Abstract

This paper traces the evolution of copper pricing in the Russian Empire to demonstrate that price has historically carried multiple meanings and functions, shaped by contextual social relations and cultural understanding of “economic” activity and “profits”. I argue that even as market imperatives gained prominence in late imperial Russia amid its deeper integration into the global economy, copper pricing remained embedded in a moral economy inherited from the state-led copper industry of the eighteenth century. This moral economy operated on two key principles. The first, which I term the baseline principle, held that fair pricing should safeguard the least cost-efficient producers, even at the expense of more efficient ones. The second, the balance principle, maintained that prices should achieve a balance between private enrichment and state prosperity, thereby contributing to the “common good.” These principles oriented concrete material production toward direct state and social needs, defining copper mines and factories not as compartmentalized, abstract profit-making vehicles but as a united material force supporting a holistic socioeconomic organism. While seemingly at odds with market logic, in late imperial Russia this moral economy blended with Russia’s growing market economy and underpinned various forms of “market” pricing, most notably a “monopolistic” pricing mechanism codified on the eve of World War I. Even as late imperial Russia became market-dominated, it hardly became market-organized. Ultimately, Russia’s 200 years of copper pricing testify to the tenacity of various metrics for evaluating economic performance—community preservation or state well-being—and reveal that free market pricing aimed at private profit-maximization was an “unnatural” social experiment that clashed with historically “normal” social practices. Moreover, in late imperial Russia, the confluence of moral economic principles favoring holistic over compartmentalized economic thinking and novel economic mechanisms facilitating both top-down and intersectoral coordination indicates that state-led socialist economic planning in the Soviet era that followed did not arise in a vacuum.