Serfdom

Abstract: I have made assumptions about individual behavior diverging from those of the moral economists. These assumptions have drawn attention to different features of villages and patron-client ties and have led to questions about the quality of welfare and insurance embedded in both villages and vertical patron-client ties. This, in turn, has demonstrated that there is more potential value to markets, relative to the actual performance level of these other institutions. Commercialization of agriculture and the development of strong central authorities are not wholly deleterious to peasant society. This is not because capitalism and/or colonialism are necessarily more benevolent than moral economists assume, but because traditional institutions are harsher and work less well than is often believed. Depending on the specific conditions, commercialization can be good or bad for peasants. In many cases the shift to narrow contractual ties with landlords increases both peasant security and his opportunity to benefit from markets. In Latin America, “the patron held life-or-death judicial authority over his dependent serfs, and the murder of peasants or the violation of their wives and daughters was not uncommon.” Paige, , p. 167. As long ago as the fifth century, a monk described the transformation that overcame freemen who became part of estates: “all these people who settled on the big estates underwent a strange transformation as if they had drunk of Circe's cup, for the rich began to treat as their own property these strangers.” Hilton, , quoting J. LeGeof, p. 58. Single-stranded relationships may be far more secure for the peasant because there may be less coercion, an absence of monopolies, competition among landlords, and less need for submission of self. The development of an independent trading class can give small peasants easy low-risk access to international markets and a way of escaping the domination of large lords who use coercion to control the economy despite inefficient practices. Independent small traders like the Chinese in Vietnam, for example, are opposed not by peasants, but by large landowners. In particular, erosion of the “traditional” terms of exchange between landlord and tenant is not the only way for peasants to turn against large lords. It is not the case that if the patron guarantees the traditional subsistence level, peasants will cede him continuous legitimacy; peasants can and do fight for autonomy when better alternatives exist in the market. There are often better opportunities for peasants in markets than under lords, and markets can reduce the bargaining power of the lords. See, for example, Blum, “The Rise of Serfdom in Eastern Europe,” p. 816; Breman, , p. 75; Hilton, , p. 214. Indeed, it was not uncommon in Europe for men to buy their way out of clientage for the security and freedom of markets. Rodney Hilton, “Peasant Society, Peasant Movements and Feudalism in Medieval Europe.” in Henry Landsberger, (Barnes and Noble, 1973), pp. 67-94, 81; Blum, et al., , p. 23. One need only note the land rush in the new areas of Cochinchina after the French made it habitable to see that markets can be an enormous opportunity for the poor. Throughout the world, peasants have fought for access to markets when they were secure enough to want to raise their economic level and “redefine” cultural standards! In medieval England, when peasant conditions were comparatively secure. The essential quarrel between the peasantry and the aristocracy was about access to the market. It was not that the peasants were worried about the impact of the market in a disintegrating sense upon their community; what they wanted was to be able to put their produce on the market and to have a freer market in land which would enable them to take advantage of the benefits of the market. Hilton. “Medieval Peasants - Any Lesson?,” p. 217. The rise of strong central states and the growth of a market economy, then, even in the guise of colonialism and capitalism cannot always be directly equated with a decline in peasant welfare due to the destruction of traditional villages and/or elite bonds. In the short-run, local village elites with the skills to ally with outside powers may reap the most benefits from new institutional arrangements, but, in the long-run, new elites emerge which ally with the peasantry against both feudalism and colonialism. As Weisser notes for Spain, “anarchism sought to sweep away the remnants of that old system by joining with those elements in the outside world that had begun a similar attack.” , p. 117. Indirectly, peasants clearly benefit from the growth of law and order and the resulting stability, as well as the vast improvements in communications. The numerous and onerous taxes of the colonial period - as applied by village elites - increased stratification in the majority of countries, but the colonial infrastructure also led to wider systems of trade, credit, and communications that helped keep peasants alive during local famines. As Day has noted of Java, local crop failures were so serious in precolonial times before there was a developed communications and trade network “because it was impossible to supply a deficit in one part of the country by drawing on the surplus which might exist in another.” Day. , p. 25. Colonialism is ugly, but the quality of the minimum subsistence floor improved in most countries. Geertz, , p. 80; Tom Kessinger, (University of California Press, 1974), p. 87; Charles Robequain, (Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 328. By stressing the common investment logic of intra-village patron-client and market relations I have attempted to show that given the actual performance levels of patrons and villages, neither decline nor decay of peasant institutions is necessary for peasants to enter markets. Further, peasant support for revolutions and protests may represent not decline and decay, but political competence.

Abstract: A classic work in political philosophy, intellectual history and economics, The Road to Serfdom has inspired and infuriated politicians and scholars for half a century. Originally published in 1944, it was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production. For 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. This new edition includes a foreword by series editor and leading Hayek scholar Bruce Caldwell explaining the book's origins and publishing history and assessing common misinterpretations of Hayek's thought. Caldwell has also standardized and corrected Hayek's references and added helpful new explanatory notes. Supplemented with an appendix of related materials and forewords to earlier editions by the likes of Milton Friedman, and Hayek himself, this new edition of The Road to Serfdom will be the definitive version of Friedrich Hayek's enduring masterwork.

Abstract: When a student of the origins of 1917 looks back through the literature that appeared on the subject during the 1920’s and early 1930’s, he is likely to be struck by the degree of consensus in Soviet and Western treatments of the problem on two major assumptions. The first of these, then almost as widely entertained by Western as by Soviet historians, was that, just like other “classical” revolutions, the Revolution of 1917 had to be viewed, not as a historical accident or even as the product of immediate historical circumstances, but as the culmination of a long historical process–stretching back to the abolition of serfdom, if not to the appearance at the beginning of the nineteenth century of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia. The second, balancing, assumption, which even Soviet historians were then still usually prepared to accept, was that, notwithstanding its deep historical roots, this revolutionary process had been substantially accelerated by the additional strains imposed on the Russian body politic by the First World War.

Abstract: Part 1 Land and labour: land and labour in North Africa rural labour in three Roman provinces "Agri deserti" labour supply in the later Roman empire Circe's pigs - from slavery to serfdom in the later Roman world. Part 2 City: the revolt of Papirius Dionysius AD 190 the poor in the city of Rome the consumer city revisited - the "Vicus" and the city do theories of the ancient city matter?. Part 3 Trade and the economy: inflation and the economy in the 4th century AD explanations of inflation in the 4th century AD trade and the aristocracy in the Roman Empire late Roman trade and traders.