#  Peter Brown 

Professor of Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian History, Rhode Island College

 

 

 



   ![Peter Brown](/sites/g/files/omnuum4931/files/styles/hwp_4_5__480x600/public/huri/files/peter-brown-360x460_1.jpg?itok=RyZrP7Xv) 

 



 

 email <pbrown@ric.edu> 

 laptop\_windows [Faculty Directory, Rhode Island College](https://www.ric.edu/people-directory/peter-brown) 

 

 



 

Peter Brown received his Ph.D. in Russian History at the University of Chicago and worked with the late Richard Hellie. His fields include Muscovy; Rus'; the Russian Empire; the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; pre-Commonwealth Poland, Belarus, and Lithuania: Ukraine and the Cossack Commonwealth. Comparative history, the sociology of complex organizations; law; historical linguistics and its relation to the study of social evolution; and Finno-Ugric studies.

Currently, Dr. Brown is completing a manuscript on hereditary unfree labor in Western Eurasia and the Americas, 1400-1800. Russia, Ukraine, Poland-Lithuania, and Belarus figure significantly in this effort. He will then complete a monograph, heavily reliant on quantitative study, on the lower-ranking servitors in the seventeenth-century Moscow service class. Two studies bearing upon these topics are “Russian Serfdom’s Demise and Russia’s Conquest of the Crimean Khanate and the Northern Black Sea Littoral: Was There a Link?,” in *Eurasian Slavery, Ransom and Abolition in World History, 1200-1860* (Farnam, Surrey, United Kingdom: Ashgate, 2015): 335-66 and “Muscovite Arithmetic in Seventeenth-Century Russian Civilization: Is It Not Time to Discard the ‘Backwardness’ Label,” *Russian History* 39, no. 4 (2012): 393-459.



 

 

 





 

 

- ## Fields of Expertise
    
     [Early Modern History](/fields-expertise/early-modern-history) [History](/fields-expertise/history) [Medieval and Early Modern History](/fields-expertise/medieval-early-modern-history)
- ## Role
    
     [HURI Associates](/role/huri-associates)