MAKING a COMMUNAL WORLD English Merchants in Imperial St
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Marie-Louise Karttunen MAKING A COMMUNAL WORLD English Merchants in Imperial St. Petersburg Academic dissertation to be publicly discussed, by due permission of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki, in Auditorium XII on the 22nd of January, 2005, at 10. Marie-Louise Karttunen MAKING A COMMUNAL WORLD ENGLISH MERCHANTS IN IMPERIAL ST. PETERSBURG Research Series in Anthropology University of Helsinki ii Academic dissertation Research Series in Anthropology University of Helsinki, Finland Distributed by: Helsinki University Press PO Box 4 (Vuorikatu 3A) 00014 University of Helsinki Finland Fax: + 358-9-70102374 www.yliopistopaino.helsinki.fi © 2004 Marie-Louise Karttunen ISSN 14588-3186 ISBN 952-10-2252-3 (paperback) ISBN 952-10-2253-1 ((PDF), http://ethesis.helsinki.fi Helsinki University Printing House Helsinki 2004 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. The research and subsequent writing of this dissertation was made possible by funding provided by the Finnish Culture Foundation from 2001-2003. Several trips to various archives in England were also assisted by Professor Jukka Siikala’s Finnish Academy funded project, “Departures”. I am very grateful to both sources. I thank my supervisors, Professors Jukka Siikala and Karen Armstrong of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki, for their suggestions and guidance. Particular thanks are due Professor Siikala for first introducing me many years ago to the work of discourse-centred scholars, such as Greg Urban, when I was preparing to research my Master’s thesis. Professor Timo Kaartinen and departmental colleagues illuminated various problems and issues in both departmental seminars and less formal settings. Many thanks to you all and also to Arto Sarla, who holds our departmental ‘communal world’ together and was, as always, untiringly helpful with practical problems. I am indebted to my preliminary examiners, Professors Greg Urban and Jukka Gronow, not only for their comments on the manuscript – which assisted me in clarifying some points, if only to my own satisfaction – but also because both helped me through some difficult periods in initial research and writing with advice and some much appreciated humour. I owe a further debt of gratitude to my ‘informants’, both those long dead members of the community under analysis, and their descendants who were so very generous in sharing their memories and memorabilia with me: Tom and Harriet Sederholm, Barbro Scheinin, Kris Bruun, Richard and Grace Riddle, Lance Grimky-Drayton and a particularly warm thanks to Anna Gullichsen who, with extraordinary generosity and trust, allowed me to temporarily appropriate an archive of irreplaceable letters written by community members. Among this group must also be listed the archivists of the Guildhall Library in London, and Richard Davies and his assistants at the Brotherton Library at Leeds University, who were all consistently obliging and helpful. My immediate family had unlimited patience and tolerance but I save recognition of my greatest debt till last: to my father, Richard – without whose inflexible work attitude to archival data collection, unfailing energy in transcribing the dusty piles I passed over many tables to him, and hilarious and spirited discussions of the day’s haul each evening in our student ‘digs’, I might be still labouring on alone. iv CONTENTS: INTRODUCTION. THE ENGLISH COMMUNITY AT ST. PETERSBURG. 1 PART ONE. 1. THE PROBLEM, THE METHOD, THE OUTLINE. How does community become – and exist – as a “thing-in-the-world”? 7 Method and materials – “one can ‘do’ ethnography in the archives”. 10 History matters – but not necessarily as ‘matter of fact’. 15 Dissertation preview. 18 2. A DISCOURSE -CENTRED APPROACH TO CULTURE AND COMMUNITY. What is community? 22 Creating ‘the world.’ through talk. 30 Metaculture: fuelling cultural transmission. 36 Metacultural Evaluation in the St. Petersburg English community. 41 PART TWO. 3. THE COMMUNITY IN TIME AND SPACE. “Why did they go there?” 53 The first instructions. 59 The first reports. 73 From Ivan the Awesome to Peter the Great. 78 Mercantilism and the Anglo-Russian Commercial Treaty of 1734. 82 4. AUTODESIGNATION AND AUTODESIGN. What’s in a name? 91 British nationality, English identity? 96 Establishing the boundaries of ‘English’. 113 We the English, they the Russian. 121 5. SOURCES OF TRADITION AND PLURALITY. “Make thy chosen people joyful.” 129 Working St. Petersburg into the communal world. 143 PART THREE. 6. DISCOURSE PATHWAYS: COHORTS, KINSHIP AND OTHER CONNECTIONS. The paths that discourse travels. 161 ‘Sister’ in representations and in practice. 171 ‘A rolling term gathers much weight’: cross-domain usage of ‘father’. 180 Role and cohort sociality. 187 7. MERCHANT MARRIAGE. Partnership and alliance in merchant kinship. 197 Case Study: The logic of a suitable choice of spouse. 211 v PART FOUR. 8. THE BRITISH FACTORY. Instituting the organization. 218 Factory membership as a “social compact”. 227 9. CONFLICT AND HEGEMONY. Deploying the church as a secular weapon. 236 Hegemony in the Anglo-Russian context. 249 “Values have valuers.” 254 10. THEORY IN PRAXIS. Case Study A: “The ruling values are the values of the dominant.” 258 Case study B: “English gentlemen will not wish me to dwell longer on this fact.” 263 Case study C: “The church is in no respect the chapel of the Embassy.” 278 The structure of conflict. 285 CONCLUSIONS. TALK IS TO HUMANS AS SILK TO A SPIDER. The English community at St. Petersburg. 294 The discourse-centred approach to culture and community. 297 APPENDICES One: English congregation in Moscow, 1706 302 Two: English residing in St. Petersburg 1782-1783 303 Three: Advice for a journey from St. Petersburg to London 1843 305 Four: Diagram of Whishaw marriage connections 306 REFERENCES 314 ILLUSTRATIONS, DIAGRAMS AND TABLES Picture 1: Map of St. Petersburg c. 1890 6 Picture 2: Interior of the English Church 44 Picture 3: ‘Ice-hilling.’ 48 Picture 4: Guests arriving at Mourino 101 Picture 5: Jim Whishaw’s summer house at Mourino 160 Picture 6: Mixed gender ‘age cohort’ at Mourino 195 Picture 7: Mary, Nurse and infant in the courtyard of the English Church 196 Table 1: Eighteenth-century community growth 90 Table 2: Mary’s pre- and post-marital contacts 190 Diagram 1: Simplified Cattley family ‘tree’ 204 Diagram 2: Simplified Whishaw family ‘tree’ 205 Table 3: Factory membership, company turnover and export trade 230 Diagram 3: Kin connection between influential families 234 vi 1 INTRODUCTION. THE ENGLISH COMMUNITY AT ST. PETERSBURG. Dominating the sea-lanes of the world, these [European] merchants invaded existing networks of exchange and linked one to the other. In the service of “God and profit,” they located sources of products desired in Europe and developed coercive systems for their delivery. In response, European craft shops, either singly or aggregated into manufactories, began to produce goods to provision the wide-ranging military and naval efforts and to furnish commodities to overseas suppliers in exchange for goods to be sold as commodities at home. The outcome was the creation of a commercial network of global scale. (Eric Wolf [1982] 1997, 265.) As Residents at St. Petersburg, interested for the most part in Commerce and manufactures, we are in a position to fully appreciate the manifold advantages which extended Trade cannot fail to afford to both countries [Russia and Britain], for it is no imaginary bond that draws the two nations together, but a community of interests, based upon an interchange of services which the greatest agricultural people and the greatest manufacturing nation of Europe are capable of rendering to each other. (GL 11749, 336. Extract from an address by the English community welcoming His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales to St. Petersburg 20th October/1st November 18661.) In 1553 a group of City of London merchants raised the finance to send three ships north east around the European continent in an attempt to discover a short sea route to Cathay. The aim was to establish a monopoly trade with the Chinese which might produce the kind of fabulous wealth that the Spanish and ‘Portingales’ were extracting from the new worlds of the Americas (Hakluyt, 1927[1589]2). Instead of China, the ships – or rather one of them – discovered a direct route to Muscovy which avoided the Baltic, the Hanseatic monopoly of Baltic ports, and the toll at the Danish Sound. The investors were satisfied with this and founded the London-based Muscovy Company (later the Russia Company) the following year – an organization which attempted to maintain a monopoly on Anglo-Russian trade from 1554 until the later decades of the nineteenth century, policed at the Russian end by a local Chief Agent and his assistants. All English merchants trading with Russia were required by English (though not Russian) law to become ‘freemen’ of the Company on payment of a fee, but were only eligible to do so via patrimony (father’s prior membership), five years ‘servitude’ with an established Russia trading house, or, from the beginning of the eighteenth century, an Act of Parliament. This latter mode of entry was the most fluid and widely implemented, though many of the hundreds listed over the years as entering the trade this way do not appear again in community records, so either never took up the option, or failed rapidly and moved on. Most of those resident in Russia, before the founding of St. Petersburg, were based in Moscow or Novgorod, shipping in and out of Archangel during the summer months when the seaways were 1 Russia operated according to the Julian calendar, revised to the Gregorian calendar in Britain in 1752, which places Russian dates in the nineteenth century twelve days behind those in England. I have not problematized this issue, citing the local date of any record, but it is an interesting point in terms of perceptions of living a behindhand existence to the rest of the western world.