Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia. By Matthew P. Romaniello (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2019) 304 pp. $99.99

Abstract

Enterprising Empires traces the commercial relationship between Britain and Russia from the eighteenth century to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. With the exception of the Continental Blockade coerced by Napoleon, Britain, heavily dependent on Russian naval materials, was Russia’s greatest foreign trading partner throughout the course of the eighteenth century. Even so, a compelling central argument of the book is that Britain typically met frustration and fell short of its aspirations in its trade negotiations with Russia because the leverage and circumstances were in Russia’s favor (3).The story is sprawling, but Romaniello’s prose, albeit highly detailed, is lucid and compact. His emphasis on the “importance of geopolitical stability for trade” keeps the geopolitical dynamics and trade interests at the forefront (8). It provides a vista from which we can view exchanges at, and memos dispatched from, the Russian court as nodes in a wider world of dynamic, globe-stretching trade. Enterprising Empires relies on English, Russian, Scottish, Spanish, American, and Danish archival records to tell a story that urges a reconsideration of Russia’s place in the (late) early modern world. Whereas Anthony Cross’s seminal By the Banks of the Neva: Chapters from the Lives and Careers of the British in Eighteenth-Century Russia (New York, 1996) kept the bilateral relations as his focus, Romaniello opens the aperture to a global view.Enterprising Empires operates at various scales. Romaniello deftly navigates rivalries among company members (the Chitty–Wolf rhubarb affair, 122); competition between the Eastland and Russia Companies in the Baltic; their broader competition for jurisdiction with the British Levant and East India Companies—in which the Navigation Acts (1651) generally disadvantaged the Russia Company—and the competitions with merchants from other nations. Romaniello’s global perspective shows how circumstances far removed from Russia, from the Navigation Acts to plague in India (158), were consequential to the Russia Company nonetheless. The refreshing result leaves the impression that a perspective attuned to the personal, local, regional, and global imperial dynamics is necessary to understand this history.1Romaniello’s command of regional and global dynamics provides valuable nuggets of information to ponder. He perceives trade in the Baltic as Russia’s primary motivator for the Armed Neutrality Pact, finding that peace in the Baltic was more responsible for improving Russia’s commercial fortunes in the eighteenth century than were Empress Catherine’s trade policies (262). In fact, he sees Catherine II’s trade policies largely as a continuation of innovations made under Empress Elizabeth. The Russian tobacco market never lived up to Britain’s hopes, but the disruption to Atlantic exports wrought by the American Revolution launched Russia “overnight as one of the world’s largest exporters of tobacco” (244, 200). In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, however, the Congress of Vienna brought a political restoration that was paralleled in the world of economics: Russia abandoned its burgeoning trade relationships with America and resumed trade with Britain. Ultimately, according to Romaniello, this return to previous dynamics redounded to Russia’s detriment (253); although Russia underwent impressive growth in the eighteenth century, its heavy reliance on raw-material exports left it at a disadvantage in the industrializing nineteenth century. Also, Russia’s geopolitically spawned acceleration of overseas trade, especially tobacco, may have been cultivated at the expense of its overland Eurasian trade, although Russia had limited leverage when it came to China’s formidable trade embargoes (260).Along with his focus on global history, Romaniello makes a strong case that history benefits from a courtly, biopic-like, perspective. Enterprising Empires revisits material not unchartered in the historiography, but it introduces new (controversial) characters such as American John Elton (Chapter 3) and Englishman Peter Dobell (Chapter 4), who served and, from the Russian perspective, betrayed Russia. Less controversially, individuals such as John Bell (Chapter 2) and Katherine Harris (Chapter 3) provided invaluable information to Englishmen, serving “as part of the information-gathering apparatus of foreign policy” (163). Rather than resorting to common presumptions of Russian incompetence alongside English ingenuity, Enterprising Empires illustrates that Russians had no monopoly on underhanded and incompetent behavior as it explains the logic of Russian strategy. For example, Chapter 3 recounts how, in the first Anglo–Russian Trade Treaty of 1734, the British won, and then lost in 1747, access to the Iran trade across the Caspian Sea (107, 152). While guiding readers through the Elton scandal, Romaniello explains that when Russia ultimately extended Britain access to Iranian trade, it did so on its own terms: Russia wanted to increase the overall volume of exports from Iran through its territory and saw British trade as advancing that end. Placing the courtly, regional, and global aspects in meaningful context is illuminating and productive.Impressively reconstructed from primary source material (archival documents, eighteenth-century texts, and the Russian law code), Romaniello’s account imparts a freshness even as the myriad permutations that accompanied negotiations sometimes threaten to overwhelm the text. The seemingly endless refrains of apprehension and optimism from Englishmen about either “national” or personal interest are not merely indulgent details; rather, they bespeak Romaniello’s approach: It was not just cold hard economic facts but also geopolitics, rumor, and court and individual machinations that commixed in the making of economic policy. Imperial agreements were made and policies formed by people with imperfect knowledge pursuing myriad agendas in dynamic contexts. Personalities mattered, but they were never the whole story: “The actions of merchants and diplomats might not have altered the grand historical sweep of empires or geopolitical contexts greatly, but the way in which these people recorded and understood these events outside their own countries, but inside their areas of expertise, alters our own ability to reconstruct causality” (258).Romaniello’s interpretation not only calls for a multifaceted approach to causality but also reaches for a more sophisticated interrogation of a complicated past: “Ultimately, the rhetoric and the trade data relate two separate narratives of Anglo-Russian commerce: the former a perpetual crisis and the latter a century of success” (260). Those interested in the ongoing reconsideration of empire and political economy in the globalizing eighteenth century will want to read this book.