Empire of Extinction

The scope of Ryan Tucker Jones’s book takes in the period between the extension of the reach of Russian fur-traders to the Aleutian Islands in 1742 and the sale of the colony of Alaska in 1867. Russian imperial policy resulted in significant environmental events in the North Pacific, new perspectives on the region’s natural history and environmental conservation, and secured the continued removal of lands from indigenous control. Jones refers to environmental catastrophe as ‘in some ways, the defining story of Russia’s eighteenth-century North Pacific empire’ (p. 61). The extinction of Steller’s sea cow ( Rhytina borealis ) in the 1760s—its already dwindling numbers rapidly reduced through overhunting encouraged by Russian imperial trade from 1741—serves as the book’s point of entry into extinction theories and approaches to conservation arising from Russian imperial activity in the Pacific. The manatee’s case alerted naturalists to the danger of species extinction and, Jones argues, prompted some of the most progressive conservation policies of the nineteenth century

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