We tend to imagine the Arctic and subarctic regions as ahistorical wildernesses, frozen spaces scarcely touched by the modern world, newly under threat from resource extraction, geopolitical contests and, above all, climate change.
But the Arctic—and the greater Bering Sea region in particular—has a history as a crossroads of cultures, continents and empires.1 Here the polyglot Pacific world, continental fur trades, maritime industries and indigenous societies collided in cross-cultural exchange, conflict and compromise in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The region was not only shaped by imperial projects, but shaped them in turn. In the Arctic and subarctic (as elsewhere in the world), the environment was not merely a backdrop to the human drama of imperial expansion, but an actor within it.2 Paying attention to environmental conditions in and around the Bering Sea region also helps us to appreciate indigenous agency in contested imperial territory. In this region of extremes where empires were overstretched, authority nebulous and technology fragile, outsiders were forced to reckon with indigenous authority and knowledge. Both the environment and its inhabitants (including Unangan [Aleut], Yupik, Chukchi and Inupiaq peoples) were far from being frozen in time, but rather were dynamic and complex. As the anthropologist Julie Cruikshank has argued, both Natives and strangers in the far North simultaneously tried to make sense of each other and of the environmental changes brought about by the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850.3 As this chapter will argue, these divergent and coeval responses to the environmental changes wrought by extractive industries were integral to the operation (and limitation) of both imperial and commercial ventures.Two key industries defined the Bering Sea’s entanglement in nineteenth-century empires: the maritime fur trade and the whale fishery. Of course, these enterprises were not the only reasons why the Arctic and subarctic regions attracted European and American interest. The search for the Northwest Passage from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries (including the search for the missing British expedition of Sir John Franklin from 1848 to 1859), and the extension of the continental fur trade, the sealing industry and commercial fisheries all played important roles. The gold rushes of the 1890s and 1900s, as well, drew thousands of outsiders north with significant and lasting ramifications for indigenous peoples.
But the maritime fur trade that formed the cornerstone of the Russian colonial experiment in Alaska from 1741 to 1867, and the whaling industry that drew thousands of multi-ethnic whalers to the north slope of Alaska from 1848 to 1907, have been comparatively understudied.4 Yet an examination of both industries can, as Tony Ballantyne has argued in a New Zealand context, help us to appreciate not only how this apparently peripheral region participated in circuits of global capitalism, but also how indigenous agency (even when it appeared to be subdued and subjected) shaped and limited those projects.5 Moreover, these industries crossed not only the physical but also the temporal boundaries of empires in this region. The sale of Alaska in 1867 transferred the territory and its waters from the established Russian Empire to the nascent American one, making it possible to imagine (and, indeed, necessary to undertake) a transnational and trans-imperial history within a clearly defined geographical frame. While the transfer of sovereignty certainly impacted on both the whaling and maritime fur industries, by and large both commercial practices and indigenous engagement responded more to local environmental conditions than to the dictates of the state. Looking at the maritime industries of the Bering Sea region can illuminate not only the messy, improvised and contested nature of imperial and commercial projects, but also how both indigenous peoples and outsiders struggled to adapt to the shifting ground beneath them.