Over the early modern centuries, Russia fended off bids by all the European powers—English, Dutch, Swedish, French—for monopolies on trade into and across Russian imperial lands, developing instead a state-dominated trade nexus through Siberia and down the Volga for eastern goods. Russia also developed exchange with European markets through Baltic and Black Sea ports, all the while emulating its counterparts by imposing protectionist tariff and trade policies. By the eighteenth century Russians were purchasing colonial goods from Dutch and British carriers through Baltic and White Sea ports as often as from traditional southern and eastern routes.
The interaction of merchants and communities in all these trading theaters witnessed exchanges of ideas, technological innovations, art, and style. We will briefly highlight some of the rich cultural interchanges that we explore in greater detail later. In the religious sphere these were centuries of heterodoxy, revival, and reasserted orthodoxies—in Europe the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, in Eurasia energized forms of Islam and Buddhism. Apocalyptic thought infused Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism in these centuries. European monarchs capitalized on religious dissent by establishing national churches; Ottoman sultans patronized both Sunni and Sufi Islam to appeal across their diverse population and made Safavid Shiism a rallying cry for militant conquest. In the Polish- Lithuanian lands, Protestantism made great inroads, as did the Counter- Reformation, pushing some Ukrainian and Belarus'an Orthodox into Union with the Vatican (Brest 1596). Russia was affected by all these heady trends. Apocalyptic thought prevailed in sixteenth-century religious writings and art, and was nurtured by religious dissenters from the seventeenth century; the Orthodox Church embarked on religious reform inspired in part by confessionalization happening in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church; those Russian reforms in turn sparked a schism by traditionalists in the seventeenth century.
Advances in military hardware—artillery and guns—stimulated and made possible more ambitious military campaigns; the arms trade, broadly conceived, brought experts and munitions to the Ottoman and Russian empires and stimulated indigenous military industry and fortifications from the fifteenth century. Catching up with China, which had had a form of printing for centuries, printing and trade in books expanded across Europe from the sixteenth century, but Russia and the Ottomans both reacted selectively to this new technology. Initially rejecting printing in the sixteenth century (the Belarus'an Ivan Fedorov and his printing press were thrown out of Moscow after printing only a handful of religious titles in the 1560s), church and state gingerly admitted printing in the seventeenth century for state documents and religious texts. Even when Peter I embraced printing, it remained state-controlled through the eighteenth century. Expanding literacy and communications in much of Europe (France, England, the Germanies, northern Italy) fueled the emergence of a public sphere of political import. Institutions of sociability (coffee houses, pubs, salons, theater, newspapers) across Europe, in Ottoman cities and by the late eighteenth century in the Russian capitals and major provincial towns provided spaces for public discussion, even as European and Eurasian rulers also mobilized communication—literacy, newspapers, proclamations— to further their own goals.
Novel ideologies of rulership emerged in these centuries to underwrite state building. Some ideas were grounded in tradition: in China, Russia, and the Ottoman sphere among others, multiple forms of communication (writings, portraiture, architecture, ritual, dress) broadcast a state's claims to legitimacy in an age- old idiom of godly appointment. Other dynasties (Mughal India, Crimean and other splinter khanates of the Mongol Horde, the Qing dynasty in China) claimed legitimacy through charismatic Chinggisid and Timurid lineage. Claims to centralized monarchical authority in Europe from the sixteenth century onward ("the well-ordered police state," absolutism) justified their reach not only by reference to God-given authority but also to the ruler's obligation to serve and improve "the common good"; these ideas were potent in eighteenth-century Russia as well. New philosophies of rule, principally in Europe, contrasted theories of strong states with visions of representative government, but all sides wielded the concept of social contract to legitimize power.
A striking aspect of political theory in Europe in the early modern centuries was the elaboration of integrated theories of political economy projecting and promoting the power of the state. Mercantilist ideas spread across Europe, advocating the acquisition of productive resources—land and people. Such theories, among other stimuli, prompted between 1500 and 1800 steady territorial expansion within Europe, imperial expansion, and the creation of colonial dependencies overseas (Spain, England, France) or contiguously (Habsburg realm, Ottoman and Russian empires). Myriad domestic economic reforms also served this goaclass="underline" streamlining of internal customs barriers, protective tariffs, abolition of privileged monopolies on trade to outsiders, construction of roads, canals, and maritime shipping industry. All are seen in Russia from the seventeenth century onward. Eurasia was characterized by empire, but in many ways, so also was post-Westphalian Europe, where the leading states were proto-nation states on the continent and overseas trading empires worldwide.
The Russian empire rose to prominence in the context of these heady trends of the global early modern. From 1450 to 1801, Moscow's rulers inexorably expanded in directions of trade routes, resources, and productive lands. They modernized their military to match steppe and European fronts of expansion; they adapted ideologies of absolutism to Russia's autocracy; they expanded export and transit trade with Siberian caravans and White, Baltic, and Black Sea ports; they absorbed religious and cultural trends. They made the most of the global early modern.
On trade and the early modern: Matthew Romaniello, "Trade and the Global Economy," in Hamish Scott, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, c.1350-1750, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2: 307-33; John F. Richards, "Early Modern India and World History," Journal of World History 8 (1997): 197-209 and his The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Jerry Bentley, "Early Modern Europe and the Early Modern World," in J. Bentley and Charles Parker, eds., Between the Middle Ages and Modernity: Individual and Community in the Early Modern World (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 13-31. On global connectedness: Joseph Fletcher, "Integrative History: Parallels and Interconnections in the Early Modern Period, 1500-1800," Journal of Turkish Studies 9 (1985): 37-57; Victor B. Lieberman, Beyond Binary Histories: Re-Imagining Eurasia to c.1830 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 289-316. On steppe empires, see Peter Golden, Central Asia in World History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). On the "great divergence": Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and Roy Bin Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011).