Acknowledgments
Introduction The Meanings of Steller and His Sea Cow
1. The Second Kamchatka Expedition and the Empires of Nature
2. Promyshlenniki, Siberians, Alaskans, and Catastrophic Change in
an Island Ecosystem
3. Naturalists Plan a North Pacific Empire
4. Extinction and Empire on the Billings Expedition
5. Ordering Arctic Nature: Peter Simon Pallas, Thomas Pennant, and
Imperial Natural History
6. Empire of Order
Conclusion Empire and Extinction
Appendix
Notes
Index
Ryan Tucker Jones is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Auckland.
"Casts new light on Russia's imperial policies in the Pacific,
joining recent works by Ilya Vinkovetsky, Gwenn Miller, and Elena
Govor...The balance in the text between the cumulative data on
environmental damage and the men who made science successfully
humanizes a difficult story, and should manage to engage students
in an unfamiliar chapter of global history."--The Russian
Review
"Ryan Tucker Jones takes the environmental history of colonialism
to new lands--and seas--in telling the story of the Russian
Empire's quest for fur and other animal products in the North
Pacific, from Kamchatka to Alaska's panhandle. It is a memorable
tale of two syndromes, the relentless search for a fast ruble at
the expense of sea otters, seals, and other marine mammals combined
with the rueful recognition of what sustained slaughter meant,
including rapid
extinction of that gentle giant, Steller's sea cow. Empire of
Extinction is simultaneously environmental history, imperial
history, Russian history, and history of expeditionary science-all
wrapped in
a highly readable package."--J.R. McNeill, Georgetown
University
"Moving beyond human actors and utilizing an innovative
methodological skillset that he himself has crafted, Ryan Tucker
Jones compels us to reconsider the interactions of ecology, empire,
commercial gain, and the practice of natural science. His book is
pioneering on a number of fronts. The emphasis on marine animals
and the people who hunted and studied them elucidates far-reaching
relationships that have not been previously analyzed. Empire of
Extinction brings in methodological insights from environmental
history and the history of science both to enrich and to challenge
the established ways of looking at the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Russian
empire on both sides of the Pacific. It is the first book that
integrates Russian America and the Russian Far East into the
broader history of the Pacific, to the benefit of both."--Ilya
Vinkovetsky, author of Russian America: An Overseas Colony of a
Continental Empire
"Empire of Extinction is a masterful study of Russia's Pacific
empire, but it also offers much more than that. Ryan Tucker Jones's
careful analysis lends keen insights into the history of scientific
exploration, environmental change, indigenous populations, and the
brutal pursuit of power and profits. This book is a stellar
accomplishment."--David Igler, author of The Great Ocean: Pacific
Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush
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