Distrust and resentment have plagued Anglo-Russian relations for centuries

Has a book ever been more bizarrely mis-titled than this one? The First Cold War: Anglo-Russian Relations in the 19th Century has nothing whatever to do with the actual Cold War, nor is it for the most part concerned with the 19th century. Rather, Barbara Emerson has written a thorough and often diverting diplomatic history of Anglo-Russian relations from the 16th to the early 20th century. This period encompasses at least 14 wars in which British and Russian troops found themselves embroiled, sometimes on the same side, sometimes on opposite sides. None of these wars was remotely ‘cold’. Nor does Emerson attempt to make any argument that the shifting great power politics of the 19th century resembled those of the post-second-world-war nuclear age.

The book begins in a period when both the Russians of Muscovy and the English were marginal powers on the fringes of Europe. ‘Muscovy and its culture were very different from any other with which Tudor England was acquainted,’ observes Emerson, forgetting the Virginia Colony and Francis Drake’s exploration of California. Mary I and her consort, King Philip of Spain, declared themselves officially the ‘discoverers’ of Muscovy (which would have come as news to Poles, Prussians and Swedes) and granted a charter in 1555 to the Muscovy Company – the first English joint-stock trading company. An embassy from Ivan the Terrible followed the next year, but the ambassador, Osip Nepeia, alienated Londoners with his extreme suspicion. ‘He thinks that every man will beguile him,’ one merchant complained. ‘As the Russians do not always speak the truth themselves, they think that other people are like them.’

Subsequent return embassies also yielded a rich crop of zinging observations of Russian customs that launched a thousand clichés still alive today.