This book explores the impact of railroads on 19thcentury Russian peasant collectivism. The mutual-insurance mechanism in a precarious agricultural environment, provided bya structured communal-village system predicated on the reputation and authorityof community norms,is exposed to rationalist exchange—occasioning an institutional adaptation process:the individualization of property rights in land. Spatial-mobility technology animated market integration, specialization, literacy,and human-capital acquisition among peasant wage workers who commuted from their villages.Temporarily rising...