Spirits & Distilled Beverages

If the map pairing for luxury goods contained a vague suggestion of goods flowing out of the southern provinces along a north-bound channel through Malorossiia into the Central Industrial region (the term is, of course, anachronistic for the late 18th century) that served as the economic hub of the imperial economy, this map works in a similar way: the prominent position of Malorossia in the macro-level map on the left might well be explained - at least in part - by the map on the right. Based solely on these visualizations, in which there is no indication of directionality, a newcomer to Russian history might nevertheless be able to piece together the idea of a linkage between the role of distilled beverages in the littoral provinces of the Black and Caspian Seas, and the market-packed provinces of Malorossiia...