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Bread upon the Waters - The St. Petersburg Grain Trade and the Russian Economy, 1703-1811 (Paperback)
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Bread upon the Waters - The St. Petersburg Grain Trade and the Russian Economy, 1703-1811 (Paperback)
Series: Russian and East European Studies
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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In eighteenth-century Russia, as elsewhere in Europe, bread was a
dietary staple-truly grain was the staff of economic, social, and
political life. Early on Tsar Peter the Great founded St.
Petersburg to export goods from Russia's vast but remote interior
and by doing so to drive Russia's growth and prosperity. But the
new city also had to be fed with grain brought over great distances
from those same interior provinces. In this compelling account,
Robert E. Jones chronicles how the unparalleled effort put into the
building of a wide infrastructure to support the provisioning of
the newly created but physically isolated city of St. Petersburg
profoundly affected all of Russia's economic life and, ultimately,
the historical trajectory of the Russian Empire as a whole. Jones
details the planning, engineering, and construction of extensive
canal systems that efficiently connected the new capital city to
grain and other resources as far away as the Urals, the Volga, and
Ukraine. He then offers fresh insights to the state's careful
promotion and management of the grain trade during the long
eighteenth century. He shows how the government established public
granaries to combat shortages, created credit instruments to
encourage risk taking by grain merchants, and encouraged the
development of capital markets and private enterprise. The result
was the emergence of an increasingly important cash economy along
with a reliable system of provisioning the fifth largest city in
Europe, with the political benefit that St. Petersburg never
suffered the food riots common elsewhere in Europe. Thanks to this
well-regulated but distinctly free-market trade arrangement, the
grain-fueled economy became a wellspring for national economic
growth, while also providing a substantial infrastructural
foundation for a modernizing Russian state. In many ways, this
account reveals the foresight of both Peter I and Catherine II and
their determination to steer imperial Russia's national economy
away from statist solutions and onto a path remarkably similar to
that taken by Western European countries but distinctly different
than that of either their Muscovite predecessors or Soviet
successors.
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