About the Lecture: Workers sifting through sand at a privately owned gold mine in the Ural Mountains discovered platinum in 1818. Other than the Spanish colony of New Granada (Colombia), the Russian empire was the only place on Earth where the metal was known to exist (at least among Europeans). Hoping to stabilize the volatile ruble and capitalize on Eurasia’s newest natural resource, Egor Kankrin, Minister of Finances (1823-44), minted platinum rubles between 1828 and 1845. By turning a rare but useless metal into money, Kankrin reasoned that he could increase its circulation—not just within the Russian empire, but around the world. Platinum’s globalization would, in turn, engender more artisanal and industrial applications, which, in turn, would increase the commodity’s value. My reading of this episode and subsequent projects for platinum’s commodification departs from existing historiography, which has characterized Kankrin’s currency dreams as a forgettable blip or the product of an attempt to insulate the ruble from international market forces. Rather, I ask what this alchemical project meant for Tsarist sovereignty and political economy, as it simultaneously commodified and monetized a natural resource whose deposits were owned almost exclusively by one family: the Demidovs. The State Bank sold the bulk of its and the Demidovs’ platinum to a British firm in a prolonged transaction between 1862 and 1872, at which point the metal’s value had proved volatile and subject to speculation abroad, and still lacked any industrially significant uses. Platinum did ultimately find utility in catalytic converters, dental prosthetics, and the metric prototypes made by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, but war and revolution brought its extraction and processing in the Russian empire to a standstill between 1914 and 1922. In the early Soviet years, platinum featured as a potential lifeline to fund industrialization, although Eurasia no longer enjoyed a monopoly on the global supply.
About the Speaker: Geoffrey Durham is an assistant professor in the Department of History at UW-Madison, where he focuses on the history of imperial Russia and its international entanglements. His book manuscript—Imperial Russia and the Global Standardization of Weights, Measures, and Money—recasts the story of how states all over the world first constructed and then ceded their sovereign rule over these standards of value by adopting the metric system and currencies regulated by international conventions. Research for this project has been supported by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies as well as the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus.
This event is part of the CREECA lecture series, which is held on Thursdays at 4:00 pm. Coffee, tea, and cookies served starting at 3:45.