ABSTRACT
‘Manchuria’ was a name given by foreigners to the Chinese north-eastern provinces formerly considered to be part of Tartary. A Scottish missionary John Ross described the geography of Manchuria before the arrival of the railway at the end of the nineteenth century.
Early Russian and British empires in the sixteenth century drew on the heritage of Greece and Rome as the Cossacks and ‘seadogs’ made their distinctive contributions to imperial expansion by land and sea. After a world-wide crisis in the middle of the seventeenth century, empires continued to grow over continents and oceans before the Russians were halted by the Chinese on the frontier of Tartary at the time of the accession of Peter the Great.
