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Modernization in Progress: Part-Year Operation, Mechanization, and Labor Force Composition in Late Imperial Russia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2022

Amanda Gregg  and
Tamar Matiashvili
Amanda Gregg*
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, Middlebury College Department of Economics, Warner Hall 316, 303 College St., Middlebury, VT 05753.
Tamar Matiashvili
Affiliation:
Ph.D. student, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. E-mail: tamrim@stanford.edu.
*
E-mail: agregg@middlebury.edu
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Abstract

This paper investigates part-year factory operation, a common but understudied dimension of industrializing economies, in a prototypical late-industrializing setting that offers rich factory-level data: Imperial Russia. Newly compiled data provides detailed descriptions of all Russian manufacturing firms operating in 1894 and shows that factories operating a greater number of annual working days were more mechanized, more urban, more likely to employ women and children, more productive, and more likely to survive. Rather than arguing that part-year operation demonstrated Russia’s uniquely inexorable backwardness, we stress operating time’s relationship to fundamental drivers of growth, including urbanization, geography, and institutions.

Type
Article
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 82 , Issue 4 , December 2022 , pp. 1143 - 1182
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Economic History Association

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Footnotes

The authors gratefully acknowledge support from Middlebury College and the National Science Foundation (#1220116 and #1658877). Thanks to Cihan Artunç, Barry Ickes, Steven Nafziger, Marvin Suesse, and participants at the Baltic Connections Conference in Social Science History at the University of Helsinki, the Penn State Russian Economic History Conference, and the Economic and Business History Society Conference for helpful comments. Special thanks to Dmitry Kofanov for providing the strike data, to Steven Nafziger for providing the scanned source for the rural wage gap data, and to Andre Zerger for the maps of Imperial Russian provinces.

References

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