During the half century after Bering, these efforts were largely private. The Russian government dispatched an occasional survey and kept a wary eye on reports of what the Spanish were up to along the North American coast, but by and large this was a fur rush of private entrepreneurs bent on individual fortune. What a contrast there was to be between this capitalistic approach, especially as championed under the laissez-faire policies of Catherine the Great from 1762 to 1796, and the strong involvement of both church and state in the later affairs of the Russian-American Company.
