The Exercise of Imperial Authority in the Province of North Carolina and the Governorate of Astrakhan, 1730-1775

Abstract

Historians have long segregated Russian colonialism from the European practice because of the dichotomy between Russia’s contiguous continental expansion and Western European nations’ noncontiguous maritime expansion, as well as Russia’s ostensibly less liberal society during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This thesis explores the utility of differentiating Russian colonialism on such grounds, examining institutions of imperial control and peripheral resistance in Russian Astrakhan and British North Carolina between 1730 and 1775. It seeks to establish a commonality of administration that the empires of Russia and Great Britain shared during the eighteenth century, as well as to identify concrete differences. Scrutinizing sources documenting the establishment and development of colonial government, as well as the writings of participants on both sides of the greatest challenges to imperial control during the period in question, it finds that the forces of physical and social control exercised in each possession were remarkably similar in composition and execution. In the same way, because both empires approached their possessions with essentially identical geopolitical philosophies, the threats to imperial control that the Governorate of Astrakhan and the Province of North Carolina faced – whether internal, at the periphery, or from without – were largely identical. Accordingly, it establishes a degree of commonality in colonialism, challenging the notion of universal Russian exceptionalism.