This gallery contains 12 mosaics. Each mosaic contains a pair of maps produced during my analysis of the data contained in a report "on the average amount of goods hauled along the rivers of European Russia from 1859 to 1862." The report was published in the Statistical Annals of the Russian Empire in 1866.
The questions that drove me to produce these maps were as follows:
- The Volga River was unquestionably the main thoroughfare of domestic trade in the Russian Empire. But what else can we say - perhaps about regional variation in the economy - by looking closely at the spatial distribution of various goods traded along the river network?
- What can we learn about the relative importance of various goods within the context of trade along individual rivers? (Quite a lot, it turns out!)
The maps below are mosaics. On the left, you will see the percentage of the total value of a certain good that was traded along each river in the statistical tables. In most cases, the Volga River has far and away the highest percentage. On the right you will see a map showing the percentage of the trade on a given river that was constituted by a particular good.
Example of the findings: From the maps of the butter trade, we see that the Volga commanded the largest portion of the trade, but that butter constituted a very small portion of the value of goods traded on the Volga in general. And while the butter trade on the Sylva River (look at the right-hand edge of the map) was inconsequential at the imperial level, it was crucial to the local economy (to the extent that the economy relied on river trade).
(Rest your cursor on an image to see which good it depicts.)
