On the Little Ice Age, see Brian M. Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000); H. H. Lamb, Climate, History and the Modern World, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 1995) and Richards, Unending Frontier, chap. 2 (with particular attention to Europe and China). On its effect in China, see Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2010), chap. 3.
On climate in Russia, see Yevgeny P. Borisenkov, "Climatic and Other Natural Extremes in the European Territory of Russia in the Late Maunder Minimum (1675-1715)," in Burkhard Frenzel, ed., Climatic Trends and Anomalies in Europe 1675—1715 (Stuttgart, Jena, New York: Gustav Fischer Verlag, 1994), 83-94; and essays by Chernavskaya and Borisenkov in Raymond S. Bradley and Philip D. Jones, eds., Climate Since A.D. 1500 (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 73-81, 171-83. An important resource in Russian: E. P. Borisenkov and V. M. Pasetskii, Ekstremal'nyeprirodnye iavleniia v russkikh letopisiakh XI-XVII vv. (Leningrad: Gidrometeoizdat, 1983).
On epidemic in early modern Europe and Eurasia in generaclass="underline" Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 29-39; William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Anchor Books, 1976); Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steeclass="underline" The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999). A classic in Russian on epidemics in Russia: K. G. Vasil'ev and A. E. Segal, Istoriia epidemii v Rossii. (Materialy i ocherki) (Moscow: Gosud. izdatel'stvo meditsinskoi literatury, 1960).
On demographic growth for Europe, see P. Malanima, Pre-Modern European Economy: One Thousand Years (10th-19th Centuries) (Leiden: Brill, 2009). Jan de Vries, "Population," in Thomas A. Brady, Heiko Oberman, and James D. Tracy, eds., Handbook of European History, 1400-1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation. Vol. 1: Structures and Assertions (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publ. Co., 1994), 1-50. For China, see Brook, Troubled Empire, chap. 2; for the Ottoman empire, see Halil Inalcik, with Daniel Quataert, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 25-41 and 646-57.
Demography and population density for Russia: McEvedy and Jones, Atlas. The English translation of Boris Mironov's study that updated Ia. E. Vodarskii's demographic calculations: B. N. Mironov and Ben Eklof, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000); B. N. Mironov, The Standard of Living and Revolutions in Russia, 1700-1917, ed. Gregory L. Freeze (London: Routledge, 2012); Paolo Malanima, Pre-Modern European Economy: One Thousand Years (10th-19th Centuries) (Leiden: Brill, 2009). For Russian classics, see N. A. Gorskaia, Istoricheskaia demografiia Rossii epokhi feodalizma. (Itogi i problemy izucheniia) (Moscow: Nauka, 1994); Ia. E. Vodarskii, Naselenie Rossii za 400 let (XVI-nachalo XXX vv.) (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1973).
On deforestation and environmental degradation, see David Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 1600-1930: The World the Peasants Made (London: Longman, 1999) andhis ThePlough That Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia's Grasslands, 1700-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
On European maritime empires, see James D. Tracy, "Trade across Eurasia to about 1750," in Jerry H. Bentley, The Oxford Handbook of World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 288-303; James Tracy, ed., The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350-1750 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and James Tracy, The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, 1350-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Wolfgang Reinhard, "The Seaborne Empires," in Brady, Oberman, and Tracy, eds., Handbook of European History, 1400-1600, 637-64; J. M. Roberts, The New Penguin History of the World, 5th edn. updated and revised by Odd Arne Westad (London: Penguin, 2007); Herman van der Wee, "Structural Changes in European Long-Distance Trade, and Particularly in the Re-export Trade from South to North, 1350-1750," in Tracy, ed., The Rise of Merchant Empires, 14-33.
On Silk Road trade and Eurasian empire, see David Christian, "Silk Roads or Steppe Roads? The Silk Roads in World History," Journal ofWorld History 11 (2000): 1 -26; Morris Rossabi, "The 'decline' of the Central Asian Caravan Trade," in Tracy, ed., The Rise of Merchant Empires; Tracy, "Trade across Eurasia," in Oxford Handbook ofWorld History, 288-303; Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Scott Levi, "India, Russia, and the Eighteenth-Century Transformation of the Central Asian Caravan Trade," in Scott Levi, ed., India and Central Asia: Commerce & Culture, 1500-1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 93-122; Alfred Rieber, The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
On the Mughals, see Richards, "Early Modern India and World History," Journal of World History 8 (1997): 197-209 and his An Unending Frontier, chap. 1; Andre Wink, "Post- nomadic Empires: From the Mongols to the Mughals," in Peter Bang and C. A. Bayly, eds., Tributary Empires in Global History (Oxford: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 120-31 and his Akbar (Oxford: One World, 2009). On China, see Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire. On the Ottomans, see Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) and Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650: The Structure of Power (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).
2
De Facto Empire
The Rise of Moscow
Russia owed its stunning rise to European geopolitical power by the late eighteenth century to a confluence of geographical location, natural resource availability, and chronological serendipity. Russia was able to provide raw materials and luxury furs when north European cities and states were generating massive demand for them. Its rulers constructed a stable political system, capable ofenduring through political turmoil, organizing an army and using it to conquer and hold territory, building the needed fiscal and bureaucratic infrastructures. While Moscow began to rise as a regional power in the fourteenth century, its consolidation as a particularly "early modern state," with reformed army, bureaucracy, and central government, began around 1450. From that point for about a century, Moscow's grand princes and elites ruled over a small territory in the center and north that was primarily, but not exclusively, populated by East Slavic peasants. One could make the argument that even in its first formative centuries, Moscow ruled over an empire—a multinational and multi-confessional realm—inasmuch as Moscow's subjects around 1450 comprised East Slavs, Finno-Ugric peoples, and some Turks, espousing Christian Orthodoxy, Islam, and animist beliefs. Here we trace how Moscow rose to regional power in its first few centuries.