The fertile lands lay far away. The low (200 metres) but wide (500 kilometres) central Russian upland separates the basins of the Baltic and the White Sea from the basins of the Black Sea and the Caspian. Its hills formed the heart of the Muscovy state – they became the curse of the Petersburg Empire. In the south, the empire had black soils which produced excellent crops. The construction of a short linking canal, just 2.8 kilometres long, would create an uninterrupted waterway almost 1,000 kilometres long, connecting the trading capital with its resource base, the Baltic Sea with the Caspian, the markets of Europe with the treasures of Asia. Having rejected tenders from foreign adventurers, Peter gave a concession to build the Vishny Volochok canal to Mikhail Serdyukov (1678–1754). A Mongolian captive from the heart of Siberia who, like many successful Russian entrepreneurs, was suspected of the heresy of Old Belief, Serdyukov had taught himself about canals from studying French books. His Vishny Volochok canal was a success.* It served to bring grain to the capital for almost 200 years, right up until the arrival of the railways. But cargo could not go in the opposite direction, against the current, with the result that the prices of imported textiles in the Russian provinces were several times higher than in St Petersburg.
Once he got his canal, Peter imposed prohibitive duties on the export of hemp and pelts from Arkhangelsk.15 St Petersburg’s population grew rapidly and in 1790 overtook that of Moscow. The mass influx of soldiers and peasants needed to keep building the city only exacerbated the shortage of bread. But the farms around the capital didn’t turn to growing rye. The Finnish peasants sold meat, milk, hay and firewood in the city and themselves bought bread. All the rye for the commoners, wheat for the rich, oats for horses and hemp for ships’ ropes were brought from the south. Transportation costs dictated consumer prices. During the time of Peter the Great, rye flour cost four times as much in St Petersburg as it did in Moscow. St Petersburg rapidly turned into a city of scandalous inequality, as described in the classics of Russian literature. But right up until the twentieth century St Petersburg never experienced the kind of bread riots that took place in Paris or London.
Grain’s way to the new capital was long: 2,000 kilometres. Barge haulers or horses pulled grain barges up from Kazan and the southern steppes along the Volga River. With luck, the grain reached the capital within six months; if things went wrong, it could take a year. The cargo might rot on the journey or the vessel carrying it might sink. Flour was easier to transport than grain. Milled locally, it was packed in birch bark baskets, each holding from 120 to 160 kilograms of flour. In autumn or winter the baskets of flour were delivered from the mills to the grain quays by cart or on sledges. Barge haulers pulled the barges upstream; it took sixty men to pull a barge carrying 2,000 baskets. In the shallows at Rybinsk the baskets had to be loaded into small boats. Like the baskets, these barques were sold for firewood in St Petersburg. One of the busiest trade routes in the world, the short canal was the bottleneck in the whole system. A barque stuck on a weir could hold up traffic for a week. New, bypassing waterways weren’t built until the nineteenth century.16 In the meantime, the area of arable land doubled in the newly colonised lands of Ukraine and Southern Russia. The empire’s problem was that in the south there was no one to sell grain to, and in the north there was nowhere to buy it. Unable to reach the grain in Ukraine, the government sent the mountain to Mohammed, billeting a quarter of the Russian army there.
After 1850, St Petersburg had the second biggest population in Europe after Paris. The development of the Black Sea ports took Ukrainian grain to Europe. But only the railways created a national grain market, and a significant share of the Russian grain export went via St Petersburg. State intervention played a decisive role in this success. Although grain was grown mostly by private producers and the price of bread was mostly free-floating, only the state could develop infrastructure. When the price of commodities is defined not by their production cost but by the cost of transportation, the state has a defining role in creating the market.
War and potatoes
The revolution in European agriculture occurred only when America and the most important of her treasures, the potato, were discovered. Following the example of the Incas, the Spanish fed potatoes to the workers in the silver mines of Potosí. Their ships carried potatoes back to Europe. Accustomed to the purity of grain, European farmers were appalled by the dirty, oddly shaped potato. In France, people believed it caused leprosy, but in other places it was thought to be an aphrodisiac. In Ireland, the potato appeared just when the English were colonising the country in the sixteenth century. Walter Raleigh may have introduced it there himself. In 1594 he had been looking for gold in South America; when he failed to find it, he wrote a book about Eldorado. Queen Elizabeth gave him tobacco plantations in Virginia and estates in Ireland, which were also called plantations. In 1602 Raleigh sold his Irish plantations to Richard Boyle, the father of the famous chemist. Potatoes were already being grown there on a massive scale. The Catholics rebelled, the English suppressed the uprisings, and the Irish discovered the strategic superiority of the potato. The enemy trampled down your crops and stole the grain from your barns, but the humble potato continued to lie in the ground waiting for its rightful owner.
Potatoes contain seven times more moisture than wheat and are therefore prone to rot. This made potatoes beneath the notice of the Exchequer and saved millions of peasants. An acre of potatoes could feed ten people, five times as many as an acre of wheat. Having discovered potatoes on his own land, Frederick II forced his farmers to plant potatoes on their fallow fields. As a result, the peasants consumed less grain and paid more taxes. The population increased thanks to the potato, and this was a long-standing aim of the Prussian crown. The potato helped Prussia to survive its multiple wars.17 Following Frederick’s example, European monarchies introduced the potato throughout Northern Europe. Potatoes and crop rotation were the key reasons for the population explosion in Europe in the nineteenth century. Diseases in cereals are quite different to those in potatoes, which helped to stabilise the harvests. Without the potato there would have been no urbanisation and no industrial revolution. In the 1830s, in the central Russian provinces, peasants rioted against the potatoes that landowners imposed on them in order to get more revenue from their ‘empty lands’. In contrast, in Ireland the landowners complained about ‘the idleness of peasants’, which they explained by the easy productivity of their potatoes. Undoubtedly, potatoes in the ground saved the peasants from starvation in a bad year. Perhaps that is why Soviet collectivisation led to a worse famine in the black soil, grain-growing regions of Ukraine than in northern Russia, where more vegetable crops were grown. Across Europe, potato growing increased the area of land under cultivation by a whole quarter. Then the introduction of tractors and motor vehicles released another quarter of the land which had been used for feeding horses. Agricultural expansion kept pace with industrial expansion.
Space and power
On the eve of modernity, the European economy depended on hundreds of towns with surrounding green belts. The main route for trade was by water. On the canals built in the Low Countries, one horse could pull as big a barge-load of grain as fifty horses could carry on a good road. Thanks to its rivers and sea coast, Poland was the main supplier of grain to the Netherlands. Productivity was low, but Poland contributed to the Netherlands a huge number of ‘ghost acres’ – according to the historian Jan de Vries, almost 2.5 million hectares of arable land, half the area of modern Holland. Still, only 5 per cent of the wheat and 12 per cent of the rye grown in Poland was exported. All the rest was consumed locally or kept back as seed. To increase his revenue, the landowner needed to reduce his peasants’ consumption even further, but they were barely able to subsist. Grain exports fed the thriving Dutch culture but led to serfdom in Poland.18
While big cities were increasingly dependent