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Introduction. An attempt is made to analyze the dynamics of labor productivity in the iron-making industry of the Urals using the equal cost vector during the replacement of welding iron production technologies with cast steel production technologies in open-hearth and Bessemer furnaces, as well as to determine the heuristic potential of this method. Materials and Methods. The study uses a vector of equal costs. This vector connects the points on the graph that reflect the number of two products released per unit of resource for a certain period of time. The source of the study was the “Collections of statistical data of the mining industry of Russia”. Results. The vectors of equal costs for the production of iron and steel per worker of the iron- making industries of the Urals in 1893–1911 are constructed. The periods in the development of iron-making production are highlighted. Discussion and Conclusion. The method of equal cost vectors revealed the following: 1) rational use of labor in private factories and irrational in state-owned ones; 2) significant influence of the Nadezhdinsky Plant on the structure of iron-making industries; 3) a more precise chronological framework for the replacement of welding iron production technologies by open-hearth and seedless production, the influence of market conditions on this process; 4) the replacement of old technologies with new ones did not cause an increas

Introduction. In modern historiography industrialization is defined as the process of replacing labor with machine technology, but in applied research, machine technology for workers acts not as a substitute, but as a complementary good that increases labor productivity. This contradiction between the definition and research results is due to the limitations of the methods used. Materials and Methods. As a tool to overcome these limitations, the author of this paper suggests using the equal release vector method, developed by him on the basis of the well-known model of the isoquant and producer equilibrium in economic theory. The purpose of this work is to test the heuristic potential of this method on the material of the iron ore industry of the Urals, Poland and Southern Russia in the late 19th – early 20th centuries. Results. The study found that the equal release vector gives a clear idea of the periods when resources replace and complement each other, and also revealed the advantages and disadvantages of the equal release vector method. Its advantages include the fact that it provides a visual representation of changes in the amount of resources per unit of output, is easy to learn, and can be used to analyze technological transformations of both an individual enterprise and the entire industry. Its disadvantages include high sensitivity to the quality of the source and completeness of data. This method should only be used as an addition to the traditional analysis of absolute and average indicators. It allows you to analyze the interaction of only two resources.

The paper analyzes the proposals and projects elaborated in 1894-1895 by the Minister of Agriculture and State Properties, Alexey Yermolov, for developing the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Urals, and Siberia. The article aims at disclosing to what extent and in what aspects the general trend to modernizing the country’s economy influenced the policies of settling and developing the imperial outskirt regions, thus submitting them to the logic of “frontier” modernization. The materials surveyed are diverse in content. In the Caucasus, the main attention was paid to the resettlement problems, in Turkestan – those of economic development; and in Siberia both directions of colonization policies were combined. Meanwhile, the general approaches can be revealed in Yermolov’s proposals. This is, first, overcoming the economic isolation of the regions and opening them with laying the transport communications; second, combining the resettlement colonization with the intensification and specialization of economics turning to more rational methods of natural resources development; third, paying emphasis to preparation and organization of the resettlement, optimization of the land use in terms of relations between immigrants and natives; fourth, starting the transition from agricultural development to industrialization of the outskirt regions. A special place among the regions belonged to the Urals, which, due to the long tradition of the mining industry, had lost the frontier features by the end of the 19th century. In the Urals, the tasks coming to the fore were concerned with the structural policy aimed at adapting the region to market.