Our Notes & References

First edition of the first systematic study of railways in Russia – an extremely rare work and most probably the first to use the relatively recent flow-map technique in the Russian empire, which Bloch does on a large and impressive scale with 16 maps of about 70 cm2.

Developed and refined by the French Charles Joseph Minard (1781-1870), these cartographic charts provide visually clear renditions of complicated statistics, especially flows of people and, in our case, traded goods. While Minard’s first such map seems to date from the mid 1840s, he published more important ones, and more similar to ours, in the 1860s; we couldn’t find any such cartographic representation of statistics published in the Russian empire before our 1875 edition.

Les Chemins de fer was the first systematic study of the railway in Russia, conducted by one of the men who had helped to build it. Jan Gotlib Bloch (1836-1901) was described in his obituary as “a Polish Jew, a [peddler] who was able to push himself out of poverty and become a successful banker, builder and administrator of railways” (Bauer). Wealthy, respectable and famous in his day, Bloch was often called the “King of Railroads” (Pieczewski).

The years immediately preceding the book’s publication had seen a massive boom in construction, after the tsarist government had realised that it did not have the capital required to build the railway itself, and had opened concessions to the zemstva as well as to private entrepreneurs (cf. Ames 10-11) — this led to the construction of over 17,300 km of new track laid in 10 years from 1868-78, more than tripling what had been accomplished in the preceding three decades (barely 5,000 km in 1838-68; cf Ames). Bloch himself had earned his fortune by building a section of the Warsaw-Petersburg rail line and multiple connections between Polish cities. Thereafter he turned his attention to scholarly pursuits, particularly economics and statistics, and founded the first statistical bureau in Poland.

Bloch’s early and effective use of visual data representation has been ranked ‘among the most striking examples […] of the Golden Age of Statistical Infographics’ in Russia (Laptev p. 70). Our second volume in particular is noteworthy, comprising 16 large folding plates examining in chromolithography the internal flows of trade within the Empire.

While books illustrating statistics had been published since 1869, they largely conformed to existing ‘classic’ cartographic models and merely showed the production of each type of good in each region. Here we see instead a superb use of Minard’s novel form of visual data representation, combining geographical features with coloured lines of varying thickness to indicate the movement of inputs and outputs connecting different parts of the Empire — thus we can see how the trade in minerals largely followed the flow of the Volga up from Astrakhan to Nizhny Novgorod and thence to Moscow, and how wheat was delivered from the black soil of Ukraine for processing into flour to feed the rest of the enormous Empire. The maps reveal much about the structure of the late Empire, which was still almost completely an agrarian economy dealing in raw products like meat, oats and barley, with a comparatively tiny industrial output of rope, paper and iron. One can also clearly see the predominance of Moscow and St Petersburg, with every province providing raw materials for processing in the two capitals — a structural problem which has never quite been overcome.

One notable exception is Bloch’s own native Poland, which is depicted as extremely prominent in the trade and processing of almost all goods — it has been suggested that through this book (which he published at his own initiative and expense), Bloch was attempting to encourage the construction of more lines to Poland. With the exception of the major Vienna-Warsaw line, Poland had largely been excluded from the railway system. Bloch’s own statistical analysis shows that nearly twice as much railroad could have been built had the tsarist government not dismissed plans which were profitable mainly to Poland itself as ‘of purely local importance’ (Pieczewski).

The text is in Russian and French, reflecting the need to attract international capital, French in particular. France had a vested interest in the Russians being able to rapidly mobilise close to the German border and by the end of the 1880s had become ‘the overwhelming primary source for foreign loans to fuel Russian industrialization and railroad construction’ (Starns p. 4).

In the same year, a Russian, smaller edition was published in St Petersburg by the Ministry of Railways, containing only the text and the statistical tables; it was subsequently expanded into the award-winning, five-volume The Impact of Railways on the Economic Condition of Russia (1878), which contains a later state of the maps first presented here.

Following the main phase of his railway work, Bloch continued writing in increasingly diverse fields. His most famous work, The War of the Future (1893), accurately predicted both the development of trench warfare and mass mobilisation in the First World War. His remarkable and equally rare final publication, Comparison of the Living Standards (1901) focused on statistics of the Jewish population in the Russian empire. It aimed to combat rising anti-Semitism by showing that Jews in the Pale of Settlement were objectively beneficial to the Russian economy and not exclusively engaged in money-lending, as was commonly believed.

Very rare. Not mentioned in the standard bibliographies, with some scholars mentioning Bloch’s 1878 5-volume set as his first. We couldn’t trace any other example on the market in recent decades. Apparently 3 copies in libraries worldwide (Canada, BL and BSB in Munich; apparently none in Russia), with a further 4 copies of the smaller Russian edition (Bonn, Warsaw, RNB in St. Petersburg and RGB in Moscow).

Provenance

Bibliothek der K. K. Technisches Hochschule in Bruenn (dissolved in 1945; blue ink stamp to title and some plates, casemark inked to upper pastedown, gilt numbers to spine feet); German trade.

Bibliography

Ames, Edward. 1947. ‘A Century of Russian Railroad Construction: 1837-1936’. The American Slavic and East European Review 6 (3/4): 57–74; Bauer, Ela. 2015. ‘Jan Gottlieb Bloch: Polish Cosmopolitism versus Jewish Universalism’. In Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and the Jews of East Central Europe. Routledge; Pieczewski, Andrzej. 2023. ‘The Attitude of the Tsarist Authorities towards Railway – Consequences for the Polish Lands (until 1879). Jan Gottlieb Bloch’s “New” Perspective’. Studiaz Dziejów Rosjii Europy Sìrodkowo-Wschodniej 58 (Sp.): 5–22; Starns, Karl E. M. 2012. ‘The Russian Railways and Imperial Intersections in the Russian Empire’. University of Washington.