INTRODUCTION. 



INTRODUCTION. 



Review^ of the Manufacturing- Industry and of the Trade 



of Russia. 



THE Russian brancli of the Slavonic peoples, occupying from immemorial times 

 as colonists the western half of the immense plain stretching for two and one- 

 half thousand kilometres from the rocks of Finland to the mountains of the 

 Caucasus, and from the Carpathians to the Urals, from necessity, from tlie rapidity 

 of its natural increase, from its inclination to peaceful domestic occupations, and 

 finally from its habit of struggling against the difficulties presented by nature, has 

 ever been mainly occupied with agricultural pursuits. Trade relations were assisted 

 by the vast rivers and the winter sledge roads, but were hindered by the lack ot 

 seacoast, extensive forests, the raids of the tribes of Finnish and Mongolian descent, 

 and the internal disorder which caused the people in the ninth century to elect 

 princes whose chief care consisted in the establishment of internal organization and 

 external defense from those neighbouring tribes which had partly fallen away from, 

 partly been assimilated by Eussia. The division of the country into many separate 

 principalities, the warring of the princes the imposition for two centuries of the 

 Mongol yoke, the ceaseless defensive wars undertaken againsr The Swedes and the 

 Teutonic knights pressing on from the uorth-west, against the Poles who had de- 

 prived Russia of her western and south-western territories, and against the Tartars 

 who attacked her from the east and south-east, all this occupied the Russian people 

 even in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to such an extent that there 

 was little possibility of beginning any lasting industrial development. Only in the 

 seventeenth century the Moscovite Tsars, after uniting the people and strengthening 

 their authority with the aid of the most enterprising inhabitants of the Moscow 

 region, were in a position to present stout resistance to the west, and having finally 

 broken the force of their eastern enemies, were able to begin to think about the 



