The Russian Empire’s Economic Policy in the Context of the Principal Developmental Tendencies of the Global Economy in the Modern Era

Abstract

Russia’s entrance into its modern period, at the turn of the seventeenth century, sped up the country’s inclusion into the European economic space. At that point, Russian economic policy began a significant reorientation toward the economy of Western Europe that would align it with the latter’s leading developmental tendencies. Scholars have identified mercantilism, liberalism, and neo-protectionism as the directions taken by European economies in modern times. European mercantilism, which dates to the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, was a time of original capital accumulation. The essence of mercantilism as an economic policy lies in the state’s operative interference in the country’s economic life, and a focus on a positive foreign trade balance and the promotion of domestically produced goods. Late-mercantilist policy is associated with active protectionism, support for the expansion of commercial capital, and the comprehensive encouragement of domestic industrial development, especially in manufacturing. In the latter third of the eighteenth century, the Industrial Revolution, which was just then beginning in Great Britain, ousted mercantilism in favor of liberalism (laissezfaire, governmental noninterference in private entrepreneurial activities, freedom of trade). After the [financial] crisis of 1873, the ideas of free trade definitively lost the popularity they had once had, and the leading Western countries embarked instead on the protectionist path. This third stage saw a resurgence of protectionist tariffs and state interference in the economy, but under a different understanding than before. Neoprotectionism entailed state-imposed restrictions on international trade to supplement the traditional limitations on undesirable imports. The task of