Presentations by Streams

This panel offers three perspectives on how we might look again at economic practices in the late Russian empire, in each case offering a reinterpretation or new exploration of a theme or topic that has been neglected in recent scholarship. Focusing on promysly (trades) in the European North, begging and almsgiving in Russian villages, and iarmarki (trade fairs) across the empire but particularly in Central Asia, the papers centre rural landscapes, economies and communities, seeking to understand and to highlight the many varied ways in which social and economic practices were mutually constitutive. The papers explore why and how people became involved in various specific economic activities (including, but not limited to, the production of tar, the sale of sheep, the collection of crusts), and consider multiple scales of production, value and exchange. The cases presented also situate, where possible, economic life in remote localities of the Russian empire in regional, global and trans-imperial settings, thus overcoming binary centre-periphery research perspectives and emphasising the agency and connectedness of local life, often seen as inert and passive. Collectively, the papers reflect on themes of empire and social and geographic marginalisation, considering what the history of groups (peasants, villagers, beggars and pastoralists) and places (Arkhangel’sk province, Central Asia) that often fall beyond the reach of more traditional economic histories can bring to our wider understandings of economic life in the late imperial period.