visions of representative government, but all sides wielded the concept of social
contract to legitimize power.
A striking aspect of political theory in Europe in the early modern centuries was
the elaboration of integrated theories of political economy projecting and promot-
ing the power of the state. Mercantilist ideas spread across Europe, advocating the
acquisition of productive resources—land and people. Such theories, among other
stimuli, prompted between 1500 and 1800 steady territorial expansion within
Europe, imperial expansion, and the creation of colonial dependencies overseas
(Spain, England, France) or contiguously (Habsburg realm, Ottoman and Russian
empires). Myriad domestic economic reforms also served this goal: streamlining of
internal customs barriers, protective tariffs, abolition of privileged monopolies on
trade to outsiders, construction of roads, canals, and maritime shipping industry.
All are seen in Russia from the seventeenth century onward. Eurasia was charac-
terized by empire, but in many ways, so also was post-Westphalian Europe, where
the leading states were proto-nation states on the continent and overseas trading
empires worldwide.
The Russian empire rose to prominence in the context of these heady trends of
the global early modern. From 1450 to 1801, Moscow’s rulers inexorably expanded
in directions of trade routes, resources, and productive lands. They modernized
their military to match steppe and European fronts of expansion; they adapted
ideologies of absolutism to Russia’s autocracy; they expanded export and transit
trade with Siberian caravans and White, Baltic, and Black Sea ports; they absorbed
religious and cultural trends. They made the most of the global early modern.
*****
On trade and the early modern: Matthew Romaniello,“Trade and the Global Economy,”
in Hamish Scott, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History,
c.1350– 1750 , 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2: 307–33; John
F. Richards,“Early Modern India and World History,”Journal of World History 8
(1997): 197–209 and hisThe Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early
Modern World(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Jerry Bentley,“Early
Modern Europe and the Early Modern World,”in J. Bentley and Charles Parker, eds.,
Between the Middle Ages and Modernity: Individual and Community in the Early Modern
World(Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 13–31. On global connectedness:
Joseph Fletcher,“Integrative History: Parallels and Interconnections in the Early Modern
Period, 1500–1800,”Journal of Turkish Studies9 (1985): 37–57; Victor B. Lieberman,
Beyond Binary Histories: Re-Imagining Eurasia to c.1830(Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1999), 289–316. On steppe empires, see Peter Golden,Central Asia
in World History(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
On the“great divergence”: Kenneth Pomeranz,The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and
the Making of the Modern World Economy(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000);
Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and Roy Bin Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of
Economic Change in China and Europe(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2011).
On the Little Ice Age, see Brian M. Fagan,The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History
1300 – 1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000); H. H. Lamb,Climate, History and the
Modern World, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 1995) and Richards,Unending Frontier,38 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801