Economic Nationalism in Tsarist Russia: The Fluidity between International and Intra-Imperial Rivalries

This essay aims to show, using a collection of vignettes spanning the geographical and chronological parameters of the project: 1) the ways in which largely irrational cultural considerations (stereotypes, identities, rivalries) intruded on ostensibly rational, economic decisions regarding who could trade in Russia; 2) how domestic and international considerations intruded upon one another in the making of such attitudes and policies, so that it becomes impossible to see the Russian nationalisms of the international and domestic arenas as separate; and 3) to at least hint at some of the larger, longer-term historical implications of some of the particular connections of commerce and ethno-national identities that we find in tsarist Russia.