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In the first half of the 19th century, Russian victories over the Ottomans (1812), the Persians (1813), and the French (1815) transformed the international balance of power, making Russia an arbiter of international law and an official opponent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The decline of the Sublime Porte and the rise of Egypt as an independent modernizing state opened up new possibilities for Russian engagement in Africa and the Near East, arenas of rivalry with the imperial powers of Britain and France. In the crucial two decades between the Treaty of Hünkâr İskelesi (1833) and the outbreak of the Crimean War (1853), Russian sent several official and semiofficial delegations to Egypt and Sudan to gather information, offer expertise, and exercise the soft power of cultural influence. This paper analyzes the records of three of these delegations led by Avraam Norov (a veteran of the Battle of Borodino), the mining engineer Egor Kovalevskii, and the physician Artemii Rafalovich, each of whom critically engaged Western discourses about race, slavery, emancipation, and imperial conquest.
SPEAKER: Eugene Clay (Arizona State Univ.)
SOBESEDNIK: Christy Monet (Brown Univ.)
