The Great Game, 1856-1907: Russo-British Relations in Central and East Asia

摘要

Evgeny Sergeev's reconstruction of the motives and activities of the Great Game, the competition between the British and Russian empires for control over Asia, delivers a masterful and lively account that reaches toward a broad reevaluation of the meaning and impact of a half-century of Russo-British tensions. Sergeev moves beyond the usual narrow definition of the Great Game as a contest of military planning and intelligence gathering and argues that this competition, instead, comprised a struggle between two different civilizing missions in Asia, with different economic, political, and ethnoso-cial goals. This was, he concludes, 'a struggle between two very different cultural paradigms - one based upon the values of Protestantism, competitiveness, free trade, and civil liberties; the other resting on the dogmas of Christian Orthodoxy, state patronage, mercantilism, and political autocracy' (pp. 344-345).