J. M. Roberts was born in Bath and educated at Taunton School and Keble College, Oxford. AfterNational Service he returned to Oxford in 1950 and became a fellow of Magdalen the followingyear. In 1953 he went to the United States as Commonwealth Fund Fellow, the first of severalvisits to America during which he held, among other posts, those of Member of the Institute forAdvanced Study, Princeton (1960), and visiting professorships at the University of SouthCarolina and Columbia University, New York. He was a Fellow and Tutor of Merton College,Oxford, from 1953 to 1979. From 1979 to 1985 he was Vice-Chancellor of SouthamptonUniversity. He then returned to the Wardenship of Merton in 1985, from which he retired in 1994.In 1996 he was appointed CBE for ‘services to education and history’.Dr Roberts edited the popular and successful partwork publication Purnell’s History of theTwentieth Century. From 1967 to 1976 he was joint editor of the English Historical Review. Heis the author of Europe 1880–1945, The Mythology of the Secret Societies, The Paris Communefrom the Right, The Age of Revolution and Improvement and The French Revolution. In 1985BBC2 transmitted the thirteen-part historical series The Triumph of the West , which Dr Robertswrote and presented, and later in the year he published his book of the same title. He washistorical adviser to the successful BBC television series People’s Century.Dr Roberts was also the author of The Penguin History of Europe and The Penguin History ofthe Twentieth Century. Dr Roberts died in May 2003.Odd Arne Westad is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics. He ismost recently the author of The Global Cold War, which won the Bancroft Prize.
Population nearly doubled in the eighteenth century, about seven million of the thirty-six million or so at which it stood at the end having been acquired with new territories, the rest having accumulated by natural increase. This was a faster rate of growth than any other European country. Of this population, only about one in twenty-five at most lived in towns. Yet the Russian economy made striking progress during the century and was unique in utilizing serfdom to industrialize. Here, it may be thought, was one of Peters unequivocal successes; though there had been beginnings under the first two Romanovs, it was he who launched Russian industrialization as a guided movement. True, the effect was not quickly apparent. Russias starting level was very low, and no eighteenth-century European economy was capable of rapid growth. Though grain production went up and
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The peasants consumption declined. This was to be the story throughout most of the imperial era and sometimes the load was crushing: it has been estimated that taxes took 60 per cent of the peasants crop under Peter the Great. The techniques were not there to increase productivity and the growing rigidity of the system held it down more and more firmly. Even in the second half of the nineteenth century the typical Russian peasant wasted what little time was left to him after work for his lord by trudging around the collection of scattered strips which made up his holding. Often he had no plough, and crops had to be raised from the shallow scratching of the soil which was all that was possible. None the less, this ag
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By 1800 Russia produced more pig-iron and exported more iron ore than any other country in the world. Peter, more than any other man, was responsible for this. He grasped the importance of Russias mineral resources and built the administrative apparatus to grapple with them. He initiated surveys and imported the miners to exploit them. By way of incentive, the death penalty was prescribed for landlords who concealed mineral deposits on their estates or tried to prevent their use. Communications were developed to allow access to these resources and slowly the centre of Russian industry shifted towards the Urals.
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The rivers were crucial. Only a few years after Peters death the Baltic was linked by water to the Caspian. Manufacturing grew up around the core of extractive mineral and lumber industry which ensured Russia a favourable balance of trade for the whole century. Less than a hundred factories in Peters reign became more than 3000 by 1800. After 1754, when internal customs barriers were abolished, Russia was the largest free-trade area in the world. In this, as in the granting of serf labour or of monopolies, the state continued to shape the Russian economy; Russian industry did not emerge from free enterprise, but from regulation, and this had to be, for industrialization ran against the grain of Russian social fact. There might be no internal customs barriers, but nor was there much long-distance internal trade. Most Russians lived in 1800 as they had done in 1700, within self-sufficient local communities, depending on their artisans for a small supply of manufactures and hardly emergin
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