Paul Dukes / Graeme P. Herdt / Jarmo Kotilaine: Stuarts and Romanovs. The Rise and Fall of a Special Relationship. Dundee: Dundee University Press, 2009. XVI, 262 S., 21 Abb., 2 Ktn. ISBN: 978-1-84586-055-4

Paul Dukes / Graeme P. Herdt / Jarmo Kotilaine: Stuarts and Romanovs. The Rise and Fall of a Special Relationship. Dundee: Dundee University Press, 2009. XVI, 262 S., 21 Abb., 2 Ktn. ISBN: 978-1-84586-055-4.

This interesting book was written by three scholars with overlapping research interests. Paul Dukes, emeritus professor at the University of Aberdeen, is a well known historian of early modern Russia whose previous books include “The Making of Russian Absolutism, 1613–1801” (1982). Graeme Herdt of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy is an expert on General Patrick Gordon, an important Scottish military expert and confidant of the future Peter the Great. Jarmo Kotilaine is a brilliant historian of early modern Russia’s economy who wrote “Russia’s Foreign Trade and Economic Expansion in the Seventeenth Century” (2005). These scholars have published an ambitious study of seventeenth-century Anglo-Russian diplomatic and commercial relations by focusing on what they claim was a “special relationship” forged between the new Stuart and Romanov dynasties that were born at the dawn of the seventeenth century. The Stuarts came to power in 1603 when James VI of Scotland (wrongly identified as James VII on pages 21 and 25) succeeded Elizabeth I to become King James I of England. The Romanovs came to power at the end of Russia’s “Time of Troubles” (a civil war aggravated by Polish and Swedish military intervention) when young Mikhail Romanov was elected tsar in 1613 by the most representative Assembly of the Land in Russian history. The Stuarts fell from power in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a transformative event that led to the emergence of Britain as a Great Power. The Romanovs, of course, lasted until 1917, but starting in the late seventeenth century Russia experienced its own transformative ‘revolution’ led by the tsar-reformer Peter the Great. “Stuarts and Romanovs” provides an accurate, detailed, well-documented, up-to-date survey of Anglo-Russian relations in the century before the emergence of Britain and Russia as Great Powers, and it will be useful to students and scholars in a wide variety of disciplines.

The greatest strength of “Stuarts and Romanovs” is in charting the vicissitudes of Anglo-Russian commercial relations during the seventeenth century. The book’s greatest weakness is its failure to demonstrate that England and Russia developed a “special relationship” while the Stuarts were in power. It may be argued that a special relationship between Russia and England developed in the late sixteenth century after Ivan the Terrible granted English merchants unique privileges in the Russian market that deeply rankled native Russian merchants. The English government was always careful, however, to avoid unnecessary political, military or diplomatic entanglement with the tsars, much to the annoyance of Ivan the Terrible and his successors. After the Time of Troubles the English continued to seek privileges in the Russian market while carefully avoiding a potentially troublesome alliance with Moscow. Far from forging a special relationship, throughout the seventeenth century the English and Russians pursued their own (often divergent) diplomatic, political, and economic interests. For example, when the Russians finally emerged from the Time of Troubles and were in the process of electing Tsar Mikhail, officials of the Muscovy Company (the English joint-stock company that monopolized Anglo-Russian trade) convinced James I to contemplate military intervention in Russia in order to secure Company profits and to help James build an empire. As a result, for a brief period of time James and Mikhail were actually rivals for the Russian throne (pages 28–29). On the other hand, readers of Stuarts and Romanovs will also learn that during the English Civil War and Cromwell’s Protectorate, the Russian government worked behind the scenes against the English “regicides” who had executed Charles I in 1649. Tsar Aleksei loaned a large sum of money to the future Charles II and allowed Charles’ agents in Russia to disrupt Muscovy Company activities and enrich themselves in the process. Once on the throne, a grateful Charles II promoted Anglo-Russian trade, but Russian merchants who opposed all foreigners’ privileges in the Russian market managed to convince the tsar to put an end to Russia’s longstanding commercial policies that favored foreign over native merchants. The resulting (mercantilist) new trade statue of 1667 was a significant step in the development of the Russian economy, and it helps explain why Muscovy Company activity and profitability continued to decline during the late seventeenth century. That eventually led to the reorganization of the company in 1698, about a decade after the Stuart dynasty was swept from power and Peter the Great came of age.

Chester S. L. Dunning, College Station, TX