When I Served the Post as a Coachman, Pt. 1

Over at the Working Group I put up a talk that I was giving last year (various universities, the AAASS), that I'd like to turn into an essay for publication. Or at least an essay for discussion, in that it contains a kind of interpretation linking infrastructural history (if I may so explain myself) with intellectual history. The talk is called "'When I Served the Post as a Coachman'," which postal cognoscenti will recognize as the title of a song, actually, created in the late 19th century through some popularization process I've yet to fully unravel, whereby lyrics by the populist poet L.N. Trefolev were defanged of some of their anti-statist zeal, made a little more like country music, and then printed up on sheets, sold, and well, it's just an awesome song (in Russian, "Когда я на почте служил ямщиком", a version of the text here, an .mp3 just a Google search and various purchasing or pirating away).

My essay concerns an event celebrated since 1994 as the foundation of the first regular Russian post, Archangel-Moscow, in 1693. It was thoroughly documented in a 2-volume history with documents by I.P. Kozlovskii, Pervye pochty i pervye pochtmeistery v moskovskom gosudarstve (1913), but the hundreds of pages of petitionary documents Kozlovskii published still have not been analyzed as a discussion about the meaning of movement, or more particularly the costs of regularizing movement, which is what I attempt to do.

As a side note, let me add one comment: in the history of transport, by and large and also in Russia, it seems, the biographical / technological mode of interpretation tends to predominate among scholars who care about transport per se (i.e. how people move through space). For Annales-like historians who care about transport in an infrastructural sense (i.e. Braudel in Civilization and Capitalism), the main thing seems to be an inspiring but still very broad description of "the limits of the possible". Getting somewhere in between these two visions -- between the vision that focuses on the designers, engineers and architects, on the one hand, and the big bassein of movement created by economy, nature, and technology, on the other, seems relatively rare.

The style of interpretation I attempt in my essay is one that tries to hit that middle spot by asking how a big (attempted) shift in the organization of official circulation reshuffled the politics of the government's relation to northern communities, and beyond that helps us think about the genesis of early imperial (Petrine) ideals.

It's a frightfully sketchy essay, empirically, but I'm hoping to fill that out now that I can make it an essay proper, and not just a talk. I guess the question for me is whether this style of interpretation can go anywhere, or whether it's the sort of thing that works for a talk but will melt like butter if you try to make it a book.

Anyway, I'd appreciate any thoughts about it, if and as this interests you.