INTRODUCTION

The early modern era was a watershed in the agrarian history of east central Europe. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, most peasants east of the Elbe paid rent or tribute in cash and kind. Then, however, in a process that began slowly in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and accelerated rapidly after 1500, seigniors embarked on a massive transformation of the agrarian economy, converting their estates into market-oriented manorial economies based on compulsory labor services they were able to impose on their village subjects. Among the seigniors were territorial princes, ecclesiastical property owners, urban corporations, and the landed nobility. After 1500, the latter played the dominant role in establishing both the manorial economy and the harsh forms of rural subjection that accompanied it.

After more than a century of research, the agrarian transformation in east central Europe remains a controversial theme in European history. Manorialism and rural subjection (often termed “the second serfdom”) in the lands of east central Europe developed in vivid contrast to the West, where the manorial economy and its strict forms of rural subjection had largely disappeared by the late Middle Ages.

Many scholars have seized on these divergent paths of agrarian development as the primary explanation for east central Europe's relative backwardness. Robert Brenner, for example, expresses this view when he argues that the second serfdom destroyed the possibility of balanced economic growth and thus consigned the region “to backwardness for centuries.”