Serfdom and Slavery

Studies in Legal Bondage

M. L. Bush

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780582291850
• eBook ISBN: 9781317887478
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Serfdom and Slavery compares the two forms of legal servitude in cultures in Western civilization, in Europe and the New World from ancient times to the modern period. Within a tightly controlled framework of general contextual chapters followed by specific case studies, a distinguished team of scholars offers 17 specially written essays that illuminate the nature, development, impact and termination of serfdom and slavery in European society. While the case studies range form classical Greece to early modern Brandenburg, and from medieval England to nineteenth-century Russia, the volume as a whole is closely integrated. It makes an important contribution to a topic of increasing international interest.

Part One

Comparative studies of serfdom and slavery

Chapter One

Introduction

Michael Bush

University of Manchester

Historically, the two most prevalent types of legal bondage were serfdom and chattel slavery. This book examines the variety of forms that they adopted, along with the problems of definition that this sets; the processes of creation, development, survival and abolition both underwent; and their economic, social and political impact. Operating within the ancient, medieval and modern worlds, the book uses comparative overview, thematic analysis and illustrative case study to accomplish its task.

Both serfdom and slavery were defined by law. As such, they are regarded as forms of extra-economic coercion. But what does this reveal about their true nature? This is the vital question that the book seeks to answer. The conclusion is: very little. The differences evident between slavery and serfdom; the different forms in which slavery or serfdom existed; the variety of slave and serf systems that emerged: all suggest that the character and condition of both were determined in reality by a wide range of other factors, notably population density, the nature of employment, the opportunities for commercial production, the capacity for protest and the power of custom. Legally defined as the property of lords and masters, the assumption could be readily made that slaves and serfs were typically victims of exploitation; but this overlooks the two-way nature of the relationship between owner and owned and ignores the modus vivendi the two parties could reach by respecting customary rights and by agreeing to negotiate change.

Serfdom and slavery were found generally acceptable before 1750, but a century later both were thought ripe for rejection. Confronted by moral outrage, on the grounds that they were evil, or by rational repudiation, on the grounds that as forms of labour they were inefficient, each underwent abolition. The process of disposal culminated in the 1860s when, within the same decade, Russian serfdom and American slavery were prohibited by law (see chapter by Kolchin). Thereafter, legal bondage was transformed rather than wiped out. By the twentieth century, it no longer consisted predominantly of serfdom and slavery, but instead was comprised of indentured service, the enforced labour of prison or concentration camp, and debt bondage (see chapters by Turley, Temperley, Engerman).

Slavery and serfdom had much in common: as forms of coerced, wageless labour (Engerman); as systems of human ownership; as expressions of dishonour and humiliation; as widely employed means of pre-capitalist, commercial production. But the elemental character of each resides in the basic differences between them. The slave was more appropriately defined as the chattel of his master (Rihll, Blackburn, Engerman). Serfs, in contrast, belonged not only to their lords but also to some prince. Whereas the obligations owed by slaves were monopolized by their masters, serfs, in the manner of freemen, had duties to the state. Obliged to pay taxes and to provide military service, they acquired something the slave signally lacked: a well-established personal identity in the law.

Slaves were usually aliens, imported rather than indigenous, and racially or ethnically different from their masters. Typically, they were the offspring of non-slaves, often captured by raiders or taken in battle, and, in most cases, uprooted for ever from their homeland (Blackburn, Engerman). Central to slavery was transportation and a trade in human beings (Engerman, Rihll). The high mortality of slaves, chiefly from diseases to which they had, as newcomers, little immunity, meant that the recruitment of fresh slaves was a necessity (Engerman). Serfs, in contrast, were home-grown, self-reproducing and generational. They were not racially or ethnically different from the rest of society. Normally, they were the offspring of serfs and therefore base-born. Normally, they were buried where they were born. They entered captivity, the basic condition of the slave, only as a result of fleeing the estate. The outcome of capture was a return to the birth-place, not the natal alienation of the slave (Blackburn). As a result, whereas slaves tended to exist beyond the society they had to serve – separated from it not only by chattel status but also by culture – the serf was, as a native, socially integrated (Engerman).

Regarded as property, it was assumed that the slave would be owned rather than owner. All their possessions were their master’s; as was most of their labour (Blackburn). In contrast, serfs normally held property in their own right. Most medieval serfs, and the Untertanen of modern Brandenburg, the Austrian Territories and Bohemia, were serfs by virtue of the property they held (Bush). Serfs, moreover, exercised some control of their own labour: whereas slaves worked full-time for their masters, serfs worked only part-time for their lords (Engerman). Both the property and labour rights of serfs rested upon the possession of a smallholding. Slaves were frequently granted some land to grow foodstuffs for their own consumption (Blackburn), but little more than garden plots (Engerman). These plots were no equivalent of the small farm typically worked by serfs, because of their minuteness and the little amount of the working day allowed for their cultivation. To farm their own land, serfs, as a rule, were allocated several days in the week. The labour they owed the lord was the rent, or part of the rent, for the smallholding (Hagen); and conversely, the smallholding was the payment the lord made to serfs, originally for the labour they provided in cultivating his demesne and to enable them, in the absence of wages, to raise the taxes required of them by the government (Engerman, Bush). This was not the case with slaves. Reciprocity was not really a part of the slave-master relationship.

Slaves were officially perceived as individual things. In contrast, serfs were officially accepted not only as persons but also as families (Engerman). Slaves were intrinsically landless labourers; serfs were usually peasants. As producers, slaves worked in gangs; serfs in family teams (Engerman). Slaves often lived in their master’s household or in dormitories; serfs usually lived in their own homes (Engerman). Allowed smallholdings with proprietorial rights attached, which defined the obligations owed and imparted tenurial security, serfs were in this manner given some incentive to accept their condition. In contrast, slaves were essentially objects of force. This meant that, when engaged in large-scale production, slavery was highly dependent upon a superstructure of physical control (Blackburn) which, along with the price paid for new slaves, could make the operation very costly. In contrast, serf production could be relatively cheap, since serf communities did not normally need restocking and, in being self-supportive, required the minimum of management. Yet land had to be set aside for the serfs’ private use, and the competing demands of demesne and tenure meant that, as a source of labour for commercial farming, serfdom was inferior to slavery in competence and reliability. Finally, the rights of slaves remained a stunted growth, qualifying them for baptism and legal protection against life-and-limb punishment but offering virtually no safeguard against the master’s arbitrariness (Blackburn). The rights of serfs, on the other hand, eventually became considerable because lords, in the absence of a system of repression, had to seek their cooperation by permitting the creation of custom and showing it respect; and also because governments, having a fiscal and military incentive to protect serfs against the extremes of lordly exploitation, were therefore inclined to produce regulations restricting what the lord could exact from the subjects they both ruled (Hagen, Bush).

Typically, slaves followed a wide range of occupations, many of them of a service nature and therefore non-economic and divorced from production (Phillips, Blackburn); and, because of the prevalence of domestic slavery and, within the history of slavery, the rarity of plantation slavery, slaves were as much urban as rural (Phillips). In contrast, serfs were typically more restricted in occupation, with most of them working the land and resident in the countryside (Bush).

Historically, serfdom and slavery tended to be alternative systems of production, with serfdom excluded by a flourishing system of slave production and emerging as slavery went into decline. On the other hand, there was a great deal of overlap between serf and slave societies, on account of the pervasiveness of domestic slavery and the practice of granting smallholdings to favoured slaves (Phillips). As systems of production, both were a response to a shortage of labour. But in the history of slavery, the recruitment of new slaves, either by conquest or purchase, was vital for maintaining it as a system of production; in contrast, for preserving serfdom, the recruitment of new serfs was unimportant (Engerman). Furthermore, whereas a plenitude of slaves always upheld the system of slavery, a plenitude of serfs could bring it to an end: for example, through persuading lords to opt for waged labour in the early nineteenth century (Bush, Hagen). As a system of production, slavery developed (both in Ancient Rome and in the New World) in the absence of a sufficient peasantry (Phillips); this was clearly not so with serfdom which derived both from the subjection of an existing peasantry as well as from the settlement of slaves as peasants on the land (Davies, Bush). Both systems provided a solution to the problems created by an absence of waged labour or an unwillingness to pay wages. In this respect, they sprang from an ingrained anti-capitalist attitude, traditionally held towards production in particular, not only by lords but also by a peasant-orientated or hunter-gatherer workforce. Both serfdom and slavery therefore eventually suffered from the general appreciation of capitalist production, and of the free waged labour associated with it, that became common from the late eighteenth century (Turley, Kolchin, Engerman).

The significance of serfdom and slavery is difficult to assess simply because of the variety of serf and slave regimes in existence. When either was entrenched as the basic means of commercial agriculture, its importance was overwhelming; so much so that it is possible to talk of serf and slave societies. But how often did this occur? Many societies were more adequately described as societies with slaves or societies with serfs: that is, societies in which these forms of bondage were an incidental and superficial feature, rather than an integral part of the economy or state. In the history of slavery, the ‘true’ slave societies were arguably confined to Ancient Rome and the Americas (Phillips); in the history of serfdom, serf societies came into their own in early modern Central and Eastern Europe but perhaps at no other time (Bush).

Economically and socially, slavery and serfdom served the same purpose, by providing unfree, unwaged labour and by upholding a concept of popular honour which distinguished the free, no matter how ordinary and poor, from the unfree. But politically they tended to be somewhat different, since slaves were usually beyond the pale of the state; whereas serfdom, in providing governments with vital fiscal and military supplies and a means of privatizing public authority, was an essential part of the political system, in both the medieval West and the modern East. However, it would be misleading to regard slavery as totally divorced from politics. Certain Islamic societies, notably the Ottoman Turks, operated a system of state slavery whereby the ruler’s army was manned by men legally defined as slaves (Phillips, Blackburn). And slave tax officials were not unknown (Blackburn). Moreover, slavery could be said to have had some political effect in the development of democracy in Ancient Greece and in the British American colonies (Rihll, Blackburn, Turley), and in the extent to which the political decision to end slavery was a response to slave resistance (Turley, Kolchin).

Their joint effect, economically, was to delay the development of a capitalist agriculture. Like peasant sharecropping, serfdom and slavery provided alternative and socially preferable means of commercial production. On the other hand, they promoted large-scale commercial farming in societies where various factors, such as a lack of suitable labour or a primitive money economy, ruled out capitalist production. And arguably the profits they created, and the services that developed to make them operable, promoted non-productive forms of capitalism, notably merchant and finance capitalism.

Socially, their joint effect was to give the free poor, or the privileged unfree, a sense of honour and social distinction; and thus to extend downwards an appreciation of formal hierarchy that rested upon not simply deference but also self-benefit. Moreover, the process of urbanization in modern Europe, pre-industrial and industrial, owed something to the productive capacity of serfdom (in grain) and slavery (in cotton), as well as to the strained relations in the countryside that persuaded lords to live in town.

Politically, their joint effect was to ensure that large numbers of inhabitants should be removed from the direct responsibility of the government, the rule of slaves and serfs being, wholly in the case of slaves and partially in the case of serfs, exercised by their lords and masters.

In each case, it could be said that the gains made from emancipation were psychological, not economic; and the poverty both suffered at the time of emancipation was not generally relieved by it (Kolchin). This was certainly true of the emancipations of the nineteenth century. Ordered by governments and freeing all slaves and serfs at a stroke, they left the freed in the same economic plight that they had suffered when unfree. But it was not true of the piecemeal emancipation of slaves that attended the fall of the Roman Empire or the piecemeal emancipation of serfs that occurred in the West between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Slavery

Over the space of 2,500 years a wide range of slave systems came into being: in the New World of the Americas and the Caribbean; in classical and medieval Europe; in Africa, India and the Arab world generally. Slavery came in three basic forms: domestic slavery; gang slavery; and state service slavery (Phillips, Blackburn). The first form consisted of slaves living, in small numbers, in the master’s house. They worked usually as household servants but occasionally as craftsmen or shopkeepers in household-based businesses (Phillips, Rihll, Saller, Turley, Blackburn). This was easily the most pervasive form of slavery. The second consisted of slaves living, in large numbers, in barracks and working principally on plantations but sometimes down mines (Phillips, Temperley, Blackburn). It was largely confined to Ancient Rome, the Deep South, Brazil and the Caribbean and therefore could not be regarded as all that common (Phillips, Blackburn). The third comprised slaves owned by the state and serving it as civil servants, soldiers or concubines. Found chiefly in Islamic states, and predominantly in a military capacity (Blackburn, Phillips), it was, overall, rarer than gang slavery. Slavery, then, was a source of service as well as of production, and not only domestic service, for on occasions it could form part of the machinery of government.

New World plantation slavery, Islamic state service slavery and the slave practices of the ancient world (e.g. Rihll, Phillips) all relied upon the enslavement of strangers. These were acquired by capture or sale and regularly imported to meet the needs of the economy, society or state. A great deal of modern slavery, moreover, was practised in colonies abroad rather than at home. But, over the centuries, there was a considerable amount of indigenous slavery, notably in Africa and India, with people native to a region serving others native to it as slaves (Turley, Temperley).

Gang slavery, as it operated on the plantations of the Deep South, the Caribbean and Brazil, would suggest that enslavement was for ever, with no real chance to attain freedom except by flight. But slavery was frequently a temporary condition (for example, in Ancient Rome, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the northern United States and the Portuguese and Spanish empires of Latin America), with manumission granted to the slave, or at least the offspring (Morris, Phillips). Consequently, in some societies, slavery could be regarded as a process of stranger assimilation (Phillips). The reward of liberation was especially given to service slavery, as opposed to production slavery (Phillips, Saller, Morris, Turley). No matter what, slavery was hardly a generational matter. Because of the high mortality associated with production slavery and the high rate of emancipation associated with service slavery, the slave condition, although legally defined as ‘in the blood’, tended to last no more than a lifetime, ensuring that both the parents and offspring of a slave would be free.

Gang slavery was undoubtedly harsh; but domestic slavery was frequently mild, largely because of the personal friendships that developed between the master’s family and the slaves attending it (Phillips, Saller, Turley). Neither form, however, offered any safeguard against the brutality of masters and overseers. Furthermore, within the household a firm distinction separated the master’s family from his slaves, no matter how close and familiar the relationship. This distinction could be made explicit in forms of address; in symbolic behaviour such as whipping and sexual subjection; and in public rituals (e.g. Saller).

Slavery was often no more than a legal construct, with only a change in the law required for its obliteration; but it could also be so imbedded in society that its legal prohibition made no difference to practice (Temperley, Turley). The former was the case in the Americas and the Caribbean; the latter, in much of India and Africa.

The possession of slaves served a variety of purposes: usually it was a source of prestige and honour (Saller); sometimes, a capital asset or a means of productive wealth (Phillips); occasionally, a source of state power (Blackburn). The independent ethos to which the free subscribed was often shaped by the presence of slaves (Rihll). Responsible for the emergence and duration of slavery, however, was not simply its usefulness and the demand this created for slaves. The use of slaves could stem simply from an abundant supply. Thus, slavery developed originally in Ancient Greece as a result of expeditions of conquest and the creation of colonies, and in response to the practice of taking prisoners alive and the establishmen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part One: Comparative studies of serfdom and slavery
• Part Two: Themes and case studies on slavery
• Part Three: Themes and case studies on serfdom
• Notes on contributors
• Index