Serfowners against Serfdom: Elite Divisions and Reform in 1803 Livonia

• In Event: Property Rights and Corporations: Bringing the State Back in History and Theory

Abstract

Why did Central and East European states abolish serfdom during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Existing explanations either treat serf emancipation in functional terms, as a necessary concomitant of the emergence of industrial capitalism, or emphasize political economy factors such as the land-labor ratio. Both schools of thought turn our attention away from the particular political alignments which made emancipation possible, and which appear to have varied drastically from case to case. To illustrate this, I use signatures on petitions to measure the preferences of some 100 members of the Livonian Diet of 1803 over serfdom and its reform. Combining the petitions with data on individual careers, landownership, education, and family ties, I test prevailing explanations for the abolition of serfdom—including revolutionary threat, the land-labor ratio, and the presence of outside options for farm laborers—and find little support for any of them. Instead, family networks, age, and attitudes towards the nobility's political institutions explain why some noble landowners favored reform whereas others opposed it. In brief, preexisting political cleavages, which originally had little to do with serfdom as such, offer a better explanation for its reform (and ultimate abolition) in Livonia than political economy variables. Local political context mattered more than economic interest.

Author

• Brendan McElroy, University of Toronto