Matthew P Romaniello

Commercial competition between Britain and Russia became entangled during the eighteenth century in Iran, the Middle East, and China, and disputes emerged over control of the North Pacific. Focusing on the British Russia Company, this book charts the ways in which the company navigated these commercial and diplomatic frontiers. It reveals how geopolitical developments affected trade far more than commercial regulations while also challenging depictions of this period as a straightforward era of Russian economic decline. By looking at merchants' and diplomats' correspondence and the actions and experiences of men working in Eurasia for Russia and Britain, it demonstrates the importance of restoring the human experience in global processes and provides individual perspectives on this game of empire. This approach reveals that economic fears, more than commodities exchanged, motivated actions across the geopolitical landscape of Europe during the Seven Years' War and the American and French Revolutions.

In 1552, Muscovite Russia conquered the city of Kazan on the Volga River. It was the first Orthodox Christian victory against Islam since the fall of Constantinople, a turning point that, over the next four years, would complete Moscow’s control over the river. This conquest provided a direct trade route with the Middle East and would transform Muscovy into a global power. As Matthew Romaniello shows, however, learning to manage the conquered lands and peoples would take decades.

Russia did not succeed in empire-building because of its strength, leadership, or even the weakness of its neighbors, Romaniello contends; it succeeded by managing its failures. Faced with the difficulty of assimilating culturally and religiously alien peoples across thousands of miles, the Russian state was forced to compromise in ways that, for a time, permitted local elites of diverse backgrounds to share in governance and to preserve a measure of autonomy. Conscious manipulation of political and religious language proved more vital than sheer military might. For early modern Russia, empire was still elusive—an aspiration to political, economic, and military control challenged by continuing resistance, mismanagement, and tenuous influence over vast expanses of territory.

In recent years scholars have increasingly challenged and reassessed the once established concept of the 'crisis of the nobility' in early-modern Europe. Offering a range of case studies from countries across Europe this collection further expands our understanding of just how the nobility adapted to the rapidly changing social, political, religious and cultural circumstances around them. By allowing readers to compare and contrast a variety of case studies across a range of national and disciplinary boundaries, a fuller - if more complex - picture emerges of the strategies and actions employed by nobles to retain their influence and wealth. The nobility exploited Renaissance science and education, disruptions caused by war and religious strife, changing political ideas and concepts, the growth of a market economy, and the evolution of centralized states in order to maintain their lineage, reputation, and position. Through an examination of the differing strategies utilized to protect their status, this collection reveals much about the fundamental role of the 'second order' in European history and how they had to redefine the social and cultural 'spaces' in which they found themselves. By using a transnational and comparative approach to the study of the European nobility, the volume offers exciting new perspectives on this important, if often misunderstood, social group.

This article begins with a consideration of Russian traditional clothing of the seventeenth century in the context of the period’s social and economic reforms.  Peter the Great would build upon these earlier policies to finance his overhaul of the Russian military system, but found his government still in dire need of new funds. Therefore, the ongoing economic pressures required more radical changes to generate the necessary revenue.  When Peter the Great passed his famous 1701 law requiring Russian urban society to adopt Western dress, it had little influence over his court, which had already adopted the new fashions.  Rather, the sumptuary laws of the eighteenth century targeted the general urban population, merchants and other townspeople, to accept the new style or pay fines.  This article will suggest Peter’s efforts were designed to generate revenue more than to foster ‘Western’ culture.

Russia transitioned from enforcing the world's longest ban on importing tobacco in the seventeenth century to legalizing the product at the beginning of the eighteenth and ultimately becoming one of the world's largest producers of tobacco by the nineteenth century. A part of this process neglected by historians is the way in which Russia distributed tobacco among the indigenous communities in Siberia, Kamchatka, and Russian America, creating new consumers where none had existed. This article discusses both the process by which Russia exported tobacco to its frontier and the manner in which tobacco consumption was localized among its diverse populations. Tobacco was not a single product experienced the same way throughout the empire but rather became a marker of difference, demonstrating the multiple communities and trade networks that influenced the nature of Russia's colonial presence in Asia and the North Pacific.

This essay is a brief comment on the preceding essays, highlighting two issues of significance raised by these authors. The first is whether the frontier itself influenced the evolution of Orthodox belief. Did distance create an opportunity to expand the faith? The second question considers the impact of the Russian Empire on its religious communities, and examines the way in which religion can reveal the tension between center and periphery. To address these issues, this comment adds a reflection on the conversion mission among the Muslim and animist communities in and around Kazan in the early modern period.

When the Mongol Empire expanded across Eurasia in the 13th century, it not only established a new political order but also unified the trade networks that spread across northern Eurasia, connecting China, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the East Slavs in Eastern Europe within one system. The collapse of Mongol rule and the rise of new states and dynasties, including the Ottoman Empire, Muscovite Russia, and Qing China, adjusted trade routes throughout Eurasia, but the commercial networks remained robust until the modern era. Historians have debated whether there was a notable “decline” of the overland caravan trade along the historic “Silk Roads” in the 18th century, as European maritime traders in Asia carried many of the goods that had traveled across Eurasia. The perception of a decline, however, is challenged by the robust intra-Eurasia trade among Russia, Central Asia, India, and China throughout the 19th century. This dynamic region was influenced by the maintenance and expansion of regional networks across Eurasia, the consequences of the involvement of state interests, and increasing economic regulations in the early modern period, and the variety of commodities exchanged east and west, which were far more than just a silk trade.

Following the conquest of the Kazan’ in 1552, the Russian Orthodox Church constructed a role for feminine behavior on the frontier that defined women’s participation in the imperial project. The Church’s officials presented colonial women as moral, obedient women in need of male protection. This image assured Muscovite society that these frontier women were safe and protected, and that this new territory had become a place for the Orthodox community to live an ideal existence. These exemplary women were also useful for the state, as they symbolized a colonial society that revealed Muscovy as a Russian Orthodox space, removing any connection of the tsar’s new land from its Muslim or animistic past. Furthermore, this exemplary version of Orthodox life recorded by the Church could be a suitable platform to encourage the conversion of the tsar’s newest subjects. As a result of all of these pressures, the frontier did not offer any new freedoms to Russian Orthodox women; rather Muscovy’s frontier only tolerated a narrowly constructed feminine role.

Early modern Russia sat at the intersection of Eurasian trade networks, which allowed both commodities and information to move from east to west and north to south. Rhubarb exported from China had held a prominent position in Western medical treatments since the classical era, but improved transportation and communication between Europe and Asia through Russia enabled the growth of the medicinal rhubarb trade to unexpected heights after 1760.  Earlier studies of rhubarb have focused on European interests in uncovering ‘true’ medicinal rhubarb, but this article will situate the plant as a part of the broader process of scientific exchange across Eurasia.  Russia’s unique position in Eurasia ultimately allowed its specialists to contribute to the development of Western science through the importation of information from Asia and its own expeditions in Siberia, Russia’s internal ‘Asian’ territory.

The Russian Empire instituted a ban on tobacco imports in the seventeenth century that would last nearly sixty years before it was reversed in 1696. When Russians finally adopted the European practice of smoking, their new habit was quite distinct from their non-Russian subjects, who had already adopted the water-pipe from the Middle East or chewing tobacco from Chinese supplies. The spread of this global product did not unify the Russian Empire with a common habit, but instead revealed strong regional distinctions that remained largely unaffected by increasing consumption.

Few products received the reception of tobacco in the early modern world, with a plurality of opinions from medical, religious, political, and economic authorities arriving in the wake of the arrival of the product.  In early modern England, much of the language of this discussion was gendered, with a consensus emerging that smoking might be acceptable for men, but was inadvisable, if not expressly dangerous, for women.  By situating the medical debate as reflective of, and contributing to, the spread of tobacco consumption, this article will reveal how the gendered medical ideas of tobacco’s beneficial qualities for men, and harmful effects on women, contributed to creating a popular consensus of the role of tobacco in early modern society.

In 1663, an English Embassy lead by the Earl of Carlisle traveled to Muscovite Russia.  Failing to make any significant breakthroughs in Anglo-Russian relations, a member of the Earl’s Embassy observed that the Russians “will in time leave off that rustick and barbarous humor, which is so natural to them, and learn by degrees to live with more civility…  And were they under a gentler Government, and had a free Trade with every body, no doubt but this Nation would in short time be taken with our civility and decent way of living.” The English expectation that trade would inspire the adoption of English customs and create consumers of their goods was predicated on a fundamental misapprehension regarding the relative weights of trade and cultural prohibitions against foreign customs. When tobacco was introduced into Muscovy in the seventeenth century, most Muscovite authorities, including the Russian Orthodox Church and the tsar, condemned the use of tobacco. Furthermore, Muscovy’s ongoing reforms created a mercantilistic economic system depending on the strict regulation of all foreign trade for Moscow’s benefit. The tobacco trade serves as an example of the failure of English economic ideology, resulting in Muscovy remaining outside of an English sphere of influence as well as demonstrating the strength of Muscovite religious and political resistance to Western culture. In other words, because the presumed influence of the exporting power has failed to alter the importer in any meaningful way, the tobacco trade reveals the limited significance of early-modern globalization.

Muscovite Russia initiated an era of empire-building with the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan’ in 1552, creating new challenges for the Russian Orthodox Church with the addition of Muslim, Turkic Tatars and Chuvashes, and animistic, Finno-Ugric Maris, Mordvins, and Udmurts.  The traditional historiography has presented the conquest as an Orthodox crusade against non-believers. However, the early years of the Orthodox Church in the region reveals a different history, in which the Church was driven by two different initiatives and neither was conversion.  Secular economic support enabled the new churches, monasteries, and convents to secure Muscovite control over the region, whether it be from assisting the physical defense of the territory or by developing the region’s resources.  At the same time, the Church began a dedicated effort to create a spiritual, Orthodox aura among the tsar’s new lands and peoples. Combined, these initiatives succeeded in making the Russian Orthodox Church integral to Muscovite political centralization over its expanding frontiers, paralleling the contemporary developments of confessionalization in Western Europe. While the conversion of the tsar’s new subjects was not the primary goal of the Church, its overall success along Muscovy’s frontier ultimately positioned its members to pursue the conversion of the local population once its earlier initiatives had succeeded.

... thank several of my fellow graduate students for their willingness to listen to some of my ideas concerning Kazan', and for suggesting secondary literature that has influenced some of my thinking on Russian history and colonialism: Jennifer Anderson, Aaron Retish, and Tricia ...