Introduction

Silk shaped the processes of early globalisation that affected Russia, by creating networks of cultural, political, and commercial connections between the East and the West. The new “cosmopolitan material culture” of the early modern period, as Beverly Lemire suggests, “redefined material life, social practice and commercial enterprise” and became “emblematic of evolving economic, social and political systems.” This chapter explores these changes and charts the identity politics related to silk textiles in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Russia by examining silk trade and acquisition, the introduction of new practices, as well as attempts to develop silk manufacturing. The chapter discusses the early development of the Russian silk industry in the context of localised consumption and mercantilist policies. I argue that silk fabrics became transformed from globally traded artefacts into tokens of local identity politics. They turned into in-between textiles negotiating and driving societal change “between Self and Other,” where the Other signified not only the territorial and cultural Other, but also old forms of life within Russia. These textiles helped to create what Homi Bhabha calls “the in-between space” where cultural values and notions of selfhood underwent negotiation. The textiles were crucial tools that materialised identities in a time when Russia became embedded in an increasingly globalised world.