On Easter morning 1831, Joseph Major was murdered in his Urals home. A Scottish engineer, he had lived for 26 years in the gateway to Siberia, producing that most modern of devices, the steam engine, for a variety of Russian enterprises. In this episode, I talk about how foreign technology, Russian ingenuity, and massive industrial colonization created the conditions in which Major lived and worked.
Sources:
F. B. Bondarenko, V. P. Mikitiuk, V. A. Shkerin, Britanskie mekhaniki v predprinimateli na Urale v XIX – nachale XX v. (Ekaterinburg: Bank kul’turnoi informatsii, 2009)
E. Tarakanova, ‘Karl Gaskoin i russkie pushki’, Sever, nos. 4, 5, 6 (2001): 96-114; 165—177; 187-201
E. S. Tarakanova, ‘Poiavlenie i rasprostranenie parovykh mashin v Rossii. Osnovye etapy i osobennosti etogo protsessa’, Polzunovskii al’manakh, no. (2004), 178-186
A. Keller, ‘“Raison d’etat” i “chastnyi interes” v Rossii kontsa XVIII v. – nachala XIX v.: na primere A. Knaufa v gornozavodskoi promyshlennosti Urala, 1797-1833 gg’, Bylye gody, vol. 37, no. 3 (2015), 508-518
A. Cross, ‘By the Banks of the Neva’: Chapters from the Lives and Careers of the British in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
M. R. Hill, ‘Russian Iron Production in the Eighteenth Century’, Icon, vol. 12 (2006), 118-167
P. Dukes, A History of the Urals: Russia’s Crucible from Early Empire to the Post-Soviet Era (London: Bloomsburg Academic, 2015)
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