STUDY OF CREDIT AND BANKING INSTITUTIONS OF THE SOUTH OF UKRAINE IN THE 19TH CENTURY: FEATURES OF THE SOURCE BASE SEARCH

Abstract

The purpose of the publication is an attempt to generalize the role and place of the source base for the study of credit and banking institutions of Southern Ukraine in the 19th century, and to determine the peculiarities of the search for the source base. The first group of sources includes a wide variety of published documents and materials that are easy to find compared to other sources. This group includes a large number of charters of banks and other types of credit institutions, which contain information on the creation of new credit institutions and the legal conditions under which it took place. The conditions for the development of credit and banking institutions in the legal field of the Russian Empire, changes in the legal status of each type of credit institution can be investigated thanks to the legislative acts from the “Complete Assembly of Laws of the Russian Empire”. The studied period is partially covered by the first, and completely by the second and third gatherings. In addition, the current legal norms at a certain point in time were printed in the “Code of Laws of the Russian Empire”, published in 1857, 1887, 1893, and 1902, respectively. Until the 1890s, in fact, Russian legislation did not cover the activities of private banking houses, so other documents are needed to research these institutions. There were also periodicals – periodicals of local significance (“Novorossiysk calendar”, “South Russian almanac”), specialized journals (“Journal of manufactures and trade”, “State trade in its various types”, etc.) and various directories (“All of Odesa”, “Address-calendar of the Odessa city government” and others). In these publications, information can be gleaned about changes in the management of major credit institutions in cities, and sometimes descriptions of the state of local industry, trade, and credit were provided in these publications. The second group of sources includes press related to previous sources. These are the newspaper “Herald of finance, industry and trade” for 1886–1898, the array of “Odesa herald” for 1827–1858 and 1860–1892, newspaper “Information of the Odessa city public administration” for 1868–1870. The third group of sources includes the most numerous materials stored in the archives. Foundations can serve as the source base of works. The State archives of Mykolaiv region, the State archives of Odesa region, the State archives of Kherson region and the temporarily occupied State archives of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. In addition, there is a significant array of archival sources contained in the Russian archives, the degree of preservation of which also raises questions, and activates the issue of duplication or relocation. The fourth group of materials consists of manuscript sources stored in libraries. Materials testifying to the state of state credit institutions and their activities in the first half of the 19th century are very difficult to find. In addition to isolated archival files, we can point only to the manuscript materials of the Odesa State Scientific Library named after Maksym Gorky, which relate to the activities of public guardianship orders in the late 1930s of the 19th century. It can be concluded that there are many sources for considering the history of the development of credit and banking institutions, all of them are very diverse and not equal. Unfortunately, not all materials have survived. In addition, if we compare the sources according to their quantitative and qualitative composition, we can definitely say that the sources on operations of state credit and banking institutions are more representative than on private institutions.