This book is an impressive achievement—original in its conceptualization, meticulously researched, and addressing a broad range of questions about Muscovy's place within the early modern European and Asian economies.
The first three chapters provide an overview of the author's argument and a thorough survey of the historiography on such matters as the history of trade and trade policy in Muscovy, the merchant corporations, the settlement of Siberia, the role of the voevoda administration and customs offices in establishing and policing the infrastructure of Siberian trade, and the respective importance for Siberian development of the fur trade, the Asian trade, and the provisioning trade.
Chapters Four through Eight are the heart of her book, the most focused and the most grounded in archival research (not only in RGADA in Moscow and LOII in St. Petersburg, but GBUTO, GATO, GUTO, and GAT in Tiumen' and Tobol'sk).
Chapter Four describes the trade infrastructure of roads and rivers, marketplaces, shops and stalls, fairs, taverns, and customs houses, showing that the Muscovite state, despite its investment in customs houses and roadblocks and its insistence on travel passes, was unable to monitor and control all trade. It cautions that relying on customs books and visitor registration books in the voevoda offices therefore cannot give us a complete picture of the scale or pattern of trade. Chapter Five elaborates upon this by examining the important annual market fair at Lake Yamysh in Kazakhstan, which had great importance for Russian-Asian trade, yet operated beyond the reach of the Russian customs administration.
Chapters Six through Eight examine in remarkable detail the operations of three merchant families. The Filat'evs, an elite gost' merchant family who started by selling furs in Moscow, soon developed their own trapping and trading operations in eastern Siberia, then branched out into the China and Bukhara trades when returns from the fur trade began to decline. The author reconstructs their trading network, explains their persistence as a trading dynasty, describes the offices and missions they held for the state, and uncovers the patronage they developed with the Patriarch and certain Siberian voevody. The Shababins, a dynasty of Bukharan merchants, initially based at Tiumen', succeeded in becoming major players in the rhubarb trade and in provisioning Russian garrison towns in Siberia. Muslim Bukharan merchants were not admitted into the elite gost' corporation and did not intermarry with Russian families, yet the Shababins were permitted their own yurt self-government, awarded land grants and special tax privileges, and were left to practice Islam largely unharassed by the state, even though the Orthodox Church viewed them with hostility. The Noritsyns were middling merchants of the gostinnaia sotnia corporation. Although they were not of elite juridical status and did not hold major offices as customs directors or agents of the tsar's monopolies, the Noritsyns were more than occasional dabblers in trade; they were crucial in provisioning the Siberian garrison town markets and thereby enabled Siberia to emerge as a frontier society, not just as chain of small garrisons.
In several important ways, the author takes issue with conventional wisdom about Russian capitalism and Russia's relative weight in the European and Asian economies. She argues that the Russian conquest of Siberia was less about the pursuit of state security and martial glory or the expansion of the Orthodox faith than about the pursuit of wealth. Monahan maintains that early Siberian colonization was driven by private initiative, for commercial interests, and that the Muscovite state acknowledged the potential value of Siberian trade in the early seventeenth century and developed a coherent mercantile policy to advance it. She adds that Siberian economic development was not as dependent on the fur trade and iasak fur tribute as historiographic tradition has maintained. Monahan argues that past studies of elite merchant families have overstated the political and cultural obstacles to limiting the effective merchant capitalism in Muscovy, and that Muscovy was better integrated into Asian trade than the European trade system, despite historians' preoccupation with the latter. Furthermore, the author purports that the study of Siberian trade has been too preoccupied with the elite gost' merchants, neglecting the roles of less privileged merchants and non-Russian merchants (Bukharans and Indians), and that if one considers Siberian activity, the rise of Indian Ocean trade had not depressed Eurasian overland caravan trade as quickly and thoroughly as once thought.
The Merchants of Siberia displays thorough mastery of the published literature and extensive archival research, and the range of issues it addresses extends its appeal beyond the circle of specialists in early modern Russian economic history.
