Stmins on Europe's Bureaucratization of Violence^153uated African states also clearly tended to grow, thanks in part to
access to weapons supplied by European traders.^8
In the New World, as in the Old, inland regions where transport
and communications were difficult remained slenderly affected by the
network of trade that European enterprise wove along the shorelines
of the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Yet the reach of the world market
could be very long. In the frozen north, for example, the high value
placed on furs led European traders to penetrate the entire breadth of
North America before the eighteenth century came to its close. They
entered into relations with local tribes, offering metal tools, blankets,
and whiskey in exchange for furs. As a result, older Amerindian pat
terns of life underwent rapid and irreversible change. Russian fur
traders did the same to the populations of Siberia, and in fact crossed
to Alaska as early as 1741. Accordingly, in the last decades of the
eighteenth century, Spanish and British claims to the Pacific coastline
of North America met and collided with the expanding Russian fur
trade empire, an encounter that dramatizes how Europe’s overseas
expansion was matched by an equally remarkable Russian eastward
expansion.
Europe’s land frontier was, indeed, almost as important in altering
European power balances as the overseas trade empires that nourished
French and British power so remarkably in the early eighteenth cen
tury. The vast Siberian wilderness—though impressive on the map
—mattered less than the occupation of steppelands in the Ukraine
and adjacent regions by grain farmers. Their labors increased Euro
pean food production very substantially in the course of the century
and provided a human and material base for the growth of the Russian
empire.
Russia was not the sole power to profit from the spread of agricul
ture into the steppelands of eastern Europe. Indeed the seventeenth
century had seen a complex struggle for dominion over the western
steppes in which local polities like the principality of Transylvania as
well as the Polish nobles’ republic competed with the three more
distant monarchies of Turkey, Austria, and Russia for control over this
part of the world.^9 The upshot, by the close of the eighteenth century,
definitely favored Russia, for the portions of the steppe that fell to
Turkey (Rumania) and to Austria (Hungary) were much less extensive
- Cf. the summing up of the impact of the slave trade on Africa in Paul Bohannan
and Philip Curtin, Africa and Africans (New York, 1971), pp. 273–76. - For an account of these struggles, see William H. McNeill, Europe’s Steppe Frontier,
1500–1800 (Chicago, 1964), pp. 126–221.