In the service of the state: Foreign financing, infrastructure, and imperialism in Tsarist Russia

Russia’s imperialism in the nineteenth century has been far less scrutinized than other episodes of great power colonization, but the Tsar’s expansion into the Caucasus was indeed an ongoing imperial project. The movement of Russian troops and settlers was only feasible with the creation of a large railway network, an undertaking for which the Tsarist regime lacked adequate funding. In response, the regime developed a system of state guarantees and incentives to attract foreign investors looking for higher returns and willing to finance railways serving the imperial project. We illustrate this point with a case study of Paris-based Crédit Lyonnais and its operations in Russia from the 1860s to the eve of World War I. Using archival and secondary materials from Russian railways and the substantial archives of Crédit Lyonnais itself, we show how foreign bankers were complicit in the project of often brutally-violent conquest and pacification of non-Russian territories in the late 1800s. Crédit Lyonnais knew precisely what their money facilitated with few, if any, qualms so long as Russian state guarantees for substantial investments were honored. Imperialism in Russia, as elsewhere at the time, appeared to be profitable.