The Industrial Identity of the Urals and Legal Culture: At the Intersection of Western European and Russian Traditions (The 18th to Mid-19th Centuries)

The article compares the legal culture of foreign technical specialists, one of the key strata of the Ural society, with the legal culture of Russian (including local Ural) administrative structures of the 18th to the first half of the 19th centuries. Foreigners were one of the elite social groups that directly participated in the formation of the Ural industrial identity based on the specifics of the economic structure of the territory. Legal culture, as part of culture in general, was an important element in the sociocultural image of foreign specialists. At the same time, experts invited from Western Europe were carriers of a different legal consciousness that often led to misunderstanding and conflicts with local mining administrations and private entrepreneurs, even despite the existence of a contract hiring system. The functioning of the system of contract law in Russian realities did not immediately go in line with European conceptions and practice. The article provides specific examples of violations of contracts or disregard of a number of their provisions by employers. This was especially pronounced at the initial stage of the mass attraction of foreigners, in the era of Peter I. Gradually, as the analysis of the later contracts shows and the above cases demonstrate, there was a rapprochement of legal consciousness and ideas about the real legal force of the contract. Such a tendency could be observed back in the first quarter of the 19th century. By the middle of the century, it became absolutely obvious that on the part of the Russian state the contract was not ignored; conversely, it was considered as an important guarantee of foreigners' rights and was carefully executed. The article also gives examples of contract violations by foreigners, who did not perform their professional duties, but demanded all payments and awards their contracts stipulated. This does not allow idealizing hired specialists as models of exclusive legal responsibility. The author makes a general conclusion that in the 18th and in the first half of the 19th centuries, during the period of establishment and intensive development of the mining Urals, when the grounds of specific identity of the future large industrial center of the new type were being formed, the interaction, collision and inter-influence of the two legal cultures (Western European in the face of foreigners and Russian in the face of the local mining authorities and private factory owners) took place, which finally formed one of the specific features of the Ural industrial identity along with the special type of administration, social structure and cultural traditions of the region. The necessity to regulate the activities of large nummbers of specialists from Western Europe, interact with them, solve conflicts-all this facilitated the gradual evolution of the local legal culture, increased its level and degree of adaptability to external impulses.

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