Nikita A. Bilenko

PhD in History, Associate Professor of the Department of History and Archeology

Tula State Lev Tolstoy Pedagogical University

(Tula, Russia)

Igor V. Alekseev

Postgraduate Student of the Department of History and Archaeology

Tula State Lev Tolstoy Pedagogical University

(Tula, Russia)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.22405/2712-8407-2024-1-43-60

Abstract. The article is devoted to the problem of the development of commercial entrepreneurship of burghers in the provincial city of Tula in the second half of the XIX century. The research was based on mass historical sources - fiscal and administrative documentation ("Journals of general verification of trade and industrial establishments"), created as a result of inspections of the activities of entrepreneurs of Tula (the administrative and economic center of the province, which combined the features of the Central Industrial and Central Agricultural regions). The standard format of the Journals allowed automating the processing of large amounts of information from historical sources by creating a source-oriented machine-readable database (based on the Microsoft Access 2007 DBMS) and answering the questions: "In what forms was the entrepreneurial activity of representatives of the bourgeoisie of the city of Tula organized in the second half of the XIX century?", "How large-scale was there any involvement of philistinism in the sphere of private trade compared to other segments of the city's population?", "Are there stable trends in the field of private entrepreneurship within the local market of the provincial center?". As a result of the study, it was found that "petty–bourgeois" establishments made up the majority of stationary commercial enterprises in the city (from a third to a half), and most of them belonged to small forms of trade - tents and small shops. Mass sources made it possible to identify an established business model that is uniform for the city's population: the desire of owners (both men and women) to independently manage institutions, a strategy to minimize investments in commercial property, a focus on short-term economic activity, a long absence of specialization of trading enterprises as a way to diversify capital, a way to minimizing the risks of ruin. The present work offers a model for studying the local community of provincial entrepreneurs, which can be scaled relative to other localities of the Russian Empire with the subsequent organization of historical and comparative studies.
Keywords: economic history, entrepreneurship, trade, the era of modernization, the city, the bourgeoisie, mass historical sources.

Full text of the article (PDF)

For citation: Bilenko, NA & Alekseev, IV 2024, ‘Commercial Entrepreneurship of the Burghers in the City of Tula in the Second Half of the 19th Century: Forms, Scales, Development Trends’, Tula Scientific Bulletin. History. Linguistics, issue 1 (17), pp. 43–60, http://doi.org/10.22405/2712-8407-2024-1-43-60 (in Russ.)

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