The Ottoman empire alternated between good density in cities and the Anatolian plateau and sparsely settled Middle Eastern deserts, Black Sea steppe, and Caucasus mountains. Inalcik estimates its European holdings to have had 41 persons per square mile in the sixteenth century; by the end ofthe century population pressure in the core was evident, expressed in flight to the cities, famine, and rising grain prices. By contrast, the Ottomans' Asian holdings had a density of only 20. As for urbanization, frontier borderlands were sparsely settled with garrison outposts; most of the empire was dotted with small market towns, while many ancient and vibrant metropoles also flourished: in Egypt (Cairo, Alexandria), in the European west (Bursa, Istanbul, Belgrade, Edirne), in Syria (Aleppo, Damascus), in Iraq (Baghdad) and the Black Sea littoral. Constantinople, renamed Istanbul after its conquest by the Osmanlis in 1453, grew exponentially, primarily through in- migration. Peasants from overpopulated Anatolia fled into the city, while the sultans worked to restore the city as a trade emporium, distributing privileges to traders and attracting artisans. Accordingly, the city's population grew by over 80 percent in the sixteenth century.
The story in China is similar: the alluvial plains of the eastern coasts and Yangtze and Pearl River deltas were overly densely settled and had been areas of intensive agriculture for centuries. By contrast, China's western and northwestern frontiers were sparsely settled. All in all, trends are as significant as numbers. Across the early modern centuries, despite the rigors of a Little Ice Age, warfare and disease, people coped. They designed political economies that kept them alive, aided in Russia by the copious supply of forest for farming and hunting. Part of what fueled and supported growth were the global interactions that kept Europe and Eurasia interconnected.
GLOBAL INTERCONNECTIONS
For millennia Europe and Asia had been connected in what historians call the "Afro-Eurasian" zone, stretching from China to northern Africa and the Mediterranean through the fabled east-west "Silk Road(s)." The Silk Road was not one, but many; its multiple routes served diverse trade emporia and shifted in response to regional political and religious developments for millennia. Routes traveled between China and Central Asia, diverging from there generally south of the Caspian Sea to India, Persia, the Arabian Peninsula, the Black Sea, and the Mediterranean. Historians argue that the Silk Roads created a single "world system" carrying luxury goods and slaves as far back as 2000 bc. The generally east-west Silk Roads relied on north-south offshoots that supplied the transit trade and served regional markets. In Russia's part of the world (some call it western Eurasia), by the tenth century trade networks along the Volga, Kama, and Dnieper ushered forest products from the Baltic and western Siberia to the Byzantine empire, Middle East, China, and India.
Over the centuries of their existence pan-Eurasian Silk Roads waxed and waned with conditions on the steppe. In the best of times, steppe empires created a stable trade environment, paralleling the Romans' fabled "pax Romanorum." The Mongol empire's "pax Mongolica" endured from the Black Sea (Pontic) steppe to China for about a century. But the norm was usually smaller nomad confederations ruling a segment of steppe, sometimes combining to maintain steady trade, sometimes (as in the seventeenth century in Central Asia) descending into internecine struggles that disrupted caravan trade and moved routes elsewhere.
As Moscow rose to regional prominence in the fifteenth century and became an increasingly important global player in the centuries thereafter, it did so as a participant in and beneficiary of the new global world. Jerry Bentley argues that the global nexus of trade that developed between about 1400 and 1800 was specific and new, a "global early modern" that extended from China to Europe, from northern Africa to New World colonies. In Bentley's view, this global world was united at all the levels of historical change postulated by the great French Annaliste historian Fernand Braudel—the level of longue durie by shared climate and by interlinked trade routes, old and new; the level of institutions by merchant networks, religious systems, and institutions of empire and diplomacy; the quotidian level by peaceful and violent interactions through trade, travel, conquest, and war.
Bentley's vision of the global early modern joins a lively discussion about the nature of early modern globalization. Scholars debate when the world truly became global, and have generally privileged European overseas empires in these discussions. As Matthew Romaniello notes, some argue for 1571 when Spain gained the capacity to send its American products (most notably, silver) all the way to Europe through the founding of its Manila colony; some point to Europeans' introduction of powerful caravels that exponentially multiplied the amount of goods that could be shipped expeditiously and cheaply. But others argue that much earlier global interchange had been possible through long-established overland and regional maritime trade patterns, and even in early modern centuries all agree that the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English overseas networks joined into local trade, shipping, and merchant networks as they built their colonial empires and global shipping patterns.
Romaniello, John F. Richards, and others remind us that the early modern global economy of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries was also interlinked by increasingly powerful political formations from empires to federations and nascent nations. Global economy went hand in hand with state building and empire building. Early modern states all regulated trade to maximize state income, protecting domestic industry, collecting specie from foreign imports. They used the profits to build the armies they needed to defend their interests abroad or expand territory for productive resources or trade depots. Muscovy, as we will see, joined in these early modern patterns, with protectionist fiscal policy and aggressive military reform.
The costs of the global economy were high, and Russia did not escape them. As noted, indigenous peoples fell to epidemic wherever imperial conquest ventured, and the production of consumer goods and specie from Asian and American markets was built on the backs of slavery. In Russia enserfment, instituted to support the army, brought such human suffering. Devastating environmental impact resulted from many colonial economies as well as from demographic growth. In the Russian empire, David Moon notes that East Slavic peasants routinely deforested to clear fields for farming or to obtain wood for construction and fire; in the center, most provinces were becoming deforested in the eighteenth century, and as East Slavic farmers moved into the steppe prairie lands, they burned steppe grasses and plowed the earth, eventually causing soil erosion by the nineteenth century.
As the leading countries of Europe waxed in global influence from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Russia rose with them. Eventually a "great divergence" (in industrialization and global power) arose between Europe and Eurasian empires;