Empire Maker

"[Empire Maker] transcends the limits of biography through some stellar archival work and by letting Baranov's story recede at key times behind the larger epic of Russian America. The authors have managed to give us both a very useful picture of life as a merchant in nineteenth-century Russia as well as a new, very accessible general history of the colony that nicely complements Lydia Black's and Ilya Vinkovetsky's recent works on the subject. . . . [An] excellent biography."—Ryan Jones, The Russian Review

"[Aleksandr Baranov] has never been the subject of a full-length scholarly biography. Empire Maker. . . is a praiseworthy effort to remedy that oversight. . . . Owens has woven biographical facts gleaned from widely scattered sources into a cohesive narrative set in historical and cultural context."—Katherine Arndt, Alaska History

"Will be the definitive, critical biography of Baranov; there is really nothing else like it. In every chapter, Owens sets Baranov's life in the context of the natural, geopolitical, and historical setting, filling in the background to the Baranov we encounter in the existing documentation and histories."—Richard Dauenhauer, coeditor of Russians in Tlingit America

"In Owens's hands, the story of Aleksandr Baranov becomes something much larger and more momentous than biography. Empire Maker brings to life the machinations of the Russian Empire in the northern Pacific: its ambitions and plans, its relations with indigenous populations, and certainly its leadership by Baranov. Based on decades of archival research, this may be the most important study to date of Russia's American empire. Owen's book is simply a phenomenal achievement."—David Igler, author of The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush

"Aleksandr Baranov deserves to be known in the same company as John Jacob Astor and other frontier entrepreneurs whose enterprising efforts transformed North America in the age of imperial expansion. He reshaped the Pacific Rim and left an enduring mark on the geography and history of that far flung and diverse quarter of the globe. Exhaustively researched and elegantly written, Kenneth N. Owens's treatment of this intriguing, colorful, and significant frontier figure will reward readers and reign as the definitive biography for decades to come."—Albert Hurtado, author of Herbert Eugene Bolton: Historian of the American Borderlands