Between 1780 and 1787 Samuel and Jeremy Bentham were asked to manage a large Russian estate owned by Prince Grigorii Potemkin, one of the closest advisors of Catherine II. They had to face two related but distinct problems: Russian peasants were unskilled, while British skilled workers and supervisors were hard to control. It was the problem of controlling skilled English workers in Russia (and not the Russian serfs) that led the Bentham brothers to reflect on the relation between free and forced labor, and then between labor and society. Before and after Foucault,Footnote ¹ the Panopticon has been seen as a response to social deviance, and in relation to prisons and the emergence of a global surveillance system in modern societies. According to Foucault, the Panopticon is not just a model for institutions, but something whose principles are those of power in society at large.Footnote ² I want to challenge this view by arguing that the Panopticon project actually was a system for controlling wage labor, which drew inspiration from a particular image of Russian serfdom and from the Bentham brothers' experiences in that country. Those experiences have been the subject of several papers and books.Footnote ³ The first aim of this paper is not to recall these, but rather to integrate them into a broader intellectual debate. In particular, I will evoke the origins of the Benthams' experiences in Russian, British, and European debates of the period about the legal status of labor. The way that “western” thought conceived of labor in general and positioned itself vis-à-vis Russia necessitates a reexamination of the thesis that the principal schools of western thought were misunderstood in Russia. I will argue, instead, that Russian authors and reformers relied on ambiguities in western thinking about labor when they advanced their own images of serfdom and proposals for reform.

I will explore the sources of these complex, shared attitudes about labor, and will situate the issue of labor relationships in an appropriate legal and historical framework. My argument will be that Bentham did not confuse “free” and “unfree” labor, because at that time these notions and the practices that ensued from them had different meanings than they do today. In Britain in particular, “free labor” included indenture contracts, which were in turn rooted in “ordinary” labor relations (i.e., the master and servant acts). The flexible boundary between freedom and “unfreedom” was apparent in the obligation to work (poor laws), the development of workhouses, and a convergence in the notions and legal practices of apprenticeship for orphans, slaves, vagrants, and minors. It was from this milieu that Bentham traveled to Russia and subsequently conceived of his Panopticon.

By contrast, the legal status of labor in Russia was not that of “serf de la glebe.” I will show that, contrary to an argument found widely in historiography,Footnote ⁴ the Russian State never interfered in the relationships between landowners and peasants. From the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the state promoted peasants' mobilization of state rules in order to change their legal status. Estate archives show the complexity of legal and economic relationships between landlords, bailiffs, and peasants. Rather than a stylized serf de la glebe, the main features of this system were different gradations of servitude within a pluralistic legal system.

Let me be clear: I am not saying that “serfs” were free men and English workers were slaves. More modestly, I maintain that we need to compare these systems not through an opposition between ahistorical categories of “free” and “unfree” labor, but rather in terms of notions and practices of labor found in Britain and in Russia at that time. These were global in their intellectual and economic origins, but they were also embedded in local legal and economic foundations and practices. Russian serfdom was an extreme solution to an economic and institutional problem wrestled with throughout Europe and its colonies in modern times: the proper status of labor in an increasingly market-dominated world. Unlike most systems of classifying labor, I do not oppose slavery and serfdom on one hand to “free” labor on the other. Rather I consider that, at least for the period that concerns us here—the seventeenth through mid-nineteenth centuries—a variety of forms of bondage and labor constraint were in play and they must be clearly separated from slavery.Footnote ⁵

During this period, a similar evolution of labor and labor institutions occurred in Russia, Britain, and most of Eurasia. The increasing limits to labor mobility known as the “second serfdom” emerged in Russia and several other countries of eastern and central Europe, while, at the same time in Britain and France a growing attention was devoted to labor institutions, such as the first poor laws, guilds, and increasing enforcement of the master and servant acts. During the eighteenth century controls over labor activity and mobility increased around all of these, though with important differences in their harshness, but they declined during the first half of the nineteenth century and were finally reformed during its second half (e.g., the official abolition of serfdom in 1861, the end of criminal penalties and master and servants relations in Britain in 1875, and the end of coalition crime in France in 1864).

My first section will describe the experiences of the Benthams in Russia, their relationships with Russian nobles and the practical organization of the estate they were concerned with. The second and third sections put these experiences into an appropriate and broader historical context. I will discuss the problem of estate organization in eighteenth-century Russia, the legal status of the peasantry, and the role of supervisors (bailiffs). This will contextualize the particular estate organization that Bentham was concerned with within the broader history of rural estate management in Russia. The third section summarizes the origin and development of poor laws and workhouses in Britain. I examine the impact that debates surrounding these had on Bentham's conceptions of labor and, thus, their influence on his Russian experiences. The section that follows discusses the fate of Panopticon, and nineteenth-century conceptions, politics, and practices of labor, in both Britain and Russia. Their convergence and differences will be the ultimate goal of my analysis.

My conclusions will reflect on the legal status and practices of labor in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe (inclusive of Russia). I will argue that shared economic, institutional, and social factors generated a common interest in limiting worker and peasant mobility.Footnote ⁶

A GLOBAL HISTORY OF LABOR CONTROL: THE CASE OF THE BENTHAM BROTHERS IN RUSSIA

Samuel Bentham, Jeremy's brother, arrived in Russia in 1780 as a naval engineer. He first worked for an English manufactory in St. Petersburg, and then toured the Urals in 1781–1782 before entering the service of Prince Potemkin in 1784. The prince was at this time Catherine's lover and close advisor, and he owned country estates and numerous factories. He was directly involved in the ongoing Russian expansion toward the east and south (Poland and Crimea). The government was devoting much attention to the development of a short stretch of Black Sea coast that it had secured from Turkey in 1774. These ambitions generated tensions and conflicts with the Ottoman Empire, and alliance with Britain was part of the Russian strategy. It was thus not by chance that Potemkin asked Bentham to manage one of his estates, located in Krichev in Belorussia.

The estate was a large one, inclusive of five towns. Krichev had been seized from Poland by the first partition in 1772; it had belonged to Polish magnates who refused to give fealty to Catherine II, who granted the estate to Potemkin. Krichev's inhabitants were Russians, Germans, Don Cossacks, and Polish Jews. Farming was the main pursuit, but the district also had rich resources of timber for shipbuilding. The people were known for their skills in carpentry, and local landowners, including Potemkin, began to bring in other skilled craftsmen; from 1776 to 1785 the male population grew from fourteen to twenty-one thousand.Footnote ⁷ When Bentham arrived at Krichev he found a brand distillery, a factory, a tannery, a copper works, a textile mill with 172 looms making sailcloth, and a rope walk with twenty wheels, supplying the Kherson shipyards.Footnote ⁸ In fact, the estate was the principal supplier of naval stores down to the Black Sea.

Samuel Bentham's main task was to build ships for Potemkin. He found himself faced with a twofold problem involving labor that was both unskilled and undisciplined. His first problem was that he thought the estate's serfs lacked the skills needed for building ships. To address this problem he suggested that both machines and skilled workers be imported from Britain. Potemkin's Anglophilia encouraged this approach—he did not care about details, but he wanted Englishmen to drive Krichev's looms, and to run his botanical gardens, windmills, and shipyards from the Crimea to Krichev. When twenty skilled workers arrived on the estate in 1785, disciplinary problems quickly surfaced. The English workers showed little respect for instructions or work schedules, and while their foremen complained about the lack of discipline, they too disobeyed Bentham's instructions.Footnote ⁹ John Debraw, in charge of their supervision, described them as “a Newcastle mob—hirelings from the rabble town; a good-for-nothing crowd demanding high pay for no return.”Footnote ¹⁰ Jeremy Bentham noted “a lack of discipline and order among the workmen,”Footnote ¹¹ and one foreman even threatened to lodge a complaint with Potemkin and Catherine. It was in this context that Jeremy, who had joined his brother a few months earlier, wrote numerous letters that took up these problems and calling for an improvement in the system of labor surveillance, particularly regarding the work of the foremen.Footnote ¹² This was the well-known problem of how to supervise the supervisors. “With regard to instruction, in cases where it cannot be given without the instructor's being close to the work, or without setting his hand to it by the way of example before the learner's face, the instructor must indeed … shift his station as often as there is occasion to visit different workmen.”Footnote ¹³ Jeremy was impressed by the virtues of the Panopticon principle elaborated by his brother: “Relative to a house of correction … it occurred to me that a plan of a building, lately contrived by my brother, for purposes in some respect similar, and which, under the name of the Inspection house, or the Elaboratory, he is about erecting here, in Krichev, might afford some hints for the above establishment. … To say all in one word, it will be found applicable, I think, without exception, to all establishments whatsoever, in which, within a space not too large to be covered or commanded by buildings, a number of persons are meant to be kept under inspection.”Footnote ¹⁴ Jeremy completed this project by imaging the architecture of the Panopticon. These letters would become famous because they contained the Panopticon project, or model prison; they were subsequently assembled into the Panopticon letters (1st English ed., 1791).Footnote ¹⁵

The prison project was, then, first of all a project for labor surveillance, and the unskilled serfs were less of a concern than the skilled foremen. That is, it was not a reaction to the indiscipline of Russian serfs, but on the contrary a response to the behavior of English foremen and skilled workers. Russia thus inspired Bentham with a model of labor organization and surveillance that could be applied in Europe, and in England in particular, as he himself suggested in his correspondence.Footnote ¹⁶ Most of the countless interpretations of the Panopticon, including Foucault's, go wrong precisely because they overlook this context and hence the link between prison and labor on one hand, and free and forced labor on the other. At the same time, it should be stressed that the Panopticon was not the reaction of an English “liberal” confronted with an absolutist system and forced labor. For Bentham, after all, the point was precisely to improve the surveillance and labor efficiency of English wage workers. It is therefore incorrect to assert that Bentham's attitudes expressed the exclusive influence of absolutist Russia on an English liberal. Quite the contrary, these concerns reflected the evolution of legal and economic organization of the Russian estates and also those that arose during this period in Great Britain, with regard to labor discipline in the newly emerging industrial world. In order to prove these assertions, I will first detail the way Russian estates were managed at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. I will then turn to a discussion on the status of labor in Britain.

ESTATE ORGANIZATION IN RUSSIA: INSTRUKTSIIA, OR HOW TO SUPERVISE THE SUPERVISOR

Tsarist state rules did not regulate estate organization or the work of the peasants. The first law to do so dates from 1797, and it limited forced labor on private estates to three days per week. Further state rules on this subject did not appear until the years preceding emancipation. The observation does not imply, however, that estate organizations lay entirely in the hands of noble landowners, free to engage in abusive practices towards peasants, as several historians have claimed.Footnote ¹⁷ Although state law did not directly control relationships within estates, it nevertheless laid down a framework of operating rules. Seigniorial justice has often been taken to be synonymous with “feudalism,” old order, and serfdom, in both medieval and modern Europe and modern Russia. More recent approaches have substantially modified this picture regarding modern Europe, and also modern Prussia, Lithuania and, last but not least, Russia.Footnote ¹⁸ I shall follow this line of thought and demonstrate that instruktsiia and legal documents issued by the landlords cannot necessarily be taken as synonymous with peasants' submission and enserfment or their coerced exploitation. In Russia at the end of the seventeenth century several estates published instructions or edicts (nakazy, instruktsiia) intended (along with a collection of national laws) to provide a list of the rules for a given estate. The state 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 application of the pertinent rules. These rules therefore supplemented rules applicable throughout the country, which defined whom was entitled to own and transfer inhabited estates. The state order determined the institutional definition of the noble landowner, and granted him the right to promulgate the rules of his estate. In other words, the tsar could withdraw a lord's authority at any moment if he abused his power or if his entitlement to land ownership did not comply with the relevant rules.

Until about 1750, these instruktsiia concerned above all taxation and estate administration, and the organization of actual farm work remained in the background.Footnote ¹⁹ This was because at that time most noble landowners were required to justify their right to ownership, cope with the introduction of capitation, and integrate their various activities, farming-related or not, within the estate.

Significant changes took place in the 1760s when the instruktsiia began to focus more on work organization, and on the role of bailiffs.Footnote ²⁰ This was the time when both the Imperial Economic Society and “western” economists (Bentham above all) focused on the question of supervision in organizations. In the estates, this change was accompanied by a corresponding modification in the form and dissemination of documents employed. The number of instruktsiia increased, although they still affected only a minority of estates. Victor Aleksandrov, one of the leading Soviet specialists on these documents, found them mostly in estates belonging to the wealthiest nobles, those with more than five hundred male peasants under them. Although this group made up only 5 percent of the noble population, 55 percent of private peasants were on their estates. Potemkin, with his twenty thousand male peasants, was at the very top.Footnote ²¹

The dissemination of instruktsiia during the second half of the eighteenth century has been commonly and relatively consistently interpreted as a confirmation of the “golden age of nobility” in Russia. It has been asserted that at the time of Catherine II nobles benefited from considerable privileges, including the right to freely exploit peasants based on specific rules validated by the state.Footnote ²² But was this really the case?

No doubt Catherine herself encouraged the publication of these instructions, both at the time of her reforms in 1767 and in the charter of nobility in 1775. It was in keeping with the logic of a “well-ordered state” proper to this autocracy and the Prussian regime during the same period.Footnote ²³ However, debates within the commissions set up by Catherine, as well as the official laws adopted at the time, emphasized the importance of having an order not only from an administrative and police standpoint, but also an economic order. The 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. At the same time, for enlightened seigniors, moral and economic issues were not separate categories; the problems of poverty and moral order were closely connected.Footnote ²⁴ This met the state's interest in reducing social tensions (particularly after the Pugachev revolts in 1774–1775) and in preserving its pool of soldiers.Footnote ²⁵

For similar reasons, the instruktsiia granted considerable weight to village communities and elders.Footnote ²⁶ 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 was intended to promote mutual control by the actors and a certain amount of flexibility within the system. Unlike the traditional views of historians, under serfdom both manors and the commune were strong.Footnote ²⁷ Of course, this legal and social order did not exclude conflicts, or even unrests. Petitions were sent to landownersFootnote ²⁸ and uprisings occurred, and in some cases there were acts of violence against the bailiff or the landowner.Footnote ²⁹ 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.Footnote ³⁰

Most important to us, however, is the way in which conflicts were solved; despite their political importance, historians have overstressed the role of conflict while giving insufficient attention to the uses peasants made of village, estate, and state institutions. Rather than being in opposition, these institutions were complementary. The instruktsiia designated legal proceedings to be undertaken by the appropriate judicial authorities (peasant courts, estate litigation offices). Thus, Roman Voronotsov, the owner of one of the largest estates and a member of the Iveo (Free Imperial Economic Society), encouraged the introduction of peasant courts to settle disputes between peasants, as well as between peasants and bailiffs.Footnote ³¹ On large estates such as Sheremetev, conflicts were settled through a central office of all the estates, in accordance with clear-cut rules.Footnote ³² Potemkin used the same system in Krichev.

In other words, the tsarist elites' demand for institutional order coincided with the more strictly economic interests of the noble landowners, and the need for economic and social stability within the peasant commune. Landowners were interested in using these instructions not so much to specify how peasants should be squeezed, but rather to control and regulate the activities of the bailiffs.Footnote ³³ The bailiffs were either nobles themselves (in which case they were called upravitely), or free or unfree peasants (prikashchiki). Bailiffs were concerned with the organization of production, taxation, censuses, and the collection of any kind of economic and fiscal information. A complex and hierarchical system of surveillance was in place: bailiffs deployed overseers among the peasants to watch them. While bailiffs supervised such peasant overseers, they were themselves viewed with great suspicion by landlords, who feared both fraud and over-exploitation of peasants. To overcome this problem landlords developed a complex system of remuneration, primes, and fees related to bailiffs. Remuneration was usually paid in-kind, as a fixed rate of the harvest. Primes were of little importance, for innovations were rare. Consequently, fees played a great role. Bailiffs were responsible for harvest or quitrent failure, and this pushed them to transfer these losses to the peasants and thus to further “squeeze” them.

Indeed, in the 1760s and 1770s, in the eyes of noble landowners, tsarist leaders, and agronomists, bailiffs often were corrupt, appropriated a good portion of the lord's revenues for themselves, and exploited the peasants without encouraging them. All of this resulted in losses for the lord because it led to a lack of peasant incentive and motivation, and could even spark riots. The aim of the instruktsiia during the second half of the eighteenth century was therefore quite the opposite of the one put forward by most historians, with the exception of Confino and Melton: they were intended not so much to further squeeze peasants as to limit abuses by the bailiffs.

These changes were pushed forward by Pugachev's unrest, and by the influence of the Enlightenment and rational estate management.Footnote ³⁴ As agronomists, economists, and philosophers suggested, constraints alone were not enough to ensure efficient use of resources, particularly of labor. Enlightened landowners were especially sensitive to this argument, and Potemkin, as a supporter of “rational” management and as Catherine's advisor, warmly supported it.Footnote ³⁵

Economic forces also help explain the attention devoted to bailiffs. During the second half of the eighteenth century, and especially in its last quarter, agricultural prices rose by two and half times. This no doubt made forced labor more profitable than a quitrent system, but this alternative was possible only if the estates were efficiently supervised. Hence the landowners' increased interest in supervisors, and the multiplication of instruktsiia with their focus on labor organization and information circulation.

At the same time, estate activities were broadly redefined. Estate and notaries archives give account of this process.Footnote ³⁶ When noble landowners and tsarist officials talked about developing barshchina (labor services) and criticized obrok (quitrent), most of them blamed the problems on peasant relocation to the cities and peasant activities beyond work.Footnote ³⁷ Some linked the labor quitrent to such side-activities outside of the estate (otkhody).Footnote ³⁸

Nonetheless, it would be reductive to see landowner reorientations regarding factories merely as a desire for estate autarchy and market closing, and hence, as a regression of the Russian economy. For what the landowners really wanted was to take over the proto-industrial manufacturing sector. This accounts for their request, which Catherine granted, to prohibit any form of serfdom in factories owned by non-nobles, and it explains why it was to the landowners' advantage to have urban guilds control commercial and manufacturing activities, particularly those of peasant-merchants and merchants operating outside of guilds.Footnote ³⁹

Judicial records of the last quarter of the century reveal a sharp increase in litigations concerning peasants and workers, such as runaways, those unwilling to reintegrate into the estate, or those accused of seizing a part of the income due to the lord.Footnote ⁴⁰ Noble landowners entered the merchant and manufacturing networks in force and proto-industry became more rural-based.Footnote ⁴¹ This conclusion is compatible with the fact that, contrary to traditional economic arguments, historically the renewal of the barshchina was not synonymous with the autarchy of the estate and its withdrawal from the market, with the exception of the international market. Certainly wheat exports, which had been relatively insignificant until the mid-eighteenth century, continued to rise, comprising about 20 percent of total Russian exports by the end of that century.Footnote ⁴² However, against Kula's and Wallerstein's arguments, this growth did not take place at the expense of the local and national markets, which in fact were increasingly integrated into the international and European markets. At the same time, the growth of exports did not take place at the expense of the local and national markets, and indeed by 1760 the need for grain in the heartland created a rise in both the demand for and price of grain.Footnote ⁴³

Thus during the second half of the eighteenth century there was an increase in the integration of Russian local markets into a national market.Footnote ⁴⁴ The nobility's role in the expansion of rural trade is reflected in the fact that much of the rural expansion took place on gentry's estates. While in 1760 nobles' estates held 413 out of 1,143 rural fairs (36 percent), in 1800 they held 1,615 out of 3,180 (51 percent). These data clearly show (as Mironov correctly stated) that not only landlords, but also their peasants firmly entered the rural agrarian markets. Peasant activity in rural markets surpassed that of merchants and small urban traders.Footnote ⁴⁵ All this means that, contrary to traditional arguments, trade of estate produce increased with barshchina, which was therefore compatible not only with export and long-distance trade, but also with the rise of local and national markets.Footnote ⁴⁶

Along with this process came changes in social and institutional equilibrium. During the century's final quarter noble landowners sought to reverse the situation that had arisen during the century's first half, when city merchants acquired control over the grain markets in the city as well as the country. Now, by contrast, noble landowners were wresting back control over the sale of products from their estates and entering into urban trade circuits with firmness.Footnote ⁴⁷

These attitudes were dictated not only by the increasing interest in markets for agricultural produce, but also by proto-industrial activity. In this field, too, while 5 percent of private factories in European Russia belonged to nobles in the 1720s, the percentage rose to 20 percent in 1773. In 1725, 78 percent of industrial activity was located in cities, but this dropped to 60 percent in 1775–1778, and 58 percent in 1803.Footnote ⁴⁸ Krichev estate, which seriously increased its crafts, industrial, and proto-industrial activities, fully entered this trend.Footnote ⁴⁹ In other words, the rebirth of barshchina 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 businesses or markets in general. These sectors expanded and the competition between noble landowners and merchants was institutionalized before it became economic. The former wanted to enter into trade and industry at the expense of the merchants, and they succeeded thanks to the support of institutional measures such as the exclusion of “serfs” from factories managed by merchants and through the transformation of dowries.

Local studies show that the maximization of annual labor time often did not cause conflict between peasants and landlords. Sometimes this reflected their shared interests,Footnote ⁵⁰ and sometimes that landlords were unable to control peasant activities.Footnote ⁵¹ Tracy Dennison and Sheilagh Ogilvie have recently stressed the strong similarities between Russia and Bohemia as regards “serfdom” and social relations. In both situations peasant and seigniorial institutions interacted, and this strongly contributed to the social and economic dynamics in play.Footnote ⁵²

This was the situation when Bentham arrived in Russia. Bailiffs' activities on one hand, and the estate's multiple forms of activity (farming, manufacturing, proto-industry) on the other, were at the core of the ideas and practices at the estate level and within the cultural and political elites. Bentham suggested improving the system for controlling the bailiffs by adopting what several landlords (including Potemkin) were already doing: allowing mutual control between bailiffs and peasant community elders. Bentham also suggested integrating and coordinating skilled and unskilled workers and peasants. At first glance, this solution considered people exclusively in their professional and “functionalist” aspects (as overseers, workers, skilled or unskilled), and ignored that Russian serfs were quite distinct from British free workers. We need to assess this consideration, not only because, as we have seen, the legal status of Russian peasants was more complex than has usually been stated, but also because British workers had a particular legal status, too, and Bentham was fully aware of this.

CONTROLLING LABOR: PAUPERS, MASTERS, AND SERVANTS IN BRITAIN

According to Bentham, the difference between a servant and a slave is that for the latter the power of the master is unlimited and the slave has no rights. Of course, “Slavery is susceptible of many modifications and alleviations … there was a great difference between the condition of a slave at Athens and Lacedemon; there is still more between that of a Russian serf and a negro in the southern states of America. But whatever may be the limits as to the modes of exercising authority, if the obligation of service be unlimited in point of duration, I always call it slavery.”Footnote ⁵³ According to Bentham, it was not the condition but rather the duration of the obligation that constituted the real difference between free and unfree labor. The living conditions of a free worker were not necessarily better than those of a slave or a serf.

We have to avoid the temptation to translate this definition into today's categories. At the turn of the century, in Britain as in France and the United States, Adam Smith's argument according to which free labor was more productive than unfree labor was not fully accepted, even among “liberal” milieus. Quite the contrary, if, according to the utilitarian principles, one could show that the enslavement of a minority group increased the sum of total happiness, then a rationale for slavery was available.Footnote ⁵⁴ This argument was advanced among British as well as French Utilitarians, Jean-Baptiste Say being one of the most important examples of the latter.Footnote ⁵⁵

This attitude was all the more widespread for the fact that, at that time, the notion of “free” labor was not that to which we are now accustomed.Footnote ⁵⁶ Until the mid-nineteenth century, in Britain most “free” labor was actually “unfree.” Servants, apprentices, laborers, and artificers could be imprisoned until they were willing to return to their employers to complete the service they had agreed upon. The Statute of Laborers of 1350–1351 was enacted two years after the contract clause of the Ordinance of Laborers had been put in place, in 1349.Footnote ⁵⁷ The Statute of Artificers and Apprentices, adopted in 1562, controlled apprenticeship until 1814. It linked the control of apprenticeship, and therefore the relationship between master and apprentice, with the rules of competition, not only between apprentices and wage earners but also between employers. This was done because labor was viewed as a common resource of the community.Footnote ⁵⁸

From the 1720s through the end of the nineteenth century several laws were enacted to strengthen criminal sanctions for breaches of contracts, especially by workers. Penalties were also stipulated for those who refused a job.Footnote ⁵⁹ Recent quantitative and qualitative analyses show that between 1750 and 1875 the rules governing labor and their interpretation by the courts became more unfavorable toward wage earners.Footnote ⁶⁰ On the whole, work-related criminal sanctions were reinforced between 1720 and 1850. These reorientations were combined in the master and servant acts. The rules continued to define wage labor on the basis of domestic status. Wage earners were considered as domestics and were above all supposed to provide a service. It was no accident that, around the middle of the eighteenth century and during the 1820s, the category of servants included not only domestics strictly speaking, but also apprentices, journeymen, and wage earners.Footnote ⁶¹ The labor of servants was usually conceived as a master's property, and property consisted of the service rather than the body or person of the captive.Footnote ⁶²

Bentham fully adhered to this view. According to him, only by offering a service could a man find “happiness or security.”Footnote ⁶³ However, “The master alone is considered as possessing a property, of which the servant, in virtue of the service he is bound to render, is the object; but the servant, not less than the master, is spoken of possessing or being invested with a condition” (par. 1472). These relationships of dependence applied also to the superintendent, subordinate to the master but controller of the servant (par. 1516). That is to say, master and servant did not enter a contract between formally equal persons, but instead each carried a different legal status. Servants were legally considered much like children and married women: they were under the full authority of their master.Footnote ⁶⁴ Because of this, “The most flagrant species of breach of duty, and that which includes indeed every other, is that which consists in the servant's withdrawing himself from the place in which the duty should be performed” (par. 1518).

The legal status of labor provided the common ground upon which lay the organizational concerns of the firm (or the estate) and the poor relief system. In fact, insubordination or failure to comply with workshop production rules were presented as a breach of contract without notice, and as such were liable to criminal sanctions.Footnote ⁶⁵ Criminal control over labor was aimed at reducing both turnover and supervision costs.Footnote ⁶⁶ Limiting the turnover was also one of the main aims of the poor laws. This link is crucial in the broad history of labor and labor institutions in Britain as well as in the particular history we are dealing with here, that is, the origin of the Panopticon. In both cases, labor surveillance was at center stage. The “Old Poor Law” (revolved through a series of statutes culminating in the “Act of Elizabeth” of 1601) required individual parishes to relieve their own poor and set able-bodied paupers to work. By the mid-seventeenth century, many parishes were using the poor law to shelter both children and the aged in hospitals and to employ those capable of labor in workhouses or with local employers.Footnote ⁶⁷ Around the end of the seventeenth century a number of urban workhouses were set up intended for training poor children while profiting from pauper labor. In this context, the distinction between “vagrant” and “poor” was crucial; a poor person without employment or residence became a vagrant, and was submitted to penalties similar to those imposed on “ordinary workers” (that is, servants). Vagrancy described a condition in which able-bodied people without work or other means of subsistence were to be submitted to corporal punishment and returned to their parish.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the English poor law system was distinctive in Europe for the extent to which it embodied a nationally organized, comprehensive, and publicly regulated approach to relief.Footnote ⁶⁸ However, in the mid-eighteenth century the workhouses and poor laws began to be disparaged as inefficient and expansive. A parliamentary enquiry of 1776 revealed the existence of 1,970 workhouses holding a total of ninety thousand paupers. In most cases, pauper labor did not meet the general running costs of a workhouse. This was made all the more alarming when the estimated poor rates sharply increased from £700,000 in 1700 to £1,500,000 in 1776.Footnote ⁶⁹ Increasing enclosure of the countryside greatly contributed to this rise by cutting off access to the land.Footnote ⁷⁰

In 1782 a bill known as Gilbert's Act was adopted that allowed neighboring parishes to group together for poor law purposes and to set up poorhouses under a board of guardians. This occurred at just the time when first Samuel and then Jeremy Bentham moved to Russia, and Jeremy closely followed this debate. The Krichev experience confirmed for him the necessity of reforming both the workhouses and the poor laws. This also explains why critiques of poor laws and the “Panopticon” affairs emerged concurrently in public debates of the mid-1780s. Bentham and others argued that only the “indigent” and disabled should receive relief, while the “ordinary poor” had to settle down and find employment, precisely because labor was a common resource of the community.Footnote ⁷¹

At the same time, attempts were made to increase the efficiency of the entire system by rational organization, that is, by supervision of the workhouses. This made the boundary between “free” and “unfree” labor still more tenuous. Servants, wage earners, the poor, criminals, slaves, and serfs all had to respond to common general principles of utility and efficiency, “no matter how different, or even opposite the purpose: whether it be that of punishing the incorrigible, guarding the insane, reforming the vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle, maintaining the helpless, curing the sick, instructing the willing in any branch of industry, or training the race in the path of education: In a word, whether it be applied to the purposes of perpetual prisons in the room of death, or prisons for confinement before trial, or penitentiary houses, or houses of correction, or work-houses, or manufactories, or mad-house, or hospital, or schools.”Footnote ⁷²

During the 1770s and the 1780s antislavery activity intensified at the same time as a profound transformation in English attitudes toward the poor was taking place. They remained connected until, under pressures of widespread hostility toward both coerced labor and public relief, a new poor law was passed in 1834, and the apprenticeship system of slavery was introduced in the colonies in 1833–1834.Footnote ⁷³ Following the suggestions of Bentham and others since the 1780s, reformers made a sharp distinction between the “natural poor” and the indigent (unable to work), and only the latter were to benefit from poor relief. The same principles were applied to former slaves, who qualified as “vagrants” if they were not settled and employed.

To sum up, in Britain at century's turn, the barrier between “free” and “unfree” labor was movable and negotiable, and it was conceived through categories quite different from those of today. In intellectual and public debates, poor relief, the general condition of labor, and the question of slavery and serfdom were tightly linked. At stake was more than “efficiency” (and therefore, Adam Smith's and others' assertions that wage labor was more productive and efficient than forced labor); public order, vagrancy, and social welfare were equally important. It was not only slaves or the indentured that might be “runaways,” but also “serfs,” servants, or apprentices. All of them were subject to not only civil but also criminal sanctions. The material and living conditions of “free” workers and servants were not necessarily better than those of “serfs.”

The difference thus lay not in the abstract ahistorical notions of “freedom” and “unfreedom,” but rather in the degrees to which they were implemented on the ground. Particularly important were subaltern peoples' opportunities to use the law to improve their condition. English workers had a different legal status than did masters, and many fewer legal and economic entitlements. Russian serfs were not entirely deprived of legal rights, but as with British servants their rights were more limited than those of their masters, and the distance between the rights of subaltern peoples and those of their masters was much greater in Russia. A key question is: how much greater?

British servants did not have the same legal status as their masters, and their existence and legal rights were tightly linked to those of the indentured, the poor, the workhouse populations, and so forth. If the “wage earners” had not been servants, then indenture would have been impossible. Indentured persons, though considered free, could be sold by one master (owner) to another.Footnote ⁷⁴

In Russia, by contrast, as I have shown elsewhere,Footnote ⁷⁵ even after the legal code of 1649 (considered as the definitive enserfdom of the Russian peasantry), peasants who settled continued to sign a contract with a lord. These contracts reflected a different legal status for master and peasant that was a source of inequality, dependence, and a unique form of servitude. That the 1649 code defined the landowners but did not mention “serfs” did not mean that servitude did not exist; instead it allowed it more flexible characteristics. This was to play a crucial role in the workings and evolution of the Russian rural world. Within the framework provided by the code, landowners continued to authorize marriages outside the estateFootnote ⁷⁶ and the emigration of entire families, as tsarist authorities encouraged peasants to undertake further colonization.Footnote ⁷⁷ This difference was partially due to the fact that in Russia, unlike in Britain, masters, peasants, landlords, and bailiffs all received their rights from the tsar.Footnote ⁷⁸ The emperor had power to take away what he had granted, and this explains how, much later, the state could do away with “serfdom,” in an extension of its ongoing concerns about labor control.Footnote ⁷⁹

This means that differences in labor control and labor legal rights in Britain and Russia were a matter not of opposite notions, but of degrees. Russia remained at one extreme of a common spectrum and not “beyond the line.” With this in mind, I now turn to explain the fate Bentham's ideas on labor organization in the two countries.

THE FATE OF BENTHAM'S PANOPTICON: LABOR ORGANIZATION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN AND RUSSIA

The Bentham brothers' plan to build a Panopticon in Krichev was met with favor by Potemkin, who was an enthusiast for ideas of labor optimization through divisions of labor and enhanced supervision. This kind of “westernizing” utopia, born from a mix of coercion, science, and control, was a cornerstone of the reform plans of Catherine and her close collaborators. One of the latter was Potemkin, and another, Mikhail Tatishchev, had been in close contact with the Bentham brothers in London in the late 1760s while he was involved in drafting Catherine's Nakaz (Instruction) for the Legislative Commission, and her new legal code.Footnote ⁸⁰ But while Bentham and his brother were originally motivated by a goal of controlling English foremen, Potemkin and the other Russian reformers came to see the project as a way to control serfs. The ambition to combine the division of labor with surveillance had a profound influence on one of the Bentham brothers' intimates in Russia, Nikolai Mordvinov.Footnote ⁸¹

Nonetheless, the shared project of the Bentham brothers and Potemkin—to build a Panopticon on Potemkin's estate—fell through because he sold the estate in 1787, which led Jeremy to return to England. Jeremy's contribution was to generalize his brother's project,Footnote ⁸² making it applicable outside of Russia and incorporating it into his general approach to the organization of labor. He extended the idea of an office of labor surveillance, first to prisons, then to schools, and finally to hospitals—to all situations where the problem of supervision arose.Footnote ⁸³

Jeremy Bentham's starting point, to be sure, was an idea that resonated powerfully with his sense of morality: that it was better to put prisoners to work than let them vegetate, and that this approach would facilitate their progressive reintegration into society. Yet he could not resist straying from this rationale and returning to the utilitarian calculation that new forms of surveillance and organization could and should make prison labor profitable.Footnote ⁸⁴ From there, it was but a short step to start thinking about ways to maximize prisoner productivity. He proposed first of all to rationalize their diet: they should not become malnourished or else their productivity would diminish. Yet he thought mostly in terms of amounts, and was not embarrassed to suggest that prisoners be given spoiled food mixed with their fresh food (within reasonable limits, to avoid abrupt drops in labor productivity).Footnote ⁸⁵ He seemed excited at the thought that prisoners could be made to work fifteen hours and more without their wanting to leave their jobs, as wage laborers did.

Bentham was not exceptional for advancing these ideas. For example, his friend Admiral Jonas Hanway, founder of the Magdalene Hospital, applied the same principles. He transformed the prison into a place of highly productive forced labor, and then exported that model to the work world at large. The link with the militarization of labor is clear when we recall, for example, Bentham's reflections on the organization of the army, or Hanway's on the criteria for recruiting children to the navy.Footnote ⁸⁶ To discipline wage labor in ways similar to forced labor was thus a widespread goal in nineteenth-century Britain, and the Panopticon was only one of many methods that were proposed.

It is here that the gap between Britain and Russia narrows. When Samuel and then Jeremy went to Russia, the question of labor surveillance was being discussed in relation to not only rural estates, but also, as in Britain in these same years, to poor relief. Before the reign of Catherine the Great, the aged and infirm were supported in parish almshouses and able-bodied vagrants were frequently conscripted to factories, mines, or the military. In 1775, an edict created Offices of Public Welfare (Prikazy obshchestvennogo prizreniia) and proposed creating workhouses under the authority of local police to punish the lazy and enable the needy to support themselves. The first workhouse (Rabotnyi dom) was built in Moscow in 1782, the same year Samuel Bentham moved to Siberia and the Gilbert's Act was adopted in Britain. This was the culmination of a broader movement started in Russia in the mid-1770s, which coupled Catherine's ambition of urbanization and modernization with police control over migrants, and with “Russian pity.”Footnote ⁸⁷ This movement received a boost from Bentham's Panopticon theory. He returned to Russia in 1806 and convinced Alexander I to build a “Panopticon School of Arts” in St. Petersburg.Footnote ⁸⁸ In the years that followed the tsar ordered the construction of a number of such buildings devoted to administration and education.Footnote ⁸⁹ At the same time, with the tsar's encouragement more and more of Bentham's works were translated into Russian. However, in Russia as in Europe, the end of the Napoleonic Wars brought a reaction against the reformers. Various Russian authors denounced the conditions of the workers in Europe and showed that the landowners treated and fed their serfs much as they did their horses.Footnote ⁹⁰

At least at this level of generality, the Russian leaders' sense of distance from Bentham was shared by almost all nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals and economists, who relentlessly criticized a utilitarianism that they contrasted with Russian empathy and communal principles. The interests of the intellectuals and the autocracy converged in affirming a Russian uniqueness that they identified with both the spirit of community and the rejection of consumerism and hedonism.

While Bentham's utilitarian ideas met with a mixed reception, his theories on prisons and labor discipline found enthusiastic adherents among some “reformers,” including Nikolai Mordvinov, friend of Samuel Bentham and president of the Free Economic Society between 1823 and 1840. Mordvinov had known the Bentham brothers since the 1780s, and their influence was mutual. He was one of those noble landowners who, since the 1780s, had issued more and more written instruktsii to improve control over their estates, especially over the labor of their serfs. Mordvinov's aims and opinions were brought to Bentham's attention, and conversely Mordvinov was deeply influenced by Bentham's ideas and his system of modeling the division of labor on a well-organized prison. In 1807 Samuel Bentham was back in Russia, and he brought Mordvinov writings by his brother, who at that time considered Samuel one of his best disciples.Footnote ⁹¹ After the Napoleonic Wars, in 1818–1819, it was Mordvinov's turn to go to England and present Jeremy with his draft project for a representative assembly in Russia.Footnote ⁹² At this time Mordvinov insisted, like Bentham, that more surveillance and control over the serfs was necessary to boost productivity.Footnote ⁹³

Finally, Mordvinov intervened in the reform of the exile system, implemented in 1822. As Andrew Gent has recently shown, there was an intersection of the system of punishment, exile to Siberia, and colonization.Footnote ⁹⁴ However, following my argument, and as the involvement of Mordvinov testifies, this issue would have not been possible without the experiences of Samuel Bentham in Siberia, the circulation of western ideas on colonization, and their link with Benthams' utopia. In this light it is surprising, and interesting from a historiographical perspective, to read later, enthusiastic praise for Mordvinov, that “great liberal” who has supposedly been unjustly forgotten.Footnote ⁹⁵

This approach was opposite of that which had been advocated by Russian reformers and economists at the beginning of the century, who were inspired by Smith and his invisible hand to show that free labor was more profitable than serfdom. According to Mordvinov, future productivity gains were unlikely to be achieved through greater freedom, for which he said the serfs were not ready, but rather through stricter supervision and organization of their work. The inspiration came from Bentham rather than Jean-Baptiste Say. This was the context in which the new military colonies attempted to reconcile serfdom with new agricultural methods, and military management with settlement on the land. From the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the mid-1830s, top leaders as well as many economists and agronomists in Russia supported the colonies, which they believed capable of reconciling order and productivity, liberty and coercion. This experiment, at once economic, political, and social, affected 750,000 people, but the results were meager, and the military colonies were abandoned after being shaken by riots in the early 1830s.Footnote ⁹⁶

This did not stop noble proprietors from putting into practice measures advocated by agronomists, but with coercive methods. We have already seen the example of Mordvinov, and a similar case was that of Pavel Kiselev, the minister of state domains, who imposed corporal punishments and fines on peasants who resisted changes in the organization of labor or the extension of the potato fields that figured in Kiselev's plans as a protection against future bad harvests. His actions sparked peasant riots that destroyed the fields.Footnote ⁹⁷ However, though this approach of forcibly introducing changes into the organization of agricultural labor was dominant, it was not universal, and scholars have shown that landowners in fact achieved varying degrees of success in introducing new agricultural methods.Footnote ⁹⁸ Many of their findings, regarding both the microeconomic level of the estate and the regional level, highlight the rising productivity of noble estates in the first half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁹⁹ In general, the noble landlords' “instructions” issued with increasing frequency from the last quarter of the eighteenth century addressed the same concerns as did Bentham: how to improve labor organization by giving greater responsibility to supervisors rather than peasants.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

We can thus conclude that the relationship between coercion and reform, free labor and forced labor, was no less complex in Russia than in the west. In Europe, Bentham inspired those who wished to “rationalize” society through supervised labor, but in Russia not everyone followed his approach, for negotiated reforms did indeed take place, most notably at some noble estates. This helps to explain the conclusion drawn by recent economic historiographers: whether in agriculture, proto-industry, or industry proper, the data show that serfdom was not synonymous with either demographic declineFootnote ¹⁰¹ or arrested economic or technological development.Footnote ¹⁰² Economic growth in the first half of the nineteenth century—its momentum as well as its limitations—rested on an institutional structure, the laws of serfdom, which formed not only a system of constraint but also a basis for mutual negotiation.Footnote ¹⁰³