Abstract:

How to build new metallurgical factories? This question haunted eighteenth-century Russian industrialists as well as the author of this paper. The eighteenth century witnessed Russia’s transformation from a country without large-scale domestic mining to a leading exporter of iron, copper, and silver to Europe. I argue that the key to understanding the scale-up of mines and factories in eighteenth-century Russia lies not in big concepts such as Enlightenment, modernization, or Catherinian enlightened absolutism. Instead, I propose “replication” as a vantage point to examine industrial development in eighteenth-century Russia and use replication to construct an alternative narrative that supplements or challenges commonplace stories about Russian enlightenment, absolutism, and empire.

Replication rests on two primary techniques: modeling and compartmentalization. Modeling creates prototypes from which homogeneous copies are further produced. Compartmentalization divides things into parts to increase replication’s efficiency and scalability. I examine a replication process that took place in Russia’s Orenburg province in the latter half of the eighteenth century: the construction of mining infrastructure. Consequently, I focus on a specific production model for mining and its necessitated compartmentalization. This model was built upon five pillars: natural resources, labor resources, technologies, regulatory framework, and the built environment. Russian bureaucrats and industrialists had molded this mining model by the mid-eighteenth century based on their mining practices in the central Urals and Siberia. Compartmentalization in this context meant treating biological and nonbiological entities the mining industry entailed as decontextualizable objects that could be reproduced from place to place. With the establishment of Orenburg province in 1744, the Russian state and individual industrialists initiated a concerted campaign to multiply or reproduce (razmnozhat’) metallurgical factories in mineral-rich Orenburg province. I examine the endeavors to replicate factories and mines in the new province based on the established model and demonstrate how situated socio-material environments in Orenburg province challenged Russia’s mining prototype.

Building upon the Russian mining model, I illustrate how enlightenment was itself designed as an overarching teleological model that was meant to be replicated across spaces. I question the conventional wisdom on enlightenment and enlightened absolutism as epistemic machinery for epoch creation in eighteenth-century Russia and even beyond. Instead, I suggest a new approach that shifts the focus from the totalizing force of enlightenment and absolutism to the interactions among multiscalar forces of humans and nonhumans, material and non-material. I show that enlightenment was always an encounter and negotiation, and absolutism was never so absolute.