The relationship between eighteenth-century Russia and Britain has sometimes seemed constrained to the length of a naval voyage from London to St. Petersburg. Whatever the stakes of great-power competition, the material implications of Russo-British diplomacy have rarely been drawn out beyond the high politics playing out on the Russian capital's embankments. Matthew Romaniello's landmark new study uses extensive archival research in Britain, Russia, and the United States to show how limiting such a perspective can be. In fact, Enterprising Empires shows that for decades Britain's chief ambition lay beyond Russia's southern borderlands: access to the bountiful silk production centers of Iran.

As he traces the connections between the mercantile networks of early modern Eurasia and northern Europe, Romaniello gives further weight to the increasingly widely-held view that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Russia was a formidable commercial power, not a subsistence-agrarian backwater. The work of scholars like Erika Monahan and Jarmo Kotilaine has shown how the activist intervention of the Muscovite state in transnational commerce generated a flourishing system of cross-Eurasian trade. But if such arguments leave room for the objection that Russia remained backward because it failed to develop an entrepreneurial merchant class autonomous of the state, Romaniello shows that British commerce was an equally entangled knot of mercantilist state policy and private economic interest. In Enterprising Empires, the focus is on the role of individual go-betweens who combined official and commercial functions in complex ways. For instance, in the 1740s the Russia Company agent John Elton undermined British trade ambitions in Iran with forms of personal misconduct that necessitated the intervention of British officials in both London and St. Petersburg.

Enterprising Empires begins by juxtaposing the origins of the Russia Company and its two main competitors, the Eastland Company and the Levant Company, with the early mercantilism of seventeenth-century Muscovy. The Companies were chartered organizations of merchants given monopoly privileges by the English (later British) government to trade with a particular region—though in practice, given the transregional reach of Eurasian trade routes, conflicts over particular ports or commodities inevitably arose. In the aftermath of the English Civil War, English companies’ interest in Russian markets and the other regions to which they were linked clashed with the Romanovs’ protectionist priorities. Chapter 2 shows why even in the era of Peter the Great, when diplomatic links had vastly strengthened, no commercial treaty between Russia and Britain could be successfully negotiated. Individual merchants, diplomats, and agents made lucrative careers trading in commodities like tobacco, but their interests could clash with the goals of the states they represented.

Chapter 3 shifts the focus directly to the Asian markets where Britain had the greatest expectations of profit after the signing of a new commercial treaty with Russia in 1734. China, the only source of highly-profitable medicinal rhubarb root, and Persia, the leading source of silk, were both foremost on the agenda, but neither worked out for the Russia Company. The Russian Empire itself, on the other hand, made a fortune from its trade with both countries. Likewise, as Chapter 4 shows, it was able to take advantage of the Seven Years’ War and subsequent conflicts in the Atlantic to profit as a supplier of naval stores and even to usurp Britain's place as Europe's leading tobacco exporter. Ultimately, however, the final chapter demonstrates that the position of strength in Europe Russia had achieved by the end of the eighteenth century could not sustain its expanding ambitions in the Pacific, amid competition with American and not just British colleagues.

Romaniello deftly interweaves the broad geopolitical narratives that frame each chapter with the stories of individuals—usually British ones—who profited or lost out in the changing context. Enterprising Empires sometimes gives the impression of being too boosterish about Russia's commercial success, since nearly every diplomatic negotiation discussed in the book results in a defeat for the British. The personal stories help to guard against this by showing how Britain's or the Russia Company's lack of success as national enterprises did not necessarily mean damaging the profits of British entrepreneurs. This became especially noticeable in East Asia. Though Russia succeeded as a mercantilist empire, its leverage as a source of key commodities for Britain and its long history of trade with China could not hope to rival the power of British capital and gunboats when it came to battering down all Chinese walls.