of space and resources and also by the dominant culture of the“Three Teachings”:
Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist. Connecting with Chinese goods through Silk
Road intermediaries, Russia constantly sought more direct access, developing in the
seventeenth century caravan routes through southern Siberia and culminating with
the Treaties of Nerchinsk (1689) and Khiatka (1727) that provided direct
Chinese–Russia trade and established border protocols.
At this same time, European maritime routes captured some transit luxury trade
but did not displace overland routes, despite arguments to that effect. Morris
Rossabi and Scott Levi have shown that, while from the middle of the sixteenth
to the middle of the seventeenth centuries political instability in the Ottoman,
Persian, Indian, and Qing empires, and the Central Asian steppe, did cause a
decline in overland caravan trade, it was compensated for with shorter routes
between China, India, Central Asia, Russia, and Europe that went north–south
and east–west on a more northerly track through southern Siberia and northern
Central Asia.
As we have suggested, the establishment of maritime networks linking European
states with trading zones of South Asia, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and China from
the latefifteenth century forged a global world economy. The Portuguese began
this process with violent takeovers of trading emporia in the Persian Gulf, Indian
Ocean, and Indonesia starting in the latefifteenth century. The British, French,
and Dutch were relative latecomers to trade in Asia, but came into their own in the
seventeenth century, particularly the Dutch. The Dutch drove the Portuguese out
of much of Indonesia in thefirst half of the seventeenth century; the British, after
vying relatively unsuccessfully with the Dutch for Indonesian and Asian trade in the
first half of the seventeenth century, settled for India, where they developed
lucrative textile and opium sources from the seventeenth century on, laying the
groundwork for later imperial consolidation in India. France established some
presence in Indian trade in the early eighteenth century. European destinations
of long-distance maritime trade originating in ports in China, Indonesia, and India
chart the evolution of empires: in the sixteenth century, Lisbon was Europe’s
emporium of colonial goods; in the seventeenth century, Amsterdam, supplanted
in the late seventeenth century by London.
Over the early modern centuries, Russia fended off bids by all the European
powers—English, Dutch, Swedish, French—for monopolies on trade into and
across Russian imperial lands, developing instead a state-dominated trade nexus
through Siberia and down the Volga for eastern goods. Russia also developed
exchange with European markets through Baltic and Black Sea ports, all the
while emulating its counterparts by imposing protectionist tariff and trade policies.
By the eighteenth century Russians were purchasing colonial goods from Dutch
and British carriers through Baltic and White Sea ports as often as from traditional
southern and eastern routes.
The interaction of merchants and communities in all these trading theaters
witnessed exchanges of ideas, technological innovations, art, and style. We will
briefly highlight some of the rich cultural interchanges that we explore in greater
detail later. In the religious sphere these were centuries of heterodoxy, revival, and
36 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801