• 1 This article was prepared with support from the Basic Research Program of the National Research Uni (...)

1This special issue brings together papers presented in May 2021 at a seminar celebrating the seventy-fifth birthday of Professor Zoia V. Dmitrieva.1 It was organized by a group of her pupils and colleagues at the National Research University “Higher School of Economics” in St. Petersburg, Russia. The seminar aimed to explore new ways of approaching early modern Russian economic and social history that combine a thorough command of the primary sources —an expertise highly valued in the field— with international theoretical and methodological innovations. This special issue is both a tribute to Professor Dmitrieva and an opportunity to situate her experience within the wider context of the development of the economic history of early modern Russia as an academic discipline from the late Soviet period to the present.

• 2 A.L. Shapiro, ed., Agrarnaia istoriia Severo-Zapada Rossii: vtoraia polovina XV-nachalo XVI v. [Agr (...)
• 3 Z.V. Dmitrieva, Z.A. Timoshenkova, “Aleksandr L´vovich Shapiro i ego shkola [Aleksandr Shapiro and (...)

2Zoia V. Dmitrieva’s scientific career is a long and successful one. Born in 1946, she studied sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Russian history at Leningrad State University, which shaped her further professional development. She was part of the group of students who, in the second half of the 1960s, were involved in preparing materials for the first volume of “Agrarian History of Northwestern Russia,”2 one of the most impressive and successful collective projects undertaken by Soviet historians. The “Agrarian history group” in Leningrad State University and the Leningrad Branch of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (LOII) was organized and led by Aleksandr Shapiro. He conceived of a vast collaborative research project that would use a single methodology to analyze the volumes of material produced during the regular land tax surveys carried out in Muscovy between the late fifteenth and the late seventeenth century. Transforming the textual descriptions found in cadastral surveys (pistsovye knigi) into quantitative data available for statistical analysis was laborious work. The task was given to students, and for several of them it eventually led to work in academia. Zoia Dmitrieva was among these students, and this experience was fundamental in shaping her research approach.3

• 4 Z.V. Dmitrieva, Vytnye i opisnye knigi Kirillo-Belozerskogo monastyria XVI–XVII vv. [Survey books o (...)

3After graduating from university, Zoia Dmitrieva found jobs in different archives, but returned to academic research in the early 1980s, entering LOII, where Shapiro became her supervisor. By the time she defended her dissertation on the taxation of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century monasteries, she already possessed very clearly formulated research agenda. Primarily working with sources from the archives of the large monasteries of the Russian North, she focused in particular on material relating to the economy of the Kirillo-Belozerskii monastery.4 She placed special emphasis on the sophisticated source analysis necessary to cast light on and synthesize the numerous data relating to the economic and material life of the monastery. Both this meticulous attention to sources and the scrupulous elaboration of facts shorn of theoretical concerns—a sort of “antiquarian” approach to historical research, which originated with the pre-Soviet tradition of the St. Petersburg school of historical studies—formed the basis of her self-identification as a “devoted positivist.”

• 5 See the complete list of publications in: “Iubilei Zoi Vasil´evnoi Dmitrievoi [The jubilee of Z.V.  (...)
• 6 See: Z.V. Dmitrieva, M.S. Cherkasova, “Konferentsiiam po izucheniiu pistsovykh knig – 25 let [25^th  (...)
• 7 E. Löfstrand & L. Nordquist, Accounts of an Occupied City: Catalogue of the Novgorod Occupation Arc (...)

5By the mid-1990s, therefore, Zoia Dmitrieva’s unmatched expertise in the analysis of complicated early modern sources, in particular cadasters and monastery records, made her Russia’s leading agrarian historian. Her work included both high-quality critical editions of the sources as well as research articles centered around source-based historical narratives.5 Moreover, she was quite generous and successful in sharing her research experience. She was instrumental in continuing the annual conference on the study of cadasters and other fiscal and administrative sources begun by Shapiro in the late 1980s,6 and also created an efficient system of postgraduate training, ensuring that her doctoral students were quite successful in their professional careers. This work resulted in the creation of what is known in the Russian academia as a research school, that is, a group of pupils of an established professor who work independently but share a common intellectual and methodological background. At the turn of the 1990s and 2000s, Dmitrieva succeeded in bringing together a group of young people who would continue her research agenda, made up of her graduate students and other young colleagues with whom she worked as a consultant and co-author, including Adrian Selin, Alexei Kraikovski, Tatiana Sazonova, Margarita Dadykina, and Nikita Bashnin. At the same time, she also established research ties with Swedish colleagues in Russian studies: Laila Nordquist (Uppsala) and Elisabeth Löfstrand (Stockholm), the main result of which was the description and analysis of the Novgorod Occupation Archives, 1611-1617—the archives of the Swedish Chancellery of the Governor of Novgorod in the Time of Troubles in Russia, now in the Swedish National Archives in Stockholm.7

• 8 J.T. Kotilaine, “The Economy and Material Culture of Russia, 1600–1725 by Richard Hellie (Chicago: (...)
• 9 E. Monahan, The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Ithaca: Cornell University Pre (...)
• 10 R. Hellie, The Economy and Material Culture of Russia, 1600–1725 (Chicago: University of Chicago Pr (...)

6The story of her research school within St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences is important for grasping the long-term acceptance (or rejection) of recent approaches to the study of early modern Russian economic history in post-Soviet academia. In recent decades, research into the economic history of Russia in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, has found itself in an ambiguous situation. At the turn of the century, the reputation of Russian scholarship vis-à-vis international scholarship was based on the assumption that “especially in the socioeconomic sphere, scholarship on Muscovy lags decades behind its Western European counterpart.”8 Specialists in the economic history of early modern Russia often focused too much on the role of the state when interpreting economic data and disregarded private actors in order to reach conclusions on the nature of Russian state power.9 In addition, despite decades of research and the datasheet containing hundreds of thousands of records used by Richard Hellie in his Economy and Material Culture of Russia, 1600–1725, the heterogeneity and fragmentary character of early modern Russian sources made comparison with contemporaneous European data quite problematic.10 On the other hand, Arcadius Kahan showed that one could mine the data derived from the sophisticated source analysis carried out by

• 11 A. Kahan, The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout: An Economic History of Eighteenth-Century Russia, (C (...)
• 12 See for instance M. Romaniello, “The Profit Motive: Regional Economic Development in Muscovy after (...)
• 13 A. Stanziani, “Russia Economic History in Global Perspective” in M. Middell, ed., The Perspective o (...)
• 14 B.I. Mironov, “Sibirevedenie segodnia [Studies of Siberia today],” in N.N. Rodigina, red., Sibiriak (...)

7Soviet and Russian scholars to produce generalizations about the development of the eighteenth-century Russian economy.11 Yet attempts to produce a general synthesis of the economic development of early modern Russia often result in rather descriptive observations without reference to recent methodological discussions in the wider field of economic history.12 At the same time, experts in global economic history who came to the field without nuanced knowledge of the specificity of sources often found themselves in an uncomfortable situation. According to Alessandro Stanziani, this resulted in a situation where “Russian economic history is constantly used to confirm our models and preconceptions instead of asking questions.”13 For his part, Boris Mironov, one of the leading Russian experts in eighteenth-century economic and social history, had to admit that “economic history, being rather popular earlier, now occupies quite a modest position.”14

• 15 Yu.A. Mizis, Formirovanie rynka Central´nogo Chernozem´ia vo vtoroi polovine XVII — pervoi polovine (...)
• 16 Z.V. Dmitrieva, ed., Prikhodnye i raskhodnye denezhnye knigi Kirillo-Belozerskogo monastyria. 1601– (...)
• 17 N.V. Bashnin, red., Opisi Vologodskogo arkhiereiskogo doma Sv. Sofii vtoroi poloviny XVII – nachala (...)

8Indeed, the period from the mid-1990s to the end of the 2010s was a difficult time for Russian scholars studying the history of the Russian economy in the early modern period. Interest in the field among the wider scholarly community was eclipsed by renewed interest in political, cultural, and social history, an indifference evident from the decreasing number of younger researchers. Professionals in the field have continued to publish editions of various sources since the 1980s, especially as publications of this sort received priority when it came to financial support from scholarly foundations in Russia. They include customs15 and account books,16 property inventories,17 records of private economic transactions, cadastral surveys, etc. Although they are published in high-quality critical editions, they are rarely accompanied by full-fledged historical analysis.

• 18 D. Moon, The Russian Peasantry 1600-1930: The World the Peasants Made (London – New York: Routledge (...)
• 19 Monahan, The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia, 13.

10As is well known, Soviet historians had to work within a strictly determined paradigm, usually labeled “Marxist-Leninist.” This was a radically simplified version of Marxism, a straightforward scheme of historical processes understood almost exclusively through the lens of class struggle and social formations theory. In general, this ideological framework shaped all research approaches used in scholarly work. Yet it is oversimplistic to reduce its consequences to the necessity, for instance, for agrarian historians “to work mostly on ‘good’ Marxist Leninist topics, such as the ‘feudal’ economy, exploitation, ‘class struggle,’ and the transit from the ‘feudal’ to the ‘capitalist’ ‘modes of production’.”18 The domination of Marxist theory in the study of the early modern Russian economy did not mean that Soviet historians simply followed state orders and “poured their energy into showing that the Russian economy had developed sufficiently to merit a Marxist revolution—this meant demonstrating developed manufacturing and a unified national market”.19

• 20 M.S. Ermolaev, Rynok kak predmet istoricheskogo issledovaniia (na primere istoriografii Zapadnoi Si (...)

11Soviet historians lived in a dynamic world and could choose from a variety of strategies for building their careers and research perspectives. The fact that the economic history of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Russia attracted enough high-level professionals to form several influential historiographic traditions, or “schools,” was neither a coincidence nor the result of direct state regulation. Mikhail Ermolaev recently offered a vision for the development of imperial and Soviet approaches to the Russian market, that both highlighted the intimate link between reconceptualizations of the market in theoretical economics and historical approaches describing past markets, including that of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Russia, and demonstrated the pre-revolutionary origins of Soviet approaches, when the tradition was passed from teacher to disciple.20 His observations are relevant to assessing the development of the field as a whole. Indeed, we are dealing with the flow of ideas from the pre-revolutionary period through the Soviet era and finally to the post-Soviet academia of present-day Russia. Therefore, to get a better handle on both the contemporary situation and the discipline’s future prospects, it behooves us to examine how this long-term trajectory determined what research skills were considered necessary by Russian historians.

• 21 E.N. Shveikovskaia, Gosudarstvo i krest´iane Rossii: Pomor´e v XVII veke [The State and Russian Pea (...)

13The formation and functioning of feudal land tenure, the exploitation and enserfment of the peasantry, and the features and phases of the latter’s stratification constituted the second major set of issues that were of interest to Soviet economic and social historians. A lively discussion unfolded in the 1960s and 1970s between scholars from Moscow and Leningrad over the essential character of landownership among black-soil peasants, a category of peasant that was not in private feudal dependence during the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. It was a vivid confrontation between the “Leningrad” and “Moscow” historical schools of that time: A. Gorskii, E. Shveikovskaia and their Moscow colleagues insisted on the feudal-state nature of peasant property, the so-called “tax-paying ‘black’ peasants,” while their Leningrad opponents argued for a quasi-private type of peasant land ownership in the North, where “chernososhnye volosti” prevailed. Later, a third point of view, expressed by Aleksandr Shapiro, emerged. He emphasized the multi-layered character of northern peasant property, connecting ideas of tsarist ownership of the land with peasant ideas of the land as both individually and communally owned (parcels were even distributed by drawing lots).21

• 22 B.V. Ananich, V.M. Paneiakh, “O Peterburgskoi istoricheskoi shkole i ee sud´be [Saint Petersburg hi (...)

14The decades-long dominance of Marxism-Leninism in Soviet historical research had many consequences, two of which are important for our topic, that is, the formation and development of a community of scholars involved in the study of the economic history of sixteenth-to eighteenth-century Russia. First, Soviet historians showed little interest in implementing new theoretical concepts, seeing it, in a sense, as an “external” activity. The Marxist-Leninist perspective to a large extent predetermined the results of analytical work, something which was even more true when it came to synthesis. In this environment, many scholars considered theoretical exploration a rather useless speculation untethered from “real” research, that is, sophisticated source analysis. They drew support for this view from the pre-revolutionary critical traditions of the St. Petersburg historical school, represented by eminent authorities like Aleksandr Presniakov, Sergei Platonov, and Aleksandr Lappo-Danilevskii.22 Second, some research areas within Soviet historical scholarship were viewed as a sort of professional “safe haven.” By choosing research topics less freighted with ideology than more recent historical events such as the October Revolution or the Second World War, historians could go about the detailed and scrupulous analysis of sources, the classical positivistic approach, in peace. Of course, they could not ignore the Marxist-Leninist framework as this was the fundamental basis of all Soviet approaches to understanding the past. Instead, they perfunctorily acknowledged the obligatory theoretical formulas before focusing their attention on establishing new “historical facts” and on introducing previously unknown sources and/or new methods of source analysis. In practice, this resulted in the development of the skills necessary for the sophisticated source analysis prized by Russian scholars.

• 24 N.V. Ustiugov, Nauchnoe nasledie [Scholarly legacy] (M.: Nauka, 1974), 18-19.

17As a result, this quote became an integral component of narrative construction in the scholarly literature on seventeenth-century Russian trade. By including it in the introductions to their works, Soviet scholars of the economic history of early modern Russia made use of a convenient exemplar to formulate clear and direct research questions and to steer discussion within ideologically appropriate discourse without needing to go deep into theory; it allowed them to place special emphasis on extracting factual data from the sources and on the methods of source studies. Nikolai Ustiugov’s conceptual paper meant to summarize the results achieved by Soviet historians by the late 1950s is a perfect example of this technology of narrative construction. Ustiugov, one of the pillars of the Soviet economic history of seventeenth-century Russia, opened his text with three quotes from Lenin and one from Marx, used them to thoroughly respond to the theoretical question, and then summarized the established facts to explain the meaning of Lenin’s words.24

• 25 A.I. Iakovlev, Tamozhennye knigi Moskovskogo gosudarstva XVII veka: Severnyi rechnoi put´ [Customs (...)

18Eventually, the labors of Soviet scholars working on this topic resulted in several important achievements that underpin contemporary developments in the field. First, one must mention the many substantive editions of relevant historical sources. The long and impressive history of high-quality critical editions of state and monastic fiscal documents continues and provides a reliable foundation for further research in the area.25 As a result, work on the economic history of early modern Russia is based on two sets of sources, each of which is studied using a distinct methodology. Scholars of early modern Russian history, then, are compartmentalized according to the specific skills needed to analyze their particular source base.

• 26 A.L. Shapiro, ed., Agrarnaia istoriia severo-zapada Rossii: vtoraia polovina XV – nachalo XVI v. [A (...)
• 27 L.V. Milov, M.B. Bulgakov, I.M. Garskova, Tendentsii agrarnogo razvitiia Rossii pervoi poloviny XVI (...)

19The first group comprises a variety of cadastral descriptions produced by the state between the late fifteenth and late seventeenth centuries for taxation purposes. Soviet specialists carried out two seminal collaborative projects that would influence all future work on these documents. In the 1970s and 1980s, the “Agrarian history group” directed by Aleksandr Shapiro published four volumes of “The Agrarian History of Northwestern Russia,” perhaps the most impressive example of the study of Russian cadasters before the advent of computers.26 In the 1980s, a group in Moscow led by Leonid Milov demonstrated how the new technology could benefit research in this area.27 Current scholars working on cadasters continue to follow in the footsteps of these pioneers and to meet annually for a conference on pistsovye knigi and other fiscal and administrative documents.

• 28 L.V. Milov Velikorusskii pakhar´ i osobennosti rossiiskogo istoricheskogo processa [The great Russi (...)
• 29 See J. Lajus, “Russian Environmental History: A Historiographical Review” in S. Ravi Rajan and L. S (...)
• 30 D. Moon, “Review of Milov, Velikorusskii pakhar´ i osobennosti rossiiskogo istoricheskogo processa” (...)

20Yet the ever-increasing accumulation of new material made scholars aware of just how much remained to be learned about other subjects: the history of prices, the history of early modern production, the history of capital, the history of taxation, of credit, etc. The debate around Leonid Milov’s book The Great Russian Plowman played an integral role in articulating this problem.28 Seeking to demonstrate the interplay between the productivity of Russian agriculture and experiences of dealing with nature accumulated by Russian peasants, he offered an impressive panorama of Russian village life and developed ideas of low productivity as an immanent feature of this traditional peasant economy, revealing strategies of dealing with severe conditions. The resulting debate bore rich fruit. Critics pointed to the unevenness that resulted from the book’s chronological scope: while the main part of the book devoted to the imperial phase of Russian agrarian history is based on a deep analysis of a large pool of source material, the section devoted to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is rather retrospective in nature and is based in part on outdated Russian and Soviet historiography. Although, the book signaled a turn from a single, dry Marxist-Leninist conception of history to one that considered a variety of other factors of economic and social development, it was its emphasis on geographical and climatic factors that attracted the most interest. Milov stated that Russia included several climatic zones and soil variants and that the differences between them needed to be taken into account. Scholars like Milov who sought to write a history of Russia in the longue durée were not free from environmental determinism. Indeed, Milov, who constructed a theory of “Russian historical process” based on the development of Russian agriculture, explicitly argued for a return to the methods of Solov´ev and Kliuchevskii. He further argued that Soviet historians, preoccupied with the social history of class struggle, did not pay enough attention to the role of environmental factors (which he called “natural and climatic factor[s]”) in history,29 leading David Moon to remark in his review that “Milov may have moved away from Marxism… but he is still a materialist.” Moon further claimed that Milov underestimated cultural factors and “how they might operate independently from the environment” in his analysis of Russia development and presented “the relationship between people and the environment they lived in as one-way” instead of a two-way process of mutual relations.30 Moon also reminds us that similar views “persisted among Western scholars as well,” including prominent American historian of Russia, Richard Pipes. In addition, historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries criticized the author’s insufficient knowledge of how peasant communities functioned and his methodological errors, for example, the fact that he extrapolated from the late nineteenth-century, when peasant households were comprised of small, nuclear families to the early modern period, when peasant households comprising multi-generational families—micro-communities—were the norm.

• 31 Dmitrieva, Vytnye i opisnye knigi Kirillo-Belozerskogo monastyria XVI–XVII vv.
• 32 N.A. Gorskaia, Monastyrskie krest´iane Tsentral´noi Rossii v XVII v. [Monastic peasants in seventee (...)
• 33 I.N. Shamina, Monastyri Vologodskogo uezda v XVI-XVII vv.: zemlevladenie i organizatsiia khoziaistv (...)

21Since the 1990s, Russian historians studying the economic history of sixteenth-to eighteenth-century Russia have continued to pursue fundamental research based on sophisticated source analysis, the main research topics being trade and agrarian relations (Agrarian history). Since the late 1980s, both Aleksandr Shapiro, Aleksandr Kopanev and their students (including Zoia Dmitrieva31) as well as their opponents, students of the Moscow historians Boris Grekov and Vladimir Pashuto (Elena Shveikovskaia, Natalia Gorskaia32, etc.), have formed strong research schools. They focused on the analysis of documents (surveys and records) kept in monastic archives,33 as well as on the study and publication of cadastral surveys—the first cadastral documents in Russia, which contain data on settlement patterns, land and commercial holdings, the urban population, demography, and taxation structures.

• 34 N.B. Golikova, Privilegirovannye kupecheskie korporatsii Rossii XVI – pervoi chetverti XVIII v. [Pr (...)
• 35 A.I. Razdorskii, ed., Torgovlia, kupechestvo i tamozhennoe delo v Rossii v XVI–XVIII vv.: sbornik m (...)

22The second group of sources with its own dedicated specialists comprises accounting materials, mainly monastic and state records, including custom books, ledgers and charters. These sources provide a broad basis for the history of trade and finance, including relations between local, regional markets (by that time already the previously hot issue of the all-Russian market faded into the background), merchants’ personal and professional relationships, customs, and taxation.34 This professional network revolves around the regular conferences on Trade, Merchantry and Customs Service in the history of Russia organized by Aleksei Razdorskii, one of the leading experts on customs books.35

• 36 V.I. Ivanov, Bukhgalterskii uchet v Rossii XVI-XVII vv.: istoriko-istochnikovedcheskoe issledovanie (...)

23Sophisticated source analysis and detailed discussion of the methodologies employed became an integral component of any monograph on Russian economic history, not to mention the numerous books and articles specifically dedicated to the technical discussion of early modern sources and how best to exploit them. To a large extent, approaches of this sort shaped the professional identity of scholars of the early modern Russian economy, marking them out as a group of experts possessing the skills necessary to successfully exploit the sources: the ability to read early modern handwriting, the knowledge necessary to grasp the nuances of record-keeping and the technical expertise to discuss on the various levels of source analysis. Eventually some among them, such as Vladimir Ivanov, Ekaterina Frantsuzova, Nikita Bashnin, Sergei Kisterev and Liudmila Timoshina, made sophisticated source analysis their main research focus and published works that minutely catalogued the specificities of the sources rather than using them to produce historical narratives.36 This skillset remains an important mark of professional identity for Russian scholars even though it is of little interest to international colleagues.

• 37 K.N. Serbina, Krest´ianskaia zhelezodelatel´naia promyshlennost´ Severo-Zapadnoi Rossii XVI–pervoi (...)
• 38 J.T. Kotilaine, Russia’s Foreign Trade and Economic Expansion in the Seventeenth Century: Windows o (...)

24This methodological approach based on careful source work inevitably led to studies of decidedly local or regional bent. Specialists themselves tend to work on specific regions, including northern and northwestern Russia, central and southern Russia, and even Siberia.37 While this approach was well-suited to the specificity of detailed source analysis, it also limited opportunities for including early modern Russian economic history into wide international and/or comparative contexts.38

• 39 E. Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (P.: Gallimard, 1975.Transl.: Ekateri (...)
• 40 F. Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, xv^e et xviii^e siècles 1. Les Structur (...)
• 41 This is a type of legal contract in which new members of a community agreed to pay taxes and to fol (...)
• 42 M. Dadykina, Kabaly Spaso-Prilutskogo monastyria vtoroi poloviny 16-17 vv. Issledovanie. Teksty [Co (...)

25The translation of work by French historians of the Annales school, especially that of E. Le Roy Ladurie39 and Fernand Braudel’s Material civilization, economics and capitalism (1979),40 published in Russian between 1986-1992, played an important role in this regard. Braudel’s three-level model of history led researchers to focus more on interdisciplinarity. (The three levels are: 1) the environment and its role in historical processes; 2) structures, institutions, and their evolution; and 3) historical events; Braudel also discussed the concept of the world-economy, which unites these layers and is considered a special kind of spatial-temporal unity.) It also focused attention on the ways in which environmental factors influence the economy, pairing chronological analysis with spatial analysis. Growing interest among Russian scholars in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the human element in economic relations, which gradually came about under the influence of the Annales school, led to increased attention to fiscal sources such as loan, work, and sale contracts, as well as contracts for admitting new members to urban or peasant communities41 and other fiscal documents reflecting the direct activities of individuals, corporations, and communities. The formal study of loan notes and acts not only provided evidence for a rather complex credit system in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Muscovy but also led scholars to reformulate their research questions: instead of fruitless debate over whether debt dependence contributed to the rise of serfdom (it did not), attention was drawn to the fact that this type of document was widely used to arrange various types of economic relationships, for example, transferable loans, bearer loans, prepaid work contracts, horse leasing agreements, seed loans, etc.42

• 43 D. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (1990) (Transl.: M.: Fond eko (...)
• 44 E. Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge, U (...)

26Since the late 1990s, concepts derived from neo-institutionalism (Douglas North43, Elinor Ostrom44) have largely been accepted in the humanities. By participating in international interdisciplinary conferences and seminars, Russian scholars working on economic and social crises in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Russia have also come to accept them.

• 45 G. Bridge, “Material Worlds: Natural Resources, Resource Geography and the Material Economy,” Geogr (...)
• 46 See, for example, U. Lubken and C. Mauch, “Uncertain Environments: Natural Hazards, Risk, and Insur (...)

28The second half of the twentieth century in international historical research became quite a turbulent time. In addition to the development of new approaches that brought methodological advances in economics to bear on international economic history, new approaches in historical studies offered a new perspective for understanding past economic activities. Environmental history, for instance, was integral for reconceptualizing the economy as a process of human interaction with nature whether through the the social construction and commodification45 of natural resources or through disaster management (disasters, of course, being bad for for the economy).46 The history of technology offered a new way of viewing industrial and infrastructure development, including their economic facets.

• 47 See the recent discussion in Stephen Broadberry, “Historical National Accounting and Dating the Gre (...)
• 48 S. Broadberry & E. Korchmina, “Russian Economic Growth during the Eighteenth Century,” Oxford Econo (...)
• 49 See for instance: M. P. Romaniello, Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century (...)

29After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian scholars, highly trained in a specific skillset, found themselves in an unusual situation. Involving themselves in collaborative research with international colleagues, they adopted the best of what these new research paradigms had to offer while at the same time displaying the value of their own professional background. Broadly speaking, scholars of pre-industrial Russian economic history interested in pursuing closer ties with the international research agenda faced three major challenges. The first is what one may call “the challenge of globalization,” that is, the need to have their research included as an integral part of the study of the large processes shaping the early modern economy during the “first globalization”. As the compilation of large databases comprising hundreds of thousands of records by computers enabled scholars to apply statistical methods to build econometric models, historians of global early modern economic history were tempted to answer fundamental questions on the causes and consequences of global inequality. This work resulted in the development of the concept of the “great divergence,” proposed by Kenneth Pomeranz to historicize and explain the gap between the West and the rest of the world in the GDP per capita growth, which emerged in the fifteenth century and was clearly evident by the late 1500s.47 In order to become collaborators in this research and to have their findings included, Russian economic historians were expected to familiarize themselves with internationally recognized methodological approaches. This work drew on expertise gained from the comparative study of income levels in early modern Russia. Currently ongoing at the University of Southern Denmark, this work is quite promising though far from being complete.48 Another avenue for future research involves studying the participation of Russian economic actors in past global economic processes, whether in the circulation of global commodities or in the interactions between global economic powers, from a more general comparative perspective.49

• 50 Kozlov, Dmitrieva, Nalogi i voiny v Rossii XVI–XVIII vv.
• 51 Ch. Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton University Press, 197 (...)
• 52 R. Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (London: Penguin, 1995, 2nd ed.); R. Pipes, “The Environment (...)

31Their investigation of imperial tax documents led Sergei Kozlov and Zoia Dmitrieva50 to view state formation in early modern Russia through the lens of the sociologist Charles Tilly’s fiscal-military state thesis51 and to reject Richard Pipes’s view that Russia was a specific type of despotism.52 The third major challenge, connected with the second one, is that of interdisciplinarity. Just as they were familiarizing themselves with the research perspectives of neighboring disciplines, economic historians also had to contend with colleagues from other fields treading on their own turf. Indeed, economic activities throughout history have been diverse. Therefore, even research inspired by issues far from the focus of mainstream economic history requires careful analysis of the economic aspects of the subject being studied, and provides opportunities for economic historians. Environmental history is a case in point, as the economic activities were, of course, contingent upon local environmental conditions.

• 53 V.I. Durnovtsev, “Na putiakh k ekologicheskoi istorii Rossii (istoriograficheskie nabliudeniia) [To (...)

33Historical reflection on humanity’s interaction with the physical environment has a long history in Russia. The notion that the interaction between society and nature is an important component of historical analysis emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century in classic works by Sergei Solov´ev and Vasilii Kliuchevskii, who tried to understand how Russia “colonized itself.” Later, Sergei Platonov, Matvei Liubavskii, and other historians further developed the history of Russian colonization, paying careful attention to geographic differences between its different regions.53

• 54 P. Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, (...)
• 55 J. McNeill “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History,” History and Theory, 4 (...)
• 56 V.N. Boriaz, ed., Rol´ geographicheskogo faktora v istorii dokapitalisticheskikh obschestv (po etno (...)
• 57 The best Soviet works on environmental history that feature the early modern period include M.A. Ts (...)

34Marxists had their own method for writing about humanity’s relationship with nature, one that was based on the framework of “historical materialism.”54 Geographical determinism was officially deemed a bourgeois way of thinking in the 1930s. Thus, “from the early Soviet period it was politically dangerous to emphasize natural factors rather than exclusively social ones, so Russian (and after 1948 East European) historians diligently ignored environmental themes in their work.”55 However, it is well known that the ideological pressure to disavow geographical determinism in Soviet scholarship was not evenly applied: it was strongest when it came to those studying modern history, while archaeologists and historians who studied earlier periods were under much less pressure.56 Environmental factors could be emphasized when studying these earlier periods or the “less developed” societies studied by ethnographers because social factors such as class struggle–the major driver of historical development according to Marxism–were less powerful.57

• 58 D.L. Lajus, J.A. Lajus, Z.V. Dmitrieva, A.V. Kraikovski, D.A. Alexandrov, “The use of historical ca (...)
• 59 A. Kraikovski, M. Dadykina, Z. Dmitrieva, and J. Lajus, “Between Piety and Productivity: Monastic F (...)
• 60 J. Lajus and D. Lajus, eds., More – nashe pole. Kolichestvennye dannye o rybnykh promyslakh Russkog (...)
• 61 Z. Dmitrieva, et al., “Retrospektivnyi analiz formirovaniia potokov fosfora na primere vodosbora La (...)

36Indeed, the project brought together historians and biologists to reconstruct the long-term population dynamics for the most important target species in global marine harvesting. As with most other countries, reliable statistical data for fisheries in Russian waters prior to the twentieth century was lacking. This rendered data revealed by historians from the fiscal documents of previous centuries invaluable. Indeed, the biological understanding of the dynamics of fish and other marine animal populations only became possible after data from economic documents was compiled and interpreted. As the monastic archives contained the only available sources for quantitative analysis, expertise in studying these sources, with all their specificities and complexities, was a crucial factor in the project’s success.58 Indeed, their work on the HMAP project, blending, as it did, traditional source analysis with interdisciplinary research, led Dmitrieva and her students to conduct an interdisciplinary study of the monasteries of the Russian north as economic actors in Atlantic History broadly defined.59 The results of the project were summarized in a book.60 It is important to note that Zoia Dmitrieva had by that time already collaborated with scientists. As early as 1988 she did research with limnologists and published an analysis of the flow of phosphorus into Ladoga Lake in which she calculated the impact of seventeenth century agriculture on the lake’s eutrophication.61 The importance she placed on such interdisciplinary collaboration helped to broaden the vision and analysis of historical documents since scientists posed new questions that historians could not answer on their own.

• 62 See for instance M. Dadykina, «Upravliaia prostranstvom: organizatsiia Spaso-Prilutskim monastyrem (...)

37Russian economic historians, in particular early modernists, have also turned to the history of infrastructure and of the activities used to create and maintain it, known as “infrastructural work.” This topic is the focus of interdisciplinary research in the history of technology, science, mobility, transport, and the environment. Studying the activities and strategies of specific actors in these processes enables us to better understand not only how such infrastructure systems were formed, but how they changed.62

• 63 https://gpih.ucdavis.edu/
• 64 E.M. Lupanova, Istoriia zakreposhcheniia prirodnogo resursa. Lesnoe khoziaistvo v Rossii 1696–1802  (...)

46In this age of digitalization, early modern Russian economic data are sooner or later included in large online databases, such as that of the “Global Price and Income History Group.”63 The data underlying the field are now available to anyone, and the mastery of the skillset developed by Soviet and post-Soviet scholars is no longer a barrier to their access. Yet the easy availability of quantitative data does not guarantee their proper interpretation. The future of the discipline, then, depends on collaboration between all interested parties and on the revival of public and academic interest in explaining, conceptualizing, and even imagining the national and international past in economic terms. Studies of the early modern state influenced by Foucault led to questions about the role accounting played in state control of resources, while the “material turn” led to reflections on what a “resource” is and how and by whom it is constructed. In this vein, work on the history of state control over forest resources has been quite productive, primarily from the point of view of the forest as a motor of the early modern economy.64 Recent work focuses on nineteenth and twentieth century material, but the topic is a relevant one even for earlier times. The knowledge and expertise of economic historians of the early modern period are essential, then, for understanding the human relationship with nature, that is, how human economic activities transformed the natural environment, over the long durée. They also help historians of contemporary history understand that many problems are rooted in quite distant times, and thus might provide usable lessons for policymakers.

• 65 J. Oldfield, J. Lajus, D.J.B. Shaw, “Conceptualizing and Utilizing the Natural Environment: Critica (...)

47The breadth and diversity of Russia’s natural resources ensures that it remains a topic of contemporary concern and debate.65 Recent scholarship in both environmental and economic history, as well as in other related fields, has provided evidence of the range and complexity of human interaction with the physical environment in Russian history. The history of exploration and resource use thus forms a significant part of the history of Russian colonization which, as a socio-political process, has played a substantial role in framing both Russia’s economic and environmental history. Both these disciplines are closely intertwined in the history of resources and especially the history of colonization. No wonder the history of monastic colonization—one of the most important waves of colonization in early modern Russia—plays such a significant role in this scholarship. As a leading expert in the history of the early modern monastic economy, Zoia V. Dmitrieva has had an outsized impact on the development of this research. Along with her students, she successfully grappled with the challenges and opportunities methodological innovation brought to bear on her field. To recognize this achievement is an important first step in understanding how the post-Soviet scholarly community is integrating itself into the global research agenda.