World of Empires

A Financial Times Best History Book of the YearMany people are familiar with American Commodore Matthew Perry’s expedition to open trade relations with Japan in the early 1850s. Less well known is that on the heels of the Perry squadron followed a Russian expedition secretly on the same mission. 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. In A World of Empires, Edyta Bojanowska uses Goncharov’s fascinating travelogue as a window onto global imperial history in the mid-nineteenth century.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. Britain’s global ascendancy leaves him in equal measures awed and resentful. In Southeast Asia, he recognizes an increasingly interlocking world in the vibrant trading hubs whose networks encircle the globe. Traveling overland back home, Goncharov presents Russia’s colonizing rule in Siberia as a positive imperial model, contrasted with Western ones.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. 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.

Bojanowska’s is a meticulously researched, highly informative, engagingly written work that both elucidates Goncharov’s text and, ultimately, outshines it., Edyta Bojanowska’s engrossing book draws on the first-hand account of Ivan Goncharov, author of the classic novel Oblomov, to narrate the voyage which a Russian frigate made in the 1850s from St. Petersburg to Japan…Bojanowska explains how Goncharov was alive to notions of globalization long before that term entered our vocabulary., A fascinating, kaleidoscopic work buzzing with insight and overflowing with ideas…A World of Empires abounds with intelligence, wit, and erudition., In this finely wrought and gracefully written book, Edyta M. Bojanowska examines Goncharov’s travelogue as both a unique literary work in its own right and a historical artifact that offers revealing insights into the Russian colonial imagination., Bojanowska’s account aims for a ‘productive conversation between the writer’s crafted vision of the world he saw, the history known then, and the history known now’. The result is most impressive. This book is at once history and literary criticism; it is political, economic and cultural; it is national, international and transnational—and, to top it off, Bojanowska makes this ambitious feat look effortless.

Edyta M. Bojanowska is the prizewinning author of A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada and Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism. She is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University.