Editing Economy of Ukraine (section)

===Before 1917===
Geography has long influenced the economy of the Ukrainian lands. Rich fertile soils (such as [[chernozem]] areas) made the area a "[[breadbasket]]": for [[ancient Greece]]<ref>
{{cite book
 | last1 = Kaplan
 | first1 = Temma
 | title = Democracy: A World History
 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=-LxPBQAAQBAJ
 | series = New Oxford World History
 | location = New York
 | publisher = Oxford University Press
 | date = 2014
 | access-date = 9 November 2018
 | isbn = 9780199929962
 | quote = Greece consisted of discrete enclaves on which agriculture was difficult and residents turned to the sea for their livelihood. [...] Athens could not have survived without grain from Ukraine, one reason that Athens feared Persian movements toward the Dardanelles, the Bosporus, and the Black Sea, and maybe the main reason Athens extended so many rights of participatory democracy to lower-class male citizens who served in its navy.
}}
</ref> as well as for early [[modern Europe]].<ref>
{{cite book
 | last1 = Havrylyshyn
 | first1 = Oleh
 | chapter = Nature of the Economy before Independence
 | title = The Political Economy of Independent Ukraine: Slow Starts, False Starts, and a Last Chance?
 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=QY_LDQAAQBAJ
 | series = Studies in Economic Transition
 | location = London
 | publisher = Springer
 | date = 2016
 | page = 18
 | isbn = 9781137576903
 | access-date = 9 November 2018
 | quote = From the mid-1500s one saw the second historical period of European orientation as 'increasing demand for grain on the European markets [led to] Ukraine earning its reputation as the breadbasket of Europe'.
| author1-link = :uk:Олег Гаврилишин
 }}
</ref> The maintenance of trade corridors – the [[route from the Varangians to the Greeks]] and [[Turkish Straits#Straits Question|access through the Straits]] to the Mediterranean world – became important. Mineral resources encouraged industrialisation – notably in the [[Donbas]] – from the 19th century onwards.<ref>
{{cite book
 | last1 = Havrylyshyn
 | first1 = Oleh
 | chapter = Nature of the Economy before Independence
 | title = The Political Economy of Independent Ukraine: Slow Starts, False Starts, and a Last Chance?
 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=QY_LDQAAQBAJ
 | series = Studies in Economic Transition
 | location = London
 | publisher = Springer
 | date = 2016
 | page = 24
 | isbn = 9781137576903
 | access-date = 9 November 2018
 | quote = In the 1860s and 1870s a major shift in economic structure began as czarist policy turned to promote modern industrialization [...]. [...] A huge government-supported program of railroad building began, followed by policies to attract foreign investors to develop metallurgy in the coal- and iron-rich areas of the South-East.
}}
</ref>

The lack of secure borders meant repeated interruptions in economic development. [[Eurasian nomads|Steppe nomads]] and other conquerors – [[Cumans]], [[Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus'|Mongols]], [[Crimean Tatars|Tatars]] for example, sometimes saw plundering as more important than fostering economic development. In the 16th to 18th centuries, the wastelands of the [[Wild Fields]] left much of Ukraine as an area of tentatively militarised outposts, prior to tsarist Russia's extension of its power into the region in the 17th and 18th centuries.