The Imperiia Project

Who owned the factories?

We can think about the "who" question two ways. We can think about the men and women listed in our source as individuals with experiences, expertise, family connections, ambitions, and tastes. We can also think of them as representatives of the empire's social structure. The Factory Index was published two decades after the emancipation of the serfs and the rollout of the Great Reforms that promised to unleash the full economic and cultural potential of the population. Because of this, it paints a social profile that would have been unimaginable just a generation earlier.

On the one hand we have someone like Pavel Ivanovich Shcherbakov, who established his small factory in the village of Gorodets (near Nizhnii Novgorod) in 1850. The 4 workers he employed baked gingerbread worth 2,000 rubles each year. On the other hand we have someone like Evdokiia Ivanovich Maksimovich, the widow of Georg Landrin. Evdokiia oversaw the chocolate empire her late husband established in the 1840s. What began as a small caramel factory in Saint Petersburg grew into a sprawling complex that produced over one million rubles of confection annually.

Men, women, peasants, merchants, Italians, Ottomans... Use the map below to take a close look at the distribution of social status. Does anything surprise you? (Pro tip: Use the bookmarks to study the data at town scale. Use the "export" icon to save any map view.)

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