The English trade with Muscovy began in the 1550s with the first voyage of Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor to Arkhangel΄sk in 1553 and the chartering of the Muscovy Company (MC) in 1555. This opened up important opportunities for the MC's export of English cloth and import of Russian timber, train oil, pitch, cordage furs, hides, fish, and caviar, as well as for the MC's re-export of these commodities to the Mediterranean, Levant, and the Americas.

Arel's study challenges the historical convention that MC commercial activity in Muscovy began to decline during the Time of Troubles, was gradually driven from Muscovite markets by Dutch competition, and was locked out of the Russian interior altogether by 1649 when Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich banned it in response to the regicide of Charles I. Arel has examined MC diplomatic records, petitions from MC agents, contracts, and loan documents archived in the Muscovite Foreign Office (Posol΄skii prikaz) in RGADA, as well as London Port Books from the 1620–40s, and she finds that the degree to which Dutch competition marginalized English MC operations in Muscovy in the first half of the seventeenth century has been overstated by other historians—in part because they have taken too literally MC complaints against Dutch privileges and “unfair practices,” and because they have overlooked the extent to which MC merchants were simultaneously engaging in collaborative enterprises with Dutch merchants. The continuing importance of the Russian trade for the MC in the seventeenth century is apparent in the entry into the Russian trade of some of the magnates engaged in the increasingly profitable West Indies and American colonial trades and in the increased scale of MC re-exports of Russian commodities to Italy and other parts of the Mediterranean. Arel also discusses how the MC maintained some Muscovite connections after 1649 to position itself for Peter I's restoration of trade relations with England in 1698.

Whereas the older historiography tended to focus on the bilateral dynamic of English and Russian commerce, Arel's work suggests avenues for future research on Russia's place in the expanding capitalist world-system. It adds much to the recently refined understanding of Russian international trade advanced by two other valuable recent studies, Jarmo Kotilaine's Russia's Foreign Trade and Economic Expansion in the Seventeenth Century (2005), focusing on northern Europe, and Erika Monahan's The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (2016), dealing with Russia-Asia trade relations.

Also of value in this book is the author's examination of the shifting demand and supply of particular commodities (caviar, potash, tobacco, beaver fur, Russian leather, tallow) and the patterns of their re-export, and Arel's identification of particular partnerships and consortia reflecting the growing interest of London merchants and investors from the East India, Levant, Virginia, and Spanish companies. She finds that MC merchants in the first half of the seventeenth century were doing little direct business with elite Muscovite gosti and were no longer active in buying at Arkhangel΄sk but were still active in trading with lesser posad merchants and peasants, with Iaroslavl΄, Moscow, Vologda, and Kargopol΄ now their most important markets. Arel of course examines the impact upon MC trading privileges and market access of Stuart-Romanov diplomacy, fluctuations in Anglo-Dutch rivalry and cooperation, conflicts of interest and political loyalty within the MC, and the grievances of Russian merchants. Especially enlightening are two chapters on MC agents’ efforts to obtain protection and redress from local and central courts and their experiences with corruption in Muscovite tax-farming. An Appendix identifies 390 MC merchants and their factors, partners, and associates.

This is a meticulous and imaginative study contributing new knowledge to the fields of Early Modern global business, cultural, and diplomatic history.