Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

Expanding their mining network across Siberia, delivering silver from the Altai and iron from the Urals to St Petersburg, the Demidovs built new roads, canals and bridges. From 1723, their workers were free from conscription, and their factories were granted the right to buy and sell serfs. However, after the death of Akinfy Demidov in 1745 an investigation began into the silver workings on the Serpentine Mountain in the Altai. But no crime was found, or it was discreetly ignored. The reasons why Christiany did not share the dismal fate of his compatriot Justi were simple: there really was silver in the Serpentine Mountain, and Christiany’s skills were also real. In 1764, in one of these Altai factories, the engineer Ivan Polzunov, a Siberian peasant who had studied in the Urals, built the first steam engine that didn’t depend on a waterwheel. Emancipating the energy of coal from the flow of the river, Polzunov’s engine started the second phase of the global industrial revolution: his steam engine was the first ever that could be installed anywhere, even on the top of a mountain, though it needed a three-storey building.

Like his father before him, Akinfy also had three sons, but he left the business to the youngest, Nikita. The eldest son, Prokofiy, disputed the will, accusing Nikita of the heresy of Old Belief. The empress Elizabeth I personally supported Prokofiy; the Demidov empire was split, and the sons received equal shares. Prokofiy worked as a botanist, helped the poor and founded a bank, but he was mostly known for his various eccentricities; in 1778 he organised a public festivity in St Petersburg, and for some reason hundreds of people died from drinking wine there. The other sons travelled abroad a great deal. Nikita, the youngest son and his father’s favourite, corresponded with Voltaire but took no interest in the mines. Nikita’s son, Nikolay, preferred Tuscany, where he became a noted philanthropist. He bought up property throughout Italy, and there is a square named after him in Florence. His son, Anatoly, married a niece of Napoleon. The ancestral line degenerated from disgraced but industrious Old Believers to high, indolent nobility.

Note

Notes

1   Goody, Metals, Culture and Capitalism . 2   Needleman and Needleman, ‘Lead poisoning and the decline of the Roman aristocracy’. 3   Childe, Man Makes Himself ; Drews, The End of the Bronze Age . 4   Graeber, Debt . 5   Muhly et al., ‘Iron in Anatolia and the nature of the Hittite iron industry’; Pense, ‘Iron through the ages’; Hedeager, Iron Age Myth and Materiality . 6   Collins, ‘Mineral enterprise in China’; Hartwell, ‘A cycle of economic change in imperial China’; Lynch, Mining in World History . 7   Steinmetz, The Richest Man Who Ever Lived . 8   Fors, The Limits of Matter . 9   Jardine, Worldy Goods . 10  Roper, Martin Luther ; Schilling and Johnston, Martin Luther . 11  Cole, The Potosí Mita ; Findlay and O’Rourke, Power and Plenty ; Lane, Potosí ; Barragán, ‘Extractive economy and institutions’. 12  Nriagu, ‘Mercury pollution’; Lynch, Mining in World History ; Lane, Potosí . 13  De Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis ; Fagan, The Little Ice Age ; Parker and Smith, The General Crisis of the 17th Century ; Koch et al., ‘Earth system impacts of the European arrival’; Blom, Nature’s Mutiny . 14  Koch et al., ‘Earth system impacts of the European arrival’. 15  Principe, ‘Alchemy restored’; Smith, The Business of Alchemy ; Bauer, The Alchemy of Conquest ; Fors, The Limits of Matter . 16  Cressy, Salpeter ; Buchanan, Gunpowder, Explosives and the State ; Robertson, ‘Reworking seventeenth-century saltpetre’. 17  Robertson, ‘A gunpowder controversy in the early Royal Society’; Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump . 18  McCune, ‘Mining the connections’; Heckscher, An Economic History of Sweden , pp. 85–7. 19  Fors, The Limits of Matter , pp. 84–90. 20  Bartlett, ‘Cameralism in Russia’. 21 Tribe, ‘Baltic cameralism?’. 22  Small, The Cameralists ; Wakefield, The Disordered Police State ; Raskov, ‘Kameralizm knig’; Zubkov, ‘Kameralizm kak model’’. 23  Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and its Institutions , p. 18. 24  Adam, The Political Economy of J. H. G. Justi ; Wakefield, The Disordered Police State . 25  Kolchin, ‘Obrabotka zheleza’; Serbina, Krest’y anskaia zhelezodelatel’naya promyshlennost’ . 26  Boterbloem, Moderniser of Russia ; Yurkin, Andrei Andreevich Vinius . 27  Ogarkov, Demidovy ; Hudson, The Rise of the Demidov Family . 28  Pashkov, ‘Inostrannye spetsialisty’; Yurkin, ‘Genrikh Butenant’; Kiselev, ‘State metallurgy factories’. 29  ‘Sozdanie pervoi v mire universalnoi parovoi mashiny’.