532 Ch. 14 • The Industrial RevolutionEarly in the nineteenth century several major canals were constructed,
including one joining Saint Petersburg to the Volga River. Internal and for
eign trade expanded markedly in the first half of the nineteenth century,
including grain and timber, much of it through Black Sea ports. However,
coal and iron ore deposits lay thousands of miles from Saint Petersburg,
Moscow, and Kiev and could be transported to manufacturing centers only
with great difficulty and at daunting cost.
Some hostility toward industrialization—and toward the West in
general—remained entrenched in Russia, in part orchestrated by the Ortho
dox Church. In the 1860s, there still was no generally accepted word in Rus
sian for “factory” or even “worker.” Industrial workers remained closely tied
to village life. The state undertook only feeble efforts to encourage industrial
development. The Council of Manufacturers was created in 1828, trade
councils organized in the largest towns, and several technical schools were
established.
Overall, despite these factors, the growth of Russian industry was sig
nificant during the first half of the nineteenth century, if only in and
around Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and the Ural Mountains. The cotton
industry developed rapidly, as did a number of traditional manufacturing
sectors in response to population growth. The number of Russian indus
trial workers—a fifth were serfs who had to pay some of what they earned
to their lords—increased from 201,000 in 1824 to 565,000 in 1860 out of
a population of about 60 million. At the same time, Russia began to import
and construct more machinery. However, spinning and weaving remained
overwhelmingly cottage industries.
The Middle Classes
One should not exaggerate the cohesiveness of the European middle class.
The size and influence of the middle class was far greater in Britain, France,
Belgium, the German states, and the northern Italian states, whose
economies and politics were slowly being transformed by the Industrial Rev
olution, than in Spain, the Habsburg monarchy, or Russia, which still were
dominated by nobles.
In liberalism, the middle class found an economic and political theory
that echoed the way they viewed the world, with the family as the basis of
social order. Within the family, men and women occupied, at least in theory,
separate spheres. Religion and education played privileged roles in middle
class families. At the same time, for all the frugality sometimes ascribed to
the nineteenth-century middle class, bourgeois prosperity found expression
in the development of a culture of comfort.