A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

The Second Industrial Revolution 75 1

Table 19.2.
tons)

Year

Production of Coal and Steel

Coal

in Russia (in thousands of

Steel

1860 695 257

(^1880) 3,276 289
(^1890) 6,015 857
(^1900) 16,155 2,711
(^1910) 25,000 3,017
(^1913) 36,038 4,918

Source: Arcadius Kahan, Russian Economic History: The Nineteenth Century (Chicago: Uni­

versity of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 21.

including oil. The output of steel increased fourfold during the last de­
cades of the century (see Table 19.2). By 1914, Saint Petersburg had
become one of the largest concentrations of industry in Europe, with more
than 900 factories. The growth of light industry and the expansion of the
market contributed considerably to the country’s economic growth, per­
mitting exports to Asian neighbors. Russian foreign trade tripled between
1885 and 1913. The length of Russia’s rail lines increased by three times
between 1881 and 1905, and its banks developed in size and scale. By the
turn of the century, railroads at last linked Russia’s major cities and facili­
tated the shipping of grain to the empire’s northern ports.
The Russian working class grew from about 2 million industrial workers
in 1900 to about 3 million by 1914 (compared to over a 100 million peas­
ants). Yet many Russian industrial workers still labored part-time in agri­
culture. In 1900, peasants made up two-thirds of the population of Saint
Petersburg, a city of more than 1.4 million people. They retained strong
ties to their villages, which remained their legal residences. The rural com­
mune still carried out functions of local authority, including many fiscal
obligations (assuring the payment of taxes and redemption payments on
land gained at the time of the emancipation of the serfs in 1861), policing
(including overseeing the division of communal lands), and rudimentary
welfare functions.

In most of Europe’s industrializing countries, the growing manufacturing
sector coexisted with small-scale production (see Map 19.2). In France, the
production of high-quality handicrafts, centered in Paris, continued to
dominate industry. Traditional small-scale manufacturing also persisted
alongside regionally specific heavy industries in Spain (Catalonia and the
Basque region), Austria-Hungary, and Italy, where little large-scale industry
could be found south of the triangle formed by Milan, Turin, and the port of
Genoa. As in Russia, most of the investment in Spanish industry came from
abroad because agriculture generated inadequate surpluses for significant
industrial investment. In the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the dynamism of