Siberian Merchants in the Competitive Struggle for the Development of Mongolia’s Markets: Problems and Solutions

Introduction. The paper deals with the history of Russia-Mongolia economic relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Goals. The study seeks to determine, analyze and evaluate the role of Siberian merchants in strengthening Russia-Mongolia trade relations in the specified period. To facilitate these, the work shall examine why Siberian entrepreneurs were that interested in developing trade with Mongolia, identify some factors that hindered Russian economic expansion in the region, characterize the significance of the Siberian merchant class in the competitive struggle for internal markets of Mongolia. Materials and methods. The study focuses on a set of both published and unpublished documents. The former include international treaties that regulated Russia-China political and economic relations from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, legislative acts of the Russian Empire pertaining to trade and industrial activities. The unpublished sources include statistical and record-keeping papers from public archives of the Republic of Buryatia and Irkutsk Oblast. Methodologically, the study rests on modernization theory in combination with a number of special methods of historical research — the chronological, statistical, system-historical ones — that prove instrumental in reconstructing the process of evolution of Russia-Mongolia trade relations in the context of political and economic transformations experienced by the Russian Empire and Inner Asian nations at the turn of the twentieth century. Results. The change in Imperial Russia’s foreign policy vector towards the Asia-Pacific entailed an intensified development of Russia-Mongolia economic ties. The former resulted from the desire of imperial authorities to facilitate further development of domestic trade and industries. The main role in strengthening trade ties with Mongolia was played by representatives of private capital — Siberian merchants. The expansion of Russian merchants into Mongolia’s internal markets was challenged by a number of problems and obstacles, the main one having been competition with Chinese trading companies that were enjoying huge financial resources and government support. Siberian entrepreneurs would rely on forces and resources of their own, count on state support — and did withstand the competition to retain control over some part of Mongolia’s internal market by the beginning of the 1911 Hsinhai Revolution.

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