In a manuscript in a Russian archive, an anonymous German eyewitness describes what he saw in Moscow during Napoleon's Russian campaign. Who was this nameless memoirist, and what brought him to Moscow in 1812? The search for answers to those questions uncovers a remarkable story of German and Russian life at the dawn of the modern age. Johannes Ambrosius Rosenstrauch (1768-1835), the manuscript's author, was a man always on the move and reinventing himself. He spent half his life in the Holy Roman Empire, and the other half in Russia. He was a barber-surgeon, an actor, and a merchant, as well as a Catholic, a Freemason, and a Lutheran pastor. He saw the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, founded a business that flourished for sixty years, and took part in the Enlightenment, the consumer revolution, the Pietist Awakening, and Russia's colonization of the Black Sea steppe. A restless wanderer and seeker, but also the progenitor of an influential merchant family, he was a characteristic figure both of the Age of Revolution and of the bourgeois era that followed. Presenting a broad panorama of life in the German lands and Russia from the Old Regime to modernity, this microhistory explores how individual people shape, and are shaped by, the historical forces of their time.

Presenting a broad panorama of society and culture in the German lands and Russia from the Enlightenment to the breakthrough of modernity, this microhistory of one extraordinary family explores how the lives of individual people are entangled with the great forces of their age.

This text contains 102 pages of entirely new full-colour maps assembled by a team of experts. Particular attention has been paid to illustrating themes of cultural history, of the relationship between different civilisations, and of the growth of an overall world community. The non-Western world, especially Asia, receives full coverage and the contributors have taken care to concentrate on information of specific importance to the themes of each map - whether it be the routes of royal progresses in medieval Germany, or the spread of government-sponsored factories in 19th-century Japan - rather than on military activity or border changes. The maps are illuminated by a series of essay which draw together the ideas of various maps and open up new perspectives from historical geography. The result is a guide to world history that is essential reference and fascinating reading for everyone interested in history.