Moderniser of Russia Andrei Vinius, 1641-1716

Andrei Vinius's life and work attest to the importance of career bureaucrats in ushering Muscovy to a seat at the table of Europe's Great Powers in the Early Modern Age. Kees Boterbloem's study goes further and shows how some phenomena that we associate with mature capitalist economies and their impact on the "developing world" originate earlier than the Industrial Revolution. As Siberian overlord around 1700, Vinius helped Russia to exchange her previous guise as colony for that of coloniser in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Altogether, this first English-language biography of Vinius provides a deeper insight into the beginnings of Russia as a Great Power, and of the nature of cross-cultural contacts in the Early Modern World.

Dr. Kees Boterbloem is Professor of History and Coordinator of Russian, East-European and Eurasian Studies at the University of South Florida, USA, and has been the editor of The Historian since 2008. He is the author of three books in English: Life and Death under Stalin: Kalinin Province, 1945-1953 (1999); The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, 1896-1948 (2004); The Fiction and Reality of Jan Struys: A Seventeenth-Century Dutch Globetrotter (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and one in Dutch: De Lotgevallen van Jan Struys in Rusland en Iran (2012).

Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. The Disappearing Dutch and Russia's Modernisation
3. The Young Vinius
4. At the Foreign Office
5. Intrepid Diplomat
6. The Miloslavskii Ascendancy: Medicine and Mail
7 Seeker in an Age of Transition
8. Peter's Confidant
9. At the Siberian Desk
10. Old Servants Never Die, They Merely Fade Away
11. The Books of Andrei Vinius
12. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index