Price: To Be Established

Publication Date: March/April 2008

Please advise me when published: click here (This will make you eligible for a 20% discount off the recommended purchase price when published)

Summary:

Over 1000 Russian lead-alloy seals connected with the flax and hemp trade have been recorded in England and Scotland and are now to be found in British museum collections. A large number are also still held in the private collections of landowners, collectors and metal-detector users. The seals on which dates are legible range from the 1740s to the beginning of the 20th century and were introduced in an attempt to regulate the quality of the fibres presented by Russian merchants or their agents at the ports for export.
A number of other seals are described which are linked with other trades. They often carry the name of the owner of the enterprise. However, these are relatively few in number compared with those generated by the flax and hemp industries. They include Railway seals issued by different Russian Railway Companies, Fur-trade seals and a number of seals connected with other enterprises. In a few instances the seals bear the names of British merchants resident in Russia.
The discovery in the last decade and a half of a growing number of such Russian lead seals in the UK has opened up a new source of material for analysing the history of commercial relations between Russian and Britain. The seals had to conform to certain criteria, having on the one hand to correspond to the technical standards of the day and on the other to distinguish goods, their quality and the ports from which the goods were exported.
The monograph describes the different types of seal found hitherto, investigates the background to their use and provides a record of the inscriptions on them. Its publication is intended to bring them more into the public and academic view so that they will be preserved as items containing much information about the trading practices of Britain and Russia. Fewer will be cast aside, and a more accurate record made of those many seals which are undoubtedly still to be discovered.
Some seals present their information clearly and in a form that can be comprehended relatively easily, but others use codification systems which need to be deciphered. Most importantly the seals provide us with the names of over 300 operatives whose identity would otherwise remain unknown to us. When coupled with other information presented on the seal it becomes possible to trace the movements of particular individuals within the quality control system for which they were working.
Finds clearly reflect the economic and political events of the 19th century. Russian exports were subject to constant fluctuations caused by political events, failed harvests and economic crises in Europe. As would be expected, the years of the Napoleonic and Crimean wars resulted in a reduction in the number of finds. The shift of 19th-century finds from England to Scotland was brought about by the development and expansion in Angus and Fife of the linen, flax and hemp spinning industries in the late 18th and 19th centuries. The decrease in the numbers of lead-alloy seals from St Petersburg which is recorded from the mid-19the century was chiefly a direct result of the abolition of the quality control system that had given rise to the use of these seals in the first place.
The monograph, which will provide a firm and reliable basis for further study, is presented in three parts. Part one is the most important for scholars and general users wishing to interpret individual examples of seals which have been recovered in Great Britain and understand the reasons why they came into being. With the help of over 150 illustrations it classifies and guides the reader through the different types of seal so far recovered, and maps help the reader identify the areas of Russia in which the seals originated. Part two provides a transcription and transliteration of all seals so far recorded. Part three extracts and lists information contained on the seals in a number of appendices which include a survey of the dates of the seals and lists of names of officers employed in checking the grade of flax and hemp, as well as the number of the posts at which they worked.
Russian lead-alloy seals cast light on the many varied commercial links that Russia or Russian-based businesses maintained with enterprises throughout Britain and additionally carry information which enables us to discern more clearly the actual operation of business over the last two and a half centuries in its attempts to control the quality of goods exported.

Author

JOHN SULLIVAN began studying Russian at school in Sheffield in 1950. After completing a degree in Russian Studies at the University of Manchester he undertook post-graduate research at the Universities of Moscow and Manchester before moving to Oxford where he was engaged as a Research Assistant and Assistant Editor of the Oxford English-Russian Dictionary. In 1964 he took up the post of Lecturer in Russian at the University of St Andrews where he became Senior Lecturer and later Chairman of the Russian Department.
His research interest lay in the development of the Russian Language, especially in the 16-18th centuries, and in Russian palaeography which led in part to his transcribing two Russian song-books of the early 18th-century, one a collection of 50 religious songs and the other a collection of over 180 love songs. He also specialized in the 18th-century manuscript tradition and literary style of the Russian Old Believers. In the 1990s he participated in a number of expeditions within Russia organized by the University of Moscow, gathering linguistic, literary and historical material on the Old Believers.
Since the mid-1990s his interest has switched to Russian lead-alloy seals, a subject on which he has published a number of articles both in English and Russian, and for which his previous research background has provided a firm base from which to interpret the imprints found on them.