RUSSIAN AFFAIRS

London: John Murray. Very Good-. 1904. First Edition. Hardcover. xv, [1], 738 pages; Contents clean and secure in original red cloth binding with bright gilt lettering at spine and front board. Original owner's name on endpaper: "H. Jennings"; upper marginal corner clipped on first fifty pages, enspapers toned, otherwise quite a nice book. All nine maps present and in very good condition. Topics examined include: Russian Ambitions (Slavophiles and Pan-Slavists); Agrarian Development (Land Tenure, Peasant Cultivators, Famines); Industry (Cotton, Mines and Metals, Kustari); Commerce (Fairs, Railway Systems, Mercantile Marine, Dugar Trade); Finance (National Debt, Spirits Monopoly, , Taxation); Poland-Finland-Baltic Provinces; Dependencies (Siberia, Manchuria, Turkestan, Afghan Frontier, Chinese Frontier, Chinese Frontier, Persian Questions, Caucasus and Armenia); Conclusions. THE AUTHOR: Geoffrey Drage (1860 – 1955) was an English writer and Conservative Party politician. He was concerned particularly with the problems of the poor. Drage was educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford, after graduating he continued his studies in European universities including Berlin and Moscow. He was called to the bar at both Lincoln's Inn and the Middle Temple, but never practised as a barrister. Drage was a prolific author and commentator of public affairs, particularly on poverty and labour relations. From 1891 to 1894 he was secretary to the Royal Commission on labour relations. Drage was chosen as a member of parliament at the 1895 general election, campaigning on "practical answers" to labour problems. He lost his seat at the next general election, in 1900 and never returned to Parliament. In 1897 he was a member of the International Congress on Housing of the Working Classes, in Brussels, and in 1900 of the International Congress on Poor Law and Charity, in Paris. In 1906 he became President of the Central Poor Law Conference. During World War I he served from 1914 in the military intelligence section of the War Office. PROVENANCE: James Hennen Jennings (1854-1920) was a mining engineer, born at Hawesville, KY. After attending private schools in London and Derbyshire, England, Jennings returned to Kentucky and set up a lumber business, but soon wanted to further his engineeering education. He graduated from the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University in 1877 with the degree C.E. Jennings then headed West and worked in gold and quicksilver mines in California for the next ten years. In 1887 he went to Venezuela for another mining job. Finally, his talents as an innovative mining engineer, took him to South Africa. During 1889-1905 he was consulting engineer of H. Eckstein, in Johannesburg, and Wemher Beit, in London. Jennings was chiefly responsible for thr fevelopment and expansions of their mines, employing the most technologically advanced methods and equipment available in the day. In the rough and tumble of South Africa, he managed to keep out of John Hays Hammond's conspiracy to overthrow Kruger's government and to earn a fortune (the equivalent of about 10 million pounds in 2014) before he returned to America in 1905. .