In the mean time the Russian commerce in the Caspian was increasing:  the Persian vessels brought into Astracan dyed silks, calicoes, and Persian stuffs, and returned with cloth, sables, martens, red leather, and old Russia money.  The trade from Archangel also increased in a still more rapid manner, principally, as we have already seen, with the English and Dutch.  In the year 1655, the exports were valued at the 660,000 rubles, two rubles at that period being equal to one pound sterling.  The principal articles were potash, caviare, tallow, hides, sables, and cable yarn; the other articles of less importance, and in smaller quantities, were coarse linen, feathers for beds, tar, linen yarn, beet, rhubarb, Persian silk, cork, bacon, cordage, skins of squirrels, and cats; bees’ wax, hogs’ birstles, mice and goats’ skins, swan and geese down, candles, &c.

Peter the Great became emperor in 1689; he soon unfolded and began to execute his vast plans of conquest, naval power, and commerce.  He gained for his country a passage into the Black Sea, by reducing Asoph, at the mouth of the Don, and he soon established a navy on this sea.  His personal exertions in Holland and England, to make himself acquainted with ship-building, are well known.  The event of his reign, however, which most completely changed the relative situation of Russia, and established her as a commercial nation, was the conquest from Sweden of Livonia, Ingria, and Carelia.  Scarcely were these provinces secured to him, when he built, first Cronstadt, and then St. Petersburgh.  The erection of this city, and the canals he constructed in the interior for the purpose of facilitating the transportation of merchandize from the more southerly and fertile districts of his empire to the new capital, soon drew to it the greater portion of Russian commerce.  Archangel, to which there had previously resorted annually upwards of one hundred ships from England, Holland, Hamburgh, &c. declined; and early in the eighteenth century Petersburgh, then scarcely ten years old, beheld itself a commercial city of great importance.

Having now brought the historical sketch of the progress of discovery and of commercial enterprise down to the commencement of the eighteenth century, it will be necessary, as well as proper, to contract the scale on which the remainder of this volume is to be constructed.  For, during nearly the whole of the period which intervenes between the commencement of the eighteenth century and the present time, the materials are either so abundant or so minute, that to insert them all without discrimination and selection, would be to give bulk, without corresponding interest and value, to the work.