Posad as an Urban Settlement in the Age of “Enlightened Absolutism”: The Town of Masters and Merchants under the Canopy of the Holy Trinity

Abstract

The paper discusses the new monograph by N. A. Chetyrina, a well-known researcher of Russian urban history. Her book is dedicated to studying one of the remarkable “small” towns of Russia – Sergievsky Posad at the initial stage of its development during the reforms of the “Enlightened Absolutism”. The author shows clearly that this town’s example highlights the features of the status, the composition of the population, the management system in the “posads”, which were a kind of urban settlement in the Russian Empire. The book made a significant contribution to the economic, social, administrative and cultural history of Russian urban settlements in the late 18th – early 19th century. In general, her monograph contains of valuable material explaining the estate structure of the Russian society in the period of the “Enlightened Absolutism”. So, a very fractional list of “titles” and “states” of different groups of residents in the historical sources now does not prevent us from the conclusion that there are common class characteristics in the category of “urban inhabitants” and in the category of “rural inhabitants planted on the state lands”. This monograph could be highly recommended for academic scholars and students in studying modern trends in the historical science – urban history, local history, social history.