The Russian Empire 1450–1801

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religions and ethnicities, balance of coercion and co-optation in governing. Its
Sunni Muslim sultans espoused a patrimonial ideology that, like Russia’s, asserted
absolute power tempered by the sultan’s justice and mercy. Historically, Russia’s
expansionist interests towards the steppe and Black Sea meant that its interactions
with the Ottoman empire were marked more by warfare than trade through the
eighteenth century.
Russia was linked with other Eurasian neighbors—Persia and India—by trade.
To the east of the Ottoman empire in the Middle East was the Shiite Safavid
dynasty of Iran, which ruled Persia from 1501 to 1736. After a turbulent mid-
sixteenth century when Sunni Ottomans contested with the Safavids for territory
and influence in the Islamic world, the Persian empire and cultureflowered under
Shah Abbas (1587–1629). Prosperous and productive, Safavid Iran possessed
several dynamic trading centers between the Far East, Europe, and the Middle
East and was long a trading partner with Russia. It declined politically from the
seventeenth century, and by the eighteenth Russian rulers were taking aim at its
Caspian ports (generally unsuccessfully until the next century).
East of Persia, the Mughal dynasty (1526–1858) ruled much of India.
A successor state of the Mongol empire, it was established in 1526 by the Muslim
Babur who claimed both Timurid and Chinggisid heritage. As André Wink has
shown, the Mughals, particularly their dynamic leader Akbar (1542–1605), adapt-
ed steppe customs to the more settled Indian peninsula. Noting that the Mughals
ruled over an“enormously productive, wealthy and densely populated”realm that
was actively engaged in regional and international trade, exporting gems, spices, tea,
cotton, and silks, John F. Richards considers Mughal India parallel to European
modernizing states for its effective, centralizing authority, skillful development of
international trade nexuses, and adoption of new crops and technologies. At its
greatest extent the dynasty controlled most of the Indian peninsula, but by the early
eighteenth century it was weakened by internecine struggles that opened the door
for growing British imperial authority. For Russia, Indian cottons were an import-
ant import trade and Indian merchants had a strong presence in Russia’s trade
through Astrakhan.
Russia’s most distant political and economic partner was China. In the centuries
of Moscow’s rise, China was controlled by two successful and productive dynasties,
the Ming (1370–1644) and Qing (1644–1917). Despite their differences—the
Ming were a Han dynasty that shrank China’s imperial space to its pre-Mongol
size, while the Qing were Manchus who expanded the empire to its farthest
limits—as Timothy Brook argues, their histories are marked by essential continu-
ity. Under both dynasties China’s economy expanded continually, responding to
the presence of European traders in the South China Sea from the early sixteenth
century by actively engaging in world trade, if not taking a leading role in
international maritime shipping. China also witnessed a continually growing,
dense population, straining the state to provide social welfare in a setting of near
Malthusian overpopulation. It continued to rely on a meritocratic bureaucracy to
rule as a centralized autocratic state, claiming for the Ming emperor or Manchu
khan unlimited authority but, as in Muscovy, limiting his power by the exigencies


Land, People, and Global Context 35
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