The Merchants of Siberia

Trade in Early Modern Eurasia

Erika L. Monahan

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501703966
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

In The Merchants of Siberia, Erika Monahan reconsiders commerce in early modern Russia by reconstructing the trading world of Siberia and the careers of merchants who traded there. She follows the histories of three merchant families from various social ranks who conducted trade in Siberia for well over a century. These include the Filat'evs, who were among Russia's most illustrious merchant elite; the Shababins, Muslim immigrants who mastered local and long-distance trade while balancing private endeavors with service to the Russian state; and the Noritsyns, traders of more modest status who worked sometimes for themselves, sometimes for bigger merchants, and participated in the emerging Russia-China trade.

Monahan demonstrates that trade was a key component of how the Muscovite state sought to assert its authority in the Siberian periphery. The state's recognition of the benefits of commerce meant that Russian state- and empire-building in Siberia were characterized by accommodation; in this diverse borderland, instrumentality trumped ideology and the Orthodox state welcomed Central Asian merchants of Islamic faith.

This reconsideration of Siberian trade invites us to rethink Russia's place in the early modern world. The burgeoning market at Lake Yamysh, an inner-Eurasian trading post along the Irtysh River, illuminates a vibrant seventeenth-century Eurasian caravan trade even as Europe-Asia maritime trade increased. By contextualizing merchants and places of Siberian trade in the increasingly connected economies of the early modern period, Monahan argues that, commercially speaking, Russia was not the "outlier" that most twentieth-century characterizations portrayed.

Part One

Commerce and Empire

Chapter 1

“For Profit and Tsar”: Commerce in Early Modern Russia

The radicalism, breadth, and volume [of the early Romanovs’ economic policy] certainly got the attention of the observer of social life in the first half of the seventeenth century and forced him to think that all the country in this period was being mobilized for trade or commerce.

—P. P. Smirnov, “Economicheskaia politika”

Since there’s no leaving the political out of political economy, this chapter surveys the state’s approach to commerce and argues that the Muscovite state consciously promoted commerce. The Muscovite state may not have promoted commerce in ways that moderns deem effective, nor that proved superior among contemporaries; nonetheless it did so according to its own understanding. Its practices were not unlike the practices of other early modern states and empires. This chapter addresses important state institutions that shaped the commercial climate in Russia: policy, customs collections, merchant corporations, and state monopolies. The latter two were means by which the state not only regulated the economy but directly participated in it as well. Before proceeding to the commercial landscape of Muscovy, some pages are devoted to situating Kievan Rus′ and early modern Muscovy in their respective contexts in order to demonstrate that Muscovy was neither as isolated nor as isolationist as is sometimes portrayed; it had more in common with other early modern polities than is generally appreciated.

Beyond the East-West Binary

“Russia and the West” is a long-established binary. The metaphysical and psychological hand-wringing generated by the question of Russia’s relationship to Europe has led to overlooking that Ivan IV’s first requests for military aid to England sought military support against a Tatar attack.1 Which is to say that the preoccupation with Russia’s contested European identity—the “obfuscatory and unedifying East/West dichotomy,” in the words of Valerie Kivelson2—has obscured the fact that Russia was long embedded in a geopolitical context that oriented it in other directions as well. With formidable neighbors to the south, east, west, and north, early modern dynamics were never just a matter of Russia and the West.

Economic exchange prevented the Slavic principalities on the eastern edge of Europe from ever being entirely isolated from its western neighbors. Muscovite economic connections to Western Europe via the Baltic and western borders can be traced, even if they are as thin as spider webs, back to ancient times. During the Carolingian period Rus′ was the main artery through which furs and Eastern goods, via the Caspian and Black Seas, reached Europe.3 Founding Vikings moved coin and wares through the river arteries between Constantinople, rendered as Tsargrad in Slavic sources, and Reval (Scandinavian Europe) from the tenth century.4 Novgorod grew into a busy medieval market frequented by merchants from Europe and as far as Central Asia. Its connectedness suffered, however, when Grand Prince Ivan III ejected the imperious Hansa league merchants from Novgorod in the late fifteenth century (1494).5 Besides the Baltic exits, an overland route via Polish and German lands had long existed. In 1489 the Russian merchant Demia Frizin traveled through Lithuania with valuable pearls and carpets from the East.6 Although these overland routes are little documented, it is speculated that they supported the highest volume of traffic because of a lack of customs regulation.7 (The Black Sea made for an important trade point, but we leave the south out for now.)

Indeed, it was never just Russia and the West. Not only that. In the cultural-intellectual transmission whereby Russia assumed its inferior place at Europe’s knee, knowledge of these connections was lost. When the first European mapmakers came to Muscovy with an interest to chart the world, a process of unknowing began. At the same time that Muscovites were re-teaching Western European mapmakers about the existence of the Aral Sea, Russians “forgot” that a body of water separated Asia and North America.8 Yuri Krizhanich, a Croatian priest exiled in Tobol′sk in the middle of the seventeenth century, reported that “this question” of whether “the Arctic and the Eastern or Chinese [oceans are] separated from one another by land which extends east from Siberia…was very recently resolved by soldiers from the Lena and Nerchinsk oblasts…. They declare that there is no land to the east, and that these seas are not divided by land, and that Siberia, the Daur and Nikan lands, and Kitai or Sina are washed on the east by one continuous ocean.”9 Yet, a half century later, the Dane Vitus Bering was charged with determining whether the continents of Asia and North America were connected. The news that the Russian Semen Dezhnev, in an exploration sponsored by the Russian merchant Vasilii Gusel′nikov, rounded the northeast coast of Eurasia in 1648 was “rediscovered” by Müller in the archive of Yakutsk in 1736.10

Attempts to counter the “backwardness” rap and “normalize” Russian history vis-à-vis Western traditions go as far back as the Westernizers of the nineteenth century. In 1952 R. W. Davies argued that the economic development of twelfth-century Kiev exceeded that of many European locations, including France and England.11 “Comparative analyses traditionally have done Russian history no favors,” remarked Valerie Kivelson with both humor and insight, while arguments for a less autocratic, more consensual political culture have been met with hostile rejections.12 Implicitly or explicitly, next to early modern England and the Dutch Republic, Russia was hopelessly backward. Even scholarship insisting on the superlative particularity of England and the Netherlands as two extraordinary early modern commercial powerhouses has done little to overturn an impression of Russia’s retrograde economy and culture.13 The following discussion situates Muscovy in its global context by schematically taking inventory of its known connections with the wider world.

Reconsidering Rus′ in the World

Commerce as a means of revenue and the regulation of commerce goes deep in Rus′ tradition. Scandinavians who had traveled long distances in search of opportunity founded the Riurikid dynasty, which ruled Russia for just over six centuries. Novgorod and Kiev emerged as trading cities, tapping into Silk Roads trades and the products of European forests, cultivating exchange with German cloth merchants and cosmopolitan Constantinople, and regulating commerce accordingly.14 Prince Yuri Dolgorukii (1099–1157) earned his epithet “the Long Armed” for the taxes he was able to collect. Recall the Primary Chronicle’s famous story of Grand Prince Vladimir, who, when considering monotheism for his state, dispatched ambassadors in all directions to learn about the religions of his neighbors. Slavic principalities fought and traded with the Bulgar kingdom founded on the Volga River in the tenth century.15

Political connections went hand in hand with economic ones. Medieval Riurikid princes frequently married their children to Western princes and princesses. Christian Raffensberger has shown that more than three-quarters (77%) of fifty-two known dynastic marriages were to countries west of Rus′.16 Vladimir Monomakh took as his bride a daughter of Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, in the eleventh century.17 Prince Daniil of Volynia and Galicia (1211–1264) made efforts to marry his children to ruling dynasties of Hungary, Austria, and Lithuania as a counterweight to Mongol power. He also established close ties with the papacy. Long-distance connections existed in other Slavic principalities in the region as well. In 1269 Novgorod concluded treaties with Gotland, Lubeck, Riga, and other German towns establishing rules governing foreign merchants’ visits to Novgorod.18

It was Kiev’s substantial diplomatic and commercial links to the wider world that led the historian V. O. Kliuchevskii to label it a “trading state” and the Russkaia Pravda a law code of trade capital.19 Although the appropriate historical legacy between Kiev and Muscovy is a contested issue, these economic connections are significant for our purposes. During the appanage period (eleventh–fourteenth centuries), Rus′ principalities to the north followed in Kiev’s footsteps. Traffic of clerics between Moscow and Greece and Istanbul was fairly regular, and their concerns extended to commercial as well as ecclesiastical matters. Links to Istanbul were only the most obvious way in which Moscow appropriated the historical connections of ancient Kiev.

Before Moscow reigned supreme among Slavic principalities of the European plain, its commerce was similar to neighboring regional principalities like Tver′ and Riazan′ and was not as important as commerce was in Novgorod and Kazan. We know little about the economy of Muscovy in the medieval period (twelfth–fifteenth centuries). Marco Polo, who never traveled to Rus′, asserted that “Rosia…[is] not a land of trade.”20 Excavations of tenth-century camel bones around Kiev testify to connections with the East centuries before Marco Polo’s adventures. The dat...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Glossary
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One: Commerce and Empire
• Part Two: Spaces of Exchange: From Center to Periphery
• Part Three: The Merchants of Siberia
• Conclusion
• Afterword: Meanings of Siberia
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index