A Financial Times Best History Book of the Year Many people are familiar with American Commodore Matthew Perry\'s expedition to open trade relations with Japan in the early 1850s.
Goncharov\'s gripping narrative offers a unique eyewitness account of empire in action, in which Bojanowska finds both a zeal to emulate European powers and a determination to define Russia against them..
Slow to be integrated into the standard narrative on European imperialism, Russia emerges here as an increasingly assertive empire, eager to position itself on the World stage among its American and European rivals and fully conversant with the ideologies of civilizing mission and race.
Traveling overland back home, Goncharov presents Russia\'s colonizing rule in Siberia as a positive imperial model, contrasted with Western ones.
In Southeast Asia, he recognizes an increasingly interlocking World in the vibrant trading hubs whose networks encircle the globe.
Britain\'s global ascendancy leaves him in equal measures awed and resentful.
Reflecting on encounters in southern Africa\'s Cape Colony, Dutch Java, Spanish Manila, Japan, and the British ports of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, Goncharov offers keen observations on imperial expansion, cooperation, and competition.
In A World of Empires, Edyta Bojanowska uses Goncharov\'s fascinating travelogue as a window onto global imperial history in the mid-nineteenth century.
Serving as secretary to the naval commander was novelist Ivan Goncharov, who turned his impressions into a book, The Frigate Pallada, which became a bestseller in imperial Russia.
Less well known is that on the heels of the Perry squadron followed a Russian expedition secretly on the same mission.
A Financial Times Best History Book of the Year Many people are familiar with American Commodore Matthew Perry\'s expedition to open trade relations with Japan in the early 1850s
