journal of jesuit studies 2 (2015) 56-76 brill.com/jjs Jesuit Conspirators and Russia’s East Asian Fur Trade, 1791–1807 Gregory Afinogenov Harvard University
[email protected] Abstract In 1791, amidst growing anxiety about British encroachment on its fur trade with the Qing Empire, the Russian government discovered that Britain was sending a large and important embassy to Beijing, led by Lord Macartney. In an attempt to derail the nego- tiations, Russia enrolled the Polotsk Jesuits in a plot to convince the Qing of the nefari- ousness of British designs. The conspiracy was not a success, despite Macartney’s failure. The Jesuits both in Belarus and Beijing continued to play a central role in Russia’s geopolitical plans in the region for the next decade and a half, although ulti- mately the project to establish a Russian Jesuit college in the Qing capital failed. Using Russian as well as Jesuit archival sources, the article reconstructs the secret plans, mis- haps, and miscalculations that shaped this unusual relationship. Keywords Jesuits in China – Jesuits in Russia – maritime fur trade – Russo-Chinese relations – Jesuit survival – Jesuit restoration – Pacific history – Catherine II – Alexander I – Russo-British relations Northeast Asia in the Eighteenth Century Jesuits have often been accused of being puppet masters. In the eighteenth century, they were held responsible for everything from religious obscurantism in France to enlightened sedition in Spain; in the nineteenth, they would join the Freemasons at the heart of the most fashionable conspiracy theories of their day. Here I will tell a different story. On the cusp of the two centuries, © Afinogenov, 2015 | DOI 10.1163/22141332-00201003 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 4.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC 4.0) License.