Gibson, James R., and Istomin, Alexei A., with the assistance of Valery A. Tishkov (eds) James R. Gibson (review)

REVIEWS 761 with ‘serfdom’. Yet how this worked in practice, and the forms that protest took, remains underdeveloped. Specifically, the workings of manorial courts and seigniorial justice are passed over in less than a page. The remaining chapters are dedicated to an economic analysis of demesne lordship, in an attempt to explain its rise, its impact on agriculture, and on economic conditions. This provides a systematic critique of those macrohistorical accounts that have sought to use ‘re-feudalization’ as a means to explain wider patterns of East European backwardness and the regions’ divergence from Western trajectories of ‘modernity’ — a framework that, as Cerman points out, has been abandoned in almost all other fields of historiography yet persists in general accounts of East European rural society. Again, Cerman’s arguments are important, yet here the analysis can be lost amidst the statistics used in the author’s attempts to detail the great variety of conditions that existed in a region stretching from Scandinavia to the Balkans. Throughout the book, the reader is left with the clear impression of how varied the terms of lord-peasant relations in East Central Europe were, both in region and over time. The assertive conclusion that there was no age of ‘second serfdom’, nor even a general model of lord-peasant relations and agrarian development that could be applied to anywhere in the region, is important to make, born out by the wide array of recent research cited in the bibliography. Overall, this book should be essential reading for anyone interested in the early modern history of East and Central Europe, and in agrarian history more broadly. It is hoped that Cerman’s survey will become the starting point for all those who address lord-peasant relations in our region, and the myth of ‘second serfdom’ can be abandoned once and for all. Department of History Robert W. Gray University of Winchester Gibson, James R., and Istomin, Alexei A., with the assistance of Valery A. Tishkov (eds). Russian California, 1806–1860: A History in Documents. Hakluyt Society Series 3, Vols 26 & 27. Translated by James R. Gibson. Ashgate for the Hakluyt Society, London, 2014. lxii + 547; xii + 640 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £125.00. As readers familiar with the field will recognize, James R. Gibson of York University in Toronto and Alexei A. Istomin of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, the editors of this collection, are scholars who are truly unrivalled in the depth of their expertise on Russian colonialism in California. Their attention to detail, coupled with an eye for the wider historical context, marks their joint effort as a particularly fruitful international collaboration. SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 762 There is considerable overlap between the contents of these volumes and the similarly weighty Russian-language document collection Rossiia v Kalifornii (Russia in California), compiled by the same editors and published in Moscow by Nauka in 2005 (volume 1) and 2012 (volume 2), but there are also important differences. In contrast to Rossiia v Kalifornii, this English-language collection is focused entirely on the Russian colonial venture (as opposed to, for example, the Spanish and the Mexican) and composed exclusively of translations of Russian-language documents, 492 of them in all. The document collection is accompanied by an Introduction that runs to some 173 dense and substantive pages — essentially a monograph in its own right. Covering in detail such subjects as: the Russian advance into California; the social and ethnic composition of the population of Fort Ross and the smaller settlements; the economic basis of the colony; Russian relations with the local indigenous peoples and the Californios; Russian exploration of the region and the eventual withdrawal from it, the introduction constitutes as comprehensive an empirical historical account of Russian California as can be found in the literature. This alone is a significant contribution. Taken together, the introduction and the document collection become, as the subtitle aptly suggests, a veritable ‘history in documents’ about how the Russian-American Company operated its Californian colony. Never before have we had such a detailed and clear picture. Russian colonial activity in Alta California peaked in the years between 1812 and 1841, when the Russian-American...

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