After Oriental Despotism by Stanziani Alessandro;

Author:Stanziani, Alessandro;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Labour on Russian estates

In Russia, landlords could ask peasants either for quitrent or for labour services (corvées). Western, Russian, and Soviet historiography all traditionally argue that quitrent encourages trade and economic growth, whereas labour service restricts both.21 This argument has been widely echoed by historians of serfdom in Western22 and Eastern Europe.23 Of course, many others maintain that trade and economic growth can also take place under a system of corvées labour or even slavery in the strict sense.24 Any satisfactory answer to this question requires an assessment of labour productivity and the overall demesne efficiency: some consider that corvées require high supervision costs while reducing labour productivity and peasants’ interest in increasing both productivity and market production. Some others have objected that labour supervision is not necessarily stricter under corvées than under quitrent. In particular, Hoch has shown that serf owners were able to exploit serf labour with minimum supervisory costs by harnessing the patriarchal authority structure of the peasant household.25

The question underlying this debate is important: were historical forms of forced labour compatible with the market, innovation and capitalism? We may note that an increased dissemination of quitrent is recorded during the first half of the eighteenth century, followed by the greater success of labour services during the second half of this century. Finally, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the quitrent came back into prominence, although to a lesser degree than during the previous century. Within this overall framework, significant regional differences can be seen: forced labour was more widespread in the ‘black earth’ (the central, most fertile regions of European Russia), whereas the quitrent system was more widely practised near industrial areas.26 Based on this observation, several historians concluded that forced labour restricted trade and economic development.27

This approach requires serious revision; empirical analysis shows that the revival of labour services went along with an increasing integration of the demesne in proto-industrial activity as well as in local and national markets for agriculture and manufactures. Overall trends provide evidence of an important link, since the eighteenth century, between rural estates and markets. Of course, regional variations were important and even beyond this, institutional constraints, social hierarchies and market dynamics varied from one area to another and even from one estate to another. Most microeconomic studies focus on large estates28 – even if some Soviet scholars like Koval’chenko exploited several estates’ archives. In part, this creates a bias insofar as large estates were more inclined to adopt ‘modern’ techniques and also, because of advantages of scale, won higher yields and rates of commercialization than smaller units. Yet this bias does not invalidate but rather confirms our argument: despite the better performances of big estates, overall data show quite good outcomes for the Russian economy as compared with most Western economies,29 and this despite the well-known tendencies of statistics to underestimate products, yields and revenues.

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