By the end of the seventeenth century Russia's domestic and international economy was modernizing on the European model, inasmuch as the state was creating more systematic forms of direct and indirect taxation, trying to exert control over national fiscal policy, and enforcing a protectionist policy that supported local merchants and maximized state income. Its economy may have been of a colonial sort, exporting more raw materials than manufactured, but it was developing the capability and wealth to compete in the global market and geopolitical world.
On global trade: Timothy Brook, Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008); Matthew Romaniello, "Trade and the Global Economy," in Hamish Scott, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, c.1350-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2: 307-33. On how Europeans took "possession" of new lands: Stephen Greenblatt,
Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993).
John Brewer on Britain's eighteenth-century fiscal apparatus: The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688-1783 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). Charles Tilly on state building: Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992, rev. pbk. edn. (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992) and the classic collection he edited with Gabriel Ardant, The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
Maps tracking the growth of the Russian empire: Alan F. Chew, An Atlas of Russian History: Eleven Centuries of Changing Borders, rev. edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970); Martin Gilbert, Atlas of Russian History, 2nd edn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Invaluable detail is provided by maps included in the otherwise outdated Ocherki istorii SSSR: B. D. Grekov, ed., Ocherki istorii SSSR, 9 vols. (Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii nauk, 1953-8).
Muscovite economic and political change as "modernization": Jarmo Kotilaine and Marshall Poe, eds., Modernizing Muscovy: Reform and Social Change in Seventeenth-Century Muscovy (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). See also Jarmo Kotilaine, Russia's Foreign Trade and Economic Expansion in the Seventeenth Century: Windows on the World (Leiden: Brill, 2005).
Foreign travelers on Russia's trade potential include Giles Fletcher (in Russia 1588) and Adam Olearius (to Russia and Persia, 1633-9, 1643): Giles Fletcher, "Of the Russe Commonwealth," in Lloyd E. Berry and Robert O. Crummey, eds., Rude and Barbarous Kingdom: Russia in the Accounts of Sixteenth-Century English Voyagers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 109-246; Adam Olearius, The Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia, trans. and ed. Samuel H. Baron (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1967).
On Russian trade: Janet Martin, Treasure of the Land of Darkness: The Fur Trade and its Significance for Medieval Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and her Medieval Russia 980-1584 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Paul Bush- kovitch, The Merchants of Moscow, 1580-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
On Indian traders, see Scott Levi, "India, Russia, and the 18th-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; Stephen Frederic Dale, Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) (including the 1684 petition against Indian traders); Audrey Burton, The Bukharans: A Dynastic, Diplomatic and Commercial History, 1550-1702 (Richmond: Curzon, 1997). On Ottoman trade, see Halil Inalcik and Daniel Quataert, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
On Armenians: Rudolph P. Matthee, The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran: Silk for Silver, 1600-1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
On Siberian trade in the global context: Morris Rossabi, "The 'Decline' of the Central Asian Caravan Trade," in James D. Tracy, ed., The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance
Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Erika Monahan, The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016) and her "Locating Rhubarb: Early Modernity's Relevant Obscurity," in Paula Findlen, ed., Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500-1800 (London: Routledge, 2013), 227-51. On tobacco as a commodity, see Matthew P. Romaniello and Tricia Starks, eds., Tobacco in Russian History and Culture: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2009).
On the domestic economy: Joseph T. Fuhrman, The Origins of Capitalism in Russia: Industry and Progress in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972); Jarmo T. Kotilaine, "Mercantilism in Pre-Petrine Russia," in Kotilaine and Poe, eds., Modernizing Muscovy, 143-74; Denis J. B. Shaw, "Towns and Commerce," in Maureen Perrie, ed., Cambridge History of Russia, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 298-316; Richard Hellie, "The Economy, Trade and Serfdom," in ibid., 1: 539-58.
On foreign experts in Muscovy: Sergei Platonov, Moscow and the West, trans. and ed. Joseph L. Wieczynski (Hattiesburg, Miss.: Academic International, 1972); William M. Reger IV, "European Mercenary Officers and the Reception of Military Reform in the Seventeenth-Century Russian Army," in Kotilaine and Poe, eds., Modernizing Muscovy, 223-46; Kees Boterbloem, Moderniser of Russia: Andrei Vinius, 1641-1716 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Co-optation
Creating an Elite
One of the great challenges of empire was to maintain stability in a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional setting. Russia did this by keeping constituent parts of the empire separated from each other and dependent on the center. The state sought only as much cohesion as it needed. The strength of its cohesion was in the constant renewal and renegotiation of its relationships with elites and commoners, confessional and ethnic groups, and other elements of empire. The state co-opted important social groups to perform essential service to the tsars; with grants of status, land, wealth, and privilege, the state forged an elite of military men, who stood at the center of a society that might be envisioned as an embracing circle.
CIRCLES OF SOCIETY
Muscovites wrote no social-political philosophy, no theory of the state similar to medieval Europe's analogy of society as the human body. Muscovy was not a self- conscious state in that regard; it is even difficult to reconstitute what were the constituent groups of society. Scattered records—household censuses, lists of dishonor compensation, military musters, signatories or historical accounts of political assemblies—give the general outline. Several visual analogies come to mind. From the perspective of ideology, the ruler would be uniquely on top of, or at the center of, all the people, who would be in an undifferentiated mass, since, in theory, they all had equal status before the tsar. They were all his children, whom he was leading to salvation by moral example. They all possessed honor, protected by the ruler's courts (save for criminals who had severed their ties with community). They all served; no one in Muscovy was a free agent, living off private income. The privileged served in the army or high merchantry, or prayed for tsar and realm in the Church. The rest of society paid taxes and more; packages of service requirements (tax burden, recruitment, labor) varied among ethnic groups, but all owed something.