The Transformation of the World (152 page)

Serfs were not slaves.
¹⁰⁴
Those in Russia could mostly invoke certain land rights and engage in subsistence farming alongside their work on the landowner's estate. Usually a peasant from the locality, the serf had not—like the slave—been wrenched from the world of his origins and shipped across vast distances. Serfs remained embedded in the culture of the peasantry; they lived in their own village community. There was a sharper functional distinction between male and female labor under serfdom. Serfs had access to the landowner's patrimonial court system, whereas slaves were usually unable to invoke rights of any kind. In the realm of European law, serfs were accorded certain customary rights; slaves did not enjoy such rights. In short the serf was a peasant, the slave was not. No general statements can be made about the implications of the two systems; slavery tended to be harsher than serfdom, but it was not necessarily so in every case. Serfs in the narrower sense—that is, hereditary subjects according to Russian convention—could be sold, given away, or lost at the card table. They were not “tied to the soil” but theoretically mobile; they were therefore hardly less disposable than American slaves.

As the two systems were wound up at exactly the same time, they may be regarded as two strands in a wider process which, though not global, covered an area between the Urals and Texas. Russian serfdom, too, was profitable and economically viable. In neither country did capitalism yet appear as the most important solvent of traditional relations, although representatives of a new liberal-capitalist thinking expected that modes of production based on coerced labor would soon run up against their limits of expansion. In Western Europe, in the Northern states of the United States, and in the public opinion of the Tsarist Empire (mainly oriented to the Western model of civilization), there was agreement in the mid-nineteenth century that the permanent servitude of human beings innocent of any crime was an offensive relic of earlier times. The abolition of serfdom by decree in 1861was almost as revolutionary in a Tsarist context as Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863—even if it was less of a frontal challenge to serfowners and gave them a say in implementing the new provisions.

At the time of emancipation, the freed black slaves in the United States seemed to have the better prospects for the future, since the Reconstruction policy of the victorious North was supposed to help ex-slaves acquire a respectable
place in society. In comparison, the overcoming of serf status in Russia was quite a slow and gradual process, without the directness of America's new beginning or its grounding in principles held to be universally valid. Rather, it gave rise to a set of texts that were hard to understand and a confusing, spatially and temporally disparate series of rights and duties, which the justice system tended to interpret to the peasant's disadvantage.
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Former owners of Russian “souls” received generous compensation, and the emancipated peasants were subject to a whole series of restrictions that continued to make their lives difficult. Only under the pressure of revolution in 1905 did the regime decree the abolition of all compensatory payments; and only in 1907 were the last debts remitted by law.

In 1900 or thereabouts, the two emancipation processes seemed to have worked out less differently than people had expected in the mid-sixties. They confirmed the rule that wherever slavery and serfdom were abolished, what first appeared in their place were not equality and prosperity but new, perhaps less oppressive, forms of dependence and poverty. In the United States, the well-intentioned Reconstruction broke down after a few years and gave way to renewed political dominance of the planters; a heavy price was paid for the failure to provide ex-slaves with land of their own. In Russia, the former serfs acquired legal title to roughly half of the land previously owned by the nobility—so that a new “peasant question” arose in place of the old. The twentieth century, from the time of Prime Minister Stolypin's agrarian reforms of 1907, then witnessed a series of experiments to solve the Russian peasant question, most of them not in the interests of the peasants themselves. Cautious attempts to foster a capitaliststyle economy of middle-sized and large farmers were brutally cut short by the collectivization of 1928.
¹⁰⁶
The emancipation of 1861 was no cultural revolution. It left untouched the raw customs of earlier times, doing little to raise educational levels or to reduce vodka consumption in a village life that was far from idyllic. “Emancipation,” in the emphatic sense of the Western European Enlightenment, is therefore too strong a term to describe what happened.

Liberating the Peasantry

For liberal theorists, the Russian serf was unfree in two ways: he was the landowner's property, and he was trapped in the collectivism of the village commune. In 1861 the first of these ties was dissolved, and in 1907 the second. As for the rest of Europe, it is more difficult to say
from what
the peasantry was liberated. Attempts at defining particular types (such as “Russian-style” serfdom) should not mislead us into thinking that Europe can be straightforwardly divided into a free West and a servile East. There were many shades of servitude. Thus, the average situation of peasants in the mid-eighteenth century did not differ dramatically between Russia and German lands such as Holstein or Mecklenburg. In 1803 the German publicist Ernst Moritz Arndt still used the term “slavery” to characterize conditions in his home area of Rügen, an island in the Baltic Sea.
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“Freeing of the peasantry” commonly refers to the protracted process that by 1870, or at the latest 1900, had transformed the majority of European peasants into something they had not been a century earlier: citizens with the same rights as everyone else; legally competent economic subjects according to the respective national norms; tax and rent payers with no unwritten obligation to any “lord” to perform labor services. Such freedom was not necessarily bound up with land of their own; an English tenant farmer was better off than a northern Spanish smallholder. The key point was assured access to land under conditions favorable for the running of a business. This might come with a secure long-term tenancy, whereas the situation tended to be decidedly more unpleasant when landowners, profiting from a rural labor surplus, played off small farmers against one another in order to drive up rents. That kind of “rack renting” was a modern method with which completely “free” peasants might be confronted in Europe as well as in China. The old moral economy of rural life had involved a degree of paternalist care; its disappearance firmly yoked the peasant family to the vagaries of the market—unless governments, as they do in Europe or North America up to the present day, pursued an agrarian policy that gave the farmer some protection.

The freeing of the peasantry was a Europewide phenomenon, which by a legal definition was completed with the Romanian edict of 1864 but in actual fact lasted somewhat longer. It missed a few regions of Europe. In England—as Max Weber sarcastically remarked—”the peasantry are freed from the land and the land from the peasantry” by the enclosures of the eighteenth century,
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so that the country's social structure at the dawn of the nineteenth century already presented the triad of large landowner, large tenant farmer, and agricultural laborer. The picture was similar in western Andalusia, where latifundia originating in the Middle Ages were mainly worked by day laborers (
jornaleros
) comprising as much as three-quarters of the farming population.
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Freeing of the peasantry meant an adaptation of rural society to general social and political roles that had only just taken shape. The peasant “estate” was stripped of its special character. It is fairly clear which forces lay behind this, but there is greater doubt as to their exact mix and the main causal factors. Jerome Blum, the great authority on the subject in a European perspective, saw the freeing of the peasantry (starting with the emancipation law of 1771 in the Duchy of Savoy) as the last triumph of Enlightenment absolutism.
¹¹⁰
He also noted that only in a few cases, most notably revolutionary France, was it carried through by a nonabsolutist regime. Yet it was precisely the French Revolution, and its diffusion by Napoleon, that in many cases was the impetus for a state-led initiative; often it was military disaster that pushed a monarchical regime to focus its attention on the peasant question. Prussia abolished serfdom in 1807 after its defeat at the hands of France. Failure in the Crimean War triggered the Russian reform package that included emancipation of the serfs; and the American Civil War was the cause of the liberation of the slaves.

Further factors were involved in the process of peasant emancipation: above all, a thirst for freedom going back to long before the French Revolution, when the peasantry had fought against restrictive “feudal” conditions and wrested some room for maneuver from various anciens régimes.
¹¹¹
The specter of peasant revolt did not vanish from some parts of Europe in the nineteenth century. There is a direct parallel with the American planters' fear of slave uprisings following the bloody revolution in Haiti—a fear that took concrete shape in Jamaica in 1816 and 1823 and in Virginia in 1831 (Nat Turner's rebellion).

The freeing of the peasantry was almost always a reformist compromise; there were virtually no repetitions of the radical French solution of separating the aristocracy from the land. Landlord classes survived the freeing of the peasantry, and although their social and political position in most European countries was weaker in 1900 than it had been a century earlier, this was rarely due to a loss of their class privileges. For many landlords, the leeway was greater and the options clearer: either to go in for large-scale agribusiness or to withdraw into the passive existence of the rentier. Other goals and interests fed into the astonishingly convergent process of European peasant emancipation: the Austrian Crown, for example, even before the French Revolution, tried to increase its share of the agricultural surplus at the expense of aristocratic estate owners. Ironically, this very policy was often devised and supported by members of the
administrative
nobility drawing their main income from public service. However, even members of the landowning elite could veer toward a course of reform, especially if they sought political support from the peasantry, as they did in Poland to counter the effects of partition or in Hungary to resist Habsburg rule.

Finally, the overall development of society created a new general framework. Like New World plantation slavery, serfdom—above all, the “second serfdom” established in eastern Europe in the seventeenth century—had been a reaction to labor shortages. Rapid population growth in nineteenth-century Europe eliminated that problem, and at the same time urbanization and early industrialization opened up new job opportunities for people from the countryside. Labor markets thus became more flexible and needed much less coercive stabilization, increasingly difficult to impose, as it was, from an ideological point of view. In countries where something like “feudal” ties of dependence had still existed in the eighteenth century, large parts of the rural population were freed from extraeconomic obligations to their landlord.

The results were varied. The peasant's lot improved most markedly in France, and things worked out quite well in Austria. Prussia and Russia made fewer concessions to the peasantry. At the other end of the spectrum were Pomerania, Mecklenburg, and Romania, where peasants were not substantially better off at the end of the century than they had been at the beginning. The biggest losers, apart from the prerevolutionary French nobility, were the millions of people in Europe who did not manage to shake off their status as landless laborers. The former landlords and former owners of human beings were far less seriously
affected. The winners were the majority of peasants and, with unerring regularity, the state bureaucracies. By the end of the emancipation process the European peasantry had a more direct relationship with the state, without ending up as a state peasantry. Its old freedom had been acted out in the village, vis-à-vis the lord; the new freedom of the nineteenth century could not go beyond the framework set by the state. Over time even the most convinced liberals saw that agrarian markets cried out more than any other for political regulation; the last quarter of the century therefore gave birth to the agrarian policy on which European farmers have remained dependent ever since.

4 The Asymmetry of Wage Labor

A Long Transition

By the end of the emancipation process, two main roles had crystallized out in the countryside: the farming entrepreneur (large or small) and the wage laborer. These were two legally distinct kinds of “free” labor. But market freedom had little to do with the old freedom of peasant utopias. Such a genealogy does not explain the emergence of the concept of “free labor” outside what we may, with some simplification, describe as the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The legal historian Robert J. Steinfeld tells a different story for England and the United States, arguing that the decisive transition to “free” labor occurred when the workers had the power to withdraw it, when absence from the workplace was no longer prosecuted as a criminal offense. In this account, the starting point is not slavery or serfdom but a type of labor obligation that appeared with the colonization and settlement of the New World: indentured service.
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By this is meant the pledging of the worker's labor power for a limited number of years against an advance payment to cover transportation costs: in other words, temporary bondage. In English legal culture, this kind of voluntary alienation of personal rights was always a contested area. The idea of the “freeborn Englishman,” which originated in the seventeenth century and rapidly became the social norm, stood in contrast to such forms of bonded labor.