Expansion in the Industrial Age - Russia

EXPANSION IN THE INDUSTRIAL AGE HIST 1301 | History Russia Early in the nineteenth century, Russian entrepreneurs started importing textile manufacturing machinery from Britain in order to produce cotton cloth, which marked the beginning of Russia's industrialization. The tsars provided financial incentives to corporate executives in Europe and America who were prepared to help them unite their empire via the employment of modern technologies. With their assistance, Russia set up steamship lines, and steamships were routinely cruising Russia's principal waterway, the Volga River, as early as 1820. The nation's capital and tsar's residence, St. Petersburg, was connected to Moscow by rail by 1851. Still, compared to the US and much of western and central Europe, Russia remained comparatively underdeveloped. This was made clear when Russia lost the Crimean War in 1856, even though it was fighting on its own territory and the enemy was more than a thousand miles away by water. Russia's population was also more than that of her rivals, Britain and France. Russia's meagre roads and railroads couldn't match the efficiency of Britain's and France's steamships for transportation, and their industries produced more and better armaments. Russia lacked many of the advantages other nations had when it came to industrialization, despite its size and the backing of its tsars. There weren't many craftspeople there, and production mechanisation is useless in a nation without crafts to mechanise. There was also no urgent need to mechanise agriculture as long as peasant households were available to cultivate and harvest crops. Many serfs made up Russia's population as well; unlike American and British farmers, they were unable to leave the land and pursue employment prospects in other places, including factories. Rather of establishing their own manufacturing sector, many Russians discovered that it was more profitable to sell raw resources like grain, lumber, and hemp to the industrialising countries of western Europe. Lastly, industrialization was challenging due to Russia's immense size. Its abundant natural resources were placed distant from the city housing the industrial. Thousands of miles of roads and railway lines had to be built to provide access, cutting through vast stretches of uninhabited woodland, crossing swift-moving rivers, and traversing the frozen tundra that encircled a large portion of the nation. Although it industrialised very early, the United States is still larger than Russia. The simple topography of mostly flat, treeless grassland and plains was traversed by the labourers who built railway lines to connect the country's Atlantic and Pacific coastlines. The few thousand miles of roads built before the end of the nineteenth century, along with the few railroads and steamship lines, were insufficient in Russia to transport manufactured goods to the countryside or natural resources to industries. After losing the Crimean War, Russia stepped up its industrialization efforts. Serfdom was outlawed in 1861, opening up labour for manufacturers. Sergei Witte, the Minister of Finance, successfully advocated in the 1890s for upgrades to Russia's railway network, which had less than a thousand miles of track after the end of the Crimean War. The building of a railway through Siberia started in 1891. There were over 36,000 miles of track in the nation by 1900. The massive iron, coal, and timber supplies in the interior were soon simpler to access. Industrialization brought about a huge benefit, but due to its late start, Russia did not achieve the same degree of industrialization as western and central Europe and the United States until the twentieth century. Once the process started, a nation could create even more riches and assemble larger, more sophisticated armed forces, giving it a competitive edge over nonindustrialized nations. It became almost hard for less developed nations to compete with developed ones or even to deter their more developed adversaries from attacking them. Japan emerged as an anomaly.