Kaya, A. Y. “Were Peasants Bound To The Soil in the 19th C. Balkans?", in L. Papastefanaki and M. E. Kabadayı (eds.) Working in Greece and Turkey, A Comparative Labour History from Empires to Nation-States, 1840–1940, Berghan Books, 2020. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Economics and History: Analysing Serfdom
History in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2023
This chapter considers the widely hypothesized antithesis between economics and history, and argues that the two disciplines are not substitutes but complements. It develops its argument through demonstration, by exploring how economics and history together provide complementary approaches to analyzing a specific historical institution: serfdom. To draw out general implications of such disciplinary complementarities, it scrutinizes three scholarly controversies about serfdom – how it shaped peasant choices, how it constrained these choices, and how it affected entire societies. To resolve these controversies, it shows, economics and history each brings special expertise, which have proven most productive when used jointly. The essay uses these debates about serfdom in particular to draw implications concerning the mutually reinforcing capacities of economics and history in general. It concludes that by working together, economics and history have improved our understanding of pre-modern society to a much greater extent than either discipline could have achieved in isolation.
Economics and History: Analyzing Serfdom
Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers, No. 200, 2022
Economics and history are often regarded as antithetical. This paper argues the opposite. It builds its case by showing how economics and history provide complementary approaches to analyzing a fundamental historical institution: serfdom. The paper scrutinizes three questions: how serfdom shaped peasant choices, how it constrained those choices, and how it affected entire societies. By working together, economics and history have generated better answers to these questions than either discipline could have achieved in isolation. Economic and historical approaches, the paper concludes, are not substitutes but complements.
Tracing Historical Forms of Servitude: Introductory Remarks and Elementary Reflections
South Asia History and Culture , 2022
History of domestic service in South Asia is beginning to attract scholars but a rich historiography around it is still distant and difficult. The forms of servitude are different across different times, places and contexts. The sources available to scholars for specific sites and moments in history are marked by extreme diversity of language, genre, concerns, and vantage points. Studies based on exploration of particular kinds of texts across dissimilar contexts make for a good beginning. Using insights from apparently disjointed explorations of servitude in uneven locales, we sketch a tentative template to study changing patterns of service relations and their articulations in the long duration beginning with the early modern period and reaching up to our own times. The study of domestic service yields empathetic vignettes of lives of domestic servants. They also yield insights on various forms of servitude and their centrality to social and economic relationships in a manner that can potentially upset the set historiographic paradigms of work, leisure, household, labour and 'labour laws' in the early modern and modern periods.
ON SOME PECULIARITIES OF SERFDOM IN GEORGIA (FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD)
STUDIES IN ORIENTAL SOURCES, 2022
From the Middle Ages onwards in Georgia serfs used to be an integral part of feudal property, and their exploitation and services were used to strengthen both the economic and political power of the lord. It should be noted that the serfdom in Georgia was not presented as a one-layer class. The phenomenon of serfdom in Georgia had some distinctive features, where the word “serf” did not quite correspond to the classical understanding of this term. Along with the development of feudalism, different strata of slaves were formed, which were differed not only in economic opportunities, but also in types of obligations towards the lord, as well as rights and position in society. The serf population, as a rule, in late medieval Georgia was better known under the general terms of “glekhi” and “kma”1. In general, the entire population of late medieval Georgia who lived in feudal dependence was divided into two categories – msakhuri and mebegre glekhi (moinale in western Georgia)2. However, there were also other strata of the serf population, and most of them are known as msakhuri, bogano, khizani, nebieri, natskalobevi, mojalabe, tavdakhsnili, mkvidri, etc. The article attempts to present a diverse and variegated picture of the phenomenon of serfdom in Georgia3
The Institute of Serfdom in Hilchen’s Draft Land Law of 1599 – a Regional Comparison
2020
Hilchen's draft land law for Livonia, a comprehensive work in three volumes written in 1599 at the request of the Polish king and on behalf of the Livonian nobility, was and is often regarded in legal literature and historical research as a document that tried to codify a particularly hard form of serfdom in Livonia. Comparisons with contemporary German and Polish land laws, Lithuanian and Curonian statutes and Roman law in the form of the contemporary ius commune provide a much more serf-friendly picture of Hilchen's draft, which will be analysed in more detail by this contribution.
The Romanian Journal for Baltic and Nordic Studies, 2015
In the 16th-19th centuries (until 1861) the term second serfdom is not applied in the investigations of the economic organization of Lithuania. However, the theory of the neo-Marxist capitalist world system (CWS) of the most famous and influential American comparative historical sociology representative I. Wallerstein offers to look at the phenomenon of the second serfdom from a global perspective emphasizing external causes and to consider it a manifestation of peripheral capitalism in Central Eastern Europe. In his fundamental work The Modern World System, the Polish and Lithuanian social economic order in the 16th-18th centuries is treated as the periphery of the CWS at that time. The goal of this article is using the access of modern comparative historical sociology to answer the question of whether the term second serfdom is applicable (and if so, when) to describe the economic organization of Lithuania in 1557–1861. The article states that in view of the economic development o...