Ethnic Factor in Urban Governance, Economy and Employment: Chisinau in the Late 19th Century

The ethno-confessional dimension of the urban economics, employment, and management in the late imperial period of Russia has been obviously understudied, with there being no generalized data. The cities of Bessarabia, particularly Chisinau, have not been investigated in this aspect either. The adequate comparative assessment of the ethnic factor in various spheres of management and economics of Chisinau is based on the indices of ethnic representation and diversity used to precess the data of the 1897 census. The analysis has shown that the factor of multiethnic urban population of Chisinau clearly manifested itself in governance, economics, and employment. Ethnicity, the corresponding cultural capital, skills, communication resources, ethno-confessional ties (within the city, region, on the intercity and the interregional level), as well as the legal conditions for certain ethno-confessional groups (mainly, Jews) remained an important factor for modernizing urban governance, economics, and employment. The comparison of ethnic representation indices has shown that the three major ethnic groups - Jews, Great Russians, and Moldovans - have debeloped a kind of mutual complementarity in the distribution of employments. The Chisinau urban minorities (Little Russians, Poles, Bulgarians, Germans, and Armenians) occupied separate niches, complementing the basic sectoral distribution of the major groups. A more detailed sectoral analysishas shown a significant number of niches with primary specialization of all - major and minor - ethnic groups in the city.

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