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Steven Nafziger - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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The slow road from Serfdom : Labor coercion and long-run development in the former Russian Empire
The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2021Co-Authors: Johannes C. Buggle, Steven NafzigerAbstract:This paper examines the long-run economic consequences of Russian Serfdom. Employing data on the intensity of labor coercion just prior to emancipation in 1861, we document that a 25 percentage poi...
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The slow road from Serfdom : Labor coercion and long-run development in the former Russian Empire
2018Co-Authors: Johannes C. Buggle, Steven NafzigerAbstract:This paper examines the long-run economic consequences of Russian Serfdom. Employing data on the intensity of labor coercion at the district level in just prior to emancipation in 1861, we document that a greater legacy of Serfdom is associated with lower economic well-being today. Our estimates imply that increasing historical Serfdom by 25 percentage points reduces household expenditure today by up to 17%. The analysis of different types of labor coercion reveals substantial heterogeneity in the long-run effects of Serfdom. Furthermore, we document persistence of economic development measured by city populations over the period 1800 - 2002 in cross-sectional regressions and panel estimations. Exploring mechanisms, our results suggest that the effect of Serfdom on urbanization in Imperial Russia was perpetuated in the Soviet period, with negative implications for structural change, the spatial distribution and productivity of firms, and human capital investment.
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Long-Run Consequences of Labor Coercion: Evidence from Russian Serfdom
2016Co-Authors: Johannes C. Buggle, Steven NafzigerAbstract:This paper examines the long-run consequences of Russian Serfdom. We use novel data measuring the intensity of labor coercion at the district level in 1861. Our results show that a greater legacy of Serfdom is associated with lower economic well-being today. We apply an IV strategy that exploits the transfer of serfs from monastic lands in 1764 to establish causality. Exploring mechanisms, we find a positive correlation between the earlier experience of Serfdom and pre-Soviet urbanization and land inequality, with negative implications for human capital investment and agglomeration over the long-run.
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Russian Serfdom, Emancipation, and Land Inequality: New Evidence
2013Co-Authors: Steven NafzigerAbstract:Serfdom is often viewed as a major institutional constraint on the economic development of Tsarist Russia, one that persisted well after emancipation occurred in 1861 through the ways that property rights were transferred to the peasantry. However, scholars have generally asserted this causal relationship with few facts in hand. This paper introduces a variety of newly collected data, covering European Russia at the district (uezd) level, to describe Serfdom, emancipation, and the subsequent evolution of land holdings among the rural population into the 20th century. A series of simple empirical exercises describes several important ways that the institution of Serfdom varied across European Russia; outlines how the emancipation reforms differentially affected the minority of privately owned serfs relative to the majority of other types of peasants; and connects these differences to long-run variation in land ownership, obligations, and inequality. The evidence explored in this paper constitutes the groundwork for considering the possible channels linking the demise of Serfdom to Russia's slow pace of economic growth prior to the Bolshevik Revolution.
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Serfdom, Emancipation, and Off-farm Labour Mobility in Tsarist Russia
Economic History of Developing Regions, 2012Co-Authors: Steven NafzigerAbstract:ABSTRACT Serfdom is the most well known institutional feature of Russia under the Tsars, but its empirical implications for growth and development have rarely been explored. This paper investigates whether the legacy of Serfdom affected labour mobility in the Russian countryside after Emancipation in 1861. I detail the structure of the reforms that ended Serfdom and transferred property to the former serfs, and show that these measures did result in smaller land endowments, higher obligation levels, and possibly stronger communal restrictions than other groups of peasants faced in the post-Emancipation period. Drawing on a unique panel dataset of representative villages in Moscow province, I show how these differences were related to the scope of mobility out of agriculture between former serf and non-serf villages after 1861. Although the results suggest some persistence of constraints on labour mobility among former serfs, the observable differences in off-farm labour market activity largely disappear b...
Tracy Dennison - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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the institutional framework of russian Serfdom
Cambridge Books, 2014Co-Authors: Tracy DennisonAbstract:Russian rural history has long been based on a 'Peasant Myth', originating with nineteenth-century Romantics and still accepted by many historians today. In this book, Tracy Dennison shows how Russian society looked from below, and finds nothing like the collective, redistributive and market-averse behaviour often attributed to Russian peasants. On the contrary, the Russian rural population was as integrated into regional and even national markets as many of its west European counterparts. Serfdom was a loose garment that enabled different landlords to shape economic institutions, especially property rights, in widely diverse ways. Highly coercive and backward regimes on some landlords' estates existed side-by-side with surprisingly liberal approximations to a rule of law. This book paints a vivid and colourful picture of the everyday reality of rural Russia before the 1861 abolition of Serfdom.
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The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom
2011Co-Authors: Tracy DennisonAbstract:1. Why is Russia different? Culture, geography, institutions 2. Voshchazhnikovo: a microcosm of nineteenth-century Russia 3. Household structure and family economy 4. The rural commune 5. Land and property markets 6. Labour markets 7. Credit and savings 8. Retail markets and consumption 9. The institutional framework of Russian Serfdom.
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did Serfdom matter russian rural society 1750 1860
Historical Research, 2006Co-Authors: Tracy DennisonAbstract:Historians have long assumed that the effects of Serfdom on rural economies were uniformly negative. More recently, however, a revisionist view has emerged, which portrays Serfdom as having had little or no effect on peasants’ social and economic behaviour. This article examines these theories, using archival material for one particular serf estate in central Russia, during the period 1750–1860. The evidence indicates that the effects of Serfdom were not as straightforward as either view suggests. While certain aspects of Serfdom on this estate – a system of property rights and contract enforcement – were beneficial to its inhabitants, these were not integrated into any larger legal framework, and their benefits were thus prevented from spilling over to the rural economy at large.
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Did Serfdom matter? Russian rural society, 1750–1860*
Historical Research, 2006Co-Authors: Tracy DennisonAbstract:Historians have long assumed that the effects of Serfdom on rural economies were uniformly negative. More recently, however, a revisionist view has emerged, which portrays Serfdom as having had little or no effect on peasants’ social and economic behaviour. This article examines these theories, using archival material for one particular serf estate in central Russia, during the period 1750–1860. The evidence indicates that the effects of Serfdom were not as straightforward as either view suggests. While certain aspects of Serfdom on this estate – a system of property rights and contract enforcement – were beneficial to its inhabitants, these were not integrated into any larger legal framework, and their benefits were thus prevented from spilling over to the rural economy at large.
Alessandro Stanziani - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Labour regime and Labour Mobility from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century”
2019Co-Authors: Alessandro StanzianiAbstract:Why coercion? Many economists and economic historians follow Domar's model according to which labour coercion is likely to develop when labour is scarce compared to land. This model was based largely on Russian and medieval European Serfdom, but it has been since used to describe several other contexts, not only in Russia, Africa and Asia, but also in Britain and the US as well. Such models are interesting not so much for what they explain but for what they fail to explain. 1 Thus, Domar's model suggests that slavery and Serfdom were established when labour was scarce; in contrast, Habakkuk, Postan, North and Thomas stressed that in Western Europe, scarcity of labour accounts not for the strength but for the decline of Serfdom and resulting capital intensification. In the first case, labour scarcity led to coercion, in the second it led to increased wages and hence to capital intensification. 2 1 Evsey D.
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russian Serfdom a reappraisal
Ab Imperio, 2014Co-Authors: Alessandro StanzianiAbstract:The article argues that the status and conditions of Russian peasants before the abolition of Serfdom were more fluid than is usually held. The author maintains that Serfdom-based agriculture sustained a considerable rate of economic growth before 1861. A more nuanced look into the institution of Serfdom reveals the complex economic and legal relationships in the preemancipation Russian Empire and the need to escape classical simplified definitions of Serfdom. The author also asserts that the abolition of Serfdom in 1861 did not have an immediate effect. Important constraints on peasant labor persisted well after that date, albeit less severe than before. These vestiges of Serfdom did not hamper escalated economic growth. The author thus concludes that economic growth can occur without democracy and full rights, even under a system of coerced labor. Резюме: Автор статьи доказывает, что правовой статус и условия жизни российских крестьян до отмены крепостного права были гораздо более разнообразными, чем принято считать. Автор также утверждает, что крепостное сельское хозяйство поддерживало значительный уровень экономического роста до 1861 г. Более нюансированный подход к институту крепостного права открывает сложное переплетение эконо-мических и правовых отношений в дореформенной Российской импе-рии, заставляя отказаться от классических упрощенных определений крепостничества. Автор также утверждает, что отмена крепостного права в 1861 г. не имела немедленного эффекта. Важные ограничения крестьянского труда сохранялись и после этой даты, хотя и не такие суровые как прежде. Эти пережитки крепостничества не препятство-вали все ускоряющемуся экономическому росту. На этом основании автор делает вывод о том, что экономический рост может происходить вне демократической системы и полноправия, даже в условиях при-нудительного труда.
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Rights and Bondage in Russian Serfdom
Labour Coercion and Economic Growth in Eurasia 17th-20th Centuries, 2013Co-Authors: Alessandro StanzianiAbstract:This chapter shows that in Russia, in the decades preceding the official abolition of Serfdom, a quarter of the whole Russian peasantry changed their legal status and became state peasant, free artisan, and free worker. It shows that shifts in the legal status of the peasantry before 1861 were not a purely administrative act, but they accomplished through judicial and/or administrative procedures. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, conflicts between peasants, peasant-workers and estate owners on both peasants' obligations and owners' titles of ownership were on the agenda of the courts. Between 1833 and 1858, the Senate recorded 15,153 cases of illegal ownership and "illegal bondage", whereas the provincial courts dealt with 22,000 cases of this type. Conscription was the most important source of administrative change of the legal status. Once a conscript had completed his military service, he could move about freely and settle in the city. Keywords:army; bondage; legal rights; Russian peasantry; Russian Serfdom
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Revisiting Russian Serfdom: Bonded Peasants and Market Dynamics, 1600s–1800s
International Labor and Working-class History, 2010Co-Authors: Alessandro StanzianiAbstract:The notion of the “second Serfdom†has to be revisited. I claim that the introduction, the evolution, and the abolition of Serfdom in Russia should be seen as a long-term process, beginning no later than the late sixteenth century and ending at the eve of the First World War. In particular, I show that Serfdom was never officially institutionalized in Russia and that the rules usually evoked to justify this argument actually were not meant to “bind†the peasantry but to distinguish noble estate owners from state-service nobles and “bourgeois.†Contrary to what has been argued by Witold Kula and Immanuel Wallerstein, the rise of capitalism in the West did not exploit the rise of Serfdom in the East, but both East and West were part of the same global wave of commercialization, protoindustrialization, and industrialization.
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revisiting russian Serfdom bonded peasants and market dynamics 1600s 1800s
International Labor and Working-class History, 2010Co-Authors: Alessandro StanzianiAbstract:The notion of the “second Serfdom†has to be revisited. I claim that the introduction, the evolution, and the abolition of Serfdom in Russia should be seen as a long-term process, beginning no later than the late sixteenth century and ending at the eve of the First World War. In particular, I show that Serfdom was never officially institutionalized in Russia and that the rules usually evoked to justify this argument actually were not meant to “bind†the peasantry but to distinguish noble estate owners from state-service nobles and “bourgeois.†Contrary to what has been argued by Witold Kula and Immanuel Wallerstein, the rise of capitalism in the West did not exploit the rise of Serfdom in the East, but both East and West were part of the same global wave of commercialization, protoindustrialization, and industrialization.
Johannes C. Buggle - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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The slow road from Serfdom : Labor coercion and long-run development in the former Russian Empire
The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2021Co-Authors: Johannes C. Buggle, Steven NafzigerAbstract:This paper examines the long-run economic consequences of Russian Serfdom. Employing data on the intensity of labor coercion just prior to emancipation in 1861, we document that a 25 percentage poi...
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The slow road from Serfdom : Labor coercion and long-run development in the former Russian Empire
2018Co-Authors: Johannes C. Buggle, Steven NafzigerAbstract:This paper examines the long-run economic consequences of Russian Serfdom. Employing data on the intensity of labor coercion at the district level in just prior to emancipation in 1861, we document that a greater legacy of Serfdom is associated with lower economic well-being today. Our estimates imply that increasing historical Serfdom by 25 percentage points reduces household expenditure today by up to 17%. The analysis of different types of labor coercion reveals substantial heterogeneity in the long-run effects of Serfdom. Furthermore, we document persistence of economic development measured by city populations over the period 1800 - 2002 in cross-sectional regressions and panel estimations. Exploring mechanisms, our results suggest that the effect of Serfdom on urbanization in Imperial Russia was perpetuated in the Soviet period, with negative implications for structural change, the spatial distribution and productivity of firms, and human capital investment.
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Long-Run Consequences of Labor Coercion: Evidence from Russian Serfdom
2016Co-Authors: Johannes C. Buggle, Steven NafzigerAbstract:This paper examines the long-run consequences of Russian Serfdom. We use novel data measuring the intensity of labor coercion at the district level in 1861. Our results show that a greater legacy of Serfdom is associated with lower economic well-being today. We apply an IV strategy that exploits the transfer of serfs from monastic lands in 1764 to establish causality. Exploring mechanisms, we find a positive correlation between the earlier experience of Serfdom and pre-Soviet urbanization and land inequality, with negative implications for human capital investment and agglomeration over the long-run.
Bruce Caldwell - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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The Road to Serfdom after 75 Years
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019Co-Authors: Bruce CaldwellAbstract:F. A. Hayek published The Road to Serfdom in 1944, so 2019 marks the 75th anniversary of the event. The paper traces how Hayek came to write the book, who his opponents were, and how the book got interpreted by both friends and critics after its publication. Because the book is more typically invoked than read, part of the goal of the paper is to identify and correct some common misperceptions.
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hayek on socialism and on the welfare state
Challenge, 2014Co-Authors: Bruce CaldwellAbstract:In an earlier issue of Challenge, Andrew Farrant and Edward McPhail noted the new popularity of F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and proceeded to criticize it comprehensively. In this piece, a leading Hayek scholar defends the book as a brilliant criticism of "hot socialism," not of the welfare state itself. This particularly literate author makes clear that the term "socialism" is widely misused today. In the article that follows, Farrant and McPhail reply.
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Hayek's The Road to Serfdom
2013Co-Authors: Bruce CaldwellAbstract:The Road to Serfdom , F. A. Hayek’s 1944 warning against the dangers of government control, continues to influence politics more than seventy years after it was turned down by three American publishers and finally published by the University of Chicago Press. A classic work in political philosophy, intellectual and cultural history, and economics, the definitive edition of The Road to Serfdom included this essay as its Introduction. Here, acclaimed Hayek biographer and general editor of the Collected Works of F. A. Hayek series, Bruce Caldwell explains how Hayek came to write and publish the book, assesses misunderstandings of Hayek’s thought, and suggests how Hayek’s fears of Socialism lead him to abandon the larger scholarly project he had planned in 1940 to focus instead on a briefer, more popular and political tract—one that has influenced political and economic discourse ever since.
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hayek on socialism and on the welfare state a comment on farrant and mcphail s does f a hayek s road to Serfdom deserve to make a comeback
Challenge, 2011Co-Authors: Bruce CaldwellAbstract:In an earlier issue of Challenge, Andrew Farrant and Edward McPhail noted the new popularity of F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and proceeded to criticize it comprehensively. In this piece, a leading Hayek scholar defends the book as a brilliant criticism of "hot socialism," not of the welfare state itself. This particularly literate author makes clear that the term "socialism" is widely misused today. In the article that follows, Farrant and McPhail reply.
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the road to Serfdom text and documents
2007Co-Authors: Friedrich A. Von Hayek, Bruce CaldwellAbstract:An unimpeachable classic work in political philosophy, intellectual and cultural history, and economics, "The Road to Serfdom" has inspired and infuriated politicians, scholars, and general readers for half a century. Originally published in 1944 - when Eleanor Roosevelt supported the efforts of Stalin, and Albert Einstein subscribed lock, stock, and barrel to the socialist program - "The Road to Serfdom" was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production. For F. A. Hayek, the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasing economic control would lead not to a utopia but to the horrors of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. First published by the University of Chicago Press on September 18, 1944, "The Road to Serfdom" garnered immediate, widespread attention. The first printing of 2,000 copies was exhausted instantly, and within six months more than 30,000 books were sold. In April 1945, "Reader's Digest" published a condensed version of the book, and soon thereafter the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed this edition to more than 600,000 readers. A perennial best seller, the book has sold 400,000 copies in the United States alone and has been translated into more than twenty languages, along the way becoming one of the most important and influential books of the century.
