In the course of the eighteenth century, Russian mining exploits in the <placeName xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" ref="https://edition-humboldt.de/H0009659 https://www.geonames.org/1488441">Urals</placeName> and <placeName xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" ref="https://edition-humboldt.de/H0002407 https://www.geonames.org/1516401">Altai</placeName> replaced the Siberian fur trade as the <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rendition="#i">raison d’être</hi> for eastward expansion. A system of exile, also begun under <persName xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" ref="https://edition-humboldt.de/H0001167 http://d-nb.info/gnd/118592955">Peter the Great</persName>, was devised to meet labor demands and thereby colonize “Asiatic” Russia.<note xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" place="foot" xml:id="ftn12" n="12"> <bibl corresp="https://edition-humboldt.de/TMW8YEA9">Popova 2018</bibl>.</note> Humboldt’s circuits through Russian Siberia not only followed in the footsteps of a long line of Germanophone naturalists working under Tsarist patronage, like <persName xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" ref="https://edition-humboldt.de/H0011804 http://d-nb.info/gnd/100166393">Hermann</persName> and <persName xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" ref="https://edition-humboldt.de/H0001770 http://d-nb.info/gnd/118591371">Pallas</persName>. He also trod the same ruddy roads as the 300,000 people banished from “European Russia” between the 1823 and 1861—as when he, <persName xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" ref="https://edition-humboldt.de/H0001040 http://d-nb.info/gnd/116609036">Rose</persName>, and company passed a fettered “transport of exiles” along the road to the Urals or later stopped at the prisoner waystation of <placeName xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" ref="https://edition-humboldt.de/H0009435 https://www.geonames.org/1489530">Tobolsk</placeName> en route to the Altai.<note xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" place="foot" xml:id="ftn13" n="13"> <bibl corresp="https://edition-humboldt.de/NADISPBH">Gentes 2010</bibl>, 6; <bibl corresp="https://edition-humboldt.de/BH8W3QPH">Rose 1837/1842</bibl>, <ref target="https://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/rose_ural01_1837/144">I, 110</ref>. </note> Humboldt entered <placeName xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" ref="https://edition-humboldt.de/H0019068">Western Siberia</placeName> just as a new exile policy, the reforms of governor-general <persName xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" ref="https://edition-humboldt.de/H0015996 http://d-nb.info/gnd/1053507836">Mikhail Speranky</persName>, took full effect. The criminalization of vagrancy and outsourcing of deportation powers to serf-owners produced a penal workforce of unprecedented scale among European empires.<note xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" place="foot" xml:id="ftn14" n="14"> <bibl corresp="https://edition-humboldt.de/TMQFGR7W">Beer 2016</bibl>, 21–27.</note> In Siberia, they were to make a mineral empire of the platinum deposits, silver lodes, and goldfields that Humboldt surveyed.