In the third decade of the seventeenth century, Russian military personnel, fur traders and hunters began their expansion into what is now Yakutia (Sakha) in Eastern Siberia. They came in pursuit of furs and sought to subjugate the local population in order to extract fur tribute. This presentation examines the human costs and compromises that made conquest possible.
The vast region of Northern Asia has long remained relatively marginal in Eurasian and Asian studies and is often treated as a remote and little-studied frontier. Far-flung frontiers, however, can be highly revealing of the both the inherent processes and existential requirements of empire.
To better understand this understudied colonial setting requires looking beyond formal political structures and focusing on everyday encounters between settlers and Indigenous communities. Rather than framing colonization solely as a process of political conquest or alliance-building, this talk introduces research highlighting the intimate, gendered interactions that developed between Russian newcomers and Indigenous communities. Russian fur traders, trappers, and military servitors typically arrived without families and encountered Yakut, Tungus, Yukaghir, and Even populations. The resulting gender imbalance among settlers made the trade in Indigenous women both possible and profitable. At the same time, some of these commercial transactions culminated in Orthodox marriages. By examining these practices, the study sheds light on how racial, cultural, and religious boundaries were negotiated through everyday interactions between Russian colonizers and Indigenous societies in seventeenth-century Eastern Siberia.
The research is based on unpublished and previously overlooked archival sources now preserved in the Archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Drawing on various types of petitions, legal cases, and administrative registers, the project raises new questions that have received little attention in existing historiography.
The evidence presented in the sources also highlights a broader interpretive challenge. Modern legal frameworks, including those in the United States, do not always classify forced marriage as human trafficking, often arguing that it lacks the key element of exploitation. If such practices remain ambiguously defined even today, how should we interpret marital transactions in the seventeenth century—a period in which the concept of consensual marriage was still nascent? In regions where bride price and other marital exchanges were customary, the line between commerce, coercion, and marriage becomes even more difficult to discern.
Dr. Angelina Kalashnikova uses archival materials, including previously overlooked documents, to explore the history of slavery, trafficking, and hostage-taking in 17th-century Yakutsk, Siberia. She aims to understand Siberia’s past, particularly women’s history, and contribute to postcolonial studies. She completed her doctorate in Russia at the Saint Petersburg Institute of History, Russian Academy of Science, in 2022. At Kiel University, she works at the Institute of History.
Presented by the Department of History, the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, and the Center for East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies.