Towns, Townsmen, and Urban Reform
Towns, Townsmen, and Urban Reform
This chapter surveys towns and cities across the empire in the eighteenth century. Small towns continued to be the norm, but major centers grew with the expansion of export trade. A new social group—the “people of various social ranks” or raznochintsy—emerged to fill the needs of the expanding economy; they were literate teachers, artisans, and traders. Peter I and Catherine II instituted urban reforms with the dual goals of enhancing tax revenue and creating a more vigorous bourgeois class and more autonomous municipalities; the latter goals remained elusive. The chapter showcases several towns as examples of urban variety: small towns such as Bezhetsk and Tula, trade centers such as Riga and Reval, and the major trade, political, and cultural centers of Kyiv, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. It ends with a profile of merchant Ivan Tolchenov as exemplar of the dynamism of eighteenth-century trade.
Keywords: towns, raznochintsy, social hierarchy, urban reforms, Reval, Riga, Kyiv, Moscow, St. Petersburg, merchants
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