This paper studies the impact of inequality in capital and land distribution on the pace of industrialization, thereby explaining the role of wealth inequality in the Great Divergence phenomenon. We build a two-sector unified growth model, in which the outcome of public policy contest between...

Traditional ideas sometimes turn into revolutionary ones because of changing circumstances in which they continue to exist. Their revolutionary appearance, however, might be intentionally accentuated by the new followers of these ideas. Consequently, a legitimate and respectable tradition of...

Education in early modern Russia has been traditionally described as imported from the West; secular; imposed by the state – or more specifically, by Peter I himself – from above on the unwilling population; driven by the military needs, and therefore, technical. This chapter seeks to...

The study explores the narrative structure of Alexandr Nikitenko's diary, one of the core sources for the history of Russian censorship, and on the role of the genre of anecdote in particular. Through an analysis of the ‘anecdotal' entries about censorship in Nikitenko's diary and their...

This article studies the evolution of housing rents in St. Petersburg between 1880 and 1917, covering an eventful period of Russian and world history. We collect and digitize over 5,000 rental advertisements from a local newspaper, which we use together with geo-coded addresses and detailed...

Studies of interconnections between social, technological, economic and cultural forces belong to the trend of modernisation studies in the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th century. Modernisation implies the establishment and growth of institutions and infrastructures that are...

Luxury has always been an intrinsic part of world history, but only in the 18th century the core of this phenomenon came up for discussion in Europe. During these debates the concept of luxury was gradually demoralized by economic liberalism and reshaped as “modern and more objective economic...

The article deals with the notion "undergoverness" in the context of the 18th century Russia. It was an attempt to get away from the general discussion based on the number of state officials per capita.The study is devoted to the analysis of the poll tax collection mechanism. We use the new data...

The Russian hunters used to kill animals in the Arctic long before the 18th c. However, the Petrine modernization has changed their life strongly. The Government has put the new goals in order to make the Russian blubber industry some kind of a driving force for the Europeanization of the...

This article uses the records of monastic account books to assess the level of prices in Russia in the second half of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The data from these books allow us to construct salt and rye price series, and identify prices of other goods for single years....