Moderniser of Russia

Andrei Vinius’s life and work attest to the importance of career bureaucrats in ushering Muscovy to a seat at the table of Europe’s Great Powers in the Early Modern Age. Kees Boterbloem’s study goes further and shows how some phenomena that we associate with mature capitalist economies and their impact on the 'developing world' originate earlier than the Industrial Revolution. As Siberian overlord around 1700, Vinius helped Russia to exchange her previous guise as colony for that of coloniser in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Altogether, this first English-language biography of Vinius provides a deeper insight into the beginnings of Russia as a Great Power, and of the nature of cross-cultural contacts in the Early Modern World.