Lecture | Russian Empire, Mediterranean, and its Diasporas in the Age of Revolution (in-person and online)

Discussing the Mediterranean as a colonial sea in modern times, historians tend to relate this with the French presence in the region -with Napoleon and his expedition in Egypt (1798) considered as the starting point. Britain was the other major power active in the region. Since the second part of the 19th century, the Mediterranean became virtually a British sea. Nevertheless, when Napoleon appeared on the Mediterranean scene in 1797, Russia was already a central actor in the region.

The Russo-Ottoman War of 1768-1774 brought Russia to the "warm waters" of the Mediterranean in an era of imperial and global ambitions, wars, uprisings, and various other forms of turbulence and insecurity on a global scale. The Mediterranean politics of Russia were multi-level and had to deal with various Mediterranean entities: Venice, French, Spain, and Portugal (including the fate of their overseas colonial empires), the Ionian Islands, the Aegean islands, Malta, Minorca, Lebanon, Egypt; and with the peoples living there: Greek-speaking, Slav-speaking, Albanian-speaking, Turkish-speaking and Arab-speaking Orthodox and Muslim communities (the later notably in Egypt and Greater Syria).

Dr. Antonia Dialla will explore the beginnings of the Russian presence in the region and the preliminaries of the entangled character of Russian and Mediterranean historical experiences. More specifically, she will (a) trace how the Russian Empire became a Mediterranean power in 1770, entangled with the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Ottoman empires, and (b) explore the vast network of various Mediterranean diasporas, expatriates, revolutionaries, politicians, and intellectuals who participated in Russian, Mediterranean, European, and even global, transnational networks in which people, discourses, and practices, traveling in space and time, with various deviations from west to east, north, and south and the other way round, influenced by the novel cultural spaces and also influencing them.