About the project
Project team
Kelly O'Neill, Olive Coles, Paul VadanCite the project
O'Neill, Kelly; Coles, Olive; Vadan, Paul. "Sweet Things: Confectioners, Chocolatiers, and a Spoonful of Economic Geography." The Imperiia Project: Building the Spatial History of the Russian Empire. Published March 19, 2025.This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
About the AI-generated confection illustrations
The set of confection illustrations used in this project was generated by Open AI DALL-E Image Generator, version 4o, 2025. We used the following prompt and stimulus:“Hi DALL-E, can you make realistic cartoon images of the images included in this document [PDF document not included] - they need to be serious and able to be used in an academic context.” Followed by the refinement: “Presenting them in a historical bakery would be great, in the 19th century too with a russian/ east European theme, muted historical tones, and no labelling.”
The PDF document included public domain reference images of each confection. URLs are recorded in the metadata for each image.
Sources
The data on factories was extracted from a volume called the Index of factories of European Russia and the Kingdom of Poland: Material for factory statistics (Указатель фабрик и заводов европейской России и царства польскаго: материалы для фабрично-заводской статистики). It was compiled by Petr Aleksandrovich Orlov for the Department of Trade and Manufacture and published in Saint Petersburg in 1887. It is in the public domain, digitized by Google and available via HathiTrust. Access it here.Import data was extracted from annual volumes of the Survey of Russia's foreign trade (Обзор внешней торговли России) published on an annual basis by the Department of Customs (Ministry of Finance). Harvard Library holds many of the volumes spanning 1824-1915. We consulted them in the stacks. (Historians still do that sort of thing.) Consult the catalog entry here.
We used the wonderful Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets (Oxford, 2015) edited by Darra Goldstein for descriptions of various confections. Consult the Harvard Library catalog entry here.
We consulted the incomparable Brokgaus-Efron Encyclopedia for information about various towns and confections. Access a digitized version here.
We drew on population data from the 1897 Census for some of the map layers. The data was compiled and made accessible in vector format by a team at the University of Heidelberg: Sablin, Ivan; Kuchinskiy, Aleksandr; Korobeinikov, Aleksandr; Mikhaylov, Sergey; Kudinov, Oleg; Kitaeva, Yana; Aleksandrov, Pavel; Zimina, Maria; Zhidkov, Gleb, 2015, "Transcultural Empire: Geographic Information System of the 1897 and 1926 General Censuses in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union", https://doi.org/10.11588/DATA/10064, heiDATA, V3.
Looking to expand your knowledge?
Take a look at Amanda Gregg's Imperial Russian Factory Database, 1894-1908. Gregg compiled data published in the factory censuses that came after the one we used for our project. The data is available for download with full documentation. Access the project here.Read Alison Smith's Recipes for Russia: Food and Nationhood under the Tsars (Northern Illinois University Press, 2011). Thank us later.
