Introduction: Russian imperialism and industrialism from Crimea to Manchuria: economic foundations of a search for imperial grandeur

The pursuit of imperial grandeur – the desire to recapture the international stature that Russia enjoyed during the eighteenth century – occupied much of the time, energy and resources of the tsarist regime. It was, however, a pursuit fraught with difficulties and contradictions. The humiliation that autocratic Russia had endured at the hands of democratic England and France during the Crimean War convinced thoughtful contemporaries that future catastrophe could best be avoided by some measure of political and economic reform. Hence the decisions between 1860 and 1874 to modernize the banking system, to dispense with the institutional prop of serfdom, to create organs of local self-government, to modernize the Russian army and to overcome deep-seated prejudices against that most modern and democratic of nineteenth-century inventions, the railway. But these institutional reforms neither guaranteed stability at home nor enhanced the external security of the Empire. Partly, this was because any reform created opportunities for new social groups to operate and for political ideas to be articulated in opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy. In addition, exogenous forces undermined tsarist Russia's attempts to regain imperial hegemony. By 1870, Germany threatened to dominate Europe, as Austria and France had recently discovered to their cost. The weakness and enforced isolationism of Russia implied that Britain, as a great naval power, alone stood in the way of Germany's complete subjection of the continent.