This paper explores the local political economy of early agronomic efforts in Tsarist Russia by undertaking a two-part analysis of the role of the zemstvo – a 19th century institution of local self-government – in improving local agricultural conditions. First, we investigate the...

The emancipation of the serfs is often viewed as watershed moment in 19th-century Russian history. However, this reform was accompanied by numerous others measures aimed at modernizing the Tsarist economy and society. Among these "Great Reforms" was the creation of a new institution of local...

Just how unequal were the incomes of different classes of Russians on the eve of Revolution, relative to other countries, to Russia's earlier history, and to Russia's income distribution today? Careful weighing of an eclectic data set provides provisional answers. In 1904, on the eve of military...

Serfdom is often viewed as a major institutional constraint on the economic development of Tsarist Russia, one that persisted well after emancipation occurred in 1861 through the ways that property rights were transferred to the peasantry. However, scholars have generally asserted this causal...

In recent years economic historians have turned new attention to questions about standards of living in pre-revolutionary Russia. However, most of the studies to date have focused on a narrow range of measures for predominantly urban areas. We expand on the existing literature with a micro-level...

Our paper provides a comparative perspective on the development of public primary education in four of the largest developing economies circa 1910: Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC). These four countries encompassed more than 50 percent of the worldÂ’s population in 1910, but remarkably...