This book provides an introduction suitable for both specialist and non-specialist to the principal traditions, objectives, conditions, and instruments of Russian foreign policy, 1700-1917, through the presentation of new research. It is both the first cooperative effort in the subject by both Russian and Western historians and the first to be consciously representative of the spirit of glasnost and a post-Cold War mentality. It is based to a large extent on previously inaccessible Russian manuscript source materials, and it contains the only serious scholarly surveys of both the historiography and the bibliography of the subject.