(^156) Chapter Five
Their mutual distrust made it easy for Russia to use the army that
Peter the Great had successfully remodeled along European lines to
continue expansion at the expense of weak and comparatively ill-
organized polities abutting on Russia’s frontiers. Thus Russia secured
the lion’s share of Poland, 1773–95; annexed the Crimea in 1783;
extended its frontiers against the Ottoman empire into the Caucasus
on the east and to the Dniester on the west by 1792; and advanced
into Finland at the expense of the Swedes as well (1790). Rapid devel
opment of grain production in the Ukraine together with industrial
and commercial expansion in the Urals and in central Russia sup
ported the rise of the imperial power to unexampled heights. Under
Catherine the Great (r. 1762–95) Russia was able as never before to
organize its resources of manpower, raw materials, and arable land to
support armed forces whose efficiency approached that of the armies
and navies of western Europe. Russia, in short, was catching up to
European levels of organization; as this occurred the advantages of
size began to tell.
British success in the Seven Years War against France was also, in
part, the result of mobilization of resources drawn from far-flung ter
ritories in North America, India, and regions in between. But whereas
in the Russian case, mobilization rested ultimately on serf labor, di
rected by an elite of officials and officially licensed private entrepre
neurs, in the British case compulsion was largely eclipsed by reliance
on market incentives registered in private choices made by relatively
large numbers of individuals. Yet slave labor on Caribbean plantations
and press gangs for manning the navy also played prominent roles in
maintaining British power. So the contrast between a frontier mobili
zation through command à la russe and mobilization through price
incentives à l’anglaise is only a matter of degree. But the degree of
compulsion mattered. Russian methods (like the slave economies of
the sugar islands) were often quite wasteful of manpower, whereas
private efforts to maximize profits tended to reward economies in the
use of all the factors of production. Market behavior, in short, induced
a level of efficiency that compulsion rarely could match.
In particular, responsiveness to a more or less free market meant
that new techniques, capable of effecting real improvements in pro
duction, were sometimes able to win acceptance in the British system
of economic management, whereas in Russia impulses to invent or to
propagate new inventions were sporadic at best. Harassed adminis
trators were almost always sure to decide that it was better to meet
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