colonial outpost of Dutch, English, or Persian trade. Therefore, as noted, Russia
was stingy with trade monopolies: the English received trade monopolies in 1555,
but their repeated requests for renewals and expansion were refused, and the
English lost those privileges entirely in 1649. Despite repeated efforts, the Dutch
never received an official trade monopoly, although many individual Dutch mer-
chants received charters for trade and industry, the premiums for these licenses
bringing Russia valuable income. Monopolies granted, for example, to the New
Julfa Armenians in 1667 for silk and to the Bukharans for China trade similarly
lined state coffers as well as bringing in customs income.
State policy tried to prohibit foreign merchants from retail trade entirely and
from the interior as much as possible. Major foreign merchant communities
enjoyed neighborhoods, warehouses, and/or markets in key trading towns for
wholesale trade only. Nevertheless, many trade centers enjoyed cosmopolitan
populations. In the seventeenth century the English had warehouses in Arkhangelsk,
Kholmogory, Vologda, and Moscow; the Swedes had access to Moscow, Novgorod,
Pskov, and Ladoga, while Dutch merchants had warehouses in Arkhangelsk,
Kholmogory, Vologda, Iaroslavl’(a key customs depot), and Moscow. As we
have seen, in 1684 Moscow hosted a trade center for Bukharan, Persian, Armenian,
and Indian merchants; furthermore, Bukharan merchants traded in Volga towns
and Persian traders in Kazan and Nizhnii Novgorod.
Foreign merchants tended to live in communities, a practice that Moscow
formalized over time. Since the sixteenth century the capital had had a neighbor-
hood for merchants from Poland and the Grand Duchy; in 1652 a“German”
neighborhood was established for northern European Protestant traders. Small
communities of Armenians were cited from the 1640s in Kazan, the 1660s in
Moscow (with a church) and in St. Petersburg as early as 1710. Such neighbor-
hoods offered the foreigners self-government and religious autonomy (there had
been a Dutch Reformed church in Moscow since 1625), but they also allowed the
state to collect customs and control trade more efficiently.
As in most early modern states, the tsar claimed monopolies (in Europe often
called the king’s economic regalia) or right offirst refusal for a wide range of
products; already in the sixteenth century luxury furs, walrus tusks, wax, and honey
were sold by the tsar’s agents for the benefit of state coffers. In 1653 the extensive
transit trade in rhubarb from China (valued in Europe as a purgative) was declared a
state monopoly, as Erika Monahan has shown. The Dutch in the seventeenth
century won a monopoly on export of caviar (valued in Catholic countries during
Lenten fast). But the state’s monopolies should not be exaggerated: the state’s
portion of exports was perhaps 10 percent, and its preferential purchases of imports
(cloths, gold, jewels, woolens, silks and velvets, wine, Persian luxury goods) at
Arkhangelsk in the seventeenth century were only 1 percent of that port’s volume.
Nevertheless, throughout the seventeenth century Russian merchants com-
plained of unfair competition from foreign merchants, perhaps because foreigners
easily got around prohibitions on retail sales. In petitions of 1627, 1635, 1637,
1646, and 1649 Russian merchants sought preferential tariff rates and protection
in retail sales. The state responded by raising tolls on foreigners at Arkhangelsk in
Trade, Tax, and Production 197