By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia

Abstract

presents an ambitious and revisionist analysis of the relationship of state and society in Muscovy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which significantly advances our understanding of early modern Russian history.Kollmann shares a growing consensus that while Muscovite autocratic theory claimed a monopoly of power, in practice geography, scant resources, and poor communications inhibited the state, as elsewhere in Europe, from exercising that power universally.Moreover, the central government understood its own limits.To husband