This ground-breaking work documents Russian efforts to appropriate Western solutions to the problem of economic backwardness since the time of Catherine the Great. Entangled then as now with issues of cultural borrowing, educated Russians searched for Western nations, ideas, and social groups that embodied universal economic truths applicable to their own country. Esther Kingston-Mann describes Russian Westernization--which emphasized German as well as Anglo-U.S. economics--while she raises important questions about core values of Western culture and how cultural values and priorities are...

This collection of original essays provides a rare in-depth look at peasant life in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European Russia. It is the first English-language text to deal extensively with peasant women and patriarchy; the role of magic, healing, and medicine in village life; communal economic innovation; rural poverty and labor migration from the village perspective; the agricultural hiring market as workers' turf; and the regional components of the late nineteenth-century agrarian crisis.

Originally published in 1991.

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This book presents a comparative history of how rural women claimed or were prevented from claiming land in the course of private and collectivist property rights revolutions in very different times and places. Using seventeenth-century England, twentieth-century Russia and the Soviet Union, and twentieth-century colonial Kenya as historical case studies despite their obvious and striking differences the book introduces women, and evidence of female agency, into the predominantly male-centered narratives of rural economic history.