Evgeny Georgievich Neklyudov,
Doctor of Historical Sciences, Institute of History and Archaeology, Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Yekaterinburg, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Merchant Families as Part of the Ural Factory Owners in the First Half of the 19th Century: Features of Ownership and Management
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2023-5-2
Based on the reconstruction of the “ownership histories” of the merchant families of the Gubins, Rastorguevs, Yartsovs, Zelentsovs and Podyachevs, the peculiarities of their ownership and management of mining factories in the Urals in the first half of the 19th century are revealed. These examples are quite representative, since they demonstrate most of the merchant families that remained among Ural factory owners throughout this period. They show that all the merchants were newcomers to the mining business and, when buying factories, they counted on their well-established work, high profits, as well as on income from their other enterprises, which, if necessary, could help “unwind” a new type of business. However, not everyone managed to cope with their duties, and in the perspective of two or three generations, only two families (Rastorguevs and Yartsovs) kept the factories in their possession. At the same time, none of the presented clans escaped the forced intervention of the state in the affairs of private administration in the form of state supervision, guardianship or state administration; there were four cases of appointing factories for sale at public auctions. The reasons for this were the accumulation of state and private debts caused by the difficulties of developing the mining business itself, which required large investments and depended on the dynamics of the metal market, or failures in other businesses that were engaged by merchants. A significant role was played by subjective factors related to the history of the clans of merchant-mining workers themselves. These include: the extravagance of individual owners; conflicts between co-owners, which led to a decrease in the quality of management; the departure of heirs from management responsibilities, and sometimes even ownership of factories under the influence of the process of nobilitation, which covered all these genera. Not a single clan escaped problems in relations with the serf workers who found themselves in their possession, which led to an aggravation of social confrontation at the factories, which also caused state intervention (in two cases this was even accompanied by the exile of the owners). In general, we can conclude that the majority of merchant practices of ownership and management were unfavorable. Mining entrepreneurship of merchants in the Urals in the first half of the 19th century, was distinguished by greater dynamism and greater instability compared with the nobility, which often led to its decline and even collapse.
Publishing: 28/10/2023
The article has been received by the editor on 12/02/2023
How to cite: Neklyudov E.G. Merchant Families as Part of the Ural Factory Owners in the First Half of the 19th Century: Features of Ownership and Management // Historical Courier, 2023, No. 5 (31), pp. 37–55. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2023/ISTKURIER-2023-5-02.pdf]
Links: Issue 5 2023
Keywords: Imperial Russia; Urals; first half of the 19th century; entrepreneurship; industry; factory owners; merchant families; Gubins; Rastorguevs; Yartsovs; Zelentsovs; Podyachevs