Big business in the Russian empire: A European perspective |
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Authors: | Volodymyr Kulikov |
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Institution: | Department of History, Karazin Kharkiv National University, Kharkiv, Ukraine |
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Abstract: | This paper presents an inventory of the largest private companies in the Russian Empire in 1914, and their comparison to the largest contemporary British, German, and French companies identified by Youssef Cassis as ‘big business’. It focusses on three questions. First, how big was big business in Russia from a European perspective? Second, how did the structure of big business in Russia compare to that of other large European economies? And finally, how did foreign entrepreneurship appear in Russian big business? Drawing on new empirical evidence, it contributes to the discussion on the ‘backward’ and ‘peripheral’ character of the Russian economy before the First World War. |
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Keywords: | Big business largest employers multinational corporation free-standing company foreign entrepreneurship business leadership corporate performance Russian Empire Second Industrial Revolution |
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