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This innovative book looks beyond the traditional history of European expansion—which highlights European conquests, empire building, and hegemony—in order to explore the more human and realistic dimensions of European experiences abroad. David Ringrose argues that Early Modern Europe was relatively poor and that its industrial and military technology, while distinctive in some ways, was not obviously superior to that of Africa or Asia. As a result, the interaction between Europeans abroad and the peoples they met was vastly different from the relationship created by the economic and military imperialism of the post-1750 Industrial Revolution. Instead, the author depicts it as a process of cultural interaction, collaboration, and assimilation, masked by narratives of European conquest or assertion of control. Ringrose convincingly shows that Europeans who went abroad before 1700 engaged in an exchange of cross-cultural contact and has framed the process in its own time rather than as the precursor of what came later. Then, as now, historical actors knew nothing of the unexpected consequences of their actions

Modern Russian identity and historical experience has been largely shaped by Russia's imperial past: an empire that was founded in the early modern era and endures in large part today. The Russian Empire 1450-1801 surveys how the areas that made up the empire were conquered and how they were governed. It considers the Russian empire a 'Eurasian empire', characterized by a 'politics of difference': the rulers and their elites at the center defined the state's needs minimally - with control over defense, criminal law, taxation, and mobilization of resources - and otherwise tolerated local religions, languages, cultures, elites, and institutions. The center related to communities and religions vertically, according each a modicum of rights and autonomies, but didn't allow horizontal connections across nobilities, townsmen, or other groups potentially with common interests to coalesce. Thus, the Russian empire was multi-ethnic and multi-religious; Nancy Kollmann gives detailed attention to the major ethnic and religious groups, and surveys the government's strategies of governance - centralized bureaucracy, military reform, and a changed judicial system

Das bestrickende, mit Schwarz-Weiß-Abbildungen versehene Büchlein passt in jeden Bestand. Anschaulich, gut gegliedert, stets auf den Punkt gebracht, mit vielen Beispielen aus ganz Europa, zeigt dieses Buch plastisch die Armut in der Frühen Neuzeit und die Art und Weise, wie die Gesellschaft damit umging. Mit Register und Glossar. Als Ergänzung zu R. Jütte (BA 7/00), der das Thema systematischer, aber ebenso breit behandelt. (2) (Jürgen Plieninger)