Untitled - OUDL Home

teenth century, far and away the largest single item inBritish exports to Russia, save during one period ofsuccessful Prussian competition. The advance in ironoreproduction and metallurgy was most striking. Inthe third quarter of the eighteenth century Russiasupplanted Sweden as the largest iron exporter toEngland. By 1750 Russia was smelting perhaps fourtimes as much pig-iron as England. The main centreof this new heavy industry was now the Urals, wherethere were abundant supplies of high - quality ore,charcoal and water-power.The lead of the Urals began to decline after about1800. By then British production of pig-iron was on alevel and it soon far outstripped the Russian output,thanks to the substitution of coke for charcoal and along series of inventions in iron and steel manufacture.These were only very slowly or very sparsely introducedinto Russia. Puddling, for instance, was not experimentedwith until 1836, fifty years after the inventionof Cort's process, while smelting with charcoal predominatedin the Urals right down to the late nineteenthcentury.On the other hand, the first half of the nineteenthcentury saw the expansion of the cotton textile industry,mainly concentrated in and near Moscow. Its growthwas assisted by high protective tariffs after 1822 and bythe impetus given by the break with England whenRussia joined Napoleon's Continental System (1807-10).Between 1820 and i860 raw cotton imports (enteringfree of duty from the United States via England) increasedover thirty fold by weight, and the workers in the cottonmills were much the largest group of factory operatives.English machinery was used in some factories, but cheapEnglish yarn was imported in increasing quantities downto 1842. In that year Great Britain repealed theprohibition on the export of machinery. As a result theRussian cotton-spinning industry began rapidly to bemechanized, and, much more slowly, the weavingindustry followed suit. A prominent part was playedby Ludwig Knoop, Bremen-born and Lancashire-trained,a proverbial figure in mid-nineteenth-century Russia,Z—R.H. 353