Some excellent studies of the Russian empire are shaped around implicit European or modernist comparisons: Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals (London: J. Murray, 2000); Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). Among those urging a value- neutral approach are Seymour Becker, "Russia and the Concept of Empire," Ab Imperio 3-4 (2000): 329-42 and Aleksei Miller, "The Value and the Limits of a Comparative Approach to the History of Contiguous Empires on the European Periphery," in Kimitaka Matsuzato, ed., Imperiology: From Empirical Knowledge to Discussing the Russian Empire (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2007), 19-32 and The Romanov Empire and Nationalism: Essays in the Methodology of Historical Research, English edn. rev. and enl. (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), particularly "The Empire and Nation in the Imagination of Russian Nationalism," 161-79. Alfred Rieber's 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) is notable for breadth and synthesis.
On the trope of "despotism": Marshall Poe, "A People Born to Slavery": Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476-1748 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); N. S. Kollmann, "The Concept of Political Culture in Russian History," in A Companion to Russian History, ed. Abbott T. Gleason (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 89-104. A synthesis of the views of newer scholarship on court politics is in the debate between Valerie Kivelson and Marshall Poe: Kritika: Explorations in Russian andEurasian History 3 (2002): 473-99. On the "Third Rome" theory: Marshall Poe, "Moscow, the Third Rome: The Origins and Transformations of a 'Pivotal Moment,'" JahrbUcher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 49 (2001): 412-29. On theory of empire: Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Jane Burbank, "An Imperial Rights Regime: Law and Citizenship in the Russian Empire," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7 (2006): 397-431; Alessandro Stanziani, Batisseurs d'empires: Russie, Chine et Inde a la croisee des mondes, XVe-XIXe siecle (Paris: Raisons d'agir, 2012). Niccolo Machiavelli is quoted from The Prince, trans. and ed. Thomas G. Bergin (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1947). Thomas T. Allsen on early empires: "Pre-modern empires," in Jerry H. Bentley, ed., The Oxford Handbook of World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 361-78. Prasenjit Duara considers modern empires fundamentally different from early modern ("Modern Imperialism," in Bentley, ed., The Oxford Handbook of World History, 379-95), but Burbank and Cooper (Empires in World History) argue for essential continuity into the era of nation-states. On Muscovy's capacious concept of empire: Valerie A. Kivelson, Cartographies ofTsardom: The Land and its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2006). On "separate deals": Brian J. Boeck, Imperial Boundaries: Cossack Communities and Empire-Building in the Age of Peter the Great (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Charles Tilly on pre-modern state building: "States, State Transformation, and War," in Bentley, ed., Oxford Handbook of World History, 176—94 and his Coercion, Capital, and European States, ad 990-1992, rev. pbk. edn. (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992).
On the Ottoman empire: Barkey, Empire ofDifference and Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). On Mughals combining Mongol and Indian traditions: 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: Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2010).
Prologue
The Chronological Arc
This work takes a thematic approach in general chronological order, with more detailed event-based history left to the background. In some cases, it is built into the chapters: Chapters 7 and 13 concerning imperial ideology, for example, pause to recount the vagaries of dynastic succession behind confident claims of seamless God-given power. In other cases events and institutions are mentioned for which the reader might wish prior knowledge. This prologue therefore provides a quick chronological overview of early modern Russian history, focusing on political events: first domestic chronicle, then foreign policy.
DOMESTIC EVENTS
The Grand Principality of Moscow—modern English-language scholarship often uses the term "Muscovy" to refer to Russia before 1700, drawing on sixteenth- century English nomenclature—rose to regional power in the fourteenth century in the wake of the weakening of the Mongol empire, dominant in modern-day European Russia from the 1240s. Its westernmost subdivision ruled East Slavic principalities from Sarai on the lower Volga and is properly called the Qipchaq khanate, more familiarly the "Golden Horde." From the early fifteenth century Moscow's grand prince and his men consolidated power and conquered neighboring principalities (the grand principality of Tver', the trade center of Novgorod), as detailed in Chapter 2. Because they had to supplement their paltry tax income from the sparsely settled peasant population with that from transit trade along major river highways, territorial expansion was constant. Conquest in the direction of major trade depots, river routes, and territories rich in resources such as furs, mines, and more fertile soil was a constant imperative; in the sixteenth century Moscow expanded down the Volga and into Siberia, in the seventeenth century across Siberia to the Pacific and into the Black Sea and Caspian steppe; in the eighteenth century, Russia won the Black Sea littoral, Crimea, northern Caucasus, modern day Ukrainian, Belarus'an and Lithuanian lands to the west, and even North American lands across the Pacific (see Maps 2-5).
Moscow's grand princes (who took the title of "tsar" in 1547) ruled over a land always short on manpower for army and bureaucracy, let alone for productive taxpaying labor. The state single-mindedly focused on mobilizing its scarce resources, resulting in the endurance over the early modern centuries of a very simple social organization, discussed in Chapter 9. The army officer corps comprised the landed elite; the peasant economy was so autarkic and domestic and export trade so controlled by the state that urban middle classes developed only weakly. Starting with Ivan III (1462-1505), Muscovy supported the elite by awarding to cavalrymen grants of land and peasant labor on condition of military service; these grants were called "pomest'e." Over the next centuries the peasants were gradually enserfed to ensure a labor supply to the military elite, as discussed in Chapter 10. The state established a strong but skeletal bureaucratic system across the realm; the cavalry elite staffed not only the army but also local government, supported by chancery bureaucrats. Every subject of the grand prince was obliged to serve the state, whether by paying taxes and providing services (peasants and townsmen) or rendering military or merchant service (landed elite, high merchants).