The Russian Empire 1450–1801

Age, affecting the northern hemisphere from Greenland and Iceland across the Europe through Russia to China, starting around 130 ...

centuries were characterized by climatic instability and extremes. In addition to very cold winters, many summers were overly dr ...

times of social unrest and dysfunction, and underscores the benefits of Russia’s persistent expansion into more fertile, resourc ...

While plague was a suddenly devastating illness, chronic infectious diseases also took great tolls. Smallpox was so endemic in E ...

intensive cultivation techniques, and more complex regional distribution systems in some areas. The empires of Eurasia also exhi ...

France 53, the Germanies 45, the Habsburg lands 39, Poland 18, and European Russia 6.5. Urbanization paralleled population growt ...

west (Bursa, Istanbul, Belgrade, Edirne), in Syria (Aleppo, Damascus), in Iraq (Baghdad) and the Black Sea littoral. Constantino ...

the global nexus of trade that developed between about 1400 and 1800 was specific and new, a“global early modern”that extended f ...

Kenneth Pomeranz has argued that it occurred already in these centuries, but others see such supremacy solidifying only in the n ...

religions and ethnicities, balance of coercion and co-optation in governing. Its Sunni Muslim sultans espoused a patrimonial ide ...

of space and resources and also by the dominant culture of the“Three Teachings”: Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist. Connecting wit ...

reasserted orthodoxies—in Europe the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, in Eurasia energized forms of Islam and Buddhism. Apoc ...

visions of representative government, but all sides wielded the concept of social contract to legitimize power. A striking aspec ...

chap. 2 (with particular attention to Europe and China). On its effect in China, see Timothy Brook,The Troubled Empire: China in ...

(London: Penguin, 2007); Herman van der Wee,“Structural Changes in European Long-Distance Trade, and Particularly in the Re-expo ...

2 De Facto Empire The Rise of Moscow Russia owed its stunning rise to European geopolitical power by the late eighteenth century ...

had conquered and then exchanged them in Constantinople for luxury goods otherwise unavailable in Rus’. The process...is usually ...

one can trace in tenth- and eleventh-century documents. While a 907 treaty of Rus’ Prince Oleg listed his emissaries as Karl, Fa ...

invented the title of“Grand Principality of Vladimir.”In 1253 the ambitious princes of Galicia and Volhynia on trade routes to H ...

ruled through the intermediaries of the Moscow princes. The East Slavs and Finno- Ugric peoples of the forest therefore had litt ...