Russia’s Mediterranean Moment: Constellations of Sovereignty and the Making of a Region, 1770–1830
Journal: The Journal of Modern History
Year: 2024

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 R