Colin Sargent, Northeastern University

The Mantle of Tamerlane: Russia and the Russians in Punch and Parliament during the Great Game and the Cold War

After the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, Britons needed a new perennial enemy that would help to define Britain and the mission of the British. In many representations within the bounds of acceptable speech in Parliament and in the cartoons of Punch and in the writings of Rudyard Kipling, a picture of the Russian competitor for empire emerged as a new Other: half-civilized, vaguely Asiatic, and having more in common with the hordes that swept out of ‘Tartary’ than with proper Europeans. This project explores these images of Great Game Russia and shows that consistent tropes of Asiatic Russia serve to underscore the differences between the Russian and British imperial projects. Further, this work also argues how this imagery reemerges in Parliamentary speech after the end of the Second World War as old images of a hostile, Asiatic, half-civilized Russia are dusted off and pressed back into service to help define the differences between postwar Britain and the Soviet Union.