Russia’s Mediterranean Moment: Constellations of Sovereignty and the Making of a Region, 1770–1830

Abstract

The 1768–74 Russian-Ottoman war opened a new realm of Russian activity: the Mediterranean. This article argues for the formation of the Russian Mediterranean, a region encompassing the waters and shores of the Eastern Mediterranean, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These decades constituted a distinctive period of the Russian Empire’s activity in these seas, marked by imperial competition and expressed in the language of international law. While scholarship has attributed Russian activities in the late eighteenth century to the opening of the “Eastern Question,” I place these developments in a Russian imperial framework. The Russian navy established “imperial republics” in the Eastern Mediterranean governed by constitutions and imperial law, but these rested on a fiction of liberation and protection and did not long survive under Russian control. Russia’s focus then shifted to policing and defending flag rights and ultimately to legal battles over the rights of Russian subjects in Ottoman waters. Its insistence on these rights contested Ottoman sovereignty, straining relations between the two polities. Russia’s projections of sovereignty were not intended to protect Ottoman Christians but to develop Russia’s commercial interests in the Mediterranean by securing legal rights to navigate in Ottoman waters. Setting occurrences that have been treated as discrete events into a single analytical framework, this article shows that Russia’s commercial, legal, and naval objectives amounted to a challenge to Ottoman sovereignty in the region. This period laid the foundation for Russian involvement in the Mediterranean that continues to this day.