Another America: Russian mental discoveries of the North-west Pacific region in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores Russian perceptions of ‘America’ as they emerged in the eighteenth century when traders, explorers, and scholars approached the North American continent from the Pacific side. It argues that these perceptions were fundamentally different from the European mental discovery of America via the Atlantic. Rather than imagining a ‘new world’, the protagonists saw the north-west American coastline as a part of the North Pacific basin, which, in turn, was considered a part of the Russian empire. Only in the early nineteenth century did Russian geographic and cultural concepts change, becoming more similar to those of Europeans and to contemporary ideas of continents and global structures.