Russian Expansion under Catherine the Great 27Russian minds about the advisability of acquiring colonies in Asia.
The prevailing wisdom asserted that colonies had made western
Europe rich. That was certainly the lesson to be drawn from the trea-
tise Catherine called her prayer book, Montesquieu's The Spirit of
the Laws.^8 From the opening of book XXI, his discussion of com-
merce, the significance of trade with India was highlighted as a source
of riches to those who conducted the trade. He regarded the com-
merce between Rome and India via Central Asia, the Caspian, and
the Caucasus as beneficial to both parties, except for the degree to
which it caused a drain on Rome's supply of precious metals. That
need not have worried Catherine unduly, given her optimism that
Siberia would be Russia's Mexico and Peru. He ascribed the decline
of that trade to the shift in the course of the Oxus so that it no
longer flowed into the Caspian and, more important, to the destruc-
tive impact of the Tatars. He went on to show that intermediaries
in Europe's trade with India—Egypt and several Western countries
with East India Companies—also prospered by that trade.
Russian imperialists could also draw encouragement from the most
influential work on imperialism of the a.ge,Histoire philosophique et
politique des etablissemens et du commerce des Europeens dans les
deux Indes by the Abbe Raynal and a number of other unnamed
collaborators. The authors were basically opposed to colonies as arti-
ficial creations that often did not deliver the hoped for economic
gains and frequently oppressed colonial inhabitants. Yet the authors
occasionally revealed enthusiasm for the benefits of trade with Asia
even when accompanied by colonialism. Raynal and his collaborators
lauded the great widening of horizons caused by the interchange of
goods and ideas between Europe and the outside world. This trade
as well as the acquisition of territory had the authors' approval as
long as the goods involved were useful items, such as spices, as opposed
to sterile luxuries, such as tea. The right kind of trade was considered
the source of great wealth for wise colonialists. For example, reforms
of the British East India Company during the early 1770s had strength-
ened it greatly so that it could bring in immense profits at small cost
to the mother country.^9 The authors' discussion of Russia's poten-
tial role in East-West trade constituted a brief for imperial expansion.
Before the anarchic eighteenth century, Iran's Caucasian and Caspian
provinces had played an important role in international trade as pro-
ducers of silk and as transit points for Indian goods, some of which
still reached Russia by an alternate route across Central Asia. There
had also been a strong market for European goods in Iran, according
to the authors. Peter the Great understood the significance of all this