COMMERCIAL LAW IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE (From the Charter of 1785 to the Towns to the Guild Reform of 1824 by E. F. Kankrin)

G. N. Ulianova

Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences

This article analyses the evolution of ideas about the social and economic status of merchants by examining the commercial legislative practices in the Russian Empire in the period of their growing weight in the national economy between 1785 and 1825. Changes in legislation and institutional arrangements during this period had a significant impact on traders’ activity. This article explores such key acts as the Charter of 1785 to the Towns of the Russian Empire, the Manifesto of 1807, and the Statute “On the Structure of Merchant Guilds and Trade Procedures for Other Estates” of 1824. The article also addresses trade regulation in Moscow in the late eighteenth through the first quarter of the nineteenth century and the role of shopkeepers of all social origins as taxpayers. It concludes that at the turn of the nineteenth century, there was an institutionalization of trade in Russia that signaled the formation of a national market.

Keywords: entrepreneurship, merchants, trade, legislation, nineteenth-century Russian History, Imperial Russia.

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