Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2020 number

The article objective is to determine the role of the energy factor under the frontier modernization conditions in the Ural-Siberian region of imperial Russia where imperial and frontier modernizations were combined. While Russian colonization has long been actively studied, investigation of the frontier modernization is just beginning, without mentioning its energy factor, which was not paid attention in historical sciences. The author explains concept of “frontier modernization” and reveals its energy component. The paper focuses on the transition from a water wheel of a traditional society to a steam engine of the early industrial era. This process was traced on the mining industry materials, as it ushered the region’s industrial development. The Altai and the Urals historical experience showed that water-producing facilities appeared rather early and outperformed similar devices in central Russia, they contributed to forming large and time-efficient mining enterprises and provided the empire with the world leading positions in obtaining ferrous and nonferrous products metallurgy. Growing the power supply ratio led to raising production efficiency and solved the unattainable task, as demonstrated by the Kolyvano-Voskresensk plants in the Altai and the Urals metallurgical enterprises. However, the steam engine advent has dramatically changed the situation. Waterworks could not compete with steam engines, which came into use in our country much later than in West Europe. The transition from a water to steam engine lasted for almost half a century and even longer in eastern regions. Russia began to lag catastrophically behind the Western world, and until the empire’s end was unable to complete its modernization, especially in new development territories, for which there were many reasons, and energy shortage is one of them.