The Dnieper Trade Route in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: A Note

Abstract

territorial gains from the First Turkish War (176874) brought with them an unprecedented opportunity to market ^ the agricultural surpluses produced in the upper and middle reaches of the Dnieper River and its tributaries. Between 1764 and 1774, Russia had increased her control over that territory by annexing Belorussia in the first partition of Poland, and by converting the formerly autonomous Ukraine into the region of the Russian Empire known as Malorussia. In 1774, the treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji extended Russian control over the Dnieper from its middle reaches, where it formed the border between Russia and Poland, to its estuary on the Black Sea. In the new circumstances created by the treaty, it was possible to envision the Dnieper as a means of moving agricultural surpluses from