On the Concepts of “Town”, “Urban Population”, “Urban Network” in the Middle of the Eighteenth Century in Historiography and the Views of Contemporaries

The concept of “town”, its content, and the defi nition of its essence have been addressed by historians at various stages in the development of historical science. In the Russian historiography of the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, two main approaches to the defi nition of a town emerged. Representatives of one of these approaches (A.P. Prigara, I.I. Dityatin, A.A. Kiesewetter) considered all settlements called towns in the sources as towns. Conversely, an alternative conceptualization of the town emerged, centering on its role as a socio-economic category and a nexus of craft and trade (N.A. Rozhkov). This definition has become firmly established in Russian historiography and, during the Soviet period, was supplemented with the notion of the posad community as an essential social structure of the town (Ya.E. Vodarsky). In the context of Soviet historiography, there was a lively discourse surrounding the question of what criteria could be utilized to categorize a settlement as a town. The response to this enquiry possessed both theoretical and practical ramifi cations, including the enumeration of urban settlements, the calculation of the urban population, and the comprehension of urban network development. In contemporary academic discourse, specialists tend to consider settlements that were previously referred to as towns as such. Nevertheless, the question of the contemporary meanings attributed to the term, and the contexts in which it was used, remains unresolved. The term “town” is utilized in a variety of ways in the sources from the period under scrutiny. It is employed to denote a center of voivode authority, a center of a district, or a location where the posad community resided. A signifi cant role was also played by the tradition related primarily to the military functions of settlements and fortifi cations. In the majority of cases, the center of a district, the administrative center, and the location of the posad community coincided, enabling contemporaries to perceive the urban network as a cohesive entity. Concurrently, numerous settlements exhibited an unstable and context-dependent designation of “town” suggesting that the formation of the state’s urban network was unfi nished.