Our Notes & References

A new era in Alaska and the North Pacific: the first complete edition of the Russian-American Company’s founding papers, together with further decrees and State documents relating to its early development. Extremely rare.

The Russian-American Company (RAC) in Alaska was chartered by Paul I in 1799; it was based on the existing Shelikhov-Golikov Company, a Russian fur trading venture, founded by Irkutsk entrepreneurs Grigory Shelikhov and Ivan Golikov in 1783. When Alexander I succeeded to the throne in 1801, he took an interest in the rapidly developing and profitable business. He appointed Count Nikolai Petrovich Rumiantsev first as Director of the Department of Water Transport, and then Minister of Commerce as early as 1802. Rumiantsev was a staunch supporter of the expansion of the Russian influence in the Pacific and North America, and a major shareholder of the Russian-American Company. With renewed ambitions, the Company needed an updated and enlarged legal frame.

Only three legal documents relating to the RAC had been published previously, in 1799, separately from each other: Paul I’s Three Decrees, Pravila [Rules] and Soderzhanie privilegii [Contents of Privileges]. This 1802 edition is much more comprehensive in establishing the Company’s shareholding matters, rights, responsibilities and in some extent its ambitions. It integrates Paul’s documents published earlier and features a wealth of new material, especially Alexander’s decrees. These additions are:

– Act of “the American United Company” (dated 3 August 1798), signed by the founders of the Company Natalia Shelikhova (wife of Grigory Shelikhov), Ivan Golikov and other shareholders, in the city of Irkutsk. Read in Peterhof on 4 July (!!) 1799, at a meeting of the Council at the Supreme Court, this Act is here published for the first time.

– Decree of Tsar Paul I, from the Governing Senate (dated 19 October 1800), in which the Emperor ordered the Governing Board of the Company to be moved from Irkutsk to St Petersburg, and the stocks of the Company to be split, to boost the influx of new shareholders;

– Decree of Tsar Alexander I, from the Governing Senate (dated 10 September 1801), outlining the particulars according to which the Company’s stocks were to be split;

– Report from the Governing Senate to Tsar Alexander I, informing His Majesty about the need to audit the Company’s shareholders and on the basis of that verify the price of each share, as well as to advertise the Company’s shares in Russian newspapers, informing citizens of this profitable opportunity. The report was approved by the Emperor on 17 August 1801;

– Letter from Tsar Alexander I to the directors of the Company (dated 25 March 1802), expressing the Emperor’s satisfaction at the growth of the Company and announcing His Majesty’s decision to contribute 10,000 roubles to the Company’s capital, for the benefit of the poor. The Emperor wrote, ‘I will be pleased if my example will increase the public trust in the Company and will attract private individuals to this new Russian industry, which links so tightly the benefits of the State to the private profits’. This is the first publication of the first direct financial involvement of the Tsar in the RAC;

– Letter from Tsar Alexander I (also dated 25 March 1802), in which he orders the Lord High Steward (Hofmeister) and the Head of the Cabinet of His Imperial Majesty Dmitry Guriev to supervise the use of profits obtained from the stocks purchased by His Majesty.

The Tsar’s support boosted the Company’s activities. In 1802 the Company’s governors, headed by Rumiantsev, presented Alexander with a plan of an expedition to establish trading links with Japan. This was achieved in 1805 under the command of Admiral Adam von Krusenstern, and its results paved the way for the first treaty between Russia and Japan half-a-century later (Treaty of Shimoda in February 1855).

Similarly, the RAC fur trade flourished: between 1797 and 1821 the Company collected an enormous inventory of furs, worth in total 16 million roubles (including 1.3 million foxes of several species and 72,894 sea otters). With the decline in animal population, the Company’s profits began to suffer, but the financial ruin was prevented by the start of salt mining.

Of the utmost rarity.

There two variant imprints of this edition: ours at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, and in Moscow, at the Senate Printing House. Both are very rare: we could trace only one example of each, both in St. Petersburg (ours in the Russian State Historical Archive, the other in the Russian National Library). WorldCat does not add any holding, but we are aware of one other copy of ours.

This edition was reissued in 1808 by Baikov in St. Petersburg. Of this second edition WorldCat shows only one holding, in the Library of Congress.

The 1799 publications appear also in very limited quantity: The Three Decrees on the Establishment of the Russo-American Company in Harvard and Yale; the Pravila dlia uchrezhdaemoi kompanii and the Soderzhanie privilegii both in the University of Alaska.

Not in Lada-Mocarski, who knew only these 1799 publications and later 19^th-c. collections.

Finally, the 1821 Four Decrees renewing the rights and privileges of the Russo-American Company for 20 years (Senat Printing House, St Petersburg) is listed at Harvard, Yale and a few other libraries.

Bibliography

Okun S.B., Rossiisko-amerikanskaia kompaniia: [istoricheskiy ocherk]. Moscow, Leningrad, 1939.

Tikhmenev, P.A. A History of the Russian-American Company. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978, pp. 146–151.

Stepanova Ye.Ye., Governing Bodies of Russian-American Company, Eastern-Siberian Institute of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, Irkutsk), 2019.

cf. Lada-Mocarski 161.