A 'Havock Made among Them': Animals, Empire, and Extinction in the Russian North Pacific, 1741-1810

• Published in: Environmental History
• Main Author: Jones, Ryan Tucker
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University Press 2011
• Subjects: ARTICLES; Pacific; Russian North
• Online Access: http://envhis.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/16/4/585; https://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emr091

In the second half of the eighteenth century, Russian fur traders in the North Pacific decimated marine mammal populations, a loss made easier to observe by the region's island geography. At the same time, European and Russian observers on several Russian-sponsored voyages of exploration noted the extinction and near extinction of these animals with alarm. In their published accounts of their voyages, these observers linked the extinction to the poor environmental ethos of the Russian Empire. This history provides another example of the power of colonial locations to influence European environmental discourses and demonstrates that extinction had become a European concern earlier than previously suspected.