Originally published in hardcover in 2012.

Edyta Bojanowska uses Ivan Goncharov's gripping travelogue--a bestseller in nineteenth-century Russia--as a unique eyewitness account of empire in action. Slow to be integrated into the standard narrative on European imperialism, Russia emerges here as an assertive empire eager to emulate European powers and determined to define Russia against them.--

The First Voyage around the World is also a remarkably accurate ethnographic and geographical account of the circumnavigation, and one that has earned its reputation among modern historiographers and students of the early contacts between Europe and the East Indies.

From 1741 until Alaska was sold to the United States in 1867, the Russian empire claimed territory and peoples in North America. In this book, Ilya Vinkovetsky examines how Russia governed its only overseas colony, illustrating how the colony fit into and diverged from the structures developed in the otherwise contiguous Russian empire. Russian America was effectively transformed from a remote extension of Russia's Siberian frontier penetrated mainly by Siberianized Russians into an ostensibly modern overseas colony operated by Europeanized Russians. Under the rule of the Russian-American Company, the colony was governed on different terms than the rest of the empire, a hybrid of elements carried over from Siberia and imported from rival colonial systems. Its economic, labor, and social organization reflected Russian hopes for Alaska, as well as the numerous limitations, such as its vast territory and pressures from its multiethnic residents, it imposed. This approach was particularly evident in Russian strategies to convert the indigenous peoples of Russian America into loyal subjects of the Russian Empire. Vinkovetsky looks closely at Russian efforts to acculturate the native peoples, including attempts to predispose them to be more open to the Russian political and cultural influence through trade and Russian Orthodox Christianity. Bringing together the history of Russia, the history of colonialism, and the history of contact between native peoples and Europeans on the American frontier, this work highlights how the overseas colony revealed the Russian Empire's adaptability to models of colonialism.

The story of the world's largest, longest, and best financed scientific expedition of all time, triumphantly successful, gruesomely tragic, and never before fully told The immense 18th-century scientific journey, variously known as the Second Kamchatka Expedition or the Great Northern Expedition, from St. Petersburg across Siberia to the coast of North America, involved over 3,000 people and cost Peter the Great over one-sixth of his empire's annual revenue. Until now recorded only in academic works, this 10-year venture, led by the legendary Danish captain Vitus Bering and including scientists, artists, mariners, soldiers, and laborers, discovered Alaska, opened the Pacific fur trade, and led to fame, shipwreck, and "one of the most tragic and ghastly trials of suffering in the annals of maritime and arctic history.

Edited and richly annotated by Lt Cdr Andrew David, this volume offers for the first time a complete transcript of the handwritten journal kept by William Broughton on his voyage to the North Pacific (1795-1798), together with supplementary letters and the journal of Broughton's journey across Mexico (1793). An extensive introduction by Professor Barry Gough places the voyage in its historical context. Broughton had first visited the North Pacific in 1792 in command of the brig Chatham during Vancouver's voyage. When negotiations between Vancouver and Juan Francisco Bodega y Quadra reached an impasse, Broughton was sent back to London to seek fresh instructions, travelling across Mexico and returning to Europe in Spanish ships. Back in London in July 1793 he was appointed in command of the sloop Providence with orders to rejoin Vancouver in the Pacific, taking with him the astronomer John Crosley.