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The Hundred Largest Employers in the Russian Empire, circa 1913

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2018

Volodymyr Kulikov
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Abstract

The article analyzes a list of the hundred largest private and state-owned employers in the Russian Empire in 1913. It explains the validity of sources underlying the data and contributes to the methodological debates concerning the interpretation of such lists. It examines the geographical and sectoral distribution as well as the ownership structure of the largest Russian employers in a comparative context, using lists from Germany and the United Kingdom. The annexed list contributes to a more representative dataset of large firms beyond western Europe and therefore adds to the discussion on the rise of big business.

Keywords

largest employersbig businessforeign entrepreneurshipbusiness leadershipRussian Empire
Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 91 , Issue 4 , Winter 2017 , pp. 735 - 765
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2018 

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References

1 See, for example, Shaw, Christine, “The Large Manufacturing Employers of 1907,” Business History 25, no. 1 (1983): 42–60 Google Scholar; Fiedler, Martin, “Die 100 größten Unternehmen in Deutschland–nach der Zahl ihrer Beschäftigten—1907, 1938, 1973 und 1995,” Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte (1999): 32–66 Google Scholar; Cassis, Youssef, Big Business: The European Experience in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar; Wardley, Peter, “The Emergence of Big Business: The Largest Corporate Employers of Labour in the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States c. 1907,” Business History 41, no. 4 (1999): 88–116 Google Scholar; Gospel, Howard and Fiedler, Martin, “The Long-Run Dynamics of Big Firms: The 100 Largest Employers from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Japan, 1907–2002,” in The Third Industrial Revolution in Global Business, ed. Dosi, Giovanni and Galambos, Louis (Cambridge, Mass., 2013)Google Scholar.

2 Scholars have identified some of the largest employers in the late Russian Empire only in certain regions ( McKean, Robert B., St. Petersburg between the Revolutions: Workers and Revolutionaries, June 1907–February 1917 [New Haven, 1990]CrossRefGoogle Scholar) or economic sectors ( Gatrell, Peter, Government, Industry and Rearmament in Russia, 1900–1914: The Last Argument of Tsarism [New York, 1994]Google Scholar; Borodkin, Leonid I. et al. , “ Ne rublem edinym ”: Trudovye stimuly rabochikh-tekstil'shchikov dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii [Labor incentives of textile workers in pre-revolutionary Russia] [Moscow, 2010]Google Scholar). Probably the first attempt to compile a list of the largest Russian employers is Peter Wardley, “A Global Assessment of the Large Enterprise on the Eve of the First World War: Corporate size and performance in 1912.” Paper presented at the Workshop on Global Stock Markets in the Twentieth, Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo, 25 July 2006, http://www.computer-services.e.u-tokyo.ac.jp/p/sousei/Wardley1.pdf, in which Wardley defines the seven largest Russian employers ca. 1912. Volodymyr Kulikov and Martin Kragh's “Big Business in the Russian Empire: A European Perspective,” (Business History [advance online publication 5 Oct. 2017], http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2017.1374369) presents an inventory of the largest private and public companies in the Russian Empire according to the criteria set up in Cassis, Big Business, based on ordinary capital and employment. These include thirty-two firms that employed more than 10,000 people.

3 Gospel and Fiedler, “Long-Run Dynamics,” 71.

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6 The manufacturing enterprises owned by the mining department, the ministry of the navy, the main artillery department, and the Crown land office are included in the present list.

7 Finland enjoyed a high degree of autonomy until its independence in 1917. In most cases, imperial statistical publications did not include this territory in their observations.

8 By January 1913, the entire population of the Russian Empire had reached 170,902,900 or 174,099,600 together with the Finnish provinces. Source: TsSK MVD, Statisticheskii ezhegodnik Rossii za 1913 god (god desiatyi) [Statistical Yearbook of Russia, 1913] (Saint Petersburg, 1915), 58.

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13 For example, the mining department published statistics on the main mining companies in Russia in 1911, including the number of workers. See Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii o gornozavodskoi promyshlennosti Rossii v 1911 godu (Petrograd, 1918).

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16 Kandaurov, Fabrichno-zavodskie predpriiatiia, 1.

17 Ibid., 10.

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20 TsSK MVD, Statisticheskii ezhegodnik Rossii za 1914 god (god odinnadtsatyi) [Statistical yearbook of Russia, 1914] (Petrograd, 1915)Google Scholar, sec. 11, 95.

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27 Index of Maximum Variation: Maximum reported employment as a percentage of minimum reported employment. Data for the United Kingdom from Wardley, “Debate,” 123; data for the Donbas in Tamara F. Izmest'eva, “Sezonnyi trud. Istochniki, priemy analiza, rezul'taty,” [Seasonal labor: Sources, analytical methods, results] in Istoricheskaia informatika. Informatsionnye tekhnologii i matematicheskie metody v istoricheskikh issledovaniiakh i obrazovanii, no. 2 (2013): 77–78 Google Scholar.

28 Brandt et al., Statisticheskii sbornik, table 12.

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30 Tat'iana K. Gus'kova, Nizhnetagil'skii gornozavodskii okrug Demidovykh vo vtoroi polovine XIX – nachale XX v. Zavody. Rabochie: Monografiia [Nizhny Tagil Gornozavodsky District of Demidovs' in the second half of the nineteenth – early twentieth century: Factories, workers] (Nizhnii Tagil, 2007), 5.

31 Shaw, “Large Manufacturing Employers,” 46; Gospel and Fiedler, “Long-Run Dynamics,” 72.

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37 Fiedler, “Die 100 größten Unternehmen”; Wardley, “Emergence of Big Business.”

38 Wardley, “Global Assessment.”

39 Fiedler, Martin and Gospel, Howard, “The Top 100 Largest Employers in UK and Germany in the Twentieth Century. Data (ca. 1907, 1935/38, 1955/57, 1972/73, 1992/95),” Cologne Economic History Paper, no. 3 (2010): 1–67 Google Scholar. Fiedler and Gospel took the data on the United Kingdom's large employers mostly from Wardley, “Emergence of Big Business.” They corrected the number of employees in five cases, including the General Post Office, the largest employer (203,600 versus Wardley's figure of 199,178).

40 Jeremy and Farnie, “Ranking of Firms,” 108.

41 See Chandler, Alfred D., “The Emergence of Managerial Capitalism,” Business History Review 58, no. 4 (1984): 491Google Scholar.

42 Excluding employment in the postal service and retailing trade. Anfimov and Korelin, Rossiia, 1913 god, sec. 9, table 7.

43 Wardley, “Emergence of Big Business,” 93.

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47 Ibid, 402–3.

48 See Owen, Thomas C., The Corporation under Russian Law, 1800–1917: A Study in Tsarist Economic Policy (Cambridge, U.K., 2002)Google Scholar; Gregg, Amanda G. “Shareholder Rights and Share Capital: The Effect of the 1901 Russian Corporation Reform, 1890–1905,” Economic History Review 70, no. 3 (2017): 919–43Google Scholar.

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50 Gerschenkron, Alexander, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 129Google Scholar.

51 The population numbers are from 1910 for both the United Kingdom and Germany. The United Kingdom does not include British colonies.

52 See the detailed comparison of British and German big businesses in Wardley, “Emergence of Big Business.”