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 then will 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.