BICEPS/SSE Riga Research Seminar: The Early History of Gold Mining in the Russian Far East and Northeast China

A vast historical literature has addressed gold mining and the gold rush periods in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa from the various perspectives of economic history, the “mining frontier” and imperialist expansion, alien labour and inter-ethnic relations, the impact of gold rushes on indigenous populations and the social history of mining as an occupation. Yet the history of gold mining in the border regions of Russia and China has never been comprehensively studied to date. As I will try to show, between the creation of the Russian Far East through Tsarist Russia’s annexation of vast territory from the weakened Qing dynasty until the nationalization of the mining industry in the Soviet Union, gold mining was an important cross-border, transnational phenomenon. It involved both European and East Asian capital along with Russian, Chinese and Korean labour migrants and influenced the development of economy and society in this region.