First published in 1853, Laurence Oliphant’s The Russian Shores of the Black Sea is a nineteenth-century travel narrative through the Russian Empire, written on the eve of the Crimean War.

Oliphant moves from St Petersburg and Moscow southward through the Volga region, the Caucasus and the Black Sea coast, recording landscapes, military displays, transport, social customs and the people encountered along the way.

It is very much a document of its period: observant, funny in places, casually imperial in others; it very much preserves the assumptions of a Victorian traveller alongside what he sees. Much within the tone of the colonial gaze, Oliphant writes with an eye for spectacle and absurdity — army manoeuvres, aristocratic clubs, exhausting journeys, dubious food, illness and the mechanics of travelling through a vast empire.

Read now, the book sits somewhere between travel writing, political observation and historical source material, offering a vivid pre-war portrait of territories that would shortly become central to European conflict.

Könemann, Cologne, 1998. Travel Classics edition. Hardcover. Light surface wear to boards with minor rubbing and faint marks; internally clean and unmarked, binding firm. Very good condition.