This book continues the cycle of works on the economic history of Russia, devoted to the history of domestic traditional forms of industrial production: rural handicrafts, urban small industrial production, artels. The point of view in Marxist historiography, according to which the rural artisan and the urban artisan were representatives of the same social identity, prevented the study of the concrete historical appearance of the latter and greatly simplified the picture of the transformation of this traditional form of small industry in the context of Russian modernization.