The Russian-German trade in the review of the "Journal of Manufactures and Trade" in 1825-1834: the content-analysis practice

Diomidova Mariya Iliinichna ORCID: 0000-0002-5761-9686 Lecturer; Faculty of History; Lomonosov Moscow State University 123458, Russia, Moscow, Lomonosovsky ave., 27 K.4, room 222 mariadiodio@gmail.com Other publications by this author

The study of foreign trade problems has become widespread in modern historiography. Traditionally, works on this topic are devoted to the analysis of trade turnover statistics and the dynamics of its changes ^[1],[2],[3], as well as legislative changes in the field of commercial law at different levels ^[4],[5],[6]. With the passage of time and the spread of mass media in the middle of the XIX century. the trade press also began to be considered as an important source for the study of trade processes ^[7],[8]. The involvement of the press allows us to highlight in more detail the reflection of various aspects of trade in the dynamics.

In recent years, the number of works devoted to the study of foreign trade subjects in the commercial press has been growing, however, in the context of studying trade in the first half of the XIX century, such works are practically absent ^[9]. Presumably, this is due to the later development of the commercial press, which peaked in the second half of the 19th century, as well as the lack of a complete set of issues.

The task of our research was to analyze the thematic content of the publications of the Journal of Manufactures and Trade related to Russian-German trade. To solve this problem, we turned to the content analysis method.

The time frame of our study (1825-1834) is determined by the beginning of the publication of the journal and the establishment of the German Customs Union, which changed the order of trade in German countries. It should be noted that the customs legislation of Russia also underwent numerous changes during this period.

Source-based aspects of the study

The Journal of Manufactures and Trade has been published since 1825 by the Department of Manufactures and Foreign Trade of the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Empire ^[10]. The issues were published monthly and consisted of two sections. The first section was devoted to novelties in the field of production and new technologies and covered a variety of issues – from sugar and soap making methods to the basics of technical chemistry and saffron processing. As a rule, the first part of the "Journal" was about 2/3 of the issue and was theoretical in nature, down to detailed instructions. At the end of the issue, drawings of the equipment discussed in the text were often published.

The second section of the magazine contained information about trade in Russia and abroad. As a rule, these were current news about the state of trade in a particular product, information about merchant privileges and excerpts from government regulations. Historical reviews and theoretical discussions on the principles of conducting trading activities and its various aspects were often given here. In some early issues of the magazine, the second section was missing, and trade news was included in the first.

Along with the thematic diversity of the journal's articles, it should also be noted the different origins of the publications: they were mainly notes by domestic correspondents and economists, but translated articles from foreign newspapers were also often found.

The collection of articles of the period under review is presented almost completely, with the exception of the following 7 issues: 1827 – No. 6 and No. 10, 1830 – No. 3, 1831 – No. 4, No. 5, 1832 – No. 3, No. 5.

Methodological aspects of the study

To analyze the text of the Journal's articles, we turned to the method of computerized content analysis ^[11],[12], which was carried out using the MAXQDA program, version 24.4.0. A variety of quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods of this program is widely used in the work of domestic historians to analyze various categories of written sources, primarily the press ^[13],[14].

The use of content analysis made it possible to identify the presence of stable patterns in the thematic content of the Journal and test several hypotheses.

The issues of the "Journal" in digitized form are stored in the National Electronic Library. The text of the articles was recognized, which greatly facilitated further analytical work. 113 issues of the recognized edition were uploaded to the program in the amount of 5.73 GB.

A preliminary acquaintance with the articles of the "Journal" published in different years and a frequency analysis of the text dictionary allowed us to identify 4 semantic categories (codes) that denoted topics of interest to us, and corresponding indicators (words and phrases) showing the presence of these categories in context (within certain fragments – sentences or paragraphs). Based on these indicators, the text was indexed (marked up) – fragments for each category were highlighted.

Table 1. Categories and indicators for content analysis of the text of articles in the Journal of Manufactures and Trade
(the table shows the indicator tokens)

Indicators with a frequency of occurrence of more than 40 are given.

Before proceeding to the direct analysis of the texts of articles to solve the tasks set, we turned to an overview tool called the "Word Cloud", which is a preliminary visualization of the text. To form it, we entered the designated indicators into the "White List" in order to assess their frequency of occurrence in the text of the issues of the Journal in the context of our research. The results are shown in Figure 1.

Fig. 1. "Word cloud" according to the indicators of the "Journal of Manufactures and Trade" for 1825-1834.

The word size in Figure 1 indicates the frequency of its occurrence in all issues of the Journal, the minimum threshold was set at 10 words. The largest semantic units were the indicators "wool", used 4066 times, "bargaining" (3771), "wood" (3306), "commodity" (2619) and "silk" (2210). The remaining indicators are presented in the texts of articles less than 1000 times. It is expected that these indicators belong to the two largest categories – "Items" and "Trade". However, it should be noted that indicators from the "Subjects" category may also be present in articles devoted not to trade, but to production issues, which were considered in the first part of the "Journal", therefore additional tools for sound analytics are needed here.

It is noteworthy that the "Cloud" clearly demonstrates the key trading partners in the German space: These are the North German cities (also called "Hanseatic": Hamburg, Bremen, Danzig), Prussia (including Berlin) and Saxony (Leipzig). This information is also confirmed by the results of our previous study on the statistical analysis of Russian-German trade ^[15].

It is obvious that the use of the "Cloud of Words" is of an overview and informative nature and cannot be used as a strict semantic accounting tool in the context of our work, however, such a review allows us to better understand the thematic content of the "Journal".

Let's move on to the direct analysis of categories and indicators.

The "Trade" category covered various aspects of trading activities. The number of marked fragments is 6040, which comprehensively characterize the trade.

The "Items" category, dedicated directly to goods, turned out to be the most numerous – 8,604 marked fragments. First of all, this is due to the fact that trade items were often discussed in the first section of the Magazine, devoted to the problems and peculiarities of production. This category included goods important for Russian-German trade according to the results of our previous study ^[15].

The category "Germany" includes the names of German countries and cities that maintained active trade relations with Russia. This category is central to our study, as it allows us to highlight the details of trade activities and trade turnover in the context of Russian-German trade, in the amount of 1,607. It is noteworthy that the South German kingdom of Württemberg is referred to in the articles as "Wirttemberg".

The final category of "Fairs" contains only 2 indicators – the fair and the fair (the word "fair" was an alternative name for the fair). This is the smallest category, it contains 521 fragments. The presence of this category is due to the important importance of fairs in European trade of this era: they were the place of the most extensive trade, as well as the exchange of new knowledge and technologies. Speaking of German countries, let's highlight the Leipzig Fair, which was the center of international trade at that time.

The designated categories are general in nature, since their formation is aimed at thematic analytics.

The results of the study

The formation of categories and their activation in the MAXQDA program allowed us to trace the change in the thematic content of magazines in the designated decade, which looks like this:

Table 2. Frequency of occurrence of categories in the texts of publications of the Journal of Manufactures and Trade, 1825-1834.

The table is presented in the form of a "heat map", where shades of warm (red) color show high values, and shades of cold (blue) color show low values. Table 2 clearly demonstrates the peak of interest in the goods we are interested in in 1828-1831, which gradually decreases towards the end of the period under review. It should be noted that the reason for the increased interest in trade items in 1831 may be related to the resumption of trading activities in many European cities, which was suspended due to the cholera epidemic in 1830 ^[16]. This can also be attributed to the growth of publications about fairs in 1830: they mainly reported news about their cancellation.

Trade issues were most often discussed in the issues of 1825. This year, Russia concluded 2 trade conventions with Prussia and Austria, an important aspect of which was related to the Polish issue ^[17]. In this regard, several theoretical reflections on the international trading system have been published, which has affected the frequency of the code this year.

The highest frequency of occurrence of the category "Germany" occurred in 1833, the year of the establishment of the German Customs Union ^[18],[19], which is understandable: interest in the new structure being created and lively negotiations between the German states on the eve of its creation was great in Russia ^[20],[21].

Thus, it can be concluded that the Magazine has a relatively stable content of trade-oriented articles and uniform coverage of various commercial issues.

Let's turn to the analysis of the links between the generated codes.

Table 3. Relationships of code categories in numerical value.

Table 3 shows the frequency of joint occurrence of the designated categories. The connection between the categories "Items" and "Trade" turned out to be the strongest, as expected. However, the second most frequent relationship of codes between the categories "Items" and "Germany" was not so obvious: the mention of German countries is primarily related not to trade, as we assumed, but to the objects of commodity exchange. The reason for this distribution can be seen in the very content of the "Magazine": it was previously mentioned that trade topics accounted for only 1/3 of the total content of the issue, therefore, reports on technical innovations and industrial transformations were also among the intersections of these categories.

The search for the intersection of all four categories yielded interesting results: 15 fragments from different issues of 1828-1834 contain detailed information about the trade of certain goods at German fairs or by German merchants. Here is the most interesting fragment:

2. An excerpt from the Journal of Manufactures and Trade, No. 5, 1834, demonstrating the intersection of four categories.

The wool trade occupied a central place in the subject of the magazine's articles; the excerpt in Figure 2 shows the characteristics of Silesian wool production and the trade that accompanied it. Such coverage of the trade aspect is quite typical for the entire "Magazine": first of all, production issues are covered, and trade is designated as an accompanying mechanism, a necessary consequence for the further development of the industry and expansion of production.

Conclusion

The content analysis of the articles of the "Journal of Manufactures and Trade" published over 10 years has demonstrated stable coverage of Russian-German trade in its various aspects. The magazine reflected the economic realities of the period under review: trade as a whole was considered in close connection with production processes.

The subject matter of the publications on the pages of the industry magazine demonstrated the editorial policy and its dynamics during the period under study. Close attention was paid to the practical aspects of trade and its legislative basis, as well as fairs; theoretical arguments were also regularly published. Foreign trade was an important, but not the main topic of the magazine, as evidenced by the relationship between the categories "Germany" and "Subjects". Nevertheless, the rich material, great potential and poor knowledge of the content of the "Journal" suggests the continuation of the work begun in order to analyze in more depth and in detail specific aspects of Russian-German trade and fair activities, as well as other topics.

The author expresses gratitude to Dr. I.M. Garskova for useful consultations in the work on the article.