THE HISTORICAL CONDITIONS OF DEVELOPMENT OF SMALL INDUSTRY IN ROMANIA UNTIL THE BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURY

The small industry in Romania developed under specific conditions determined by the geographical region and the influence of the neighboring empires: the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire and the Austrian Empire. Although at the beginning of the sixteenth century Hungary had been transformed into a Turkish Pashalic, Transylvania retained its autonomy, thus creating favorable conditions for the development of small industries which were organized in guilds. Neither in Moldova nor in Romania did the trade restrictions and dependence on the Ottoman monopoly not lead to the disappearance of the small industries. These experienced a new development under Austrian domination in the eighteenth century in Transylvania and, a century later, Moldavia and Wallachia emerged from the Ottoman domination. This process experienced three stages: dissolution of the Ottoman trade monopoly (1829), the Union between Wallachia and Moldavia in 1859 and the independence of the country achieved in 1877. After the guilds were abolished (1873), the small industry and the big industry, though hit by the Commercial Convention between Romania and Austria-Hungary in 1876 , succeed to develop in the last decades of the nineteenth century.