The Practice of Personal Finance and the Problem of Debt among the Noble Elite in Eighteenth-Century Russia

P. 116–135.

Korchmina E. S.

“Keeping the Books” includes an analysis of changing practices in accounting books maintained by the elite for their own use, which detailed income and expenditure. By way of an analysis of the categories through which the elite related income to expenditure, we identify emerging processes of rationalization and changing attitudes toward debt. The material presented in this section demonstrates that as sources of income diversifed in the last three decades of the eighteenth century, the elite became increasingly concerned with understanding and rationalizing their fnancial situation, which qualifes the received stereotype of an elite blithely contracting debts for the sake of ostentatious consumption.

Keywords: economic history, дворянство, экономическая история России 18 - первой половины 19 веков, Russian nobility in XVIII century

In book

The Europeanized Elite in Russia, 1762–1825. Public Role and Subjective Self

DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016.