Сommodity and Money Flows in Russian Empire in the Second half of the Nineteenth Century: Network and Geoinformation Analysis

Abstract

This article deals with the domestic interregional cash flows in the Russian Empire, which flowed in the opposite direction to the flows of commodities and services; thus, they can be used as proxies of the resource allocation and uneven development of regions. This study is based on the statistics of transfers between branches of the State Bank of the Russian Empire, and it conducts a network and geoinformation analysis for 1868, 1878, 1888, and 1898. The study proves that the top segment of the payment network, including ties with St. Petersburg and Moscow, was organized like a “double star” (i.e., a star-type network with centers in two capitals with a huge flow between them). From St. Petersburg, the largest proportion of payments for goods and services were dispersed throughout the country, while Moscow was primarily a nationwide center for buying goods or receiving payments. The metropolitan segment always serviced more than half of all settlements in the country. In the European part of the empire, the largest regional ties (beyond the capitals) looked like the flows in the “pre-railway” period (1868); then, the largest flows were redistributed along the principal railways (1878); later, the flows compressed during the depression (1888); and then, the intraregional (local) flows increased sharply due to the expansion of local railroads (1898). Large interregional flows in the Asian part of the empire were inferior in size to those in the European part; until the 1890s, their main axis was the ties between Tomsk and Irkutsk as well as access to Nizhny Novgorod in the European part (through Yekaterinburg from the 1870s onwards). In the 1890s, new segments appeared in the Far East, in the Steppe Region (Kazakhstan), and in Central Asia.