THE GREAT LAND

Jeremy Atiyah (Parker Press, £19.95)

It was the greatest sale - or the most stunning folly - of all time. This was the $7.2m purchase of Alaska by the Americans from the empire of Russia in 1867. It was also an ill omen for the ruling tsar, Alexander II, who was later assassinated. This much is familiar to history buffs.

Much less so is the colonising of the American west coast by Russian fur traders, inspired by the fabulous expeditions of Vitus Bering across Siberia. After years of arduous exploration in the early part of the 18th century, he gazed upon a huge mountain range in Alaska and claimed the "great land" for his imperial masters.

While the Atlantic seaboard was being settled by Puritans and craftsmen from Europe, the west coast remained a virgin landscape scarcely inhabited by American natives but awaiting massive commercial exploitation. The success of Siberia was the springboard of trade for all the land above Spanish Mexico. That would include California and reach out even to Hawaii, some 25 years after its discovery by Captain Cook.

Oxford-born Jeremy Atiyah has left a legacy (sadly dying at the age of 43) of a ground-breaking book on the Russian conquest of America.

If Peter the Great - founder of St Petersburg and a lover of the sea - had been alive at the time, he surely would have opened up a new and permanent window on the Pacific.

The Russians had every opportunity to do this. Their fur traders were on the shoreline, bartering for sea-otter pelts before the wagons had made their way through the heartland of America. The westward migration was later to be the greatest barrier to Russian hegemony, particularly when gold was discovered in California. Although Russian pioneers had established hunting outposts, their foothold was too tenuous, weakened by the Crimean War and lack of funds.

The Russians, questing so heroically beyond the hell of Siberia, were also defeated by global geography a long way from home, much the same as they experienced later when they failed to penetrate the mountains of High Asia in a bid for Britain's jewel of India. Thus they did not take political advantage of the wilderness they had conquered, either in Alaska or around San Francisco.

Atiyah's colourfully detailed book is an adventure in itself. It is full of the tough challenges faced by the hard men of Russia in uncharted territory and is a literary landmark that should shock America to its roots.