On the Civilizing Mission of the Global Economy: German Observers of the Colonization and Development of Siberia, 1900–1918

Abstract

This paper examines a group of German social scientists and economists who observed the Russian Empire’s efforts to colonise and develop Siberia in the two decades before World War I. In writing about Siberia, these observers exhibited a fascination with the vastness of the territory and the benefits of possessing a continental empire. For many commentators, Siberia was viewed as Russia’s America – one in which individualistic settlers were able to rapidly increase productivity and bring their goods to the global market. These developments contrasted with the peasants in European Russia, who German observers considered to be both culturally and economically backward. In writing and commenting on Russia’s development of Siberia, Germans observers were contributors to a transnational discourse on imperial governance. They also fantasised about the ways in which Germans might develop and order the territory if they were to possess the land and resources of a continental empire.