Empire Maker

[Owens provides] full and useful context for every stage of Baranov's career, and much information which helps the reader appreciate the character of the man and how his experiences contributed to his success as chief manager. An important addition to the growing literature on the history of Russian America. -- Stephen Haycox, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Alaska Anchorage Will be the definitive, critical biography of Baranov; there is really nothing else like it. In every chapter, Owens sets Baranov's life in the context of the natural, geopolitical, and historical setting, filling in the background to the Baranov we encounter in the existing documentation and histories. -- Richard Dauenhauer, coeditor of Russians in Tlingit America In Owens's hands, the story of Aleksandr Baranov becomes something much larger and more momentous than biography. Empire Maker brings to life the machinations of the Russian Empire in the northern Pacific: its ambitions and plans, its relations with indigenous populations, and certainly its leadership by Baranov. Based on decades of archival research, this may be the most important study to date of Russia's American empire. Owen's book is simply a phenomenal achievement. -- David Igler, author of The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush Aleksandr Baranov deserves to be known in the same company as John Jacob Astor and other frontier entrepreneurs whose enterprising efforts transformed North America in the age of imperial expansion. He reshaped the Pacific Rim and left an enduring mark on the geography and history of that far flung and diverse quarter of the globe. Exhaustively researched and elegantly written, Kenneth N. Owens's treatment of this intriguing, colorful, and significant frontier figure will reward readers and reign as the definitive biography for decades to come. -- Albert Hurtado, author of Herbert Eugene Bolton: Historian of the American Borderlands

A native of northern Russia, Alexander Baranov was a middle-aged merchant trader with no prior experience in the fur trade when, in 1790, he arrived in North America to assume command over Russia’s highly profitable sea otter business. With the title of chief manager, he strengthened his leadership role after the formation of the Russian American Company in 1799. An adventuresome, dynamic, and charismatic leader, he proved to be something of a commercial genius in Alaska, making huge profits for company partners and shareholders in Irkutsk and St. Petersburg while receiving scandalously little support from the homeland.

Baranov receives long overdue attention in Kenneth Owens’s Empire Maker, the first scholarly biography of Russian America’s virtual imperial viceroy. His eventful life included shipwrecks, battles with Native forces, clashes with rival traders and Russian Orthodox missionaries, and an enduring marriage to a Kodiak Alutiiq woman with whom he had two children. In the process, the book reveals maritime Alaska and northern California during the Baranov era as fascinating cultural borderlands, where Russian, English, Spanish, and New England Yankee traders and indigenous peoples formed complex commercial, political, and domestic relationships that continue to influence these regions today.