Ab Imperio

439 Ab Imperio, 3/2011 украинскими, так и зарубежными историками. Тем не менее книга Екельчика заставляет задуматься и стимулирует обновление ис- следовательской программы. Еще одним достоинством этой публи- кации нам кажется то, что она мо- жет быть интересной и полезной не только для исследователей и преподавателей гуманитариев, но и для широкой читательской аудитории. Sergei ZHUK Mennonites as “the RUssian aMeRiCans,” oR pRoBleMs of Colonization and ModeRnization in the soUth of the RUssian eMpiRe Наталья В. Венгер. Менно- нитское предпринимательство в условиях модернизации Юга России: Между конгрегацией, кланом и российским обществом (1789–1920). Днепропетровск: Из- дательство Днепропетровского на- ционального университета, 2009. 696 с. ISBN: 978-966-551-286-8. When Russia expanded its frontiers in the 1760s–1780s southward toward the Black Sea, Empress Catherine II decided to organize the colonization and settlement of the new lands by removing the Ukrainian Cossacks from that area. To achieve this, in 1762–1763 she began inviting foreign colonists of predominantly German origin to settle southern Ukraine. During the 1760s and 1780s the first families of German colonists entered this region and became the most important “charter” group of settlers there. According to the historical sociology of colonization, the first groups of settlers (so-called charter groups of colonization) establish the main “cultural configurations” for the future development of the colonial 440 Рецензии/Reviews settled in southern Russia, and by 1917, 350,000 Germans were spread throughout the Ukrainian provinces of the Russian Empire. By that time, the German population in the Russian Empire exceeded 3.5 million. There were 10,000 settlements scattered throughout fifty-three regions .3 The Russian administration’s generally pragmatic attitude toward foreigners can be traced to Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, who both knew the role of religious sects such as Quakers, Mennonites, and Moravians in settling British America. The first known suggessociety , using the “social forms and values they brought with them.”1 The “charter groups” of settlers create the original matrix of interaction that will affect inhabitants of the frontier for generations to come. The ethos of these groups or their “folkways” (“the normative structure of values, customs and meanings”) produce the “initial” sociocultural patterns, the subsequent evolution of which will create the contours of social history on the frontier.2 By 1850 more than 139,000 of these colonists (among them 20,000 Mennonites from Prussia) had 1 As T. H. Breen notes, the first British colonists in North America established the rules for interaction, by deciding which customs would be carried to the new settlements. Finally, they “determined the terms under which newcomers would be incorporated into their societies.” See: T. H. Breen. Creative Adaptations: Peoples and Cultures // Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Eds.). Colonial BritishAmerica: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era. Baltimore, 1984. P. 204. According to John Porter, the first settlers should be regarded as “charter” groups. In his view “the first ethnic group to come into a previously unpopulated territory, as the effective possessor, has the most to say. This group becomes the charter group of the society, and among the many privileges and prerogatives which it retains are decisions about what other groups are to be let in and what they will be permitted to do.” See: John Porter. The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada. Toronto, 1965. P. 60. 2 Max Weber coined the sociological terms of the ethos, and William Graham Sumner – the term “folkway” at the beginning of the twentieth century. Max Weber applied the word “ethos” to a particular set of moral principles generated by a particular type of religion. In his concept of “ethos” Weber included such elements as the “system of moral values,” “style of life,” and “orientation of culture.” Sumner used the word “folkways” to describe the habitual “usages, manners, customs, mores and morals” that he believed to be practiced more or less unconsciously in every culture. See: William Graham Sumner . Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Manners, Customs, Mores and Morals. Boston, 1907. P. 2, and David Hackett Fischer. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York, 1989. Pp. 7-11. 3 Of 1,790,489 German-speaking Russian subjects of German origin 1,333,662 lived in fifty regions of European Russia; 407,480 in ten regions of the kingdom of Poland; 57,502 in the Caucasus; 5,828 in Siberia; and 8,947 in Central Asia; 1.3 million of Russian Germans (76.62 percent) belonged to the rural population and 401,960 (23 percent) to the urban population. In Ukraine, the number of so-called Black...