Further, Czar Alexander I issued a ukase (an imperial decree) prohibiting foreign vessels from coming within 100 miles of Russian territory, including all of the islands of the Aleutians. The results were predictable. Internationally, Great Britain and the United States screamed bloody murder over their exclusion from the fur trade and Russia’s arbitrary extension of the internationally recognized three-mile territorial limit. Locally, Sitka and the company’s other outposts—deprived of the reliable supply of British and American trade goods that Baranov had labored so long to develop—went
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