Ivanovo

Ivanovo developed as a village of trade and textile crafts rather than a community supported chiefly by ploughland. The scribal books of 1627–1630 recorded sixty-four households, fifty belonging to land-poor inhabitants occupied in crafts and other earnings. During the seventeenth century its population grew rapidly, eventually exceeding that of nearby Shuya. Linen production connected peasant households with markets beyond the village.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, wealthy peasants were establishing manufactories. Textile growth continued into the early nineteenth century, while the village remained within a landlord's estate. Many factory workers were hired peasants who entered long contracts with manufacturers. Economic success therefore did not remove the constraints of serfdom or the authority of the estate owner. In the mid-1830s local manufacturers proposed a thirty-bed hospital, but the landlord rejected the plan to avoid additional communal expenses. Ivanovo's expanding textile economy joined commercial initiative to a social order still governed through inherited rights over land and people.