Between agriculture and industry: peasant economic practices (promysly) and modernisation in the European North of the late Russian Empire

Programme : Back to Vasily Borovoy

Between agriculture and industry: peasant economic practices (promysly) and modernisation in the European North of the late Russian Empire

Sat6 Apr11:00am(20 mins)

Where:

Linnett Room

Stream:

New outlooks on economic life in the late Russian empire

Presenter:

Vasily Borovoy

Authors

Vasily Borovoy¹; ¹ University College Dublin, Ireland

Discussion

Economic theory usually breaks down labour into agriculture, industry, and services. But much of the livelihood of peasantry in the late imperial Russia could hardly be put under any of these rubrics exclusively. Logging and rafting of timber, maritime fishing and hunting, forest hunting, commuting for work to nearby provinces or Saint-Petersburg, artisanal tar production, and many other activities neither belonged to agriculture, nor to industry in both historical and modern senses of these concepts. Imperial elites imagined the ideal Russian peasantry as full-time agriculturalists that represented the foundations of the Official Nationalism doctrine – orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationhood. Contrary to the centrally produced ideology, the economic practices of Russian and other peasants were a mix of proper agriculture with various market-driven activities accessible in a given time and space and varied greatly through both geographical conditions and social structure of the empire. Neither could these activities be classified by imperial officials and statisticians as industry due to their small scale, lack of capital involved, and ‘backward’ technologies utilised. In this presentation I use data on three provinces of the European North of Russia (Arkhangelsk, Vologda, and Olonets), mainly yearly provincial overviews and related descriptions. It will expand our knowledge on how the late imperial goals of economic modernisation lead to unpredictable results such as growing inequality and erosion of the estate hierarchy in one region of empire.

Programme

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