The chapter traces attitudes of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Marxists toward paid domestic labor and domestic servants. Discursively connecting domestic service with slavery and serfdom, European and Russian radical thinkers saw it as antimodern. Following this line of thinking, the Bolsheviks emphasized the nonproductive nature of servants’ labor and placed them outside of “the modern proletariat.” Only after the active participation of domestic servants in the First Russian Revolution of 1905 did the party began to engage with what was then the largest female occupational group outside of agriculture. The chapter demonstrates that the Bolsheviks had given little thought to the place of paid domestic labor in the new society, anticipating its disappearance. Yet, it also shows that the key elements of the Bolsheviks’ approach to domestic service were present in their prerevolutionary thinking: ambiguity about the class status of servants, paternalistic attitudes toward them as the most backward members of the proletariat, and, most importantly, the vision of society in which housework was women’s work, whether it was paid or unpaid.

In this chapter, we explore this possibility when it comes to the three most known exploitative work forms slavery, serfdom and wage labour. It turns out that they all have an attached ideology, explaining why respective way of organising work is the only morally good and therefore meaningful one. Each work form is portrayed as the single one being beneficial to all involved and thereby meaningful to all. Slavery is good for slave owners as well as slaves, serfdom for feudal lords as well as serfs, wage labour for capitalists as well as wage labourers. Each ideology also says that all other work forms are morally reprehensible and therefore meaningless. The aim of the chapter is to illustrate that the theorisation of the concept of work in the way we suggest opens up the possibility of comparative studies of the meaning of different work forms.

The Black Death of the fourteenth century reduced Europe’s population by about two-thirds between 1348 and 1420. Since endowments of land and capital remained unchanged, standard economic theory predicts rising real wages, falling rents of land and capital, and hence a drastic reduction of economic inequality. All of this occurred in most of western Europe. Elites eventually yielded, serfdom ended, landowners shifted from labor- to land-intensive production (grazing displaced planting), and labor-saving inventions abounded. In Europe east of the Elbe, by contrast, a formerly free peasantry was reduced to serfdom and landowners specialized increasingly in grain production, much of it for export. A plausible reason for the divergent responses is soil and climate: western Europe was mostly suitable for sedentary animal husbandry, eastern Europe was not; and the two were separated by a sharp dividing line that lay only slightly west of the Elbe. Data on Prussian landholdings suggest a strong correlation between low suitability for animal husbandry and the prevalence of serf-cultivated estates. Western elites could engage in factor substitution; eastern ones could not.

This chapter investigates the connection between officeholding and serfdom in light of new interpretations which have suggested that serfdom, rather than being a significant liability that the unfree fought hard to remove, was instead characterised by routine obligations and disappeared quickly after the Black Death. Through comparing lists of officers with records of landholding and personal status, it finds that both free and customary landholders served in office. It also demonstrates that serving in office was rarely resisted as an obligation and that while officials did help enforce some aspects of serfdom, they were no longer doing this by the mid-sixteenth century, and even before this only enforced limited aspects of personal unfreedom which likely did not disadvantage tenants in a meaningful way. These findings highlight that the division between unfree and free landholding was breaking down in the late Middle Ages, but also, more significantly, show that officials were not put-upon unfree servants. Communities of tenants were not forced to serve in office but recognised the utility of manorial structures for meeting their own objectives.

This chapter explains the Great Reforms of Alexander II, and Tolstoy’s complex response to them in his work. It explores the basic structure of serfdom, and the ways in which it was fundamental to Russian social and economic structures in first half of the nineteenth century. The chapter explains the process of emancipation, and how it gave serfs a degree of freedom while still keeping economic and social power in the hands of the landowners. Tolstoy recognized serfdom as unjust, but also owned serfs and made only an ineffectual attempt to partially free them before the official end of serfdom in 1861. In his works, serfdom is described as oppressive but also connected with love and family. His works also reflect his concern that emancipation would destroy the nobility without solving the fundamental problems of poverty and exploitation. The creation of the zemstvo as a system of local government was a similar source of ambivalence for Tolstoy. He served in his local zemstvo for some years, but in his fiction the zemstvo is shown as an inadequate solution. His later works suggest that a more radically empathetic solution is needed to break down the barriers between peasants and landowners.

This chapter considers the widely hypothesized antithesis between economics and history, and argues that the two disciplines are not substitutes but complements. It develops its argument through demonstration, by exploring how economics and history together provide complementary approaches to analyzing a specific historical institution: serfdom. To draw out general implications of such disciplinary complementarities, it scrutinizes three scholarly controversies about serfdom – how it shaped peasant choices, how it constrained these choices, and how it affected entire societies. To resolve these controversies, it shows, economics and history each brings special expertise, which have proven most productive when used jointly. The essay uses these debates about serfdom in particular to draw implications concerning the mutually reinforcing capacities of economics and history in general. It concludes that by working together, economics and history have improved our understanding of pre-modern society to a much greater extent than either discipline could have achieved in isolation.

This chapter analyzes the history of imperial politics from 1800 to 1914, with special emphasis on three key elements: the autocracy, the army, and peasant life before and after serfdom’s abolition in 1861. It argues that Tolstoy’s worldview took shape in the context of bureaucratic and military systems in which serf-owners occupied privileged positions, which complicated the abolition of serfdom, and which made impossible the building of an egalitarian social order in Russia.

The estate at Yasnaya Polyana was both a blessing and a curse to Tolstoy and his wife Sofia. It became the beloved familial, historical stage where the Tolstoys proudly lived and raised their ten children, and Tolstoy wrote his work. It had belonged to his mother, whose great-grandfather Major General Prince Sergei Volkonsky had purchased it in 1763. Tolstoy inherited the property of 330 serfs in 1847, and in 1860, inherited another 300 serfs when his eldest brother died. He had sold half his land and the main house to pay gambling debts by the time he married in 1862. In the next two decades, he managed to re-establish the Tolstoy fortune, investing money earned from the novels in land nearby and in Samara province. By 1880, Tolstoy believed that property ownership was evil. His self-censure reflected his ambitions to acquire property. He had quintupled the value of his holdings to 500,000 rubles by 1891, when the land was divided among his wife and children. After his death, they gave much of Yasnaya Polyana to the peasants, as Tolstoy requested, using the sale of his works to buy out their shares. Tolstoy’s family, literature, and property were everywhere intertwined.

This chapter looks at the varieties and trajectories of unfree status in the Carolingian empire. Rather than seeing it only as a point of transition from A (Roman slavery) to B (medieval serfdom), it aims to consider the practical logic of unfreedom as a category in the early medieval West, in a variety of different contexts: enslavement (the slave trade, self-sale, penal enslavement), household slavery, on great estates, and in law-making.

Russia provides the final testing ground for the concept of conditionality. This chapter shows how the limited incidents of representation in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Russia can be explained through the conditional rights to land granted to the lower nobility in order to counter the strength of the upper nobility, the boyars. This makes Russia another case of "second-best-constitutionalism." At that level, it displayed striking similarities to patterns observed in England, leading to the conclusion that the two cases differed not in the institutions that were being created but in the capacity of the state to enforce them. This position is at odds with common conceptions of the Russian tsar as all-powerful, so the chapter offers evidence to counter this assumption. It examines the weak control over the boyars, the limited taxing capabilities, and the mass enserfment of peasants to show how they either reflect or result from state weaknesses. The chapter then describes how these conditions interacted with the emergence of representation in Russia, as well as how they explain its demise.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book. It begins by justifying the study of ancient slavery then turns to the difficulties of studying slavery from the available evidence. Methods for recovering the experiences of slaves are explored, including the use of comparative evidence. Next, ancient and modern definitions of slavery are surveyed and the distinctions between slavery and other forms of unfree labor, including serfdom, are discussed.

The Black Death first reduced England’s population by nearly one half then prevented demographic recovery. Volatility characterised the 1350s and 1360s, due to extreme weather conditions, poor harvests, contracting output, disrupted markets, labour shortages and a high turnover of people. Towns struggled to assimilate the influx of migrants. The availability of land on favourable terms, and of well-paid employment, greatly benefited the lower orders of society, but caused consternation to the ruling elite.The government responded with a wave of legislation to regulate labour mobility, prices and wages, so as to impose upon workers the discipline of manual labour deemed essential to the common profit. By the 1380s equilibrium had replaced the volatility. The economy had contracted, and shifted from arable production to pastoral and manufactured products. Towns were smaller, but their residents tended to be wealthier. The attitude of the authorities to labour had become more realistic and less idealistic, emphasising its noble qualities rather than denouncing its vices.

What is ‘heresy’? One answer would be, ‘that which orthodoxy condemns as such’; though we may also wish to consider when conscious dissent invites such a condemnation. The main ‘heresy’ in late medieval England was that usually termed Lollardy, understood to be inspired by the radical theological thought of John Wyclif (1328-1384), which among other things emphasised the overwhelmingly importance of Scripture, and of lay access to Scripture, through vernacular translation. Orthodox repression of heresy began in the late fourteenth century and developed in various ways in the fifteenth. There are small traces of these much wider battles in Chaucer’s oeuvre, but it would be very hard to say quite how he saw them. We might instead see the fluidity of attitude toward aspects of religion in Chaucer as a sign of his times. ‘Dissent’ can encompass more than that which is solidly decried as heresy, and ‘orthodoxy’ can turn out to be more than one mode of religious thought and expression.