5 - Dreams of a Siberian Mississippi

Summary

“The merchant princes of the earth”

The 1840s and early 1850s witnessed a series of major developments on both coasts of the Pacific. The most momentous of these was the victory of Britain over China in the Opium Wars, which dramatically widened the scope for the penetration of European commerce and influence into the Middle Kingdom. Although it was to take yet more military pressure before the Europeans obtained concessions which fully satisfied their commercial appetite, the lucrative China market now lay more invitingly accessible than it had ever been, and the Western powers wasted no time in moving to secure their respective positions on it. This movement, in turn, gave rise to a contest among these powers themselves for diplomatic and political advantages and spheres of influence. The opening of China was followed in the 1850s by the opening of Japan to Western commerce, exposing a market less populous than that of China but powerfully attractive nonetheless. At the same time, on the opposite side of the ocean this period witnessed the definitive occupation by the United States of its own Pacific margin, an event which as we will see had a very particular significance for the Russians. Each of these factors taken alone would have naturally seemed portentous enough, but they combined to lend the Far East and the Pacific a distinct and quite unprecedented aura of burgeoning development.