Economically the paradox of this period was that, although labour mobility had been achieved by peasant emancipation, the gap between Western and Eastern Europe was arguably as great in 1914 as in the 1860s. Significant parts of Eastern Europe, notably the German-speaking lands of the Habsburg Monarchy, parts of Hungary and Russian Poland, were closer to the West than ever before in terms of economic diversification and appearance, but even these were still primarily agrarian societies. As of 1900, 50 per cent of the population of the Austrian' half of the Habsburg Monarchy still lived off the land and two-thirds of Hungary and Russian Poland. The percentages were far higher elsewhere in the region.1
The terms under which emancipation was agreed in most of the Habsburg Monarchy, Prussia and Russia enabled only a minority of peasants to establish
Themselves as independent smallholders. Those who could not make this transition had to accept a precarious existence as tenant farmers or landless labourers. Among the noble landowners, many small to middling gentry also found it hard to survive once bereft of their peasants' free labour. The biggest landowners tended to buy out the lesser ones as well as the even more vulnerable smallholders. In some parts of Eastern Europe, therefore, and most strikingly in Prussia, this finally facilitated the modernisation of agriculture because the big estates were wealthy enough to invest in new techniques and machinery. In some Balkan states, by contrast, in the absence of a native aristocracy, the predominant peasant proprietors were sheltered from economic reality by government, which forbade the confiscation of farms for debt. This preserved the smallholder class, but at the cost of perpetuating the inefficiency of agriculture, whose practitioners were not wealthy enough to modernise their production methods. In the Ottoman Balkans the chief burden on the peasantry was the high level of taxation.
All the while rural population was steadily rising, doubling between 1860 and the turn of the century.2 This, coupled with the general inefficiency of agriculture, had certain consequences. Firstly, elemental peasant revolts were still a possibility in some parts of the region into the twentieth century. The uprisings in Ottoman Bosnia and Bulgaria in the 1870s, the widespread peasant unrest in Russia in 1905—6 and the terrifying revolt of 1907 in Romania were all testimony to the grinding poverty of the rural masses. Secondly, the natural reaction of most East European peasants to their rising numbers was to subdivide their plots still further to provide for the new arrivals; while understandable in human terms, this only made the inefficiencies of scale more obvious. Thirdly, peasants could now migrate: from region to region and at times from state to state in search of work; from countryside to town, swelling the urban population; and increasingly after 1890 from Eastern Europe entirely, emigrating in their millions to the Americas or Australasia or, in the case of Russia, to Siberia.
Labour mobility and population increase both facilitated the spread of industrialisation. In most areas this was a cumulative process going back generations, given extra impetus by emancipation, the founding of banks and credit institutions and, in the case of the Habsburg Monarchy, the abolition of internal customs barriers. Prussia's industrialisation, which was based partly on Silesia but really took off in the Rhineland, was stimulated by the customs union formed with other German states in the 1830s, but then massively reinforced by the creation of the Empire in 1871. In Russia, by contrast, large-scale industrialisation came late, largely after 1890, and was state-led, a consequence of the tsarist regime's recognition that Russia's effectiveness as a great power was being seriously imperilled by its backwardness. So capital-poor was the Russian economy, however, that much of the capital for industrialisation had to come from foreign, mainly French, banks as well as from a huge effort by the state to maximise grain exports. A similarly government-led attempt at modernisation was made by some of the Balkan states, but with indifferent success due to the impoverished revenue base from which these states were starting.
Where industrialisation did take hold, it was characterised by the greater exploitation of mineral resources, the building of railways and other infrastructure and the emergence of factory-based production, although much of the latter evolved around the processing of the region's agricultural products: milling, brewing, sugar-beet refining, farm machinery and the like. The rudiments of a regional infrastructure were achieved by the completion of such projects as the Semmering rail link between Vienna and Trieste in 1853, the Vienna—Constantinople route in 1888, the clearing of the Danube for navigation, Russia's opening up of the grain-growing Ukraine in the 1860s and 1870s, and its building of the Trans-Siberian Railway after 1891.
Industrialisation, and the quickening of trade that went with it, led to a rapid growth of some cities, even if these were still islands in a sea of agrarian society, and the average size of towns remained small. Between 1850 and 1910, for instance, the population of Vienna exploded from 444,000 to 2.03 million, Budapest from 178,000 to 880,000, Warsaw from 100,000 to 856,000, Moscow and St Petersburg from 365,000 to 1.4 million and 485,000 to 1.9 million, respectively.3 The rapidity of this urbanisation meant that overcrowding, sub-standard accommodation, poor hygiene and disease were endemic problems, resulting in social unrest and the formation of labour organisations and political movements focused on the amelioration of conditions, if not the overturning of the entire economic order. Urbanisation also meant a steady increase in the number of literate East Europeans as more and more people had access to education, the beginnings of a mass media and an introduction to politics. In terms of nationality issues, the growth of towns also spelled change. Whereas at the start of the century the urban population in large parts of the Habsburg Monarchy, and in the Baltic provinces of Russia, had been German, by the end of the century the balance had shifted the other way: both Budapest and Prague, largely German speaking in 1848, were mainly Hungarian and Czech centres by 1900.4 Overall the economic and social change in this period had the effect of heightening political awareness, including nationalism.
World History
