Revisiting Russian Serfdom: Bonded Peasants and Market Dynamics, 1600s–1800s

Abstract

AbstractThe notion of the “second serfdom” has to be revisited. I claim that the introduction, the evolution, and the abolition of serfdom in Russia should be seen as a long-term process, beginning no later than the late sixteenth century and ending at the eve of the First World War. In particular, I show that serfdom was never officially institutionalized in Russia and that the rules usually evoked to justify this argument actually were not meant to “bind” the peasantry but to distinguish noble estate owners from state-service nobles and “bourgeois.” Contrary to what has been argued by Witold Kula and Immanuel Wallerstein, the rise of capitalism in the West did not exploit the rise of serfdom in the East, but both East and West were part of the same global wave of commercialization, protoindustrialization, and industrialization.