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The Exercise of Imperial Authority in the Province of North Carolina and the Governorate of Astrakhan, 1730-1775 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Pickering, Jared. 2020. The Exercise of Imperial Authority in the Province of North Carolina and the Governorate of Astrakhan, 1730-1775. Master's thesis, Harvard Extension School. Citable link https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37365030 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA The Exercise of Imperial Authority in the Province of North Carolina and the Governorate of Astrakhan, 1730 – 1775 Jared F. Pickering A Thesis in the Field of History for the Degree of Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies Harvard University March 2020 Copyright 2020 Jared F. Pickering 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. 3 Table of Contents List of Figures.................................................................................................................... vi Chapter I. Introduction.........................................................................................................1 Chapter II. Definition of Terms ...........................................................................................9 Chapter III. Eighteenth Century European Colonialism....................................................12 Chapter IV. Colonial Governance......................................................................................22 Imperial Government.............................................................................................22 Bodies Advising the Monarch. ..................................................................24 Imperial Government Executive Departments and Peripheral Control. ....28 Additional Central Government Influence on Peripheral Control.............36 Official Religion and Government.............................................................41 Provincial Government ..........................................................................................43 The Provincial Governor............................................................................43 The Provincial Government Executive......................................................48 Provincial Judiciaries.................................................................................53 Local Government .................................................................................................57 North Carolina: The County, its Officials, and Inferior Courts.................58 Astrakhan: Municipal Administration and Differentiated Government. ...63 Chapter V. Armed Institutions of Imperial Control...........................................................71 Provincial Military Forces .....................................................................................72 Imperial Military Forces: Imperatives of the Center and Peripheral Resistance...89 iv Challenges to Imperial Control in North Carolina: The War of Regulation..........98 Challenges to Imperial Control in North Carolina: The Stamp Act Crisis..........115 Challenges to Imperial Control in Astrakhan ......................................................121 Chapter VI. Conflict between Provincial and Imperial Institutions ................................130 Chapter VII. Conclusions................................................................................................137 Chapter VIII. Bibliography..............................................................................................145 v List of Figures Figure 1. The Province of North Carolina among Britain’s North American possessions..5 Figure 2. The Province of North Carolina in 1755. .............................................................6 Figure 3. The process of Russian imperial expansion from 1300 until 1796. .....................7 Figure 4. The Governorate of Astrakhan, especially the North Caucasus, and surrounds. .8 vi Chapter I. Introduction In his classic examination of the methodologies and motivations underlying European colonial expansion, Imperialism: A Study, John Atkinson Hobson is careful to set Russia aside from other imperialist nations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cataloguing the ways in which it “stands alone” from other empire-builders. Echoing sentiments reflected in much of the prevailing scholarly discussion of European colonialism, Atkinson divides Russia from the subject by way of its “more normal and natural” process of accretion, emphasizing the progressive “direct extension of imperial boundaries”1 that characterized Russian growth. In contrast to concepts of colonialism and imperialism commonly attached to Western European nations like Great Britain, which usually encompass the seizure or influencing of overseas territories and the establishment of a regime of remote control, Russian empire-building is often explained as a “process of unification and consolidation.”2 In the same way, discussion of the nature of provincial Russian society during the eighteenth century is almost invariably couched in terms of its differences from Western European norms. Like many scholars, Aleksandr Kamensky charts the course of Russian cultural currents during the eighteenth century as a struggle between those who continued 1 John Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (New York: James Pott, 1902), 22. 2 Steven Sabol, The Touch of Civilization (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2017), 3. to embrace traditional Russian influences and those who sought to implement reform along Western lines. For Kamensky – and many others – conditions in Russia’s colonies were distinguished from those prevailing in Britain’s possessions by far more than their geographical distance from the imperial center; arguing that Russia’s history demonstrates “another set of values, developed along a different path”3 than Western Europe, Kamensky postulates a far smaller degree of democratic participation, as well as religious and social freedom, within Russia’s possessions, and a generally less vibrant and far-reaching pattern of commerce than in Great Britain’s own colonies of the time. Although eighteenth century Russian colonialism can quite obviously be differentiated from British expansion by the continental, contiguous accretion of territory which largely characterized it, as well as by the rigid definition in fundamental law of Russia’s social estates (soslovie), do those differences alone constitute adequate grounds with which to segregate Russia’s entire program of colonization from Britain’s own efforts – to proclaim Russian imperialism an exceptional phenomenon? Regardless of the methodology of acquisition, were the basic social and political power structures maintaining control in Russia’s acquired territories very much different to those employed by Great Britain? Were the political, economic and social dynamics between imperial metropole and peripheral possession any different? Between imperial government and local administration? Was Russian control of its periphery not threatened by the same internal and external factors as Great Britain’s overseas colonies? This thesis compares the administration of the Governorate of Astrakhan in the Russian Empire and 3 Aleksandr Kamensky, The Russian Empire in the Eighteenth Century: Searching for a Place in the World (New York: Routledge, 1997), 7. 2 the Province of North Carolina in the British Empire during the eighteenth century in order to answer these questions, relying primarily on the thousands of primary source documents from the time contained in the Colonial and State Records of North Carolina, as well as documents translated and excerpted or cited by other scholars in the case of Astrakhan. Beginning with an examination of the particular concepts in imperialism and colonialism that provide