazil
Edinburgh
Portugal
Institutions
Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA)
St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences
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