LAUSR

In the eighteenth century, Peter the Great and his successors invested a lot of energy and funding to make Russia a European country. This process included the transformation of political, economic and cultural life – the nature use system was definitely not an exception. The paper will discuss the ideological base for the project of modernization of marine harvesting in the Russian North, which took place in the eighteenth century. This region corresponds to the White and Barents Sea basin and was the only place where Russia had direct contact to the Oceanic environment in the seventeenth century. The Russians living there known as the Pomors (the people of the Sea in Russian) created original system of marine harvesting based on the exploitation of marine and coastal ecosystems.