“From Northeast Passage to the Northern Sea Route”. A New Publication on the History of the Northern Sea Route

Abstract

The present article provides a brief introduction to the first comprehensive scholarly account in English of the history of the Northern Sea Route (NSR) from the earliest exploration to the first decades of the 21st century. It was published in October 2022 under the title “From Northeast Passage to Northern Sea Route. A History of the waterway North of Eurasia” by Brill Academic Publishers, Leiden, The Netherlands. This introduction touches on a few important issues that are discussed in the volume, which is written by a team of Russian, Norwegian, Dutch and British historians and political scientists. The first stage of this project was carried through in the 1990s, within the framework of INSROP (The International Northern Sea Route Programme (1993–1999)), which was conducted by the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Oslo. As a result of their efforts four working papers appeared on the history of NSR. In the end a decision was made to develop the topic further into a collective monograph. This second stage of the project, however, started only many years later, in 2015, and was executed in the course of seven years, now under the leadership of the UiT  The Arctic University of Norway. In the present article you will find information about the contents and direction of the monograph, as well as a small sample from the book, chosen from a multitude of other themes, for the simple reason that it is relevant to the recent commemoration of 150th anniversary of Franz Josef Land’s discovery (1873–2023).