At the Siberian Desk

Abstract

The Early Modern Russian empire resembled both contemporary European colonial empires and the Mongolian empire created by Chingis Khan’s descendants during the thirteenth century, to which it was an heir.1 Like the Mongolians, the Russians took hostages to enforce the delivery of tribute (mainly in furs), and some of the practices and terminology they used in administering their empire were directly borrowed from the Mongolians, whom they had replaced in less than a century (1553–1637) in Kazan, Astrakhan and in Siberia, but whose subjects they had been for most of the three centuries preceding that conquest.2 The colonized, in other words, had become the colonizers.