The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis

The Journal of Economic History

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 1970, Pages 18-32

  Domar, Evsey D ^a  

^a MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

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EID: 84905893161     PISSN: 00220507     EISSN: 14716372     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0022050700078566     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. V. Kliuchevsky, Kurs russkol istorii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe sotsial'no-ekonomicheskoe izdatel'stvo, 1937). The original work was published in 1906. All my references apply to the 1937 edition. An English translation by C. J. Hogarth, A History of Russia, was published in New York by Russell and Russell in 1960. For specific references, see Part II.
2. I mean by the “government” any organization capable of maintaining some measure of law and order and particularly of using non-economic compulsion. It can be a king, an assembly of landowners, a magnate, etc.
3. He may be restrained by custom and by the fear that his serfs can run away-a common occurence in Russia.
4. Kliuchevsky, Vol. I, p. 379; Vol. III, pp. 9-10, 121. Blum, however, talks about depopulation already in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. See Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 60-61. It is possible that Kliuchevsky describes the relative position of Moscow among other Russian lands, while Blum refers to the whole country.
5. Kliuchevsky, Vol. I, pp. 282-83; Vol. II, pp. 182-83.
6. Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 121,125, 221-22; Vol. Ill, p. 135.
7. Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 221, 229-42, 248; Vol. III, pp. 63-64, 230-31, 257, 283. Blum, pp. 93, 157.
8. Kliuchevsky, Vol. II, pp. 254-57, 339-44; Vol. III, pp. 182, 244. Blum, pp. 147, 152-54, 157, 160, 252. B. D. Grekov, Krest'iane na Rusi s drevnelshikh vremen do XVII veka (Moscow-Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1946), pp. 794-96, 849.
9. Kliuchevsky, Vol. II, pp. 259, 307. Blum, pp. 253-54. Grekov, pp. 870-71, 903, 909. Grekov, Glavnehhie etapy v istorii krepostnogo prava v Rossii (Moscow- Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe sotsial'no-ekonomicheskoe izdatel'stvo, 1940), p. 46. It is interesting to note that when the leaders of the gentry militia were negotiating a treaty with the Polish king Sigismund regarding the accession of his son to the Moscow throne in 1610 and in 1611, they demanded the inclusion of a provision forbidding the movement of peasants. Kliuchevsky, Vol. II, p. 349.
10. Kliuchevsky, Vol. III, p. 188.
11. Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 317-18, 336-37, 340. Blum, pp. 96, 234.
12. Kliuchevsky, Vol. II, pp. 321-23, 331-50; Vol. III, pp. 181-88. Blum, pp. 254-
13. Grekov, Krest'iane, pp. 826, 850. Grekov, Glavnelshie, pp. 64-65. If the peasants’ debts tied them to their lords as strongly and as hopelessly as Kliuchevsky asserts, it is puzzling that the government had first to limit and then to forbid their movement by law. is Kliuchevsky, Vol. III, pp. 243-46; Vol. IV, pp. 142-48. Grekov, Glavnelshie, pp. 71-72.
14. Here are a few examples: In Pushkin's Dubrovsky, the old Dubrovsky is identified as the owner of seventy souls, and Prince Vereisky, of three thousand; in The Captains Daughter, the commandant's wife is impressed by Grinev's father's ownership of three hundred souls; in Gogol's The Dead Souls, Pliushkin owns more than a thousand souls; in Goncharov's Oblomov, the principal hero owns three hundred and fifty; in his A Common Story, a certain Anton Ivanich has twelve, mortgaged over and over again….
15. Kliuchevsky, Vol. I, p. 293.
16. Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 293-94. Grekov, Krest'iane, p. 387.
17. Jerome Blum, “The Rise of Serfdom in Eastern Europe,” American Historical Review, LXII (1957), pp. 807-36. See particularly pp. 821-22.
18. Kliuchevsky, Vol. III, pp. 101-02.
19. Grekov, Krest'iane, pp. 381-83. There seems to be considerable disagreement among the authorities he cites. He mentions a number of legislative enactments passed at the end of the fifteenth century and in 1510, 1519, 1520, 1532 limiting the freedom of peasants to move (p. 387).
20. Blum, “The Rise of Serfdom,” p. 819.
21. Georg Ostrogorsky, “Agrarian Conditions in the Byzantine Empire in the Middle Ages,” The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), I, 206. See also pages 11, 27-28, 33, 66 and 257 of the same volume. Also, W. R. Brownlow, Lectures on Slavery and Serfdom in Europe (London and New York: Burns and Oates, Ltd., 1892), pp. 49-50.
22. Francois Louis Ganshof and Adriaan Verhulst, “Medieval Agrarian Society in its Prime: France, The Low Countries, and Western Germany,” Cambridge Economic History, I, 294; M.M. Postan in his essay on “England,” same volume, pp. 552-56, 563-64, 624; Blum, “The Rise of Serfdom,” pp. 810-11.
23. R. E. F. Smith, The Enserfment of the Russian Peasantry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 4.
24. Postan, essay on “England,” Cambridge Economic History, I, 566-70.
25. T Ibid., p. 609.
26. Brownlow, Lectures on Slavery, pp. 157-83. Smith, Enserfment, pp. 4-5.
27. The idea that sheep-breeding may have had something to do with serfdom was suggested by Nieboer in his book (pp. 371-75) discussed in Part III.
28. K. G. Ponting, The Wool Trade Past and Present (Manchester and London: Columbine Press, 1961), p. 30. The figures are based on a chart facing p. xviii of Medieval Merchant Ventures by E. Cams Wilson.
29. According to Postan, p. 568, domestic consumption of cloth is not known. Peter J. Bowden arbitrarily assumed it to be 50 percent. See his The Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Macmillan&Co., Ltd., 1962), p. 37.
30. Data on the size of the sheep population, or more correctly on increments in it, would not be sufficient for our problem. We would have to know how many cropraising peasants were replaced, say, by 1,000 extra sheep.
31. See E. Lipson, The History of the Woollen and Worsted Industries (London?: Frank Cass&Co., Ltd., 1965), p. 19; E. Nasse, On the Agricultural Community of the Middle Ages, and Inclosures of the Sixteenth Century in England (London: Macmillan&Co., 1871), pp. 77-78; Brownlow, Lectures on Slavery, p. 184; Bowden, Wool Trade, p. xvi.
32. i Woodman, Slavery and the Southern Economy, p. 7.
33. Conrad and Meyer, Economics of Slavery, p. 80; James Benson Sellers, Slavery in Alabama (University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1950), pp. 71, 120, 162-63; Rosser Howard Taylor, Slaveholding in North Carolina: An Economic View (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1926), p. 72; Harrison Anthony Trexler, Slavery in Missouri (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1914), pp. 13, 19; Woodman, Slavery and the Southern Economy, pp. 14-15.
34. As the authors practically admit on p. 78. On the profitability debate see Stanley L. Engerman, “The Effects of Slavery Upon the Southern Economy: A Review of the Recent Debate,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, Second Series, IV (1967), pp. 71-97.
35. It was published in The Hague by Martinus Nijhoff. A republication is scheduled in 1970 by Burt Franklin, Publisher, New York.
36. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (London: Cannan's edition, 1922), II, 66-68. There is another book by Wakefield on the-same subject: England and America: A Comparison of the Social and Political State of Both Nations (London: Richard Bentley, 1833), Vol. II. Other sources: J. E. Cairnes, The Slave Power (London: Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1862); J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 1848 (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1920), I, 316.
37. Nieboer, Slavery as an Industrial System, pp. 312, 389.
38. A dear statement by Ostrogorsky was quoted in Part II. For the American views, see Woodman's collection.
39. Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 84. Ulrich B. Phillips, “The Economic Cost of Slaveholding in the Cotton Belt,” Pol. Sci. Q., XX (June 1905), partially reproduced in Woodman, Slavery and the Southern Economy, p. 36.