The article examines the main types of food industry in the Right-Bank Ukraine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the role of the human factor in the development of the distilling, flour milling, sugar, and brewing industries. It presents and analyzes data on the activities of enterprises in Kyiv, Podillya, and Volyn provinces, as well as in the Russian state as a whole. The article determines the role of the Right-Bank Ukraine, which was the main area of sugar beet production, and the emergence of the first factories owned by K. Yakhnenko and P. Symyrenko and the Tereshchenko brothers. It is determined that after the liberal reforms of the 1860s, representatives of all social groups gained access to entrepreneurial activity, but the most active were people who had some money and could direct it to the development of their own production – merchants and landlords. An analysis of the flour milling industry in the period under study is made, noting its active development and the organization of grain processing enterprises. Considerable attention is directed to the study of the problems of development of internal trade in food industry goods in the Ukrainian provinces of the Russian Empire in the second half of the XIX – early XX centuries and the organization of fair trade in Ukraine and in the whole empire.

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