Russia’s Foreign Trade and Economic Expansion in the Seventeenth Century

This study is the first comprehensive assessment of Russia’s commercial relations with the outside world in the seventeenth century and of the relationship between trade and economic growth. Based on exhaustive research in some thirty archival repositories, it represents the first systematic quantification of commodity flows across the range of Russia’s trade partners. The book reveals late Muscovy to have been an increasingly open economy, experiencing remarkable commercial expansion driven in large part by its interaction with the outside world. It fundamentally debunks the notion of pre-Petrine Russia as a closed and stagnant, essentially mediaeval, society and established a clear link between seventeenth-century economic policy and Russia’s subsequent rise to become one of the great powers of the world.