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Chapter 4 • Political Transformations, 1450–1750 223

Russians and Chinese created vast new empires by conquering much of Central and
Northern Asia. Meanwhile, after centuries of political fragmentation, much of the
Islamic world came together in four major empires — Mughal, Safavid, Ottoman,
and Songhay — stretching from South Asia through the Middle East to sub-Saharan
West Africa.
None of these empires had the global reach or worldwide impact of Europe’s
American colonies; they were regional rather than global in scope. Nor did they
have the same devastating and transforming impact on their conquered peoples, for
those peoples were not being exposed to new diseases. Nonetheless, these expand-
ing Asian and African empires reflected the energies and vitality of their respective
civilizations in the early modern era, and they gave rise to profoundly important
cross-cultural encounters, with legacies that echoed for many centuries.

The Steppes and Siberia: The Making
of a Russian Empire
By 1480, a small Russian state centered on the city of Moscow was emerging from
two centuries of Mongol rule. That state soon conquered a number of neighbor-
ing Russian-speaking cities and incorporated them into its expanding territory.
Located on the remote, cold, and heavily forested eastern fringe of Christendom,
it was perhaps an unlikely candidate for constructing one of the great empires of
the modern era. And yet, over the next three centuries, it did precisely that, extend-
ing Russian domination over the vast tundra, forests, and grasslands of northern
Asia that lay to the south and east of Moscow, all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
Russians also expanded westward, bringing numerous Poles, Germans, Ukrainians,
Belorussians, and Baltic peoples into the Russian Empire.
It was security concerns that drew Russian attention to the grasslands south AP
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and east of the Russian heartland, where pastoral peoples, like the Mongols before CAUSATION
them, frequently raided their agricultural Russian neighbors and sold many into What motivated Russian
slavery. Across the vast expanse of Siberia, Russian motives were quite different, expansion?
for the scattered peoples of its endless forests and tundra posed no threat to Russia.
Numbering only some 220,000 in the seventeenth century and speaking more
than 100 languages, they were mostly hunting, gathering, and herding people, living
in small-scale societies and largely without access to gunpowder weapons. What
drew the Russians across Siberia was opportunity — primarily the “soft gold” of
fur-bearing animals, whose pelts were in great demand on the world market, espe-
cially as the world cooled during the Little Ice Age.
Whatever motives drove it, this enormous Russian Empire took shape in the
three centuries between 1500 and 1800 (see Map 4.2). A growing line of wooden
forts offered protection to frontier towns and trading centers as well as to mounting
numbers of Russian farmers. Empire building was an extended process, involving
the Russian state and its officials as well as a variety of private interests — merchants,
hunters, peasants, churchmen, exiles, criminals, and adventurers. For the Russian
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