Language For Trade
An Early Modern Dutch How-To Guide to Russian Trade
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25365/cts-2022-4-2-2Keywords:
Global History, trade, Early Modern, Translation, Russia, The NetherlandsAbstract
This article uses a case-study of a Dutch translation of a Russianbook of tariffs and trading laws from 1724 to examine how language shaped and was shaped by global trade. In the early modern period shifting trade routes brought new commodities with new names, imperial expansion reified imperial terms as the norm for imperial-control/ed products, and both joined old terms for the technica/ities and legalities of international trade. All those terms had to be arranged within texts, tables, and books, and rearranged in translations vital to international trade. Such mercantile texts aimed not for definitive and lasting translations, but rather translations that worked in the immediate and fleeting context trade required. Comparing these two books shows how the semantics of commerce were shaped not only by linguistics but the expediencies of trade. Examining this unexpected and as-yet unused textual pairing demonstrates the interconnected nature of linguistic, mercantile, and material changes in the early modern global world.
References
AKELEV, Evgenii V. & WILSON, Leann (2016): “The Barber of All Russia: Lawmaking, Resistance, and Mutual Adaptation during Peter the Great’s Cultural Reforms,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 17 (2), 241–275. https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2016.0019.
ANEMONE, Anthony (2000): “The Monsters of Peter the Great: The culture of the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera in the eighteenth century,” The Slavic and East European Journal 44 (4), 583–602. https://doi.org/10.2307/3086285.
ARGENT, Gesine & OFFORD, Derek & RJEOUTSKI, Vladislav (2015): “The Functions and Value of Foreign Languages in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” The Russian Review 74 (1), 1–19.
BERZOCK, K. B. (2019) (ed.): Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
BOGATYREV, Sergei (ed.) (2017): “Special Issue: The Journeys of Ivan Fedorov: New Perspectives on Early Cyrillic Printing,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 51 (2–3).
BOOMERT, Arie (2001): “Names for Tobago,” Journal de la Société des américanistes 87, 339–349. https://doi.org/10.4000/jsa.1856.
BOSS, Valentin (1972): Newton and Russia: The Early Influence, 1698–1796. Boston: Harvard University Press.
BRUCE, Jacob (1717): Kniga leksikon ili Sobranie rechei po alfavitu c roccijskogo na gollandskii iazyk [A lexicon book or collection of language arranged by alphabet translated from Russian into Dutch]. St Petersburg: 1717). https://kp.rusneb.ru/item/material/5fcf8bd1991f3b9142344d1b [Accessed 17.11.2021].
BURKE, Peter (2004): Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
CHIA, Ning (2018): “The Solon Sable Tribute, Hunters of Inner Asia and Dynastic Elites at the Imperial Centre,” Inner Asia 20 (1), 26–63. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26572272.
CHRISSIDIS, Nikolaos (2016): An Academy at the Court of the Tsars: Greek Scholars and Jesuit Education in Early Modern Russia. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press.
CRACRAFT, James (2004): The Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture. Boston: Harvard University Press.
FRANKLIN, Simon (2010): “Printing and Social Control in Russia 1: Passports,” Russian History 37 (3), 208–237. https://doi.org/10.1163/187633110X510428.
FRANKLIN, Simon (2011): “Printing and Social Control in Russia 2: Decrees,” Russian History 38 (4), 467–492. https://doi.org/10.1163/187633111X594560.
FRANKLIN, Simon (2015): “Printing Social Control in Russia 3: Blank Forms,” Russian History 42 (1), 114–135. https://doi.org/10.1163/18763316-04201010.
GERRITSEN, Anne & RIELLO, Giorgio (2015): The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World. New York and London: Routledge.
GRIFFIN, Clare (2017): “Bureaucracy and Knowledge Creation: The Apothecary Chancery,” in: FRANKLIN, Simon & BOWERS Katherine (eds): Information and Empire: Mechanisms of Communication in Russia, 1600-1850. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 255–285. https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0122
GRIFFIN, Clare (2020): “Disentangling Commodity Histories: Pauame and Sassafras in the Early Modern Global World,” Journal of Global History 15 (1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022819000305
HELLMAN, Lisa (2021): “Learning (on) Local Terms: The Cantonese dictionaries of two Eighteenth-Century European Traders,” Chronotopos 3 (1), 32–51. https://doi.org/10.25365/cts-2021-3-1-3
HENDRIKS, Pepijn & SCHAEKEN, Jos (2008): Tönnies Fenne’s Low German Manual of Spoken Russian, Pskov 1607: An Electronic Text Edition. Leiden: Opl. Slavistik, i, https://www.schaeken.nl/lu/research/online/editions/fenne11.pdf.
HOLLAND, Martha A. (2017): “Russian Orthographic Reform,” Mānoa Horizons 2 (1), 11–19. https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/8c5b4fc0-ec20-45f0-8946-04b1a3160a8d/content
JANSSON, Olena & WAUGH, Daniel C. (2023): “Muscovite Acquisition of Books from Poland in the Late 1640s to Early 1650s,” in: TORRES PRIETO, S. & FRANKLIN, A. (eds.): Medieval Rus’ and Early Modern Russia. London: Routledge, 165–182.
KAMENSKII, Aleksander (2014): “Do We Know the Composition of the 18th Century Russian society?” Cahiers du monde russe. Russie-Empire russe-Union soviétique et États indépendants 55 (1–2), 135–148. https://doi.org/10.4000/monderusse.7989
KOTILAINE, Jarmo T. (2003): “Competing Claims: Russian Foreign Trade via Arkhangelsk and the Eastern Baltic Ports in the 17th Century,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4 (2), 279–311. https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2003.0023
KOTILAINE, Jarmo T. (2005): Russia’s Foreign Trade and Economic Expansion in the Seventeenth Century: Windows on the World. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
LIU, Lydia H. (1999): “Legislating the Universal – The Circulation of International Law in the Nineteenth Century,” in: LIU, L. (ed.): Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 127–164.
LOBACHEV, Sergei (2017): “Indexing Books in 18th-century Russia: The Publishing Career of Andrei Bogdanov,” The Indexer 35 (2), 50–59. https://doi.org/10.3828/indexer.2017.17
MAIER, Ingrid (2002): “Newspaper Translations in Seventeenth-Century Muscovy: About the Sources, Topics and Periodicity of Kuranty ‘Made in Stockholm’ (1649),” in: AMBROSIANI, P. (ed.): Explorare necesse est: hyllningsskrift till Barbro Nilsson. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 181–190.
MAIER, Ingrid (2008): “Foreign-Language Specialists in Muscovite Russia (16th and early 17th Century),” in: LINDSTEDT, J. et al. (eds.): S ljubov'ju k slovu. Festschrift in Honour of Professor Arto Mustajoki on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday. Helsinki: Slavica Helsingiensia, 191–206.
MARTIN, Janet (2004): Treasure of the Land of Darkness: The Fur Trade and its Significance for Medieval Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
MIKHAILOVA, Yulia & PRESTEL, David K. (2011): “Cross Kissing: Keeping One’s Word in Twelfth-Century Rus,” Slavic Review 70 (1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.5612/slavicreview.70.1.0001.
MIRONESKO BIELOVA, Elena (2017): “The Phrasebook [‘razgovornik’] as a Communication Tool for Medieval Russian Travelers,” Postmedieval 8 (4), 425–43. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-016-0019-x.
MUGGLESTONE, Lynda (2014): “Ranging Knowledge by the Alphabet: The Literature of Categorization and Organization 1700–1830”, in: DEMARIA JR, R. & CHANG, H. & Zacher, S. (eds.): A Companion to British Literature, Volume 3: The Long Eighteenth Century, 1660–1830. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 207–222.
PEREZ-GARCIA, Manuel & WANG, Li & SVRIZ-WUCHERER, Omar & FERNANDEZ-DE-PINEDO, Nadia & DIAZ-ORDOÑEZ, Manuel (2022): “Big Data and ‘New’ Global History: Global Goods and Trade Networks in Early Modern China and Europe,” Itinerario 46 (1), 14–39. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0165115321000310
RABUZZI, Daniel A. (1995): “Eighteenth-Century Commercial Mentalities as Reflected and Projected in Business Handbooks,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (2), 169–189.
RJÉOUTSKI Vladislav & OFFORD, Derek (2013): Translation and Propaganda in the Mid-Eighteenth Century: French Versions of Sumarokov’s Tragedy ‘Sinav and Truvor’. Bristol: University of Bristol, https://data.bris.ac.uk/datasets/3nmuogz0xzmpx21l2u1m5f3bjp/Sumarokov%20introduction.pdf [Accessed 17.11.2021].
ROMANIELLO, Matthew P. (2011): “Muscovy’s Extraordinary Ban on Tobacco,” in: ROMANIELLO, M. P. & STARKS, Tricia (eds.): Tobacco in Russian History and Culture. London: Routledge, 19–35.
ROUÉ, Marie & MOLNAR, Zsolt (2017): Knowing our Lands and Resources: Indigenous and Local Knowledge of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in Europe and Central Asia. Paris: UNESCO Publishing, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000247462.
SCHAEKEN, Jos (2011): “On Language Learning and Intercultural Communication in Seventeenth-Century Russia,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 390–398. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41302567
STONE, Gerald (1996): A Dictionarie of the Vulgar Russe Tongue, Attributed to Mark Ridley, Edited from the Late-Sixteenth-Century Manuscripts and with an Introduction. Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag.
VELUVENKAMP, Jan Willem (2006): Archangel’sk: Niderlanskie predprinimateli v Rossii 1550–1785 [Archangel: Dutch Entrepreneurs in Russia 1550–1785] Moscow: ROSSPEN.
VELUWENKAMP, Jan Willem (2022): “Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Family Networks in Dutch Trade with Russia, 1590–1750,” in: DREHER, S. & MUELLER, W. (eds.): Foreigners in Muscovy: Western Immigrants in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century Russia. London: Taylor & Francis, 206–223.
WATSON, Christine (2012): Tradition and Translation: Maciej Stryjkowski’s Polish Chronicle in Seventeenth-century Russian Manuscripts. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.
ZAKHAROV, V.N. (1996): Zapadnoevropeiskie kuptsy v Rossii. Epokha Petra I. [Western European Merchants in Russia During the Era of Peter the First] Moscow: ROSSPEN.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Clare Griffin
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
licence: CC BY-NC 4.0
