Janet Hartley
Russia in the Napoleonic Era: War, Economy and Utopianism
This paper looks at the economic impact of the Napoleon Wars on Russia. It discusses the material impact of the wars, the human cost of war, and the impact of war on Russia’s finances. But the focus of the paper is on the military colonies, which were set up in attempt to defray the material and human costs of maintaining an enormous standing army, a cost which “backward” Russia could no longer afford in the early nineteenth century. Colonies were supposed to supply future manpower, and to occupy and maintain men and officers in peacetime. The paper will show that far from the colonies helping to ease the financial burden on the state, in practice they cost a vast amount of money to set up and maintain. The reason for this was that the colonies were intended to do far more—to modernize agriculture, improve standards of life, and, in the process , to create new types of “citizen” for the state. This is a study of utopianism as much as a study of economic impact.
Janet Hartley is Professor of International History Pro Director (Teaching and Learning) at the London School of Economics, Department of International History. She has written books and articles, and edited books, on the military, diplomatic, cultural, social and political history of Russia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her books include: Alexander I (1994); A Social History of the Russian Empire 1650–1825 (1999); and Charles Whitworth: Diplomat in the Age of Peter the Great (2002). Her most recent book is Russia, 1762–1825: Military Power. The State, and the People (2008), which studies the impact on Russia, a country which we would normally consider to be “backward,” of almost continual warfare in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. She is currently completing a history of Siberia, from the late sixteenth century to the present.
