The recrudescence of corvées from the seventeenth century through the eighteenth century (the so-called second serfdom) in Eastern Europe and Russia is usually explained by the increasing interest local landlords devoted to the rising international market for wheat, mostly pumped up by Western European demand and growth. Liberal, radical, and Marxist historiography, including works by Witold Kula, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Douglas North, agree that in early modern times, Eastern Europe responded to commercial, agrarian, and then industrial expansion of the “West” by binding the peasantries to the land and its lords.Footnote ¹ According to this view, enserfment of the peasantry in the East contrasted to the emergence of “free” wage labor in the West. These dynamics supposedly accompanied an increasing international division of labor in which the periphery (Asia, Africa) and quasiperiphery (Southern and Eastern Europe) were subordinated to the “core” (Northern and Western Europe). The fact that very different authors agree on these arguments confirms the persistent strength of two assumptions common to “liberal” and “Marxist” historiographies: first, an ethnocentric approach in which Europe and Britain are supposed to be the “core” in modern and contemporary history and, second, a clear-cut and ahistorical opposition between free and unfree labor. It is only on the ground of these assumptions that the overall economic dynamics of the early modern world can be depicted in terms of “periphery,” “dependence,” and the opposition between freedom and unfreedom, markets and coercitive institutions. Interestingly, even new approaches in world history (such as Ken Pomeranz's great divergence) contest China's backwardness and European ethnocentrism but still consider Russia the paradigm of unfree labor and lack of markets, and as such opposed to both lower Yangtse and Britain.Footnote ² In particular, Russia is associated with serfdom and “serfs de la glebe.” This last expression underlines the fact that the serf could not be sold without the land to which he or she was attached, while the broader definition of “serf” includes this possibility as well. In both cases, a serf is said to be the property of her or his master and can be sold and have duties toward his or her lord. The legal status of serf is hereditary, so serfs cannot own property rights themselves. Serf labor is said to be a form of coerced, wageless labor.Footnote ³

This paper aims to challenge these statements. It argues that Eastern Europe was much less dependent on Europe and much less centered on cereal exports than is usually believed; it experienced growth and transformation, in particular in agriculture and proto-industry. This was so because the legal status and the real conditions of labor in Russia (and a fortiori in Eastern Europe) did not correspond to the standard image of “serfdom,” in particular of “serf de la glebe.” Russian peasants had limited but nonetheless existing rights that evolved over time and well before the reforms of 1861 officially abolished “serfdom.”Footnote ⁴ In a global perspective, our reinterpretation of serfdom implies that labor institutions and labor markets in Eurasia did not express opposite worlds (freedom against unfreedom) but different gradations of the same world. Russia just offered an extreme solution within a common Eurasian path. In order to prove these statements, after recalling the legal status and the concrete use of rules and institutions made by peasants and other social actors in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia, we will study labor activity at the estate level. We will then consider the overall dynamics of Russian agriculture and protoindustry.

The Legal Status of Labor in Russia

In the mid-eighteenth century, in his L'esprit des lois, Montesquieu opposed the free statute of labor in contemporary France to serfdom and “serfs de la glebe” in medieval France and in contemporary Eastern Europe.Footnote ⁵ This last was therefore put far back on a continuous and universal timeline.Footnote ⁶ This argument has long influenced historians, social scientists, and the wider public, despite the fact that, following Marc Bloch's seminal article of 1921, medievalists have strongly contested it and showed that the “serf of the glebe” barely corresponded to reality.Footnote ⁷ Serfdom in medieval Europe therefore has been considered a much more flexible system than its stereotypes; rather than a passage from “feudalism” to “capitalism,” a long-term evolution of complex systems occurred, in which “freedom” and “unfreedom,” coercition and markets coexisted.Footnote ⁸

During the last fifteen years a similar reassessment also has occurred for second serfdom in Prussia and Eastern Europe. In these areas, scholars have demonstrated that bondage and “feudal” institutions were more open and flexible than previously stated.Footnote ⁹ Historical watersheds have therefore been reconsidered and incorporated into a longer process of transformation. This implies that the traditional opposition between Eastern and Western Europe has to be nuanced, exactly as the similar clear-cut distinction between feudalism and capitalism has been.

Unfortunately, no such attempt has been advanced for Russia, for which the existence of a strict and formalized serfdom is usually considered as a matter of fact. The icon of Russian serfdom persists in scientific and common narratives as a central feature unique to Russia, running from absolutism and serfdom to communism and the gulag.Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, if we study Russian original sources in detail, we discover a much more complex world. Limits to peasant mobility were adopted in Russia during and after the mid-sixteenth century and progressively extended over the following two centuries. These limitations alone, however, cannot be taken as synonymous with serfdom; otherwise we might include most of the worldwide labor relationships up through our days under this category. We must therefore view limitations to mobility within the broader set of rules to which they belong.

For over three centuries, from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth, Russian official documents, such as decrees, statutes, jurisprudence, and estate archives, never spoke of “serfs” but only of peasants and rural inhabitants. As it would be difficult to assume a collective and spontaneous censorship over such a long period, we must take these sources seriously. Limitations to peasants' mobility entered into a complex set of tensions opposing Russian elites.Footnote ¹¹ These measures were not only dictated by the taxation and military requirements of the rising Russian state,Footnote ¹² which were linked to Russian territorial expansion,Footnote ¹³ but overlapped with a significant redefinition of the relationships between social groups and that state, especially the value of land ownership as a social and political marker.Footnote ¹⁴ The Russian elites welcomed the requests of the provincial nobility to legitimize their properties, for the elites could thereby secure an important ally in their fight against the boyari. The delimitation of properties and the increasingly strong link between land ownership and the obligations of the resident population formed the point at which the interests of those groups intersected. These rules actually aimed to establish a cadastral survey in order to improve fiscal income and military conscription, as well as to settle estates for which different categories of nobles, the crown, church, and monasteries advanced claims. In other words, access to land, the social-political status linked to it, and the resulting conflicts among Muscovy elites were at the roots of rules concerning cadastre; peasant mobility was only a consequence and a tool in this fight, not the main aim of Russian politics.Footnote ¹⁵ Rules therefore sought to identify the “entitled landowner” and the “real” noble and to clearly distinguish them from service state nobles and merchants. This explains why despite “serfdom,” and in accordance with its rules as we have defined them, peasants never stopped moving from one estate to another, from one region to another, as well as the government's measures to ensure this right.Footnote ¹⁶ In particular, in inland Russia, peasants moved from central “black earth” lands to state or court lands if they felt so inclined. Besides these trends, between the mid-sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, the colonization of the southern and eastern steppe was the most important event that occurred in Russia. With the help of the state, half a million people moved to the new areas, despite the complaints of landowners of central Russia.Footnote ¹⁷ Beyond long-term migration, temporary migration to towns was also widespread and involved around 105,000 peasants in central provinces between 1719 and 1744.Footnote ¹⁸

All of this helps explain why peasants, despite “serfdom,” still signed “settlement contracts”Footnote ¹⁹ with landlords, according to which they identified the conditions and terms of their engagement. These contracts provided landlords with titles over their peasants in case the peasants ran away. By the 1630s, landlords also signed a kind of discharge certificate (the otpusknaia gramota).Footnote ²⁰ This allowed landowners not only to claim a fee from peasants willing to move, but also to attack in court landowners who accepted “fugitive” peasants (i.e., peasants without a proper discharge certificate).

To sum up, legal rules aimed to identify the “real” noble, granting him or her rights over peasants. These rights officially consisted of controlling marriages, side activities, and emigrations; they actually applied in that landlords only required fees to the involved peasants and compensation to the state and other landlords in order to grant their permission. “Serfdom” was, above all, a form of institutionalized racketeering of peasants by landlords: Interdictions aimed much less at being respected than at providing income to landlords in exchange for their agreements. At the same time, labor obligations and legal constraints on peasant mobility, marriages, and so on—that is, the bulk of “serfdom”—were important in the conflicts between merchants and nobles and between hereditary and service nobles.Footnote ²¹

This importance is confirmed by the huge number of judicial litigations among landlords and between landlords and peasants, as well as between landlords and merchants over peasants moving without permission or working for another landlord or merchant without paying a fee and compensation to the entitled estate owner. Litigations concerned not only civil and trade affairs (contracts), but also questions of the legal status of those involved. Noble landowners contested the rights of service nobles, merchants, and so on to claim peasants' duties, that is, the right to claim fees and labor activity of local inhabitants. From the mid-sixteenth century up through the end of the eighteenth century, these litigations between elites were extremely widespread in Russia. Numerous disputes concerned the validity of noble titles and opposed landowners to the administration and estate owners to one another. Such disputes arose when estates were to be transferred, dowries were constituted, or an inheritance needed to be settled.Footnote ²² As a result, throughout the eighteenth century a great number of texts were still seeking to define who was entitled to own and transfer inhabited estates.Footnote ²³

During and after the last quarter of the eighteenth century, these conflicts took on a new dimension: With the help of the state, peasants and working people exploited conflicts between elites as a ground to contest the latter's rights over them. In particular, they demanded to be resettled into another social group with a different legal identity, such as state peasant or urban dweller, with few—if any—labor obligations toward the state or the municipality. State peasants lived on state estates and had to pay rent for the use of land; the rent was paid either in money or in product, and more and more rarely in corvées, which were suppressed in the early 1800s. State peasants could move with the authorization of local authorities. These claims were encouraged by the fact that in the 1770s peasant courts were set up by Catherine II. Until then, there were no special courts in Russia for peasants, so they were forced to go through nobles and their courts to request emancipation, which considerably reduced any attempt to initiate proceedings. The situation changed in 1775 with the introduction of peasant courts, accompanied by a clear-cut legal separation between ownership of things and rights over human beings. These courts and the broader reforms responded to the famous Pugachev unrests in the early 1770s and to the broader reforms of Catherine II, who wished to secure nobles' property rights. In 1762, nobles had been emancipated from compulsory service to the state; in return, the state considered itself freed from any obligation to protect the interests of the nobility. Catherine therefore attempted to define and secure the rights of her subjects within the framework of the legally distinct and hierarchically arranged Petrine social categories (nobles, merchants, peasants, and so on).Footnote ²⁴ She therefore reformed the provincial administration and set up nobles' boards beside peasants' courts. To be sure, the new peasant courts had limited powers and were under the control of local nobles. Moreover, the peasants were still not allowed to sue nobles over matters of corporal punishment or work organization. Despite these limitations, peasant courts played an important role in the evolution of Russian society; indeed, in these courts, peasants exploited litigations between elites on a property to contest their own obligations toward an estate owner who was apparently not legally entitled. As a result, peasants won the support of the state, itself interested in defining ownership rights. Political stability, economic efficiency, paternalistic criticism of serfdom, concrete economic interests of the state, and a part of the nobility—all these variables contributed in varying degrees to these reforms.Footnote ²⁵ Many laws were thus adopted between the end of the eighteenth century and 1861; they aimed to facilitate the submission of cases to these courts and challenges of ownership rights to “inhabited estates.” For example, in many cases the plaintiffs emphasized that the transfer of the estate took place through the intermediation of a non-noble, which was a prohibited practice. In other cases, the plaintiffs demonstrated that the landowner was not a noble but a merchant and, as such, prohibited from ownership.Footnote ²⁶

Proceedings instituted by peasants became so numerous that between 1837 and 1840 the senate even decided to call a halt to cases where serfs were still living with their master.Footnote ²⁷ Between 1833 and 1858, the senate recorded 15,153 cases of illegal estate ownership and thus of illegal “servitude.” Overall, between 1801 and 1861, when serfdom was officially abolished, half of the peasantry left the stature of “private peasant” and became state peasants or urban inhabitants. At this time, as we will see in the next section, barely half of private peasants were still engaged “in corvées.” This means that in 1861 the end of “coerced labor” concerned barely a quarter of the whole Russian peasantry. From this perspective, the reforms of 1861 have to be put in a broader context: They were in fact several reforms implemented over a century and a half, aiming not to abolish “serfdom” but rather to change forms of power and hierarchies in the countryside. In particular, these changes affected the legal entitlement of estate owners, on the one hand, and forms of bondage, on the other. The reforms of 1861 did not mark a break insofar as “serfdom” did not exist as such before, and legal constraints on peasant mobility and peasant labor did not disappear after 1861.

In order to validate these statements, we need to determine whether coerced labor did play a role in the organization of the estates and in the wider relations between towns and the countryside, despite the invisibility of coerced labor in legal texts or in administrative and legal proceedings. This question is legitimate because many historians in Russia and the “West” have argued that estate owners prevaricated about their official rights and, with the benevolent support of the state, informally but effectively enserfed the peasantry. In order to consider this possibility, we will look more closely at the economic practices on the estates.

Corvées and Labor on Russian Estates

After the seventeenth century, several Russian estates published instructions or edicts (instruktsiia, nakazy) that sought, along with collection of national laws, to provide a list of the rules in place in a given estate.Footnote ²⁸ In fact, state law gave these regulations the force of law. This formal framework is important because it testifies to the tsarist state's determination not to abdicate its authority inside the estates, but rather to decentralize the production and the application of the rules pertaining to it. The lords' authority could be withdrawn by the tsar at any moment if they abused their power or if their entitlement to own land did not comply with the rules. Tsarist administrative elites encouraged this trend insofar as nobles were supposed to run their estates in a more rational way, both in the sense of using more advanced farming techniques and of laying down appropriate operating rules governing the peasants as well as the bailiffs. This met the state's interest in reducing social tensions (above all, after the Pugachev revolts in 1774–1775) and in preserving its pool of soldiers.Footnote ²⁹ For similar reasons, the instruktsiia granted considerable weight to village communities and elders.Footnote ³⁰ Just as state rules acknowledged and legitimated the instruktsiia, the latter acknowledged the existence of peasant customary law and village communities. This hierarchy of legal rules aimed to promote mutual control by the actors and a certain amount of flexibility within the system. Of course, this legal and social order did not exclude conflicts or even unrest. Petitions were sent to landownersFootnote ³¹ and uprisings occurred, in some cases leading to acts of violence against the bailiff or the landowner.Footnote ³² These actions were not always a reaction to the services demanded by the landowners but, on the contrary, often came in response to technical or organizational innovations, such as the introduction of new crops or new techniques and thus different labor organization.Footnote ³³ This issue not only sheds new light on social stability and its relations with legal institutions in Imperial Russia, but also helps to explain the organization of labor in the estates and its dynamics over time.

Now, in Russia landlords could ask peasants either for quitrent or for labor services (corvées). “Western” as well as Russian and Soviet historiography traditionally argues that quitrent encourages trade and economic growth, whereas labor service restricts both.Footnote ³⁴ This argument has been widely echoed by historians of serfdom in “Western”Footnote ³⁵ and “Eastern” Europe.Footnote ³⁶ Of course, many others maintain that trade and economic growth can also take place under a system of corvées labor or even slavery in the strict sense.Footnote ³⁷ Any satisfactory answer to this question requires an assessment of labor productivity and the overall demesne efficiency: Some believe that corvées require high supervision costs while reducing labor productivity and peasants' interest in increasing both productivity and market production. Others have objected that labor supervision is not necessarily higher under corvées than under quitrent. In particular, Hoch has shown that serf owners were able to exploit serf labor with minimum supervisory costs by harnessing the patriarchal authority structure of the peasant household.Footnote ³⁸

The question underlying this debate is important: were historical forms of forced labor 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 labor 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 labor was more widespread in the “Black Earth” (the central, most fertile regions of European Russia), whereas the quitrent system was more widely practiced near industrial areas.Footnote ³⁹ Based on this observation, several historians concluded that forced labor restricted trade and economic development.Footnote ⁴⁰

This approach requires serious revision. Empirical analysis shows that the revival of labor services went along with an increasing integration of the demesne in protoindustrial activity as well as in local and national markets for agriculture and manufactures. Indeed, in the eighteenth century, agricultural prices continued to climb, rising by two and a half times, which no doubt made service labor more profitable than quitrent.Footnote ⁴¹ At the same time, this solution was possible only if the estates were efficiently supervised. Hence, the already mentioned increased interest in supervisors on the part of landowners. The supervisor was supposed to adopt good working methods, carry out an inventory of goods, land, and harvests, and keep the landowner informed about the running of the estate.

In this context, there is no evidence of an increasing autarchy of the demesne coupled with increasing wheat exports from “backward” Russia to the benefit of “advanced” Europe, as Wallerstein and Kula have argued. Exports undoubtedly rose, and, as Mironov has shown, Russian markets were more and more integrated into the international and European markets. At the same time, the growth of exports did not take place at the expense of local and national markets; indeed, by 1760 the need for grain in the heartland created a demand and a rise in grain prices.Footnote ⁴² An increasing integration of Russian local markets into a national market therefore occurred during the second half of the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁴³ The nobility's role in the expansion of rural trade is reflected in the fact that much of the rural expansion took place on the gentry's estates. If in 1760 nobles' estates had 413 out of 1,143 rural fairs (36 percent), in 1800 they had 1,615 out of 3,180 (51 percent). This data clearly shows that not only landlords but also their peasants firmly entered the rural agrarian markets. Peasants' activity on rural markets surpassed that of merchants and small urban traders.Footnote ⁴⁴ Therefore, contrary to traditional arguments, trade of estate production increased with barshchina (corvées), which was compatible not only with exportation and long distances, but also with the rise of local and national markets.Footnote ⁴⁵

It was all the more important that local markets were widespread not only for agriculture produce, but also for protoindustrial products. Since the mid-eighteenth century, peasants bought important shares of proto-industrial products while benefiting from increasing incomes. For example, the larger accessible labor market of peasants already familiar with linen weaving gave Moscow and Ivanovo firms a greater competitive viability compared to St. Petersburg.Footnote ⁴⁶ In order to control this market, noble landowners were taking back control of the sale of products from their estates and entering into urban trade circuits with a certain degree of firmness.Footnote ⁴⁷ Protoindustry became ruralized.Footnote ⁴⁸ The urban population dropped from twelve percent to eight percent of the total population between 1742 and 1801.Footnote ⁴⁹ Rather than a duality between industrial towns and agrarian countryside, we find that agricultural and industrial rural areas were sometimes differentiated and sometimes highly integrated.

Thus, while five percent of private factories belonged to nobles in the 1720s, the percentage rose to twenty percent in 1773. In 1725, seventy-eight percent of industrial activity was located in cities; that percentage dropped to sixty percent in 1775–1778 and fifty-eight percent in 1803.Footnote ⁵⁰ As a whole, during the second half of the eighteenth century, landlords massively entered the protoindustrial sector; the “ruralization” of protoindustry was not a symptom of demesne autarchy, but, quite the contrary, it testified to its increasing commercialization. Both peasants and landlords entered the market for cereals as well as the protoindustrial activities and trade, and transportation activities. Numerous “serf-entrepreneurs” registered, on behalf of the landowner or sometimes quite independently, to start up business or even protoindustrial and industrial activities.Footnote ⁵¹ Serf-entrepreneurs often employed “workers” in their protoindustrial activity. They came from the same villages or from neighboring districts.Footnote ⁵² During and after the mid-eighteenth century, peasants bought an important share of protoindustrial products while benefiting from increasing incomes.

All this increased the need for labor and exasperated competition for goods and protoindustrial and labor markets. Competition therefore rose not only between nobles and merchants but also among nobles; even more than in the first half of the eighteenth century, landlords were in competition with each other in order to keep the best masters-peasants, who trained other artisans. Litigations on runaways and estate records confirm this picture. The return of service labor only made sense if peasant movements and extra activities outside the estate were reduced.Footnote ⁵³ As in the case of the sale of production, it would be reductive to see the landowners' orientation regarding factories merely as a desire for estate autarchy and market closing, and hence as a regression of the Russian economy. In reality, what the landowners wanted was to take over the protoindustrial and manufacturing sector, once dominated by peasants and merchants. This accounts for their request, which was granted by Catherine, to prohibit any form of serfdom in factories owned by non-nobles.Footnote ⁵⁴ Estate archives show that landlords had all the interest to develop a sort of “protectionist” politics beneficial to the estate's peasants and craftsmen.Footnote ⁵⁵ For example, Count Sheremetev did not hesitate to publish an instruktsiia giving priority to local peasant-traders over urban merchants in the commercialization of Pavlovo estate's products.Footnote ⁵⁶ Peasants-masters also demanded from Count Sheremetev the exclusive right to sell their products in Nizhegorod.Footnote ⁵⁷ Sheremetev's estate-law court regulated conflicts between peasants and merchants, and the decisions were often favorable to the former.Footnote ⁵⁸ In other words, peasants and landlords made arrangements in order to shape markets and competition rules to their own advantage and to exclude urban merchants and producers.

Labor relations were therefore extremely complex. In Nizhnyi-Novgorod province (250 miles east of Moscow), on the Demidov estate in particular, there was a mix of both compelled and hired labor. This last was used for some processing of products and for the supervisory personnel in the mills and brickworks; compelled labor was used for the milling of rye and wheat and for cottage industry, comprising, among other things, the spinning of yarn and the making of linen cloth.Footnote ⁵⁹ Relations of “dependence” among peasants, merchants, and manufacturers have to be included in this context. One of the key factors was the control of raw materials. As long as every stage in the production process took place within the peasant household, the producer remained more or less an independent craftsman. The fact that flax cultivation was so widespread in the non-black-soil provinces helped make linen production especially resistant to change. But in sectors like cotton and silk weaving, where the cottage weavers depended on outside sources for their materials, wage relations grew more rapidly.Footnote ⁶⁰ For the supply of raw materials for metalworking, the development of production in the Ural region modified the networks and the hierarchies. This was true in particular after the 1760s when the Demidov estate in the Ural region “exported” raw materials for metallurgy to protoindustrial districts of Tula, Nizhni-Novgorod, and Moscow.Footnote ⁶¹

Peasants could buy materials themselves, but sometimes provisions of raw materials were made by landlords, who made advances to their peasant-master. In this case too there was, after the end of the eighteenth century, a clear strategy on the part of landlords to enter and control networks that had been previously dominated by traders and merchants. It is interesting that nobles adopted the same strategies as merchants in order to control the output system (i.e., advances in money and/or raw materials).Footnote ⁶² Again, this confirms that legal limitations to mobility alone did not suffice, otherwise estate owners would have not developed this system of advances in order to keep peasants-workers bound to them.

To sum up, the rebirth of barshchina (corvées) during the second half of the eighteenth century was accompanied neither by increased exploitation of peasants solely with a view to export trade nor by a crisis in manufacturing business and markets in general, according to the model by Witold Kula. The demesne economy and the Russian economy as a whole were much more efficient, flexible, and market-oriented than usual. Agriculture and protoindustrial markets developed intensively, and so did the national income and the per capita income. Agriculture and protoindustry expanded, and the competition between noble landowners and merchants was institutional before it became economic. The former wanted to enter into trade and industry at the expense of the latter and succeeded, thanks to the support of institutional measures such as the exclusion of “serfs” from factories managed by merchants. Thus, labor services raised commercial produce, and protoindustrial activity became strongly integrated into the demesne activity.

At the same time, these multiple activities increased competition for labor time between estate owners and peasants, nobles and merchants, and even within the peasant family. Institutions (state law, demesne law, and peasant commune law) provided a set of rules to solve this problem. These arrangements were not without conflicts, but, as a whole, rural institutions worked well enough to ensure coordination. The decreasing impact of bad harvests on the standard of living and the increasing integration of the peasantry and the landlords into market networks testify to this increasing coordination among the involved actors. Evidence suggests that the output of both agricultural produce and protoindustrial products increased throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century; in turn, this sustained the demand for manufactured goods, which was mostly satisfied by local protoindustrial activity that utilized labor-intensive technology.Footnote ⁶³

Briefly, the growth in productivity and the standard of living and the commercialization of agriculture in Russia can hardly be explained by the potentialities (i.e., the possibility of extorting more and more surplus by force) of a system-serfdom, which did not exist as such, at least in its “pure” form, but rather by the flexibility of a world made up of inducements and constraints, central law and local customs. Thus, the coexistence of service labor and quitrent enabled the peasant economy and that of the noble landowners to cope with the fluctuations of the economy by limiting their impact on the level of activity, standard of living, and investments.

Toward a Reassessment of Second Serfdom in Eastern Europe

These outcomes confirm similar recent issues on Eastern European agriculture under serfdom. For example, in Brandenburg-Prussia, by the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth century commutation payment increasingly eclipsed the labor services. As in Russia, the government encouraged changes in the legal status of peasants.Footnote ⁶⁴ However, before that date, increasing labor service in the seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries was not synonymous with retreat from the market, as previously stated in the historiography, but, quite the contrary, commercialization of both peasant and demesne production (agriculture and protoindustrial products) quickly increased.Footnote ⁶⁵ Unlike traditional historical literature on these matters (which conveys the impression that East-Elbian agriculture was a simple affair of cereal monoculture based on coerced labor), new detailed analyses based upon estates' archives reveal a complex picture of a large and expansive workforce and high commodity sales. This was true not only of Brandenburg, but also of other regions of east central Europe, including Poland. Here peasant labor services provided only forty to fifty percent of the demesne labor force required during the summer months and thus to be supplemented by hired labor.Footnote ⁶⁶ In all these areas, both peasants and seigniors employed hired labor.Footnote ⁶⁷ There were also migrant day laborers who worked only during the harvest. In eastern Prussia many of the day laborers lived in small towns, subsisting on wages earned during the peak season. Tracy Dennison and Sheilagh Ogilvie have recently stressed the strong similarities between Russia and Bohemia regarding “serfdom” and social relations. Interaction between peasant and seigniorial institutions was at hand in both systems and strongly contributed to the social and economic dynamics within them.Footnote ⁶⁸

Taken together, the experiences of Russia, Prussia, Lithuania, and parts of Poland lead to the conclusion that, as a whole, “second serfdom” was not so much a form of slavery but, above all, a set of legal constraints on labor mobility. These rules were dictated much less by “scarcity of population” than by increasing demand for agriculture produce and protoindustrial products encouraging a “Smithian” growth. Labor and other institutions (i.e., seigniorial estate and justice, communes, and guilds) were flexible enough to guarantee at the same time a stable set of rules and the procedures to adapt them to the changing economic and social environment. Labor services were not opposed to market development: On the contrary, they enhanced each other. Protoindustry developed, and the specialization of some areas went along with the seasonality of protoindustrial activity for many peasants. Estate relations sometimes opposed protoindustry but in some other cases were favorable to it, which did not necessarily enhance or retard proletarization of peasants and craftsmen (as stated by Franklin Mendels and confirmed by Jan de Vries when saying that protoindustrialization slowed down the growth of towns).Footnote ⁶⁹ Agrarian development, protoindustry, demographic insights, and institutional and legal hierarchies varied from one estate to another within the same country according to the peculiar relations among the landlord, the peasant community, and the involved markets. Still, despite this extreme variety, it is difficult to admit that bondage and legal constraints on labor mobility were opposed to market and protoindustrial development and that developing markets in the West were at the origin of increasing bondage in the East.

The standard historiography's categories are less expressions of historical realities than Eurocentric visions and teleological aims. They rely upon a mythical West made of equally mythical actors (the proletarian, the capitalist, the law, and so forth). Indeed, serfdom, nobility, workers, peasants, urbanization, market development, proletarization—all these macro- and micro-categories, economic systems, and social actors' identifications did not exist as such. The category of serf, and most of the other ideal categories of social sciences born in the nineteenth century, should be revised, including those of wage-earner and merchant. In particular, in Russia, there were no official rules mentioning corvées before limitations to them in the 1770s. Existing rules imposing limitations to peasants' movements were produced and implemented at the intersection of state, seigniorial, and village institutions. Unlike Brenner, I do not see these rules as the sole expression of the strength of the nobility over the peasantry, for they required the interaction between the rules of the nation, estates, and villages. The real functioning of “serfdom” was founded upon these multiple institutions, actors, and rules. There were no classes in the Marxist sense, but rather porous estates. Russian peasants were not “serfs de la glebe,” although they were strongly dependent people with extremely limited legal rights. These rights, however, increased over time. They were not chattel slaves as were American slaves. A contract was always signed between them and the landlord, and their progressive emancipation occurred before the general abolition of serfdom in 1861. This is why labor services and strong legal constraints on labor mobility were not opposed to market development. Landlords and the demesne economy were not devoted to unproductive tasks and monopolistic attitudes financing parasitic attitudes but instead sought to exploit imperfect competition in order to increase their profits. Peasant economy under “serfdom” corresponded neither to the Chayanovian model of a peasant willing to satisfy his family's needs and entering the market only when obliged, nor to Kula's model of peasants pushed to produce by the landlord, who took the entire product and sold it to the market. Peasants were already integrated into market activity, and protoindustry was not necessarily “residual.” Peasants' and nobles' integration into the market does not confirm the link between labor service and poor market development. “Antieconomic” cultural values are useful to oppose imaginary peasantries to proletarians, landlords to capitalists. In reality, Russian landlords were interested in profits, and peasants were to different degrees integrated into markets. The fact that they did not transform according to some Western models does not mean that they were necessarily backward, only that historical transformations of markets and societies take different forms.

These issues do not close the dossier but raise new questions. If “second serfdom” was a much more flexible world than is usually held, if social groups evolved and the economy showed a high rate of growth, then where can one put the boundary between “second serfdom” and free labor and capitalism? This set of questions constitutes an effort to escape explanations of non-European realities in terms of “missing factors” (missing in relationship to a mythical, stylized West). Free labor, private property, industrialization, and urbanization are some of the most recurrent features of this mythical West. We consider Russian history as a confirmation of the existence and viability of different paths of development and as heuristic to questioning the imaginary “West” and occasionally Asia. Rather than looking for “missing factors” to explain Russian backwardness, we want to reevaluate the rules and the practices of labor in some Western countries on the basis of the Russian case. More generally, once we have called into question the existence of “second serfdom” and, therefore, an ideal type of economic and social system opposed to an equally ideal type of “capitalism,” we need to progress further in this direction and ask whether “free labor” is an appropriate category to understand market economies.