subsidies and charters went to foreigners for gunpowder factories; in the 1630s
Dutch merchant Andrei Vinius—father of Andrei Vinius, postmaster-general,
translator, and economic advisor to Aleksei Mikhailovich and his son Peter—
founded the Tula iron forge and armament factory using water-powered mills.
Wealthy Russians, such as Aleksei Mikhailovich’s confidant and brother-in-law
Boris Morozov and the tsar’s Romanov relatives, also received state support. The
state allowed foreigners to hire Russians and even transferred whole villages to their
possession as factory labor. The state itself developed ironworks at Zvenigorod and
Tula, which produced not only weaponry but iron equipment needed for other
enterprises (salt and potash works) and for construction of royal residences and
churches.
The state encouraged foreign investment in other industries in the seventeenth
century, but they were generally less successful. Glass works, silk production, paper
mills, and luxury leather tanning were all launched, but their products proved
inferior or more expensive than imported counterparts. Nevertheless, the state’s
efforts to encourage industry brought hundreds of European entrepreneurs and
skilled artisans to Russia, and transferred some skills to Russians in the generations
before Peter I, particularly in the iron industry. By 1725 Russia was one of Europe’s
leading producers of iron.
By the 1670s there were perhaps 3,650 foreign experts in Moscow, about one-
fifth of Moscow’s adult male population; entrepreneurs and engineers were joined
by military officers creating Russia’s “new model”infantry and cavalry army.
Primarily European, most lived in the“German Suburb”; other ethnic neighbor-
hoods focused on merchants. The German suburb had a German school, one
Dutch and three Lutheran churches, and many two-storey European mansions laid
out on European-style straight, wide thoroughfares. Arkhangelsk also supported a
Dutch church in the 1670s. As Joseph Fuhrmann details, some foreigners, like
the Dutch Calvinist Vinius family, converted to Orthodoxy, while others, like the
Dutch Marselis family, retained their Calvinism and remained more aloof from
Russian culture. Both families, however, served the tsars over generations.
By the end of the seventeenth century Russia’s domestic and international
economy was modernizing on the European model, inasmuch as the state was
creating more systematic forms of direct and indirect taxation, trying to exert
control over nationalfiscal policy, and enforcing a protectionist policy that sup-
ported local merchants and maximized state income. Its economy may have been of
a colonial sort, exporting more raw materials than manufactured, but it was
developing the capability and wealth to compete in the global market and geopol-
itical world.
*****
On global trade: Timothy Brook,Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn
of the Global World(New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008); Matthew Romaniello,
“Trade and the Global Economy,”in Hamish Scott, ed.,The Oxford Handbook of
Early Modern European History, c.1350– 1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015),
2: 307–33. On how Europeans took“possession”of new lands: Stephen Greenblatt,204 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801