England is said to have been a global hegemon in the peirod between the the fall of Napolen and the early 19th century, but how much, if at all, did Russia challege England's hegemonic status? Was it akin to the 20th century rivalry between America and the USSR?
Greetings! Thanks for asking a gem of a question, and one which has actually been a topic of some historiographical debate for quite some time. In a single sentence: Russia was the threat to the Pax Britannica which successive Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries in the Victorian age sought to counter and check. Britain's age of "global policing" was more often than not directed towards the "Russian Bear" to its East, and we shall see in the course of this response several things:
With those details and an outline of sorts established, let's begin.
The Bear and the Lion
"I take [Tsar] Nicholas [I] to be ambitious, bent upon great schemes, determined to make extensive additions to his dominions and, animated by the same hatred to England which was felt by Napoleon."
- Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Lord Palmerston remarking on his views of Russia in 1835.
After the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the emergence of the "Concert of Europe" in the 1820s, the British began to retreat from engagement on the continent. Their politicians had always viewed events in Europe with some degree of suspicion and (at times) downright contempt for their neighbours across the Channel or the North Sea. Though Russia had certainly assisted with the downfall of the French Emperor in 1812 - 1814, the British quickly came to re-adopt their position of skepticism and suspicion when it came to dealing with St. Petersburg. Lord Palmerston, a giant of British foreign politics during the first half of the 19th century, embodied this Russophobia clearly in his stance towards the Tsar and the Russian nation in general.
The British Parliament had their reasons to fear the Russian government in its post-Napoleonic state. The Russian government structure, with its autocratic Tsar (or Czar) at the head of the nation, was viewed as the epitome of absolutist despotism in Europe, a backwards form of national leadership which the democratic and "liberal" British regarded as a polar opposite to their own style of governance. In the 1820s, Russia had also embarked on a vast campaign of eastward expansion, pushing its borders ever further east and penetrating slowly yet surely into Central Asia and the Caucasus region. The British were particularly concerned at Russian expansion in the direction of the Black Sea region, where the Ottoman Empire (or the "Sublime Porte" as its head offices in Constantinople were known) seemed to be buckling under the pressures of the Bear to the North.
Now, whether or not this antagonism of Britain was a deliberate policy of Russian Tsars is probably unlikely. Nicholas I and his successors were probably trying to pre-empt internal threats to Russia's power on the continent - namely her economic backwardness, a weak sense of national identity, and an overstretched government - by directing her might outwards. One Russian observer at the dawn of the 20th century noted with some gloom the difficult position of the empire following its inability to keep up with the rapidly industrialising (and colonising) of the other European nation-states in the 1800s:
"The future does not hold out the promise of peace to humanity. The struggle for markets calls forth an ever sharper industrial competition. The final division of the last free lands on the globe is occurring...Russia's strategic position is extremely difficult."
For Britain, such considerations were largely ignored in the face of observations that the Russian behemoth was constantly moving ever further east, and (perhaps more alarmingly), ever further south. They feared in the middle of the 1800s the ascendancy of Russia over the Caucasus and the Levant. With the Ottoman Empire already weakening under internal stressors, the pressures placed upon it by Russian military campaigns in the Black Sea region were (at least to British and French observers), bound to lead to catastrophe.
The British were certainly not pro-Ottoman for any religious, cultural, or indeed political reasons, but merely viewed the Sublime Porte as the "best alternative" to a Russian hegemony in the Middle East. Such an outcome would threaten their "Clapham junction" of empire: the Suez Canal (at least after they took control of it in the late 1870s), as well as endanger the freedom of trade between the **British Raj (**India) and the other polities in the region. Lord Palmerston, ever the giant of anti-Russian policies in the British government, voiced such a concern in 1840:
"Sooner or later, the Cossack and the Sepoy [Indian soldier serving under Britain], the man from the Baltic and he from the British islands will meet in the centre of Asia. It should be our business to make sure that the meeting is as far off from our Indian possessions as may be convenient."
David Fromkin, an American historian with expertise in Middle Eastern affairs, lists the other reasons for British concerns regarding Russia's expansion:
"Britain, then, by the middle of the nineteenth century had at least nine reasons for opposing the continuing Russian expansion in Asia: (1) it would upset the balance of power by making Russia stronger than the other European powers; (2) it would culminate in a Russian invasion of British India; (3) it would encourage India to revolt against Britain; (4) it would cause the Islamic regimes of Asia to collapse, which in turn would lead to the outbreak of a general war between the European powers in order to determine which of them would get what share of the valuable spoils; (5) it would strengthen a country and a regime that were the chief enemies of popular political freedom in the world; (6) it would strengthen a people whom Britons hated; (7) it threatened to disrupt the profitable British trade with Asia; (8) it would strengthen the sort of protectionist, closed economic society which free-trading Britain morally disapproved of; and (9) it would threaten the line of naval communications upon which Britain's commercial and political position in the world depended."
Finally, consider the factors laid out in this duo of quotes from imperial historian John Darwin on the fears of Russian expansionism to British governments:
"The British were nervous of Russian expansion: slow but unstoppable, like a glacier, some said. Russia's vast army, its inscrutable politics, its invulnerability to sea power and the apparently unlimited scale of tsarist ambition encouraged a form of 'Russophobia' in Britain.
"What made Russia so dangerous, thought the policy-makers, was its ability to exert pressure on four different regions of great strategic or commercial importance to Britain: the maritime corridor between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean; Persia and the Persian Gulf; Afghanistan and the inner Asian frontiers of India; and North China and Peking. In British eyes, the danger was compounded by the sheer scale of Russia's resources, especially in manpower, and the erratic, inscrutable process of Russian policy."
To this end, the "Pax Britannica" was faced with the challenge of checking Russian expansion which threatened its interests in Central Asia, and in this it had mixed results. The Crimean War of 1853-1856 was a hard fought war to avoid the Russians encroaching further into the Black Sea region and threatening the Ottomans, but it was a success for the Anglo-French-Ottoman forces nonetheless. In Central Asia, the British efforts yielded more of a mixed bag of results.
Part 1 of 2