The societies of Eastern Europe remained largely agrarian in this period, yet not only was economic and social development happening of its own, but the perceived gap between Eastern and Western Europe was beginning to attract serious attention. This was not least because the gap was getting wider all the time. The crucial problem was posed by the system of land tenure and whether and how it might be altered.
The Habsburg Monarchy saw perhaps the most complicated change. This was an empire which enjoyed the reputation of a great power, but whose outstanding economic characteristic was backwardness and financial weakness. The Monarchy had a problem for decades with securing international credit, a vulnerability heightened by the post-1815 slump in grain prices; yet in Italy and Germany it had a position to maintain. Competing with Prussia, which had the edge as an industrialising power, the Monarchy soon found itself shouldered out of the German market by the Prussian-led Zollverein or customs union of 1834, which specifically excluded Austria.
In the 'Austrian' lands, excluding Hungary, there was gradual economic recovery, even growth, by the beginning of the 1830s. This was despite the personal opposition to modernisation of the emperor Francis, who initially refused to sanction the importation of steam engines and railway technology, on the ground that it 'would only bring revolution into the country'.9 The advent of steam in fact transformed the Monarchy's prospects, and it is significant that the first major application of the new technology was to river traffic, with the founding of the Danube Steam Navigation Company in 1831. The first railway was opened in 1832 and by 1848 there were 1,025 kilometres of track. The improvements in infrastructure meant that exports of agricultural produce, especially from Hungary, could expand; this in turn stimulated the arrival or the expansion of certain industries: food processing, brewing,
Textiles and some metal working. Urban centres grew: Vienna in 1800 had 247,000 inhabitants; by 1850 the figure was 444,000.10
In Hungary, despite the market for agricultural produce, economic growth was less marked and industry non-existent. Here the redundant class was the numerous gentry, most of whom did not have enough land or income; this noble proletariat gravitated to genteel occupations like the law, literature, journalism and politics, and Hungarian politics from the 1820s was dominated by the pressure to accommodate this class, increasing demands for autonomy in order to gain control of the jobs in the state bureaucracy.
Another peculiarity of Hungarian society, however, was the acute consciousness of the country's backwardness shown by some nobles. Count Istvan Szechenyi was a pivotal figure, not only in articulating this predicament but also in trying to do something about it. His travels in Western Europe, especially industrialising Britain, convinced him that 'the century is on the march but, unfortunately, I live in a country that is dragging one leg behind'.11 Immensely wealthy, Szechenyi personally sponsored steamship navigation, the improvement of livestock, the building of infrastructure like Budapest's famous Chain Bridge and much else. He also had the insight to perceive the immense drag on modernisation imposed by serfdom, the free labour from which would be unnecessary if greater credit, and the liberalisation of property laws, could be allowed to create a genuine market, attracting investment.
The greatest single economic change in the Monarchy in this period was the Act of Peasant Emancipation, passed by the Austrian Constituent Assembly in September 1848 and subsequently extended to Hungary after its reconquest; both governments had in any case decreed emancipation early in 1848. Austrian peasants had to pay for their freedom from manorial dues, as well as for the land they tilled, because the landowners were to be partially compensated for the loss of free peasant labour. For those peasants who could manage it, the life of a smallholder beckoned, but for the millions who could not, a whole class of landless agricultural labourers was created. Among the landowners, smaller landowners tended to go bankrupt and sell out, while the big estates expanded. Research has shown that the ending of serfdom did not, in itself, produce economic development; certainly the lot of most peasants was not appreciably improved, and for many it was worsened. Rather, the economic growth that did characterise the period after 1850 was the result of several factors, including railway construction and the foundation of credit banks.12 The true impact of emancipation was that, by giving the peasant masses their legal and physical freedom, it put in place one of the essential preconditions for the deepening of industrialisation in the Austrian lands and, later, in Hungary.
Prussia, by virtue of its possession of Silesia and, after 1815, the mineral-rich Rhineland, was in a different league in the modernisation stakes. From about 1830 industrialisation was well under way in the western provinces, while leadership of the Zollverein conferred on Prussia real economic advantage over Austria, in securing it a large domestic market. The eastern provinces were profoundly agrarian; yet even here a series of reforms after 1806 changed the entire nature of the lord-peasant relationship. The reforming ministry of Baron Karl vom und zum Stein formally proclaimed all peasants free men in October 1807, and from then until 1821 a series of acts worked out the details. Landowning peasants could commute their labour dues in return for cash or the surrender of the land they farmed, and as a result of their relatively favourable circumstances most paid it in cash. Things were not so easy for the landless tenant farmers, since the compensation required was steep and beyond the means of most in this category. The result was a gradual flight from the land in their case, even though the effect of the reforms was on the whole 'quite favourable for the majority of peasants'.13
The Prussian Junkers did well out of the abolition of serfdom, since the majority received compensation for the loss of labour dues. In addition, noble estate owners were able to buy up the plots of emancipated peasants who found they could not make ends meet. The result was that the big estates got bigger and because of this could start making the transition to industrial agriculture. Prussia's agricultural revolution, which began to take effect from about 1850 because of technological improvements, was another ingredient in its economic supremacy, but in the process it also consolidated the social, economic and political power of the Prussian landowning class.
Economic development in the Ottoman Balkans fell into two distinct compartments. In the newly autonomous or independent Balkan states, political self-rule did not make for economic advance; on the contrary, these societies can be said to have regressed in this period. In parts of those Balkan provinces which remained under direct Ottoman rule, by contrast, something like an economic rebirth took place. The Balkans as a sub-region undoubtedly remained an economic backwater throughout the nineteenth century. Population density overall remained low. Between 1790 and 1910 the population grew by only 0.97 per cent per year, and much of the peninsula was desolate or undercultivated, with a transport system ranging 'from the bad to the non-existent'. As a consequence of the poor infrastructure, agriculture was largely on a subsistence level, supplemented by extensive livestock raising.14
Balkan nation-states thus inherited a dismal economic legacy and found themselves unable to achieve much in the way of development, even where they were minded to do so. In addition, both Serbia and Greece started life at the end of savage and destructive insurrections against the Ottomans, and in all the Balkan states the expulsion or gradual expropriation of the Muslim landowners and urban community caused further economic dislocation. Only in the Romanian principalities did land tenure remain stable, with most land in the hands of the native boyars; elsewhere it was at the disposal of the rulers of peasant societies with no native nobility.
Serbia's government thus created a class of peasant smallholders which remained a feature of Serbian society into the twentieth century. This was not, however, a recipe for modernisation: Serbian peasants remained inefficient, subsistence farmers, which meant the government's tax revenue remained low. Serbia became in some respects more backward in the course of the century, and by the end of the 1860s a period of not just political but economic dependency on the neighbouring Habsburg Monarchy was all too predictable.
Greece's experience was similar. Widespread devastation and disorder followed the Ottoman withdrawal at the end of the 1820s, and the new government struggled for decades to impose control on a fractious and lawless population. The question of land tenure was especially chaotic. The result, as in Serbia, was a nation of miserably poor smallholders. As with Serbia, this made Greece the plaything of the great powers.
The Romanian principalities were entitled, under the terms of the 1829 Treaty of Adrianople, to expel all Ottoman subjects. Boyars received legal title to their land, but the peasants who farmed these estates had no such rights and in fact saw their labour service increased. The era as a whole was a profitable one for the landowner class, while the condition of the peasantry clearly worsened.
The bane of Ottoman rule in the Balkans, and ultimately the reason for Christian revolt, was the breakdown of central control in the late eighteenth century. In the Bulgarian provinces this chaos came to an end with the crushing of janissary power by Mahmud II in 1826. The Ottoman government repossessed lands held by janissaries, which increased revenue, but in addition the restoration of order led to a revival of trade and economic activity.
Much of this economic activity was led by the Christian population; yet the latter traditionally occupied an inferior status in courts of law in any dispute involving Muslims. The need to safeguard this Christian wealth generation therefore put pressure on the government to regularise the position of Christians. The imperial rescript of Gulhane, of November 1839, promised legal equality between Christians and Muslims. Well before this it was apparent that what Michael Palairet describes as 'proto-industry' was taking root in the Bulgarian-inhabited uplands.15 Here the rural population had turned their hands to cottage industry, and after 1826 the restoration of order meant that these Bulgarian manufacturers could reach the Ottoman domestic market again. The result was a considerable manufacturing industry, which compared favourably with the progressive immiseration of the independent nation-states of the Balkans.
In terms of economic and social development Russia brought up the rear, even in comparison with the Ottoman Balkans. Russia in the early nineteenth century was by no means economically stagnant; yet it was evidently backward and getting more so. The Empire's trade with Western Europe went up significantly in this period, and some of this was due to improvements in infrastructure, notably canals in the Baltic region, the arrival of steam navigation on the river system in the 1830s and the first railways from 1837.16 Yet in this all-important indicator of economic modernisation Russia was woefully slow: by 1855 there were still only 1,060 kilometres of track in the entire Empire.17 The imperial finance minister from 1823 to 1844 was opposed to railways as leading to 'unnecessary travelling'.18 During the Crimean War, it took Russian troops longer to reach the theatre of conflict than it did the French and the British because there was no rail link between northern Russia and the Black Sea.
Manufacturing, largely in textiles, continued to grow and the urban population doubled between 1811 and 1863, although at 10 per cent of the total population its proportion was tiny. The population, like the manufacturing, was concentrated in the big cities; Warsaw and Eodz, in Russian Poland, were significant centres for textiles and metal working by the 1860s. None of this economic growth, however, owed much to government policy; rather, it derived mainly from the expansion of Russian agriculture, which in turn was finding a growing market, for grain especially, in industrialising Western Europe.19
The most obvious factor perpetuating Russian backwardness was its overwhelmingly agrarian, serf-based agriculture. Long before the Crimean conflict showed up Russia's disastrous lack of modernity, it was generally agreed that, in the words of the westerniser B. N. Chicherin, 'serfdom is a shackle which we drag around with us, and which holds us back just when other peoples are racing ahead unimpeded'.20
Alexander II (1855—81) finally acted to remedy this situation with the issue of the Edict of Emancipation of 1861. As in the rest of Eastern Europe, emancipation was a legal measure, not an act of social welfare. The peasants were legally freed from bondage and in theory guaranteed land. Few peasants could afford to buy, or keep, the land they had previously tilled; instead the government favoured corralling them into village communes or mirs, where they were obliged to remain as long as they still owed their former landlords compensation and in conditions which Geoffrey Hosking has called 'a form of social (though not racial) apartheid'.21 The rural population continued to rise and increasing subdivision of the mirs put yet more pressure on the land and lowered productivity. Nor was there any dramatic increase in the labour available for industry, which in any case was hardly sizeable enough to soak up this surplus population. All that can be said is that more peasants were, potentially, free to leave the land if they could find the wherewithal to escape, but in the succeeding period this all too often took the form of emigration.22 As a consequence Russian society remained one of extraordinary tensions and economic backwardness, conditions bound to exacerbate the discontent of not just Russians but also the large number of non-Russians in the population.
World History
