Does Jack Goldstone's Model of Early Modern State Crises Apply to Russia?

Abstract

In 1991 Jack A. Goldstone published an important book, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, in which he boldly charted a new way to explain the basic causes of revolution throughout Eurasia from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Goldstone attempts to explain the periodic waves of early modern state crises, rebellions, and civil wars in widely divergent cultures and geographic settings by developing an intriguing model of state breakdowns which he applies primarily to England, France, the Ottoman Empire, and China. Goldstone views the crises of large agrarian absolute monarchies mainly as the result of a single basic process: prolonged population growth in the context of relatively inflexible economic and social structures, eventually resulting in rapid price inflation, sudden shifts in resources, and rising social demands on a scale that most agrarian-based bureaucratic states found overwhelming. Simply put, long-term population and price in-creases have helped push rigid political, economic, and social institutions into crisis. Since the publication of Goldstone's work, there has been a positive response to it from many historians and social scientists. So far, however, no one has attempted to test Goldstone's model by applying it to a state break-down which the author did not include in his study. In my own research I have discovered that Goldstone's model may apply to Russia even though he did not focus on it. In this article I hope to demonstrate that his work helps explain Russia's Time of Troubles (1598–1613) and that the Russian test case helps validate Goldstone's model as an important contribution to comparative history.