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Agricultural Structure and Proto-Industrialization in Russia: Economic Development With Unfree Labor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Richard L. Rudolph
Affiliation:
The author is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455. He would like to express his gratitude for helpful comments at various stages to Stanley Engerman, Robert Fogel, Jacek Kochanowicz, Donald McCloskey, and Russell Menard, as well as for comments by participants at the Eighth International Economic History Conference in Budapest in 1982.

Abstract

A revised view of the nature of Russian industrialization is proposed. It is argued that economic conditions on the serf estates did not hinder industrialization; they in fact facilitated proto-industrialization by promoting the nonagricultural pursuits of the peasantry. In opposition to the traditional view that industrialization took place after the Emancipation of the serfs in 1861, and that there was an “agrarian crisis” in the nineteenth century, it is argued that industrialization was well underway on a wide scale on the basis of serf labor before 1861. The so-called agrarian crisis may really have been a period of increased proto-industrial activity by the peasants.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1985

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References

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21 Gini coefficient based on data in Table 1. Gavin Wright shows a Gini coefficient for slaveholding in the cotton South of the United States of.793. See Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South, p. 27.Google Scholar

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