Introduction
In 1766, hundreds of German families sailed into Kronstadt from the cold Baltic Sea, seeing the Russian Empire for the first time with their own eyes. They had traveled on the explicit invitation of another German, a noblewoman from Pomerania, who had recently been crowned as the Empress Catherine II. The agents of the Empress of all Russias had been busy in the principalities of the Holy Roman Empire, carrying her Manifesto to the peasantry and smallholders who had seen their lands despoiled by the Seven Years War. This Manifesto promised settlers “a great many advantageous and convenient places for the settlement and Habitation of Mankind; and… unexhaustable Treasures of divers metals hidden in the Bosom of the Earth… Woods, Rivers, Lakes, and Seas belonging to Commerce.”[i] On these promises, thousands of German speaking immigrants embarked on a journey in the Russian Empire, the majority of whom would end up on the Lower Volga steppes, a region far from European civilization and the promises of the Imperial government and its agents, where they would play a part as the vanguard of Russian colonization in the face of nomadic resistance.
Almost a century later in 1845, a similar group of German speakers embarked from Bremen with a destination in precisely the opposite direction as their 18th century forebears: to Texas. They too were promised a land of boundless opportunity and beauty, described by a German traveler as “a vestibule of the Lord’s temple… so calm, so solemn, so majestic; forest and plain, meadows and pastures, so pure, so fresh, as though just come forth from the hand of the Almighty Creator.”[ii] They arrived, however, at the reality of a rough frontier region embroiled in war and the threat of Comanche attacks. Abandoned by both their patrons in the German nobility and the Texas government, these people destined to become the Texas Germans trekked into the interior of the largely unpopulated newly annexed State of Texas. Settling in the Texas Hill Country, the future Texas Germans played a part in the 19th century consolidation of the United States’ continental empire as the tip of settler communities in Central Texas, far from their Rhineland origins.
What makes these two histories unique is also what unites them. The German immigration to the frontiers of two continental empires was not an accident, but part of a deliberate approach on the part of governments eager to see “wasteland” turned into productive land. The disunity of Germany in both eras meant that there were large groups looking for a way out, and who therefore found themselves attracted by the promises of agents and advertisers to seek their fortunes in foreign lands rather than face the lack of prospects at home. Though brought by the demands of imperial expansion, these Germans created in the frontier space cultures adapted to their new environments and survived intact into the 20th century. But far from being simply provincial curiosities, these groups of Germans played an integral part in what Alexander Etkind calls “internal colonization,” which he describes as colonization “not directed away from the state borders but expanded along with the movement of these borders, filling the internal space in waves of various intensities.”[iii] This internal space was the frontier, defined here as a “zone of contact with or without a specified boundary line”[iv], a space in which state control and settlement was thin, and different lifeways encountered each other. In Central Texas and the Lower Volga, this took the form of a frontier region inhabited by the feared horse nomads of the vast grasslands at the hearts of North America and Eurasia. Therefore, the Germans in both cases inhabited frontiers where there was a tripartite zone of contact between the dominant settler culture, nomadic indigenous culture, and the German immigrant culture, in addition to being a zone of contact with a totally new environment with its challenges. The histories of the Texas Germans and the Volga Germans therefore illustrate the multiethnic possibilities of the American and Russian continental empires, their ideologies of population increase and prosperity, and two stories of struggle and synthesis of old ways with the new that survived well into the 20th century.
The Ideological and Political Origins of German Frontier Settlement
Before diving into the ideology that prompted the sponsorship of mass German immigration, it is important to understand, why the Germans were willing to leave their homeland for an uncertain future across oceans and vast territories. For the Volga Germans, many of whom originated in the Hessian principalities of Central Germany, the Seven Years War from 1756-1763 turned their homeland into a battlefield of the major European powers, with the French army in particular despoiling Prussia’s ally Hesse-Cassel, extorting large amounts of money, hanging peasants, and burning villages.[v] The underlying economics of the German principalities were also turning against the interests of the peasantry. With significant portions of the land in the hands of large landowners and a general population increase, there was increased pressure particularly on those who had no land of their own and were therefore forced to perform agricultural labor or cottage industries that made them susceptible to price increases such as occurred with the bad harvest of 1756-57.[vi] The founding population of Texas Germans faced similar problems of economic pressure in addition to the political pressures of a Germany turning towards unification in the 19th century. After the disruptions of the Napoleonic Wars, the population of the German states saw a large and steady increase as reforms produced a peasantry that was “permitted to marry and raise legitimate families, and to change their job and place of residence.”[vii] The increases in population paired with the enclosure of common lands created a class of rural proletariat which had little choice between moving to the cities or emigrating.[viii] This was parallel with the rise of a disaffected intelligentsia that felt stifled by the conservative political system established by Metternich, and their disaffection would be a crucial factor in the Revolutions of 1848 as well as in the emigration of educated Germans in the 1840s.[ix]
In both eras of emigration, the disunity of the German states and the associated pressures on both lower classes and the developing middle class made these people especially receptive to the invitations of states invested in an ideology of expansion and empire. A key part of this imperial ideology was the belief that the frontiers, especially those inhabited by nomads, constituted a ‘wasteland’ or tabula rasa that could be made productive by the introduction of civilization through settlement. In the case of the Volga Germans, Catherine the Great explicitly stated the desires of her ‘enlightened’ government in her Instruction or Nakaz of 1767: “Russia not only has not Inhabitants enough but it contains immense Tracts of Land, neither peopled nor cultivated… People dwelling in their Native Wilds have neither Encouragement nor Industry; Fields capable of sustaining a whole People, scarcely afford Sustenance to a single family.”[x] This was underscored by the “Second Supplement,” where Catherine directly states the base of the nation as she saw it: “What are the first Foundations, which support this Economy by their Strength and Firmness? Nothing, certainly, but the People. Hence follows, the Necessity of encouraging the Increase of Population, in order to produce a greater Number of People in the State.”[xi] It is from this desire for population increase and its attendant economic benefits that the Manifesto of 1763 originated. Catherine’s government found itself with the vast lands acquired through the conquests of Peter and his successors, but with the majority of the population residing in the crowded inner regions of European Russia.[xii] Catherine’s invitation to the German population to resettle in her empire therefore fit directly into her ideology of population as the foundation of wealth and the government structures made to create population expansion.
Similarly, the settlement of Texas originated with the initiatives of the Mexican government, which sought to increase the population of the far-flung province of Coahuila y Texas not only for the economic benefits, but also to discourage the attacks of the nomadic Comanches. Upon independence, Mexican officials turned their attention to solving the problem of low population in the northern territories through the creation of a Colonial Commission in 1821 and a Colonization Law in 1824.[xiii] The latter promised “those foreigners who may be desirous of settling in her territory security for their persons and property, provided they obey the laws of the country… [Mexico] being desirous of augmenting by all possible means the population of its territory.”[xiv] Ironically, it was this desire to populate the frontier that invited the Anglo-American settlers into Texas who would declare the Republic of Texas in 1836 and defeat the Mexican government. However, the desires remained the same in the Republic of Texas, which passed an 1837 colonization law following the Mexican precedent,[xv] which was followed in 1841 by a colonization law specifically geared towards attracting groups to large land grants, with population increase as its driving force.[xvi] The Republic of Texas after independence found itself in possession of vast lands with a nearly empty treasury, and therefore followed the same course as the land-rich and population-poor Mexican territorial governments, attempting to dispense lands to those most willing to settle and defend these lands from incursions of both the indigenous populations and rival governments. These policies were retained and even expanded under American rule after 1845, with the state government of Texas enacting the first “homestead” law, which was a solution to the problem of unclaimed lands, granting them to those who could claim it.[xvii]
For both the Volga Germans and the Texas Germans, the pressures of life in a disunited Germany made emigration attractive, but especially so when combined with the promises of governments who were clearly aware of the possibilities that vast lands and low populations created. The land grant policies these governments adopted were part of a shared belief in economic improvement and its direct link to population increase, most clearly stated by Catherine but certainly present in the Mexican and Texan governments as well. From the perspective of the governments, they were in possession of large amounts of land without the worth conferred on it by agriculture and industry, and when the natural increase of population did not meet their needs for populating their territory they turned to the German states, overpopulated and riven by political divisions. It was from there, in the same general region of West Central Germany, that the Russian and American governments attracted the settlers whom they planned to use to solve their problem of an underpopulated frontier.
The Promises of Empire and the Struggle to Survive
Beyond the parallel reasoning for recruitment, another similarity between the Texas and Volga Germans were the methods of their recruitment, and the illusory promises that attracted them. Catherine propagated her Manifesto in multiple languages throughout the German states through agents hired from France, who found that the Hessian states were, in the words of historian Fred C. Koch, “the softest spots in the economic and social structure… where a century and a half of virtually unending wars and civil strife had left their deepest and rawest scars.”[xviii] Carrying the Empress’ promises of free land and religious tolerance away from the war-weary German states, these agents persuaded large groups of Germans to migrate together, particularly with the section of the Manifesto which read “We allow and give Leave for all Foreigners to come into Our Empire and settle themselves wheresoever they shall desire in all Our Governments.”[xix] As the settlers would find out when they had already arrived in Russia, this promise was in conflict with Catherine’s true intentions from the very beginning, which were to settle the colonists where most advantageous to the government’s aims.[xx] In fact, the German settlers, newly branded as “colonists,” were shuttled from St. Petersburg to the deep interior of the Russian Empire, their preferences notwithstanding. A journey of over a thousand miles claimed the lives of many of the settlers, and they arrived to an environment that was as familiar to the Germans from the Rhineland and Hesse as another planet.[xxi]
The Texas Germans likewise faced an arduous journey on the backs of wishful promises, though these promises came from a different source. A society of German nobles, officially called the “Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas,” but often referred to simply as the “Adelsverein,” was established in 1842 with the express goal of promoting German immigration to what was then the Republic of Texas.[xxii] It was this society that acted as the catalyst for German immigration in combination with Texas’ land policy, which turned out to be “more extravagant than liberal and more impractical than judicious… Out of it grew a great deal of graft.”[xxiii] Land speculators posing as official representatives of the Republic of Texas and holders of land claims amounting to thousands of acres swindled the Adelsverein with false promises, first a Frenchman by the name of Bourgeois and then an American by the name of Fisher.[xxiv] The Texas land grant policy left the territory especially prone to the work of these land speculators, which meant that by the time the boats of German settlers had arrived to the Texas coast the grants, which had been located in the rough scrub of West-Central Texas, had already expired and lapsed back into state control.[xxv] In an infamous episode in 1845-46, thousands of German settlers were left on the beach at the Gulf port of Indianola without transportation to the interior due to the outbreak of the Mexican-American War in 1845; over 800 of the stranded Germans died of disease in tents and dugouts amidst torrential rains.[xxvi]
The promises that the German immigrants were sold painted their destinations as lands of freedom and bounty, but what truly awaited them was struggle. Less than the “blessed land of our hopes,”[xxvii] as Texas was described by the naive German settlers, the frontier turned out to be a place of danger and deprivation, where land that had never before been cultivated awaited many who had never been cultivators. Far from only being farmers, both groups of German settlers included a diverse range of professions, reflecting the necessity of cottage industry in Central Germany where land scarcity meant land tenure was by no means guaranteed. In both cases this diversity, in combination with the limits placed on settlement by governments, laid the foundation for geographically concentrated settlement areas which were able to establish self-sufficiency and a distinct cultural space surrounded by both the dominant imperial cultures and nomadic groups.
Belts and Clusters – Settlement Patterns
The thousands of Germans who were recruited to settle the frontier in Texas and the Lower Volga faced the harsh realities that characterized the frontier space. Both frontiers were “zone[s] of indeterminacy and uncertainty,”[xxviii] that were geographically open, thanks to their similar steppe/plains environments, and therefore difficult to police and control from often distant power centers. By the time the first Volga Germans arrived on the Volga in 1766, the Bashkirs living east of the Volga had revolted against Russian authority repeatedly over a the course of a century,[xxix] and there remained the constant threat of raids from the nomadic Kalmyks and Kazakhs.[xxx] In Texas, the situation in 1845 was similarly perilous, with the Texas government controlling only a small portion of their territory, and the rest of the state a battleground between the nomadic Comanches and incoming settlers. The insecurity of the frontier space, combined with the land grants given to German settlers, encouraged them to settle together in concentrated geographical areas. This is not to say that the areas inhabited by the Texas and Volga Germans were bereft of other groups, indeed, both struggled with and profited from the diversity of the frontier space. However, it was the geographic concentrations of German settlement that laid the foundation for unique blended German cultures to take root, and both groups grew out of the unique dangers of the frontier space and decisions by authorities to settle the Germans on marginal lands requiring innovative forms of cultivation.
The Texas Germans established significant clusters of settlement both in the blackland prairie of Central Texas roughly parallel to the Gulf Coast west of Galveston and the Fisher-Miller grant lying northwest of the Texas German town of Fredericksburg.[xxxi] These clusters were partly the result of the sparse population, as described by German naturalist Ferdinand Roemer: “it is easy for immigrants of one nation to live as a unit in a community, thus having the advantage of living among their compatriots, and retaining the customs and habits of their native land.”[xxxii] However, the violence of the frontier also encouraged concentrated settlements. In a famous incident illustrative of the dangers faced by settlements even on the relatively secure coast, in 1840 failed negotiations and the killing of Comanche leaders in San Antonio provoked a Comanche raid that sacked the towns of Victoria and Linnville and threatened Houston.[xxxiii] Indeed, the threat of Comanche raids was prevalent enough that the Texas government, perennially indebted and financially insecure, used its scarce resources to establish frontier fortifications at the cost of one million dollars.[xxxiv] It was only through a stroke of genius diplomacy the Texas Germans were largely spared the fear that paralyzed frontier settlement in the decades before the Civil War, namely the peace treaty spearheaded by the leader of Texas Germans after the failure of the Adelsverein, John O. Meusebach. Under his leadership in 1847, a delegation of Germans and Comanche chiefs signed a lasting treaty promising payment for the land designated for German settlement under the deal made between the Adelsverein and Fisher.[xxxv] That treaty allowed for the establishment and success of the Texas German settlements of New Braunfels and Fredericksburg, which acted as the centers of Texas German cultural and political life, and therefore the centers of a distinct Texas German culture.
The Volga Germans were similarly bounded in their settlement patterns thanks to the unique challenges of the Russian steppe frontier. As with many Russian frontier areas, the Lower Volga had long been a refuge for runaway serfs, non-Orthodox Russian subjects, and communities of indigenous peoples. These existing settlements meant that the German colonists had to establish brand new settlements on the Volga and her tributaries, the majority of which were on the left bank, especially on the Big and Small Karaman Rivers.[xxxvi] Unfortunately, the left bank of the Volga lay open to the raids of the nomads who inhabited the steppe that stretches southwards all the way to Central Asia and the Caspian Sea. Almost immediately upon arrival in 1766, the German colonies on the left bank were attacked repeatedly by Kirghiz raiding parties, with some of the smaller colonies being destroyed entirely.[xxxvii] Combined with the fact that a large portion of the colonists were not farmers but artisans, who had sailed from Germany with the false notion that Catherine intended to fulfill her promise of settlement anywhere in the Empire, the concentrated nature of Volga German settlements was a survival strategy. In the open environment of the steppe, depending on the troubled Russian colonial authorities and their unreliable forces for security, having settlements clustered together was a matter of survival that also resulted in the development of a distinct Volga German identity under the Russian Empire.
New Lands and New Neighbors
The environment that the Texas and Volga Germans faced was incredibly different from the Central German environments where they originated. Both migrated from the temperate and marine climate of the Central German states to radically different conditions on the steppe of the Lower Volga and the dry Southern Great Plains and coastal prairies of Texas. Aside from the disastrous weather and deadly disease that faced the Texas Germans on their arrival in 1845, contemporary accounts noted that “the climate is so different from that of northern Europe, that at first it reacts rather severely upon the German constitution… I can scarcely name one whose health was not affected by the change of climate.”[xxxviii] The Volga Germans similarly faced an alien environment, with the hot summers and bitterly cold winters of the steppe wreaking havoc on agriculture.[xxxix] They also faced the freak weather of the steppe, the dreaded Hoehenrauch or “high smoke,” that drove searingly hot sands from the deserts of Central Asia across the steppes at high speeds, withering crops in an afternoon.[xl] These environmental challenges also help to explain the endurance of these two German frontier cultures, as they encouraged the growth of communal organization as communities turned inwards to meet their needs. For the Texas Germans, they benefited from the immigration of several groups of German intellectuals who founded the first newspapers and communal organizations that lasted well into the 20th century.[xli] At the furthest extreme, these intellectuals founded communes in the naive hopes of fulfilling the hopes of European romantic socialism in the Central Texas wilderness.[xlii] For the Volga Germans, with the expiration of their tax exemptions they gradually adopted the mir village communal ownership system common among Russian peasant communities, which attempted to ensure a fair distribution of lands and tax burdens amongst the village members.[xliii]
The Texas Germans also arrived in the midst of the Mexican-American War, being unable to procure wagons for travel from the coast to the interior because of US Army requisitioning.[xliv] This would not be the last time the Texas Germans were caught in the troubles of the American state. During the Civil War, the Texas Germans were suspected by their Anglo-American neighbors of harboring Unionist sentiments, largely thanks to an anti-slavery convention sponsored by liberal Texas German intellectuals in San Antonio 1854.[xlv] This led to a period of suspicion that exploded into violence in 1862 when several dozen Texas German men fleeing Confederate conscription were killed in a battle on the Nueces River.[xlvi] The Volga Germans were similarly caught in the greatest reaction to Catherine’s centralization of the Russian Empire: the Pugachev Rebellion. In 1773, a mere seven years after the arrival of the first Volga German colonists, the steppe frontier was set ablaze, literally and figuratively, by the Cossack Pugachev and his rebel army made up of many of the disaffected peoples of the Russian steppe frontier: Bashkirs, Kalmyks, Kazakhs, and Cossacks.[xlvii] Though the Volga German colonies escaped complete destruction, the widespread looting and murder that followed Pugachev’s band, in addition to the raids of Kirghiz eager to take advantage of the government’s weakness on the frontier simply intensified the struggle to survive in the first decade of settlement.[xlviii]
Conclusion
The histories of the Texas and Volga Germans, and the parallels between them, embody the processes of empire on the Texas and Lower Volga frontiers, both a part of a transnational encounter between rising states with ideologies of expansion and new environments and their inhabitants who presented a challenge to that expansion. These expanding terrestrial empires believed that the key to economic prosperity lay in expanding cultivation, and therefore in expanding population, and when the natural increase of population was too low, they turned to foreign immigration to settle their vast uncultivated lands. In both eras of immigration, the German states presented fertile ground for the recruitment of large groups of German settlers, and governments went out of their way to promise lands of abundance for them. This resulted in the creation of two new German communities in the frontier space created by imperial expansion, a space that was uncertain and hostile, but was also a space of opportunity. Surviving hardship, violence, and disease, the Texas and Volga Germans both planted roots in lands that were far different than those promised them, and proceeded to adapt to the reality of life on the frontier. In doing so these Germans were, knowingly or unknowingly, a part of a process of internal colonization, filling the space created by conquest. By creating concentrated German frontier communities, the object was to encourage development, even if it meant bringing in a totally new culture. In moving into the frontier space, the Texas and Volga Germans were fulfilling processes of empire that preceded and followed their settlement, and left their indelible mark on the spaces they colonized, even to the modern day.
[i] Roger P. Bartlett, Human Capital: The Settlement of Foreigners in Russia 1762-1804 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 237. [ii] Charles Sealsfield, The Cabin Book: or National Characteristics, trans. Sarah Powell (London: Ingram, Cooke, & Co., 1852): 9. [iii] Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 2. [iv] Thomas D. Hall, “Borders, Borderlands, and Frontiers, Global,” in New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz (New York: Scribner, 2005): 239. [v] Franz A.J. Szabo, The Seven Years War in Europe, 1756-1763 (London: Routledge, 2013): 180. [vi] Diedrich Saalfeld, “The German Peasantry on the Eve of the French Revolution,” History of European Ideas 12, no. 3 (1990): 353-357. [vii] Jürgen Reulecke, “Population Growth and Urbanization in Germany in the 19th Century,” Urbanism Past & Present no. 4 (1977): 22-23. [viii] Toni Pierenkemper and Richard Tilly, The German Economy During the Nineteenth Century (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004): 30. [ix] Bruce Levine, “The Migration of Ideology and the Contested Meaning of Freedom: German Americans in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” German Historical Institute Occasional Papers no. 7 (1992): 9. [x] Paul Dukes, ed., Russia Under Catherine the Great, vol. 2, Catherine the Great’s Instruction (Nakaz) to the Legislative Commision, 1767 (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1977): 77-79. [xi] W. F. Reddaway, ed., Documents of Catherine the Great: The Correspondence with Voltaire and the Instruction of 1767 in the English text of 1768 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1971): 303. [xii] Willard Sunderland, “Catherine’s Dilemma: Resettlement and Power in Russia, 1500s-1914,” in Globalising Migration History: The Eurasian Experience (16th-21st centuries), eds. Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen (Leiden: Brill, 2014): 55. [xiii] David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1982): 162-163. [xiv] “Law of Colonization Passed by the Supreme Government of Mexico, and by the Provincial Government of Coahuila and Texas, 1824-25,” in The Laws of Texas 1822-1897, vol 1, ed. H. P. N. Gammel (Austin, TX: The Gammel Book Company, 1898): 97-99. [xv] Moritz Tiling, History of the German Element in Texas from 1820-1850 (Houston, TX: Moritz Tiling, 1913): 54. [xvi] An Act Granting Land to Emigrants, Republic of Texas 80, 5th Congress. (1841). Link [xvii] Seymour V. Connor, “Land Speculation in Texas,” Southwest Review 39, no. 2 (1954): 142. [xviii] Fred C. Koch, The Volga Germans: In Russia and the Americas, From 1763 to the Present (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977): 7. [xix] Bartlett, Human Capital, 237. [xx] Reddaway, Documents of Catherine, 260-261. [xxi] Koch, The Volga Germans, 20-22. [xxii] Glen E. Lich, “Archives of the German Adelsverein, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 91, no. 3 (1988): 361-362. [xxiii] Don H. Biggers, German Pioneers in Texas (Fredericksburg, TX: Fredericksburg Publishing Co., 1925): 16. [xxiv] Biggers, German Pioneers in Texas, 24-27. [xxv] Walter Struve, Germans & Texans: Commerce Migration and Culture in the Days of the Lone Star Republic (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1996): 46-47. [xxvi] Irene Marshall King, John O. Meusebach: German Colonizer in Texas (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1967): 87-88. [xxvii] Caroline von Hinueber, “Life of German Pioneers in Early Texas,” The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 2, no. 3 (1899): 228. [xxviii] Michael Khodarkovsky, “From Frontier to Empire: The Concept of the Frontier in Russia, Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries,” Russian History 19, no. 1 (1992): 127. [xxix] Koichi Toyokawa, “The Strategy of I.K. Kirilov Toward the South-East Russia,” Literature and Culture: Historic and Contemporary 3, no. 2 (2018): 15-17. [xxx] Gottlieb Beratz, The German Colonies on the Lower Volga: Their Origin and Early Development, ed. Adam Giesinger, trans. Leona W. Pfeifer, et al. (Lincoln, NB: American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, 1991): 210-216. [xxxi] Terry G. Jordan, German Seed in Texas Soil: Immigrant Farmers in Nineteenth-Century Texas (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1966): 40-46. [xxxii] Ferdinand Roemer, Roemer’s Texas, trans. Oswald Mueller (San Antonio, Texas: Standard Printing Company, 1935): 28. [xxxiii] John J. Linn, Reminiscences of Fifty Years in Texas (Austin, TX: The Steck Company, 1935): 338-344. [xxxiv] Anna Muckleroy, “The Indian Policy of the Republic of Texas, III,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 26, no. 2 (1922): 131-133. [xxxv] King, John O. Meusebach, 112-118. [xxxvi] Timur Natkhov and Natalia Vasilenok, “Technology Adoption in Agrarian Societies: The Effects of Volga Germans in Imperial Russia,” (Basic Research Program Working Paper No. 220/EC/2019, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia, 2019), 9-10. [xxxvii] Koch, The Volga Germans, 104-106. [xxxviii] Roemer, Roemer’s Texas, 28. [xxxix] James W. Long, From Privileged to Dispossessed: The Volga Germans, 1860-1917 (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1988): 2-3. [xl] Koch, The Volga Germans, 58. [xli] T. Herbert Etzler, “German-American Newspapers in Texas with Special Reference to the Texas Volksblatt, 1877-1879,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 57, no. 4 (1954): 424-427. [xlii] Louis Reinhardt, “The Communistic Colony of Bettina (1846-8),” The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 3, no. 1 (1899): 39. [xliii] Koch, The Volga Germans, 70-71. [xliv] Tiling, German Element in Texas, 87. [xlv] Jordan, German Seed, 181-185. [xlvi] Robert W. Shook, “The Battle of the Nueces, August 10, 1862,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 66, no. 1 (1962): 39. [xlvii] Alan Bodger, “On the extent and nature of Kazakh participation in the Pugachev revolt, 1773-75,” Central Asian Survey 12, no. 4 (1993): 497. [xlviii] Igor R. Pleve, The German Colonies on the Volga: The Second Half of the Eighteenth Century, trans. Richard R. Rye (Lincoln, NB: American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, 2001): 176-183.