In eastern Europe, in the 17th century a couple of “great powers” were coming into their own. The vast empire of Russia was modernizing under Peter the Great, and the relatively tiny state of Prussia was evolving as well. Russia (and Tsar Peter) reformed many aspects of Russian governance, realigning them toward the way things were done in western Europe. In Prussia, efficiency of institutions became a thing, and Prussia turned into “a large army with a small state attached.”
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Sources
Hosking, Geoffrey. Russia: People and Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Hunt, Lynn et al. Challenge of the West: Peoples and Cultures from 1320 to the Global
Age. Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1995.
Kivelson, Valerie A. and Ronald Grigor Suny. Russia’s Empires. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2016.
Stites, Richard. Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia The Pleasure and the Power. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
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