Founders of Russian joint-stock banks in the 1860s - 1870s: contemporary use of the RUSCORP database from 1993

The article is dedicated to the issues of reusing historical databases, using the example of the database RUSCORP, created in 1993 by American historian Thomas Owen, which contains information about joint-stock companies in the Russian Empire from 1700 to 1914. Based on RUSCORP, the article examines the social status of the founders of commercial and land banks during the years 1864–1873, i.e., during the period of the formation of a new banking system. The data processing followed the classic ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) approach typical for data analysts, within which the necessary data was extracted from RUSCORP using a spreadsheet application, transformed from the storage format (*.txt) to a tabular format, cleaned, and loaded into a database management system. The new database contains information about 62 banks and 787 instances of founding, which included both individuals and banking and trading houses. Analysis of this data showed that joint-stock banks were established not only in financial capitals (St. Petersburg and Moscow), but almost three-quarters of the cases pertained to regions. The banking industry was little affected by legislative restrictions, and banks varied significantly in capital size, with a median of 1.5 million rubles. Analysis of the records of founders revealed that, in addition to individual founders, 12.6% of the records pertained to banking and trading houses, more than half of the records were attributed to Russian or Russified entities, and nearly a third of the cases involved Russian Jews, Germans, Greeks, Poles, and foreign Germans. Only 37 records out of 787 pertained to subjects or citizens of other countries. In terms of social composition, 43.4% of the records belonged to the trading, industrial, and financial world, 32.7% were aristocrats, courtiers, landowners, officials, and military personnel, while in 23.9% of cases, the status could not be determined. A separate direction of research involves identifying information loss from the primary source and discussing ways to refine and expand the database on bank founders.