Kenneth Pomeranz has argued that it occurred already in these centuries, but others see such supremacy solidifying only in the nineteenth century. The early modern period that we shall survey witnessed multiple major players driving dynamic change, Russia holding its own among European, Ottoman empire, and Chinese powers, as well as myriad smaller entities, in trade and war.
Let us conclude by situating the Russian empire in the context of its global neighbors, trade partners, and rivals. When Russia rose to regional power starting in the fifteenth century, Siberia was a vast and sparsely populated forest, inhabited by numerous, widely separated tribes and peoples, weakly controlled by the western Siberian khanate at Kuchum claiming Chinggisid heritage. To Russia's east and south the steppe was inhabited by volatilely shifting nomadic confederations, many like Kuchum also having splintered from the Mongol Horde. They included settled and powerful khanates at Crimea and Kazan and loose confederations in the Black Sea and Caspian steppes. The Caspian Sea and Central Asia steppe constituted distant objects of imperial expansion; Russia obtained eastern trade through the intermediaries of Bukharan merchants.
Russia's most direct political rival was its neighbor to the west, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which was joined dynastically with Poland from 1387 and then in federation from 1569 as the "Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania." It controlled modern Belarus'an and Ukrainian lands to the steppe borderland and from Moscow's point of view the Grand Duchy stood between it and the Baltic. From the Grand Duchy's point of view, the rising Russian grand principality was a tempting target in eastward expansion. The result was almost constant warfare on Russia's western front through the early modern period. Russia and Poland- Lithuania shared the steppe frontier with the Habsburg empire, which was caught up in defending or regaining its Hungarian territories from the Ottoman empire from 1526 to 1699; for Russia the Habsburg realm served as a useful ally flanking Poland. All three ofthese powers, as Alfred Rieber has brilliantly shown, competed for the "Eurasian borderlands" through the early modern centuries.
The Ottoman empire loomed as a potent rival to Russia, vastly outpacing it in wealth and expanse throughout this era. Taking advantage of the weakness of the Byzantine empire in Anatolia in the late 1300s, the Osmanli dynasty rose to power in the fifteenth century by securing Anatolia, Bulgaria, and some Balkan territories. Until 1453 Italian trading centers at Tana (on the Sea of Azov) and Caffa on the Crimea, and Crimean trading ports of Perekop and Ochakov, had dominated the northern Black Sea shore; the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul in 1453 opened up Ottoman expansion here and by 1475 the Ottoman empire ruled the Black Sea shore, forcing Italian, Jewish, Armenian, and other non-Muslim merchants out or into subject status. The Chingissid Girey dynasty of Crimea became an Ottoman vassal in 1478. In the sixteenth century the Ottoman realm reached its greatest extent by conquering Egypt, Syria, other Middle Eastern lands, and more of the Balkans, including much of Hungary in 1526.
The Ottoman empire provides an interesting comparative example of early modern empire, since, like Russia, it deployed many of the strategies of a "politics of difference" empire: central control, supranational ideology, tolerance of diverse religions and ethnicities, balance of coercion and co-optation in governing. Its Sunni Muslim sultans espoused a patrimonial ideology that, like Russia's, asserted absolute power tempered by the sultan's justice and mercy. Historically, Russia's expansionist interests towards the steppe and Black Sea meant that its interactions with the Ottoman empire were marked more by warfare than trade through the eighteenth century.
Russia was linked with other Eurasian neighbors—Persia and India—by trade. To the east of the Ottoman empire in the Middle East was the Shiite Safavid dynasty of Iran, which ruled Persia from 1501 to 1736. After a turbulent mid- sixteenth century when Sunni Ottomans contested with the Safavids for territory and influence in the Islamic world, the Persian empire and culture flowered under Shah Abbas (1587-1629). Prosperous and productive, Safavid Iran possessed several dynamic trading centers between the Far East, Europe, and the Middle East and was long a trading partner with Russia. It declined politically from the seventeenth century, and by the eighteenth Russian rulers were taking aim at its Caspian ports (generally unsuccessfully until the next century).
East of Persia, the Mughal dynasty (1526-1858) ruled much of India. A successor state of the Mongol empire, it was established in 1526 by the Muslim Babur who claimed both Timurid and Chinggisid heritage. As Andre Wink has shown, the Mughals, particularly their dynamic leader Akbar (1542-1605), adapted steppe customs to the more settled Indian peninsula. Noting that the Mughals ruled over an "enormously productive, wealthy and densely populated" realm that was actively engaged in regional and international trade, exporting gems, spices, tea, cotton, and silks, John F. Richards considers Mughal India parallel to European modernizing states for its effective, centralizing authority, skillful development of international trade nexuses, and adoption of new crops and technologies. At its greatest extent the dynasty controlled most ofthe Indian peninsula, but by the early eighteenth century it was weakened by internecine struggles that opened the door for growing British imperial authority. For Russia, Indian cottons were an important import trade and Indian merchants had a strong presence in Russia's trade through Astrakhan.
Russia's most distant political and economic partner was China. In the centuries of Moscow's rise, China was controlled by two successful and productive dynasties, the Ming (1370-1644) and Qing (1644-1917). Despite their differences—the Ming were a Han dynasty that shrank China's imperial space to its pre-Mongol size, while the Qing were Manchus who expanded the empire to its farthest limits—as Timothy Brook argues, their histories are marked by essential continuity. Under both dynasties China's economy expanded continually, responding to the presence of European traders in the South China Sea from the early sixteenth century by actively engaging in world trade, if not taking a leading role in international maritime shipping. China also witnessed a continually growing, dense population, straining the state to provide social welfare in a setting of near Malthusian overpopulation. It continued to rely on a meritocratic bureaucracy to rule as a centralized autocratic state, claiming for the Ming emperor or Manchu khan unlimited authority but, as in Muscovy, limiting his power by the exigencies of space and resources and also by the dominant culture of the "Three Teachings": Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist. Connecting with Chinese goods through Silk Road intermediaries, Russia constantly sought more direct access, developing in the seventeenth century caravan routes through southern Siberia and culminating with the Treaties of Nerchinsk (1689) and Khiatka (1727) that provided direct Chinese-Russia trade and established border protocols.
At this same time, European maritime routes captured some transit luxury trade but did not displace overland routes, despite arguments to that effect. Morris Rossabi and Scott Levi have shown that, while from the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth centuries political instability in the Ottoman, Persian, Indian, and Qing empires, and the Central Asian steppe, did cause a decline in overland caravan trade, it was compensated for with shorter routes between China, India, Central Asia, Russia, and Europe that went north-south and east-west on a more northerly track through southern Siberia and northern Central Asia.
As we have suggested, the establishment ofmaritime networks linking European states with trading zones of South Asia, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and China from the late fifteenth century forged a global world economy. The Portuguese began this process with violent takeovers of trading emporia in the Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, and Indonesia starting in the late fifteenth century. The British, French, and Dutch were relative latecomers to trade in Asia, but came into their own in the seventeenth century, particularly the Dutch. The Dutch drove the Portuguese out of much of Indonesia in the first half of the seventeenth century; the British, after vying relatively unsuccessfully with the Dutch for Indonesian and Asian trade in the first half of the seventeenth century, settled for India, where they developed lucrative textile and opium sources from the seventeenth century on, laying the groundwork for later imperial consolidation in India. France established some presence in Indian trade in the early eighteenth century. European destinations of long-distance maritime trade originating in ports in China, Indonesia, and India chart the evolution of empires: in the sixteenth century, Lisbon was Europe's emporium of colonial goods; in the seventeenth century, Amsterdam, supplanted in the late seventeenth century by London.