Imperial Gaze: Dom Pedro de Alcântara’s Visit to the Russian Empire in 1876

The aim of this thesis is to understand how the Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro II [D. Pedro d’Alcântara] found the Russian Empire, in his journey the world-over in 1876, as a tool for his identity building and a reflex of his own internal politics. Through a Global History perspective, D. Pedro d’Alcântara appears as an actor that represents how the aristocracy needed to deal with the main “modern changes” in the second half of the nineteenth century. To understand Dom Pedro’s reception and perception in the Russian Empire, we need to revisit the context where he came from. For that sake, it is important to look through the lens of the Imperial History at the formation of the Brazilian Empire as an alternative to restoring the power of the old Iberian empires in a new context, funding it in a colonized continent and charging it with new modern values. It resulted in an empire made of contradictions at different levels of its constitution. We look how Dom Pedro, living and ruling over such contradictions, used the erudition to build a scenario of progress and knowledge. Within the process of nationalization of Brazil, the emperor’s found the image of a civilizer, an intellectual with a love for the Orient that existed so far from his imperial peripheral context. Nevertheless, the so desired modernity by this aristocrat ruling a monarchy in a republican continent could be found only overseas. It made him travel with restless itineraries to encounter the modern world ordered and exhibited to him in the form of expositions, museums, parks and gardens, schools, universities, and etc. The peculiarity that Dom Pedro would encounter in the Russian Empire is a vast territorial place exhibited in a way that reveals as it being another great European power, but with the characteristic of carrying oriental features.