Russian Medical Diplomacy in Ethiopia, 1896–1913

The Russian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was certainly a great power, but, lacking the far-flung colonies that its peers and competitors, such as the British, French, and Germans possessed, it did not have a global reach in quite the same way as the others—particularly the British and the French—did. Although Russian merchant steamships plied the waters of the Indian Ocean and Russian explorers added to the sum of European knowledge about far-flung regions of the Indian Ocean World (IOW), Russia’s political weight was, for the most part, absent from the Indian Ocean littoral. Nevertheless, during this period, which coincided with the rule of Emperor Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917), Russia sought to make itself more visible on the international stage.2 This desire to show the flag extended even to areas that Russian diplomats acknowledged were far from its true sphere of interest, most notably Ethiopia, for which many Russians felt a cultural affinity, which was derived, o some extent, from similarities in the predominant strains of Christianity in the two empires.