‘Native’ Vladivostok vs. ‘Alien’ Dal’nii – the Pacific Porto-Franco and the Search for ‘Russian Interests’ in the Far East (1901–1904)

This article examines the 1901–1904 discussions about free trade in the Priamur region and the territories in Chinese Manchuria leased to the Russian Empire. The discussions are placed in the contexts of nationalising empire, Russian imperialism, and cosmopolitan society of the globalised free port of Vladivostok. The piece traces the place of ideas about free trade in the social and political imagination of contemporaries in the Priamur region to show how these images were challenged by imperial expansion in Manchuria. It also analyses the rhetorical strategies used by regional actors to re-negotiate the borders of economic and political expansion, as well as the internal and external comparisons they made. The article demonstrates how debates about free trade in the Russian Far East offer deeper insight into how ideas about free trade and free ports as institutions affected not only the economic but social and political transformations in the late imperial period.