The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe: Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages until the Early Twentieth Century [n ed.] 9780520064218, 0520064216

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (page ix)
1. Causes and Consequences of Backwardness (Daniel Chirot, page 1)
2. Economic Backwardness in Eastern Europe in Light of Developments in the West (Robert Brenner, page 15)
3. Agrarian Systems of Central and Eastern Europe (Péter Gunst, page 53)
4. The Polish Economy and the Evolution of Dependency (Jacek Kochanowicz, page 92)
5. Tradition and Rural Change in Southeastern Europe During Ottoman Rule (Fikret Adanir, page 131)
6. Imperial Borderlands or Capitalist Periphery? Redefining Balkan Backwardness, 1520-1914 (John R. Lampe, page 177)
7. The Social Origins of East European Politics (Gale Stokes, page 210)
CONTRIBUTORS (page 253)
INDEX (page 255)

Citation preview

The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe

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The Origins of

Backwardness in Eastern Europe Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages Until the Early Twentieth Century

DANIEL CHIROT

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles Oxford

This book is a print-on-demand volume. It is manufactured using toner in place of ink. Type and images may be less sharp than the same material seen in traditionally printed University of California Press editions.

This project was sponsored by the Joint Committee on Eastern Europe of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council, with funds provided by the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Foundation. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1989 by The Regents of the University of California Printed in the United States of America First Paperback Printing 1991

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The Origins of backwardness in Eastern Europe: economics and politics from the Middle Ages until the early twentieth century / edited with an introduction by Daniel Chirot.

: p. cm.

Papers originally presented at a conference in June 1985 at Bellagio, Italy. Includes bibliographies and index. ISBN 0-520-07640-0 (alk. paper) 1. Europe, Eastern—Economic conditions—Congresses. 2. Europe, Eastern—Politics and government—Congresses. I. Chirot, Daniel.

HC244.065 1989 88—-29090 330.947—dc19

'The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997 ) ( Permanence of Paper )

To Jason Parker, friend, colleague, and supporter

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS / ix

1. Causes and Consequences of Backwardness

Daniel Chirot / 1

2. Economic Backwardness in Eastern Europe in Light of Developments in the West

Robert Brenner {| 15

3. Agrarian Systems of Central and Eastern Europe

Péter Gunst / 53

4. The Polish Economy and the Evolution of Dependency Jacek Kochanouwcz | 92

5. Tradition and Rural Change in Southeastern Europe During Ottoman Rule

Fikret Adaniy / 131

6. Imperial Borderlands or Capitalist Periphery? Redefining Balkan Backwardness, 1520-1914

John R. Lampe [ 177 7. The Social Origins of East European Politics

Gale Stokes / 210

CONTRIBUTORS / 253 INDEX / 255

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All of us who participated in the conference that led to this volume would like to thank the Joint Committee for Eastern Europe of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council for financing our travel costs. We would also like to thank the Rockefeller Foundation, which put its Villa in Bellagio, Italy, at our disposal for a week and generously provided the excellent fare and services that matched the physical beauty of the site. We are all grateful to Jason Parker, to whom this volume is dedicated, for his help. Not only did he make this conference possible, but he has

done more to further the study of Eastern Europe in the 1980s than any other individual. All of us in the field owe him a great debt. I would like to thank Ed Hewett of the Brookings Institution and Jan Gross of Emory University for the time they took to read and make comments about this manuscript. Finally, I must express my gratitude to my able assistants, Glen Furnas, Marjean Young, and Teri Crisp, who have helped me put together this volume and accomplish most of what I have been able to do in the field of Eastern European Studies over the last four years.

Seattle, Washington Daniel Chirot

1x

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ONE

Causes and Consequences of Backwardness Daniel Chirot

The classic question—Why did the Industrial Revolution take place in the West, and why in England?—remains as interesting today as ever. To pick a particular answer is not merely to conclude that.one set of data or another support a “Weberian,” “Marxist,” or one of several other

available theories. To take sides in this debate about history is also to have a position about some important contemporary issues. What causes economic growth? Are there moral justifications for politically unpleasant solutions to the problems of slow growth? Are there cultural traditions that somehow “merit” destruction because they impede development? Assigning historical blame or praise to specific policies, in-

stitutions, and beliefs need not be a mere mask for involvement in today’s controversies. For some intellectuals, perhaps, and certainly for professional social scientists, careful reevaluations of key historical issues may also alter opinions about contemporary controversies. It may be too much to expect that serious historical inquiry will have any direct influence on many people except through misplaced analogies and anachro-

nistic parallels. But for a few careful students, the nature of the past necessarily illuminates the critical controversies of the present. This is outstandingly true of any explanation of the historical causes of economic backwardness in a region as sensitive to its past as Eastern Europe. There are as many explanations about the causes of economic growth

as there are theories of society. Some have long been discredited. Who would now make a serious claim, at least in North America or Western Europe, that inherited genetic traits of this or that population determine its propensity to progress? On the other hand, geographic determinism, I

2 CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES in a much more sophisticated way than in the early twentieth century, is making something of a comeback.' Cultural determinism, in the sense of claiming that at a certain key moment civilizations adopt a set of ideas, moral principles, and religious views that determine their future capacity to advance, retains a serious following.? There are Marxist explanations of what causes growth or backwardness. Class relations, that is, the

way in which ruling classes extract surpluses from the producers, and the use to which they put that surplus, are seen by some as the key to understanding economic change.’ Then there are the mainline economic historians, those Robert Brenner would call naive “Adam Smithians.” They believe that people and societies have a natural propensity to grow and progress and that therefore economic advance is not problematic. Rather, in some circumstances, institutional perversions will block natural growth, but eliminating these restores the pristine conditions for growth.‘ A sociological variant of this theory, once called “modernization theory,” believed that contact with Western modernism would free the traditional restraints against growth throughout the world and automatically produce progress.° Strangely, classical Marxism, like classical liberal economic theory,

did not consider growth problematic either. Both shared common nineteenth-century Western Eurocentric assumptions. Progress from feudalism to capitalism was “natural” and the stagnant non-Westerners, the “Asiatics,” were a giant residual case. But in the twentieth century Marxists have made up for this failure by developing a quite different

theory of economic stagnation based on the notion that Western imperialism, not domestic “Asiatic” attitudes or institutions outside the West, has been responsible for slow growth. Luxemburg and Bukharin theorized this way, and recently “world system theory” has extended this

notion back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to explain the last half millennium of economic history.®

For non-Western, relatively backward countries it is not hard to see the various consequences of each theoretical stance. Which is best: autarky or integration with the capitalist world economy? statist eco-

nomic planning or market determined prices and investment allocations? emphasis on ideological education or on technical competence? These choices make up only a very partial list of questions whose answers could be altered by changing historical views.

When I began to organize a conference in 1983 on the causes of economic backwardness in Eastern Europe I thought that enough had been learned about the economic and political history of that region to offer some tentative but serious answers to larger theoretical questions

CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES 3 about the differences between more and less dynamic societies. Indeed, the scholars who assembled for a week of discussion at Bellagio in June 1985 represented an extraordinary accumulation of scholarly knowl-

edge and experience in this field and in Eastern European history. Along with the authors of the essays in this volume there were also Joseph Love, a specialist on Latin American economic history and on the evolution of dependency theory; Jaime Reis, an economic historian who has worked on Brazil and Portugal; Jane Schneider, a historical anthropologist specializing on Southern Italy; and Waldemar Voisé, a historian and philosopher of science. Eric Hobsbawm, who has written not only about economic history but also about almost every important aspect of social, political, and cultural history, participated as a commentator, as did Ken Jowitt, an analyst of comparative communist politics, and Gail Kligman, an anthropologist specializing in the study of cultural symbols in Eastern Europe. Ivan Berend, an economic historian of Central Europe, sent a paper but was unable to attend or later to revise his work because of his duties as President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

As these papers and discussions progressed in the marvelous, serene, and somewhat other-worldly atmosphere of the Rockefeller Foundation villa on the hill above Lake Como and the town of Bellagio, it soon became obvious that despite theoretical disagreements and a rather broad range of specializations, there was substantial agreement about some

very important points. Some of these related exclusively to Eastern Europe, but others were more general. It was particularly interesting to see Marxists and anti-Marxists, some from the East and some from the West, able to accept common conclusions about the nature and causes of economic backwardness. One point, which I think everyone accepted, was that Eastern Europe was in some sense economically backward long before it was absorbed into the broader Western world market. This backwardness had roots

in the very distant past, not in any distortions imposed on Eastern Europe in the last few centuries. Eric Hobsbawn put this issue in a nutshell by asking, halfway through the conference, why Albania was not as rich as Switzerland? Both countries were, after all, thinly populated, mountainous, resource poor, weak but fiercely independent, providers of mercenary soldiers, and backwaters for much of their histories. No one answered immediately because a good answer would have required a lengthy economic, political, cultural, and social history of both Switzerland and Albania and the contexts in which their histories evolved. The superficial structural similarities between the two countries, it turns out,

4 CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES are interesting and worth comparing, but they could not be considered decisive. In a sense, this seemingly absurd question comparing what became Europe’s richest and its poorest societies is anything but naive. Albania and Switzerland developed in entirely different contexts. One was centrally located in Western Europe and the other on the margins of a backward region. To understand why these contexts were so different is to understand the differences between Western Europe and the Balkans, between economic dynamism and stagnation throughout the late Middle Ages and much of modern history. Robert Brenner’s central point, that the economic dynamism of Western Europe—and a relatively small part of Western Europe at that— was exceptional, became a central theme of the conference. Eastern Europe’s failure to keep up was not so unusual as to need a special explanation. Eastern Europe, or most of it, was more like the rest of the world, slow to change and progress. Given that it is rapid growth rather than a tendency toward stagnation that is exceptional, it is not difficult to show why Eastern Europe was already backward in the Middle Ages and remained so in the twentieth century. It would have been a much greater challenge to explain why China, with its high population densities, developed markets, rich irrigated agriculture, and its scientific and philosophical sophistication in about 1000 A.D. under the Song Dynasty, did not become the world’s most dynamic region. But that was not our task. (As Jason Parker, whose first specialty is Chinese history and who attended as an observer, put it, he had never before this realized how backward all of Europe, not just Eastern Europe, really was in the early Middle Ages.) Robert Brenner’s model of agricultural economies in Western Europe, particularly England, explains an important part of the West’s progress. Had he chosen he might have extended his model by discussing the unique role of towns in the Western European Middle Ages.’ He might have talked about the unusual set of circumstances that led to a long running political stalemate in Western politics between towns, kings, lords, and the Church.® The resulting political compromises set the stage for the uniquely flexible parliamentary system that allowed capitalism to flourish, especially in England, but in the Netherlands as well, and to a more limited extent in other parts of Western Europe. Throughout Northwestern Europe the combination of strong towns and the absence of strong imperial and Church rule allowed a kind of intellectual atmosphere that produced the major advances on which Western

progress ultimately came to depend.’ Eastern Europe, on the other hand, lacked many of the prerequisites for such developments. Whether

CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES 5 discussing Poland, Hungary, or the Balkans, the essays in this volume demonstrate that Eastern Europe was not just a little behind the West in 1500 or 1600, but very seriously so. There was very substantial agreement during the conference that as far as direct East-West European comparisons are concerned, Brenner is right to say that fundamental differences in agriculture existed very early and were decisive in creating a drastically different potential for economic growth by the late Middle Ages. The issue of imperial compared to Stdndestaat regimes, or of innovative scientific thought compared to a more conservative philosophical tradition, might have consid-

erable bearing in a comparison of Western Europe to China, but would miss the more basic material contrast between the eastern and western parts of Europe. This was even more the case in the Balkans than farther

north in parts of Hungary and Poland. A preponderance of pastoral economies over settled agricultural ones in many parts of Southeastern Europe, and some areas of low population density throughout all of Eastern Europe, made the situation unpromising. But to have stopped there would have been unsatisfactory. This was, in fact, a point from which to begin. Eastern Europe may not have become backward because it played a peripheral role in the West’s development, but it certainly did become dependent in the sense used by world

system theorists. First Poland, then, to some limited extent, Hungary, and finally, much later in the nineteenth century parts of the Balkans became economic adjuncts of the more developed West. What was the effect of that dependency? Was it as negative as world system theory claims it must have been throughout the world? Were the mechanisms of dependency primarily political or economic? What were the relations between these two? The study of Eastern European history from the late Middle Ages until the early twentieth century cannot answer all these questions definitively, but because the area has always been

strategically placed near the West, its evolution can illuminate many of the relevant debates. Eastern Europe is by no means a single entity. Péter Gunst’s paper strongly supports the view that the greater the exposure to the West through migrations, trade, and even conquest, the more advanced a region became. This was true from the start of the Middle Ages when a series of distinct zones were created in Eastern Europe. Bohemia (which would not, today, be considered part of Eastern Europe if it were not for a political accident) became socially and economically almost indistin-

guishable from neighboring Bavaria and Austria. Despite its political subjugation in the early modern period it was not pushed back into any-

6 CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES thing that might be called dependent backwardness. Large parts of west-

ern Poland and Hungary, though distinctly more backward than Bohemia, benefited from close relations with the West. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these constituted another distinct area more advanced than places farther east. In a sense, then, one can argue, as

Gunst does, that simply from the point of view of agrarian technology and organization there was a “Central Europe” quite early. Jacek Kochanowicz’s essay fully concurs with this viewpoint. To the east, in the

huge expanses of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Russia, the Ukraine, and in Moldavia and Wallachia to the south, a fundamentally more backward agricultural economy prevailed into the twentieth century. Fikret Adanir’s essay shows that the Balkans also formed a separate zone, so that on purely agrotechnical grounds one can argue that at the

start of the early modern period there were at least four distinct parts of Eastern Europe. To a considerable extent these still exist. Contact with the West, absorption into the world economy, the rise of nationalism, even socialism have failed to eliminate such deep historical differences. The great transformations that have taken place since 1500 have been channeled into streams whose banks were partially formed before that time. It would be going much too far to say that the past has determined the present in any fixed or predictable way, but discussions at the conference showed how greatly past developments set limits on the possibilities for future change. A confusing aspect of world system theory, at least in the form propounded by its leading advocate, Immanuel Wallerstein, is that it com-

bines economics and politics as if both simultaneously sprang from a country’s place in the world system. Therefore, Poland, the greatest political loser in the eighteenth century in Eastern Europe, is necessarily

assumed to have been more backward than Russia. But if this kind of reasoning were applied to Western Europe, greater Burgundy should have become an economic backwater, too. Instead, divided between

French and Habsburg rule, then further split by civil wars and foreign occupations, it remained economically dynamic. The Netherlands,

Belgium, northeastern France, northwestern Switzerland, and south-

| western Germany have never been economic peripheries in the modern period. On the other hand, even at its political height, Philip II’s Spain was centered on an economically weak, agriculturally backward Castille.'°

Russia’s extraordinary political successes certainly need to be explained. That was not, of course, part of our main task. But the Gunst and Kochanowicz essays make a strong case for saying that no matter

CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES 7 how politically subjected they may have come to be, neither Hungary nor Poland, particularly their western parts, were as agriculturally backward as the “real” Eastern Europe, which would include Russia. For that matter, it is perfectly clear that whatever political and cultural damage may have been done to Bohemia, it always remained more developed and ultimately more economically dynamic than the rest of what we now call Eastern Europe.

In the Balkans, too, conventional political explanations about the causes of backwardness are shown to be unsatisfactory. The Fikret Adanir and John Lampe essays complement each other. The former shows that Ottoman occupation did not originate Balkan economic backwardness, and the latter proves that contact with the West in the nineteenth

century cannot be blamed either. In fact, in the light of careful documentation and a synthesis of the recent historical work done on Balkan economic history, the very question of assigning “blame” to this or that political development seems frivolous. Such a complex interaction of ecological, political, and cultural forces were at work that any simple theoretical model would have to be suspect. Yet, the outcome of all these forces is less difficult to understand. The Balkans were quite typical of large parts of the world. They alternated between periods of prosperity and population growth that were inevitably followed by overuse of the land, ecological degradation, migrations, political chaos, and population decline. Local conditions varied but the basic pattern was closer in many respects to that in the ecologically fragile Mediterranean world than to

the more fortunate temperate parts of Western Europe." As the conference proceeded, we asked whether we should not throw out the concept of dependency entirely. Our discussion convinced most of us that despite its flaws the concept certainly describes a situation that existed in much of Eastern Europe. Dependency may never have been a cause of backwardness as such, and in the case of “East-Central Europe” tighter contact with the more advanced West brought more economic benefits than losses, especially in the late Middle Ages. But as Kochanowicz’s essay shows, by the late fifteenth century Poland and some of the rest of northern Eastern Europe, including the eastern Baltic, were becoming increasingly dependent on a technologically more

dynamic West to which they sold grain in return for manufactured goods. In Poland this contributed to the decline of towns and played into

the hands of the great magnates who were vying with the Polish state as well as with the lesser nobles for economic control of the land. Depen-

dency may not have caused serfdom, but it made it a more profitable institution for the landowners. Centuries later, the effects of the growing

8 CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES grain trade also turned a light and quite theoretical form of serfdom into a brutal form of peasant exploitation by landowners in Romania.” Contact with the West, whether in sixteenth-century Poland, or in late nineteenth-century Romania, did not automatically bring the benefits of progress. This observation opened a fruitful debate among us at Bellagio. Why _ has contact with the West and with Western markets sometimes stimulated economic progress in backward regions, and why has it sometimes had the opposite effect? The Kochanowicz essay helped us move toward a solution by unbundling political and economic effects. The imposition of increased obligations on peasants east of the Elbe (the so-called second serfdom) was a natural reaction to market pressures, to the need to raise more money in agriculturally backward areas with relatively low population densities.'* But this did not determine political outcomes. More advanced Prussia to the west, and more backward Russia to the east of Poland, used increased surplus extraction as the base for the construction of absolutist monarchies. In Poland, on the other hand, the seeming im-

munity of their territory to outside intervention in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries persuaded the magnates that they could dispense with a strong state. Without an adequate urban base to help them against these magnates, the kings were unable to resist. In Prussia and Russia outside threats and invasions had much to do with the support lords gave to their rulers. By the time the high Polish aristocracy awoke to their vastly changed political circumstances, with absolutist predatory empires surrounding them, it was too late for reform. Neither dependency nor tardy serfdom had much to do with the political outcome. On the other hand the combined effects of a weak agricultural base and political weakness ensured that the effects of dependency would

be heightened in Poland. Without an adequate military industry or a strong central court to stimulate commerce and manufacturing, Poland’s cities decayed and its commercial life remained too tightly bound to limited exchanges with the West. Russia, though fundamentally more backward, did manage to create an independent industrial base to service its military needs in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.

Paradoxically, it was only after Poland was finally divided and absorbed into other empires that parts of it began to progress. Western Poland’s agricultural development benefited from contact with and a protected market in Germany. Russian Poland’s industrial development profited from its privileged access to the huge Russian market. Just as in the case of Bohemia, whose relatively high level of development

CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES 9 made it a favored area for industrial investment in the Austrian Empire, political subservience actually fostered economic growth. Prussian, Austrian, and Russian rule may have hurt Poland in some ways. But at a certain stage of economic development weak, small inde-

pendent states may make it more difficult for their societies to grow than foreign dominators who need to use an area’s comparative advan_ tage to the fullest. (The long-run beneficial economic effects of Japanese colonialism in Taiwan, Manchuria, and Korea in the first half of the twentieth century are a more extreme example of this, and an object lesson to those who see all exploitation as a cause of economic stagnation.) But this conclusion applies to places that have substantial existing strengths and to imperial rulers intent on modernizing their politically dependent regions in order to strengthen their own political and military positions. This argument was made in Ivan Berend’s essay and can be found in some of his published writing about the complete lack of uniformity between the many so-called peripheries in Eastern Europe." Political dependency is not, by itself, a meaningful predictor of economic dynamism. In the case of the Balkans, political subordination had a rather different effect than in regions to the north. The Ottoman Empire’s ability to alter the economies of the regions it controlled was limited to the fiscal

measures it could impose. These could be serious enough, but they could not fundamentally alter very old cyclical patterns. Nor did contact with the expanded capitalist world system have much economic impact until the late nineteenth century. What did have an effect was the continual border warfare between Habsburgs and Ottomans. In the seven-

teenth and eighteenth centuries the border provinces on both sides of the shifting military frontier were abused by the unsettled conditions and military depredations of both armies. Whereas Habsburg rule finally turned to Hungary’s profit in the nineteenth century when railways allowed the full exploitation of Hungary’s agricultural potential, the more backward Balkan periphery gained no such advantage. Balkan backwardness, as John Lampe suggests, was perpetuated by the area’s lack of contact with the West, not by its peripheralization in the world system. When the world grain market finally reached Romania in the mid-nineteenth century, the extreme backwardness of its agricultural technology meant that the landowners, backed by their states, Moldavia and Wallachia, could only use corvée peasant labor to enter that market. This certainly made life more miserable for the peasants, but by the early twentieth century, in Romania as elsewhere in the

Balkans proper, where commercial agriculture had been established,

10 CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES technological progress was occurring. Dependency, then, for all its painfully unsettling effects, did not create or perpetuate backwardness in this

part of Eastern Europe. Here again, political circumstances had an effect on economic development, but not in the straightforward way posited by most Marxist or dependency theorists, and certainly not in the way suggested by modernization theorists, who have claimed that contact with the West and adoption of Western ways necessarily stimulate progress. Both John Lampe and Gale Stokes agree that the nationalist efforts of the new Balkan states led to significant waste on show projects and the maintenance of artificially high exchange rates in order to reassure foreign lenders who financed government bonds. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century aping of Western European state structures, and | dependence on the Western powers for government financing and international support detracted from economic growth. That was quite a different consequence of formal political independence than that which nationalist leaders and intellectuals had expected, and though the circumstances are very different, the experience of the Balkan governments a century ago bears some parallel to that of newly independent governments in much of Africa in the late twentieth century. Fiscal and political imitation of and reliance on the Western powers led to a form of dependency that was not exactly straightforward economic peripheralization, but was nevertheless economically inhibiting. If no single theoretical model adequately explains backwardness and °

its consequences, this is because economic stagnation is not a single, unified phenomenon. Western dynamism from the late Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution may well have been such a unique event that it can be fit into a single model. The rest of the world, even Eastern Europe, was backward in many different ways. There were different degrees of backwardness, different political and class histories, and different cultural traditions. But contact with the West eventually brought

some uniformity that began in the late eighteenth century and became very evident in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is this seeming uniformity, which should not be exaggerated, that needs more discussion.

Of course growing exchanges between all backward regions and the West consisted largely of primary goods sent out as exports and goods with higher technological inputs sent in. It could not be otherwise for areas not yet industrialized. That did not make all backward areas uniform, and it did not guarantee any common future pattern of development. Such trading patterns did not then and do not now ensure future

CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES I] stagnation. If anything, the essays in this volume show that the opposite may have been true more often than not in Eastern Europe. The great, overwhelming impact of the West on other regions as it came into contact with them, and on Eastern Europe in particular, was political. Western commerce may have been economically constructive or destructive, but Western political intervention always posed a deadly

threat to local elites. They had three avenues they could take in response: reform to create polities strong enough to fight back; eschew reform and engage in a hopeless fight to the death as Western pressure increased; or accept a limited degree of sovereignty in return for serving

the Western powers. Competitive state-building efforts began in West- | ern Europe in the late Middle Ages, accelerated in the age of absolutism, and intensified during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The process then continued and only culminated in Europe with the dreadful world wars of the twentieth century. But it is quite clear that throughout the rest of the world the process is still in full swing, and there are even indications that it has not yet run its full course in Eastern Europe. At first the strength of the Western European states was based purely on their economic development, though the stimulating effects of state building should not be underestimated.’ But later, politics, the effort to build strong state structures, became the basis of economic growth. Political ambitions and ideals have been limited by what particular economies could bear, but economic limitations have set boundaries for political action, not vice versa. In the nineteenth century virtually all the Central and Eastern European elites developed strong nationalist ambitions, that 1s, a desire to es-

tablish strong states under their control. They took as their ideals the strong Western countries, large or small, who seemed able to survive and thrive as independent nation-states. As the Eastern European countries gained independence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they built their own bureaucracies, armies, and school systems. They hoped to achieve economic growth as well because this was so obvious a part of national strength. They all became, to a greater or lesser extent,

somewhat amusing imitators of Western Europe, and the object of mockery for this in the West, much as the posturing diplomats and presidents of the small new states of the Third World are still viewed by all Europeans, Western or Eastern. But these political efforts were anything but amusing. Nor were they quite as uniform as they seemed to be. As Gale Stokes’ essay shows, class relations and class structures which existed before the construction of modern states had a strong effect on the political directions they ulti-

I2 CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES mately took. Using and modifying Barrington Moore’s model allows Stokes to compare Eastern European political developments to those of other parts of the world. It is not surprising that the Czechs, based on the region’s most developed economy, managed to create a working democracy. For those not familiar with modern Balkan history it may come as more of a surprise to discover that Bulgaria in the early 1920s came closer than any country in Europe to having a true peasant rev-

olutionary government. In any case, underneath the structures that aped Western state institutions there existed a variety of arrangements that deeply affected the lives of their subjects. Here, too, the past remained to constrain the paths toward the future. To summarize, the political power of Western Europe played a major role in Eastern Europe as it did everywhere in the world. In the most successful cases, strong states were built. But Prussia, Austria, and Russia stimulated nationalist reactions in all of the areas they controlled in East-

ern Europe, and in the Balkans, the new states that emerged from the crumbling Ottoman Empire also adopted Western, nationalist forms of government. The seeming similarity of response, however many distinct

paths it may have taken, has misled world system theorists, and many others, into thinking that there was an equal and parallel economic consequence of contact with the West. However much nationalist ideology may have wished it, the satisfaction of nationalist political goals could not overcome economic backwardness in a direct way. But as all of us who have studied and thought about Eastern Europe and other parts of the world that have undergone analogous experiences know perfectly well, such wishful thinking, flawed as it may be, is shared by the intellectuals and political elites in most of Eastern Europe and the Third World.

Thus, it is not the theoretical errors of contemporary social scientists which matter so much, but the very real belief in these theories that have shaped more than a century of policy. Yet, the historical record shows that in Eastern Europe such naive economic nationalist theories are not capable of explaining the past. This volume, and our conference, stopped in the early twentieth century. But we all agreed that our discussions and papers set the stage for

a deeper understanding of the present. After 1945, a new kind of dependency was imposed on Eastern Europe. It was and remains primarily

political, but political change has thoroughly transformed economic structures as well. Yet, once again, as was the case when Western influence ultimately created a certain political uniformity and a superficially uniform economic dependency, both uniformity and dependency are misleading. The different experiences of these countries is leading them

CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES 13 toward quite divergent routes in the late twentieth century. The past cannot explain or predict the future, but it can set very definite limits on change and direct its general direction. By showing the main patterns of Eastern European economic and political history from the late Middle

Ages until the early twentieth century, we, the participants, hope that we will help others interested in more contemporary topics to begin their

work with a better grasp of that past. NOTES 1. Eric L. Jones, The European Miracle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

2. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “Cultural Traditions and Political Dynamics,” British Journal of Sociology 32 (1981); John A. Hall, Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pt. 1.

3. Maurice Dobb’s classic Marxist text remains useful as an example. Studies wn the Development of Cajfitalism, rev. ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1963).

4. This is a crudely simplified, but not unfair statement about Douglass C. North’s Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: Norton, 1981).

5. Bert F. Hoselitz and Wilbert E. Moore, eds., Industrialization and Society (UNESCO: Mouton, 1963); Marion J. Levy, Modernization and the Structure of Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). 6. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vols. 1 and 2 (New York: Academic Press, 1974 and 1980); Daniel Chirot and Thomas D. Hall, “World System Theory,” Annual Review of Sociology 8 (1982); Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1982). 7. Emphasizing the special role of towns in Western Europe has a venerable pedigree. See Max Weber, Economy and Society (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), particularly pp. 482-483 and 1351—1352; Marc Bloch, Feudal Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), particularly page 352. More recently, see Daniel Chirot, “The Rise of the West,” American Sociological Review 50:2 (April 1985): 181-194. 8. Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), pp. 36—59. g. John A. Hall, Powers and Liberties, pp. 127-141; Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 1:165—-221; Jan De Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis,

1600-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 243-254; Brian Wilson, The Dutch Republic (New York: McGraw Hill, 1968), pp. 230-244.

10. John H. Elliott, “The Decline of Spain,” in Carlo M. Cipolla, ed., The Economic Decline of Empires (London: Methuen, 1970). 11. Of course, most of Southern Europe was subject to these kinds of swings, too. Jamie Vicens Vives shows a similar process at work in Spain in “The Decline

14 CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES of Spain in the Seventeenth Century,” in Carlo M. Cipolla, ed., Economic Decline.

In fact, that seems to be the key to understanding the growing difference between Southern and Northern Europe during the “crisis” of the seventeenth century. See Eric J. Hobsbawm, “The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century,” in Trevor Aston, ed., Crisis in Europe 1560-1660 (Garden City: Doubleday/Anchor, 1967). 12. Daniel Chirot, Social Change in a Peripheral Society: The Creation of a Balkan

Colony (New York: Academic Press, 1976). 13. For a general statement about the relationship between population density, market pressures, and servile labor, see Daniel Chirot, “The Growth of the Market and Servile Labor Systems in Agriculture,” Journal of Social History 8 (Winter 1975), 67-80.

14. Ivan T. Berend and Gyérgy Ranki, “Foreign Trade and the Industrialization of the European Periphery in the XIXth Century,” Journal of European Economic History g (1980).

15. Charles Tilly, As Sociology Meets History (New York: Academic Press, 1981), pp. 114-120.

TWO

Economic Backwardness in Eastern Europe in Light of Developments in the West Robert Brenner

The problem of backwardness in Eastern Europe is a question badly posed. Its unstated premise is the widely held view, originating with Adam Smith, that economic development is more or less natural to society and that its failure to occur must therefore require reference to certain exogenous interfering factors. The view that, historically speaking, non-development is the rule rather than the exception is, in some contrast, the point of departure for this essay. From this standpoint, if anything needs special explanation, it is the unprecedented breakthrough to sustained economic growth which took place in certain parts of West-

ern Europe during the early modern period, rather than a supposed failure of development in Eastern Europe. This essay thus begins by showing that, although Adam Smith provided an unparalleled description of how modern economic growth takes place, his analysis constitutes an entirely misleading point of departure for a theory of economic development because it fails even to pose the question of whether modern economic growth will actually occur—of the

conditions required for its emergence. I shall then sketch an approach to economic evolution in the long run which seeks directly to address the question that the Smithian account fails to pose by specifying, on the one hand, what I take to be the fundamental societal relationships that condition the reproduction of economic backwardness and, on the other hand, those societal relationships that make for modern economic growth. On that basis, I shall argue that the explanation of economic development comes down to the explanation of the transition from the

former to the latter, and I shall try to comprehend, in terms of the 15

16 ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS theory I have presented, the contrasting experiences—during the later medieval and early modern period—of economic backwardness in Eastern Europe and much of Western Europe, as well as the breakthrough to economic development in some parts of Western Europe. THE MECHANISM OF MODERN ECONOMIC GROWTH AND THE PROBLEM OF ITS EMERGENCE

As is well known, Smith thought that the pursuit of rational self-interest leads individual producers to try to make use of the specialized productive capacities of other producers. They do this, Smith believed, by specializing themselves and by offering their output for exchange to their prospective trading partners, who can then be expected to do the same. Individual rational self-interest thus leads, in the aggregate, to specialized production for exchange, bringing increased returns to the trading parties and increased efficiency to the economy as a whole. Of course, producers who specialize for the market must buy their means of production and means of subsistence on the market; specialization entails dependence upon the market. But producers who must buy what they need on the market in order to continue in production must also be able to sell their product on the market, and they must be able to do this com-

petitively. To sell competitively, producers must be able to produce goods that are in demand and to do so with the minimum cost; that is, to produce at the “socially necessary rate” or to “maximize the price/cost ratio” of their output. But in order to be able to produce at the socially necessary rate, producers must seek, continually and systematically, to

cut costs by further specializing, accumulating their surpluses, and adopting the best available production techniques (innovating). Thus, for Smith, the pursuit of individual rational self-interest leads to ongoing economy-wide development. The distinctive mechanism behind modern economic growth is, in my view, captured in the foregoing sketch of the operation of Smith’s invisible hand. Thus, what constitutes the differentia specifica of modern economic growth is not this or that once and for all improvement in production, this or that specialization, this or that allocation of the surplus, this or that innovation. It is not, per se, the spread of commerce, nor the extension of the division of labor, nor the rise of cooperation, nor the growth of manufacture, nor the development of machinofacture— although all of these things do, of course, contribute to economic growth

in the sense of the increase of per capita output. What distinguishes modern economic growth is something more general and abstract: it

ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS 17 is the presence in the economy of a systematic, continuous, and quite generalized drive or tendency on the part of the direct producers to transform production in the direction of greater efficiency by whatever means possible. What accounts for this drive or tendency is that the individual economic actors find it in their rational self-interest to undertake patterns of economic activity which correspond, quite systematically, to the requirements for the economic growth of the economy as a whole. It just so happens that what individuals find it rational to do is to carry out full-scale production for exchange by means of the systematic cutting of costs through specialization, accumulation, and innovation in order to compete successfully, and this turns out to be the very thing the economy requires for ongoing growth. What’s good for every individual economic actor is good for self-sustaining economic growth in the aggregate. Nevertheless, while Smith thus succinctly characterizes the mechanism by which modern economic growth takes place when it occurs, he entirely begs the question of the conditions under which his mechanism can be expected to operate. Smith, in fact, ends up simply assuming the extraordinary phenomenon that needs to be explained, namely, the correspondence between what is required for the economic growth of the system as a whole and what the individual economic actors find to be in their rational self-interest. This is because, by taking for granted the now famous “natural tendency of men to truck and barter” and by assuming the consequent operation of the invisible hand, Smith takes for granted

precisely what needs to be demonstrated: first, that the producers will have the desire to commoditize all or most of their output in response __. to the possibility of trade; second, that the producers will have the ability

and the liberty to allocate their resources as they see fit and to appropriate the full returns on their investments, free from the exactions or the controls of “political” powers.' It is only the producers’ full commoditization of their output and their consequent dependence upon the market which compels them to produce competitively in order to survive. It is only their ability to allocate labor power and the means of production freely so as to maximize profits which allows them to respond efficiently to the pressure of competition by producing to meet demand and striving to cut costs. To take for granted that the producers will fully commoditize their output and possess the liberty to maximize and to appropriate fully the returns from their production is to make a whole series of implicit and arbitrary assumptions about what is rational and what is possible for the individual economic actors under varying socioeconomic conditions. It

18 ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS is to assume, first, that the producers’ rational self-interest will always require them to produce with the intention of maximizing exchange values, rather than to produce with the intention of directly obtaining the full range of their subsistence goods so as to insure their maintenance, while marketing only physical surpluses beyond subsistence. It is to assume, second, that the direct producers will always find it in their rational self-interest to allocate their resources toward increasing their productive efficiency and productive capacity, rather than toward improving and increasing their capacity to transfer the product from others to themselves by force. PROPERTY RELATIONS, RULES FOR REPRODUCTION, AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Under what conditions will or won’t the patterns of economic action pursued by the individual economic actors correspond to the requirements of economic growth of the economy as a whole? To answer this question, I will try to demonstrate that generally it is only given the prevalence of certain quite specific, historically developed property re| lations—which we can call capitalist property relations—that the individual economic actors will find it rational and possible to follow the patterns of economic actions supportive of modern economic growth outlined by Adam Smith. On the other hand, through most of world history, from the appearance of settled agriculture until the early modern period (and in most places well beyond that time), economies have been characterized by forms of property relations under which the individual economic actors find it rational to adopt patterns of economic action which, although individually rational, are nonetheless systematically

subversive, in the long run, of economic development. From this perspective, the emergence of modern economic growth as characterized by Adam Smith depends upon historical processes of transition through which precapitalist property relations are transformed into capitalist property relations—processes that are, I will try to argue, by no means universal or to be taken for granted. By property relations, I mean the relationships among the direct producers, among the members of the class of exploiters (if any exists), and between the exploiters and producers, which specify and determine the

access of the individual economic actors (or families) to the means of production and to the economic product. In every social economy, such property relations will exist and make it possible for the direct producers

and exploiters (if any) to continue to maintain themselves in the class

ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS 19 position they already held. But more to the point, these property relations, once established, will determine the economic course of action which is rational for the direct producers and the exploiters, that is, their rules for reproduction. Since this is so, the property relations will, to a very great extent, determine the pattern of economic evolution of any society; for that pattern is, largely, merely the aggregate result of the carrying out of the rules for reproduction by the individual direct producers and the exploiters. So, the causal sequence runs roughly as follows: the form of property relations shapes the rules for reproduction of the individual economic actors which in turn determine the long-term pattern of economic development/nondevelopment. Under what conditions, then, will the economic actors adopt patterns of economic action conducive, in the aggregate, to modern economic

growth? In my view, they can be expected to do so only where the direct producers are separated trom their means of subsistence, above all from the land, and where no exploiters are able to maintain themselves through taking part of the product by extraeconomic coercion. It is only where the organizers of production and the direct producers (sometimes the same person) have been separated from direct access to the means of subsistence that they must buy on the market the tools and means of subsistence needed to reproduce themselves. It is only where the producers must buy on the market their means of reproduction that they must also be able to sell competitively on the market, that is, “at the socially necessary rate,” or to “maximize the price/cost ratio.” It is only in the presence of the necessity of competitive production—and the correlative absence of the possibility of raising revenue by more effectively coercively redistributing wealth or income from the direct producers—that we can expect the systematic and continual economy-wide pressure to increase the efficiency of production which is the sine qua non of modern economic growth. Naturally, in an economy where the direct producers have been separated from their means of subsistence, it will be somewhat difficult to develop productive efficiency through the familiar methods requiring cooperative labor in manufacturing, unless it is possible to purchase on the market not only tools and means of subsistence, but also labor power. It is a good question, moveover, whether or not the availability of labor power depends upon the separating of some economic actors not only from their full means of subsistence, but also from their means of production, that is, leaving some economic actors with only their labor power

to sell in order to reproduce themselves. But however this may be, in an economy of producers deprived of their full means of subsistence,

20 ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS we can expect that the entailed processes of competitive accumulation will themselves lead to the differentiation of the economy into those possessing means of production (as well as labor power) and those possessing only labor power. This is because these processes give a competitive advantage to those who can deploy relatively large, and ever larger,

masses of means of reproduction. To put it succinctly, in a capitalist economy, the process of capital accumulation creates its own labor force of proletarians. In sum, it is only where capitalist property relations prevail that the economic actors have no choice but to adopt as their rule for reproduc-

tion the putting of their entire output on the market at the competitive price, that is, producing for exchange. It is only in such an economy that the economic actors are perpetually motivated to cut costs. It is only in such an economy that there exists a mechanism of natural selection—

competition on the market—to eliminate those producers who are not effectively cutting costs. It is for these reasons that it is only under capitalist property relations that we can expect a pattern of modern economic growth.

My initial conclusion, therefore, is that in order to understand the onset of modern economic growth, or economic development, it is necessary to understand how capitalist property relations come to pre-

vail. To confront this problem adequately, it is necessary to understand not only why the precapitalist property relations imposed rules for reproduction largely incompatible with the requirements of eco-. nomic development on the precapitalist economic actors, but also why these actors nonetheless sought to maintain and strengthen those precapitalist relations.

PRECAPITALIST PROPERTY RELATIONS: HOW THEY ARE CONSTITUTED

Agricultural societies, with few if any exceptions, have been predominantly characterized by property relations of a single broad type, imposing rules for reproduction more or less inimical to modern economic growth for the societies as a whole. In all of these societies the property relations had two fundamental defining traits. First, the direct producers held direct (i.e., nonmarket) access to their full means of subsistence, namely the tools and land needed to maintain themselves. In some instances they possessed this individually; in others,

ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS 21 they held it as a usufruct from the community of producers which was the formal possessor or owner. There were many intermediate forms of possession in between these poles as well, but the point is that, in every case, the direct producers did possess full access to their means of subsistence.

What secured the direct producers their means of production, in particular the land, was, in the last analysis, their conscious political or-

ganization into communities, the fundamental purpose of which was precisely to protect their members’ possessions. The communities of peasants, as we shall call all direct producers who possessed their full means of reproduction, thus saw as their conscious goal to protect the ongoing access of their members to their means of reproduction against

threats posed by outsiders, by other members of the community, and especially by any class of exploiters. The communities of producers organized themselves in a variety of ways, under different conditions, to protect their members’ possessions. But however this was, the peasants were not expropriable. Second, in consequence of the direct producers’ possession, the members of the class of exploiters (where one existed) were obliged to reproduce themselves through appropriating a part of the peasants’ product by means of extraeconomic coercion. The peasants were economically independent by virtue of their possession of the means of subsistence, so that the exploiters’ ownership of other means of production, notably land, did not in itself allow them to realize a part of the peasants’ product. Nor could the threat of expropriating the peasants enable individual

lords to appropriate a part of the product. There was no class of economic actors devoid of their means of reproduction and thus obliged, in order to maintain itself, to take up the lords’ land as tenants or work the lords’ land as wage workers. The individual lords did not, as a rule, find it in thetr self-interest to expropriate thetr own peasants. But even if the lords

did desire to expropriate their peasants, they were generally unable to do so, because they were prevented by the peasant communities, which stood as the ultimate guardian of the peasants’ land. Because of the merger of the direct producers with their means of reproduction, the lords (as we shall henceforth call all precapitalist exploiters who maintained themselves by extraeconomic coercion) were able to establish and maintain themselves as exploiters only on the condition that they organized themselves politically into self-conscious groups or communities capable of imposing and maintaining, by virtue of their organization and resources, institutionalized relationships with their peasants, which enabled them to appropriate by force part of the peasants’

22 ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS product. In some instances, such lordly political organization allowed their individual members to maintain themselves by directly and individually appropriating the peasants’ product. In such cases, the individual lords might appropriate the product directly from each individual peasant, or they might appropriate it from the community of producers as a whole (in which instance, the community would be responsible for collecting the rent from each of the members). In other cases, the community of lords applied force collectively and appropriated the product indirectly. They received their income by virtue of their holding an office that gave them a share in a tax levied on the direct producers by the collectivity of lords (tax/office state). Again, in this case, the collectivity of lords might levy this tax either on each individual peasant, or alternatively, on whole peasant communities (which would collect the tax from each of their members). But whatever the specific form of the levy,

the lords found the application of extraeconomic coercion to be indispensable to their establishment and reproduction as an exploiting class, and they found participation in the institutionalized structures through which force was applied and surplus extracted to be indispensable to their membership, as individuals, within it. As a result of the predominance of precapitalist property relations and so long as they prevailed, no precapitalist society could achieve modern economic growth and all were, in the long run, subject to strict limits

on aggregate increases in output per capita. The reason for this was that in the presence of precapitalist property relations—characterized, in various forms, by peasant possession of their means of reproduction

: and lordly surplus appropriation by extraeconomic coercion—both peasants and lords found it rational to adopt patterns of economic action, rules of reproduction, which were ultimately antithetical to the requirements for the development of the economy as a whole. To show why this was so, I shall discuss the establishment and general economic evolution of a classic case of an economy structured by one specific form of precapitalist property relations, European feudalism. This account of economic development in the feudal economy of medieval Europe can

serve as a general account of why precapitalist property forms, once established, tend to reproduce economic nondevelopment and to prevent a breakthrough to modern economic growth. It will also serve as a

point of departure, conceptually and historically, for confronting the question of the continuation of economic nondevelopment in Eastern Europe and, indeed, in most of Western Europe during the late medieval and early modern era.

ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS 23 FEUDAL EVOLUTION AS A PRODUCT OF PRECAPITALIST PROPERTY RELATIONS

The Origins and Constitution of Feudal Property Relations. Feudalism

originally took shape in the early part of the eleventh century in many parts of Western Europe, including much of France, northern Italy, and western Germany, on the ruins of the Carolingian empire. Feudal rule was first constituted through the formation of highly localized lordly political groups, initially organized around a castle and led by the castellan. The castellan’s power was derived from his knightly followers. The

knights possessed military training, fought on horseback wearing increasingly elaborate coats of armor, often lived in the castle, and, from around the second third of the eleventh century, tended to be bound to the castellan through ties of vassalage. The castellan’s hegemony was manifested in his capacity to exert the right of the ban over his district— whose outer limits were usually no more than half a day’s ride from the — central fortress. Banal rights—which traditionally had been in the hands of the early medieval kings and the direct expression of their authority— allowed the castellan, above all, to extract dues from the peasant households within his jurisdiction, as well as to dispense justice and keep the peace. Although the surrounding lesser lords were usually tied to a castellan, in some cases they retained their full independence, not only collecting feudal rents derived from their authority over their tenants, but imposing taxes and exerting justice within their manorial minyurisdictions. In any case, all these lords confirmed their membership in the dominant class by claiming exemption from fiscal exactions: freedom

under feudalism thus took the form of privilege. The peasants’ unfreedom in some cases originated from their ancestors’ having formally

commended themselves to their lord, that is, their having subjected themselves to his domination in exchange for his assuring their safety. But, with the crystallization of feudal domination, it simply expressed

the lords’ having appropriated the right to extort protection money from them. The peasants’ unfreedom was thus defined and constituted precisely by their subjection to arbitrary levies.’

The feudal economy was thus structured, on the one hand, by a form of precapitalist property relations in which the individual peasant families, as members of a village community, individually possessed their

means of reproduction. This contrasted with other precapitalist property forms in which the village community itself was the possessor (or more of one). On the other hand, under feudalism, the individual lords

24 | ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS reproduced themselves by individually appropriating part of the peasants’ product, backed up by localized communities of lords connected by various sorts of political bond, classically vassalage. This contrasted with other precapitalist property systems, in which the community, or communities, of lords appropriated the peasants’ product collectively (as a tax) and shared out the proceeds among the community’s, or communities’, members. From Feudal Property Relations to Feudal Rules for Reproduction. ‘The fundamental sociopolitical structure thus constituted shaped feudalism’s

economic evolution, because it established the constraints under which lords and peasants determined the patterns of economic activity most

sensible for them to adopt in order to maintain and improve their condition.

First, and perhaps most fundamental, because both lords and peasants were in full possession of what they needed to maintain themselves as lords and peasants, they were freed from the necessity to buy on the

market what they needed to reproduce, and thus they were exempt from the requirement to sell their output competitively on the market. In consequence, neither lords nor peasants were obliged to produce so as to maximize their rate of return. In consequence, they were relieved of the requirement to cut costs so as to maintain themselves, and so of the necessity constantly to improve production through specialization, accumulation, or innovation. Feudal property relations, in themselves, thus failed to impose on the direct producers that relentless drive to improve efficiency so as to survive, which, as noted, is the differentia specifica

of modern economic growth and is required of the economic actors under capitalist property relations. Absent the necessity to produce so as to maximize exchange values, and in view of the underdeveloped state of the economy as a whole, the peasants tended to find it most sensible actually to deploy their resources so as to ensure their maintenance by producing directly the full range of their necessities, that is, to produce for subsistence. Given the low level of agricultural productivity which perforce prevailed, harvests and therefore food supplies were highly uncertain. Since food constituted so large a part of total consumption, the uncertainty of the food market brought with it highly uncertain markets for other commercial crops. It was therefore rational for peasants to avoid the risks attached to dependence upon the market, and to do so, they had to diversify, rather than specialize, marketing only physical surpluses. In fact, beyond their concern to minimize the risk of losing their livelihood, the peasants appear

ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS 25 to have found it desirable to carry out diversified production simply because they wished to maintain their established mode of life, and spe-

cifically, to avoid the subjection to the market which production for exchange entails. To make possible ongoing production for subsistence, the peasants naturally aimed to maintain their plots as the basis for their existence.

To ensure the continuance of their families into the future, they also sought to ensure their childrens’ inheritance of their holdings. Meanwhile, they tended to find it rational to have as many children as possible, so as to ensure themselves adequate support in their old age. The upshot was relatively large families and the subdivision of plots on inheritance. Like the peasants, the lords occupied a “patriarchal” position, possessing all that they needed to survive and thus freed of any necessity to increase their productive capacities. Moreover, even to the extent they

wished, for whatever reason, to increase the output of their estates, the lords faced nearly insuperable difficulties in accomplishing this by means of increasing the productive powers of their labor and their land. Thus, if the lords wished to organize production themselves, they had no choice but to depend for labor on their peasants who possessed their means of subsistence. Because the peasants were possessors, the lords could get them to work only by directly coercing them—by taking their feudal rent in the form of labor. But precisely because the peasants possessed their plots, the lords could not “fire” them and were thereby deprived of perhaps the most effective means yet discovered to impose labor discipline in class-divided societies. Because the peasant laborers had no economic incentive to work diligently or efficiently for the lords, the lords found it extremely difficult to get them to use advanced means of production in an effective manner. They could force them to do so only by making costly unproductive investments in supervision. In view of both the lords’ and the peasants’ restricted ability to allocate investment funds effectively to improve means of production to increase agricultural efficiency, both lords and peasants found that the only really

effective way to raise their income via productive investment was by opening up new lands. Colonization, which resulted in the multiplication of units of production on already existing lines, was thus the preferred form of productive investment for both lords and peasants under feudalism. Beyond colonization and the purchase of land, feudal economic actors, above all feudal lords, found that the best way to improve their income was by forcefully redistributing wealth away from the peasants or

26 ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS from other lords. This meant that they had to deploy their resources (surpluses) toward building up their means of coercion by means of investment in military men and equipment, in particular to improve their ability to fight wars. A drive to political accumulation, or state building, was the feudal analogue to the capitalist drive to accumulate capital. From Feudal Rules of Reproduction to Feudal Laws of Motion. Feudal

property relations, once established, thus obliged lords and peasants to adopt quite specific sets of rules for reproduction as the most sensible forms of economic behavior. Peasants sought to produce for subsistence, to hold on to their plots, to produce large families, and to provide for their families’ future generations by bequeathing their plots. Both lords and peasants sought to use available surplus funds to open new lands.

Lords directed their resources to the amassing of greater and better means of coercion. Generalized on a society-wide basis, these patterns of individual economic action determined the following developmental patterns, or laws of motion, for the feudal economy as a whole.

Declining productivity in agriculture. The generalized tendency to adopt production for subsistence as their rule for reproduction on the part of the peasantry naturally constituted a powerful obstacle to commercial specialization in agriculture and to the emergence of those com-

petitive pressures that drive a modern economy forward. In so doing, it also posed a major barrier to agricultural improvement by the peasantry, since a significant degree of specialization was required to adopt almost all those technical improvements that would come to constitute “the new husbandry” or the agricultural revolution (fodder crops, upand-down farming, and so forth). In addition, production aimed at subsistence and the maintenance of the plot as the basis for the family’s existence posed a major barrier to those rural accumulators, richer peasants and lords, who wished to amass land or to hire wage labor, since the peasants would not part with their plots, which were the immediate bases for their existence, unless compelled to do so; nor could they be expected to work for a wage unless they actually needed to. Further counteracting any drive to the accumulation of land and labor was the tendency on the part of the possessing peasants to produce

large families and subdivide their holdings among their children. The peasants’ parcelization of plots under population growth tended to over-

whelm any tendency to the buildup of large holdings in the agricultural economy as a whole, further reducing the potential for agriculture improvement.

ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS 2/ Finally, individual peasant plots were, most often, integrated within a village agriculture which was, in critical ways, controlled by the community of cultivators. The peasant village regulated the use of the pasture and waste on which animals were raised and the rotation of crops in the common fields. Individual peasants thus tended to face significant limitations on their ability to decide how to farm their plots and thus, very often, on their capacity to specialize, build up larger consolidated holdings, and so forth. To the extent that the lords succeeded in increasing their wealth by means of improving their ability to coercively redistribute income away from the peasantry, they further limited the agricultural economy’s capacity to improve. Increased rents in whatever form reduced the peasants’ ability to make investments in the means of production. Meanwhile, the lords’ allocation of their income to military followers and equipment

and to luxury consumption ensured that the social surplus was used unproductively, indeed wasted. To the extent that the lords increased their income, to that extent, more or less, the agricultural economy was undermined.‘

Population growth. The long-term tendency to the decline of agricultural productivity thus conditioned by the feudal structure of property was realized in practice as a consequence of rising population. The peasants’ possession of land allowed children to accede to plots and, on that basis, to form families at a relatively early age. Married couples, as noted, had an incentive to have many children, both to provide insur-

ance for their old age and to assure that the line would be continued. The result was that all across the European feudal economy there occurred a powerful tendency toward population growth from around the beginning of the twelfth century, which led, almost everywhere, to a doubling of population over the following two centuries.’ Colonization. The only significant method by which the feudal economy achieved real growth—and counteracted the tendency to declining agricultural productivity—was by way of opening up new land for cultivation. Indeed, economic development in feudal Europe may be understood, at one level, in terms of the familiar race between the growth

of the area of settlement and the growth of population. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, feudal Europe was the scene of great movements of colonization, as settlers pushed eastward across the Elbe and southward into Spain, while reclaiming portions of the North Sea in what became the Netherlands. The opening of new land did, for a

28 ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS time, counteract and delay the decline of agricultural productivity. Nevertheless, over time—as expansion continued, as less fertile land was brought into cultivation, and as the person/land ratio rose—rents rose, food prices increased, and the terms of trade increasingly favored agricultural as opposed to industrial goods. At various points during the thirteenth and early fourteenth century, all across Europe, population and production appear to have reached their upper limits, and a process of demographic adjustment along Malthusian lines began.°

Political accumulation or state building. Given the limited potential for developing the agricultural productive forces and the limited supply of cultivable land, the lordly class as noted tended to find the buildup of the means of force for the purpose of redistributing income to be the best route for amassing wealth.’ Indeed, the lords found themselves more or less obliged to try to increase their income in order to finance the buildup of their capacity to exert politico-military power. This was, first of all, because they could not easily escape the politicomilitary conflict or competition that was the inevitable consequence of the individual lords’ direct possession of the means of force (the indispensable requirement for their maintenance as members of the ruling

class over and against the peasants) and thus of the wide dispersal of the means of coercion throughout the society. It was, secondly, because they had to confront increasingly well-organized peasant communities and, as feudal society expanded geographically, to counteract the effects of increasing peasant mobility. In the first instance, of course, military-politico efficacy required the collecting and organizing of followers. But to gain and retain the loyalty of their followers the overlords had to feed and equip them and, in the long run, competitively reward them. Minimally, the overlord’s household had to become a focus of lavish display, conspicuous consumption, and gift giving, on par with that of other overlords. But beyond this, it was generally necessary to provide followers with the means to attain or to maintain their status as members of the dominant class—that is, a permanent source of income requiring a grant of land with associated lordly prerogatives (classically the fief). But naturally such grants tended to increase the followers’ independence from the overlords, leading to renewed potential for disorganization, fragmentation, and anarchy. This was the perennial problem of all forms of patrimonial rule,

and it was at the center of feudal concerns from the beginning. The tendency to fragmentation was, moreover, exacerbated as a result of the pressure to divide lordships and lands among children. To an important

ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS 29 degree, then, feudal evolution may be understood as a product of lordly efforts to counteract fragmentation and to construct firmer intralordly bonds to withstand intralordly politico-military competition. It meant, in brief, not only the development of better weapons and improved military organization, but also the creation of larger and more sophisticated political institutions, and it naturally entailed increased military and luxury consumption.

Actually to achieve more effective political organization of lordly groups required political innovation. Speaking broadly, the constitution

of military bands around a leading warlord for external warfare, especially conquest, most often provided the initial basis of intralordly cohesion. This served as the foundation for developing more effective

collaboration within the group of lords for the protection of one another’s property and for controlling the peasantry. As a further step in this direction, the overlord would establish his preeminence in settling disputes among his vassals (as in Norman England). Next, the leading lord might extend feudal centralization by establishing immediate relations with the undertenants of his vassals. One way this took place was through constructing direct ties of dependence with these rear vassals (again, as in eleventh-century England). More generally, it was accomplished by the extension of central justice to ever-broader layers of the lordly class, indeed to the free population as a whole. Sometimes the growth of central justice was achieved through the more or less conscious collaboration of the aristocracy as a whole (as in twelfth-century England). On other occasions it had to be accomplished through more conflicted processes whereby the leading lord (monarch, prince) would

accept appeals over the heads of his vassals from their courts (as in medieval France). Ultimately, the feudal state could be further strengthened only by the levying of taxes, and this almost always required the constitution of representative assemblies of the lordly class. This is not to say that a high level of lordly organization was always required. Nor is it to argue that state building took place as an automatic or universal process. At the frontiers of European feudal society, to the south and east, colonization long remained an easy option, and there was relatively little internally generated pressure upon the lordly class to improve its self-organization. At the same time, just because stronger feudal states might become necessary did not always determine that they

could be successfully constructed. The point is that to the degree that disorganization and competition prevailed within and between groups of feudal lords, they would tend to be that much more vulnerable not only to depredations from the outside, but to the erosion of their very

30 ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS dominance over the peasants. In sum, the economic success of individual lords, or groups of them, does seem to have depended upon successful feudal state building, and the long-term trend throughout Europe, from

the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries, appears to have been toward ever more powerful and sophisticated feudal states. Trade, Towns, and Feudal Crisis. The growing requirements of the lordly class for the weaponry and luxury goods (especially fine textiles) required to carry on intrafeudal politico-military competition were at the

source of the expansion of commerce in feudal Europe. The growth of trade made possible the rise of a circuit of interdependent productions in which the artisan-produced manufactures of the towns were exchanged for peasant-produced necessities (food) and raw materials, appropriated by the lords and sold to merchant middlemen. Great towns thus emerged in Flanders and north Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries on the basis of their industries’ ability to capture a preponderance of the demand for textiles and armaments of the European lordly class as a whole. In the first instance, the growth of this social division of labor within

feudal society benefited the lords, for it reduced costs through increasing specialization, thus making luxury goods relatively cheaper. Nevertheless, in the long run, it meant a growing disproportion between productive and unproductive labor 1n the economy as a whole, for little of the output of the growing urban centers went back into production to augment the means of production or the means of subsistence of the direct peasant producers: it went instead to military destruction and conspicuous waste. Over time, increasingly sophisticated political structures and technically more advanced weaponry meant growing costs and thus increased unproductive expenditures. At the very time, then, that the agricultural economy was reaching its limits, the weight of urban society

upon it grew significantly, inviting serious disruption. | Because the growth of lordly consumption proceeded in response to the requirements of intrafeudal competition in an era of increasingly well-constructed feudal states, the lords could not take into account its effect on the underlying agricultural productive structure. All else being equal, the growth of population beyond the resources to feed it could have been expected to call forth a Malthusian adjustment, and most of Europe did witness the onset of famine and the beginning of demographic downturn in the early fourteenth century. Nevertheless, while the decline of population meant fewer mouths to feed with the available resources, it also meant fewer rent-paying tenants and so, in general,

ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS 31 lower returns to the lords. The decline in seigneurial incomes induced the lords to seek to increase their demands on the peasantry, as well as to initiate military attacks upon one another. The peasants were thus subjected to increasing rents and the ravages of warfare at the very moment that their capacity to respond was at its weakest, further undermining their ability to produce and to feed themselves. Further population decline brought further reductions in revenue leading to further lordly demands—resulting in a downward spiral that was not reversed in many places for more than a century. The lordly revenue crisis and the ensuing seigneurial reaction thus prevented the normal Malthusian return to equilibrium. A general socioeconomic crisis, the product of the overall feudal class/political system, rather than a mere Malthusian downturn,

gripped the European agrarian economy until the middle of the fifteenth century.®

In the long run, feudal crisis brought its own solution. With the decline of population, peasant cultivation drew back to the better land, increasing output per capita and creating growing peasant surpluses. Meanwhile, civil and external warfare seemed to have abated, a reflection perhaps of the exhaustion of the lordly class; and the weight of ruling class exactions on the peasantry declined correspondingly, especially as the peasants were now in a far better position to pay. The upshot was

a new period of population increase and expansion of the area under cultivation, of the growth of European commerce, industry, and towns, and, ultimately, the familiar outrunning of production by population.

, Thus, by the seventeenth century, there was through much of Europe a descent into crisis, much like that which struck late medieval Europe. Clearly, in most of Europe the old feudal property relations persisted, undergirding the repetition of established patterns of feudal economic nondevelopment. AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH TO DEVELOPMENT? A CRITIQUE OF HISTORICIZED SMITHIANISM

It is a fundamental implication of the foregoing analysis that so long as feudal property relations, or more broadly precapitalist relations, persist, we Can expect a repetition of the same long-term economic patterns. So long as feudal property relations obtained, lords and peasants could be expected to find it rational to adopt the same rules for reproduction; in consequence, one could expect the same long-term cyclical tendencies to declining agricultural productivity, population growth, and the open-

ing of new land, culminating with a Malthusian adjustment, but also

32 ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS overlaid by a continuation of the secular tendency to lordly state build-

ing and growing unproductive expenditures. Generally speaking, so long as precapitalist property relations obtained, no inauguration of a long-term pattern of modern economic growth could be expected. From these premises, it is logical to conclude that the onset of economic de-

velopment depended on the transformation of precapitalist property relations into capitalist property relations, so that the fundamental question for a theory of economic development is how this transition could come about. It is to this problem that we shall return in our concluding section on the comparative economic evolutions of Eastern and Western Europe. Beginning with Adam Smith himself, a long line of historically sensitive theorists have ignored, or sharply downplayed, the problem of the transformation of property relations and of social relationships in seeking to explain economic development. Specifically, it is their hypothesis

that the growth of commerce, an enormously widespread if not universal phenomenon of human societies, systematically leads precapitalist economic actors to assume capitalist motivations or goals, to adopt

capitalist rules for reproduction, and eventually, to bring about the transformation of precapitalist to capitalist property relations. It is undoubtedly because Adam Smith and his followers have believed that the growth of exchange will in itself sooner or later create the necessary conditions for modern economic growth that they have not greatly concerned themselves with these conditions or viewed their emergence as a problem that needs addressing.*

Thus, Smith and his many followers have all produced analyses that follow essentially the same progression. First, merchants with their merchant capital offer previously unobtainable products to economies hitherto composed of self-subsistence economic actors. This is understood as a more or less epoch-making historical event, an original rise

of trade. Next, the very opportunity to purchase these commodities induces the individual economic actors to relinquish production for subsistence as their rule for reproduction and to adopt the economic strategy of capitalists-in-embryo, namely, production for exchange so as to maximize returns by way of cost cutting. Third, since precapitalist property relations marked by the direct producers’ possession of the means of subsistence and by the exploiters’ extraction of a surplus by means of extraeconomic coercion prevent the individual economic actors from most effectively deploying their resources to maximize exchange values, the individual economic actors, both producers and exploiters, move on a unit-by-unit basis to transform these property relations in the direction

ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS 33 of capitalist property relations. On this transformed foundation, they are able to pursue most efficiently their drive to cut costs via specialization, accumulation, and innovation.

The foregoing argument of those we might call the “historicized Smithians” is thus designed, implicitly or explicitly, to show how the rise

of exchange in itself creates the conditions under which rational economic actors will pursue self-interested action which leads to modern economic growth. This ignores precapitalist property relations, particularly the way in which these relations, once established, determine what is actually rational for individual economic actors. Of course merchant capital does indeed appear as the original form of “abstract wealth” and, as such, it is a precondition for economic development. Moreover, merchants do tend to be systematic profit maximizers. They are, as a rule, cut off from direct access to their means of reproduction. Therefore, if they wish to maintain themselves as merchants, they have little choice but to attempt to employ their merchants’

capital to buy cheap and sell dear on the market so as to make a profit. Nevertheless, the question remains: can merchant capital, by itself, induce precapitalist economic actors to adopt capitalist rules of reproduction? In the first place, despite their possession of money and commodities, the merchant can in no way ensure that the precapitalist economic actors will even put the products they produce on the market. The merchant may carry commodities from one part of the globe to another, from one region to another, but the mere offer of these commodities does not at all automatically call forth the appearance on the market of products for exchange. Given the existence of any form of precapitalist property relations, both lords and peasants have everything they need to maintain themselves. The opportunity to buy new goods may very well make it possible for some precapitalist economic actors to increase or enrich their consumption, but the increased potential for exchange simply cannot determine that exchange will increase."° Second, even where the appearance of new goods brought by merchants does lead the lords and peasants to try to increase the degree to which they orient their production toward exchange, this process will tend to be strictly limited to immediate surpluses over subsistence. Until reasons to expect the contrary are provided, one may reasonably assume, for reasons already noted, that the lords and peasants will make sure that they can directly carry out the diversified production needed to assure the fulfillment of their basic economic needs prior to allocating resources to commercialized production. In other words, only

34 ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS what might be called surplus resources will be devoted to commercialized production. To the degree this is so, masses of labor power and land, devoted to production for immediate reproductive needs, remain

strictly outside the sphere of commodity production. Despite trade, these factors of production are largely immune to the tendencies toward specialization, accumulation, and innovation which make for economic development.

On the other hand, it is true that in this situation there will be a

“surplus” commercialized sector alongside the subsistence sector and thus a rudimentary division of labor, with different producers or regions selling specialized products to one another. Still, it should not be forgot-

ten that neither lords nor peasants are economically dependent upon this commercialized production. The result is that neither the exploiters

nor producers must treat the resources of this sector in accord with capitalist rules for reproduction (maximizing the price/cost ratio, and so _ forth). In consequence, the degree to which even the commercialized sector partakes of the distinctively modern developmental tendencies toward systematic and increasing specialization, accumulation, and innovation is likely to be sharply restricted.

Third, even to the degree that, in response to market opportunities, the individual lords or peasants, or the merchants themselves, do seek to specialize as much as possible in the aforementioned “surplus” commercialized sector, and, beyond that, maximally to accumulate and innovate in that sector, they encounter, as already emphasized, major barriers to their actually doing so, barriers that result from the fact that the economy as a whole remains structured by precapitalist property relations. Precisely because of the prevalence of property relations char-

acterized by the merger of the economic actors with their means of reproduction, it will thus be difficult or impossible for potential accumu-

lators to acquire the labor power, and perhaps even the land, needed to facilitate cooperative and scale production and other improvements. This is because the other lords and peasants cannot be counted on to part with the land and labor power which constitutes the immediate basis for their maintenance. Moreover, even to the extent that any given precapitalist exploiter disposes of his own direct producers (as in feudalism or patriarchal slavery), he will find it difficult to use this labor effectively to improve production by means of the adoption of new, more effective

tools and techniques, given the problems, to which I have already referred, of disciplining laborers who are “merged” with their means of subsistence.

The foregoing considerations lead, once again, to the conclusion that

ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS 35 so long as precapitalist property relations persist, trade in itself is not enough to set off a process of economic development. Implicitly recognizing this, Adam Smith and a long line of followers, prominently in_ cluding Karl Marx, Henri Pirenne, Alfons Dopsch, Paul Sweezy, and others, have seen the growth of exchange as leading the individual preCapitalist actors to find it in their rational self-interest to dismantle, in piecemeal fashion, the existing precapitalist property relations and to constitute capitalist property relations so as to achieve greater productive efficiency and to maximize exchange value. Thus, they envision a process whereby the individual precapitalist exploiters respond to the new opportunities originating with the growth of trade by seeking to introduce more effective productive techniques. In order to accomplish this, they dispense with their (unproductive) military followers and military luxury expenditures; they free their hitherto-dominated peasant producers; they expropriate these peasants from the land; then, finally, they enter into contractual relations with these free, expropriated peasants. This gives rise, within each unit, to the installation of free, necessarily commercialized (market-dependent) tenants on economic leases, who, ultimately, hire wage laborers. The end result is the establishment of capitalist property relations in the economy as a whole and the onset of economic development." Unfortunately, this analysis takes into account precapitalist property relations only to end up by ignoring their significance. Under precapttalist property relations, the individual lord can hardly find it in his rational self-interest to free his peasants, for he would lose thereby his ability to exploit them, to take part of their product or their labor, and thus his ability to make an income. The point is that once freed from the lord’s extraeconomic domination, his possessing peasants would have no need to pay any levy to him, let alone increase the quality and quantity of their work for him. Moreover, even if the lord could at the same time free and expropriate his peasants, he would still lose by the resulting transformation of his unfree peasant possessors into free landless tenants and wage laborers. The newly landless tenants or wage laborers would have no reason to stay and work for their former lord or to take up a lease from him. The error of the historicized Smithians, therefore, is twofold: first, they ignore the distinctively precapitalist rationality and rules for reproduction imposed by precapitalist property relations; second, they view the property relations characterizing the illdefined economic unit, in essence, as if they are merely productive techniques (tools), to be adopted or relinquished (like other techniques) as conditions for making maximum profits change—specifically, when the

36 ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS growth of exchange opens up new opportunities. To put the same point in a different way: the historicized Smithians take for granted the ex-

istence of capitalist property relations in order to account for their appearance. They implicitly believe that in the presence of trade the individual (precapitalist) productive units will necessarily adopt capitalist motivations and capitalist rules for reproduction, implicitly assuming (without justification) that the economy as a whole (both internal and external to the units) is already composed of the capitalist actors necessary to fully reconstitute their units—specifically tenants (and workers) separated from their means of subsistence (and means of production). Immanuel Wallerstein has presented an extreme version of the historicized Smithian approach which carries it to its logical conclusion, thus embodying all of its problems.'? Wallerstein also sees the rise of trade as leading the economic actors—specifically the lords—to transform their property relations so as to achieve greater effectiveness. But Wallerstein goes a step further. He explicitly views the economic actors, once linked to one another through the trade-based division of labor, and simply by virtue of their involvement in that trade-based division of labor,

as capitalist—not only possessed of the motivation to maximize profits, but also subject to the constraints of competition. Moreover, consistently enough, Wallerstein regards differing systems of “labor control/reward to labor” as just so many capitalist methods for maximizing profits, to be adopted or relinquished by individual economic actors within their units according to their effectiveness, that is, their profitability, for dif-

ferent productive lines in different regions. So for Wallerstein, wage labor is merely the best means to organize core capitalist industrial production, while coerced cash crop (1.e., serf) labor is the best means to organize peripheral capitalist agricultural production. In ultra-Smithian fashion, Wallerstein thus explicitly treats property relations as if they were simply techniques, adopted by and constituted within individual, already-capitalist profit-making units. Wallerstein’s abstraction from precapitalist property relations, his view that these are dissolved in the presence of trade, cannot be justified.

First, as patriarchal producers, in possession of their means of reproduction, the precapitalist lords, despite Wallerstein’s claims, could not be expected to respond to market opportunities as if they were maximizers of exchange value, for they simply did not have to produce competitively in order to survive. Second, no lords who wished to increase their output in order to take advantage of market opportunities could have been expected to seek to do so by transforming their individual economic units in a capitalist direction, as Wallerstein assumes they did

ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS 37 in the core, no matter what the type of their production or what their region. For, as just noted, the freeing and expropriating of the peasants which would have been required to do this would have run counter to the lords’ rational self-interest. Third, and correlatively, where lords sought to increase their output in response to trade, they would have found it in their rational self-interest not to transform, but to intensify the precapitalist property relations. Because precapitalist exploiters found it, on the one hand, difficult to get their laborers effectively to use more productive techniques and, on the other hand, irrational to install capitalist property relations within their units, they had little choice but to try to do so within the constraints imposed by precapitalist property relations—by increasing their levies on the direct producers in money, kind, or labor. To make this possible, they would have had no

choice but to try to strengthen their institutionalized relationship of domination over their peasants, by investing in improved means of coercion and by improving the politico-military organization of their lordly group. It needs to be emphasized that the lords could not be sure they could succeed in this, for the peasants would likely resist, and perhaps successfully. But this was the lords’ most promising route." Finally, it needs to be noted that the sort of products on the market which were most likely to stimulate the exploiters to try to increase their income for the purpose of trade were goods that “fit” their specific reproductive needs. These were not producer goods, but, on the contrary, means of consumption—specifically, materials useful for building up the exploiters’ political and military strength. These were certainly not luxury goods in the ordinary sense of superfluities, for they were, in fact, necessities for the exploiters. But they were luxuries in that their production involved a substraction from the means available to the economy

to expand its fundamental productive base. |

Paradoxically, then, to the extent that the rise of trading opportunities, in itself, can be expected to affect precapitalist economies, it is likely to bring about not the loosening but the tightening of precapitalist property forms, the growth of unproductive expenditure, and the quickening not of economic growth, but of stagnation and decline. COMPARATIVE CHANGE IN THE VARIOUS PARTS OF EUROPE

The Maintenance of Backwardness and the Breakthrough to Develop-

ment. Modern economic growth thus appears to have required the

38 ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS breakup of precapitalist property relations characterized by the peas-

ants’ possession of their means of subsistence and the lords’ surplus extraction by extraeconomic compulsion. The problem that thus emerges is how the precapitalist property relations could ever have been transformed? This question is posed that much more starkly when it is remembered why and how precapitalist property relations were established and maintained: both lords and peasants politically organized themselves as communities for the explicit purpose of reproducing those

relationships in order to ensure their own reproduction. In view of this fundamental fact, it becomes difficult to see why either communities of lords or communities of peasants would have sought to take action that had as its conscious purpose the transformation of the precapitalist property relations into capitalist property relations. The communities of peasants, of course, saw it as their goal to maintain their individual members in possession of their means of reproduction. They found it necessary at times, therefore, to enter into conflict with the lords over the lords’ demands or over the character of the lords’ controls. But even had the peasants been able to succeed to the fullest

extent in resisting the lords, reducing to zero the lords’ levies and eliminating the lords’ domination, they would still have remained a community of peasants in full possession of their means of subsistence. The powerful barriers to economic development built into that set of property relations would thus have remained intact, and it is not easy to think of any conditions in which the communities of peasant producers would have intentionally removed them, by breaking up their members’ direct, nonmarket access to the means of reproduction. The case of the lords is perhaps somewhat more complex. Still, given

the fact that the lords reproduced themselves by means of their communities’ asserting and maintaining their domination of the direct producers, it does not seem farfetched to assert that, as a rule, to the extent that they wished to improve their position by increasing their income and resources, they would do so by strengthening, not weakening or transforming the precapitalist institutional arrangements by which they levied exactions on the peasants by extraeconomic compulsion. Can we conceive of any conditions in which the lords as a class would

have found it in their rational self-interest to move not to strengthen precapitalist property relations, but to transform them in a capitalist direction? Since we have already seen that individual lords could not find it in their rational interest to free their peasants and expropriate them on an individual and piecemeal basis, this comes down to the question

ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS 39 of whether the lords as a class could have increased their income by carrying out the change to capitalist property relations collectively and all at once throughout the economy. All else being equal, it is hard to see

why this would have been the case. Of course, the lords might have found it in their rational self-interest to install capitalist property relations if, upon making the transition, they could have expected to be able to use the new property relations so as to be better able to make specific technical changes (for example, in order to install forms of production requiring careful cooperative labor using advanced means of produc-

tion) or, more generally, so as to benefit from the system-wide productiveness that capitalist property relations can entail. Nevertheless, it is difficult to see how they could have found themselves in possession of such possibilities, unless capitalist property relations already had emerged elsewhere and had brought with them specific technical advances as well as system-wide growth, thereby demonstrating the advantages that might be gained through transforming the property relations. But to explain how economic development can occur by means of positing the existence of modern economic growth is of course to beg the fundamental problem: How did modern economic growth come to occur in the first place? To begin to answer this question, I shall try in the remainder of this essay to make a preliminary case for the following large-scale hypothesis,

which follows more or less directly from the general theory so far presented. Insofar as breakthroughs occurred to modern economic growth in this period, these must be understood as unintended consequences of the actions by individual lords and peasants and communities of lords and peasants in seeking to reproduce themselves in precapitalist ways. In other words, transformations from precapitalist to capitalist property relations resulted from the attempts by precapitalist economic actors, individuals and groups, to follow precapitalist rules for reproduction or to reproduce precapitalist property forms under conditions where doing so actually had the effect of undermining those relations. In order to begin to give some force to this hypothesis, I shall carry through a necessarily roughly hewn comparative analysis of the property relations that emerged and reproduced themselves in Northeastern Europe, Southeastern Europe, and various regions of Western Europe

during the later medieval period and early modern periods and the forms of economic evolution which accompanied them. Developments in these regions are particularly amenable to comparative study. Except for Southeastern Europe, they experienced closely interconnected agrarian histories, had roughly similar, essentially feudal, agrarian re-

40 ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS gimes during the medieval period, and even went through the same late medieval feudal crisis. This crisis has constituted the concluding point of our initial survey of feudal property relations, rules for reproduction, and economic evolution, and can thus serve quite well as the point of departure for our comparative analysis. Western Europe: Peasant Proprietorship and the Absolutist State. Feudal

property relations had established themselves earliest in France and parts of Western Germany, and, naturally, in these regions they had assumed the most primitive, decentralized forms. In consequence, the very locally organized feudal lords in these areas were rather vulnerable to the resistance of peasant communities. Through a long process of village-by-village struggle, the peasants in these areas, during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries won a surprising degree of village autonomy and self-government and, perhaps most important, full rights of inheritance and the fixing of seigneurial dues. Fixed dues, in the face of inflation, plus rights to inherit their plots, gave French and German peasants, in many instances, something like de facto (if not always de jure) property in their land by the close of the medieval period. The repercussions of successful peasant struggle for the feudal economy of these regions were far-reaching. The weakening of feudal dues

allowed, in the first place, for the flourishing of peasant population, which reached unparalleled levels of density in these regions by the thir-

teenth century. It determined, in the second place, the early onset of a

began to decline." .

seigneurial revenue crisis, which began to be felt even before population

The severity of the problems of French and, apparently also, West German lords, in appropriating revenues in the classical feudal, decentralized manner during the medieval period had powerful consequences for lordly class organization and, ultimately, property relations. On the one hand, local lords, suffering from reduced revenues, were often too weak to stand up to the expansionist designs of great lordly competitors, princes and monarchs. On the other hand, many of these same local lords were only too happy to offer their collaboration with those monarchs and princes, in exchange for places in their emerging feudal states. Thus, in the longest run, feudal property relations in France and much of Western Germany were reorganized around monarchs and princes, who collected centralized taxes and whose followers reproduced themselves through taking possession of offices as military leaders, judges, or governmental administrators in the emerging absolutist (i.e., tax/office) states.

ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS 4] It is true that by the end of the long period of feudal economic expan-

sion in the early fourteenth century, absolutist state forms had only just emerged in France and were a long way from consolidation. Nevertheless, during the subsequent period of crisis, they experienced a sub-

stantial development. As population downturn made the local lords’ problems of revenue even worse, the monarchy was able to build its administration by carrying out expansionary military campaigns that naturally attracted impoverished seigneurs who assumed positions in the army or in the taxing apparatus that developed to finance the army. The ensuing wars, and the novel tax levies that accompanied them, proved

disastrous for the peasantry and exacerbated the crisis of the feudal economy. But, in the long run, not only the absolutist state but also the peasants emerged the stronger. On the one hand, the monarchy, with the aid of its supporters in official positions were only too glad to help the peasants consolidate their already powerful property rights against local lords who were competitors for the surplus, and during the late medieval and early modern period gave the peasants legal recognition of full ownership in their plots. On the other hand, over time, the possessing peasants proved a fertile field for the taxation upon which the absolutist state nourished itself." In one sense, then, the crises and conflicts of the medieval period worked a massive transformation in property relations in France and much of West Germany. Peasants succeeded, through long-term resistance, in establishing essentially full property in their plots. Many local lords, in turn, lost the capacity to maintain themselves in the classical

feudal manner of coercively appropriating rent, on a decentralized basis, from individual peasants. Symptomatically, however, the lords reconstituted themselves by evolving a new form of quintessentially precapitalist reproduction: through improving their political organiza-

tion they increased their capacity to extract their product from the peasantry, imposing centralized levies (taxes) and appropriating the proceeds (and other fees) via the proprietorship of their offices.

That feudal property forms had been, in essence, reconstituted was demonstrated by the fact that France and West Germany witnessed during the early modern period a repetition of the very same developmental patterns that had obtained during the medieval period. Thus, beginning

from the second half of the fifteenth century, these regions were the scene of a new wave of population growth and land reclamation which was at first even more dynamic than that of its medieval predecessor, because the peasants were, initially at least, even more free from lordly levies than they had been previously. Demographic and agrarian expan-

42 ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS sion was accompanied by the overall growth of incomes and, in turn, a new period of rising demand for consumption goods and thus of commerce and the cities.

By the end of the sixteenth century, however, population growth was outrunning production and agricultural productivity was falling, as was evidenced by the familiar pattern of rapidly rising land and food prices, relative to those of industrial goods. Once again, though, a simple Malthusian adjustment via the reflux of population was prevented as an indirect consequence of the secular growth of lordly consumption, reflecting the intralordly competition between now much larger, more centralized, and more effective lordly class organizations, that is, lordly states. Ever-increasing lordly levies, especially in the form of state taxation, compounded by the depredations of warfare, thus struck peasant communities already decreasingly able to support themselves as a result of the outrunning by population of agrarian resources. The result was

predictable: the demographic dropoff that might have been expected simply as a result of overpopulation was made more severe; the weight of lordly revenues per peasant was thus increased; lordly levies and lordly warfare were eventually stepped up to compensate; and, in the end, one witnessed a “seventeenth-century crisis” very much replicating the “fourteenth-century crisis” that had preceded it.'® In sum, despite crisis, class conflict, and the rise of trade, feudal lords and peasants—acting individually and collectively—had ended up constructing, not very surprisingly, a new form of precapitalist property re-

lations based on peasant proprietorship and now-centralized lordly surplus extraction by extraeconomic compulsion. In consequence, the economic actors, both lords and peasants, adopted rules of reproduction more or less similar to those of the medieval period, with the result that the long-term developmental patterns, both cyclical and secular, familiar

from the medieval period continued to obtain right through the early modern epoch and beyond. Northeastern Europe: The Rise of Serfdom. Essentially feudal property

relations developed in Northeastern Europe—that is, East Elbian Germany and Poland—significantly later than in Western Europe, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, out of a process of colonization very much influenced, both directly and indirectly, by West European feudal society. In East Elbian Germany, feudal lords originating in West Germany and elsewhere took direct charge of the expansionary process.

They induced peasants from the West to emigrate to systematically planned villages by instituting the so-called Germanic law, under which

ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS 43 lordly dues were limited, peasant rights to possession and inheritance were relatively strong, and peasant freedoms and village autonomy were quite extensive. In Poland and elsewhere, colonization was again quite central, as East European lords instituted relatively weak feudal forms under Germanic law much like those in East Elbian Germany. With the emergence of the new, less onerous feudal property relations, economic development throughout East Elbian Europe proceeded from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries along lines already traced in feudal Western Europe. Emigration, population growth, and the reclamation of new land thus powered a long phase of expansion, marked by the growth of production, of feudal income and consumption, and the rise of commerce and towns." The late medieval crisis of the feudal economy came to Northeastern Europe later than to the West and struck fiercely in some regions, while leaving others largely unscathed. In East Elbian Germany, the crisis of the West European feudal economy had disastrous effects, for it meant the drying up of immigration from the West. This naturally posed a huge threat to seigneurial incomes, for the lords had been obliged to adopt a highly attenuated form of lordship in order to attract peasants; they were thus largely dependent for rents on expanding the number of their tenants and were, for that reason, very hard hit when they could no longer rely on the influx of immigrants. The East German lords were obliged to try to resolve their revenue problems by unleashing attacks on one another, organizing for war externally, and, ultimately, seeking to increase their controls over the peasantry so as to raise incomes. Not surprisingly, this set off the same downward demographic-economic spi-

ral of crisis already familiar in the West. In some contrast, the Polish lords seem to have been largely unaffected by the essentially demographically induced problems of their East German counterparts, although it has been argued that they, too, suffered problems of revenue as a result of the flight of their tenants to the towns and the debasement of coinage, which devalued money rents. Poland seems, in any case, largely to have avoided the late medieval crisis of the feudal economy, perhaps because it had not yet reached a high enough level of population to cause diminishing marginal returns in agriculture." Nevertheless, in the long run, the same system of property relations came to prevail all throughout Northeastern Europe. In response to falling population, increased opportunities to purchase luxury goods, increased opportunities to sell their grain on both the home and foreign markets, and perhaps, too, the debasement of coinage, lords throughout the region radically increased their controls over peasant mobility, re-

44 ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS duced peasant freedoms of all sorts, raised dues, and ultimately resorted to direct farming of enlarged demesnes on the basis of the labor of enserfed labor. It remains uncertain just how the Northeastern lords were able to succeed in intensifying their domination over their peasants in a period that witnessed the rise of peasant freedom throughout Western Europe. It can, however, be argued that the peasantry of the East was much less well-positioned to resist the seigneurial reaction than was its Western counterpart, basically because the lords had led and dominated the process of colonization by which Northeastern Europe had been set-

tled, whereas in the West the peasants had “come first.” Thus, in the East, the lords had resorted to small, isolated, rationally laid-out settlements dominated by a single seigneur; colonization came relatively late and population was relatively thin. In the West, in some contrast, competing lords often divided power within very densely populated villages, while peasants could and often did build their solidarity across villages. Moreover, by the later medieval period, West European peasants had built up long traditions of solidarity and struggle for rights. These tra-

ditions of struggle were largely unknown in the East where peasants were, at first, simply granted their freedom, then confronted with the all-out assault of the lords. The lords were able, in the end, to consolidate their domination through the achievement of an unprecedented level of political organization manifested in their creation of local and provincial estates through which they achieved the coordination necessary to control the peasantry.” The rise of an extraordinarily tight form of feudal property relations

in Northeastern Europe brought a predictable pattern of overall economic evolution. At first, through much of the sixteenth century, as population and the area of settlement grew, production increased, the income of both lords and peasants grew, and commerce expanded. But,

in the longer run, agricultural growth on the basis of expanding demesnes and increasing services offered only the most restricted possibilities for development. By the 1560s and 1570s, Poland’s national output appears to have reached its outer limit, and the results were apparently much the same throughout Northeastern Europe. From this point onward, the growth of the lords’ product depended upon coercively enforced redistributive measures and was largely achieved by increasing the size of the desmesnes at the expense of the peasants’ plots, thereby eroding the system’s chief productive forces. Precipitously de-

clining productivity brought the end of population increase and the familiar “political” remedies. The lordly ruling classes increased their levies on the peasants, further eroding their capacity to produce, and

ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS 45 became increasingly involved in devastating warfare, both internal and external. The result was economic regression and social dislocation, the Northeastern European version of the “general crisis of the seventeenth century.””°

Southeastern Europe: The Ottoman State. The Ottoman conquest of

Southeastern Europe from the middle of the fourteenth through the middle of the sixteenth centuries brought a radical reconstruction of property relations in the region. Hitherto, local aristocracies, whose members organized themselves into as yet relatively weak and unstable

states, seem to have reproduced themselves by coercively extracting rents on an individual basis from the peasantry. But with the establishment of the Ottoman regime, the extant feudal forms were demolished, replaced by a system in which the new rulers, organized in a centralized state, reproduced themselves through the centralized taxation of peasants who held essentially full property in the land. Speaking generally, the state took a not too onerous and essentially fixed head tax as well as

taxes on animals, plus extraordinary or irregular taxes that had the

greatest potential for being raised over the long run. In addition, the | state granted to its stpahi cavalrymen, as their means of support, rights to collect a tithe and a land tax in specified areas. However, the peasants

retained not only full private property rights to their houses and attached patrimony, but also perpetual leases on their arable Jand.”' The replacement of the old, basically feudal property relations by the new tax/office state determined a form of economic evolution which ran parallel in important ways to that elsewhere in Europe during the same period, with differences largely attributable to installation of the centralized system of surplus extraction in place of the old decentralized system. The Ottoman state created the conditions for an especially dynamic peasantry and a peasant-led process of development, for it gave unprecedented guarantees to peasant possession of the land, it reduced the weight of surplus extraction in comparison to the previous system, and it made for peace in the countryside, ending centuries of local intralordly feuding. As the other side of the same coin, however, rural economic development under the Ottomans was subject to all the restrictions on economic development which are inherent in possession—the overwhelming orientation of production to subsistence, the strict limitations on the accumulation of land, labor, and capital, and the regulation of production by strong village communities. These barriers to growth were, moreover, compounded in Southeastern Europe by the absence of a landed aristocracy that could, as in the West, have carried through

46 ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS those more imposing projects of colonization and land reclamation for which the peasants lacked the capital. Finally, to make matters worse, the Ottoman state, seated in the huge urban conglomeration of Constantinople, found it necessary to exert strong controls over the grain market, so as to ensure supplies to the city and thus to maintain order. This command economy in grain naturally reduced the already limited incentives for the improvement of production for the purpose of exchange. Not surprisingly, then, the initial effect of the installation of the Ottoman system was to unleash a vigorous process of peasant-led growth, especially since the later medieval period apparently had been marked by demographic decline. For most of the sixteenth century, Southeastern Europe was the scene of rapid population growth and dynamic colonization efforts analogous to those simultaneously occurring in the West. There was even an important growth in the export of food from the countryside, not only to domestic markets, but also abroad. But the expansionary trend encountered serious constraints relatively early on. Peasants lacked animals for ploughing heavier soils; they lacked the wealth required for large-scale irrigation projects. The Ottoman state did attempt to underwrite the clearing of new lands with its sendlirme policy of land grants to those members of the elite who would make the massive expenditures often required for reclamation. Even so, the entreprenuers who undertook large-scale projects were, apparently, significantly hindered in their efforts to establish profitable commercial agriculture by the lack of available manpower, a direct expression of the peasants’ strong hold on their means of reproduction. By the closing decades of the sixteenth century the economy of Southeast Europe began to experience those symptoms of Malthusian crisis which were appearing, at the same time, all over Europe. The growth of grain output slowed down radically. Population increase appears to have struck a ceiling. Food prices rose, and the state intervened on the food market with preemptive purchases at politically established prices. Nevertheless, again as in West Europe, simple processes of Malthu-

| sian adjustment were disrupted because of the autonomous growth of ruling class consumption, the result of the inescapable pressures arising from precapitalist forms of politico-military competition. By the end of the sixteenth century, the old Ottoman cavalry was militarily obsolete.

But the new militias recruited from the ranks of the peasantry had to be paid for. In the end, they simply took what they needed by pillag-

ing of the countryside, with disastrous consequences for agricultural

production. , More generally, the Ottoman state involved itself from the end of the

ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS 47 sixteenth century in a series of large-scale and ultimately disastrous wars. These had to be financed, and the result was the rapid rise of state taxation. The Ottoman state, which previously had only lightly taxed its sub-

jects, thus resorted to increasingly heavy irregular, emergency levies carried out by newly installed tax farmers. To make matters much worse, moreover, during the seventeenth century the long process of Ottoman imperial expansion ultimately reached its limit. The state and its officials, who hitherto had enjoyed the fruits of a growing empire, thus had to turn their redistributive weaponry inward on the peasantry with predictably disruptive results for agriculture.

In short, as almost everywhere else in Europe, from the end of the sixteenth century, the inexorable growth of Ottoman ruling class demands struck a decreasingly productive peasantry and only further reduced its capacity to produce. Nevertheless, because in Ottoman Europe, as in almost every other European region at this time, ruling class

demands for income continued to expand in response to the requirements of “political accumulation,” of building a larger and more powerful state apparatus, and thus without reference to the peasants’ ability to pay, the region, like almost all others in Europe, ended up experiencing its own particular version of the “general crisis of the seventeenth century.” Early Modern England: A Breakthrough to Development. Feudal prop-

erty forms were established in England somewhat later than they were

in France and other parts of Western Europe. The Norman ruling group that conquered England in the eleventh century brought with it a significantly more developed and sophisticated form of feudal political organization than existed on the continent at the time; it was an organization that developed largely out of processes of political conflict with the French monarchy and out of the conquest of England itself. Norman military organization was more developed than that of any of its continental competitors; the Norman aristocracy was more directly tied to the

monarch; and, perhaps most important, the Norman ruling class had evolved, through the extension of the monarchy’s courts, more effective means of settling disputes among its members. The result was the consolidation in medieval England of a much more centralized and cohesive form of feudalism than any that existed on the continent at that time, and one that allowed the individual members of the English ruling class to more effectively exact their levies by extra economic compulsion and to organize themselves more effectively for war. In the upshot, whereas the French aristocracy experienced a succession of military defeats and

48 ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS declining feudal levies as a result of peasant victories throughout most

of the period of feudal economic expansion from the late eleventh through the late thirteenth centuries, the English aristocracy enjoyed increasing returns in consequence of its increasingly effective lordship and a series of military triumphs in the same period.” Nevertheless, in England, as elsewhere, by the early fourteenth century, the built-in limitations of an agrarian economy, organized through individual peasant possession and individual lordly surplus extraction by political compulsion, began to make themselves felt. Productivity declined, food prices and land rents rose, and population reached a ceiling and began to fall off. As elsewhere, in England, too, the ruling class tried to compensate for declining rents by extraeconomic measures. Especially after the disasters of the plague, it sought radically to strengthen its controls over the peasantry and to raise rents in the face of a declining person/land ratio. But this effort failed under the impact of peasant revolt and mobility. By the fifteenth century, the English peasants, like those throughout Western Europe, had won their freedom and were enjoying low rents. For a time, the well-organized English aristocracy was able to counteract declining incomes at home by successful military campaigns abroad. But from the middle years of the fifteenth century, they encountered growing resistance from an increasingly centralized French ruling class. The ultimate outcome was civil war at home, as the English feudal class turned its politico-military resources toward redistributing the wealth of its own members.” It was the English lords’ inability either to reenserf the peasants or to move in the direction of absolutism (as had their French and German

counterparts) which forced them in the long run to seek what turned out to be novel ways out of their revenue crisis. Lacking the ability to reimpose some system of extraeconomic levy on the peasantry, the lords

were obliged to use their remaining feudal powers to further what in the end turned out to be capitalist development. Although unable to im-

pose a neoserfdom as did their Northeast European counterparts, the English lords, in contrast to their French and German colleagues, did succeed in making use of their not insubstantial feudal class organization to establish their full property in the land. Here, their continuing maintenance of broad demesnes right through the medieval period was certainly important. But what turned out to be their trump card was their ability to prevent their customary tenants from achieving full prop-

erty in their plots and to consign these tenants to essentially leasehold status. Once again, this continuing control of landed property was only

ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS 49 made possible by the power they had established throughout the feudal period. Of course, the English lords’ property in land only gave them the

right to lease their holdings at competitive rates; and, at the start, in the fifteenth century, rents must have been very low. Indeed, it must be emphasized that in asserting their rights to the land, the English lords had no intention of establishing a new system of property relations. Their concern was simply to prevent the peasants from establishing the

fixed rents and rights to inheritance which would have threatened the lords’ ability to reproduce themselves as lords. Nevertheless, the epochmaking, if unintended consequence was to subject their tenants to competition for leases, and all that that implied for economic development.”*

As the demand for land, for food, and for raw materials thus began to grow in consequence of the expansion of population, commerce,

and industrial production in the course of the sixteenth century, tenants found themselves under pressure to maintain their holdings. They could no longer produce for subsistence for the simple reason that they no longer possessed their means of reproduction, and the results were far-reaching indeed. The English agriculturalists had no choice but to adopt production for exchange as their rule for reproduction; for unless they specialized, accumulated, and improved, they would fail to compete

successfully on the market for leases and lose their plots. At the same time, the landlords found themselves obliged to create larger, consolidated, and well-equipped farms if they wished to attract the most productive and thus most profitable tenants. The long-run results were

twofold. First, processes of differentiation led to the emergence of capitalist farmer-tenants who were able to employ wage laborers; sec-

ond, processes of competition in agricultural production ultimately meant an agricultural revolution, as commercial farmers were forced to adopt techniques that were long available, but long eschewed by peasants who would not intentionally take the risks of specialization, let alone make the necessary capital investments. In sum, by the eve of the early modern period, the resistance and mobility of English peasants largely had broken the capacity of the lords to

exert the extraeconomic controls required to extract a feudal rent. In turn, the action by feudal lords to retain their ability to take part of their peasants’ product had separated the peasants from the means of repro-

duction. The unintended outcome was to destroy the feudal property system and to introduce a new system of capitalist property relations in which the ruling class could no longer reproduce itself by taking a prod-

50 ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS uct by virtue of its extraeconomic domination of the direct producers and in which the new free direct producers no longer possessed their means of subsistence. The result of the consolidation of the new system of property relations was naturally to impose on the economic actors new rules for reproduction, above all production for exchange, which naturally led in the long run to an entirely new pattern of economic evolution. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries English agriculture transcended the old tendency toward declining returns and actually experienced a long-term increase in production per person. No

Malthusian adjustment brought an end to the long-term growth of population. Only England and the Netherlands experienced no “general crisis of the seventeenth century.” Instead, cheap agricultural products put a long-term downward pressure on wages, allowed for the rise of discretionary consumption, made possible the transfer of an increasing proportion of the population out of agriculture and into industry,

and facilitated the emergence of a growing home market for industrial goods. Industry and agriculture, for the first time, proved mutually supporting, rather than mutually competitive, and population growth served to stimulate growth rather than undermine it. England experienced unbroken industrial and demographic growth right through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which ultimately resulted in the Industrial Revolution.

In conclusion, it was Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Southern Europe, and most of Western Europe which were “normal” in not experiencing a breakthrough. Only England, and to a more limited extent, the Netherlands, were different. But only these exceptions fit the conditions under which Smithian “normal” development could take place. NOTES

1. Smith does discuss barriers to economic development posed by feudal lords’ political domination of the peasant producers. But he is, at best, ambiguous about the actual significance of these barriers, as he also argues that the rise of trade directly dissolves them. See Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nattons, which was first published in 1776. I am using

the edition prepared by Edwin Cannan (New York: Modern Library, 1937). See in particular bk. 2, “Of the Different Progress of Opulence in Different Nations.” 2. Georges Duby, The Three Orders of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Georges Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974).

ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS 51 3. For a discussion of lords’ and peasants’ rules for reproducing under feudalism, see Robert Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-

industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 262-242, 306-311, 319-323. 4. For more on the declining productivity of medieval European agriculture, see Guy Bois, La crise du féodalisme (Paris: Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1976); M. M. Postan, “Medieval Agrarian Society in its Prime: England,” in Postan, ed., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe. Vol. 1, The Agrar-

ian Life of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). 5. Bois, Crise du féodalisme, p. 331; Postan, “Medieval Agrarian Society”; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Les paysans du Languedoc, 2 vols. (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1966): vol. 1. 6. Postan, “Medieval Agrarian Society.” 7. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: NLB, 1974). 8. Bots, Crise du féodalisme, pp. 267-273.

g. Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. 3. See also Robert Brenner, “Marx’s First Model of the Transition to Capitalism,” in Bernard Chavance, ed., Marx en perspective (Paris: Ecoles des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1985). 10. Rosa Luxembrug, The Accumulation of Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968). 11. Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. 3, chap. 4; Paul Sweezy, “Reply to Dobb,” in Sweezy, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: NLB, 1976). For

an interesting demonstration that precapitalist economic reactions are not the same as capitalist ones, see Witold Kula, Théorie économique du systéme féodal: pour un modéle de l’économie polonaise, 16°—18° stécles (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1970). 12. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System. vol. 1: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New

York: Academic Press, 1974). 13. Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalism: A Critique of NeoSmithian Marxism,” New Left Review 104 (1977). 14. Guy Fourquin, Les campagnes de la région parisienne a la fin du moyen age (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1970), pp. 175-179, 151-152; R. Fossier, La terre et les hommes en Picardie jusqu’a la fin du XIII’ stécle (Paris and Louvain:

B. Nouwelaerts, 1968), 2:555~-556, 622-623, 714; Bois, Crise du féodalisme. 15. Brenner, “Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” pp. 253-264, 289— 291; Bois, Crise du féodalisme, pp. 203-204, 254-256, 264, 364. 16. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Les masses profondes: la paysannerie,” in Fernand Braudel and Ernest Labrousse, eds., Histoire économique et sociale de la

France, vol. 1, pt. 2 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1970~1982), pp. 555-576; Michel Morineau, “La conjoncture ou les gerbes de la croissances,” in Histotre Economique et sociale de la France, vol. 1, pt. 2, pp. 978-980; Brenner, “Ag-

rarian Roots of European Capitalism,” pp. 82-83.

52 ECONOMIC BACKWARDNESS 17. F. L. Carsten, The Origins of Prussia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 101-102, 114; Marian Matowist, “Problems of the Growth of the National Economy of Central-Eastern Europe in the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of European Economic History 3 (1974): 322-329; Jacek Kochanowicz, “The Polish Economy and the Evolution of Dependency,” in this volume. 18. Carsten, Origins of Prussia, chap. 8; M. Biskup, “Polish Research Work

on the History of the Teutonic Order State Organization in Prussia,” Acta Poloniae Historica 2 (1960); Matowist, “Problems of the Growth of the National Economy”; Kochanowicz, “The Polish Economy.” 19. Brenner, “Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” pp. 275-283; Kochanowicz, “The Polish Economy.” 20. Antoni Maczak, “Export of Grain and the Problem of Distribution of National Income in the Years 1550-1650,” Acta Poloniae Historica 18 (1968); Jerzy Topolski, “La regression économique en Pologne du XVI* au XVIII* siécles,” Acta Poloniae Historica 7 (1962); Kochanowicz, “The Polish Economy.”

volume. :

21. The material on the Balkans is based on Anderson’s chapter on “The

House of Islam,” in Lineages of the Absolutist State and on Fikret Adanir, “Tradi-

tion and Rural Change in Southeastern Europe During Ottoman Rule,” in this 22. F. M. Stenton, English Feudalism 1066-1166 (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1932), chap. 1; David C. Douglas, William the Conqueror (Berkeley and Los

Angeles: University of California Press, 1964), pp. 133-155. 23. Postan, “Medieval Agrarian Society”; Rodney H. Hilton, The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England (London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 32—37.

24. See Brenner, “Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” pp. 291—299.

THREE

Agrarian Systems of Central and Eastern Europe Péter Gunst

The particular features of East European agricultural development can-

not be understood without first expanding our horizons geographically and chronologically. The regional scope of research must include continental Russia and especially Western Europe, while chronological boundaries must extend far back in time to encompass important agrarian developments that came about prior to the sixteenth century. Moreover, nonagrarian sectors of the economy in general, and the development of towns in particular, must be considered if we are to explain the characteristic features of agrarian development in the different zones of Eastern Europe. The development of Western Europe in a world perspective has to be considered first, because this specific type of development eventually

became, in whole or in part, a model to be achieved by the rest of the , world. In other words, the rest of the world was obliged to follow the evolutionary course of Western Europe. From this perspective, one of the main characteristics of East European development is that this region was the earliest and the quickest to follow Western Europe and the first to adopt its technical and social achievements. Why did the development of Western Europe, compared to the rest — of the world, “accelerate” onto a separate and peculiar road? What ts the essence of West European development, and how did this unique phenomenon come about? The first fact to consider is the relationship between the land and its population. Western Europe (here meaning the areas of Northern Italy, France, Western Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and England) was much more densely popu53

D4 AGRARIAN SYSTEMS lated in the early Middle Ages than were most other parts of the world, and certainly more than Eastern Europe. This population density constantly pressed for more intensive forms and modes of development, at first only in connection with agriculture, but increasingly in other sectors of the economy as well. Whereas in Eastern Europe the great quantity

of arable land and the ease of population resettlement resulted in a repetition of traditional structures of production from one century to another, in Western Europe the peasants were obliged to ensure that a limited amount of land would be capable of supplying the needs of an increasing population. The development of Western Europe was thus accelerated by the force of intensification. What made this intensification possible in the West? In my view, it was the fortunate amalgamation of the ancient world of Greece and Rome on the one hand with the Celtic and Germanic cultures on the other. This was no simple mixing, but a complex process of unification by which the economic, legal, and technical achievements of the ancient world actually swallowed up the Celto-German system based on common

property of land, while at the same time taking over certain achievements from the Celtic and Germanic peoples. The development of agriculture was based on landowners’ feudal estates formed from Roman villas, new techniques and technologies such as three-field rotation and the asymmetrical heavy plow with coulter and mouldboard (or what the French call charrue), and a new economic and social system of individual

plots and villeinage. The villeinage and plot system continued to grow from the sixth century onward, until between the eighth and tenth centuries the village of villeins became dominant. Significantly, this system was based on a principle of private property supported by the Christian Church. This victory of the ancient Greek principle of private property ultimately enabled Western Europe to adopt more intensive methods, once its increasing population reached the critical point.' The principle of private property led the producer to take a personal interest in increasing his production. The larger part of surplus production remained in the possession of the producer. The former system of land commune agriculture gave way to a new system in which, despite remaining communal features stemming from the three-field system, the product now became the property of certain families. The fact that taxation was no longer based on the community but on individual taxpayers was a fundamental change. The attraction of surplus production was thus very great, and peasant society became interested in technical innovations, which naturally demanded more labor than had the earlier methods. The system of private property was guaranteed by the Ro-

AGRARIAN SYSTEMS 55 man way of Christianity and by the receptivity of society to Roman legal practice.

This system of private ownership was not, however, dominant in — other parts of the world, including Eastern Europe. Even within the Roman Empire it made its way only toward the West: to the Greek polis,

to Italy, and partly to Gaul. It did not show up in Asian territories, or even in the Balkans. The explanation for this variation can be found in relative population densities. Whereas in Western Europe the population of Roman origin was relatively dense and exceeded the Celtic and Germanic populations, in the Balkans the case was different. The influx of Slavic peoples into the Balkans far outnumbered the surviving population of Byzantine origin, so Byzantine legal relations could not play the same role in the Balkans that Roman law played in the West. In Greek colonies, the Greek social order was achieved only in those places where

local population did not exceed Greek population. In the villages of Northern Africa and Asia Minor, by contrast, the previous form of land property and the social order based on it remained unchanged. The split

} of the Christian Church can be considered the approximate demarcation line, with the Eastern type of land property remaining preponderant in the zone where the Orthodox Church prevailed. In any case, the Church never attained a social position in the East comparable to the role of the Church in the West, instead always remaining subordinate to the ruling power.’ Other agrarian civilizations of the world were generally based on common land property. Above the little village communities there stood the joining units of state power—more simply clans, tribes, and rulers—who appeared as the owners of the land, and in whose person the common property in land was exemplified. To the ruler belonged all of the land, which was not used by peasants individually, but through village and land communes. The village community, being the smallest taxing and administrative unit, guaranteed taxes for the state machinery. In this system it was the village that faced the state, while the individual was of little interest. These village communities were isolated from one another and from changes that occurred in the political sphere, which explains in part the permanence of the system.* Greek society, which for the first time treated land as private property, differed entirely from this social structure, as would the Roman

and West European societies that followed. The western part of the Roman Empire had a social system based on private property, which the

Germanic peasants were unable to change; instead they adopted it, at least as far as tillage plots were concerned, though grazing lands and

56 AGRARIAN SYSTEMS forests remained common property. The system of livestock inheritance,

which up to that time had not been known in this part of the Roman Empire, now came to dominate. The result of the interaction of these two systems was feudalism in Western Europe, which meant the abolition of land communes. Instead the peasant possessed the land individually, and likewise faced the landlord as an individual. The peasant performed his services, or the larger part of them, alone.’ The surplus resulting from increased production remained mostly the property of the peasant, and this encouraged him to greater efforts. The result was one of the most important differences between West and East, namely that West European societies were more dynamic.°® By contrast, the system of communal fields and village communities led to an economic and social stasis wherever it was practiced. The intensification of production was not encouraged within this system, for it did not pay the peasant well to produce more. The relatively despotic system

of power did not present an opportunity for the individual producer to

keep surplus product for himself. This was the situation in Eastern Europe, as seen in the early Russian chronicles. There we get a characteristic picture of village communities being exploited in the most primitive way by tax collectors in the name of rulers and their escorts, who represent state power.’

This also explains why the structure of feudal society in Eastern Europe differed from that of Western Europe. In Western Europe the prevalence of Roman legal practice, the early breakup of common landed property, and the German system of single inheritance (primo- or ultimate geniture) enabled vassalage to penetrate into society. Throughout Eastern Europe, by contrast, an extraordinarily strong central power prevailed over a dependent nobility. Even in Hungary state organization was much more homogeneous than in Western Europe. The structure of East European society was therefore not as deep nor its legal structure as complex as in Western Europe. The feudal nobility of continental Eastern Europe had always been a kind of service nobility, long unable to achieve hereditary tenure (in Russia, for example, until the reforms of Peter the Great), and was therefore subordinated to the ruler.®

Social systems based on communal land are not uniform in every way. It is not known, in fact, why in one case the system takes on a despotic

character while in another case more democratic forms appear. In the case of the Slavic tribes, despotic power became dominant rather early. The point is that in Eastern Europe as a whole the possibility of a West European type of development was precluded by the collective form of

AGRARIAN SYSTEMS 57 land property, by the despotic system of rule built on land communes and village communities, and by the economic and legal order of the whole society. It is evident that in such societies socioeconomic changes could only originate from above. Not only was the majority of the ruling class often against reforms, but the village communities were largely indifferent as well. This was certainly true of the reforms of Ivan IV and Peter the Great, and of the struggle for liberation of the serfs in Russia and the Romanian principalities. There was a long period in Eastern Europe when Western social forms were assumed outwardly but did not penetrate into society. Such was the case with the adoption of West European legal terminology by societies that lacked the real legal content on which the terms were based. It is essential to stress that the tardiness and superficiality of such borrowing was due not only to the communal land system, but also to the fact that this system had not been affected by the ancient influences of Greece and Rome, as had Western Europe. It is true that Christianity spread and Roman legal practice appeared in Eastern Europe, which in that sense can be said to have followed the West European pattern with a delay. But the time difference is not what is essential here. In Eastern Europe even the slightest remains of any classical tradition were missing;

as a result, social mechanisms that embodied this tradition in Western Europe in the period of migrations did not exist to spur a revival in the East.

The relative abundance of land and the system of village communes, as well as the complete lack of Graeco-Roman traditions resulted in the fact that Eastern Europe developed on other tracks and at a considerably

slower pace than did Western Europe. Production did not need to be

| intensified, as land was plentiful. It is illustrative that in most parts of Russia even in the middle of the nineteenth century the two-field system was still dominant, and it was in large areas supplemented by yet more primitive cultivation methods such as slash-and-burn agriculture.*? The development of nonagrarian sectors of the East European economy was correspondingly slow.

In Western Europe intensification of production characterized not only agriculture but every sector of the economy. This is fundamental, because the development of agriculture was greatly influenced by the other sectors. West European towns, whether their origin was Roman, Celtic, or later, soon developed from their initial role as centers of administration (royal, ecclesiastical, or manorial) into a new role as trade centers. The settlement of towns was rather dense, reaching some 7 to 10 percent of total population by the thirteenth and fourteenth cen-

58 AGRARIAN SYSTEMS turies. These towns became not only junctures for long-distance trade, but also the forum for the internal exchange of products within certain districts and, later, industrial settlements. West European towns therefore had a great influence on agriculture. The towns became markets for local agricultural products, thus making the town—village relationship the driving force behind agricultural commodity production. The

connection between town and village changed, as the town gave an impulse to the development of agriculture and to the village itself. Meanwhile, in accordance with their role in the division of labor, the inhabitants of the towns created a special social order of their own.

The East European town did not play the same economic role as that of Western Europe. Various types of towns in Eastern Europe long

preserved their original character. Many towns were way points for long-distance trade, primarily engaged in transshipping goods toward Western Europe from distant points. Most of the inhabitants in this type of town were not of local origin but were foreign merchants: in Russia the Varangians or Arabs, for example, and in the Balkans the Greeks, Jews, or Armenians. A second group of towns were the military and administrative centers; here the primary occupation of local populations was to provide services for those centers. The characteristics of these East European centers did not change over time, except that the rulers and heads of church, along with their escorts, were later replaced by soldiers and civil servants."°

The third type of town in Eastern Europe was in fact nothing but a bigger village, serving the goals of long-distance agricultural trade. Its development in Eastern Europe was due to the fourteenth-century development of large-scale cattle exports toward Western Europe from the

region stretching from South Sweden through the Polish lowlands to Moldavia and to the Carpathian basin. Apart from the fact that certain of these market towns later received urban privileges or became industrial towns, their formation was otherwise connected with agricultural production, principally with delivering cattle to foreign markets. Such market towns were primarily collection points that failed to generate any

: autonomous economic drive. Wherever the breeding of cattle served export purposes, this sort of settlement came into being: on the Polish plains and in the Ukraine, Moldavia, and Hungary." These three types of towns were characteristic of Eastern Europe, though none could be called a real town in the West European sense, since these places were not inhabited by citizens creating a separate order in feudal society. Most of the inhabitants were engaged in agriculture. What turned them into towns, aside from certain features of their

AGRARIAN SYSTEMS 59 legal status, was the fact that to the eyes of West European observers their very size gave them an urban appearance. True, there were also towns in the West European sense of the word to be found in Eastern Europe. These were towns in which the population consisted mostly of merchants or miners, migrants from the West, mainly of German origin. The structure of settlement, the economic and social organization, and the outlook of the towns created by these people

met the requirements of a West European town, and the inhabitants usually possessed the social status accorded town dwellers in the West as well. But these towns were not characteristic of Eastern Europe, arising only in part from local conditions. Rather, they were developed in order to extract ores. Mining was undeveloped in the region, so rulers imported miners. As a consequence these towns did not fit into the local socioeconomic structure, and even ethnically remained strangers for centuries. By the time such towns assimilated, they had already begun to decline, as their character became more agrarian and their development stopped. Furthermore, these Western-type towns did not form as dense a network and did not account for such a considerable part of the

entire population in Eastern as in Western Europe. These towns remained largely isolated from the East European peoples, just as Greek towns had done in ancient Northern Africa and Asia Minor. Socioeconomic structure differed not only in the town but also in the village. In most parts of Eastern Europe the peasants remained more or less serfs (bondsmen) until a late date. Communal land property, the system of domination based on it, and the dependent status of the village peasant were closely connected. The situation was different only where Christianity had been spread by the Western Church: the Baltic area, Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, Croatia, and Slovenia. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe the peasants belonged to the property of the rulers, landowners, or boyars. Under the influence of Christianity the slavery-like features of the system were restrained, but the peasants themselves remained personally enserfed. The members of the village communities had mutual responsibilities for each other, and this primitive relation-

ship prevailed into the twentieth century. Apart from their nominal legal status, the peasants had essentially the same destiny. The masses of Russian peasants were, for example, either slaves or serfs (holop), and sources referred to them as equivalent to cattle. Another form of serf was the tcheliadj, who was distinguished from the free peasant (smerd),

but the blood-payment that was to be paid in case they were killed was the same.” The position of the ruling classes in Eastern Europe also differed

60 AGRARIAN SYSTEMS from the West European version. In what may more properly be called Central Europe—Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, and Poland—the foundations of feudal society were laid by the foreign, mainly German feudal aristocracy that had spread Christianity and become the military base of

the ruling families. In Hungary these aristocratic families of foreign origin quickly amalgamated with the tribal leadership and became an organic part of the feudal aristocracy. Similar processes took place in Po-

land and Bohemia where the number of foreign families was greater than in Hungary. In Croatia and Slovenia foreign families predominated in the aristocracy. The course of development in Croatia was further complicated by a feudal aristocracy of Hungarian origin that played an important role. The crowds of foreign aristocrats and their military retinue entering this region modified the original form of tribal proprietorship. The landed properties became feudal estates very soon in Hungary, Poland, and especially Bohemia, which was part of the Holy Roman Empire. Estates became inheritable in the same way as had happened in Western Europe. The structure of the ruling class, the connection between ruler and certain strata of nobility followed behind the West European pattern by one or two centuries. Still, the feudal system did not develop here in as complicated a form

as in France and Germany. Towns did not take part in the feudal assemblies that arose, leaving the aristrocracy and large landowners so dominant as to become stronger than the royal power itself. The most extreme case, the “Polish Republic of Nobility,” became a regime of the high aristocracy. Further east, for many centuries the ruler remained the sole theoretical owner of land, especially in Russia. The majority of the Russian nobility, and also the Romanian and Serbian nobilities, were servitors who received land only for the period of their services and whose land could

not automatically be inherited by their descendants. A smaller part of the nobility consisted of the tribal or clannish aristocracy, the boyars, most of whom were in the direct service of the monarch or territorial ruler. In Russia and the Balkans feudal parliaments never came into being, so power was not divided between the rulers and the estates. The first great nationwide assembly of the nobility in Russian history occurred in 1549, but it was more a royal council than a “States General” and was never of much importance. The same was true of the very limited assemblies of nobles in Romania." Thus in Eastern Europe society was of a different character than in

AGRARIAN SYSTEMS 61 Western Europe. The fact that peasants were treated like serfs for so long was an enormous obstacle to the intensive development of the econ-

omy. Because lands belonging to the nobilities were for a long period not hereditary meant that they were subject to extortion rather than more careful, rational exploitation. Paradoxically, the communal form of village property facilitated such a superficial form of control. The internal coherence of the village allowed lords to exploit it without having to consolidate ownership rights. Aristocracies were not obliged to consolidate as self-conscious classes. This made it more difficult for them

to counterbalance central power in Russia and the Romanian principalities. This does not mean, of course, that these states never fell apart, but in such cases the petty local monarchs exercised the same despotic

power as had the rulers of the big empires. Power was divided only geographically, not socially. The lack of West European feudal property

in land caused the absence of real feudal features in the East; most notably, it precluded the development of a broadly based, relatively independent feudal nobility. In other words, after the tenth century, Eastern Europe began to divide into distinct zones. Those parts closest to the West had to adapt in order to fight on more equal terms with their more advanced neighbors. Weapons were a commodity from Western Europe that altered society somewhat, for skilled personnel as well as armaments needed to be imported, much as would happen later tn the case of miners. Hungarian, Bohemian, and Polish armies changed over rather quickly to the military tactics of feudal Europe, while the assimilation of armed men coming into these countries from the West sped the transformation toward a modified form of feudalism. This contact created an intermediary area, partly Eastern, with some Western traits; but Western influence still remained fairly shallow. , THE FORMATION OF AN EAST CENTRAL EUROPEAN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL ZONE

In the fourteenth century, West European economic development and expansion led to the establishment of closer economic connections with the region nearest to it. This is why at least some parts of Eastern Europe were compelled to adopt elements of the Western model of development quite early. We cannot speak about the influence of Western Europe in other parts of the world in this period, for relations with the Middle East and Asia were limited to a low-volume exchange of a few commodities

62 AGRARIAN SYSTEMS over long distances. Not until a later phase, following the so-called age of discoveries, would this type of trade relation take on a qualitatively

new form. :

_ The Western economic impact on East Central Europe made itself felt

from the very start in raw agricultural products and ores. The latter could be purchased in these centuries only from East Central Europe. The surge of copper and precious metal mining in Hungary, Bohemia, and Silesia is explained by this demand. Precious metals were exported to the West either in raw form or as coins; in return, consumption goods and articles such as dresses, textiles, and arms were imported. The technical achievements of West European development created a good market for these articles among members of the ruling class. This is the period, after all, when Western fashion began to conquer the world, and when the sumptuary habits of the people and the noble aristocracy in Eastern Europe began to differ from each other. The prosperity of the mining industry brought miners with new techniques into the region, created mining settlements and towns, and marked the beginning of a new type of social development. Similar to the demand for precious metals and copper, yet greater

and longer lasting in its importance, was the demand for agricultural products that began in the fourteenth century. The growth of towns and

the increase in population produced a demand for food products that could not be satisfied by West European supplies alone. The demand for meat, especially, could no longer be met from nearby areas. At the same time meat was the product that could be delivered relatively easily on its own legs to the markets. In the fourteenth century cattle exports began to take place from a wide area. This marked the beginning of the development of market towns in Eastern and Central Europe. From the next century onward a new feature was included with the former two: an increasing demand for grain and timber. The demand for grain from Dutch towns, to which it could be delivered by water, exerted an influence everywhere. From the end of the fourteenth century this influence spread over England, Denmark, and Southern Swe-

den on one side, and East German, Polish, and Baltic areas on the

other.’* As a matter of fact, until the appearance of railways there would not be any way of delivering grain in large quantities to Western Europe from other East European areas. Only after the construction of the railway network could Russian, Hungarian, and Romanian grain appear on the Western markets. At this point the effects of Western Europe’s dynamic geographical expansion become important to our theme. We can witness an eastern

AGRARIAN SYSTEMS 63 as well as western migration from the territory called Western Europe. The peasants of the overpopulated areas settled in huge waves in the as yet uninhabited North Flemish territories, and colonization towards the east spread with a surprising velocity. This was facilitated by a fact not usually mentioned in this connection, namely the German system of inheritance by which the land could be inherited by only one successor. The oldest or youngest son thus received the entire inheritance, leaving the other successors the choice of remaining there to serve, or migrating to begin cultivation of a new piece of land. _ This system of succession provided the German peasants with greater mobility than other peasants in Eastern Europe and facilitated their migrations. As a result of population growth, colonization by German peasants had reached the Elbe-Saale-Czech forest line in about the eleventh

century, and by the thirteenth century their colonization had spread from Silesia to Poland and Hungary. In the other direction the German peasants very successfully inhabited Holland, soon even reclaiming areas from the sea. Such colonization activity meant not only the migration or expansion of a population to uninhabited areas, but also the transplantation of an economic and social system. The German peasants settling between the Elbe-Saale and the Oder Germanized and practically absorbed the earlier inhabitants. However, in the territories east of the

Oder, there were not enough German peasants to achieve such results. , Thus in the Baltic region there appeared mixed settlements of peasant and town citizens. Colonization of this sort was supported by the Polish, Czech, and Hungarian kings, because they expected their income to increase by it. In return the settlers were allowed to maintain their social and economic

order, as well as their personal freedom, which had previously been unknown in these territories. Where the Germans settled in masses, the advantages of this socioeconomic order soon became clear for the Czech, Hungarian, and Polish peasants. The settlers introduced more advanced agricultural techniques and technologies: the asymmetric, partly iron heavy plow; the three-field system; individual plots; horse yoking; and better animal husbandry, which allowed permanent stabling. Of even more importance, however, were the personal freedom of the peasant, the freer communal system of the German village, which was limited to the use of special commons, and more advantageous tax conditions. Within a few centuries the colonization by German peasants reached

its eastern limit. Setthements in Russia in the eighteenth century no longer brought about the significant effects that had occurred east of

the Oder since the twelfth century. While the German villages in

64 AGRARIAN SYSTEMS Bukovina and Russia in the eighteenth century kept their own social order, including personal freedom and lighter services than their Russian counterparts, their population was too small to exert any substantial influence on the surrounding areas. In Polish, Baltic, and Bohemian territories, however, the appearance

of numerous German villages reshaped the structure of the local societies. In Silesia at the end of the thirteenth century there were 200 so-called villages under German law, and by the mid-fourteenth century the number had risen to 1200, with 120 towns of the same kind. In Great Poland, where a “privilege” consisted of several villages, the number of privileges grew from 164 in the mid-fourteenth to about a thousand by

the early fifteenth century. By the turn of the sixteenth century, 153 towns under German law had also come into being. In the territories of the archbishopric of Gnezno, for example, 215 settlements under German law were founded between the years 1285 and 1512. We also know

that at the time of the first partition of Poland in 1772 there were 73 towns and 96 villages under German law around Lemberg and altogether 650 such settlements in Galicia.’ In time, of course, the population of the villages under German law dissolved rather easily into the native population. This was not the case with towns, however, so it 1s easier to determine the eastern border of

these settlements. In the northern part of the continent, towns under German law were found from Stettin to K6nigsberg; these took the law of Lubeck (niederdeutsches Recht) as their basis. In the central zone, towns based on the law of Magdeburg (flammisches Recht) were founded in Eastern Galicia along a line through Brest, Lublin, Radom, Sandom, and Lemberg. In the south the law of Nuremberg (oberdeutsches Recht) prevailed in the German towns of Bohemia, Moravia, and Hungary to the line of the Carpathians. The eastern border of German set-

tlements of large numbers is approximately the Memel line, running from Brest up the Bug. To the north we usually find towns such as Riga and Dorpat, but no network of village settlements as extensive as those in the central and southern regions.'® Large-scale colonization by the German peasants cemented the already existing processes leading to the gradual strengthening of certain

Western elements of the economic and social system in this part of Europe. A few places in this area had belonged to the Roman Empire and later to the empire of Charlemagne, so in these places the ancient traditions had left traces. It is not by chance that Hungary and Bohemia

were influenced by the Roman rather than Greek Church so that the Western form of Christianity triumphed. Besides the representatives of

AGRARIAN SYSTEMS | 65 the Church, military men soon appeared, invited by the rulers of those countries. They protected the power of the king against pagan rebels in Hungary, for example. The Hungarian tribes did not find the Carpathian basin deserted at the time of their colonization, for there were ethnic groups with Western-style social and economic structures inhabiting the area west of the Danube, which had belonged to Charlemagne’s empire. The effect of these peasant folk groups upon the development of

Hungarian society is undeniable. The conquering Hungarians settled | not upon empty or depopulated land in the trans-Danubian area, but into an existing agrarian society that had previously been saturated by Western structures. Italian, French, and Southern German influence played a role in this area later, exerted partly by the Church and partly by feudal military elements. This divergence in Hungary between western trans-Danubia and the eastern plains gives an example of how certain state formations could incorporate two types of structure from the start. But it also proves the role played by ethnic groups living in the western half in forming the socioeconomic order of Hungarian folk society, and it shows that this has been an important and manifest advantage to the country for centuries.

In Hungary, Bohemia, Croatia, and Slovenia, Roman law had a deeper effect than in Poland or the Baltic states. The role of the classical Mediterranean tradition was about the same in Croatia and Slovenia as in Hungary. In Bohemia there was the added influence of the Celtic oppidum culture, whose effect could still be felt after the Slavic colonization.'”? Thus the societies and economies of these areas had many Western or Western-like structural elements even before the arrival of German settlers. These elements had not, however, prevailed. It was the German peasants and townsmen who accounted for the relatively quick

and strong success of Western patterns of development in Central Europe.'®

Later on, unfortunately, the matter of German colonization became an issue of national politics throughout the region. The ideological positions that resulted either preached the superiority of German culture, or totally denied any significant role for German colonization. The fact was, though, that for certain peoples of Eastern Europe, those who came to form a distinct East Central European culture, the achievement of Western social and economic development materialized in the form of settlements inhabited by German peasants. The stress here is not so much on the German peasants who migrated into the area, but on the Western-style social structures that spread and were maintained. This had a great effect on the Hungarian, Czech, and Polish peasants

66 AGRARIAN SYSTEMS who were in contact with the greatest number of German settlers. Especially Polish, but also Hungarian historical sources bear witness to the process by which peasants began to follow German law (called hospes or “guest” law in Hungary). After a period of time the colonists could not be distinguished from other peasants who lived according to German

law. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries began the process of unification of different strata of the peasantry, first in Bohemia, then Hungary, then Poland. Parallel to this process was the spread of produc-

tion techniques and technologies introduced by the settlers. The fact that a great number of towns under German law came into being with the aid of the territorial rulers served to accelerate and deepen the process and contributed to the formation of a new social structure with Western features in Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, Poland, and the Baltic countries.'®

Of course East Central Europe showed important differences from the West, as well, which must be pointed out. In these countries the delicate structure of feudal society found in Western Europe never existed. The role of the towns was not as great or as important, except in Bohemia, and in fact the rise of towns did not really reshape society as it had in Western Europe. Commodity production, and with it the money economy, had not penetrated to the extent it had in the West. Central power remained much stronger, and there was an essential difference in the social position of the nobility. Sull it is true that this part of Eastern

Europe broke away socially from the rest of Eastern Europe as well. Peasants faced their lords individually, they supplied services individually, the solidarity of the village community vanished, the land commune system of redistribution ceased and the land was given permanently to individual farmers (although the village community reserved a certain

role in connection with the field rotation system). On the whole, the same basic system of private land property spread as among the peasants of Western Europe. THE INTRODUCTION OF THE MODERN WORLD MARKET

By the time these processes had completely unfolded and transformed society, a new type economic impact from Western Europe was being felt in the form of greatly increased demand for grain. From the second half of the fifteenth century the demand for grain in towns of the Netherlands gradually increased. The Low Countries, being by the sea coast, profited from their advantageous position by importing grain in large quantities, while their own agriculture concentrated on more valuable

AGRARIAN SYSTEMS 67 products such as meat and dairy foods. A world agricultural market came into existence. The Dutch demand for grain made itself felt all around the Baltic Sea, where navigable streams facilitated the delivery of grain to the sea. At a distance of one or two days’ journey from both sides of the great Elbe, Oder, and Vistula Rivers, large-scale production of grain commenced. This produced relations between Western Europe and the western zone

of Eastern Europe that were more organic than had previously been imaginable. Direct economic influence was exerted over these places. The economic relations of previous centuries between these two parts of Europe now became more and more tightly woven. In the fifteenth century a number of everyday articles, such as textiles and utensils, ap-

peared among the nobilities of Hungary, Bohemia, and Poland. As a result, this part of East Central Europe was also attached to the West financially.

The price revolution of the sixteenth century gave a new impetus to these economic ties, and at the same time determined for a long period to come the economic and social relations in the western belt of Eastern Europe. The nobility of the region was very badly hit by the price revolution because its profits were no longer enough to maintain the living standard to which it was accustomed. The difficulties arose from the fact

that the economies of these countries could not keep up with the economic development of Western Europe. Western imports rose in price faster than domestic ones, and the terms of trade shifted against the East Central European exports. The nobility could no longer increase its income by raising peasant dues, especially not where they had been established earlier by tradition.

Land rent in kind could not be increased either; the grain production capacity of the peasant economies was too limited. The nobility needed money, but where nobles attempted to raise the burden of the peasants, the peasants sooner or later rebelled (as in Transylvania in 1437 when the Church increased its tax by demanding it in hard currency retroactive for three years). The nobility was obliged to look for new sources of income, which meant suitable new ways of exploiting the peasants or new economic activities.

A different solution presented itself in each area according to the economic conditions, but the widening of economic activities among the nobility was characteristic of all areas and led to the establishment of di-

rect connections between the nobility and economic life. The nobility had earlier been engaged in the cattle trade and had excluded the direct producers, the peasants, from a share of the profits. In the period of

68 | AGRARIAN SYSTEMS the price revolution the nobility now quickly joined the new business of

grain export and, even more importantly, became engaged in direct grain production as well.” All along the rivers flowing into the Baltic Sea the nobility became active in growing grain. Many places already had enough cultivable land, while others had the possibility for increasing their available land. The

nobility began building individual grain-producing estates wherever feasible. The heart of these estates consisted of the smaller plots of land previously used by nobles for securing their own provisions. These plots

existed in some form or other in most areas, though not to the same extent as two or three centuries earlier. Where there was not enough land, peasants’ lands were wholly or partially expropriated, and land became much more concentrated in noble hands. In Poland and Hungary the nobles rarely had to resort to such measures because of the low density of land use; further west, in Mecklenburg or parts of Brandenburg, for example, a denser population and the resultant land shortage led nobles simply to drive the peasants away from their small plots (Bauernlegen). Especially after the mid-seventeenth century, self-managed grain production farms were established in this way by the nobles. From the beginning of the eighteenth century up to the first decades of the nineteenth, we find increasing numbers of such self-managed farms alongside the major rivers in the great region between the Elbe and the Vistula. Thus, as a result of the direct economic impact of Western Europe, the large manorial farm came into being.” The formation of these large manorial farms entailed serious social consequences by reshaping peasant conditions. Besides the land itself,

large-scale production also required labor power and equipment in quantities that the nobility had not before possessed. The nobility lacked

the necessary financial means to engage sufficient numbers of paid workers for large-scale grain production. Instead they came upon another solution: they began gradually to increase the socage services of the peasantry. In part of Prussia and the region between the Elbe and the Oder, where the nobility was scrambling to secure enough labor to grow and deliver grain to the markets, socage services grew from one and two up to five or even six days out of the week. This meant in practice that a peasant household had to hire outside labor either to meet its own needs or to fulfill the manorial demands of socage. This increasing burden of socage services prevented any possible development of peasant economies, making it simply impossible for the peasants to develop their own lands. The increase of socage burdens led in certain cases to legal conse-

AGRARIAN SYSTEMS 69 quences as well. The free migration of peasants and the ability to abrogate their contract had to be stopped, that is, they had to be deprived of the important right they had obtained as a result of the German colonization. In many places the free movement of peasants was banned, as in the eastern part of Poland or in the Baltic states. The bondage of

the peasant to the person of the noble was the actual sine qua non for : the adequate functioning of large-scale grain production based on socage services everywhere in Eastern Europe where there existed market possibilities. In other areas of Eastern Europe peasants had to be tied to the seigneur because the great amount of empty land tempted peasants to migrate, and the nobles would have been deserted and left without taxpaying subjects. This was the case in Russia. The limitation of the rights and personal freedom of peasants forced them practically into the

status of slaves. In places the peasants’ right to inherit had been abolished, and the seigneur gained the power to make important decisions about their lives, such as marriage. The most extreme utilization of peasant labor resulted in Poland, Brandenburg, and Prussia, and also in part of Bohemia—everywhere, that is, where grain production found good markets as a result of the

continuous and permanent increase of West European demand. In these areas the system of manorial large-scale production based on the utilization of corvée labor power and equipment of the peasants was established.”” This type of development, however, was only characteristic of areas where there existed suitable market and delivery opportunities. This zone of grain-producing farms based on socage services included the eastern part of Germany, Polish and some Latvian territories, and the district of Livonia. The situation was somewhat different in Bohemia

and Hungary and in the regions further south, as well as in the huge areas east of the Polish and Hungarian borders. But Bohemian development was not identical to Polish or Baltic patterns because Bohemia had already become much more Westernized. In Bohemia German colonization had proved to be very successful as a

society-shaping process. Characteristic of this were the formation of a substantially free peasant society, wide diffusion of the asymmetric heavy plow and a three-field system, and fixed taxation obligations for the peasants. The social position of the peasants in Bohemia (German settlers and their Slavic partners equally) was established on the basis of deutsches Recht. A great number of towns were built as a consequence of

colonization: Czech silver played a determining role in the European economy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and colonization by miners began relatively early. To this day it is not known what caused

70 AGRARIAN SYSTEMS the large-scale development of commodity production and the money economy conditions that occurred before the German colonization, yet it is an undoubtable fact that Czech town development was unique in

Eastern Europe. While Poland and Hungary had a loose network of towns that lay rather far from one another, the Czech towns lay only one or two days’ journey apart. This dense network of towns provided a large internal market for agricultural goods, not only for one or two articles but for a whole range of products from grain, fruits, and milk to meat and fish. In Bohemia, as in Western Europe, the internal basis for the development of agricultural production had been laid and this development

could therefore take intensive forms. Here, too, manorial farming existed, and nobles tried to increase their income by means of grain production, but the large-scale production consisted here primarily of bar-

ley and hops (components of beer) instead of wheat and rye. Another important form of manorial commodity production was the creation of fish ponds. Fish is a delicate commodity that decays easily; delivering it is no easy task, and to deliver it over great distances in the Middle Ages was quite impossible. It is evident that the large-scale development of fish ponds was due to the high standard of Bohemian town development from the fifteenth century on. Artificial fish breeding is a labor intensive branch of production, so the socage burdens of the peasants significantly increased in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries in Bohemia. Peasant economies became part of commodity production in Bohemia. The peasants themselves became connected with money circulation, which was made possible by the significant network of towns. The great number of towns limited exploitation by landowners, for the peasants’

moving into town was a real and everyday danger in spite of legal restrictions. The general economic and social development of Bohemia thus included a number of West European elements that made this region totally different from the rest of East Central Europe and raised Bohemian development to the same quality as that of Western Europe. (It must be added, though, that Bohemian development had been, as

it later turned out, one of the weakest among the West European socioeconomic systems.) Simply put, beginning in the thirteenth century

the quality of Bohemian development bore the ubiquitous marks of a West European type of development and had a share in it.” The situation was quite different in Hungary because the main river of the Carpathian basin, the Danube, did not enable that country to join the European grain trade. Thus, large manorial grain-producing estates

AGRARIAN SYSTEMS 71 did not come into being in Hungary in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as in Germany or Poland. There existed a sporadic local demand for grain, especially during the Turkish-Hungarian wars. After that the system of forts running through the middle of the country as a result of the Turkish occupation produced a market for grain. This, however, failed to reform economic life permanently. The Hungarian nobility therefore had to choose another way to increase its income. ' One way the Hungarian nobility increased its income was through various trade monopolies, especially on wine and spirit sales and the right to run a mill or butcher shop. The inhabitants of villages in Hungary were obliged to drink only the wine of the nobles for six months of the year. This was not, as a matter of fact, wine made by the nobles; the majority of what was sold by force by the landowners to the peasants had been made by the peasants themselves, then had been delivered in the form of services to the nobles and the church. The greater part of the income of landlords consisted of income from licensing spirits, mills, and other such monopolies. This was the road taken by the nobles to raise their incomes until the second half of the eighteenth century. Even then, however, the grain-producing manorial estates began to develop only in the western and northwestern regions of the country, in the very regions where grain could easily be transported to nearby Austrian or Bohemian towns. Within the larger eastern part of the country, grain

production began only in the second half of the nineteenth century, after the construction of the railway network. The Hungarian nobility naturally participated in the animal trade as well. An increasing part of its income came from this, as well as from the licensing of inns, mills, and butcher shops. Large manorial farms based on socage services first took shape only in the second half of the eighteenth century. In spite of the statute declaring the so-called terrestrial tie of the peasants, manorial estates based on socage service did not stabilize before the eighteenth century. This statute withdrew the peasants’ right to move from one place to another and plunged them into

serfdom following the 1514 peasant revolution. But elements of free movement again appeared in Hungarian society during the sixteenth century. The reaction of 1514 proved therefore premature; the nobility could not make use of bound corvée labor. Even the peasant revolt itself originated from rivalry between the nobility and the wealthiest elements of the peasantry which dealt with the animal trade and mostly inhabited market towns. While in the second half of the fifteenth century royal power supported the development of market towns, at the turn of the

72 AGRARIAN SYSTEMS sixteenth century it was the nobility that came out on top and cruelly liquidated its rival. This was the intent of the terrestrial tie and eternal serfdom. Its ultimate result, however, only emerged in the middle of the eighteenth century, when large manorial grain farms came into being in the western part of the country.” Nor did large grain-producing farms arise in the continental regions further to the east. Nobles in Russia, Eastern Poland, Moldavia, and Wallachia had no other choice than to take the same path as the Hungarian nobility, namely to make use of alcohol and other monopolies. These regions fell outside the reach of the European grain markets, because grain could not yet be transported from these areas. Only after the Treaty of Adrianople, which in 1829 opened the gates of the Bosporus to Russian trading ships, could large-scale grain production finally begin in earnest.” Soon after, train connections were established, which

grain trade. ,

meant that the whole of Eastern Europe could finally join the world During the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries Eastern Europe became permanently bifurcated: in the smaller western zone, big manorial farms based on socage and grain production appeared, while in the larger zone to the east, a society based on taxation and rent took shape. The features of this society that hindered development were even stronger than those of the socage system, because they were combined with the mutual responsibility system of village communities. The parasitic nature of this eastern system determined the relationship between the nobility and the peasantry in Russia and the Romanian principalities. We must take into consideration though that a completely clear picture of either zone of Eastern Europe cannot be drawn. The big manorial farm based on socage is generally characteristic of Poland and Bohemia, yet there remained areas unsuitable for transporting grain, especially in Poland, where manors were not established. There the nobility increased its income by means of seignorial monopolies. At the same time there existed districts within the eastern belt which for some

reason were able to join in the grain trade, so that manorial grainproducing economies with their consequent socage burdens could be formed. Thus for example in Moldavia the possibility of manorial grain production was greater than in Wallachia; and again in some Hungarian regions in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries the socage system also appeared for a few decades. This, however, did not change the position of the regions as a whole, which preserved their character as shaped by more permanent conditions.

AGRARIAN SYSTEMS 73 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

An important new feature in the socioeconomic position of Eastern Europe and in the development of agriculture was the agrarian boom that

appeared in the whole East European region at the turn of the nineteenth century. Over two decades, in the age of the Napoleonic wars, this boom left undeniable marks on the agrarian development of both zones of Eastern Europe. For the western sphere it brought about the significant strengthening of manorial grain-producing farms. The

manorial economy, using socage and the tools of the serfs, now appeared all over in areas where the effects of the grain boom had not shown up earlier because of the distance from markets. The permanently enlarged armies and their garrisons produced an important mar-

ket for grain and fodder production and for the products of animal breeding. The quick construction of a network of roads to satisfy army demands at the turn of the nineteenth century also contributed to the economic expansion, as these roads were also utilized for trade pur-

poses. The continental embargo further strengthened the military boom, yielding favorable conditions for the production of sugar beets and tobacco. The diffusion of potato production, especially in the Baltic area, contributed to an increase in the distillation of spirits, while the towns of the district produced a market for manorial dairy farming.” One new economic effect of Western Europe reaching the continental

parts of Eastern Europe, including inner Russia, appeared forcefully during the last three decades of the eighteenth century in the form of a strong demand for wool. West European, Austrian, Czech, and German textile industries began to demand increasing quantities of wool, which was all the more important for Russia because it was easier to transport wool than grain. As a result, the demand for wool produced a boom in places where this had never before occurred. Sheep farming spread quickly, and different Western ovine species appeared rather early. Even in continental parts of Russia as well as in Hungary and Po-

land, manors in regions far from the markets could now join in wool production. Far-reaching consequences followed. Under the conditions of the wool boom a change of species soon took place on the sheep farms of the bigger estates, with the goal of acclimatizing Western ovine races. These animals, however, were kept differently than the traditional species. In Hungary and Poland, and in parts of Bohemia and Russia, the Western-type merino sheep were fed with cultivated fodder. This

74 AGRARIAN SYSTEMS brought about the introduction of new forms of vegetation and new production techniques. On the most developed manorial sheep farms the Western species of sheep that were bred on a wide scale were usually foddered, while sheep runs had become only an accessory element in feeding sheep. Fodder plants were either imported directly from Western Europe or they came in indirectly, via Austria or Bohemia. The new fodder plants were cultivated in a field system especially established for

this purpose, with the help of the then modern English, French, or

new tools. ,

Dutch tools. Hired labor was often used instead of socage services, because dependent peasants were not trusted to deal with the expensive

As a consequence of this process in the western sphere of Eastern

Europe, the second and third decades of the nineteenth century brought signs of the great difference in production techniques between big farms on one hand and peasant economies on the other. The farms of the richest landowning aristocrats represented an enclave within East European agriculture in the first half of the nineteenth century comparable to that of the modern industry established by West European firms in the colonies a century later. On a few farms of a few great landowners we can

find the most modern production techniques and technologies of the age: new plows, sowing machines, drainage, rotations system instead of the old field system, new and previously unknown fodder plants, stabled animal breeding, acclimatization of new animal species, and in places the hiring of wage laborers. These farms stood up to the modern English, French, and Dutch farms of their age. But there were only a few such farms belonging to a few great landowners, and this was more of a luxury or an expensive passion than a good business. Moreover, these same great landowners operated the more traditional grain farms on most of their land, cultivating with unpaid socage labor. These manorial initia-

tives did not mean a breakthrough in the agriculture of the whole region, therefore, as they did not significantly diffuse modern production techniques and technology. Agricultural production was carried out all over Eastern Europe largely in the old form, with the old means. This was also the case on the majority of estates belonging to the great landowning aristocrats; in reality the new means could only be introduced by the richest aristocrats on only a few model farms. The basic reason for this was the lack of capital in the whole region, which resulted in the inability of the nobles and the peasants to improve their technology. The difference between continental Eastern Europe and East Central

Europe was that in Hungary, Poland, and the Baltic lands there were to be found such modern farms among the richest feudal proprietors,

AGRARIAN SYSTEMS 75 and slow modernization among the less rich landowners had also started, while in continental Eastern Europe even the great landowning aristocracy was not able to develop its economy in comparable proportions. The general lack of capital, the extremely long distance from the market, and the lack of technical knowledge prevented this.” In Hun-

gary, for example, in the regions lying west and northwest of the Danube there were a few big farms in every county that represented the new and the modern, at least in a few respects. In Russia, on the other hand, even in provinces of a regency scale there were hardly even one or two to be found. The difference in this regard is not just quantitative, it is qualitative, and it reflects perfectly the differences between the two major regions of Eastern Europe.” In many ways the situation was different in Bohemia. Here the general level of development of the economy, and especially the urbanization essential for the development of agricultural production, was at a higher level. The beneficial effect of this advanced level presented itself in greater agricultural production as well as in the socioeconomic condi-

tions of the peasantry. In the whole region, Bohemia alone produced a strong and increasing internal market for agricultural goods, while

everywhere else most commercialized agricultural goods were merely exported. The presence of this internal market promoted the balanced development of agriculture. The usual case in Eastern Europe was that only those branches of agriculture developed which found markets abroad. In Hungary cattle breeding and quality wine production developed first, then from the second half of the eighteenth century grain production, and in the first half of the nineteenth century sheep farming. In Poland grain production and a few branches of animal breeding developed. Similarly the Baltic lands became involved in grain, and potatoes were also grown for the distillation of spirits. In Bohemia, however, every branch of agriculture developed proportionally. Along with grain, fodder plants were also grown on the arable land; all branches of animal breeding were practiced; hops and barley were grown for beer;

and from the first half of the nineteenth century, sugar beets were grown as well. Here no single leading branch of large-scale production, as in Hungarian or Polish estates, ever dominated. At the same time the developmental gap between peasants’ and landlords’ farms was not as

great as, for example, in Hungary. The peasant economies kept pace with modern production technologies, whose use was not limited to big manors. The social position of the peasantry was also different in Bohemia. In the early seventeenth century the resistance of the estates had been

76 AGRARIAN SYSTEMS crushed, and following the peasant revolt of 1680 the nobles could no longer use peasant socage to the same extent as before. During the eighteenth century the peasant-supporting measures of the court in Vienna were enforced in Bohemia, thereby changing significantly the social position of the peasantry. The high level of town development played a primary role in this area as well. The dense network of towns enabled peasants to settle in cities, and this opportunity was so widely taken that the demands of the landlords were automatically limited. Agrarian development in Bohemia took the West European path, in fact, in every respect, so that at the turn of the nineteenth century there was no difference at all between Austrian, Bavarian, and Bohemian agricultural conditions. Bohemia, in fact, belonged more to Western Europe. Let us summarize the essence of what characterized the social and economic situations of the peasantry in the two zones of Eastern Europe by the middle of the nineteenth century. A substantial German colonization of this region beginning in the thirteenth century had resulted in a growth of the population density, which in turn led to a general intensification of agricultural systems. The economic influence of Western Europe then produced a demand in the nearby western zone of Eastern Europe for grain and later wool, making conditions favorable for the growth of large grain-producing farms. These farms were cultivated with socage labor and with the tools of the peasants. At first only in spots, but by the mid-nineteenth century all over the region, modern techniques such as three-field rotation and tools such as the asymmetric heavy plow became dominant, particularly on the large manorial farms. By the turn of the nineteenth century the cultivation of fallow land had begun in some areas, yielding potatoes in Poland’s most developed places, and potatoes and maize in Hungary. Meanwhile the peasant’s methods of cultivation and the peasant economy itself had not changed qualitatively. Peasants still used traditional tools and traditional forms, though by the mid-nineteenth century the three-field system had replaced the two-field system almost everywhere. In other words, despite advances, the western part of Eastern Europe (i.e., Central Europe) still lacked a sufficiently high population and ur-

ban density to support full agricultural modernization. Only Bohemia was an exception. By the early nineteenth century a certain degree of modernization had occurred in the technology of the large landowners who grew grain for export, but these enclaves of modern economic production did not transform the peasant economies, nor even the great majority of big farms, which were still based on socage service. The peasant economy, serving the small internal market, stayed at its tradi-

AGRARIAN SYSTEMS 77 tional level of production technique, unchanged and unmodernized. The peasantry of this region was cultivating the land in the same manner as the West European peasantry had been doing in the fifteenth and six-

teenth centuries. But even the production pattern that has just been described was not characteristic of the zone lying farther to the east, especially not for the inner Russian regions. In this continental portion of Eastern Europe the pressure of the population was not strong, agricultural export was not significant until the late nineteenth century, and the internal market was not even as developed as, for example, in Poland. Here we cannot speak of the spread of the asymmetric heavy plow or about the dominant role of the three-field system; for here the two-field system was dominant, and the more extensive forms of cultivation played an important role.” Peasant production remained at its earlier level, and the income of the nobility grew not as a result of self-managed manors, but as a result of the use of various noble monopolies, first among them being the distillation and sale of alcoholic spirits. When the export possibilities for agricultural products finally arose, in the nineteenth century, the production capabilities of the nobles’ self-managed farms, based on peasant labor, proved unable to exceed the standard of the peasant economies.

While in the western sphere of Eastern Europe the big farms of the great landowners created enclaves of modern agricultural production,

this did not occur on the continental side even after railroads had

brought international trade to the rural agricultural region as far as the Urals. Only after the liberation of the serfs did such a process begin in the eastern zone. In the whole of Eastern Europe the strong role of the state was elemental in the liberation of the serfs. This meant that the power of the state had to impose liberation of the serfs against the stubborn resistance of the majority of the land-controlling class. Furthermore, the state played a dominant role everywhere in securing financial compensation for the nobility, due to the low economic level of society and the lack of capital of the peasantry. Precisely the low standard of economy and the great lack of capital of these societies explains why serf liberation and the creation of capttalist conditions took place in agriculture by reforms from above. In continental Eastern Europe—Russia, Romania, as well as in Serbia and Bulgaria—the preconditions of capitalism were so weakly formed that these countries could not wait decades or centuries for their development. Here, too, the military challenge had to be calculated. The example of greater Russia proves what role the military interests of the empire played in the abolition of serfdom. The state itself thus quick-

78 AGRARIAN SYSTEMS ened the process, though it was not capable of creating capitalist conditions at once. The nobility was compensated for the liberation of the serfs in both zones of Eastern Europe, making the level of economic development at the time of liberation most influential. The precondition of liberation was in every case a certain amount of commodity production and the existence of money circulation in agriculture. In this respect there were essential differences between the continental and western parts of East-

ern Europe. Hungary, Poland, the Baltic lands, and Bohemia joined world trade earlier and more powerfully, and goods and money played a much greater role in agriculture than was the case in Russia and some of the Balkan countries. Emancipation therefore occurred not only earlier, but in several respects differently than in the east. In Croatia, Hungary, Bohemia, and the western and central parts of Poland, peasants could keep a rather large part of the land in their own use; the compensation did not mean that the peasant had to compensate for his freedom by giving up his land. Here even the various forms of labor compensa-

tion were not long-lasting, and the changeover to a capitalist type of farming took place rather early.” There were other differences as well. In Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary the serfs were no longer as subservient as in Russia and Romania. The quantity of services to be performed had been limited by the state. The only question to be decided in 1848 was thus whether the peasants

should also receive a share of the landlords’ land (terra dominicalis,

/ as opposed to terra rusticalis in law). In Russia the debate was about whether peasants still regarded as virtual slaves should be freed in person, and whether the liberated serfs should then receive any share in the land whatsoever. In the Romanian principalities, too, the issue was whether or not the freed serfs should get any land, and if so, how much. The land in this eastern zone, as a matter of fact, had not been legally divided into two parts, so in principle all the land belonged to the nobility. Although peasants had used the land, the owners could still take it away, change it, or reduce its size, unhindered by legal obstacles or customary law. In the same way, the person of the serf could be bought, sold, or pawned quite independently of the land.

In Russia and Romania the liberation of the serfs took place after these areas had joined international trade, namely at about the same time as the construction of railway networks. This created the possibility for the peasants to produce goods. The relative backwardness of the region meant that the peasants did not have enough money. This was one reason why the landowners were compensated with land and services.

AGRARIAN SYSTEMS 79 Compensation by services included cultivation of the landlords’ land in socage even after the liberation, land lease against labor service, and sale

of peasant labor for a period of years in advance. All these forms of service resulted from the fact that the peasantry was chronically impecunious. This eventually spread usury into villages and caused the deterioration of the peasants’ conditions.” One result of the general shortage of money was that by liberating the serfs the state strengthened village communes throughout the eastern zone. In Russia these communes were made responsible for the correct settlement of the redemption of the peasants: if someone failed to pay, the village community had to pay instead. In the case of Romania the village community had to guarantee implementation of the labor duties of peasants. Communal lands and villages prevailed long after this type of liberation of the serfs had taken place. In vast areas of Russia the system of redivision of land by the community also existed. This all hindered the capitalist development of agriculture a great deal, and because the peasants were practically tied to the land communities, it also meant a blockage to the development of industry. The systematic and equalizing redivision of the land, the principle of solidarity among members of the village community, and the binding of superfluous labor power to the agricultural land—none of this could be adjusted to capitalist conditions.” In the second half of the nineteenth century, in the decades of the grain boom and the following grain crisis, the peasant economies of Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary developed significantly. The three-field system changed to a more advanced rotation system, and the technique of plowing improved with the introduction of factory-produced iron plows that could be pulled by a pair of horses. ‘These plows became widely available by the end of the century. The iron harrow, the sowing machine, and the scythe also contributed to the development of cultiva-

tion. Machine threshing was predominant by the end of the century in the peasant economies. During the grain crisis there began the rapid development of animal breeding in peasant households. The changeover to stalling and the acclimatization of western types of cattle, swine, and sheep followed the big farms with a delay of only one or two decades. The development of cooperatives made dairy farming profitable for peasant holdings, especially in Bohemia. The development of animal breeding started a new wave of investment in which farm buildings were

constructed; new machines such as grinders were purchased and in-

| stalled on the peasant farms. Increased breeding also changed the use of arable land, as the cultivation of fodder plants gained ground against

80 AGRARIAN SYSTEMS the extensive raising of grain in plowed fields. The proportion of hoed

and industrial plants such as sugar beet, maize, and potato also increased. As a result of all this the productivity of the peasant economies increased dramatically, while the great capitalist farms characteristic of Bohemia, but also found in parts of Poland and Hungary, surpassed the peasant economies in every way and rivaled the most advanced German or Dutch farms. This ts reflected in the average yields of the more important crops, which approached French or Bavarian levels.*

These patterns hold true for the whole western belt of Eastern Europe, yet variations are worth noting. Western Poland, being part of imperial Germany and thereby protected by its tariffs, achieved a much

higher level of agricultural development than the part of the country belonging to the tsarist empire, a difference that is still, in fact, apparent today. Bohemia’s high level of industrialization and urbanization created a significant internal market that exerted an extremely strong demand on agricultural production. The gap between the large estates and the peasant holdings was not nearly as great as in Poland or Hungary, for the peasant farms operated at quite a high level. Agricultural production in Bohemia matched the most advanced German districts and surpassed that of France; only a few areas in Europe did better, those being Bel-

gium, Holland, and industrialized parts of France and northern Italy. It is an important factor that Bohemian industrial development, like that of German Poland, absorbed excess labor from agriculture and allowed thereby for a relatively egalitarian development of peasant agriculture. Such was not the case in Hungary. Industrial development there was

insufficient to absorb the quantity of agricultural labor that was released. Emigration did reduce somewhat the excess labor power, but not enough to stop the sharpening social differences. The real wage of ag-

ricultural labor was decreasing at the turn of this century due to the grain crisis, which along with increasing unemployment caused a few tense decades. By this time the agrarian society of Hungary had been significantly proletarianized due to the principle of equal inheritance. Since industry could not absorb the agrarian labor, about half the agricultural population consisted of totally destitute agrarian proletarians or dwarf holders who subsisted by wage labor. The shortage of land

meant that peasant landholders were proportionally fewer, and the agrarian proletariat proportionally greater, than in Russia. The poverty stricken agrarian strata were the “agrosocialists” of the turn of the cen-

tury, whose movements took the form of harvest strikes, and who calmed down only 1n 1907 when the protective tariffs of the AustroHungarian Monarchy were raised. Under the protection of these duties

AGRARIAN SYSTEMS 8&1 Hungarian agriculture then attained a favorable position in the markets of the monarchy, which enabled agricultural wages to rise. The situation was completely different in Russia and the Balkans. In Russia the redemption sums paid to landlords, along with taxes, placed such a heavy burden on the peasants that they were not able to invest in farms. The system of redivision of lands also prevented accumulation and investment. Meanwhile the settlement of liabilities forced the peasants to increase production on the land. By the end of the nineteenth century this exploitive farming, still based on the wooden plow, thornharrow, and other medieval tools, ended in a series of bad harvests and famines. The government reduced the burdens somewhat, but kept the land communes and the system of paying debts in labor. Peasants suffered usury and such hardships that the revolutionary situation brought on by the Russo-Japanese war spread revolt among the peasants like wildfire. Usury was even worse in Romania, where peasants sold their labor to landlords in advance, or traded it for land. The big landowners did not cultivate the land themselves, but signed usurious contracts with tenant farmers. The situation sometimes became unbearable, leading to the bloody revolts of 1888 and 1907. These turns of events were caused mainly by the insufficient development of money and trade conditions and the consequent inability of the peasants to settle their debts. The simultaneous growth of the peasant population in the nineteenth century caused a relative overpopulation of the land. For the first time in Russian history it was impossible to increase tillage to match population growth. Considering the burdens of the peasantry, any increase in agricultural production could only have been attained through intensive methods. Such intensification could not be effected through accumulation and investment because of a short-

age of peasant capital and because of the long survival of the land communes, which lasted until 1907. The famines that arose regularly around the turn of the century (there were twelve bad harvests in Russia between 1891 and 1914) marked the crisis in the system. Finally the peasant revolts of 1905 to 1907 in Russia and Romania washed away the roadblocks preventing development along the Polish or Hungarian path. This created the possibility of accelerating the capitalist development of agriculture.* CONCLUSION

The whole of Eastern Europe was divided rather early into two unequal parts by the economic relationships that tied them to Western Europe.

§2 AGRARIAN SYSTEMS In the territories lying geographically nearer Western Europe the influ-

ence of Roman law made for a more private, less communal form of peasant property. Large-scale colonization took place continuously after the twelfth century, giving strong impulse to the socioeconomic development of private peasant property in agriculture. This process allowed

| peasants to be less dependent on lords. Population density contributed considerably to the development of agricultural techniques and technology. The attraction of West European markets beginning in the fifteenth — century led to the creation of great manorial farms that produced commodities using socage labor (hence, the notion of a “second serfdom”). These great manors spearheaded the modernization of agriculture after the eighteenth century and served as examples for peasant holdings as well. After the liberation of the serfs the transformation of peasant holdings was quick.

This zone spreading from Finland and Estonia through Latvia and Lithuania, the western part of Poland, Hungary, Croatia, and Slovenia can actually in a historical sense be called “Middle Europe.” This is a transitional area where West European and East European influences mixed with one another, creating at places dominant Eastern features moderated by Western influences, and at other places the reverse. Given their social and economic structures, Bohemia and Austria did not be-

long to this Middle Europe, but constituted the least developed line of Western Europe. Regions to the east of Middle Europe, on the other hand, developed on a different basis altogether. The region lying to the east of the line between the Baltics, Lithuania, and the Carpathians entered West European markets only very slowly.

Outside markets exerted an influence on agricultural production only in the late nineteenth century when railways facilitated large-scale exports. The landowners in these areas, lacking money, derived an income from the alcohol monopoly, taxes, rents, and other activities outside the productive sphere. Peasants belonged to the landowners as personal property, particularly in Russia. Peasants lived within a system of land communes and village communities that lasted into the twentieth century. Thus, both from the top and bottom there were strong forces that prevented agricultural modernization. Lords had little direct interest in it, and peasant communities were bound by traditional institutions highly resistant to any individual initiative or change. The great amount of land and sparse population did not demand intensive techniques, so production remained extensive instead. Even the three-field system was not in preponderance in the mid-nineteenth century. Production tech-

AGRARIAN SYSTEMS 83 niques remained at a rather low level on peasant farms and on manorial estates alike. The fact that the nonagrarian sectors of the economy were underdeveloped up to the end of the nineteenth century also contributed to the

survival of traditional agricultural methods in the eastern zone. Industry, trade, and urbanization were undeveloped, so that those who lived from this sector were nearly as much in servitude as were the peasants. From the late seventeenth century the state took important steps to develop industry and towns but this was limited mostly to the military realm and was never in organic relation to the rest of the economy. West European military techniques meant an inescapable challenge for Russia, sO tsarist policy strived to create a military equilibrium, especially

under Peter I. The modernization that resulted had no real effect on the economy as a whole, though, because manufacture was limited to military needs and was carried out by serfs. The direct economic impact of Western Europe on the vast territories of continental Eastern Europe did not appear until late in the nineteenth century. Characteristically for the inflexible rigidity of the whole society, it took an immense military defeat to shock tsarist absolutism into carrying out any of the most necessary modernization, even in the military sector. And because only the most necessary changes were made, continental Eastern Europe had to suffer yet other shocks before finally opening itself to the world market. Even then, the opening was never completed. NOTES 1. See A. I. Shevelenko, “O tipologii genezisa feodalisma,” Voprosy Istorii, no. 1 (1971), 97-107; Aleksandr R. Korsunski, Gotskaia Ispania (Moscow: University of Moscow, 1969); Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: NLB, 1978), pp. 128-142; Péter Gunst, Einige Probleme der wirtschaftlichen und sozialen Entwicklung Osteuropas (K6ln: University of KélIn, 1977), pp. 8-10. On plows see Marc Bloch, French Rural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 50-53.

2. This prevailed typically in the case of the Russian Church which was at last degraded to a mere government office by the reforms of Peter I in 1721. It was the situation in the case of the Romanian principalities, too. This is shown excellently in Dimitrie Cantemir, Descrierea Moldovei (Bucharest: Cartea Romaneasca, 1923), pp. 173-177. [The original Latin text was written in 1715,.] He pointed out that the ruling power could keep the Church in total subjection only in Russia and Moldavia. For the social position of the Church in Kievan Russia, see Andrzej Poppe, “Le prince et l’église en Russie de Kiev depuis la fin

8&4 AGRARIAN SYSTEMS du X* siécle et jusqu’au début de XII‘ siécle,” Acta Poloniae Historica 20 (1969): 95-119; and Iaroslav N. Shchapov, Knazheskie ustavi 1 cerkov’ v drevnet Rusi XI— XIV vv. (Moscow: Academy of Sciences, 1972), pp. 13-21. This raises the question about the difference between the religious doctrines of Eastern and Western Europe. What role did the distinctive split in Western Christianity play? In the

Orthodox Church, of course, there was never a Reformation. 3. This statement is valid for the early period of Russian history and the foundation of the Russian state. Soviet historiography differed from this standpoint for a long time and in connection with early Russian development emphasized that it had developed qualitatively together with the Western European feudal system. The most outstanding representative of this tendency is Grekov. But even in Grekov’s work the data support my opinion in several respects. Compare with Boris D. Grekov, Ktevskaia Rus’ (Moscow: Academy of Sciences, 1949), and B. D. Grekov, Krest’iane na Russi s dreunteitshtkh vremen do XVII

veka (Moscow: Academy of Sciences, vol. 1, 1952; vol. 2, 1954). In the newer studies of the last decade, Soviet historians have been increasingly disposed to recognize that Kievan Russia did not belong to a Western type of society. The outstanding representatives of this tendency are Y. A. Kirilov, “Predposylki perehoda vostochnogo slavianstva k feudalismu,” Voprosy Istorit no. 3 (1969), go— 104; Aleksandr L. Shapiro, “O prirode feodal’noi sobstuennosti na zemliu,” Voprosy Istoru, no. 12 (1969), 57-72; Igor 1. Froianov, “Kievskaia Rus’,” in Ocherki sotsialno-ekonomichesko1 istoru (Leningrad: University of Leningrad, 1974); Mik-

hail B. Sverdlov, “Iz istorii sistemy nalogo-oblozhenia v Drevnei Rusi,” in Lev V. Cherepnin and Iaroslav N. Shchapov, eds., Vostochnaia Evropa v Drevnosti t Sredneivekovie (Moscow: Academy of Sciences, 1978), pp. 144-150; Igor I. Froianov, “Kievskaia Rus’,” in Ocherki sotstalno-politicheskot istoru (Leningrad: University of Leningrad, 1980). For similar development of the Romanian principalities see Henri H. Stahl, Traditional Romanian Village Community: The Transition from the Communal to the Capitalist Mode of Production in the Danube Region (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 37—42, 129-158, and 216. There are a great number of studies dealing with village communities and the despotism based on them. I mention here only those, besides the standard works of Haxthausen, Kowalewski, Maine, etc., which were theoretically the most useful in the course of my studying this problem. See Karl Polanyi, Dahomey and the Slave Trade: An Analysis of an Archaic Economy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966); Karl Polanyi, Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies (Garden City, N.Y.:

Anchor Books, 1968); Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon, 1968); Maurice Godelier, Sur les sociétés précapitalistes (Paris, 1970); Henri Mendras, Sociétés paysannes (Paris: Armand Colin, 1976); Eric Wolf, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1969); Aleksandr V. Tschajanow (Chaianov), Die Lehre von der bauerlichen Wirtschaft (Berlin: P. Parey, 1923); Teodor Shanin, ed., Peasants and Peasant Societies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971); J. M. Potter, M. N. Diaz, G. M. Foster, eds., Peasant Society: A Reader (Boston: Little, Brown,

1967). On the concrete forms of Eastern despotism, for China see Etienne

AGRARIAN SYSTEMS 85 Balazs, “La propriété fonciére en Chine,” in Att: del Primo Congresse Internazionale di Diritto Agrario, vol. 2 (Milan, 1955) and John L. Buck, Land Utilization in China,

vols. 1—3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937). For the Indian village community see the classical Baden H. Baden-Powell, The Indian Village Community (London: Longmans, Green, 1896) and The Land Systems of British India, vols. i—3 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1892). See also Eric J. Hobsbawm, Introduction to Karl Marx’s Pre-capitalist Economic Formations (New York: International Publishers, 1965).

4. For Greek society and the formation of private ownership see Attila Agh, Labyrinth in the Mode of Production Controversy (Budapest: Institute for World Economy, 1980); Ferenc Tokei, Anteke und Feudalismus (Budapest; Akadémiai Kiad6o, 1977) and Zur Theorte der Geschichtsformen (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiad6, 1977)-

5. There is a good description of the Western European village community in Karl S. Bader, Rechtsformen und Schichten der Liegenschaftsnutzung im mittelalter-

lichen Dorf (Vienna: Bohlau, 1973). 6. For the whole problem—among others—see Gunst, Eimige Probleme, pp. 13—14, and Péter Gunst, “Some Characteristics of East European Economic and Social Development: Data and Reflections,” in Irene P. Winner and Thomas G. Winner, eds., The Peasant and the City in Eastern Europe: Interpenetrating Structures (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1984), p. 18; Anderson, Passages, pp. 182-196; Aleksandra D. Liublinskaia, “Tipologia rannego feodalizma v Zapadnoi Evrope i problema romano-germanskogo sinteza,” Srednie Veka 31 (1968): 9-44. 7. See Sverdlov, “Iz istorii sistemy nalogo-oblozhenia,” pp. 144-150; Igor I. Froianov, “Froianov’s Study,” in Problemy istori feodalnot Rossi (Leningrad: Uni-

versity of Leningrad, 1971); Mikhail B. Sverdlov, “M. B. Sverdlov’s Study,” Problemy tstoru feodalnoi Rossu; Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp.

24—42; Lev. V. Cherepnin, “Iz istorii formirovania klassa feodalnozavisimogo krest’lanstva na Rusi,” Istoricheskie Zapiski 20 (1956), 234-264. 8. Blum, Lord and Peasant, pp. 70-74, 92, 135-148, and 168-170. For Poland, see S. Smolka, Uwagi o pierwotnym ustroju spotecznym Polski Piastowskiej [Observa-

tions on the Original Social Structure of Poland in the Age of Piasts] (Krakow, 1881).

g. For Eastern European, especially Russian, land use systems, see the volumes of Ezhegodnik po agrarnot istoru vostochnot Evrofn, from 1959. The volumes

of the series contain studies of this problem based on good source material. Compare with Blum, Lord and Peasant, pp. 22-23, 166, 328, and 336-3309. 10. Russian towns are the most typical in this respect. See A. 1. Nikitskii, /storia ekonomicheskogo byta Velikago Novgoroda (Moscow, 1892); Kesniia N. Serbina, Ocherki iz sotsialno-ekonomicheskoi istorut russkogo goroda (Moscow: Academy of Sci-

ences, 1951); M. V. Tihomirov, Drevnierusskie goroda (Moscow, 1956); A. M. Saharov, “O termine ‘gorod’ v istochnikah XVI v.,” in Obshchestvo 1 gosudarstvo feodal’noi Rossi: Sbornik statier (Moscow, 1975), pp. 62-66; Witold Hensel, An-

86 AGRARIAN SYSTEMS fange der Stddte bet den Ost- und Westslawen (Bautzen; Domowina-Verlag, 1967); Aleksander Gieysztor, “Aux origines de la ville slave: Ville de grands, ville d’état aux IX*-XI* siécles,” Cahters Bruxellots 12 (1967), 97-106; T. Lalik, “Recherches sur les origines des villes en Pologne,” Acta Poloniae Historica 3 (1960), 101-131;

Jiti Kejt, “Nad potatky naSich mést” [The of the Bohemian Ceskoslovensk¥ Casopis Historick¥ no. Beginning 3 (1976), 377-401; NikolaiTowns], Todorov, “The Balkan Town in the Second Half of the 19th Century,” Etudes Balkaniques no. 2 (1969), 31-50; Nikolai Todorov, “Balkansku gorod XV—XIX vv. v sostave osmanskoi imperii” [The Balkan Town of the 15th—19th Centuries in the Ottoman Empire], Etudes Balkaniques, no. 4 (1971), 28-54; Nikolai Todorov and N. Sofia, eds., La ville balcanique XV°—XIX* stécles (Bucharest: International

Association for the Study of Southeastern Europe, 1980); Bistra A. Tsvetkova, Proutshvania na grodskoto stopanstvo prez XV—XVI vek [Studies of Town Economy

in Bulgaria in the 15th—16th Centuries] (Sofia: Nauka 1 Izkustvo, 1972).

11. For this form of settlement, which is typical in the Eastern European countries, see Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR, Zentralinstitut ftir Geschichte, Arbeitskreis ftir Haus- und Siedlungsforschung, Protokoll der 15 Jahrestagung in Weimar vom 16.bis 19. Junt 1974 (Berlin, 1975). For the Hungarian market towns see Vera Bacskai, Magyar mezévdrosok a XV. szdzadban [Hungarian Market Towns in the 15th Century] (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiad6, 1965); Péter Gunst, “Der ungarische Bauernaufstand von 1514,” in Peter Blickle, ed., Historische Zeitschrifte Beiheft 4 (1975), 62~-83. For Russia see Anatoli P. Gritskevich, Chastnovladel’cheskie gorody Belorussti v XVI-XVII vv. (Minsk: Nauka 1 tekhnika, 1975); and Anatoli P. Gritskevich, Sotstalnaia borba gorozhan Belorussit: XVI-XVIII vv. (Minsk: Nauka 1 tekhnika, 1979). 12. For the various strata of the Russian peasantry, and the whole question, see Grekov, Krest’tane na Russi, vols. 1 and 2, which are still used although they have been criticized severely for about twenty years. See also Blum, Lord and

Peasant, pp. 27-28, 45-56; Cherepnin, “Iz istorii formirovania,” pp. 234-264; Sverdlov, “Study”; A. A. Zhimin, Holopi na Rusi: s drevneishih vremen do konca 15 v. (Moscow, 1973). 13. For Russia and for the Russian nobility, see Blum, Lord and Peasant, pp.

32-35, 38-42, 74, 80-85, 140-143, and 150-151. See also Henryk Lowmianski, “O proizhozhdenii russkogo boiarstva,” in Lev. V. Cherepnin, ed., Vostochnaia Evropa v Drevnosti i Srednevekove (Moscow: Academy of Sciences, 1978), pp. 93—

100. For Poland, see Eugen O. Kossmann, “Die polnischen liberi als herzogliche Heermannen,” Vierteljahrschrift fiir Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (1968), 182—

192. On the assemblies of the Romanian principalities, see P. P. Panaitescu, “La grande assemblée du pays, institution du régime féodal en Moldavie et Valachie,” in Nouvelles Etude d’Histoire, vol. 3 (Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1965).

14. For the development of the European division of labor in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, see Marian Matowist, Wschéd a zachéd Europy w XIII-XIV.

wieku [Eastern and Western Europe in the 13th—14th Centuries] (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawn, 1973); Michael M. Postan, “Economic Relations Between Eastern and Western Europe,” in Geoffrey Barraclough, Eastern and Western

AGRARIAN SYSTEMS 87 Europe during the Middle Ages (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970), pp. 125174; Barbara Krzemienska and Dugan TreStik, “Wirtschaftliche Grundlagen der friihmittelalterlichen Staates in Mitteleuropa: BGhmen, Polen, Ungarn im 10— 11. Jahrhundert,” Acta Poloniae Historica 40 (1979): 5-31.

15. For German colonization see H. F. Schmid, “Das deutsche Recht in Polen,” in Albert Brackmann, ed., Deutschland und Polen: Bettrage zu thren geschichtlichen Beziehungen (Munich: R. Oldenburg, 1933), pp. 64-80; Walter Schlesinger, “Die geschichtliche Stellung der mittelalterlichen deutschen Ostbewegung,” Historische Zeitschrift 183 (1957) 517-542; Rudolf Kotzschke, “Die Anfange des deutschen Rechtes in der Siedlungsgeschichte des Ostens,” Berichte liber die Verhandlungen der Sdchsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig 93:2

(1941); Franti8ek Graus, “Deutsche und slawische Verfassungsgeschichte?” Historische Zeitschrift 197 (1963): 279-305; Benedykt Zientara, “Foreigners in Po-

land in the 1oth—15th Centuries: Their Role in the Opinion of the Polish Medieval Community,” Acta Poloniae Historica 29 (1974): 5-28; Wtadystaw Ru-

sinski, “Deutsche Siedlungen auf polnischem Boden im 16-18. Jahrhundert: Mythen und Wirklichkeit,” Acta Poloniae Historica 47 (1983): 209-257; Eugen O. Kossmann, “Zur Geschichte der Polnischen Bauern und threr Freiheit,” Historische Zeitschrift 205 (1967): 15-45. 16. Max Sering and Constantin von Dietze, eds., Agrarverfassung der deutschen Auslandsstedlungen in Osteuropa (Berlin; F. Vahlen, 1939), pp. 14-18.

17. I refer to those Celtic settlements, not only in Bohemia, which were not exclusively villages. The number of inhabitants and the quantity of industrial production in these places were early signs of urbanization in a period of European development preceding and independent of Roman influence. 18. Franti$ek Graus, “Origines de I’état et de la noblesse en Moravie et en Bohéme,” Revue des Etudes Slaves 51 (1961), 43-58, and FrantiSek Graus, Déjiny venkouského lidu v Cechach v dobé piehusitské, 2 (Prague: Czechoslovak Academy, Historical Sections, 1957): 114-118.

1g. For the economic and social importance of the German colonization in this region see Kossmann, “Zur Geschichte,” pp. 15-45; Heinz Stoob, “Die Ausbreitung der auslandischen Stadt im éstlichen Mitteleuropa: Untersuchungen zu einer Kartenfolge im Atlas Ostliches Mitteleuropa,” Zeitschrift fiir Ostforschung 10 (1961), 25-84; Ilona Bolla, A jigilag egységes jobbdgyosztdly ktalakuldsa Magyaror-

szdgon [Formation of the Class of Copy-holders Unified by Law in Hungary] (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiad6, 1983); Kazimierz Tymieniecki, Historia chtopow polskich [History of Polish Peasantry] (Warsaw: Panstowe Wydawn, 1965) 1: 132— 147; Valentyn M. Fomenkova, “Polozhenie krest’ian v Polshe vo vtoroi polovine XIII i XIV wv.,” in Uchente Zapishi Instituta Slavianovedienta (Moscow: Academy of Sciences, 1956); Gunst, “Einige Probleme,” pp. 33—35; Stanistaw Trawkowski,

“W sprawie roli kolonizacji niemckiej w przemianach kultury materialnej na ziemiac polskich w XIII wieku” [To the Real Role of German Colonization in Polish Material Culture in the 13th Century], Kwartalntk Histor Kultury Matertalne] 8 (1960), 183-207.

-20. For the position of nobility and its consequences, see Jerzy Topolski,

88 AGRARIAN SYSTEMS Narodziny kajnitalizmu w Europie x XIV-XVII wieku [The Birth of Capitalism in Europe in the 14th—17th Centuries] (Warsaw: Paristwowe Wydawn. Naukowe,

1965); Topolski, “La reféodalisation dans l'économie des grands domaines en Europe Centrale et Orientale: XVIS—XVIII* siécles,” Studia Historiae Oeconomicae

6 (1972), 51-63; Topolski, “Grand domaine et petites exploitations, seigneurs et paysans en Pologne au Moyen Age et dans les Temps Modernes,” in Péter Gunst and Tamas Hoffmann, eds., Grand domaine et petites exploitations en Europe au Moyen Age et dans les Temps Modernes (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiad6, 1982), pp. 209-227; Anderson, Passages, pp. 257-264; Witold Kula, Théorte economique du systéme féodale (Paris: Mouton, 1970), pp. 50-68; Ferenc Maksay, “Gutswirt-

schaft und Bauernlegen in Ungarn im 16. Jahrhundert,” Vierteljahrschrift fiir Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (1958), 37-61; Zsigmond P. Pach, Die ungarische Agrarentwicklung im 16~—17. Jahrhundert: Abbiegung vom westeuropdischen Entwitck-

lungsgang (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiad6, 1964); Vera Zimanyi and Gyula Benda, “Grand domaine et petite exploitation en Hongrie: XIIIS—XVIII* siécles” in Gunst and Hoffmann, eds., Grand domaine et petite exploitations, pp. 142-153;

Hartmut Harnisch and Gerhard Heitz, “Feudale Gutswirtschaft und Bauernwirtschaft in den deutschen Territorien: Eine vergleichende Analyse unter besonderer Beriicksichtigung der Marktprodktion,” in Gunst and Hoffmann, eds., Grand domaine et petites exploitations, pp. 9-32.

21. A full discussion of this problem is worked out and summarized by Anderson, Passages, 246—264. See also Pach, Die ungarische Agrarentwicklung; Johannes Nichtweiss, Das Bauernlegen in Mecklenburg: Eine Untersuchung zur Geschichte der Bauernschaft und der zweiten Leibeigenschaft in Mecklenburg bis Beginn des 19.

Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Rittten and Loening, 1954). For Poland see Stanistaw Sreniawski, Uwlaszczenie chtopéw w Polsce [Expropriation of the Peasants in Poland] (Warsaw: Paristwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1956); Leonid Zytkowicz, “The Peasant’s Farm and the Landlord’s Farm in Poland from the 16th to the Middle of the 18th Century,” Journal of European Economic History, no. 1 (19°72), 135—154.

22. For the restriction of free migration and other rights of peasantry in these countries, see Gyérgy Székely, “Féldesuri torekvések a jobbagysag kdltézési joganak felszamolasara Magyarorsz4gon-Kelet-eurdpai tipusu tarsadalmi folyamat az 1514 elétti évtizedekben” [East European Social Process in the Decades

before 1514: Efforts of the Landlords to Liquidate the Rights of the Peasants to Move in Hungary] Agrartérténeti Szemle 16 (1972), 261-264. For the situation in Russia, besides Grekov, Krest’iane na Russi, vols. 1 and 2, see Blum, Lord and Peasant, pp. 106—116, 247-249, and 253-268; and D. L. Pohilevich, “Pravo,”

pp. 50-66. 23. For Bohemia’s development, see the data and interpretations in the following studies: Graus, Déjiny venkouského; Alois Mika, Poddansylid v Cechdch v proni poloviné 16. stoleté [The Obliged Peasantry in Bohemia in the 16th Century] (Prague: Czechoslovak Academy, 1960); Franti$ek Matejek, Feuddlni velkostatek a poddany na Moravé s prihlednutim k prilehlému tizemi Slezska a Polska (Prague: Czechoslovak Academy, 1959); Josef Valka, Hospoddiskd politika feuddlntho velko-

AGRARIAN SYSTEMS 89 statku na predbélohorské Moravé [Economic Policy of the Great Domains in Moravia After 1620] (Brno: University of Brno, 1962); Josef Petran, Poddany lid v Cechdch na Prahu tricetileté valky (Prague: Czechoslovak Academy, 1964); Josef Kodi, “Patent a zruseni nevolnictvi v ¢eskych zemich,” Ceskoslovenskyj Casopis Historicky no. 1 (1969), 69—108.

24. See Gunst, “Der ungarische Bauernaufstand,” pp. 62—76; Maksay, “Gutswirtschaft unds Bauernlegen,” pp. 37-61; Pach, Die ungarische Agrarentwick-

lung; Zsigmond P. Pach, “Az 1514. évi parasztfelkelés és a ‘mdsodik jobagysag’” [The Peasant Uprising of 1514 and the So-Called Second Serfdom in Hungary], in Az MTA Filoz6fiai és Tdrsadalomtudomanyi Osztdlydnak Kézleményet

(1972), pp. 231-257; Zsigmond P. Pach, “A kelet-eurépai ‘Gutswirtschaft’ problematikajahoz: robotmunka és bérmunka a f6ldesuri majosagokon a XVI-XVII. szazadi Magyarorszagon” [To the Problems of East-European “Gutswirtschaft”: Socage and Paid Work on the Landlord’s Demesne in Hungary in the 16th—17th Centuries], Agrartérténeti Szemle (1971), 1-14; Janos Varga, Typen und Probleme des bituerlichen Grundbesitzes in Ungarn, 1767-1849 (Budapest: Académiai Kiad6, 1965); Varga, Jobbdgyrendszer Magyarorszdgon a feudalizmus kései szdzadatban 1556—

1767 [The System of Serfdom in Hungary in the Late Feudal Ages, 1556-1767] (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiad6d, 1969). For development in the eighteenth century see Varga, Jobbdgyrendszer, Imre Wellmann, A magyar mezégazdasdg a XVIII. szdzadban [Hungarian Agriculture in the 18th Century] (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiad6, 1979), pp. 67~121; Péter Gunst, “Die technische Entwicklung der ungarischen Landwirtschaft und die Hindernisse dieser Entwicklung,” Zeztschrift fiir Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie 23:1 (1975), 59-70.

25. For the position of the Romanian principalities, see Sergiu Columbeanu, “A havasalféldi majors4gi foldek kérdéséhez a XVIII. szazadban és a XIX. szazad elsé felében” [The Manorial Lands in Wallachia in the 18th and First Half of the 1gth Centuries], Agrdrtérténets Szemle 14 (1971), 296-316; Sergiu Columbeanu, Economia domeniului feudal din Tara Roméneascd in secolul al XVIII-lea. (Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1972); V. Mihordea, Maitres du sol et paysans dans les Principautés Roumaines au XVIII‘ siécle (Bucharest: Editura Academiel, 1971); Demir M. Dragnev, Selskoe choztatstvo feodalnoi Moldavit: konets XVII—nachalo XIX

| v. (Kishinev: Moldavian Academy of Sciences, 1975); Ilie Corfus, Agricultura Tari Roménesti in prima jumdatate a secolului al XIX-lea. (Bucharest: Editura Aca-

demiei, 1969); Ioana Constantinescu, “Arendarea mosiilor in Moldova pina la Regulamentul organic,” Studi si Materiale de Istorte Medie (Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1973), pp. 259-267; Demir M. Dragnev and P. V. Sovetov, “Perestroika stuktury zemklevladienia v Moldavii XV—XVIII wv.,” Istorra SSSR no. 1 (1968), 70-92; Serban Papacostea, Oltenia sub stdépinirea Austriacd: 1718-1739

[Oltenia under Austrian Rule] (Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1971); Ile Corfus, “Dreptul de stapinire al clacasilor din Tara Romaneasca asupra pamintului defrisat in perioada destraméarii feudalismului,” Studz: Revista de Istorie 2 (1970), 341-361; Daniel Chirot, Social Change in a Peripheral Society: The Creation of a Balkan Colony (New York: Academic Press, 1976).

90 AGRARIAN SYSTEMS 26. Juhan Kahk, and Enn Tarvel, “Large Estates and Small Holdings in Estonia from the 16th to the 19th Centuries,” in Gunst and Hoffmann, eds., Grand domaine et petites explottations, pp. 365-375; Jan Rutkowski, Historie gospodarcza Polski: do 1864 r. [An Economic History of Poland to 1864] (Warsaw: Ksiazkai Wiezda, 1953); A. E. Tobin, Die Agrargesetzgebung Livlands im 19. Jahrhundert, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1899), vol. 2 (Riga, 1911); Gyula Mérei, Magyarorszdg térténete 17g0—

1848 [The History of Hungary, 1790-1848] (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiad6, 1982), pp. 245-250, 264-276, 324-372. 27. For Russia, see Michael Confino, Systémes agraires et progrés agricole: L’assolement triennal en Russie aux XVIII°-XIX° siécles (Paris: Mouton, 1969), pp. 230253.

28. For the prosperity of wool at the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth century and its influences on agricultural cultivation and the growth of a gap in productive equipment between the peasant’s and landlord’s farms in Eastern Europe, see Gunst, “Die technische Entiwicklung,” pp. 61-63; Gunst, Einige Probleme, pp. 32—33; Blum, Lord and Peasant, pp. 326-344, 386-413. 29. Confino, Systémes agraires, pp. 37-51, 109-115. go. For the abolition of serfdom in the Eastern European countries see Emil Niederhauser, A jobbdgyfelszabaditds Kelet-Eurépdban [The Abolition of Serfdom in Eastern Europe] (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiad6, 1962); Emil Neiderhauser, “A jobbagyfelszabaditas Kelet-Eurépaban” [The Abolition of Serfdom in Eastern Europe], Szazadok 116 (1982), 562-576; Blum, Lord and Peasant, pp. 575-600;

Alexander Gerschenkron, “Russia: Agrarian Policies and Industrialization, 1861-1914,” in Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Belk-

nap Press of Harvard, 1962), pp. 140-248; Nikolai M. DruZinin, “Die Agrarre-

formen der sechziger Jahre des 19. Jahrhunderts und ihr Einfluss auf das russische Dorf,” in Rudolf Berthold, ed., Studien zu den Agrarreformen des 19. Jahrhunderts in Preussen und Russland: Sonderband des Jahrbuchs fiir Wirtschaftsgeschichte

(Berlin Akademie-Verlag, 1978), pp. 117-288; Nichita Adaniloaie and Dan Berindei, Reforma agrara din 1864 (Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1964).

31. For Russia, see Blum, Lord and Peasant, pp. 575-600; Gerschenkron, “Russia,” in Economic Backwardness, pp. 140-248; Ivan D. Koval’tenko, “Das Dorf des Europaischen Russlands vor der Aufhebung der Leibeigenschaft,” in Studien zu den Agrarreformen des 19. Jahrhunderts in Preussen und Russland, pp. 295-352. For Romania, see Chirot, Social Change, pp. 132—145. 32. For questions of the land community, see Maksim M. Kovalevskii, Le régime économique de la Russie (Paris: V. Giard et E. Briére, 1898); Vadim A. Aleksandrov, Sel’skaia obshchina v Rossu, XVII-nachalo XIX v. (Moscow: Academy

of Sciences, 1976); Sergei M. Dubrovski, “K voprosu ob obshchine v Rossii v nachale XX v.,” Ezhegodnik po agrarnot istori Vostochnoit Evropy (1962); Andrei

M. Anfimov and Pavel N. Zyrianov, “Nekotorye cherty evoliutsii russkoi kresvianskoi obshciny v poreformennyi period, 1861-1914 gg.,” storia SSSR, no. 4 (1980), 26-41. For the position of the Romanian peasantry, see D. B. Ionescu, Die Agrarverfassung Rumdniens, thre Geschichte und thre Reform (Leipzig, 1909);

AGRARIAN SYSTEMS 91 George D. Creanga, Grundbesitzverteilung und Bauernfrage in Rumanien (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1907); Stahl, Traditional Roumanian Village Communities,

pp. 217-221.

33. For Hungarian agricultural development in the second half of the nineteenth century, see Péter Gunst and Laszlé Gaal, Animal Husbandry in Hungary in the 19th—2oth Centuries (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiad6, 1977), pp. 11-60; Laszlo Gaal and Péter Gunst, “Livestock Husbandry in Hungary from 1848 to World War I,” Agrdrtérténeti Szemle Supplementum (1972), 7-48; Gunst, “Die Entwicklungstendenzen der Hektarertrage in der ungarischen Landwirtschaft zwischen 186g und 1969; mit internationalem Vergleich,” Jahrbuch fiir Wortschaftsgeschichte, no. 3 (1974), 127-139. 34. See Péter Gunst, “The Comparative Impact of Industrialization on West-

ern and Eastern European Agriculture in the 19th and Early 2oth Centuries,” Agrartérténett Szemle Supplementum (1976), 15-36. For Romania’s agrarian reform of 1908, see George D. Creanga, Grundbesitzverteilung und Bauernfrage in Rumdnien: Die von der Regierung im Jahr 1908 durchgeftihrten Agrarreformen (Leip-

zig: Duncker and Humblot, 1909).

FOUR

The Polish Economy and the Evolution of Dependency Jacek Kochanowicz

The essay focuses primarily on Poland, not only because it is the case I know best, but also because Poland seems to have been the most extreme case of a “dependent” economy in this part of Europe. After briefly de-

scribing the main trends of the Polish economy from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries I shall examine some specific problems related to “backwardness” and “dependency” in more detail. Then, to conclude, I shall try to compare the Polish case with Bohemia

and Hungary, and make some brief comments about the utility of a “world system” perspective for this kind of analysis. THE MAIN TRENDS OF THE POLISH ECONOMY

There was steady economic growth in Poland up to the end of the sixteenth century. This was followed by a decline in the seventeenth century, and then again by modest growth in the second half of the eighteenth century. In the year 1000 the population density of the three parts of historical Poland, Great Poland, Little Poland, and Mazovia,' was about 4.8 inhabitants per square kilometer. By the year 1340 it had reached 8.6, by 1580 21.3, and in the year 1650 it was about 26.3. Then there was a dramatic fall to 19.9 in the next decade, and the density of 1650 was only reached again in about 1790. Of course, those numbers are much higher than they were for the entire Commonwealth of Poland

~ and Lithuania whose population density was only 6.6 inhabitants per square kilometer in 1500, 11 in 1650, and 19.1 in 1772. A contrast with the population density of Great Britain shows how low Poland’s was. In 92

POLISH ECONOMY 93 1500 Great Britain’s population density was about 15.9 inhabitants per square kilometer, in 1650 about 21, and in 1772 about 38.8.’ Beginning with a distinctly lower population density than Western Europe’s, historical Poland was in the process of catching up by the beginning of the fourteenth century. The urban share of the population and the number of large towns were also lower than in the West, but by the end of the sixteenth century there was a significant upward trend in this aspect of demographic development, too.

Cereal yields (in terms of product per seed ratios) were probably rising until the middle of the sixteenth century. They may have reached a ratio as high as 5:1, though this is questioned by many scholars. But

in the seventeenth century there was a distinct regression, especially after the wars. A slow process of recovery only began in the second half of the eighteenth century. But it was only in the nineteenth century that modern agricultural techniques began to spread on a wide scale, particu-

larly on the lands of the wealthier and more progressive landowners. Only then did yields rise above sixteenth-century levels.* Attempts to be more specific about agricultural production are very speculative, but it is probably correct to say that from the sixteenth century on, the share of cereal production out of total agricultural output grew systematically.

A similar impression can be formed by looking at nonagricultural production. Though no overall statistical indicators exist, it seems that per capita iron production did not rise until the nineteenth century.‘ Urban nonagricultural production grew from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, declined in the seventeenth, and grew again in the eighteenth. During these centuries there were major changes in the social organi-

zation of the Polish economy. Until the thirteenth century there had been almost no manorial economy, but instead the system of tus ducale.°

All the land belonged, in principle, to the prince, and the peasants were theoretically all his subjects. The prince symbolized the state, which

consisted of a group of aristocrats serving in various military and administrative roles. This group collectively extracted a “surplus” from the peasant population who were treated as state serfs or subjects. But the

peasants had rights to the land they cultivated, and there was no dominium directum, there were no seniors and vassals, and there was no system of personal dependence. In the thirteenth century the German law, tus Theutonicum, was introduced as part of the process of intensive colonization and the settlement of new villages and towns.° In part this change was the result of migrations from the West in the

94 POLISH ECONOMY twelfth and thirteenth centuries. On average some 2000 persons per year migrated from lands west of the Elbe to eastern lands during this period, but not all of them went to Poland. This small number of migrants (there were about one and a half million inhabitants in the Polish territories at this time) played a decisive role, however, in introducing Frankish and Flemish technological, judicial, and institutional arrangements into Poland. Three-field rotation, new patterns of concentrated rural settlement, and the increasing importance of rent in cash marked these developments. Also more cereal came to be grown for the urban

markets. Peasant and noble status became more clearly defined, and nobles were increasingly able to live from grants of land rather than from military services performed for the prince. In the new towns craft guilds were formed, and artisans supplied not only the wealthy nobles and burghers but also the more prosperous peasants. The era of the serf labor economy (in Polish, the folwark economy) started in the sixteenth century. Nobles began to manage their estates directly, changing rents from cash payments to labor obligations. Serfdom was established, tying peasants to their lords and to the land. The economic role of towns diminished, and nonagricultural goods came to consist mostly of goods produced within the demesne or of imports from outside Poland.

Trade patterns changed during these centuries as well. Until the thirteenth century the peasant economy was probably predominantly natural. External trade in luxury goods was important primarily for the

nobles. But during the thirteenth century the relatively fast pace of economic and demographic growth altered the self-sufficient peasant economy, too. Market exchanges developed between small towns and villages as well as between such major centers as Poznan and Gniezno. But international trade did not yet play a decisive economic role, and it was the trade between small towns and between those towns and the vil-

lages that was more important.’ Exported goods were such primary products as wood and minerals. It was only in the fifteenth century that trade with the West became more significant. Because of the Western European crisis of the fourteenth century Western merchants had begun extending their Eastern contacts, and the Polish nobles were able to take advantage of this even

before the development of the cereal trade. Wood, potash, and furs were exported for Western luxury goods, which then became important status symbols.

In the sixteenth century cereals began to play a crucial role. Poland became the main source of urban Northwestern Europe’s food imports.

POLISH ECONOMY 95 Later, however, other competitors entered the market, and agricultural

progress in England and the Netherlands made those countries less dependent on Polish grain. During the last quarter of the eighteenth century the volume of cereal exports fell dramatically because of the first

partition of 1772 and the imposition of a Prussian toll on traffic from Poland. Internal trade declined during the period of the serf labor economy,

too, because of the semiautarky of the great landed estates, the impoverishment of the peasants, and the decline of the towns. All these developments interacted and accentuated each other. Tables 1 and 2 show the evolution of grain exports from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

| THE ORIGINS OF DEPENDENCE A group of Polish scholars dealing primarily with the late Middle Ages and the early modern period have stressed the dependence of the Polish economy on Western Europe as the decisive factor that shaped Polish economic and even political development. The works of Marian Matowist gave an important stimulus to this line of interpretation, which came to use the term “colonial situation” to describe the pattern.’

Their argument can be described briefly. Even before the development of the grain export trade, Poland was less developed than Western Europe. Not only was it less densely populated, but it lacked the techni-

cal and cultural heritage of the Roman Empire.’ But in the course of the fourteenth century Poland began to catch up. The economic and demographic crisis of Western Europe brought about by relative overpopulation, plague, and a long series of wars did not seriously affect Eastern Europe. As Western merchants turned eastward they realized that they needed to extend the range of products from the East to sustain profits, so they developed trading in bulk commodities. The price of wood and other forest products increased fortyfold in the fifteenth century.’° Trade in furs and oxen also grew. Consequently Polish nobles, clergymen, and rich burghers came into contact with Western man-

ufactured goods and merchants as Poland became a major exporter of primary products. At the same time the union with Lithuania created the potential for the development of an extensive economy that could bring high returns for low outlays. So Poland, or rather PolandLithuania, was included into the European economy as a primary exporting, low investment area. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, according to Maczak,

96 POLISH ECONOMY TABLE 1 Rye Exports via Gdansk (Selected Years)

Years Laszt* Years Laszt 1465 2,300 1590-1594 2,800 1470 2,200 1595-1599 36,685

1490 9,500 1615 32,600 1492 10,200 1618 84,805 1530 14,000 1625 19,200 1557 21,000 1631-1635 31,400

1562—1565** 42,700 1635-1640 31,800 1566—1569 : 35,350 1641-1644 50,900

1575-1579 19,780 1646-1649 40,775

1580-1584 18,908 1649 70,896

1585-1589 27,380

* The laszt (Dutch Jast) was a large measure of grain by volume used in the Baltic. Though its definition

varied between various ports and times, and it varied by weight according to the type of grain in question, on average it amounted to roughly two metric tons of grain. ** Here and subsequently = annual averages. sourcE: L. Zytkowicz, “Trends of Agrarian Economy in Poland, Bohemia and Hungary from the Middle of the Fifteenth to the Middle of the Seventeenth Century,” in A. Maczak et al., eds., East-Central Europe in Transition: From the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1985), p. 66.

Poland’s situation became more thoroughly colonial because along with being a primary product exporter, its trade fell into the hands of foreign merchants based in Antwerp, and later Amsterdam." THE ORIGINS OF THE SERF LABOR ECONOMY

The agrarian system in which the lord’s demesne became crucial developed, as I have pointed out, only in the sixteenth century. Based on unfree labor, it persisted until the emancipation reforms of the nineteenth century. Later, however, it was perpetuated in a different form because rural overpopulation made it easy to keep the peasantry dependent, and its traces were finally abolished only with the communist

land reform of 1944.

The origins of the demesne system are the subject of a long scholarly debate. Because of its close links to serfdom the two must be treated simultaneously. Many Eastern European scholars have linked the growth of lordly demesne and serfdom with grain exports. For example, Henri Stahl maintains that:

POLISH ECONOMY 97 TABLE 2. Wheat and Rye Exports by Sea from Poland (Yearly Averages in Laszt)

Years Wheat Rye

1651-1655 42,790 163,560 1661-1665 34,233 81,030 1666-1675 1676-1685 41,430 66,290 115,830 131,820 1686-1695 64,240 103,360 1696-1705 30,440 73,554 1706-1715 31,330100,520 74,790 1716-1725 57,710 1726-1735 49,260 73,280 1736-1745 29,470 79,650 1746-1755 53,630 84,930 1756-1765 1766-1775 57,300 69,430 79,570 92,020 1776-1785 50,410 32,490 1786-1795 43,000 39,130 1796-1805, 176,990 57,070 souRcE: Cz. Biernat, Statystyka obrotu towarowego Gdatiska w latach 165 1~1815 [The Statistics of Gdansk’s

Foreign Commerce 1615-1815] (Warsaw: Paristwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1962), p. 284.

During the sixteenth century all of Europe formed a single social unit where the laws of the market imposed themselves, more or less, however great were the differences separating the various countries.”

Rusinski expresses a similar opinion: The possibilities of agricultural exports . .. were decisive in the development of the so-called second serfdom; it can be said that they constituted a driving force in the change of the agricultural economy between the

fifteenth and seventeenth centuries." | More recently Immanuel Wallerstein has claimed that:

The rise of a Polish wheat-exporting economy meant .. . the rise of large domains with coerced cash-crop labor."*

And Wilhelm Abel has stated the same view emphasizing that in his opinion it was the potential for exports that created a demesne economy that had not previously existed." The opinion of Nichtweiss about the development of a demesne economy in Mecklenburg is very similar.’

98 POLISH ECONOMY This opinion, however, is not shared by everyone. Some scholars maintain that it was in fact previously established class relations that con-

ditioned the development of the demesne economy. Recently Robert Brenner reiterated this view when he initiated a major controversy in Past and Present. In his view serfdom must be treated as a relationship based on force which cannot be changed per se by market forces or by demographic development. In sum, economic backwardness in Eastern Europe cannot be regarded as economically determined, arising from “dependence” upon trade in primary products to the West, as is sometimes asserted. Indeed, it would be more correct to state that the dependence upon grain export was the result of backwardness; of the failure of the home market—the terribly reduced purchasing power of the mass of the population—which was the result of

| the diminished productivity and the vastly unequal distribution of income in agriculture, rooted in the last analysis in the class structure of serfdom."

An even more radical opinion was formulated by Perry Anderson, who writes that: In fact, while the corn trade undoubtedly intensified servile exploitation in Eastern Germany or Poland, it did not inaugurate it in either country, and played no role at all in the parallel development of Bohemia or Russia."*

In Polish historiography the classic formulation of this position was made by Jan Rutkowski, who states that: The coexistence of these two factors, that is, the potential for grain exports, and peasant serfdom, formed the necessary base for the evolution of corvée system.'®

For Rutkowski the existence of serfdom, or at least the possibility of introducing it, constituted a precondition for the establishment of a demesne system. This was activated by the development of a foreign grain market. The explanation, then, lay in the political sphere, not in the purely economic one.

| Rutkowski tried to explain why money rents were not introduced instead of direct management of estates and use of labor obligations. He did not agree that it was too difficult for the peasants to reach distant markets. Rather, the decisive element, he felt, was the possibility of reducing the standard of living of the peasants to a lower level than if cash rents had been imposed.” This reduction of peasant consumption explains why Poland, with grain yields lower than those in the West, could

POLISH ECONOMY 99 still export part of its production. Had production been based on hired

labor, the landowners would not have been able to sell at the prices offered in Gdanisk.”! Why were the nobles able to enserf the peasants? What was the original source of such political power? Some scholars have maintained that

it was colonization from the West and the spread of German law that was at the root of this situation. Tymieniecki notes that far from being advantageous to both parties German legal arrangements reinforced the position of the lords.” Similarly, Jerome Blum has stressed that German law not only strengthened the lords, but it also weakened royal power.” Brenner believes that this type of colonization prevented the formation of a strong peasant community that might have acted as a countervailing power to the lords. Similarly Tymieniecki argues that whatever peasant “self-government” existed was actually an instrument of lordly power.” Topolski explains the lack of peasant resistance against the imposition

of serfdom by the good economic position of the peasants in the sixteenth century.”° Tymieniecki maintains that the local noble assemblies played a crucial role in the movement to restrict peasant rights.” Blum’s explanation is similar. In the struggle for control of the state, Eastern European nobles won against the towns and royal power except in Russia where the nobility became an element of the state apparatus.” Perry Anderson, who also stresses noneconomic factors, expresses a slightly different opinion: The most fundamental domestic rationale of Eastern Absolutism . . . lay in the countryside. Its complex machinery was essentially and primarily directed against the peasantry.”

So the state was an element used by the nobles to keep the peasants in their place. Class relations were decisive, but they worked through the state. Anderson claims that the uprising of 1648 was a price the Polish nobility had to pay for the lack of an absolutist state structure to maintain order.* Leaving aside the more general formulation of Anderson’s position, this point of view is questionable. It was only in the Ukraine that the uprising took place. Those areas were largely free of serfdom and had their own semi-independent military traditions. Why the other Polish territories did not experience any significant uprisings is a point to which I shall return a bit later. Tymieniecki’s hypothesis about serfdom is that in the fourteenth century there was a rent crisis in Poland because peasants were fleeing to the developing towns. When attempts to keep them on the land by offering them better conditions failed, the nobles, competing with the towns

100 POLISH ECONOMY for labor, began to introduce serfdom. So the nobility’s action was a form

of class struggle against both the towns and the peasantry.*' From our point of view an important element in his argument is the stress on the use of force rather than on the automatic effect of a changing market. Tymieniecki stresses the fact that the nobles were seeking a new solution to their problem. In this respect he disagrees with Roman Grodecki’s hypothesis about the origin of the demesne system. Grodecki’s earlier argument is that even before this period lords had controlled their own reserves, and that the demesne evolved from this.* In other words, class, or sheer political power relations, gave nobles an advantage that predated the introduction of Western market forces. The introduction of a cereal exporting economy exacerbated the situation by further strengthening the power of the lords against towns, the central government, and the peasants. But had the original political situation not existed, the development of external markets would have had different effects. THE ECONOMICS OF THE DEMESNE SYSTEM

Not only the origins, but also the economics of the folwark are debated.*°

Witold Kula popularized the theory of the serf labor economy as an export-oriented one.* In his view, the folwark owner was motivated by the desire to import Western luxury goods, and he had to sell cereals in order to do so. Because grain was the most exportable commodity, there was a tendency toward monoculture. Certainly, by the later part of the period I am discussing, this was the case. But in the sixteenth century the situation was probably more complicated than that. Topolski stresses that there were two types, or rather ideal types, of folwark. One

was autonomous and the second was export oriented. The first type was more frequent in Great Poland. But there, because estates also supplied local towns, in some cases their production was much more diversified. The estates of the eastern territories, moreover, were further from rivers, and they tended to export only when their harvests were good.**

Most of the studies of the demesne economy are based on the estates that belonged to the Crown or to magnates. They were leased or managed by officials who produced more documentation than did the estates of the lesser nobility. But in fact the latter type of demesne was much

more common. The number of villages in the hands of “one-manor” nobles was probably three times as high as the number owned by magnates in the sixteenth century.* The share of these lesser noble estates

POLISH ECONOMY 101 in the export trade, however, was not large. Wyczanski estimates that from 1537 to 1576 only about 20 percent of exports came from them.”

Only the estates belonging to the magnates, the Church, and the crown were major exporters, then, and the lesser nobility supplied local towns. It is true that this might have changed later as Poland’s towns declined and the great landed estates of the magnates expanded. Another point of contention has been whether or not the folwark was a “capitalist” or a “feudal” enterprise. Recently Wallerstein has stressed

the capitalist character of the folwark.* To a certain extent the debate is , a semantic one. As long as an institutional arrangement is understood, it does not matter what it is called. Those who favor a “capitalist” thesis stress the production for distant markets and the importance of world prices. As far as the magnates and the royal folwarks are concerned, of course, this is correct. But at the same time they were not really capitalist enterprises in the ordinary Marxist sense of that term. Peasants who performed labor services were not hired, paid laborers. Were they coerced labor, like slaves in capitalist plantations? The answer is not a simple one,

and I shall return to it later. The noble actually had almost no money costs of production, so that even in a situation of low prices there was no danger that he would be unable to cover his costs of production or that he would be unable to support his household. His everyday consumption was produced on his own estate. (As a matter of fact, even on English landed estates of the nineteenth century, the very model of “capitalist agriculture,” much of the household’s consumption was domestically produced.) Paradoxically hired labor was more common on the folwark of the lesser nobility where there were not enough peasant serfs.*° But they were probably paid in kind rather than in cash. Kamler’s remark that in the first half of the seventeenth century the increase in hired hands marked an economic decline, not progress, seems relevant.* Land was a unique form of investment. Not only did it have prestige value but there were very few alternative investment opportunities. Trade, banking, and manufacturing were not available as in the West, and there was little possibility of technical improvement of the land. So the noble with funds to invest had little choice but to acquire land, whatever its market price. If we remember that the lord had no money costs of production it is clear that his reaction to market fluctuations was not simply that of a

capitalist. Falling prices did not induce a fall in production, as in a capitalist market where price has to be at least equal to the marginal cost

of production. On the contrary, a fall in prices could induce a rise

L102 POLISH ECONOMY in supply as lords would try to make up for lost income. But an increase in price could also stimulate production.*' In practice, the variation in marketed supply was more a function of annual variation in crop yields than of any other factors, a fact well documented by empirical research.” Another point worth mentioning is that in a capitalist economy invest-

ment has a money form. In a demesne system money played a more limited role. From the point of view of a single owner, the purchase of a new village constituted an investment. But for the economy as a whole, it did not matter because productive capacity was not increased. Those

investments that mattered for the economy as a whole—clearing new land or previously abandoned land—did not require cash expenditures. Of course, they constituted “savings” in the economic sense, because a certain amount of labor had to be used to prepare future production. Often the land was cleared illegally by peasants.*® Then the lords would

question the possession of the peasants, and the land would either be added to the demesne or the peasants would be required to perform additional obligations.** The decision to undertake such an investment was therefore not determined by the market situation for agricultural products, but by the availability of untilled land, of spare labor, and on a calculation by peasants of how much they could get away with before having to pay penalties. For these reasons, emphasizing the “capitalist” nature of Poland’s demesne economy in the early modern period can be misleading even if it is not entirely misplaced in a discussion of the international cereal market that operated in the Baltic ports to which large Polish estates sent their exportable grain. THE EVOLUTION OF THE SERF LABOR ECONOMY

During the three centuries of its existence, the economic system based on the demesne underwent significant changes. They can be summarized briefly as follows: 1. The lords’ share of the land increased and that of the peasants de-

creased. The size of the average peasant plot decreased, though it is difficult to say what portion of this decrease was due to the expansion of lordly demesne and what share to demographic pressure. In any case,

: the amount of duties owed by peasants also rose. 2. There was increasing concentration of land in the hands of the magnates. One-manor lesser nobles were the losers.** Magnates were better able to hold out for good cereal prices and could organize their

POLISH ECONOMY 103 own transport to Gdarisk. They could use various legal and illegal means

to seize the lands of lesser nobles who might be ruined by bad crops, poor market conditions, but mostly by debts. The addition of the Eastern territories to the Polish commonwealth facilitated the growth of huge estates on newly colonized lands. Magnates were much better placed to take advantage of this than lesser nobles. Magnates were also able to concentrate offices in their hands. As office holders were given royal domains during their terms to compensate them for their services, magnates tried to hold as many positions as possible simultaneously. Rich families often kept such domains in their own hands for generations.** The small gentry opposed this and wanted crown domains to serve instead as a source of state revenues. But after the sixteenth century the antimagnate movement had little success. The sheer size of the country, its poor transportation network, and the general lack of political and social integration had doomed the movement to failure in any case.*”

The growth of large estate complexes facilitated the growth of an exportable surplus despite the drop in cereal yields. The share of cereals produced for the home market probably declined.*

3. Beginning in the seventeenth century there were signs of an emerging “crisis” in the system. Scholarly debates about this center mostly on the question of whether the crisis was shaped by internal mechanisms, by external market conditions, or by the wars of the seven-

teenth century. The internal argument stresses a built-in tendency toward the system’s self-destruction. As the peasants’ share of the land decreased they were able to keep fewer draught animals. As they worked the manorial demesne with their own animals, in effect, this decrease lowered the

amount of available manure and animal labor available. Therefore, cereal yields declined.* No one denies the additional devastating effect of the wars. What is

important about this is that reconstruction after the wars was, for the most part, extensive. Lands were brought back under cultivation or cleared for the first time with peasant labor, but the shifting balance of power gave the peasants less land of their own as their obligations were being increased. 4. Additional troubles arose in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Despite the modest economic growth of that time, the first partition of Poland in 1772 and the consequent imposition of a Prussian toll on Vistula traffic caused a sharp drop in cereal exports (see table 2). Generally it was easier for the magnates to survive these problems than for

104 POLISH ECONOMY the lesser nobles. Nevertheless, in some ways the magnates were more dependent on money, markets, and exports than the small nobles. This dependence was not strictly economic, as their estates could be largely self-sufficient, but social and political. They kept large courts, substantial private armies, and their consumption of luxury imports was a necessary element of their social status. As the cereal trade declined, they could no longer obtain needed revenues. Some went so far as abolishing labor services and trying to introduce rent in cash instead in order to remedy the problem.” It is difficult to say to what extent such reforms were successful. Another solution to the magnates’ monetary problems was to establish manufacturing, either for the local market or for internal estate “import

substitution.” Magnates could thereby hope to replace previously imported luxury goods. Kula has stressed that this kind of manufacturing had a “feudal” rather than a “capitalist” character. It used serf labor, and only foreign craftsmen were paid in cash. A substantial share of construction materials, especially wood and other primary products, came

from unpaid local resources. Though many estate manufactures were established, almost none of them played any role in the later industrialization of the nineteenth century.”

A third method of resolving the crisis of income, and one which turned out to be very profitable, was propinacja, the forced sale of locally produced drinks to the peasants. Monographic studies show that revenues from this source came to be very significant compared to those from the sale of cereal. In the long run, however, this way of raising income by the magnates was socially disastrous. In the nineteenth century, after the introduction of potatoes and of new methods of vodka production, alcoholism became a serious problem.” The puzzle

is: where did the peasants get the money they were spending in local inns? How was it that the nobles were unable to sell their products, but the peasants could? I shall treat this question later. THE ECONOMIC IDEOLOGY OF THE NOBILITY

Additional light can be shed on the economic motivations of the nobility

and, therefore, on the character of the demesne economy. According to Topolski a new type of “gentry” arose in Poland in the sixteenth century.** It was not so much that commoners rose into the ranks of the gentry, but that relatively large numbers of the established “old” nobility started to behave differently, presumably in response to changing con-

ditions. This strata put forward a program of reforms against the old

POLISH ECONOMY 105 _ high nobility, but at the same time it fought against the king, the towns, and the peasants as it simultaneously tried to gain supremacy in state politics, to control the grain trade, and to impose serfdom on the peasants. The new type of magnate discussed earlier actually emerged from a process of differentiation of this sixteenth-century gentry. The new gentry based its existence mostly on economic activity and represented a kind of “rational” attitude. The sixteenth century was the period of the reformation and many of these nobles were Protestants. Mikotaj Rej, one of the most famous Polish writers of the sixteenth century, was a good representative of this new economic mentality, according to Topolski.® His attempt to maximize his wealth had many capitalist traits. He began as the owner of two villages, and by his death he had seventeen villages as well as two towns. He settled wastelands with peasants, built fish ponds, and established breweries. He borrowed money for investment, not for consumption, and always paid his debts on time. Another example is Anzelm Gostomski, the author of one of the best known Polish husbandry manuals of the sixteenth century.” He was the owner of twenty-eight villages and a major grain merchant as well. There were also nonagricultural enterprises on his estates. It is difficult to place him in the “capitalist versus feudal” debate. He was a rational manager who required his officials to give him detailed accounts, but his primary economic philosophy was a sort of small-scale mercantilism. He

felt it was better to sell than to buy, and that it was unwise to spend money to increase production. Serfs should have their lives tightly controlled and regulated. Tight internal management was the best way of raising production. These two examples demonstrate the mentality of the nobility at the height of the folwark period. It was an income maximizing, rational men-

| tality, but at the same time there was a strong tendency toward feudal autarky.

A century and a half later, the picture had changed. According to Burszta the emphasis on “rational management” had given way to one on “noble status.”*’ Isolation and self-sufficiency were even more valued

than before because they guaranteed independence, and therefore, the personal and political liberty of the noble. As Bystron has remarked, the noble viewed himself as entirely sovereign in his own manor.® Estates were best if they were big, but in contrast to the view of the sixteenth century, they were not supposed to be too big. All the needs of the owner had to be satisfied by his estate, but he should also be able to supervise it himself.°® Social contacts were best restricted to close neighbors; even

106 POLISH ECONOMY marriages were supposed to be arranged between families from the same area.” Rural goods were morally superior to those from towns, and foreign imports were highly suspect.®' Travel, luxury, intellectual pursuits, and excessive social aspirations were seen as reprehensible. The lesser noble who seemed to want to become a magnate risked social disapproval.” Tazbir points out that this idea of happiness at home and in one’s place became common in Polish literature at this time, and that it served as an apology for mediocrity and lack of ambition.” All this, of course, was ideology, and it did not necessarily correspond to reality. Foreigners traveling in Poland were amazed by the display of

extravagant luxury in the magnates’ courts.“ But the ideology corresponded to something important. It is difficult to find any trace of a capitalist attitude among Polish nobles at this time. Of course there was little opportunity or interest in making money from anything other than land, but even more significant was the attitude that money, as such, was

not an important measure of success. Rather, autarky and modesty within a traditional rural setting were suitable for lesser nobles. Autarky and great shows of luxury for the few great magnates went hand in hand with this ideological orientation and hardly contradicted it. PEASANTS AND SERFDOM

The peasant farm formed the basic unit of the Polish economy, but our knowledge of peasant social and economic life is limited to fragmentary evidence from crown, Church, and magnate estates. Various studies of the folwark, particularly Kula’s model of the Polish economy during these centuries, have treated the peasant household as an element of the demesne economy. Kula states that: ... the typical peasant holding is a small piece of land sufficient to feed a family and for purposes of reproduction.™

The lord’s aim was to reduce the size of this holding as much as possible

to increase the folwark’s area and to “free” the peasants from work on their own plots so that more labor could be devoted to the lordly demesne. Kula believes that this was how peasant plots gradually shrank

over time.” In the long run, the diminution of the peasants’ holdings reduced their marketable surplus and purchasing power. That partially explains the deterioration of Poland’s towns. The suppression of peasant economic freedom depended on the exis-

POLISH ECONOMY 107 tence of serfdom. Some have called this type of subjugation a “second serfdom,” but in fact there was no “first serfdom.” Polish authors sometimes use the term zaostrzone poddanstwo, literally “aggravated serfdom.”

“Neoserfdom” is also used to describe the phenomenon. From the legal point of view serfdom tied the peasant to the land as well as to the person of the landowner. It restricted freedom of movement and the peasants’ control of their own economic resources and even of their family life. There was no appeal from the lord’s jurisdic-

tion, and it was not until 1768 that the lord’s right to invoke capital punishment was abolished. The key was the peasants’ obligation to perform labor services. The introduction of serfdom was gradual and was based on the writ-

ten privileges of kings, on laws passed by the Sejm, and on customs established by the manors. The law of 1496 forbade peasants to leave for towns. The law of 1520 introduced an obligatory labor duty of one day per week per fan, but over time, this rose considerably. (A fan was a unit of land originally meant to support a household, which varied _ from about 16 to 26 hectares. With population growth, however, average households got less.) The labor duty became five days a week per peasant household in the seventeenth century, and six days a week in the eighteenth. There was some peasant resistance against the imposition of the lords’ will.©’ The most common form was passive resistance. Labor duties were

performed carelessly. Draught animals and tools brought by the peas- _ ants for work on the demesne were of poorer quality than those used on their own plots. Constant supervision was necessary, and the peasants cheated on time as much as possible. Against such forms of resistance the lords were almost helpless. There were also more dramatic forms of resistance. Flight was a risky, complicated matter, but in extreme cases it occurred.® It involved abandonment of any wealth or security the peasant might possess. There was the risk of punishment, and peasants’ knowledge of the countryside outside of their own immediate area was limited. Clearing new lands required tools and help, so that fleeing peasants were usually obliged to seek a new lord with the hope that he would be more humane than the previous one. Sometimes lords who were short of labor offered better conditions.® Some peasants managed to move to towns, and some even succeeded in establishing themselves successfully, but most simply became marginal. In Poland, however, unlike in Russia, there was no central state police apparatus to help nobles look for their peasants.” Nobles

108 POLISH ECONOMY had to find fugitives on their own, and if they were discovered on another noble estate, the matter had to be settled with the peasant’s new lord. Poorer peasants tended to leave their masters more often than richer ones, but generally, they did not flee far. There was no clear pattern of flight except that there were more fugitives from Little Poland, probably because it was more densely populated.”' The seventeenth century wars increased the number of peasants fleeing, and some of them even began to try to leave the country. Perhaps this helped the colonization of the eastern lands, but not much is known about this subject.” There were some very localized rebellions restricted to one or two vil-

lages. These were extremely rare in the sixteenth century, but much more common in the seventeenth. There were no large-scale uprisings such as those in Russia, Hungary, or Germany except for the Cossack uprising of 1648 which was limited to the eastern lands. In fact it was only in the nineteenth century, after the partitions, that peasant disturbances became widespread in the Kingdom of Poland and especially in the part taken by Austria in 1846.” It would take too long to explain why Poland lacked large-scale peasant uprisings. Perhaps the lack of any agricultural modernization at the expense of the peasantry until the nineteenth century has something to do with this absence.’* Another factor, useful in comparing the eastern lands of Poland and Russia to the western parts of Poland may have been the lack of a communal free peasant, frontier tradition which existed among the Cossacks.” Then, too, Barrington Moore’s suggestion that peasants rebel when demands on them rise quickly and unexpectedly may be relevant.” In the historical parts of Poland the obligations imposed on the peasants rose gradually over a considerable period of time. Nevertheless in some parts of Poland, particularly in southern Little Poland, there were elements of “self-government.”” Villagers could pass some laws of their own, elect their own officials, and have small civil and criminal matters decided by their own juries. But even in these instances the peasants had to act within the framework of their lord’s consent. The lord could then leave unpopular decisions to village officials and could hold them responsible for the village’s duties toward the manor. The village officials tended to be the richer peasants, and on the whole, they acted as the lord’s agents. But occasionally, in times of conflict, they could also become leaders of peasant resistance against the lords.” It is not entirely clear to what extent the model of the peasant farm as a part of a lordly demesne gives a complete picture of the peasants’ situation in Poland. Kaminski has recently pointed out that the situation

POLISH ECONOMY 109 was far from uniform.” There were always some free peasants in Poland, though not many of them. Some had royal privileges; there were free millers and innkeepers; and there were some peasants who had been settled on the free “Dutch” model.” Even among the serfs there were important variations. Some were not obliged to perform labor duties. The folwark was a less common institution in the southern mountain regions, for example.*' On the estates in

the East, with no easy access to markets, rents in kind prevailed. This was particularly true in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. On the other hand near the major cities of Royal Prussia, primarily around Gdansk, large commercial farms prevailed. Peasants paid rent in cash and their economic life was in some ways similar to that in West-

ern Europe, even to that in the Netherlands.” In some parts of Great Poland the situation was similar. For example the peasants from villages that belonged to the city of Poznan paid cash rents and pursued marketoriented farming.® Finally, there were also landless peasants. It is impossible to know how many of these there were because they do not appear in the documents in any systematic way.

It is difficult to reconstruct much of the substance of peasant economic behavior. The extensive literature on peasant economic history concentrates on only a few material aspects of peasant life, the size of their holdings, their obligations, and so on.® It is more of a problem

to estimate their production and even harder to understand how the peasants actually made economic decisions. Attempts have been made to measure their grain production, but not that of other crops. Yet, it is clear that even inside the serf labor economy the majority of peasants had some margin of economic autonomy. Somehow they had to be able to adapt to variations in their economic environment, to changes in the weather, in crop yields, to demographic changes within their own fami-

lies, to fluctuations in the lord’s demands, and at least indirectly, to changes in the market. Lords had an interest in maximizing the number

of their subjects, and so had an interest in allowing some freedom of action for the peasants. If the peasant economy of these centuries was a subsistence economy, it was not a “natural” economy. Money played some role, as did rudi-

mentary forms of credit. Maczak gives examples of land leasing and subleasing to cover debts and analyzes the role this played in causing internal differentiation within the peasantry. His examples, however, are drawn from the relatively advanced districts of Royal Prussia. But in all regions, satisfying the family’s needs was the primary economic

110 POLISH ECONOMY motive, so variations in family size were accompanied by variations in the size of holdings and in the extent of economic activity.*’ Reluctant to have bigger farms because of the extra labor obligations this imposed, enterprising peasants preferred instead to rent abandoned land if that

was possible.

But what was the nature of the peasants’ contacts with the market? How did they make the money they later spent in the lord’s inn? It was probably not from the sale of grain, especially as the lord of the manor

sometimes had difficulty selling his own grain. We can only assume that the peasant also produced vegetables and animal products, and perhaps nonagricultural goods as well, and that his competitive strength lay in

these. The money earned from their sale was used to buy more than alcoholic drink, but also for ceremonial obligations, for salt and iron, and for those few “luxury” goods that were affordable. Sometimes, if the lord approved, a peasant might be able to buy an extra piece of land. The work of Zytkowicz® has uncovered cases of peasants who made small fortunes, mostly by lending money and engaging in petty trade. But this was not widespread. Such fortunes rarely lasted more than one generation and did not facilitate social mobility out of the peasant class. Certainly, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such stories were very unusual. In sum, then, there was not much opportunity for any form of “petty capitalism” to exist in Poland on a large scale with the exception of the region of Gdansk and parts of southern Little Poland where a puttingout system existed in the eighteenth century.” In most areas the lords were simply too powerful and the peasants too dependent for whatever ' local market forces existed to dissolve the tight grip of the folwark on the economy. In interpreting the situation of the peasants in Poland, and especially the role of serfdom, two elements must be taken into consideration: the

role of the state and the land/labor ratio. The Polish state was a “soft” one. Perry Anderson’s hypothesis that Eastern absolutism was an instrument with which to control peasants does not fit the Polish case. Generally, peasants did not rebel despite the absence of a strong state, or even, at times, of any state at all. Domar and Hicks have explained Eastern serfdom by the insufficiency of labor in relation to available land.” In order to make a profit the gentry had to “possess” labor as well, and because of its scarcity, anything close to a wage rate determined by supply and demand would have made such profits impossible. To a certain extent this model fits the Polish case. In the sixteenth century, with abundant land and scarce labor, the lords

POLISH ECONOMY 111 tried to bind their peasants to the land. In the eighteenth century, on the contrary, lords in the more densely populated provinces lost interest

in looking for fugitive serfs.*' In the early nineteenth century it was relatively easy to abolish serfdom in the Duchy of Warsaw, though lords insisted that all the land, both demesne and peasant holdings, belonged

to them.” By then the land, not labor, had become the scarce factor of production. Sull, this interpretation does not answer the question of why peasants agreed to, or let themselves be forced into, serfdom. North and Thomas have claimed that in Western Europe, during the Middle Ages, serfdom was a contractual arrangement.* Kahan has pointed out that when one of the parties in a contract is free to interpret the contract as he wishes, there is no real contract at all.* Yet, there is an element of truth in the North and Thomas argument, and it applies to Poland as well. Polish peasants usually had no alternatives to agricultural employment, and it was extremely difficult for individual peasant families to clear new land alone, even if they could find some. The vast distances, harsh climate, and underpopulation of the eastern lands were as much of a deterrent to free peasant life as they were an inducement to the lords to bind their labor to the land. So ultimately, it was not only coercion that tied the peasant to the land, but simply their need to make a living. TOWNS AND BURGHERS

A major element in the Polish pattern of development was not only the gradual decline of towns after the sixteenth century, but also the lack

of any significant burgher political power. ;

Towns were developing relatively well up to the first half of the seven-

teenth century.” Renaissance town halls from that era bear witness to this. By the end of the sixteenth century there were about goo chartered towns in Poland proper, excluding Lithuania, though only eight of them exceeded 10,000 inhabitants. Gdansk had 50,000 people, WarSaw 30,000, and Cracow 28,000. Poznan, Torun, Elblag, Lublin, and Lvov each had between 12,000 and 20,000 inhabitants. There were a number of middle-sized towns of about 4,000 to 5,000 people, but the vast majority of the goo chartered towns had a mere 500 to 2,000 residents, and they remained primarily agricultural. In this respect Poland

did not differ from other parts of Central-Eastern Europe, notably Bohemia and Hungary, which also had a “fairly dense urban network, __. made up of very small centers, often half rural.”” But Polish merchants only played a local role. In the sixteenth century

112 POLISH ECONOMY the gentry managed to forbid their engaging in foreign trade, which was taken over by Dutch, English, German, and other foreign merchants. In the heyday of the Polish grain export trade the Polish nobility felt that their cereal was indispensable for the West. They reasoned that if foreign merchants could be made to come directly to the source of grain with their products to sell in return, it would be easier to dictate prices to them. Polish merchants therefore remained primarily local middlemen. They did not specialize to any great extent, and more importantly, banking did not become an important part of their operations as was happening among the larger Western European merchants. Polish nobles monopolized the main branch of long-distance exchange, the grain trade. It is worth noting that Jews did not play an important role in the grain

trade, either. In the second half of the seventeenth century there were some 600,000 to goo0,000 Jews in Poland. Most were very poor and were

engaged mostly in crafts. burghers viewed them as competitors and tried to obtain royal privileges against them, but to a certain extent, the nobility supported the Jews. The seventeenth-century crisis hit the Jews as it did urban life in general, and the small number of Jewish bankers and merchants declined. Though a small elite of rich Jews remained im-

portant in the overland trade, particularly in the eastern lands, they were more commonly used on estates as innkeepers, petty officials, and other lords’ men. For this reason they were despised by the peasants for whom they often acted as moneylenders and petty traders. Their legal status was similar to that of a distinct status group, with specific rights, privileges, and obligations. In the’ sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the legal position of the urban population deteriorated. Laws were passed against burghers. In 1496 they were prohibited from owning land, merchants were forbidden to travel abroad, and maximum prices were set on some nonagricultural goods. Simultaneously, nobles were denied the right to engage in town occupations so that barriers against social mobility were erected. Nor were the towns’ autonomous rights respected. Their noble owners or royal officials meddled in urban affairs, and burghers of lesser towns were even forced to perform labor obligations. The autarkic tendencies of the demesne economy led to the establishment of industrial production on nobles’ estates,” and this weakened

craft guilds in the towns. It also prevented the development of crafts and manufacturing through any kind of putting-out system from leading to capitalist development.” Cloth production stagnated because of the loss of purchasing power by the peasants and burghers. Ironworks

POLISH ECONOMY 113 were bought by the nobles and turned into grain mills.” In the towns themselves the gentry and clergy (the Church, in fact, did not play a role distinct from that of the landowners), living from their agricultural revenues, became an important part of the social and political structure.

The wars and epidemics of the seventeenth century aggravated the situation. The Swedish War and its aftereffects may have reduced the urban population by as much as 60 to 80 percent.’ In this era of stagnation many burghers were obliged to turn from crafts to agricultural production for their own use. There were exceptions, most of all Gdansk, and a few smaller towns in Royal Prussia.'*' This was the richest part of the Polish commonwealth. Gdansk merchants made fortunes from the trade in cereals, and an entire urban economy flourished on that basis. Gdafisk was the biggest center of nonagricultural production in the commonwealth, and it supplied more distant Polish magnates and lesser nobles as well as closer

regions within its direct economic orbit.'” Capitalist production and banking were present, setting Gdarisk aside from other Polish towns. Gdansk was economically dependent on Poland, and as the grain trade declined, it also stagnated and regressed, particularly in the first

half of the eighteenth century. But it maintained a de facto political autonomy, and it even pursued its own foreign policy. The patrician burghers of Gdansk, not royal officials, governed the city and there were numerous conflicts with the crown. Even its culture was different. It was

Protestant instead of Catholic, its people spoke German rather than Polish, and its architecture resembled Lubeck more than Cracow. Some smaller towns of Royal Prussia, particularly Elblag and Torun, were also able to profit from their business relations with Gdansk and the rest of the Polish commonwealth. Their craft guilds were well developed, and the rich peasants of the region constituted a good market for them.’” The towns of Great Poland were not as harmed by the crisis as were those in other regions, and even during the eighteenth century many towns were established. In fact, earlier, during the Thirty Years’ War,

an influx from Silesia and Brandenburg had played a role in their development.'™

Then, there were some private towns which acted as the centers of some magnates’ land complexes. Zamos¢ is an outstanding example. Such towns continued to do well despite the problems experienced by other towns.'” Finally, there was Warsaw, which reached a population of 100,000 in the second half of the eighteenth century.'® Trade and crafts flourished

114 POLISH ECONOMY there, banks were established, and new residences were built, as can be seen from a Canaletto painting of this period. The economic revival of

the second half of the eighteenth century can explain Warsaw’s resurgence, particularly in view of its cultural and political importance. Officials, professionals, and army officers influenced its cultural life, and Warsaw’s burghers and ideologues played an important role at the time of the Sejm of 1788-1792 which tried to reform the country just before its final collapse.

But despite these exceptions, the key fact is that Polish towns and burghers were unable to become autonomous social or political forces. They were unable to forge national bonds among themselves, or to act as a uniting force. Nor were they available for use by the kings against the encroachment of noble power. This absence is certainly one of the most important characteristics of Polish economic, social, and political history. THE FATE OF THE POLISH STATE

The obvious question arises as to whether there was a connection between the Polish pattern of economic development and the collapse of the Polish state at the end of the eighteenth century. There is an enormous literature on this topic. In the sixteenth century Poland was a European power. In the nineteenth century the Polish nation was stateless and its most active part, the nobility—accustomed to a large measure

of political and personal liberty—was subordinated, together with the rest of the population, to three alien, absolutist regimes. This produced intense frustrations, an inferiority complex, and questions repeated thousands of times in political pamphlets, historical writing, and even fiction: what went wrong? There is not enough room in this essay to say much about this, nor do I feel competent to summarize the relevant discussion. But one point has to be touched very briefly, namely: was the political collapse caused by the serf labor system and by the “peripheral” role of Poland in the European economy? The answer seems to be negative. The argument is very simple. The three powers who divided Poland among themselves had basically similar economies to Poland’s but in spite of that they were militarily much stronger. So the answer to the question of the collapse of the Common-

wealth of Poland and Lithuania must be sought in the absence of a strong state in Poland. In the eighteenth century the Polish army was small and Polish nobles claimed that Poland, being in no danger from foreign powers, was best safeguarded by its weak state. However self-

POLISH ECONOMY 115 serving those arguments were for the nobles—who refused to pay taxes and were not prepared to give up any part of their political and personal

liberties—there was an element of truth in that argument. One might argue that it was precisely in 1793 that the foreign powers were moved to act against Poland because the Sejm of 1788-1792 had started to reform and modernize the state and the army. In Prussia, the army, even during peace time, reached 3 percent of the population; in Poland it comprised about 0.2 percent. Only in 1788 did Poland decide to have an army of 100,000, or 1 percent of the population.'*’ The army was weak simply because the nobles did not want to pay taxes. As R. R. Palmer has estimated, taxes per capita in 1775 were 1 shilling in Poland, 6 shillings in Prussia, 6 shillings in Russia, and 20

shillings in Austria.' It is not so easy to answer why there was no absolutism in Poland. In | this respect Poland was an exception among the bigger countries of Eastern Europe. Noting the lack of an answer for this question in Polish his-

torical writing, Perry Anderson formulated the hypothesis that at the peak of Poland’s development in the sixteenth century, there was no threat strong enough from abroad to stimulate the nobility to form a strong state. Later the Polish monarch was “drastically and definitively reduced by the aristocracy.”'” This leads to another question, that of the rise of the Polish magnates.

This strata, in its modern form, developed throughout the sixteenth century. There were rich families before this who had made fortunes due to the relatively fast pace of economic development in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the sixteenth century links with the royal court seem to have been a frequent path toward magnate status, because capable royal secretaries were often rewarded with state offices accompanied by life grants of royal domains.''’® Financial operations, especially loans to the lesser nobility, were also a way to amass wealth.

Land was taken over when a loan was not repaid. The union with Lithuania is of particular importance, because it opened the way to huge , land grants in the East, at the same time giving already existing Lithuanian magnates rights in the commonwealth. Magnates, who, contrary to many countries in Western Europe, never formed a legally separate group, profited from the success of the entire class of nobles in curbing royal power. Special privileges for the nobility

began in the fourteenth century, but were of particular importance in the period after 1572, when the last king of the Jagellonian dynasty died and kings came to be elected by the nobility. At each election nobles bargained for new royal concessions.

116 POLISH ECONOMY It was relatively easy to restrict royal power not only because there was no countervailing burgher class to act as a force against the nobility, but also because there was no well-developed state bureaucracy in Po-

land to support the monarch against the nobility and aristocrats. Even in those countries that, like Poland, had not been transformed from a “domain state” into a “tax state,” royal holdings were subordinated to strict control by state administrators. In Poland, the holders of such domains tried at all costs to avoid such control.'"' In any case, the sheer size of the country, 700,000 to 900,000 square kilometers, with its very poor transportation network, did not make the introduction of efficient state administration likely. This factor also facilitated the centrifugal tendencies of magnates and hindered the possibilities of any antimagnate movement by the lesser nobility.'" Once the magnates gained considerable wealth, they were able to play important social and political roles. They were never incorporated into

the state apparatus, as in Russia or in a certain measure in Prussia. As patrons of impoverished small nobles, they were able to influence local noble assemblies and the Sejm itself. The berum veto, the customary law that stated that one vote was enough to make all legislation invalid, was very helpful. Magnates used the royal council, the Senate, composed of the highest state officials, as a means of direct control over the king who became the de facto president of the council. The royal council then be-

came a counterweight to any independent tendencies in the chamber of deputies, which represented the local noble assemblies. Wyczanski points out, however, that contrary to prevailing opinion, in the sixteenth century, up to 1572, kings gained rather than lost power, having the right to nominate Senate members and playing the lesser nobility against the magnates.’ But after 1572 this changed. The magnates began to conduct their own foreign policy, having individual relations with foreign

courts, a fact of particular importance during the elections of Polish kings. Sometimes foreigners were elected, and of course favors to powerful magnate lobbies were a necessary condition. Magnates even had their own private armies, albeit their role consisted mostly of policing their estates. It served none of their interests to promote a strong state, and in fact some of them signed the Confederation of Targowica in 1792 calling in Russian troops against the supporters of the Constitution of May 1791. Economically, it was not impossible for Poland to have a strong state.

The problem was rather one of social and political structure. The nobility, and in particular the magnates, opposed a strong state because they feared it would restrict their liberty and would strip them of part of their

POLISH ECONOMY 117 wealth. In neighboring countries peasants were taxed and the nobility was incorporated into the state apparatus. Let us assume for a moment that per capita national income was at roughly the same level in Poland as in the neighboring countries. But what substituted for military expenditures in Poland? Certainly Prussia and Russia had much higher military costs. In Poland this part of the national income did not finance the nonagricultural sphere of the economy. Instead, it went into the luxury consumption of the noble class, so it financed imports and nonproductive spheres of economic life." CONCLUSION

The Polish case, which has been described here at some length, had certain characteristics in common with other countries of this part of Europe. A demesne economy, with labor obligations for serf peasants, the legal and economic deterioration of the situation of these peasants, and the lack of an independent political base for burghers were common elements for Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary. There were differences in chronology, but these were not critical. A more important difference was that distant foreign markets for grain did not play an important role in the cases of Bohemia and Hungary. There was no equivalent of Gdansk in either of those two countries and their geographic position did not facilitate the export of bulk commodities to the West. Hungary, how-

ever, was an exporter of three important agricultural products: oxen (200,000 a year were sent in peak periods to Austria, Moravia, Upper Germany, and Venice), wool, and wine, both of which were exported mostly to Silesia, Bohemia, and Poland.'* Minerals, especially copper, were important export articles as well. The rearing of oxen was done mainly by peasants, so it did not constitute an element of the demesne economy, though the nobility played an important role in the trade itself. Although the market, in the Hungarian case, was external, it cannot be called a “core capitalist” market. Bohemia, especially after 1620, when intensive development of private towns started, had quite an important domestic market, despite the rather small size of most of its towns.'’® Grain was produced mostly by peasants and manorial grain production was less important than in Poland. But as a significant part of that grain went to the manors in the

form of rent, lords were suppliers of the urban market. Brewing and fish breeding were also important elements of the demesne’s economic activity. A part of its products was sold to the towns, and a part, particularly beer, was sold to peasants who had to purchase it, as with vodka

118 POLISH ECONOMY in Poland or wine in Hungary. Indirectly this proves that there was money in the peasants’ hands, presumably because of their trading with the towns.

In a sense, it is difficult to classify Bohemian, and especially Hungarian markets according to a foreign—domestic dichotomy, because there was also another market. This was, roughly speaking, “the state.” The Habsburg garrisons had to be fed and so constituted a good market, although this booming market diminished in Hungary at the end of the seventeenth century. Vienna was a good market by itself, although its urban role is better explained by its position as the capital of an empire rather than in terms of a “capitalist world economy.” The problem of the state is related to yet another difference between Poland and the two other countries. The Habsburgs developed an absolutist system in their empire. It influenced the situation of both the nobility and the peasants. Contrary to the Polish case, the peasants were taxed and at least some of them were obliged to serve in the army. In the eighteenth century, they were taken under the protection of the state. This protection was a part of the struggle between the state and the nobility for their share in the national income. Peasants were pro-

tected in order to enable the state to exploit them more effectively through the tax system.

Coming now to the more general problem of “backwardness,” it seems that it has very ancient roots in Eastern Europe. To construct a precise definition of backwardness would be a risky venture, but it probably can be agreed that it applies roughly to a situation when productive forces are less developed than in some other region which is taken as a point of reference. In preindustrial times backwardness was usually accompanied by relatively low population density and by low urbanization, although, of course, low population density cannot be taken as a general

characteristic of backwardness in all cases. The particular factors that were responsible for the technological, economic, and social changes in the West in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period did not operate in Eastern Europe. It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss all these factors, but it must be emphasized that backwardness is not the same thing as dependence, although, in certain conditions, it makes dependence likely. By dependence, roughly speaking, I mean the situation

when: (1) there are important trade links between two regions, one more, one less developed; (2) this trade works in the direction of changing the structure of production of the less developed country or region, most likely toward specialization in one primary product; (3) the vari-

ations in demand for that particular product are an important factor

POLISH ECONOMY 119 determining the functioning of the less developed region’s or country’s economy. In the Polish case it seems that dependence started in the fifteenth century, even before the era of the grain trade, but at the same time the Polish economy was dependent only to a certain limited degree. There

were regional and sectoral differences in its economy which can be explained without any reference to the “capitalist world economy.” For example, Great Poland was relatively well developed, and the eastern regions were more backward from the start. ‘The Hungarian and Bohemian cases seem even less explainable from a “dependency” perspective, although their.economies had so many elements in common with the Polish one. In particular “core-capitalist” demand was not a factor in their development. The roots of the similarities between all three economies seem to lie in their social structures rather than in the European division of labor. If a key factor is to be identified (and to try necessarily means to simplify)

it is the role of the aristocracy. Whether the nobility came to dominate the state, as in Poland, or whether it was incorporated into the state, as

in the Habsburg Empire and Russia, did not make much of an immediate difference to the patterns of economic development because in all three places the aristocracy continued to play such a major economic | role. Even the lack of historical continuity of the aristocracy, as in the case of Bohemia after White Mountain, did not make an essential difference. The domination of the aristocracy over the bourgeoisie and the cities inhibited capitalist development, and that was critical.

On the other hand, the differing positions of the aristocracies with respect to the states in this region had striking consequences. Because the Polish aristocracy was not obliged to back a strong state to protect their interests in the sixteenth century, at a time when Poland seemed to have no highly dangerous external enemies, they destroyed their state. Russia stands in marked contrast to this, as does Prussia, and to a certain extent, the Habsburg Empire. But politics and economies did not

automatically interact to produce uniform results. The existence of a strong state did not necessarily produce more rapid economic development, and ultimately, as Bohemia, and to some extent parts of Poland as well were to show in the nineteenth century, political subordination did not necessarily inhibit economic growth either. In short, then, dependency, whether economic or political, may be a real phenomenon, but its causes may be more domestic than world systemic, and its consequences may not be as unidirectional as some of its adherents have believed.

120 POLISH ECONOMY These conclusions lead me to a necessary postscript, a brief description of the course of Polish economic evolution in the nineteenth century, after the end of the period of the folwark economy. NINETEENTH-CENTURY POLAND

Poland, partitioned between three powers, entered the era of the Industrial Revolution with an impoverished peasantry that could not form a strong domestic market and with a tiny bourgeoisie. In spite of that, there were to be cases of quite successful economic development as well as cases of stagnation and failure. These cases do not fit a simple model of core versus periphery. The first interesting example is the Kingdom of Poland, formed by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 with the Russian Tsar as its king. During the short period of its relative autonomy from 1815 to 1830 it had no independent foreign policy, but it did possess its own army, which in 1830 fought Russia. Its finance minister, Prince Ksawery LubeckiDrucki, adopted what may be called, after Barrington Moore, a “conservative modernization.”''” He established state iron works and supported a private wool industry, financing them by heavy taxation of the peasant population.''* This further reduced the peasants’ purchasing power. Peasants, in order to make ends meet, had to engage in nonagricultural jobs, which were often provided by state construction projects. What money they earned, the state took back in the form of taxes.'" This attempt at industrialization represented a “manufacturing stage” of the development of industry according to Marxist terminology. Charcoal, not coke, was used in the ironworks, and the family workshop was still the basis of the wool industry. At the same time, a bourgeoisie began to grow from the ranks of state contractors engaged in completing the state’s heavy industrial projects. However, much of the money they made went back to the agricultural sector. They invested mostly in landed property, which was more secure and more prestigious than trade or industry. Only in the long run did some of this money help the next wave of industrialization of the Kingdom of Poland in the second half of the nineteenth century. Then, finally, the Industrial Revolution got under way. Coke replaced charcoal, steel replaced iron, and cotton was introduced in the place of wool. Production moved into factories from family workshops. The Kingdom of Poland became the most industrialized part of the Russian Empire, at least up to the last decade of the century, when the “great spurt” of Russian industrialization gathered its own momentum.

} POLISH ECONOMY 121 This second wave of industrialization happened under conditions

of tariff protection. Being on the Western borders of the Empire, the industry of Lédz could take advantage of the huge Russian and

competition. : Far Eastern markets and remain protected from neighboring Western

An even more important case of industrialization was Upper Silesia, though most of it did not belong to Poland from the fourteenth century until 1945. Due to mineral deposits of zinc and coal, it developed very quickly, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, when railway construction started. The German part of Upper Silesia had intensive links with the Dabrowa Gornicza region of heavy industry in the Kingdom of Poland, just over the border. In the second half of the cen-

tury Upper Silesia became one of the greatest industrial regions of Europe. Quite different was the fate of Great Poland, especially the Poznan region, which became Prussian after the partitions. It was agriculture, both on peasant farms and landowner estates (though it must be remembered that estates here were never very big), which developed very well after the gradual emancipation of the peasantry. This agriculture was highly protected from foreign competitors and it took advantage of the huge German market to which it exported not only food, but also labor. This saved it from agricultural overpopulation which was serious in parts of the Kingdom of Poland and especially in Galicia, that part of Poland under Austrian rule. The agriculture of Great Poland was modernized so fast that it became comparable to that of the well-developed regions of Western Europe in terms of efficiency and yields. Industry did not grow so fast in the face of German competition, but distilleries, sugar plants, and agricultural machine factories were built. A railway network was established, and to this day it is much denser than in the territories of the former Kingdom of Poland or Galicia. Galicia and the former Polish territories east of the Bug River, except perhaps the Biatystok textile region, remained the most backward areas in the nineteenth century, but in different ways. Galicia was overpopulated, with almost no industry, so its redundant peasant population had to engage in various nonagricultural activities as well as seasonal agricultural employment, even in remote areas. When the occasion arose, people from this region, as well as peasants from the Kingdom of Poland, started to emigrate to America. The eastern territories, on the contrary, were rather sparsely populated. The countryside was mostly of non-Polish origin, except for the nobles. Agriculture here was of an extremely low technical level, com-

122 POLISH ECONOMY mercialization was low, and the economy remained in a primitive,

seminatural state.

The birth and growth of industry on the Polish lands in the 1860s and 1870s, except in Silesia, as well as the development of modern agriculture in Great Poland are to a large extent explicable by the protectionist policy of their respective states. But despite this growth, the Polish lands remained backward in comparison with Western Europe. In the Kingdom of Poland industry constituted islands of modernization

in a sea of traditional peasants whose standard of living and level of civilization were almost untouched by industrial development. The bourgeoisie, in large measure of foreign origin, remained small. Galicia was almost not touched by industrialization. Upper Silesia’s development, and perhaps even that of Great Poland, is rather explicable in the context of what was generally happening in Germany, although those parts of the Polish lands had been quite well developed in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. On the whole, however, the economic history of Poland after the partitions remained the history of a backward, if no longer classically dependent, economy.

NOTES

* I would like to thank Professor Antoni Maczak of Warsaw University for his very valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 1. These regions had shifting and imprecise boundaries, but they were the heartland of late medieval Poland. They do not include the more easterly ter-

ritories of Ruthenia, Galicia, and Podolia, the lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, or the Polish territories taken from the Teutonic knights, including Gdansk, that were called “Royal Prussia.” 2. Irena Gieysztorowa, “Ludnos¢ [Population], in Encyklopedia histori gospodarczej Polski [Encyclopedia of the Economic History of Poland] (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 1981), pp. 430-431. 3. A. Wawrzyniczykowa, “Plony” (Corn Yields], in Encyklopedia historia. 4. Jerzy Topolski, Gospodarka polska a europejska w XVI—XVIII wicku [Polish

Economy and European Economy, 16th—18th centuries] (Poznan: Wydawn. Poznahiskie, 1977), pp. 47~70, based his indices on average per capita consump-

tion and then multiplied by the entire population. 5. Karol Modzelewski, “The System of Ius Ducale and the Idea of Feudalism: Comments on the Earliest Class Society in Medieval Poland,” Questiones Medii Aevtt 1 (1977), especially pp. 136-273.

6. Benedykt Zientara, “Meltoratio terrae: The Thirteenth-century Breakthrough in Polish History,” in J. K. Fedorowicz, et al., eds., A Republic of Nobles: Studies in Polish History to 1864 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

POLISH ECONOMY 123 7. Henryk Samsonowicz, “Polska w gospodarce europejskiej XIV i XV wieku” [Poland in the European Economy of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries], in Alexander Gieysztor, ed., Polska dzielnicowa 1 zjednoczona: Panstwo, Spoteczerstwo, Kultura [Poland Disintegrated and United: State, Society, Culture] (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 1972), p. 370. 8. Antoni Maczak, Migdzy Gdariskiem a Sundem [Between Gdansk and the Sund] (Warsaw: Paristwowe Wydawn. Nau Kowe, 1972), pp. 154-156. See also Marian Matowist, “Z zagadnien popytu na produkty krajéw nadbattyckich w Europie zachodniej w XVI w.” [The Question of Western Europe Demand for the Products of the Baltic Countries in the Sixteenth Century], Przeglgd Historyczny 4 (1959); Matowist, “The Economic and Social Development of the Baltic Countries from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries,” Economic History Review (1959); and Antoni Maczak and Henryk Samsonowicz, “Z zagadnien genezy

rynku europejskiego. Strefa battycka” [The Questions of the Origins of the European Market: The Baltic Sphere], Przegigd Historyczny 2 (1964). g. Marian Matowist, Wschéd a Zachéd Europy w XIII-XVI w. [Eastern and Western Europe in the Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries] (Warsaw: Panistwowe Wydawn. Nau Kowe, 1973), p. 370. 10. Samsonowicz, “Polska w gospodarce europejskiej,” pp. 379, 388. 11. Maczak, Migdzy Gdarishktiem a Sundem, p. 155.

12. Henri H. Stahl, Traditional Romanian Village Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 6. 13. Wiadystaw Rusinski, “Znaczenie rynku zewnetrznego w dziejach gospodarki folwarczno-panszczyZnianej” [The Significance of External Markets in the History of the Manorial Economy], Pamigtnik VII Powszechnego Zjazdu Historykow 1 (1958): 441. See also Rusinski, “Kilka uwag o istocie ekonomiki feudal-

ne} w XV—XVIII wieku” [Some Remarks Concerning the Nature of Feudal Economy in the Fifteenth to Eighteenth Centuries], Roczniki Dziejéw Spotecznych i Gospodarczych 27 (1965): 9-33; Rusinski, “Uber die Entwicklungsetappen der Fronwirtschaft in Mittel- und Osteuropa,” Studia Historiae Oeconomica g (1974): 27-45; Rusiniski, “Kilka uwag o zréznicowaniu struktury agrarnej w Europie Srodkowo—wschodniej w XVI-XVIII w.” [Some Remarks Concerning the Differences in the Agrarian Structure of Central-Eastern Europe in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries]. Roczniki Dziejéw Spotecznych i Gospodarczych 39 (1978): 11—25; Rusinski, “Kryzys agrarny w Europie Srodkowo—wschodniej w XVII w.”

[The Agrarian Crisis in Central-Eastern Europe in the Seventeenth Century], Rocznikt Dztejow Spotecznych t Gospodarczych 42 (1981): 25~76; Rusiriski’s argument

stresses the relative advantage of the lord over the peasant in contacts with the more distant market and treats it as a variable explaining the growth of both the demesne economy and the role of the serf labor. 14. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System. Vol. 1: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New

York: Academic Press, 1974), p. 304. 15. Wilhelm Abel, Crises agratres en Europe, XII°—XX° stécle (Paris: Flammarion, 1973), P- 149.

124 POLISH ECONOMY 16. J. Nichtweiss, “Zur Frage des Zweiten Leibeigenschaft und des sogennan-

ten preussischen Weges der Entwicklung des Kapitalisumus in der Landwirtschaft Ostdeutschlands,” Zeitschrift fiir Geschichtswissenschaft 1 (1953): 687~—71°7.

17. Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” Past and Present '70 (19°76). 18. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: NBL, 1974), p. 196.

19. Jan Rutkowski, “La genése du régime de la corvée dans l'Europe Centrale depuis la fin du Moyen Age,” La Pologne au XI° congrés International de Sciences Historiques, Oslo, 1928 (Warsaw, 1930), p. 6. 20. Rutkowski, “La genése du regime,” p. 5; and S. Orsini-Rosenberg, Rozw6) i geneza folwarku panszczyinianego w dobrach katedry gnieznienskiej w XVI w. [The

Origins of Manorial Economy in the Estates of the Cathedral of Gniezno in the Sixteenth Century] (Poznan, 1925), p. 70. 21. Jerzy Topolski, Gospodarka polska a europejska w XVI-XVIII wieku [The Polish and European Economies in the 16th—18th Centuries] (Poznan: Wydawn Poznanskie, 1977), p. 81. 22. Kazimierz Tymieniecki, Historia chtopéw polskich [History of the Polish Peasants], 3 (Warsaw: Panistwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1969), pp. 43-44. 23. Jerome Blum, “The Rise of Serfdom in Eastern Europe,” American Historical Review 4 (1957): 816.

24. Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure,” p. 27. 25. Kazimierz Tymieniecki, “W sprawie powstania zaostrzonego poddanistwa w Polsce i Europe srodkowej” [On the Origins of the Second Serfdom in Poland and Central Europe], Roczniki Historyczne 24 (1958): 304; and Tymieniecki, Pisma wybrane [Selected Writings], (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1956), p. 280. 26. Jerzy Topolski, Prawda i model w historiografii [The reality and the model in historiography] (L6dz: Wydawn Lédzkie, 1982), pp. 318~319. 27. Tymieniecki, “W sprawie powstania zaostrzonego poddanstwa,” p. 304. 28. Blum, “Rise of Serfdom,” p. 836. 29. Anderson, Lineages, p. 32. 30. Ibid., p. 209. 31. Tymieniecki, “W sprawie powstania zaostrzonego poddanstwa.” 32. Roman Grodecki, “Poczatki gospodarki folwarcznej w. Polsce” [The Origins of Manorial Economy in Poland], in Henryk Barycz and Jan Hulewicz, eds., Studia z dziejéw kultury polskie] [Studies from the History of the Polish Culture] (Warsaw: Gebethner i Wolff, 1949).

33. The folwark was the estate, or more narrowly, the demesne under the lord’s control. There is an extensive literature about the folwark. Some key works are Bohdan Baranowski, Gospodarstwo chlopskie 1 folwarczne we wschodniej Wielkopolsce w XVIII w.[Peasant and Manorial Economy in Eastern Great Poland in the Eighteenth Century] (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1958); Stefan Cackowski, Gospodarstwo wiejskie w dobrach biskupstwa 1 kapituty chetmiiskie) w

XVII-XVIIIw. [Rural Economy in the Estates of the Chapter of Cheltmno in the

POLISH ECONOMY 125 Seventeenth—Eighteenth Centuries], 2 vols. (Torun: Roczniki Towarzystwa Naukowego w Toruniu, 1961, 1963); Marcin Kamler, Folwark szlachecki w Wielkopolsce w latach 1580-1655 [The Manorial Economy in Great Poland in the Years 1580— 1655] (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1976); Witold Kula, An Economic Theory of the Feudal System (London: NBL, 1976); Orsini-Rozenberg, Rozwoj t geneza folwarku panszzyznianego; Irena Rychlikowa, Klucz wielkoporebski Wodzickich [The Estate of Wielka Poreba of the Wodzicki Family] (Wroctaw, Warszawa: Polish Academy of Sciences, 1960); Irena Rychlikowa, Studia nad towarowg produkcjg wielkie; wlasnosct w Matopolsce w latach 1764-1805 [Studies on the Commercial Production of Great Landowners in Little Poland in the Years 1764-1805] (Wroclaw: Zaktad Narodowy im Ossolinskich, 1966); and Jerzy Topolski, Gospodarstwo wiejskie w dobrach arcybiskupstwa gnieimenskiego od XVI do XVIII

w. [Rural Economy in the Estates of the Archbishop of Gniezno from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century] (Poznan: Pafistwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1958); Andrzej Wyczanski, Studia nad folwarkiem szlacheckim w Polsce w latach

1500-1580 [Studies in the History of the Manorial Economy in Poland in the Years 1500-1580] (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1960). 34. Kula, Economic Theory. 35. Topolski, Gospodarka polska a europejska w XVI-XVIII w., p. i17. 36. Wyczanski, Studia nad folwarkiem szlacheckim, p. 204.

37. Ibid., p. 208. 38. Wallerstein, Modern World System, pp. 87-107. 39. Jan Rutkowski, Studia z dziejéw wsi polskiey XVI-XVIII w. [Studies in the

History of Rural Poland in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries] (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1956), pp. 127-143. 40. Kamler, Folwark szlachecki, p. 168. 41. Antoni Maczak, U érédet nowoczesne; gospodarhi europejskiej [Origins of the

Modern European Economy] (Warsaw, 1967), p. 40. 42. Kula, Economic Theory; Rychlikowa, Studia nad towarowg produkcjg, pp. 184—189.

43. Celina Bobiriska, “Pewne kwestie chtopskiego uzytkowania gruntu i walka

o ziemie” [Some Questions of Peasant Tenure and the Fight for Land], in Bobiriska, ed., Studia z dziej6w wsi matopolskiej, [Studies in the Rural History of Little

Poland] (Warsaw: Ksiazka i Wiedza, 1957), p. 358. 44. Kula, Economic Theory, pp. 69-71; Witold Kula, Miary 7 ludze [Measures and People] (Warsaw: Paristwowe Wydawn. Nauke, 1970), p. 241. 45. This is a well-known phenomenon. See, for example, Ireneusz Ihnatowicz, Antoni Maczak, and Benedykt Zientara, Spoteczenstwo polskie od X do XX

wieku [Polish Society from the Tenth to the Twentieth Centuries] (Warsaw: Ksiazka Wiezda, 1979), pp. 245-253. 46. Teresa Zielinska, Magnateria polska epoki saskiej [The Polish Magnates in the Saxon Epoch] (Wroctaw: Zaktad Narodowy im. Ossolitiskich, 1977), pp. 79137, shows that this process added to the political and economic strength of the

magnates in the first half of the eighteenth century. 47. Anna Sucheni-Grabowska, Monarchia dwu ostatnich Jagtellonéw a ruch eg-

126 POLISH ECONOMY zehucyjny (The Monarchy of the Two Last Jagiellons and the Movement for the Execution of Laws] (Wroclaw: Zaktad Narodowy im. Ossolinskich, 1974), pp. 46-73, 143-165; and Antoni Maczak, The Conclustve Years: The End of the Sixteenth Century as the Turning Point of Polish History (Forthcoming).

48. Antoni Maczak, “Problemy gospodarcze” [Economic Problems], in Janusz Tazbir, ed., Polska XVIII w.: Patstwo, Spoteczerstwo, Kultura [Poland in the

Eighteenth Century: State, Society, Culture] (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 1969), p. 103.

49. Jerzy Topolski, “La regression économique en Pologne du XVI* au XVIII® siécle,” Acta Poloniae Historica 5 (1962); Topolski, “La dynamique de court terme et la dynamique de la longue durée dans I’explication de l’évolution agraire en Pologne du XVIS—XVIII® siécle,” Studia Historiae Oeconomicae 17 (1982): 15~—27; there is also a very long discussion on the nature of this crisis in Rusinski, “Kryzys agrarny.”

50. Irena Gieysztorowa, “Zniszczenia 1 straty wojenne oraz ich skutki na Mazowszu” [War Devastations and the Effects of War in Mazovia], in Kazimierz Lepszy, ed., Polska w okresie drugie] wojny pétnocnej, 1655-1660 [Poland during

the Second Northern War, 1655-1660] (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1957); Stanistaw Hoszowski, “Zniszczenia w czasie wojny szwedzkiej na terenie Prus Krdélewskich” [War Devastations during the War with Sweden in Royal Prussia], in Lepszy, Polska w okresie drugiej wojny potnocne;, Wtadystaw Ru-

sinski, “Uwagi o zniszczeniach po wojnach z potowy XVII w.” [Remarks Concerning the Devastations after the War of the Mid-Seventeenth Century], in Lepszy, Polska w okresie durgiej wojny potnocnej; and Rusinski, “Straty 1 zniszczenia

w Czasie wojny szwedzkiej, 1655-1660” [Losses and Devastations during the War with Sweden, 1655-1660], in Lepszy, Polska w okresie drugiej wojny pétnocne). 51. Stefan Inglot, ed., Préby reform wtosciariskich w Polsce XVIII wieku: Wybér

irédel. [Attempts at Peasant Reforms in Poland in the Eighteenth Century: Selected Sources] (Wroctaw: Zakladu Narodowego im. Ossolinskich, 1952). 52. Witold Kula, Szkice o manufakturach w Polsce XVIII w. [Essays on Manufac-

turers in Poland in the Eighteenth Century], 2 vols. (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1956); Witold Kula, Les débuts du capitalisme en Pologne dans la perspective de l’histotre comparée (Rome: Academia Polacca di Scienza, 1960).

53. Rychlikowa, Studia nad towarowg produkcjg, pp. 72-78, 202-203; Baranowski, Gospodarstwo chtopskie 1 folwarczne, pp. 252-253; Hillel Levine, “Gentry,

Jews and Serfs: The Rise of the Polish Vodka,” Review 4:2 (1980): 223-250; Hillel Levine, “Between Polish Autarky and Russian Autocracy: The Jews, the Propinacja and the Rhetoric of Reform,” International Review of Social History 27:1

(1982): 66-84; and Halina Rozenowa, Produkcja woédki 1 sprawa pyanstwa w Krélestwie Polskim, 1815-1863 [The Production of Vodka and the Question of Drunkenness in the Polish Kingdom, 1815-1863] (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1961). 54. Topolski, Gospodarka polska, pp. 100-102.

POLISH ECONOMY 127 55. Ibid., pp. gg—-111. 56. Anzelm Gostomski, Gospodarstwo [Economy] (Wroclaw, Wydawn. Zak-

tadu Narodowego im Ossolinskich, 1951). 57. Jozef Burszta, Wrest karczma [The Village and the Inn] (Warsaw: Ludowa Spdéidzielnia Wydawnicza, 1950), pp. 198-199. 58. Jan Bystron, Dzeje obyczajéw w dawne) Polsce [History of the Customs of Ancient Poland] (Warsaw: Panistwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1976), p. 148. 59- Janusz Tazbir, Kultura szlachecka w Polsce [Noble Culture in Poland] (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 1979), p. 19. 60. Mieczystaw Piszczkowski, Zagadnienta wiejskie w literaturze polskiego OSwie-

cienia [Rural Questions in the Literature of the Polish Enlightenment] (Cracow: Polish Academy of Sciences, 1960), p. 92. 61. Tazbir, Kultura szlachecka, p. 17. 62. Alina Witkowska, Stawtante, my lubim sielanki . . . (Warsaw: Panstwowy In‘stytut Wydawniczy, 1972), p. 108; Tazbir, Kultura szlachecka, p. 21. 63. Tazbir, Kultura szlachecka, p. 20.

64. Ibid., pp. 170-196.

| 65. Kula, Economic Theory, p. 62. , 66. Ibid., p. 62. See also the still classical work on this topic by Rutkowski, : Studia z dzejow wst polskiey, pp. 145-240, first published in 1914. . 67. Stefan Inglot, ed., Historia chlopéw polskich [History of the Polish Peasants] (Warsaw: Ludowa Spdldzielnia Wydawnicza, 1970), 1: 397-450; Josef Leszczynski, Der klassenkampf der Oberlauzitzer Bauren in den Jahren 1635-1720 (Bautzen:

Domowina-Verlag, 1964), especially pp. 52-56; and Celina Bobinska, “Les mouvements paysans en Pologne aux XVIIS—XIX°* siécles,” Acta Poloniae H1storica 22 (1970). 68. Stanistaw Sreniowski, Zbiegostwo chlopéw w dawnej Polsce jako zagadnienie

ustroju spotecznego [The Flight of Peasants in Ancient Poland as a Question of the Social System] (Warsaw, 1948). 69. Wlodzimierz Dworzaczek, “Dobrowolne” poddatistwo chtopéw (“Voluntary” Enserfment of Peasants] (Warsaw: Ludowa Spétdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1952). 70. Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 414-441. 71. Sreniowski, Zbiegostwo chtopéw, p. 55. 72. Maczak, Miedzy Gdarskiem a Sundem, p. 153.

73. Hipolit Grynwaser, “Kwestia agrarna 1 ruch wioscian w Krolestwie Polskim w pierwszej potowie XIX w.” [The Agrarian Question and the Peasant Movement in the Polish Kingdom in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century], in Pisma [Writings] (Warsaw, 1951). 74. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), shows that the introduction of more modern economic forces may upset the balance of a peasant “moral economy” by threatening its survival.

128 POLISH ECONOMY 75. Paul Avrich, Russzan Rebels, 1600-1800 (New York: Schocken, 1972). 76. Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 1966), p. 474. 77. Jézef Rafacz, Ustréj wsi samorzednej matopolskie] w XVIII wieku [The Legal System of the Self-governing Village in Little Poland in the Eighteenth Century]

| (Lublin, 1922). Some village court records were published. 78. Emanuel Rostworowski, “Rola urzedu wiejskiego w walce klasowej wsi matopolskiej” [The Role of the Village Office in the Class Struggle in the Villages of Little Poland] in Bobiriska, Studia z dziej6w wsi malopotskiej.

7g. A. Kamitiski, “Neo-Serfdom in Poland-Lithuania,” Slavic Review 34:2 (1975): 253-268. 80. Zbigniew Cwiek, Z dziejéw wsi koronnej XVII w. [From the History of

Crown Estates of the Seventeenth Century] (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1966), pp. 119-135; and Wiadystaw Rusinski, Osady tzw. “Oledréw” w dawnym woj. Poznanskim [Dutch Settlers in the Former Voievodship of Poznan]

(Poznan: Gebetner i Wolf, 1939-1947). 81. Antoni Podraza, “L’agriculture dans les Carpates polonaises aux X VIIIS— XX*€ siécles,” in Celina Bobinska and Joseph Goy, eds., Les Pyrénées et les Carpates

XVI*—XX° siécles (Warsaw: Editions Scientifique de Pologne, 1981), p. 79; and Alicja Falniowska-Gradowska, Swiadczenia poddanych na rzecz dworu w krélewszczyznach wojewédzwa krakowskiego w drugiej polowie XVIII w. [Serfs’ Obligations in the

Crown Estates in Little Poland in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century] (Wroclaw: Zakiad Narodowy im Ossolinskich, 1964), pp. 296-297. 82. Antoni Maczak, Gopsodarstwo chtopskie na Zutawach Malborskich w poczatkach

XVII w. [Peasant Economy in the Region of Zutawy-Malbork at the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century] (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1962). 83. Rutkowski, Studia z dziejéw wst polskiej, pp. 241-366. 84. Baranowski, Gospodarstwo chtopskte 1 folwarczne; GCackowski, Gospodarstwo wiejskie; Maczak, Gopsodarstwo chtopskie; J]. Pétéwiartek, Pofozenie ludnosci wiejskiej starostwa lezajskiego w XVI-XVIII w. [Rural Population of the Starostvo of Lezajsk

in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries] (Warsaw, 1972); Rychlikowa, Studia nad towarowg produkcjg; Topolski, Gospodarstwo wiejskie; Alina Wawrzynczykowa, Gospodarstwo chtopskie na Mazowszu w XVI 1 na poczathu XVII w. [Peasant Economy

in Mazovia in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century] (Warsaw, 1962). 85. See, for example, Witold Kula, “Les fermes paysannes en Pologne au 18° siécle avaient-elles un caractére des fermes autarciques?” in Fourth International Conference of Economic History—Bloomington 1968 (Paris, 1973); Witold Kula, “Money and Serfs in Eighteenth Century Poland,” in Eric Hobsbawm, ed., Peasants in History (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1980). 86. Antoni Maczak, “Folwark panszczyzniany a wie§ w Prusach Krdélewskich w XVI/XVII w.” [Serf Labor Demesne and the Village in Royal Prussia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries], Przegled Historyczny, 2 (1956), 3'73-3'78. 87. Jacek Kochanowicz, “The Peasant Family as an Economic Unit in the

Polish Feudal Economy of the Eighteenth Century,” in Richard Wall, Jean

POLISH ECONOMY 129 . Robin, and Peter Laslett, eds., Family Forms in Historic Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 88. Leonid Zytkowicz, “Uwagi o bogaceniu si¢ chtopé6w” [Remarks on Peasants Getting Rich] Historyka 12 (1983). 89. Mariusz Kulczykowski, “Les activités industrielles des paysans dans les régions submontagneuses,” in Bobinska and Goy, Les Pyrénées. go. Evsey Domar, “The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis,” Journal of Economic History 30 (1970): 18-32; and John R. Hicks, A Theory of Economic History (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 113. g1. Inglot, Proby reform wtosciariskich, p. 21.

g2. Grynwaser, “Kwestia agrarna,” pp. 27-30. 93- Douglass C. North and Robert P. Thomas, “The Rise and Fall of the Manorial System: A Theoretical Model,” Journal of Economic History 31:4 (1971):

777-803. 94. A. Kahan, “Notes on Serfdom in Western and Eastern Europe,” Journal of Economic History 33:1 (19'73): 86—g9.

95. Maria Bogucka, “Polish Towns Between the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Fedorowicz, Republic of Nobles; and Bogucka, “The Towns of East-

Central Europe from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century,” in Maczak, East-Central Europe in Transition.

96. Bogucka, “Towns of East-Central Europe,” p. 101. 97. Henryk Samsonowicz, Rzemiosto wiejskie w Polsce XIV-XVII w. [Rural

Crafts in Poland in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries] (Warsaw: Patistwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1954), pp. 106-163, 228-229. 98. Jerzy Topolski, “Zagadnienia gospodarki w Polsce” [The Question of the Polish Economy], in Andrzej Wyczanski, ed., Polska w epoce Odrodzenia [Poland in the Epoch of the Renaissance] (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 1970), p. go. 99. Antoni Maczak, Sukiennictwo wielkopolskie [Cloth-making in Great Poland] (Warsaw: Paristwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1955), p. 296; and Benedykt Zientara, Dzeje matopolskiego hutnictwa zelaza XIV-XVH w. [The History of Iron-making in Little Poland in the Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries] (Warsaw, 1954), pp. 190-215. 100. Maria Bogucka, “Miasto-spotecznos¢” [TTown-Community], in Encyklopedia historit.

101. Edmund CieSlak, ed., Historia Gdariska [The History of Gdansk], I: 1454-1655 (Gdansk: Wydawn. Morskie, 1985), summarizes the state of research on the history of Gdansk; see also Jan Matecki, Zwigzki handtowe muiast polskich z Gdanskiem w XVII i pierwszej potowie XVIII wieku. [Trade Relations of the Polish

Towns with Gdansk in the Seventeenth and the First Half of the Eighteenth Century] (Wroclaw: Zaklad Narodowy im. Ossolinskich, 1968). 102. Maria Bogucka, Gdarisk jako oSrodek produkcyjny w XIV-XVII w. [Gdansk

as a Production Center in the Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries] (Warsaw: Panistwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1962). 103. Stanistaw Gierszowski, Struktura gospodarcza 1 funkcje rynkowe mniejszch

130 POLISH ECONOMY miast wojoewddztwa pomorskiego w XVI i XVII w. [Economic Structure and Market

Functions of the Smaller Towns of the Pomeranian Region in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries] (Gdansk: Gdanskie Tow. Naukowe, 1966). 104. Jerzy Topolski, “Gospodarka” [Economy], in Bogustaw LeSnodorski, ed., Polska w epoce OSwiecenia [Poland in the Epoch of Enlightment] (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 1971); Maczak, Sukiennictwo wielkopolskie, p. 268. 105. Wojciech Trzebitiski, Dziatalnosé urbanistyczna magnatéw 1 szlachty w Polsce

XVIII w. [Town-planning Activities of the Polish Magnates and Nobility in the Eighteenth Century] (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1962). 106. Maria Bogucka et al., Warszawa w latach 1526-1795 [Warsaw in the Years 1526-1795] (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1984). 107. Emanuel Rostworowski, “Polska w ukladzie sit politycznych Europy XVIII w.” [Poland in the European Balance of Forces in the Eighteenth Century], in Lesnodorski, Polska w epoce Oswiecenia.

108. Quoted in Rostworowski, “Polska w uktfadzie sil,” pp. 24-25. 109. Anderson, Lineages, p. 286. 110. Andrzej Wyczanski, “The Problem of Authority in Sixteenth Century Poland: An Essay in Reinterpretation,” in Fedorowicz, Republic of Nobles. 111. Antoni Maczak, “The Structure of Power in the Commonwealth in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Fedorowicz, Republic of Nobles, pp. 130-131; and Maczak, Conclusive Years. 112. Maczak, Conclusive Years.

113. Wyczanski, “Problem of Authority”; and Wyczanski, “The System of Power in Poland, 13770-1648,” in Maczak et al., East-Central Europe in Transition.

114. Topolski, “Gospodarka,” pp. 204~210. 115. Istvan N. Kiss, “Die demographische und wirtschaftliche Lage in Ungaren vom 16,—18. Jahrhundert,” Stidost-Forschungen 42 (1983); Kiss, “Agricultural and Livestock Production: Wine and Oxen; The Case of Hungary,” in Maczak et al., East-Central Europe in Transition; Leonid Zytkowicz, “Directions of Agrarian Development in South-Eastern Europe in the 16th—18th centuries,” Acta Poloniae Historica 43 (1981); and Zytkowicz, “Trends of Agrarian Economy.” 116. Al. Klima and J. Macirek, “La question de la transition du féodalisme au capitalisme en Europe centrale, 16°~18° siécles,” International Congress of Historical Sciences, Stockholm, 1960, in Rapports, IV: Histotre moderne (G6teborg, 1960);

Maria Bogucka, “Towns of East-Central Europe”; Zytkowicz, “Trends of Agrarian Economy.” 117. Moore, Soctal Origins, chap. 8. 118. Jerzy Jedlicki, Nieudana préba kapitalistycznej industrializacji [A Failed At-

tempt at Capitalist Industrialization] (Warsaw: Pafistwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1964).

119. Jacek Kochanowicz, Paviszczyiniane gospodarstwo chtopskie w Krélestwie Polskim w pierwszej potowie XIX w. [The Economics of Peasant Farming in the

Polish Kingdom in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century] (Warsaw: University of Warsaw, 1981), pp. 168—187.

FIVE

Tradition and Rural Change in Southeastern Europe During Ottoman Rule Fikret Adanir

It is a historical commonplace that the Ottoman Empire, once a rival of Western powers, had become by the nineteenth century “the sick man of Europe” and the Ottoman lands the backwater of the continent. In fact, already at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Ottomans themselves had made imperial decay a key topic of their political writing. At that time, worried observers as well as responsible men of the ruling class tended to attribute the social, economic, and political “degeneration” to change, to “pernicious innovations” in the traditional institutions of the Empire.’ By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, the problem had become more complex, and the solution did not seem to be feasible in the traditional context. Officials at the Porte recognized now that change was inevitable and that perhaps the only hope of saving the crumbling Empire lay in political and economic “Westernization.” Once even the Ottoman bureaucrats admitted the necessity of following the West, it is understandable that the national elites of the emerging independent Balkan states easily succumbed to the temptation of blaming the centuries old “Ottoman yoke” for everything backward in their countries. Likewise, many a difficulty in the Republic of Turkey in the twentieth century has conveniently been attributed to the misrule of the preceding age. The contemporary historian, more receptive since World War II to the methods and findings of the social sciences, is studying processes such as the Ottoman decline increasingly in a comparative perspective,” not least in the hope of understanding better the phenomenon of underdevelopment in today’s Third World. Thus, research on the problems 131

132 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE of modernization in the sense of catching up with the industrialized West’ has focused on the Ottoman experience as well.’ The elaboration since the 1960s of a structural theory of imperialism with its central concepts of “core” and “periphery” has permitted new insights into the subject.® In the last decade, the work of Immanuel Wallerstein has stimulated particularly productive discussions in this field.’ With respect to the Ottoman Empire, Wallerstein sees the historian confronted with an apparently simple problem: At one point in time, the Ottoman Empire was outside the capitalist worldeconomy. At a later point in time, the Ottoman Empire was incorporated into the capitalist world-economy. How do we know what these points in time were? And by what process did the transition from T, to Tg, take place?®

To furnish an answer to this question, considerable efforts have been undertaken.® Yet, the professed aim—to explain convincingly the trans-

formation of the Empire from the imperial greatness of the “classical age’”’'° to the status of a semicolony in the nineteenth century—has not, in my opinion, been achieved. This might be due to weaknesses inherent

in the conceptual framework of the analysis'’ and/or to insufficient familiarity with the current stand of research in the specific fields.’? Indeed, as students of Ottoman history would readily admit, investigation into the causes and modalities of socioeconomic change and _ political decline remains a challenging task. Some scholars feel that conclusive

judgments on the true causes and character of Ottoman retardation, especially with respect to the crucial seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, cannot be reached yet because of the inadequate source material available.'* Others approach the problem from a rather different angle: they question the tenability of views of Ottoman backwardness in relation to the centuries preceding the modern industrial period."* This essay, although inspired by such highly theoretical interpretations of Ottoman decline, does not itself claim to be a contribution to the theoretical discussion that aims at establishing the laws of socioeconomic development in the preindustrial period. Rather, its primary in-

tent is to shed some new light on certain controversial aspects of the discussion on rural change in the Ottoman Balkans. The geographical area under consideration is basically the Balkan Peninsula south and southwest of the line defined by the Danube and Sava rivers. Occasionally, information pertaining to developments in Anatolia and the Middle East is also referred to by way of comparison.

The essay is organized into four sections: (1) agriculture and set-

TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 133 tlement at the time of the Ottoman conquest; (2) the “classical” Ottoman land regime; (3) rural change during the seventeenth century; and (4) export-oriented agriculture and the Ottoman landholding category

| caftlik.

AGRICULTURE AND SETTLEMENT AT THE TIME OF THE OTTOMAN CONQUEST

The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, a process lasting approximately from the middle of the fourteenth to the middle of the sixteenth century, meant, as is well known, the disappearance of several medieval states in the region. Modern historians from the modern Balkan states understandably stress the destructive aspects of this process, interpreting it on the whole as a national catastrophe.’ Such a view, the focal point of which lies decidedly in the field of political developments, also seems to be roughly in line with the tradition of European historiography on Christian-Muslim (respectively Ottoman) relationships.'® It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that value judgments of a cultural, religious, or nationalistic nature should creep into the fabric of argumentation even in studies devoted strictly to the economic and social history of the area. The following assertion in an otherwise excellent book on the economic history of Southeastern Europe, for example, per-

petuates the traditional image of the Ottoman conquest: . Unlike previous medieval struggles between the Byzantine Empire and the

Bulgarian or Serbian Kingdoms, the Ottoman onslaught from the late fourteenth century forward destroyed peasant villages and generally disrupted settlement in the grain-growing lowlands. Surviving peasants often fled to higher, safer ground where they supported themselves by raising livestock. Many returned, how many we cannot say, during the generally peaceful sixteenth century."

This interpretation of the effects of the conquest, the adoption of which obviously has profound implications for our overall view of rural life in the Ottoman Balkans, requires, in my opinion, a critical revision. The Balkan Peninsula had experienced demographic and economic decline long before the foundation of the Ottoman state. Without overemphasizing the importance of demographic fluctuations as a factor in long-term economic and social change,'* I would like to point out that Southeastern Europe was by no means spared the dramatic population decrease and desertion of land that affected most parts of Europe in the late medieval period.'® Indeed, in the Balkans a downward trend had

set in apparently even earlier than in other parts of the continent. As

134 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE usual, arable farming suffered most, with peasants abandoning the “marginal” soils often located in marshy plains and river valleys. Particularly, Thessaly, the lowlands of Macedonia, and Danubian Bulgaria had become already by the twelfth century the grazing grounds for the herds of the Wallachians; it is not by chance that sources of the late medieval period refer to these areas as magna valachia.” No doubt, internal strife

as well as invading armies must have contributed to the contraction of the arable land, but the process could be observed even in areas untouched by warfare.” The extensive application of jus valachicum during the early Ottoman period has to be seen in this connection.” Since the stock-raising population, the majority of which practiced transhumance,” could deliver only small tithes of agricultural produce, the state demanded the payment of a money rent, one gold piece (filurz) per household per annum. In addition, as a labor rent, the peasants subject to the Wallachian law were obligated to send to the Sultan’s army one voynuk for every five or, in some places, ten households. Also the settlement of a substantial number of Turkish peasants and nomads in certain parts of the Balkans can be understood best in light of the preceding depopulation of these areas. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, northeastern Bulgaria, Thrace, the flatlands of Macedonia, and Thessaly had acquired a predominantly Turkish character.” Some of the newcomers, who often stemmed from religiously heterodox and therefore politically unreliable groups in Anatolia, had been deported to the sparsely populated lowlands of Rumelia as punishment.” Many of them had yiriik status with rights and duties similar to those under jus valachicum; for the yiiriik were, just like the Wallachians, stock

raisers practicing transhumance.” _ Direct information about land and cultivation during the early Ottoman period is scanty. We know that military chiefs were awarded large estates (gazi milk), which they usually converted into religious endowments (vakif). ® On uncultivated land in the plains, near river crossings, and in woodlands numerous dervish recluses came into existence, which served as nuclei for later settlements.*® Christian monastic property, too, had a status similar to that of the vakif land.* Yet it seems that despite the state’s interest in settled rural life, pastoralism persevered. The revolts of Seyh Bedreddin and Bérkliice Mustafa at the beginning of the

fifteenth century were basically antifeudal resistance movements of stock-raising groups, Christian and Muslim alike.®? The existence of a large pastoral population beside the peasantry en-

gaged in arable farming has significance in two respects for the history

TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 135 of the Balkans during Ottoman rule: in the first place, the herders, being a mobile group unattached to the soil and obligated to pay a money rent instead of the usual peasant tithes, were from the beginning in a much better position than the common peasantry to develop commercial interests and connections. In fact, the caravan trade throughout the Balkans was a typically Wallachian pursuit, and Traian Stoianovich’s “conquering orthodox Balkan merchant” was a person more often than not of pastoral (Wallachian) origin.*? Secondly, the stock raisers with Wallachian or yiirtik status were organized into quasi-military categories and developed a consciousness of higher social status.** These semimilitary pastoral groups felt socially superior to the reaya peasants, the common

taxpaying subjects of the Sultan, and they resisted fiercely whenever their “privileges” were in jeopardy. THE CLASSICAL OTTOMAN LAND REGIME

The Ottoman state had, until the middle of the fifteenth century, struc-

tural features not unlike those of the contemporary feudal states of Europe. The sultan was the overlord of powerful Turkish beys of Anatolia who formed a virtual nobility.* In the Balkans, similarly, there were Christian princes bound in vassalage to the sultan. (Incidentally, this feudal framework might explain why leaders of Christian peoples in the Balkans supported varying Ottoman factions during the chaotic years of the Interregnum from 1402 to 1413, instead of joining forces to take advantage of Ottoman weakness.) In this respect, the reign of Mehmed II marks a turning point in Ottoman history. With the capture of Constantinople in 1453 Mehmed II, perhaps also in awareness of being heir to the Eastern Roman tradition, began to implement a centralistic imperial policy, laying thereby the foundations of the classical Ottoman state.*’

The Ottoman landholding system, known under the name of t2mar,”°

was perfected during the period starting in the second half of the fifteenth century and lasting approximately until the last quarter of the sixteenth. The rights and obligations of the reaya, laid down in detail in provincial kanunnames, the data contained in various land surveys, and the extant registers of kad: courts permit today the reconstruction of a picture of the conditions prevailing in the countryside. The individual peasant disposed of his house, barn, shop, vineyard, orchard, or vegetable garden as miilk, a term of Islamic law corresponding to dominitum plenum in re potestatem of Roman law, that is, as private property with all the rights implied by the terms jus utend:, fruendi et abutendi.*° By contrast,

136 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE the agricultural land was “state land” (miri), only the usufruct of which belonged to the peasant.“ However, the cultivator held the land in the form of a perpetual lease and could, within the limits of local custom, freely determine the crop pattern, provided he fulfilled his obligations toward the sipahi cavalryman, to whom the state had apportioned a certain amount of the agricultural surplus of an area as compensation for military service. To the sipahi the peasant had to deliver in the first place the tithes of all agricultural produce. Next in importance was a land tax called ¢ift resmi when due to be paid by Muslims and «spence in the case of Christians. In the Balkans, the gift resmt amounted to 22 akces and the ispence to 25 akces. Both taxes were in reality the money equivalents of the traditional labor services, which no longer played an important role in the Ottoman system.*! As for the obligations of the reaya toward the state, the Christian adult males were supposed to pay a head tax (cizye), the amount of which was fixed by Islamic law at three levels: 12, 24, or 48 dirhem silver (1 dirhem

= 3.2 grams of silver) according to the economic capacity of the taxpayer.*? Expressed in Ottoman currency, akce, which had a silver content

for most of the sixteenth century of 0.6 grams,* the respective equivalents were 64, 128, and 256 akces. During that century, however, the Christian population in the Balkans actually paid, in lieu of the head tax, a household tax amounting to 60 to 70 akges annually, which, incidentally, was the approximate equivalent of a Venetian ducat.“ Christians and Moslems alike paid to the treasury a tax on small animals like sheep and pigs, one akcge for every two heads, a very low amount.* It is remarkable that this tax remained practically unchanged until 1857 and that the typical animal raisers, the Wallachians, were often exempted from the tax on sheep altogether.“ The most significant in the long run were the so-called extraordinary or irregular taxes (avariz-i divaniyye), levied upon avariz haneleri, fiscal units consisting of three, five, or ten households each. For most of the sixteenth century, these taxes retained the character of irregular payments, collected usually to cover the costs of military campaigns. Some-

times corn, barley, or hay had to be delivered for the army; at other times a sum of money, the avariz akgesi, was required. The general trend was a gradual shift toward payments in cash.‘

The exemption from the irregular taxes constituted the most common form of granting “privileges” to population groups with special duties, the so-called muaf reaya. Miners, rice cultivators, horse breeders,

tar extractors, saline workers, producers of gunpowder, of lubricating

TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 137 greases and oils, of charcoal, sometimes whole villages near mountain passes or at river crossings enjoyed some sort of tax immunity.“ According to one estimation, about 13 percent of all households belonged to the muaf category.* In the sancak of Sirem (Sirmium) on the middle Danube, for example, forty settlements were thus privileged, “a goodly portion of the total population of Srem and a substantial alienation of

revenue.”

The prebendal system of surplus extraction in the Ottoman Empire, which depended for its functioning on the state’s ability to control the mechanisms of redistribution in the society, seems to have permitted

quite tolerable conditions of life in the countryside. It is generally acknowledged that the tax load of the peasantry was not unduly heavy.” It should, however, be remembered that this “golden age” of Ottoman rule was not a phenomenon unique to the Ottoman Empire, but coincided with the general demographic and agricultural upswing in the rest of Europe. Practically everywhere the sixteenth century was a period of population rise and intense land reclamation.” In the Balkans, the rapid urbanization, the demands of a large army frequently engaged in long campaigns, and the occasional opportunity to export corn to Italy and other Mediterranean countries were among the inducements to extend

the arable land.” The land registered in the contemporary surveys under the category

mezraa deserves special attention when discussing the nature and extent of this process. However, there is still uncertainty in the literature as to the exact meaning of mezraa. For Halil Inalcik, who offered a definition

already in the mid-1g50s, the term denoted the land of a deserted or destroyed village; more recently, he has employed it in the sense of “abandoned arable lands of méri status.”** Following Inalctk, Bistra Cvet-

kova added that these “terres arables non habitées” were the result of the depopulation of the countryside during the period of Ottoman conquest.* Christo Gandev pushed this interpretation to its extreme: he counted every mezraa in Bulgaria mentioned in the Ottoman registers as a former village that had been destroyed by the Turks, thus arriving at a total of 2,608 “lost villages” with an annihilated Bulgarian population of 560,720 persons.” A rather different reading of the term mezraa was offered by Lajos Fekete. He took the word to denote: simply “uninhabited land” and translated it, as far as Hungary was concerned, as puszta.*’ It is evident that uninhabited land and land of an abandoned village do not mean the same thing. We owe further clarification of the term to two Bulgarian historians.

138 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE Petir St. Koleradov considered mezraa as corresponding to the Byzantine zeugelateton and the Old Slavonic zevgelia, both of which originally—

during the period of agricultural expansion in the Middle Ages— denoted “a secluded farm.”* In view of certain historiographic tendencies in his country, Koleradov made it a point to stress that the mezraa of the Ottoman period could not have been the land of a former Bulgarian village.** StraSimir Dimitrov supported this concept. Arguing explicitly against Gandev and Cvetkova, he pointed out that the mezraa in the Ottoman sources signified cultivated, not abandoned, land. He explained the relative density of mezraas in Bulgaria in the late fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries as proof of the advanced sedentation process

of the nomads.

A similar view was taken by the German geographer and historian Wolf-Dieter Hiitteroth. Studying settlement patterns in central Anatolia, he considered mezraas to have been arable spots inhabited only temporarily by cultivators of nomadic origin.®' Later, with respect to southern Syria, he defined mezraa as “usually small arable areas, dispersed amongst the hills, lying within the village area but apart from the main

fields belonging to the village, as is still the case today.” Suraiya Faroghi, writing about the situation in the Balkans and Anatolia, elaborated on this definition: The mezraa was in most cases a temporary settlement where certain families lived dur-

ing the summer to cultivate the surrounding fields and pasture their flocks. Occasionally a family or two was registered as domiciled in such a place. In areas of strong nomad preponderance, actual villages were often

few and far between, and the mezraa constituted the dominant type. In places where settled peasantry predominated, a.village often had one or more mezraas attached to it. . .. There was a tendency for mezraas to form the core of new villages in times of population expansion and for villages to continue their existence as mezraas in time of decline.®

In my opinion, the interpretation of the term mezraa developed by the group of scholars from Fekete to Faroghi is more convincing.™ Of particular importance for this paper is the correlation they establish between the mezraa and transhumance or the nomadic way of life. In most cases, the emergence of new villages and the extension of the arable land were indicators of sedentation of pastoral groups. For instance, Stragimir Dimitrov has shown that a substantial number of mezraas in Bulgaria, cultivated mostly by nomadic yitirtik during the fifteenth century, had gradually developed into permanent settlements.” The sancaks of Semendire, Sirem, and Segedin on the Middle Danube, once known as

TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 139 livestock-raising provinces par excellence, became corn surplus areas in the second half of the sixteenth century, after the population subject to the Wallachian law had turned to agriculture.® In central Anatolia, the mezraas of the Atceken nomads had acquired by the last quarter of the sixteenth century the status of ordinary agricultural settlements. Simi-

larly, in the sixteenth century the huge Cilician plain in southern Anatolia came under the plow for the first time since late antiquity; again, the new cultivators were former nomads who had settled on the mezraas.°°

It seems that the term mezraa played an important role in connection with the senlendirme policy of the state, that is, the “revivification” of wasteland. The state encouraged the restitution of unused lands to ag-

riculture, recognizing the right of private ownership (milk) on such lands. Enterprising members of the ruling elite invested considerable amounts of capital in land reclamation, especially for the purpose of rice

cultivation, which was introduced into the Balkans during Ottoman times.” In this way some unused land in river valleys was turned into rice paddies. Once the reclamation project had been authorized by the central government, much capital was needed, primarily for the construction of canals and other types of water conducting systems and, later on, for their maintenance. More difficult, however, was finding the labor. As Halil Inalcik has noted, “the peasantry usually sought to escape rice cultivation not only because of the heavy physical nature of the work and the health hazards connected with it, but also because of intensive exploitation of their labor.””! On the other hand, the Sultan’s authoriza-

tion document contained as a rule a stipulation that no peasant could be employed against his will on such an enterprise. Consequently, the special category of rice cultivators (celtiikci-reaya) came into being, which allowed the parties involved a modus vivendi (excepting, of course, the servile labor’”—war prisoners or other slaves—employed a limited degree on some demesnes). The main attraction for peasants to turn to rice cultivation was the exemption from the extraordinary government levies. It is interesting that despite this “privilege” the majority of the rice-growing population in the lowlands of Thrace and Macedonia as well as in comparable locations of Anatolia was not of settled peasant background, but of nomadic origin. RURAL CHANGE DURING THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

The transformation of classical Ottoman agrarian relations is generally considered to have set in during the last quarter of the sixteenth cen-

140 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE tury.” The causes of this complex process and the factors influencing it are, as has been indicated, a matter of lively discussion. That the process cannot be understood without reference to the underlying class interests is not disputed. Equally important from the historian’s point of view are the questions: why did the transformation set in at the time it did, and how can the specific results that it brought about be explained? A basic, but not necessarily the decisive, factor to be considered when

studying agrarian change is the legal framework affecting the free movement of the population in the countryside. The Ottoman reaya peasants enjoyed a remarkable degree of mobility. Although they were supposed to pay a special tax to the sepahi when they left their farm-

steads, this did not necessarily mean bondage to the soil.” On the contrary, stipulations in some provincial kanunnames providing for a “compensation” for fief holders were post factum measures, indicating not only that peasants left the land in significant numbers, but also that they could do so legally, whenever it seemed economically prudent.” The following passage from the kanunname of Pozega, dated 1545, illustrates this point quite well: And many reaya after being registered as the reaya of a stpaht and bound to production, become woodsmen, or potters, or fishermen, or millers, or stoneworkers, and some do day labor or busy themselves in some other way for a living. And having abandoned agriculture no tithes or taxes from them go to the szpahi. Because of their untrustworthiness 80 akches in cash have been customarily taken from the poorer of these under the name of chift bozan (“farm-breaking”) and 120 akches from the better off; and for

this reason this has been entered into the new imperial survey in that fashion.”

How was this mobility of the peasantry related to demographic fluctu-

ations during the early modern period? There is unanimity of opinion that the population of the Ottoman Balkans as well as of Anatolia increased considerably in the course of the sixteenth century.” It seems that until about the 1580s the production of cereals could keep pace with this development; in fact, the period between 1548 and 1564 saw a boom

of Ottoman wheat exports to Italy." From then on, however, the authorities were frequently compelled to issue a ban on grain exports, apparently because they were having increasing difficulties in provisioning the urban centers, especially the capital of the Empire.” In order to se-

cure the regular flow of staples to Istanbul, a complicated system of preemptive purchases by state agents had to be elaborated, which relied as the main areas of supply on the Bulgarian Black Sea shore, the northern coast of the Aegean, and the eastern shores of the Sea of Marmara.*°

TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 141 Toward the end of the sixteenth century, the rise in population reached its peak. This is indicated, among other things, by the relatively high number of “half-farms” (nim cift) in some tax registers of the period, apparently a result of the splitting up of farmsteads.®' According to Suraiya Faroghi, who has studied land surveys pertaining to central Anatolia, the rise in population was accompanied by a general impoverishment of the peasantry. For example, the survey of 1584 registered, in comparison with earlier records, considerably higher percentages of the population as landless and unmarried. Interestingly, want of land or exorbitant landholding relations were not the chief cause

of this development; in fact, land was abundant, but it was fairly difficult at times for an Anatolian peasant to take new land under cultivation. The provision of fodder for new plough animals was a limiting factor, as was the scarcity of cultivable land lying within manageable distance from a site well enough provided with water to support a settlement.”

Keeping this in mind, one can understand why M. A. Cook even speaks of “population pressure” for certain parts of Anatolia in the late sixteenth century.** According to his calculations, the ratio of bachelors to all adult males had risen from approximately 3 percent at the end of the fifteenth to 48 percent at the end of the sixteenth century.” One can assume, therefore, that under the prevailing conditions many unmarried men left the villages in search of new occupations, thus contributing to the swell in the urban population.® But some took up a profession unusual for peasant youth—they became soldiers.

The “price revolution,” which hit the Ottoman Empire about this time—1584 saw a massive devaluation of the currency—was a further factor that affected profoundly the redistributive mechanisms of the Ottoman system.*’ Especially the tzmar fiefs, defined in terms of fixed income, soon became economically obsolete. (Eventually, the state was going to have difficulties in finding interested persons for vacant temars in some regions of the Empire.)* In turn, less and less sipahis heeded the summons to join a military campaign.®® Thus, the timar system gradually lost its previous significance as the basis of Ottoman military

might. The central government was confronted with the problem of financing a new army of paid soldiers at a time when the treasury was practically empty.” It responded by farming out the taxes of more and more tzmars.”!

The growing importance of the infantry equipped with firearms to the detriment of the traditional cavalry accounts to a great extent for

142 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE the emergence of a new class of peasant-soldiers (levendat) who contributed to the destabilization of rural society.” According to Halil Inalcik, the state’s demand for more and more mercenaries equipped with muskets in order to be a match for the Austrian infantry was the chief factor enticing the underemployed village youth to abandon the land. Provincial governors began to recruit private troops from among such

young men, reducing in this way their dependence on the unenthusiastic—and outdated—sipahi as a fighting force. Such irregular peasant units were relatively cheap, since they were disbanded as soon as the campaigning season was over, or, when kept, the burden of feeding them was imposed on the peasantry.” Understandably, villagers resented visits by military leaders and their retinues. The latter reacted by forming marauding bands, joined by hungry, unruly students (suhte) and often by some disgruntled sepahi; they terrorized the countryside. This situation, which climaxed in the celal? revolts of 1603-1610, caused the depopulation of wide stretches of land in Anatolia.”

However, also in the Ottoman Balkans, which had not experienced anything like the devastations of the celal? revolts, the contraction of the

arable land, coupled with a population decrease that reached alarming levels, was a common phenomenon. Bruce McGowan mentions the following hypothetical explanations for the drop in population of about 25 percent in the Macedonian district of Manastir before 1641: overtaxation, brigandage, climate change, crop failures, famines, and epidemics

such as typhus.” :

No doubt, preindustrial rural societies were highly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of nature. Crop failure followed by famine and epidemics was a constant threat.” As regards the Balkans, evidence in contemporary travel accounts corroborates this view. For example, nearly all the peasants whom the Austrian envoy to the Porte encountered between Belgrade and Aleksinac in the summer of 1608 seemed to be ill. Apparently they were suffering from a fever that the Austrians associated with the unwholesome air, food, and water of the region.” With respect to the overtaxation of the peasantry as a possible factor of population decline, it is important to know that the seventeenth century was the period during which the extraordinary taxes (avariz) became the main source of revenue for the state. To cover the enormous costs of the wars of 1593-1606, 1645-1669, and 1683—1699, the central authority resorted to the annual collection of extraordinary taxes, exacting, for instance, about goo akces from each nominal tax household in the middle of the century, a rate which was about three times as high as the average rate in the sixteenth century, even when calculated in con-

TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 143 stant prices.” Furthermore, the head tax (cizye), paid in the Balkans as a household tax, was reverted at the end of the seventeenth century to its original form of a personal tax, thus becoming a heavier burden.” Despite the increasing tax load, however, it seems unlikely that the level of taxation could have had a decisive influence on demographic development already during the first decades of the seventeenth century, considering that the most important tax imposed on the Christian pop-

ulation, the cizye, remained a household tax until 1691 and that the extraordinary taxes became a great burden for the Balkan peasantry only with the Cretan War of 1645—1669.'” The rise in the level of taxation was accompanied by a virtual leveling of differences in social status in the countryside. As has been mentioned, various reaya groups had enjoyed tax exemptions in the context of the traditional system, often as compensation for special tasks fulfilled. In the course of the seventeenth century such “privileges” were abolished one by one. The loss of privileges, especially in the case of semimilitary groups, was one of the chief causes of what Eric Hobsbawm calls “social banditry,” which plagued the Balkan countryside during that period.’ To what extent were the described developments comparable to those in the rest of contemporary Europe? Without delving into the controversial discussion of “the crisis of the seventeenth century,”'” one can safely state that the contraction of the arable land was a common phe-

nomenon in many parts of the continent.'® In Poland, for example, the production of cereals had reached its peak already in the second half of the sixteenth century; in the following period stagnation and even a perceptible fall set in which led to the catastrophic decline of the 1650s.'°*

The agricultural land abandoned in the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the sixteenth to the seventeenth century was generally of the “marginal”—mezraa—type. Such land had only recently been brought under cultivation and, for that matter, mostly by nomads. For instance, the old settlements at the edge of the Cilician plain remained unaffected by the regressive trend during the seventeenth century, whereas the plain itself was reverted to traditional grazing grounds for the flocks of the nomads.'*° The same applies to the central Anatolian plain where hundreds of settlements, which had emerged during the period of agricultural expansion, disappeared now for good.'® But also land cultivated by the reaya since generations was diverted now to other uses, such as viticulture or animal husbandry. Indeed, this seems to have been the characteristic development in the first half of the seventeenth century. At that time the reaya, while increasing the

144 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE number of sheep on the village commons, apparently reduced the tillage

in most regions. The Austrian envoy, who traveled in the summer of 1608 from Vienna to Istanbul, left us some interesting observations con-

cerning the situation in the Balkans. He and his entourage found developed agriculture only in the Thracian plain around Plovdiv, which was covered with rice paddies.'’” By contrast, the plain between Dragoman and Sofia was a heath,'® and wide stretches between Belgrade and NiS were practically wilderness.’ But, around Slankamen the Austrians observed peasants planting vine anew in a landscape dominated by vineyards that apparently had been neglected on account of the “Long War” between the Sultan and the Emperor.'’ In the hill country between Ni8 and Sofia, they encountered a relatively prosperous peasantry. Here the Austrians were especially impressed by the abundance of fruit.'"’ Also the plain between Pirot and Dragoman, with villages located on higher ground on the hillsides, left a positive impression upon them." But even here, field cultivation seemed on the decline. Around Pirot, for example, agriculture was in a poor state, whereas vineyards were numerous.''*

These rural conditions could not have been restricted to the lands along what was the major military road of the Empire,'* as one might easily be led to assume, thinking that the villagers would have been scared away by plundering soldiers. Not only the flourishing rice cultivation in the plain of Plovdiv contradicts such an assumption, but also the

fact that the Bulgarian women in the hilly country, who sold fruit to travelers on this same military road, could not have been out of reach of the Ottoman military. One must, therefore, look for still other factors in order to account for the rural change during the seventeenth century. The research done by Suraiya Faroghi on the agricultural activities of a dervish tekke in western Thrace gives us an indication of the actual trends of development.' At the end of the fifteenth century, this tekke consisted of a complex of mezraas, with only twenty-one Christian peas-

ants settled on one of them, who tilled the land and paid the tekke the tithes.''® (Incidentally, since the community was entrusted with the guarding of a nearby mountain pass, it enjoyed exemption from the extraordinary state taxes.)''” During the sixteenth century, the number of Christian peasants working the lands of the dervishes increased, as did the income accruing from the tithes of various agricultural products.'™ Unfortunately, little is known about the changes in the economic situation of the tekke during the seventeenth century. But records from the

beginning of the eighteenth century show that, in the meantime, the dervishes had acquired large flocks of sheep; for example, it is known

that they had secured exemption from the sheep tax for at least a

TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 145 thousand animals." Stock breeding was therefore a new activity which Suraiya Faroghi interprets as a sign of adaptation to changing economic circumstances by means of diversification. Commenting on similar developments in Bulgaria in the seventeenth century, Bistra Cvetkova noted: Afin d’éviter certaines obligations fiscales importantes, telles que l’dsiir et l’impot foncier, les raias s’efforgaient de modifier l’aspect des terres qu’ils

possédaient—de les transformer de champs en vignes, en jardins maraichers et en paturages communaux.'”° {In order to avoid certain burdensome fiscal obligations such as the ésiir and the land tax, the reaya tried hard to change their land usage—to turn ordinary fields into vineyards, vegetable gardens, or communal pasture. ]

But this was the common development in most parts of Europe. Regarding the situation in Upper Hungary under Habsburg rule, where agricultural decline had apparently begun at about the same time as

in the Balkans, the authors of a recent study reach the following

conclusion:

En derniére analyse, deux phénoménes apparaissent nettement: l’abandon progressif des terres marginales et la croissance continuelle de l’élevage—et peut-étre aussi de la viticulture—au détriment de la production de céréales panifiables.'*! [In conclusion, two phenomena seem clear: the gradual abandonment of

marginal lands and the continual growth of animal husbandry—and perhaps also of viticulture—to the detriment of the cereals with which bread was made.]

The general trend in agriculture away from arable farming to livestock raising could have been stimulated by changing trade patterns. With respect to the expanding animal husbandry in the Balkans, for example, McGowan highlights the growing significance of the wool trade. In his opinion, European demand for wool was a stimulus that contributed to “changing modes of using the land” on the Balkans.'” Ragusa and Durazzo served as the major outlets for wool, but also for cattle hides, sheep skins, or goat’s hair, coming from the Balkan hinterland as far away as Bulgaria and headed for French and English markets.'” But already the fall in grain prices on the internal Balkan markets during the first half of the seventeenth century would serve well to explain the general trend away from the cereal farming.'** Whatever the reasons might have been, the changes in agriculture had far-reaching

146 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE implications for the income of the stpahi, not only because the amount of the tithes diminished, but also because the sheep tax, which now returned a higher revenue, was due by law to the central treasury. And when the stpahi tried to compensate his “loss” by demanding, for example, a pasture tax from the peasantry, the central government was often against him, as court registers of the period illustrate.'” The response of the Ottoman state to the socioeconomic changes in the countryside consisted essentially of fiscal and administrative measures. Their results were peculiar to Ottoman lands. The new landholding category ¢zftlik was such a characteristically Ottoman phenomenon; it can be understood best in terms of Ottoman agrarian tradition. EXPORT-ORIENTED AGRICULTURE AND THE OTTOMAN LANDHOLDING CATEGORY CIFTLIK

The Emergence of Ciftliks (Large Farms). When discussing the landholding relationships in the Balkans, there is consensus among scholars that the dissolution of the t2mar system had adverse effects on the well-being of the rural population. The extension of tax-farming to tithe collection is thought to have led to mounting tax rates, and it is

often assumed that the tax-farming interests, represented by the emerging groups of dyan and other provincial notables, strived under all circumstances to effect a decentralization of the Ottoman state.'”® What had happened is seen basically as a class struggle, waged for the control of land and labor: As a result of a combination of forceful appropriation, usury, and abandonment of land by peasants, the size of the land-units controlled by the tax-farmers grew, most notably in Rumelia. These large agricultural

estates were called ¢iftliks....The ¢iftlks...entailed enserfment of labor and share-cropping relations, perpetuated essentially by the mechanism of usury.'*’

Thus the giftlzk, symbolizing both a de facto refeudalization of the so-

ciety and the beginning of commercial agriculture in the Balkans,'” is one of the central themes in analyses of the socioeconomic structure of the Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nevertheless, some important aspects of the ¢zftlkk economy do not seem to have been studied adequately yet. For example, our knowledge about the percentage of the arable land occupied by these estates, the number of people working on them and the quality of the soil cultivated is still rather preliminary. It would be premature, therefore, to pass com-

TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 147 prehensive judgments when assessing the socioeconomic role of the ¢iftltk in a Balkan context; it would be even more dubious to attempt to subsume this Ottoman landholding category either under the late medieval Grundherrschaft, the early modern Gutsherrschaft of the East Elbean type, or the modern capitalist mode of production in agriculture.'”

The argumentation of this paper has accentuated from the beginning the relationship between agriculture and extensive animal husbandry, between the arable and the pastureland. This division is also relevant when discussing the ¢iftlkk phenomenon. Was the ¢iftlk a predominant unit of production in agriculture, comparable to the grain-producing demesnes in Poland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Or was it an institution on the fringe of Balkan agrarian life? The question of “location” should be understood in both an economic and legal, as well as geographic sense. The process of ¢zftk formation had its origins in the sixteenth century. Influential persons in the countryside developed at that time an interest for new land, which was usually to be found on mezraas.'*° Often

a water mill to grind grain together with a surrounding meadow served as the nucleus of a farm."*' Also property of the miilk category bought from peasants—houses, vineyards, or gardens that could even be situated in different locations—is sometimes registered as belonging to a single ciftlik.'? A striking feature of these estates was their modest size; not seldom, fields were small enough to be tilled with a single plow in one day, and meadows would yield only one wagonload of hay.’ But also larger estates, established on land classified as mevat—waste or unused land—and owned by members of the ruling class, were not unknown in the sixteenth century.'* The cultivation of rice or cotton'®

seems to have been the economic stimulus behind land reclamation schemes of this order. The question of the necessary working force was apparently solved in most cases by sharecropping arrangements, but also by employment of farm hands or sometimes even of servile labor.'** However, ¢2ftlzk farms, whether large or small, were far too few at that time to be considered in any sense characteristic of the prevailing land regime. (The exporters of Ottoman grain in the second half of the six-

teenth century were mostly members of the ruling class who had a surplus originating from the tithes of their has fiefs and not from direct production on their own estates.)'*’ By contrast, ¢iftlkks emerged in substantial numbers during the seven-

teenth century. These were, however, ranches devoted primarily to stock breeding. Since the areas pastured were often the cultivated mezraas of the previous century, and since the ranches, owned mostly by

148 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE members of the military class, had appeared, as far as Anatolia is concerned, in the wake of the celali disorders, this process is generally considered a result of a violent disruption of agriculture and forcible seizure of land by powerful social groups during a period of internal strife.'* But, as we have seen, desertion of land followed by extensive animal husbandry was a general trend in most of Europe in the seventeenth century. It would be stretching the point to consider ¢2/tlk formation at this stage a result of the “usurpation” of the land of peasants.'* Too much emphasis, however, on the relationship between receding agriculture, expanding animal husbandry, and the increasing number

of ciftlik ranches must not obscure the obvious fact that arable farming continued. Urban centers, especially the huge city of Istanbul with an estimated population of 700,000 in the seventeenth century,'*® had to be supplied with all kinds of staples. Commercial agriculture could thus not have been unknown in the vicinity of large towns. For example, a court record from 1641 indicates that a certain Mehmed Aga had 150 paid laborers working on his farm near Manastir in western Macedonia."*!

As a rule, however, the provisioning of the cities fell into the sphere of the Ottoman “command economy.”'*? The official purchases of grain

were effected at prices that were usually lower than the actual market prices. For the supplying areas, such purchases were often “a financial burden similar to a tax.”'** And, as Bruce McGowan has rightly observed, the complex provisioning system for the cities was “one Ottoman institution of the sixteenth century which became more powerfully organized with the passage of time.”'** Under these conditions, the pro-

duction of cereals for free urban markets could not have been a great stimulus to the development of the cftlikk economy. A new wave of ¢iftlk formation has been associated with the rise of the dyan to political prominence during the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth century.'* The role of the dyan is related to the institution of tax-farming. The system of allocating the avanz taxes on the district level would have hardly functioned without the cooperation of the local population. With the sociopolitical eclipse of the stpahi and the deterior-

ation of public order in the countryside, the local notables began to assume a more important role in administering provincial affairs.'** In time, these men were able to purchase mukataas, tax-farming units, and, later on, malikdnes, tax-farms leased on a hereditary basis.*7 No doubt, the dyan were in many respects in a strong position to accumulate land, and the relative economic boom during the eighteenth century seems to have been a great enticement to do so.

TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 149 Especially the period from 1710 to 1760 seems to have been a time of considerable growth for all sectors of the Ottoman economy.'*® An upsurge of commercial activity throughout the Empire was accompanied by a remarkable rise in textile manufacturing as well as in the exports of important textile materials such as cotton, wool, and silk, either as processed goods in the form of cloth or yarn or as unprocessed raw materials, the latter becoming the dominant form toward the end of the century due to “Indian competition, protective duties in Britain and France and, increasingly, technological progress in the West.”'*? The effects of this development on agriculture were obvious, particularly in the case of cotton.’ Equally important in this respect were the introduction of a new crop like maize’®' and the repeal of the imperial decrees that had prohibited tobacco cultivation in the seventeenth century.'*? An increase in the production of cereals was also discernible, allowing the

government to revoke frequently the traditional ban on the export of grain.'*> However, even when export restrictions were in force, wheat from the Archipelago and the coastal regions of the Aegean continued to reach Marseille as late as the closing years of the eighteenth century.'* In 1790, for instance, the British ambassador reported that “a considerable quantity of wheat, barley, and lentils have been clandestinely exported to France and different parts of Italy.”'® One should bear in mind, however, that the proportion of the total agrarian production going into exports during the eighteenth century was virtually negligible.'® Likewise, it would be wrong to assume that the ¢zftlsks played more than a modest role in the agricultural upswing during that period. This was due to a large extent to the fact that neither the social nor the political status of the dyan depended primarily on ¢2ftlik ownership, although some powerful dyan certainly owned such estates. Land turned into ¢2ftizk did not acquire a legal quality different from the

ordinary mri land worked by the peasantry. For example, in the seventeenth century the central government demanded from persons who had taken over land previously held by the reaya the same taxes as the peasants had had to pay: As for those s¢pahts and other Muslims who have taken over Christian holdings and made use of them, then make excuses when the time comes

to collect the jizye and ispenje and don’t give it and have the poor indemnify | them, let jezyes and ispenjes be collected from such as these without fail whether they are bailiffs, stpahis, or whoever they happen to be.'*’

Why should the d@yan have been very interested in acquiring land if

the land they managed to bring under their control did not enjoy any

150 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE sort of fiscal immunity, and, furthermore, if they did not have at their disposal the services of a sufficient labor force? Writing about the ¢2ftlk estates in the possession of some leading dyan of western Anatolia during the latter half of the eighteenth century, Halil Inalcik concludes: Because of the high costs of maintaining agriculture and the shortage of agricultural labor in many areas, ¢iftl&kk owners preferred to convert their farms into cattle ranches or dairy farms (mandira) supplying oxen for neighboring villages and dairy products to nearby towns.'®

Significantly, the most powerful dyan of the region, as Inalak—in concurrence with Gilles: Veinstein'**°—points out, did not owe his wealth to the agricultural production of his estates, but to “financial operations as usurer, tax-farmer and controller of trade between European merchants

and Turkish producers.”'® This view is confirmed by further research on the subject.'®' It seems, therefore, that picturing Ottoman provincial notables as a landowning class operating in a social context analogous to that of the “second serfdom” in Eastern Europe would be overtaxing the sources.'® The Cifthk Economy in the Era of Free Trade. The period from the end

of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 until about 1860 was one of profound social and economic change in Ottoman Europe.’ European capitalism made important inroads into the sphere of the traditional command economy. A milestone in this process was the Anglo-Ottoman commer-

cial convention of 1838; it ushered in the era of free. trade.'* The reforms of the tanzimat period (1839-1876), which strengthened the position of the central bureaucracy vis-a-vis the political influence of the dyan in the provinces, were conducive to increasing production in agriculture

for export markets.’ The Crimean War of 1853-1856, during which large European armies on Ottoman territory had to be provisioned, created a strong demand for staples.’ With the Land Law of 1858 large estates established on abandoned land were recognized to all intents and purposes as private property.'® In an attempt to boost the cultivation

of cash crops, the government granted the producers tax rebates for longer periods.'® In 1867 foreigners were allowed to own farm land as private property in the Ottoman Empire.'® These measures resulted in a remarkable growth in agricultural pro-

duction. The tithe index, if one takes 100 for the year 1848, shows roughly the following progression: 1857 = 183, 1862 = 223, 1867 = 226, 1871 = 336, 1876 = 381.'" According to another, more cautious

TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 151 calculation, the volume of agricultural output more than doubled between 1860 and 1914.'” Really spectacular was the development of agricultural exports: an elevenfold increase in constant prices between 1840 and 1913.'” In what way did the obvious commercialization affect the social relations of production in the countryside? One would expect under these

circumstances that the ¢iftlik type of consolidated farms would have dominated the production in agriculture. However, this was not the case. In the Balkans as well as in Anatolia, the part played by the ¢iftlik estates in the economy remained rather negligible. This is corroborated by the scanty empirical research conducted so far with the purpose of

quantifying the amount of land incorporated into, and the number of people associated with, large farms. For example, the districts of Vidin and Kjustendil have been studied and are often quoted as important cifthk regions in Bulgaria.'’” But StraSimir Dimitrov has rightly pointed out that these areas were not only too small to permit generalizations on a national scale, but also that the gospodarlk relationship, which characterized the landholding system in both cases, was historically atypical for ¢zftltk formation.’ Today, one can safely argue that the ¢zftlik economy, even at its peak, did not encompass more than 10 percent of

the agricultural land in Bulgaria and that the percentage of people involved in it was in all probability still lower.'” Of course, Bulgaria (or Serbia, for that matter) is not the country that comes to mind first when talking about the ¢ftizks in the Balkans. It 1s Macedonia, along with Thrace and Thessaly, which has become famous (or rather notorious) as the ¢iftlkk region par excellence in Balkan history. Yet here, too, as a careful review of the available material would reveal, the ¢iftlk was not the dominant institution in agriculture.'”° It is generally recognized that many districts in the interior could not play an important role as agricultural surplus areas, not least because of poor transportation facilities. A consular report to the Foreign Office from the early 1860s recommended as a profitable mode of capital investment in the Ottoman Empire “above all, as immediately conducive to the extension of the export trade, the improvement of inland navigation, and the means of land transport.”'”’ For example, Bruce McGowan’s study

on Manasttir has shown that western Macedonia, which can be considered as having been rather secluded, was not a leading ¢iftlzk region in the Balkans.'”® (For the same reason, Central Anatolia could not as-

sume the role of the grain entrepét for Istanbul until the construction of the Anatolian Railway in the 18g90s.)'”? So we are left with the sup-

152 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE posedly “better watered and therefore more fertile”'® bottom lands of the coastal plains as the regions with the highest concentration of ¢iftliks in Ottoman Europe. But especially the Macedonian lowlands belonged well into the first decades of the twentieth century to the quite inhospitable and infertile areas in the Balkans. They were, and still are, the places with the low-

est amount of rainfall on the Peninsula.'*’ Paradoxically, during the nineteenth century they were also the sites of expansive marshes, sustained by annual floods. As late as the 1930s only a small portion of the Macedonian plains could be cultivated; for example, in 1926 only goo square kilometers of the plain of Salonika, which had a surface area of 2080 square kilometers, were under cultivation.'®” In those parts of the lowlands that were being used agriculturally, the salinity of the soil represented—as it does today—a serious problem.’**

In addition, the flatlands in the southern part of the Balkans seem to have been deficient in two agriculturally essential elements, namely, nitrogen and phosphorus. Soil investigations conducted for the Greek government in the 1920s showed that the soils of the lowlands were almost completely lacking in nitrogen.'* (Similar results were obtained in tests carried out after World War II in Yugoslav Macedonia.)'® By contrast, the land on mountain slopes was relatively richer not only in nitrogen, but also in another agriculturally important mineral, phosphorus.’

The sometimes exaggerated importance attributed to the Macedonian ¢iftliks in the literature can be seen as stemming from an uncritical interpretation of the data contained in historical maps and statistics of the nineteenth century. Such sources have a tendency to juxtapose indiscriminately large villages existing on hill slopes ab antiquo and mezraas turned into ¢zftlzks in modern times and, in most cases, boasting of only a few huts as if they were settlements of comparable size. A few share-

cropper families among the inhabitants of a large village would be enough to classify that settlement as “mixed” and thus to deduct it, along with the ciftlk farms, from the total of “independent” rural settlements. The numbers arrived at by this method served as bases for statistics that

were originally used as an ideological weapon in the struggle for national independence.‘ In order to illustrate how misleading the conclusions drawn from such material can be, I would like to refer the reader to table 5.2 in Lampe and Jackson’s book, Balkan Economic History: the

authors claim that about 64 percent of all villages in the districts of Salonika, Melnik, Demirhisar, and Petri¢ in the third quarter of the nineteenth century were ¢zftlks.'* But their source, the monography of Christo Christov, indicates a few pages further on that the sharecrop-

TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 153 pers cultivating ¢2ftlzk land on the territory of today’s Socialist Republic

of Macedonia made up, toward the end of the nineteenth century, less than 10 percent of the peasant population. '* The only period during Ottoman rule, in which ¢iftlik agriculture in the Macedonian lowlands seemed to have a promising future, was the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when cotton from the Seres plain and from Thessaly was exported, mainly to France.'® During the Napoleonic Wars, especially at the time of the Continental Blockade, cotton exports via the land route to Central Europe gained importance.'® But

very soon the decline of this trade had set in, the prices having shown a downward trend since 1801.'” After the Napoleonic Wars, Ottoman cotton could not compete with the better qualities the industry of Lancashire imported from the United States and India.'’® Rising prices during the “cotton famine” caused by the American Civil War stimulated once more the expansion of cotton cultivation in various areas of the Ottoman Empire. But the sharp price fall after the Civil War as well as the better and cheaper cotton from India, which reached the Mediterranean ports

much more easily after the opening of the Suez Canal, killed the Macedonian cotton trade almost completely.'” Another reason why the ¢iftlik agriculture in Macedonia was doomed to failure can be seen in the spectacular upswing in the cultivation of cash crops, such as tobacco or opium, which flourished best on the loose and rather dry soils of the hillsides and required, what was even more

important, the investment of a comparatively high degree of manpower.'* For example, one hectare of land was the most an average peasant family could cultivate without recourse to hired labor. Even draft animals were dispensable, since plowing the fields could easily be arranged with peasants who specialized in such work. Under these conditions, tobacco became the most valuable export item of Ottoman Eu-

rope.'” Its gradual expansion into the traditional grain growing areas in the hinterland, such as the district of Skopje,'* toward the end of the nineteenth century contrasted with the crisis of the ¢iftlik economy in the coastal plains. The shortage of manpower was apparently the major problem for ¢iftk agriculture everywhere. Charles Issawi has pointed out that the wages in the Ottoman Empire during the second half of the nineteenth

century in comparison with those in England were relatively high.’ This was caused by the abundance of land as well as the cheapness of draft animals.” On the basis of British consular reports, Issawi has calculated that in 1863 the price of horses in Turkey varied between £2 and £7 and that of oxen between £3 and £10. At that time, the average

154 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE earnings of an agricultural laborer amounted to about £14 a year. He concludes: “This sum could have bought several acres of land in most parts of the Empire, and two to four draught animals.”*”" The ¢iftlsk farms, situated as they were mostly on the malaria-stricken wet bottoms of the coastal plains, could not compete with the intensive cultivation practiced on family holdings. In a consular report on Thrace from the 1860s it is stated that “small farms, varying from 20 to 50 acres in extent, kept by peasant proprietors, are generally better cultivated and comparatively more productive than the farms in which hired labourers are employed.” The French consul in Izmir described the situation in 1861 in the following words: In the neighborhood of Smyrna, many persons have tried to farm with the help of European labor. Swiss, Germans, Alsatians, and even southern Frenchmen specially chosen from among veteran soldiers acclimatized by a long stay in Algeria, have been hired. But in a, so to speak, virgin soil, farming gives forth miasmas which often engender fevers that soon scatter these colonies. And yet new populations are necessary, to give these lands once more the value they had in ancient times. But where can these pop-

ulations be found? Perhaps among the black peoples of the interior of Africa.”

Presumably, the consul was aware that in antiquity, too, it was slave _ labor that had made these plains fruitful. Intensified agriculture in the Macedonian (and Anatolian) lowlands became possible only in the twentieth century. But even then, the peasants did not settle there of their own free will, but of necessity, as a result

of tragic events such as deportations or population exchanges in the wake of World War I.?* Today, these plains are among the most fertile in the world. However, present conditions should not be projected onto the historical past. CONCLUSION

In the Ottoman Empire, then, the land tenure relations in agriculture retained their pattern almost unchanged throughout the nineteenth century. How can we explain this continuing predominance of the small

peasant holding as the unit of production in view of the fact that the Empire had become by this time a “periphery” of the world economy? And are we to look for the key to understanding the specificity of this region in an analysis of the internal dynamics of the capitalist world economy,”” or can we find it in the history of Ottoman society itself?

TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 155 This essay stresses the second possibility. This does not mean that great changes in the West such as the emergence of the Atlantic economies or the Industrial Revolution did not influence the Ottoman system profoundly. In fact, Ottoman “decline” since the sixteenth century is in-

tricately connected with them. Yet they did not affect the relations of production in agriculture, the main sector of the Ottoman economy, significantly. The “transformation” of the Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which entailed many upheavals in the countryside, took place chiefly in the superstructure, exhausting itself in some adjustments and readjustments in the distributive mechanisms of the sociopolitical order.?” Consequently, this essay has focused on factors that seem to have conditioned this result. Attention has been paid, in the first place, to secular fluctuations in population, production, prices, and wages during the late

medieval and early modern periods, which had an impact on the rural life in Ottoman Europe, as they did in other parts of the continent.” However, the idea “that social-property systems, once established, tend to set strict limits and impose certain overall patterns upon the course of economic evolution,”’” carries great weight in the Ottoman case, too. The social groups that were the supports of the centralist Ottoman state played a crucial role by maintaining the state’s control over land, resources, and subjects. Private large estates, even when the owner was a member of the ruling elite, could not attain predominance in agricultural production, chiefly because the working force had to be won over from a relatively free peasant class, whereas the produce would be sold at low prices fixed by the mechanisms of a command economy. In the decades preceding the Crimean War, the industrialized West achieved a veritable “breakthrough” in opening the Ottoman Empire to economic penetration. For the sake of convenience, we may speak in this connection—in the terms of the Wallerstein school—of “incorporation

into the world economy” or “transformation into a peripheral structure.” Significantly, however, Ottoman bureaucrats who negotiated the Convention of 1838, which introduced the principle of free trade, were not responding to pressures from a domestic merchant class, but were simply acting out of raison d’état. The fact that the Ottoman state remained formally independent until its dissolution was to exercise a deci-

sive influence on the extent and form of European penetration of the Ottoman territories.” In my opinion, the Oriental Question cannot be reduced to a mere conflict of commercial interests in a peripheral region of Europe.?"” With respect to the introductory theme of this essay, the backward-

156 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE ness of Ottoman Europe in relation to the capitalistic West, one result seems to be certain: the Ottoman system spared the peasantry the so-called second serfdom. In the long run, however, it also proved to be an obstacle to substantial increases in agricultural productivity and rendered more difficult the transition to the capitalistic mode of production. NOTES 1. See the memorandum of the Grandvizier Yemisci Hasan Pasa to Mehmed III in Cengiz Orhonlu, Osmanl: tarthine did belgeler: Telhisler (1597-1607) (Istanbul: Istanbul Universitesi Yayinlari, 1970), p. 32. For literature on Ottoman decline at that time see Vasilij Dmitrievi¢ Smirnov, Kocybeg Gjumuldzinskiy 1 drugie osmanskie pisatelti XVII veka o pricinach upadka Turci (St. Peterburg, 1873); Klaus R6hrborn, Untersuchungen zur osmanischen Verwaltungsgeschichte (Berlin: de Gruy-

ter, 1973), pp. 88-95.

2. Among the many titles on Ottoman modernization in the nineteenth century see Roderic H. Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856-1876 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), and Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964), especially

pp. 138-223. 3. Of special interest in this connection are two studies on Spain: J. H. Elliott, “The Decline of Spain,” in Crisis in Europe, 1560-1660: Essays from Past and Present, Trevor Aston, ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 167— 193; and Henry Kamen, “The Decline of Spain: A Historical Myth?,” Past and Present 81 (1978), 24-50. 4. Free ownership of land, commercialization of agriculture, urbanization, social mobility, and a high level of literacy are seen as the prerequisites for successful industrialization. See Peter Flora, Modernisierungsforschung: Zur empirischen Analyse der gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1974); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Modernisierungstheorien und Geschichte (G6ttingen:

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975). See also the contributions in Modernisierung und nationale Gesellschaft im ausgehenden 18. und im 19. Jahrhundert: Referate einer deutsch-polnischen Historikerkonferenz, Werner Conze, Gottfried Schramm, Klaus

Zernack, eds. (Berlin: In Kommission bei Duncker & Humblot, 1979). 5. Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, (London: Oxford University Press, 1961); Robert E. Ward and Dankwart A. Rustow, eds., Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964); William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers, eds., Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).

6. André Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967); Arghiri Emmanuel, L’Echange inégal:

TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 157 Essai sur les antagonismes dans les rapports économiques internationaux (Paris: F. Maspero, 1969); Samir Amin, L’accumulation a léchelle mondiale. Critique de la théone

du sous-développement (Dakar: IFAN, 1970); Johan Galtung, “A Structural Theory of Imperialism,” Journal of Peace Research 8:2 (1971): 81-113. A German translation of this article appeared, beside several Latin American contributions on dependencia, in Dieter Senghaas, ed., Imperialismus und strukturelle Gewalt: Anal-

ysen tiber abhdngige Reproduktion (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972). See further Senghaas, ed., Peripherer Kapitalismus: Analysen tiber Abhdngigkeit und Un-

terenturcklung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974). 7. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System. Vol. 1: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Vol. 2: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750 (New

York: Academic Press, 1974-1980). 8. Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Ottoman Empire and the Capitalist WorldEconomy: Some Questions for Research,” in Social and Economic History of Turkey

(1071-1920), Papers presented to the First International Congress on the Social and Economic History of Turkey, Hacettepe University, Ankara, July 11-13, 1977, Osman Okyar and Halil Inalcik, eds. (Ankara, 1980), p. 117. g- Huri Islamoglu and Caglar Keyder, “Agenda for Ottoman History,” Review, 1 (1977), Pp. 31-55; Sevket Pamuk, “Foreign Trade, Foreign Capital and the Peripherilization of the Ottoman Empire, 1830-1913” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1978); Immanuel Wallerstein, Hale Decdeli, and

Resat Kasaba, “The Incorporation of the Ottoman Empire into the WorldEconomy,” Paper prepared for International Conference on Turkish Studies, Madison, Wisc., May 25-27, 1979; Immanuel Wallerstein and Regat Kasaba, “Incorporation into the World-Economy: Change in the Structure of the Ottoman Empire, 1750-1839,” in Economie et société dans l’Empire ottoman, J. L. Bacqué-Grammont and Paul Dumont, eds. (Paris: CNRS, 1983), pp. 335~354; Iikay Sunar, “Anthropologie politique et économique: |’Empire ottoman et sa transformation,” Annales ESC 35, (1980), 551-579. See also Halil Inalcik, “Impact

of the Annales School on Ottoman Studies and New Findings,” Review 3-4 (1978): 69-96. 10. Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300-1600 (LondonNew York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973). 11. For a critique of the so-called commercialization model see the articles of Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” Past and Present 70 (Feb. 1976): 30—75; “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review

104 (July-Aug. 1977): 25-92; and “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” Past and Present 97 (Nov. 1982): 16-113. With respect to the Ottoman history see Ahmet Insel, “Tanri’nin hikmetinden sermayenin hikmetine: Wallerstein Tarihi’nin bir elestirisi,” Toplum ve Bilim 25-26 (Spring-Summer 1984): 133-148. 12. Wallerstein’s treatment of Eastern Europe, for example, has been criti-

158 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE cized for this reason by Hans Heinrich Nolte, “Zur Stellung Osteuropas im internationalen System der frithen Neuzeit. AuBenhandel und Sozialgeschichte bei der Bestimmung der Regionen,” Jahrbticher fiir Geschichte Osteuropas 28 (1980): 161~—197. See also Holm Sundhaussen, “Zur Wechselbeziehung zwischen fritihneuzeitlichem AuBenhandel und 6konomischer Riickstandigkeit in Osteuropa: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit der ‘Kolonialthese’,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 9 (1983): 544-563. For general information on controversial positions see Dieter Senghaas, ed., Kapitalistische Weltékonomie. Kontroversen tiber thren Ursprung und thre Entwicklungsdynamtk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979); Jochen Blaschke, ed., Perspektiven des Weltsystems: Materiahen zu Immanuel Wallerstein, “Das moderne Weltsystem” (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1983); T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1985). For an overview of related literature on countries of the European periphery see Holm Sundhaussen, “Neuere Literatur zu Problemen der Industrialisierung und der nachholenden Entwicklung in den Landern der europaischen Peripherie,” Siidost-Forschungen 43 (1984): 283-303. 13. See Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy 1800-1914 (Lon-

don: Methuen, 1981), pp. 1-23. 14. Fernand Braudel is of the opinion that “il n’y aura eu décadence franche de l’Empire turc qu’avec les premiéres années du XIXe siécle.” See his article “L’Empire turc est-il une économie-monde?,” in Mémorial Omer Lutfi Barkan, R. Mantran, ed. (Paris: A. Maisonneuve, 1980), p. 49. For a similar line of thought see Peter F. Sugar, Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354-1804 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977), p. 282.

15. Such a judgment seems to be colored by the projection of a modern ideological situation onto a distant past. A recent example of this method can be found in Istorija na Bilgarija, t. 1V: Bilgarskijat narod pod osmansko vladiéestvo (ot XV do naéaloto na XVIII v.), Christo Gandev, ed. (Sofija: Bilgarska akademija na naukite, 1983). 16. Ernst Schulin, Die weltgeschichtliche Erfassung des Orients be: Hegel und

Ranke (Géttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958); Hans Heinrich Schaeder, “Die Orientforschung und das abendlandische Geschichtsbild,” in H. H. Schaeder, Der Mensch in Orient und Okzident: Grundziige einer euroastatischen Ge-

schichte, Grete Schaeder, ed. (Miinchen: Piper, 1960), pp. 397-423; Norman Daniel, Islam and West. The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: University Press, 1962).

17. John R. Lampe and Marvin R. Jackson, Balkan Economic History, 15501950. From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-

versity Press, 1982), p. 33. 18. Conceptually, | am following here Guy Bois, Crise du féodalisme: Economie rurale et démographie en Normandie orientale du début du XIV° au milieu du XVI° siécle

(Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1976). 19. For overviews see J. C. Russell, “Population in Europe 500-1500,” in The

TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 159 Fontana Economic History of Europe. Vol. 1, The Middle Ages, C. M. Cipolla, ed. (Glasgow: Collins, 1972), pp. 25-70; David Grigg, Population Growth and Agrartan Change: An Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1980). Important works on different geographic areas are M. Postan, “Revisions in Economic History: The Fifteenth Century,” Economic History Review 9 (1939), 160-167; Wilhelm Abel, Die Wiistungen des ausgehenden Mittelalters (Stutt-

gart: G. Fischer, 3rd rev. ed., 1976); Maurice Beresford, The Lost Villages of England (London: Lutterworth, 1954); Wladystaw Rusinski, “Wustungen: Ein Agrarproblem des feudalen Europa,” Acta Poloniae Historica 5 (1962): 48-78; Villages désertés et histotre économique. XI°—XVII’ siécles (Paris: S. E. V. P. E. N.,

1965); Rodney H. Hilton, “Villages désertés et histoire économique: recherches francaises et anglaises,” Etudes Rurales, 32 (1968): 104-109; Deserted Medieval Villages, studies ed. by M. W. Beresford and J. G. Hurst (London: Lutterworth, 1971); John Day, “Malthus démenti? Sous-peuplement et calamités démographiques en Sardaigne au bas Moyen-age,” Annales ESC 30 (1975): 684—702. On de-

velopments in the Balkans see David Jacoby, “Phénoménes de démographie rurale a Byzance aux XIII®, XIV‘ et XV¢° siécles,” Etudes Rurales 5—6 (1962): 171-

186; Héléne Antoniadis-Bibicou, “Villages désertés en Gréce: Un bilan provisoire,” in Villages désertés et histoire économique, pp. 343-417; Angeliki E. LaiouThomadakis, Peasant Soctety in the Late Byzantine Empire: A Social and Demographic

Study (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 20. Alfred Philippson, Die griechischen Landschaften, I/1: Thessalien und die

Spercheios-Senke (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1950), p. 225; Bozidar Ferjanéic, Tesalya u XII 1 XIV veku (Beograd: Srpska akademija nauka 1 umetnosti, 1974), pp. 198-205; P. S. Nasturel, “Les Valaques balkaniques aux X*—~XIII* si¢cles (Mouvements de population et colonisation dans la Romanie grecque et latine),” Byzantinische Forschungen 7 (1979): 89-112; Borislav Primov, “Stizdavaneto na vtorata bilgarska durzava i uéastieto na Vlasite,” in Bilgaroruminskite vriizki 1 otnoSenija prez vekovete. Izsledvaniya. t. I (XII—XIX v.), D. An-

gelov et al., eds. (Sofija: Bulgarska akademija na naukite, 1965), pp. 24-28. 21. Interesting examples are the islands of Euboia and Crete under Venetian

rule, both of which experienced pronounced population decline during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. See Alfred Philippson, Die griechischen Landschaften, I/2: Das dstliche Mittelgriechenland und die Insel Euboea (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1951), p. 635; Elijahu Ashtor, “Observations on Venetian Trade in the Levant in the X1Vth Century,” Journal of European Economic History

5 (1976): 533-586. Johannes Koder claims that attacks by Turkish pirates as well as epidemics were the chief factors of population decrease on Euboia in the fifteenth century. He points out, however, that thanks to the immigration of Albanians from the mainland, the fall in population did not reach critical dimensions. See J. Koder, Negroponte: Untersuchungen zur Topographie und Siedlungsgeschichte der Insel Eubota wahrend der Zeit der Veneztanerherrschaft (Wien:

Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1973), pp. 170-173. For critical revisions of the widespread assumption that the devastations of war caused last-

160 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE ing demographic and socioeconomic decline during the Late Middle Ages see G. Bois, Economie rurale et démographie en Normandie orientale, pp. 10-11; Svend Gissel et al., Desertzton and Land Colonization in the Nordic Countries, c. 1300-1600: Comparative Report from the Scandinavian Research Project on Deserted Farms and Villages (Stockholm: Almgvist & Wiksell, 1981), pp. 135f., 206-209, 238f.

22. For terminology and translated texts see Nicoard Beldiceanu, “La région de Timok-Morava dans les documents de Mehmed II et de Selim I,” Revue des études roumaines 9-4 (1957), 111-129; Kanuni 1 kanun-name za bosanski, hercegovacht, zvornicht, kliskt, crnogorshi 1 skadarskt sandiak, B. Djurdjev et al., eds.

(Sarajevo, 1957) [Monumenta turcica historiam slavorum meridionalium ilustratia, serija I: Zakonski spomenici, sv. 1]. 23. M. Gyoéni, “La transhumance des Vlaques balkaniques au Moyen-Age,” Byzantinoslavica 12 (1951), 29-42; Vasil Marinov, “Ethnographische Charakteristik der Transhumanz in den Landern der Balkanhalbinsel,” in AIESEE, Actes du premier congres international des études balkaniques et sud-est européennes, t. VII (Sofia: Académie Bulgare des Sciences, 1971), pp. 535~548; and Nicolae Dundre

“Typologie des traditionellen Hirtenlebens im karpatobalkanischen Raum,” Zeitschrift fiir Balkanologie 11:2 (1975), 23-28.

24. Halil Inalak, Fatih devri tizerinde tetkikler ve vesikalar 1 (Ankara: Tiirk

Tarih Kurumu, 1954): 154-156; Nicoara Beldiceanu and Iréne BeldiceanuSteinherr, “Quatre actes de Mehmed II concernant les Valaques des Balkans slaves,” Siidost-Forschungen 24 (1965): 116-118; DuSanka Bojani¢-Luka¢, Turski zakoni i zakonski popisi iz -XV i XVI veka za smederevsku, kruSevatku 1 vidinsku oblast

(Beograd: Istorijski institut, 1974), p. 112. 25. Ernst Werner, Die Geburt einer GroBmacht: Die Osmanen (1300-1481). Ein Beitrag zur Genesis des tiirkischen Feudalismus 4th rev. ed. (Berlin: Akademie-

Verlag, 1 985), pp. 146-148. . 26. Omer L. Barkan, “Osmanl: Imparatorlugunda bir iskan ve kolonizasyon metodu olarak suirgiinler,” Iktisat Fakiiltesi Mecmuast 11 (1949-1950), 524-5703

13 (1953-1954), 209-237. See also Halil Inalaik, “Ottoman Methods of Conquest,” Studia Islamica 2 (1954), 103-129, especially 122-125.

27. Salahaddin Cetintiirk, “Osmanh Imparatorlugunda yuirik sinifi ve hukuki statiileri,” Ankara Universitesi Dil ve Tarih-Cografya Fakiiltesi Dergisi 2 (1943); 107-116; M. Tayyib Goékbilgin, Rumeli’de Yiiriikler, Tatarlar ve Evldd-1 Fatthan

(Istanbul: Istanbul Universitesi Yayinlari, 1957); Metodije Sokoloski, “Za jurucite i juruckata organizacija vo Makedonija od XV—XVIII vek,” Istorsja g:1 (1973), 85~99; Enver M. Serifgil, “Rumeli’de eskinci yiirtikler,” Tiirk Diinyas: Arastirmalan 12 (June 1981), 65-83. 28. M. Tayyib Gékbilgin, XV—XVI. astrlarda Edirne ve Pasa Livas. Vakiflar Miilkler - Mukataalar (Istanbul: Istanbul Universitesi Yayinlan, 1952). See also Werner, Die Geburt einer GroPmacht, pp. 167f.

29. Omer L. Barkan, “Osmanh Imparatorlugunda bir iskan ve kolonizasyon metodu olarak vakiflar ve temlikler,” Vakiflar Dergisi 2 (1942), 279-365. go. Elizabeth A. Zachariadou, “Early Ottoman Documents of the Prodromos

TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 161 Monastery (Serres),” Stidost-Forschungen 28 (1969): 1-12; “Ottoman Documents from the Archives of Dionysiou (Mount Athos) 1495-1520,” Stidost-Forschungen

go (1971): 1-35 plus 14 plates; Zdenka Vesela-Prenosilova, “Sur I’activité du Monastére de Ste. Catherine de Sinai en Bosnie,” Prilozi za orijentalnu filologiju 28—29 (1978-1979): 257-267; Fehim Dz. Spaho, “Nekoliko turskih dokumenata o Monastiru MileSevo,” Prilozi za orijentalni filologiju 28~29 (1978-1979): 363374; Vando BoSkov, “Pitanje autenti¢nosti Fojnitke ahd-name Mehmeda II 1z 1463. godine,” Godtsnjak drustva tstoricara Bosne t Hercegovine 28-29 (1977-1979):

87-105; and “Dokumenti Bajazita II u Hilandaru (Sveta Gora)—Komentar 1 regesti,” Priloz za oryentalnu filologyu 31 (1981): 131-154.

31. Franz Babinger, “Scheijch Bedr ed-din, der Sohn des Richters von Simaw,” Der Islam 11 (1921): 1-106; Abdiilb4ki Gélpinarh, Semavna Kadistoglu Seyh Bedreddin (Istanbul: Eti Yaymevi, 1966); Nedim Filipovi¢, Princ Musa i Sejh Bedreddin (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1971); Werner, Die Geburt einer Grofmacht, pp. 217~233; Necdet Kurdakul, Biitiin yénleriyle Bedreddin (Istanbul: Déler Reklam Yayinlari, 1977). 32. Mihailo Dini¢, “Dubrovatka srednjovekovna karavanska trgovina,” Jugoslovenski tstoriski Easopis 3 (1937), 119-146; Traian Stoianovich, “The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant,” Journal of Economic History 20 (1960), 234-313; Francis W. Carter, Dubrovnik (Ragusa): A Classic City-State (London and New

York: Seminar Press, 1972), pp. 138, 151ff.; Max Demeter Peyfuss, “Balkanorthodoxe Kaufleute in Wien: Soziale und nationale Differenzierung im Spiegel der Privilegien fiir die griechisch-orthodoxe Kirche zur Heiligen Dreifaltigkeit,” Osterreichische Osthefte 17 (1975), 258-268.

33. This consciousness was common to all “peasant-soldiers.” A well-known example is the Hungarian haiduks in the early modern period. See Istvan Racz, A hajditk a XVII. szdzadban (Debrecen: University of Debrecen, 1969); and several contributions in Aus der Geschichte der ostmitteleuropdischen Bauernbewegungen im __ 16.—17. Jahrhundert, Gusztav Heckenast, ed. (Budapest: Akadémia Kiad6, 1977).

34. See Fikret Adanir, “Heiduckentum und osmanische Herrschaft. Sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte der Diskussion um das friihneuzeitliche Rauberwesen in Stidosteuropa,” Stidost-Forschungen 41 (1982), 43-116. 35. Mustafa Akdag, Tiirktye’nin tkttsadi ve wtimai tanhi, 1: 1243-1453 (Istan-

bul: Cem Yayinevi, 1974), pp. 285-386. For an example of a Turkish aristocratic family see Ismail Hakki Uzungarsil, Candarl: vezir ailesi (Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu, 1974). 36. On the Interregnum see Paul Wittek, “De la défaite d’Ankara 4 la prise de Constantinople,” Revue des études islamiques 12 (1938): 1-34. 37. See Franz Babinger, Mehmed der Eroberer und seine Zeit. Weltensturmer einer

Zeitenwende (Munchen: F. Bruckmann, 1953), p. 266; Halil Inalcik, “The Rise of the Ottoman Empire,” in A History of the Ottoman Empire to 1730 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 40-53; Osman Turan, Tiirk cthan hékimiyett mefkiirest tariht, 3d ed. (Istanbul: Nakislar Yayinevi, 1979), pp. 363-399;

Bistra Cvetkova, “Sur certaines réformes du régime foncier au temps de Meh-

162 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE met II,” Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 6 (1963), 104—120; Ernst Werner, Sultan Mehmed der Eroberer und die Epochenwende im 15. Jahrhundert

(Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1982). 38. Omer L. Barkan, “Timar,” /slém Ansiklopedis vol. 12 (istanbul, 1972), pp. 287-333; and “Feodal diizen ve Osmanli timan,” in Tiirkiye tktisat tartht seminert, Ankara, 8—10 Haziran 1973. Metinler/Tartigmalar, O. Okyar, U. Nalbant-

oglu, eds. (Ankara: Hacettepe Universitesi Yayini, 1975), pp. 1-24; Hamid | HadiZibegi¢, “Rasprava Ali Cau8a iz Sofije o timarskoj organizaciji u XVII stoljecu,” Glasnik Zemaljskog muzeja u Sarajevu 2 (1947): 139-206. On the origins of the institution see Nicoara Beldiceanu, Le timar dans I’Etat ottoman: début XIV°— début XVI° stécle (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1980). 39. F. A. Belin, “Etude sur la propriété fonciére en pays musulmans et spécilalement en Turquie,” Journal asiatique 18 (1861): 410. See also Colin Imber, “The Status of Orchards and Fruit Trees in Ottoman Law,” Tarih Enstitiisii Dergist 12 (1981-1982): 763~—774.

40. See, also for the following, Omer L. Barkan, “Osmanh Imparatorlugunda ciftci siniflarm hukuki statist,” Ulkii 9 (1937), 33-48, 101-116, 329-

341; 10 (1937), 147-159, 293-302, 414-422; Barkan, “Turkiye’de toprak meselesinin tarihi esaslar,” Ulkii 11 (1938), 51-63, 233-240, 339-346. 41. Halil Inalcak, “Osmanhlarda raiyyet risimu,” Belleten 23 (1959), 575610; Vera Mutafcieva, “De l’éxploitation féodale dans les terres de population bulgare sous la domination turque au XV¢ et XVI¢ s.,” Etudes historiques 1 (1960), 145-170; Mutaftieva, Agrarnite Otnosentja v Osmanskata imperya prez XV-XVI v. (Sofija: Bilgarska akademija na naukite, 1962); D. Bojani¢-Lukaé, “De la nature et de l’origine de l’ispendje,” Wiener Zettschrift fiir die Kunde des Morgenlandes 68

(1976), 9-30.

42. B. C. Nedkoff, “Osmanh Imparatorlugunda cizye (bas vergisi),” Belleten 8 (1944), 599-649; Omer L. Barkan, “894 (1488-1489) yili cizyesinin tahsilatina ait muhasebe bilancolari,” Belgeler 1:1 (1964): 1-117; Hamid Hadzibegi¢, Glavarina u Osmanskoj drzavi (Sarajevo: Orijentalni institut, 1966). 43. See table 1 in Lyuben Berov, Dviienteto na cenite na Balkanite prez XVI-XIX

veh 2 evropejskata revoljucija na cenite (Sofija: Bulgarska akademija na naukite, 1976), pp. 183-185. 44. Hamid HadiZibegi¢, “DZizja ili harat,” Priloz za oryentalnu filologyu 3-4 (1952-1953), 55-1356, 5 (1954-1955), 43-102; Gyula Kaldy-Nagy, ed., Kanunz devri Budin tahrir defteri, 1546-1562 (Ankara: Ankara Universitesi Yayinlart, 1971), p. 1; Adem HandzZi¢, “O druStveno}j strukturi stanovniStva u Bosni poéetkom XVII stoljeéa,” Prilozi za oryentalnu filologyu 32—33 (1982-1983), 129-146.

45. For example, in the sancak of Srem, where stock raising was important in the sixteenth century, the contribution of this tax to the total of normal tax revenues was only 7 percent. See Bruce W. McGowan, ed., Sirem sancagi mufassal

tahrir defteri (Ankara: Tirk Tarih Kurumu, 1983), p. Ixiv. 46. Hamid Hadzibegi¢, “Porez na sitnu stoku i koriStenje ispaSa,” Prilozi za oryentalnu filologyu 8~—g (1958-1959), 63-109.

47. Omer L. Barkan, “Avariz,” Islam Ansiklopedisi, vol. 2 (Istanbul, 1943),

TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 163 pp. 13-19; Bistra Cvetkova, Izviinredni dantici i ditriavni povinnosti v biilgarskite zemi pod turska vlast (Sofija: Bulgarska akademija na naukite, 1958).

48. Inalcaik, “Osmanlilarda raiyyet riismu,” p. 598; Vera P. Mutaftieva, ' “Kategoriite feodalno zavisimo naselenie v naSite zemi pod turska vlast prez XV— XVIv.,” [zvestya na Instituta za tstorya pri Bilgarskata akademija na naukite g (1960), 80.

49. O. L. Barkan, “Osmanh Imparatorlugunda ciftci simiflarin hukuki statuisti,” Ulkii g (1937), 103 fn. 1. 50. McGowan, Sirem sancagi, p. |xxii.

51. Traian Stoianovich, “Balkan Peasants and Landlords and the Ottoman State: Familial Economy, Market Economy and Modernization,” in La révolution industrielle dans le Sud-Est Européen—XIX. S. N. Todorov et al., ed. (Sofia: Institut

d’Etudes Balkaniques, 1977), p. 174f. As Lampe and Jackson have pointed out, “the system left the Balkan peasant almost a century to cultivate grain in the lowlands on better terms, if not with more modern methods or even greater commercial incentive, than the shifting balance of feudal power between native lords had afforded them in the late medieval period.” Balkan Economic History, p. 33. 52. B. H. Slicher van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe. A.D. 500— 1850 (London: Arnold, 1963), pp. 195-206; Peter Kriedte, Spatfeudalismus und Handelskapital. Grundlinien der europdischen Wirtschafisgeschichte vom 16. bis zum Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980), pp.

28-78. 53. Maurice Aymard, Venise, Raguse et la commerce du blé pendant la seconde mow du XVI° stécle (Paris: S. E. V. P. E. N., 1966), pp. 125-140; Jorjo Tadic, “L’unité économique das Balkans et de la région méditerranéenne,” in AIESEE, Actes du premier congrés international des études balkaniques et sud-est européennes, vol.

III (Sofia: Académie Bulgare des Sciences, 1969), pp. 633-640; Nikolaj Todorov, Balkanskijat grad XV-XIX vek. Socyalno-ihonomicesko i demografsko razvitie

(Sofija: Nauka i izkustvo, 1972); Aleksandar Stojanovski, Gradovite na Makedonya od krajot na XIV do XVII vek—Demografski proucuvanja (Skopje: Institut za nacionalna istorya, 1981). 54. See Halil Inalcik, Hicri 835 tarthli suret-i defter-i Sancag-t Arvanid (Ankara: Tuark Tarih Kurumu, 1954), p. xxix, and “The Emergence of Big Farms, (2/ftltks: State, Landlords and Tenants,” in Contributions 4 l'histoire économique et sociale de Empire ottoman (Collection Turcica, III) (Louvain: Peeters, 1984), p. 112. 55. Les Institutions ottomanes en Europe (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1978), p. 15. 56. Bilgarskata narodnost prez 151 vek. Demografsko 1 etnografsko izsledvane (So-

fija : Nauka 1 izkustvo, 1972), pp. 20-56. 57. Die Styaqat-Schrift in der tiirkischen Finanzverwaltung. Vol. 1, Einleitung, Textproben (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiad6, 1955), p. 77. On the varying meanings of the term “puszta” in the context of historical geography see Péter Gunst, “Das ungarische Wort ‘puszta’ und seine Bedeutung,” in Wirtschaftliche und soziale Strukturen 1m saekularen Wandel. Festschrift fiir Wilhelm Abel zum 70. Geburtstag, In-

gomar Bog et al., eds. (Hannover: M. & H. Schaper, 1974), pp. 212-216. 58. “Kim vuprosa za razvitieto na seli8tnata mreZa 1 na nejnite elementi v

164 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE sredistnata i iztocnata Cast na Balkanite ot VII do XVIII v.,” lzvestija na Instituta za istoriyja pri Bilgarskata akademiya na naukite 18 (1967), 89-146, particularly 135.

59. “Kim viprosa za razvitieto...,” 136. 6o. StraSimir Dimitrov, “Mezrite 1 demografskijat kolaps na bilgarskata narodnost prez XV v.,” Vekove 2:6 (1973), 50-65. 61. Landliche Siedlungen im siidlichen Inneranatolien in den letzten vierhundert Jah-

ren (Gottingen: Géttinger Geographische Abhandlungen, 46, 1968), pp. 16o0ff. 62. Wolf-Dieter Hiitteroth and Kamal Abdulfattah, Historical Geography of Palestine, Transjordan and Southern Syna in the Late 16th Century (Erlangen: Erlanger Geographische Arbeiten, 5, 1977), p. 29. This view is supported by Ehud Toledano, “The sanjaq of Jerusalem in the Sixteenth Century. Aspects of Topography and Population,” Archtvum Ottomanicum 9 (1984), 279-319. 63. Suraiya Faroghi, “Rural Society in Anatolia and the Balkans during the Sixteenth Century, II,” Turcica 11 (1979), 104. See also Faroghi, “The Peasants of Saideli in the Late Sixteenth Century,” Archivum Ottomanicum 8 (1983), 225f.

64. To be sure, the phenomenon of deserted villages—this has been shown above—was not unknown in the Balkans. But the Ottoman surveys, as a brief review of published tahrir defterleri would suggest, registered them as such, and not as mezraa. For many examples see Gy. Kaldy-Nagy, Kanuni devri Budin tahrir defteri, pp. 61, 62, 63, 114, 152, 224, 322, 323, 336; Opsirni popisni deftert od XVI vek za Kustendilskiot sandzak (Turski dokumenti za istoryata na makedonskiot narod, t.

V, kn. ID), Metodi Sokoloski, trans. and ed. (Skopje: Archiv na Makedonya, 1980), pp. 101, 178, 234, 311, 469, 493, 558, 588; B. McGowan, Sirem sancagr mufassal tahrir deftert, pp. 85, 111, 340, 463, 492, 505. For an especially interest-

ing example see p. 37, where the village “Beleveg” in the nahiye of “Ilok” is registered as deserted (hali ez raya), but in its vicinity also a mezraa is registered, practically under the same name as mezraa-i belevega—a good indication of the

fact that the Ottomans differentiated between the two terms. 65. Dimitrov, “Mezrite i demografskijat kolaps,” pp. 52ff. For many exam-

ples for yiriik settling on the mezraas see Opsirni popisni defteri od XVI vek za Kustendilskiot sandzak.

66. See Bruce McGowan, “Food Supply and Taxation on the Middle Danube, 1568-1579,” Archivum Ottomanicum 1 (1969), 139-196. 67. W.-D. Hiitteroth, Landliche Siedlungen im stidlichen Inneranatolien, p. 1'70f.; Faroghi, “The Peasants of Saideli,” p. 23gof.

68. Yusuf Halacoglu, “Tapu-tahrir defterlerine gére XVI. yiizyilin ilk yarisinda Sis (= Kozan) sancagi,” Tarth Dergist 32 (1979), 819-892; Mustafa Soysal, Die Siedlungs-und Landschaftsenturcklung der Cukurova. Mit besonderer Beriicksichtigung der Yiiregir-Ebene (Erlangen: Erlanger Geographische Arbeiten, 4, 1976).

69. Omer L. Barkan, “Milk topraklar ve sultanlarin temlik hakki,” Istanbul Hukuk Fakiiltest’ Mecmuast 7 (1941), 157-176. See also Klaus Schwarz, “Eine Herrscherurkunde Sultan Murads II. fiir den Wesir Fazlullah,” Journal of Turkish Studies 5 (1981), 45-60. 70. Halil Inalck, “Rice Cultivation and the ¢eltiikgi-re’aya System in the Ot-

TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 165 toman Empire,” Turcica 14 (1982), 69-141. See also Nicoara Beldiceanu and I. Beldiceanu-Steinherr, “Riziculture dans ’/Empire ottoman (XV‘°-XVIF siécle),”

Turcica 9-10 (1978), 9-28. .

71. Inalak, “Rice Cultivation,” pp. 83-84. 72. Halil Inalcik, “Servile Labor in the Ottoman Empire,” in The Mutual Effects of the Islamic and Judeo-Christian Worlds: The East European Pattern, Abraham

Ascher, Tibor Halasi-Kun, Béla K. Kiraly, eds. (Brooklyn, N. Y.: Brooklyn College Press, 1979), pp. 25-52. 73. Mustafa Akdag, “Timar rejiminin bozulusu,” Ankara Universitesi Dil ve Tarth-Cografya Fakiiltest Dergist 3 (1945), 419-431; Halil Cin, Osmanl: toprak diizent ve bu diizenin bozulmas: (Ankara: Kiltiir Bakanhg Yayinlan, 1978); Halil Inalcik,

“Military and Fiscal Transformation in the Ottoman Empire, 1600-1700,” Archivum Ottomanicum 6 (1980), 283-337.

74. Nikolaj Todorov wrote: “La loi méme et la pratique courante permettaient aux personnes qui s’établissaient ailleurs d’y exerces librement une autre profession” and further: “La circulation de la main-d’oeuvre n’était pas sérieusement entravée par les rapports agraires existants.” See his “Sur quelques aspects du passage du féodalisme au capitalisme dans les territoires balkaniques de |’Empire ottoman,” Revue des études sud-est européennes 1 (1963), 118, 121. Bistra Cvet-

kova, too, pointed out that, under the condition of paying a special tax, a peasant could at any time “abandone I’agriculture pour devenir artisan, transporteur ou ouvrier.” See “Actes concernant la vie économique de villes et ports balkaniques aux XV* et XVIS siécles,” Revue d'études islamiques 4 (1972), 356. On the relative freedom of the Balkan peasants in this period see also Peter F. Sugar, Southeastern Europe, pp. 212, 218f. 75. Aleksandar Matkovski, who starts from the thesis that the reaya were serfs bound to the land—see his KreposniStvoto v Makedoniya vo vreme na turskoto vla-

deenje (Skopje: Institut za nacionalna istorija, 1978)—studies phenomena of peasants giving up agriculture primarily in the context of social protest against the Ottoman feudal system. See his Otporot v Makedonija vo vremeto na turskoto vladeenje. Vol. 1, Pastuniot otpor (Skopje: Misla, 1983), passim. The opposite stand-

point on the question of serfdom in the Ottoman Empire, represented by Omer L. Barkan, “Tiirkiye’de ‘servaj’ var mi idi?,” Belleten 20 (1956), 237-246, suffers from a strictly juridical approach to the subject. 76. Bruce McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe: Taxation, Trade and the Struggle for Land, 1660-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), P- 53-

77. See Omer L. Barkan, “Essai sur les données statistiques des registres de recensement dans !’Empire ottoman aux XV° et XVI° siécles,” Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 1 (1957), 9-36, especially pp. 26—-31; Josiah C. Russell, “Late Medieval Balkan and Asia Minor Population,” Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 3 (1960), 265-274; Leila Erder and Suraiya Faroghi, “Population Rise and Fall in Anatolia, 1550-1620,” Middle Eastern Studies 15, (1979), 322-345. 78. Aymard, Venise, Raguse et la commerce du blé, pp. 125ff.

166 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 79. For a list of the periods of dearth and famine in the Ottoman Empire between 15,78 and 1637 see Latfi Giicer, XVI-XVII. asirlarda Osmanl: Imparatorlugunda hububat meselesi ve hububattan alinan vergiler (Istanbul: Istanbul Universitesi Yayinlari, 1968), pp. 8—9. 80. On the system of provisioning Istanbul see Lath Giicer, “XVI. ytizyil sonlarinda Osmanh Imparatorlugu dahilinde hububat ticaretinin tabi oldugu kayitlar,” Iktisat Fakiiltesi Mecmuast 13 (1951—52), 79-98; Robert Mantran, Istanbul dans la seconde moitié du XVII’ siécle: Essai dhistoire institutionelle, économique et soci-

ale (Paris: A. Maisonneuve, 1962), pp. 181-213; M. M. Alexandrescu-Dersca, “Quelques données sur la ravitaillement de Constantinople au XVI* siécle,” in AIESEE, Actes du premier congrés international des études balkaniques et sud-est euro-

péennes, vol. III (Sofia: Académie Bulgare des Sciences, 1969), pp. 661-673; Suraiya Faroghi, “Istanbul’un iagesi ve Tekirdag-Rodoscuk limam (16.—17. yuzyillar),” ODTU Gelisme Dergisi 1979-80 Ozel Sayisi, pp. 139-154; McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe, pp. 10—15.

81. See the data given by Faroghi, “The Peasants of Saideli,” pp. 221-223. 82. Faroghi, “The Peasants of Saideli,” p. 224f. 83. Faroghi, “The Peasants of Saideli,” p. 224. 84. M. A. Cook, Population Pressure in Rural Anatolia, 1450-1600 (London: Oxford University Press, 1972). 85. Cook, Population Pressure, pp. 25-27. 86. See Suraiya Faroghi, Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia. Trade, Crafts and Food Production in an Urban Setting, 1520-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 267-287.

65-79. 87. Omer L. Barkan, “The Price Revolution of the Sixteenth Century: A

Turning Point in the Economic History of the Near East,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 6 (1975), 3-28, and “Les mouvements des prix en Turquie

entre 1490 et 1655,” in Histoire économique du monde méditerranéen 1450—1650. Mélanges en V’'honneur de Fernand Braudel, vol. 1 (Toulouse: E. Privat, 1973), pp.

88. This was the case at the beginning of the eighteenth century. See

Strasimir Dimitrov, “Politikata na upravljavaStata virchuSka v Turcija sprjamo spachijstvoto prez vtorata polovina na XVIII v.,” Istoriéeski pregled 18:5 (1962),

32-60, particularly 37—39. 89. Vera Mutaftieva and StraSimir Dimitrov, Sur [état du systéme des timars des XVII°-XVIIF’ ss. (Sofia: Académie Bulgare des Sciences, 1968), pp. 21 ff. go. Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire, p. 4of.

gi. See Bistra Cvetkova, “Recherches sur le systeme d’affermage (il-tizam) dans Il’Empire ottomane au cours du XVI siécle par rapport aux contrées bulgares,” Rocznik orientalistyczny 27:2 (1964), 111-132.

92. On the emergence of the levendat see Mustafa Cezar, Osmanli tarihinde levendler (Istanbul: Giizel Sanatlar Akademisi Yayinlari, 1965), pp. 30—40. 93. See Inalcik, “Military and Fiscal Transformation,” pp. 287ff., and “The Socio-Political Effects of the Diffusion of Fire-Arms in the Middle East,” in War,

TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 167 Technology and Soctety in the Middle East, J. Parry and M. E. Yapp, eds. (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 195-217. By contrast, Niels Steensgaard has advanced the hypothesis that not the technological response to Austrian military

superiority, but the government’s increased liquidity as a result of inflation during the price revolution prepared the ground for the mercenary system in the Ottoman Empire. See his The Asian Trade Revolution of the Seventeenth Century. The East India Companies and the Decline of the Caravan Trade (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 80. 94. The classical work on the celali movement is that of Mustafa Akdag, Celdli isyanlan. (1550-1603) (Ankara: Ankara Universitesi Yayimlari, 1963). See also William J. Griswold, The Great Anatolian Rebellion, 1000—1020/1591—1611 (Ber-

"lin: K. Schwarz, 1983). 95. McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe, pp. 86f., 131-134. g6. See Wilhelm Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur: Eine Geschichte der Land- und Erndhrungswirtschaft Mitteleuropas seit dem hohen Mittelalter (HamburgBerlin: P. Parey, 1978), pp. 129-135, and Massenarmut und Hungerkrisen im vorindustriellen Europa: Versuch einer Synopsis (Hamburg-Berlin: P. Parey, 1974), pp. 17-32. Cf. also some critical evaluations regarding the influence of the climate on agricultural productivity in T. M. L. Wigles et al. eds., Climate and History: Studies in Past Climates and Their Impact on Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

97. The envoy wrote, “Von Griegischen Weissenburg [Belgrade] bis daher [Aleksinac] sein uns stetig viel Leuth, entweder der ungewohnlichen Lufft, Speis

oder Tranck und groBer Hitz, die gewest, erkranckt, alle miteinand hitzige Kranckheiten.” See Karl Nehring, Adam Fretherrn zu Herbersteins Gesandtschaftsreise nach Konstantinopel. Ein Beitrag zum Frieden von Zsitvatorok (1606) (Miinchen:

R. Oldenbourg, 1983), p. 114. For a list of epidemics in the Balkans during the seventeenth century see Vladimir Bazala, “Calendarium pestis (II),” Acta historica medicinae, pharmaciae, veterinae 2 (Beograd, 1957), 72-87. g8. McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe, pp. 108~110. Cf. Inalcik,

“Military and Fiscal Transformation,” pp. 313-317. For information on niizul, an important category of the extraordinary taxes on cereals, see Giicer, XV/.— XVII. aswrlarda Osmank Imparatorlugunda hububat meselesi, pp. 69~92. gg. On cizye reform of 1691 see McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe,

pp. 80-85. 100. Avdo Suéeska, “Die Entwicklung der Besteuerung durch die Avariz-i divaniye und die Tekalif-i é6rfiye im Osmanischen Reich wahrend des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts,” Siidost-Forschungen 27 (1968), 89-1930, particularly 97ff. 101. Bistra Cvetkova, Chajdutstvoto v biilgarskite zemt prez 15/18 vek (Sofija: Nauka 1 izkustvo, 1971); John K. Vasdravellis, Klephts, Armatoles and Pirates tn Macedonia during the Rule of the Turks (1627-1821) (Thessaloniké: Makedoniké bibliothéké, 43, 1975); Aleksandar Matkovski, Otporot vo Makedonia vo vremeto na turskoto vladeenje, vol. 3, Ajdutstvoto (Skopje: Misla, 1983). See also Adanur,

“Heiduckentum und osmanische Herrschaft.”

168 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 102. See T. Aston, ed., Crists in Europe, 1560~—1660. Essays from Past and Pres-

ent, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965); Jean de Vries, Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); The General Crists of the Seventeenth Century, Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M. Smith,

eds. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); Miroslav Hroch and Josef Petran, Das 17. Jahrhundert—Krise der Feudalgesellschaft? (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1981). 103. See Slicher van Bath, Agrarian History, pp. 206-221; Henry Kamen, The Iron Century: Social Change in Europe 1550-1660 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), pp. 223-228; Kriedte, Spdtfeudalismus und Handelskapital, pp. 83-89. 104. See Jerzy Topolski and Andrzej Wyczariski, “Les fluctuations de la production agricole en Pologne XVI®—XVIII° siécles,” in Prestations paysannes, dimes, rente fonciére et mouvement de la production agricole a l’époque préindustrielle, Joseph

Goy and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, eds. (Paris: Cahiers des Etudes rurales, 4, 1983), Pp. 129-134. 105. Soysal, Die Siedlungs- und Landschaftsentuicklung Cukurovas, p. 38. 106. Hiitteroth, Landliche Stedlungen im stidlichen Inneranatolien, pp. 163-208.

107. The envoy wrote, “...ein schén eben Land, da viel Reis wechst..., von vielen Doérfern besetzt und die Velder wol sonderlich mit Reis erbauen.” Nehring, Adam Fretherrn zu Herbersteins Gesandtschaftsreise nach Konstantinopel, p. 118.

108. They wrote, “...ein braite Hayden zwischen zweyen Gebtirgen,” Nehring, Adam Fretherrn, p. 116.

109. A frequent entry in the ttnerartum of the envoy read: “Diesen Tag haben wier auch bis daher durch ein ungebauet waldechtig Land gefahren, auch

den gantzen Tag kein Dorff noch Haus gesehen.” Nehring, Adam Fretherrn, p. 113. 110. Nehring, Adam Fretherrn, p. 103.

111. Their comment was, “...da uns die bulgarischen Weiber in grofer Menge allerley Obs vom Gebiirg herab zu kauffen gebracht,” Nehring, Adam Fretherrn, p. 115.

| 112. They reported, “... ein schén wolgebauet Thal, herumb etliche Dorffer auf den Hohen liegen.” Nehring, Adam Fretherrn, p. 116.

113. The report said, “...ein schén gelegen, doch gar wenige gebauet Thal...,darin zimlich viel Weingarten zu sehen gewest,” Nehring, Adam Fretherrn, p. 116. 114. Constantin J. Jirecek, Die HeerstraBe von Belgrad nach Constantinopel und die Balkanpdsse: Eine historisch-geographische Studie (Prag, 1877); Olga Zirojevic¢, Carigradski drum od Beograda do Sofye, 1459-1683 (Beograd: Zbornik Instituta muzeja Srbiye, vol. 7, 1970); Zirojevic, Carigradski drum od Beograda do Budima u XVI 2 XVII veku (Novi Sad: Institut za izuéavanje istorije Vojvodine, 1976).

115. “Agricultural Activities in a Bektashi Center: the tekke of Kizil Deli 1750-18930,” Stidost-Forschungen 35 (1976), 69-96.

116. “Agricultural Activities in a Bektashi Center,” p. 72.

TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 169 117. “Agricultural Activities in a Bektashi Center,” p. 711. 118. “Agricultural Activities in a Bektashi Center,” p. 72. 119. “Agricultural Activities in a Bektashi Center,” p. 75. 120. Bistra Cvetkova, “Documents turcs concernant le statut de certaines localités dans la région de Veliko-Tarnovo au XVII¢ siécle,” in Mémorial Omer Litfi Barkan, p. 70. 121. L. Makkai, V. Zimanyi, “Les registres de dime, sources de l’histoire de la production agricole en Hongrie 1500-1848,” in Goy and Le Roy Ladurie, eds., Prestations paysannes, p. 105. 122. McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe, p. 39. 123. McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe, pp. 39ff. See also F. W. Carter, Dubrovnik (Ragusa), pp. 361-371, and Snezka Panova, Biilgarskite tiirgovet prez XVII vek (Sofia: Nauka 1 izkustvo, 1980), pp. 95-136.

124. The cereal prices fell rapidly during the first decades of the seventeenth

century and then kept their low level throughout the century. See Berov, Dutienieto na cenite na Balkanite prez XVI~XIX v., pp. 289-291. 125. See Cvetkova, Les institutions ottomanes, p. go.

126. For a recent example of this interpretation see Richard J. Crampton, Bulgaria 1878-1918. A History (Boulder, Colo.: East European Monographs, 1983), p. 2. 127. Immanuel Wallerstein, Hale Decdeli, Resat Kasaba, “The Incorporation of the Ottoman Empire into the World-Economy” (Paper prepared for International Conference on Turkish Studies, Madison, Wisc., May 25-27, 1979), p. 5.

128. “Cifthks were examples of commercial farming where enserfed peasantry or share-cropping were employed.” Islamoglu and Keyder, “Agenda for Ottoman History,” p. 52. 129. For a critique of such tendencies in recent scholarship see Inalcik, “Impact of the Annales School on Ottoman Studies,” pp. 6g—96. See also Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, pp. 33ff. 130. Almost all the ¢zftiks mentioned in the survey of the sancak of Srem are

shown located on a mezraa. For example, see Bruce McGowan, Sirem sancagr mufassal tahrir defterr (Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu Basimevi, 1983), p. 208. 131. McGowan, Sirem sancagi mufassal tahrir defterr, pp. 26, 34, go. 132. McGowan, Szrem sancagi mufassal tahrir deftert, pp. 27f., 91, 192, 283. 133. McGowan, Sirem sancagi mufassal tahrir defteri, pp. 28, 34, 59, 75£. 134. See Inalcik, “Emergence of Big Farms,” pp. 108-111.

135. On cotton growing in this period see Suraiya Faroghi, “Notes on the Production of Cotton and Cotton Cloth in XVIth and XVIIth Century Anatolia,” Journal of European Economic History 8 (1979), 405-417; Halil Inalcik, “Os-

manh pamuklu pazari, Hindistan ve Ingiltere: Pazar rekabetinde emek maliyetinin rolti,” ODTU Gelisme Dergisi, 197g—80 Ozel Sayist, pp. 1-65, especially pp. 4-7; Maureen F. Mazzaoui, The Italian Cotton Industry in the Later Middle Ages,

1100-1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 44-55. 136. See Inalcik, “Rice Cultivation” and “Servile Labor.”

170 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 137. Aymard, Ventse, Raguse et le commerce du blé, p. 12°.

138. Akdag, Celali Isyanlan, pp. 37-44. 139. The leading exponent of this thesis is Christo Christov. See his Agrarnite otnosenija v Makedonija prez XIX i naéaloto na XX vek (Sofija: Izd-vo na Bilgarskata

akademiia na naukite, 1964) and Agrarnyat viipros v biilgarskata nacionalna revoluciya (Sofija: Nauka i izkustvo, 1976). For a discussion of further pertinent literature see Fikret Adanir, “Zum Verhidltnis von Agrarstruktur und nationaler Bewegung in Makedonien 1878—1908,” in Der Berliner KongreB von 1878: Dte Politik der GroBmdchte und die Probleme der Modernisierung in Stidosteuropa tn der zweiten Halfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, R. Melville and H. -J. Schréder, eds. (Wiesba-

den: F. Steiner, 1982), pp. 445-461. 140. See Barkan, “Essai sur les données statistiques,” p. 27; Mantran, Istanbul dans la seconde moitié du XVII‘ siécle, p. 47; Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen a Vépoque de Philippe I, 2d. ed. (Paris: A. Colin, 1966), 1:318. According to Traian Stoianovich, however, Istanbul must have had a population

of less than 400,000 people in the mid-seventeenth century. See “Model and Mirror of the Premodern Balkan City,” in: La ville balkanique XV°—XIX’ ss., N. Todorov, ed. (Sofia: Académie Bulgare des Sciences, 1970), p. 91. 141. McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe, p. 136.

142. On the economics of the Ottoman system see Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, pp. 23-32.

143. Tevfik Giran, “The State Role in the Grain Supply of Istanbul: The Grain Administration, 1793-1839,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 3:1

(Winter, 1984-1985), 27—41, particularly p. 32. 144. McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe, p. 14f.

145. On the dyan see Yiticel Ozkaya, Osmanl: Imparatorlugunda dyénlk (Ankara: Ankara Universitesi Yayinlari, 1977); Kemal H. Karpat, “Some Historical and Methodological Considerations Concerning Social Stratification in the Middle East,” in Commoners, Climbers and Notables. A Sampler of Studies on Social Ranking in the Middle East, C. A. O. Nieuwenhuijze, ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1977), pp. 83-101; Avdo Suceska, Ajant. Prilog izuéavanju lokalne vlasti u nasim zemljama za

urijeme turaka (Sarajevo: Nautno druStvo SR Bosne i Hercegovine, 1965), and “Bedeutung und Entwicklung des Begriffes A’yan im Osmanischen Reich,” Siidost-Forschungen 25, (1966), 3-26; D. R. Sadat, Urban Notables in the Ottoman Empire: the Ayan (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1969). 146. For a discussion of the fiscal role of the dyan see Michael Ursinus, Regionale Reformen im Osmanischen Reich am Vorabend der Tanzimat: Reformen der rumelischen Provinztalgouverneure im Gerichtssprengel von Manastir (Bitola) zur Zeit der Herrschaft Sultan Mahmuds II., 1808-1839 (Berlin: K. Schwarz, 1982), pp. 8— 100. 147. See Avdo Suceska, “Malhikana,” Prilozt za orijentalnu filologiju 8—g (1958—

1959), 111~141; Mehmet Geng, “Osmanli maliyesinde malikane sistemi,” in Tiirktye tktisat tariht seminernt, pp. 231-291.

148. Mehmet Geng, “XVIII. yiizyilda Osmanh ekonomisi ve savas,” Yant 49:4 (1984), 52-61.

TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 171 149. Charles Issawi, “Population and Resources in Ottoman Empire and Iran,” in Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History, Thomas Naff and Richard Owen, eds. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), p. 160. 150. McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe, pp. 42-44. For a more detailed treatment, on the basis of French sources, see Nicolas Svoronos, Le commerce de Salonique au XVIII’ stécle (Paris: PUF, 1956); Robert Paris, Histoire du com-

merce de Marseille. vol. 5: De 1660 a 1789. Le Levant (Paris: Plon, 1957); J. -P. Filippini et al., Dossters sur le commerce frangais en Méditerranée onentale au XVIII’ stécle (Paris: PUF, 1976). See also A. E. Vacalopoulos, History of Mace-

donia, 1354-1833 (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1973), pp. 387425.

151. Jean-Jacques Hemardinquer, “Les débuts du mais en Méditerranée (Premier apercu),” in Histoire économique du monde médtterranéen 1450~1650: Mélanges en l’honneur de Fernand Braudel, vol. 1 (Toulouse: E. Privat, 1973), pp. 227-233; Traian Stoianovich, “Le mais dans les Balkans,” Annales ESC 21 (1966), 1026-1040. 152. Hans-Joachim Kissling, “Zur Geschichte der Rausch- und GenuBbgifte im Osmanischen Reiche,” Siidost-Forschungen 16 (1957), 342-355; Aleksandar Matkovski, “Auftreten und Ausbreitung des Tabaks auf der Balkanhalbinsel,” _ Stidost-Forschungen 28 (1969), 48—93.

153. Geng, “XVIII. yiizy:ilda Osmanl ekonomisi ve savas,” p. 54.

154. Spyros I. Asdrachas, “Marchés et prix du blé en Gréce au XVIII siécle,” Siidost-Forschungen 31 (1972), 178-209, particularly 201—209.

155. Quoted in Issawi, “Population and Resources,” p. 158. 156. Sevket Pamuk, Osman: ekonomist ve diinya kapitalizmi, 1820-1913 (Ankara: Yurt Yayinevi, 1984), p. 16. Wheat exports from Macedonia to France and Italy during the “boom” years 1763-1766 averaged approximately 2000 tons annually. Towards the end of the century, grain exports were no longer a profitable business. See Asdrachas, “Marchés et prix du blé,” pp. 202, 200. 157. Dusanka Bojani¢, “Edno Ohridsko kanunname,” Glasnik na institutot za nacionalna istorija 3 (1959), 295 (translation by B. McGowan in Economic Life in Ottoman Europe, p. 13'7).

158. Inalcaik, “The Emergence of Big Farms,” p. 118. 159. “Ayan de la région d’Izmir et commerce du Levant (deuxiéme moitié du XVIII* siécle),” Revue de ’'Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée 20 (1975), 131-147. This article appeared also in Etudes balkaniques 12:3 (1976), 71-83. 160. Inalcik, “The Emergence of Big Farms,” p. 124.

161. In the lists of property and money left by the leading families of Sarajevo during the first half of the nineteenth century ¢ifiliks play a subordinate role. See Yuzo Nagata, Materials on the Bosnian Notables (Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, 1979). The same can be

inferred from a recent monography on an Anatolian dyan “dynasty”: Necdet Sakaoglu, Anadolu derebeyt ocaklarindan Kose Pasa hanedant (Ankara: Yurt Yayin-

evi, 1984). . 162. That is why I would characterize the dyan not so much as a factor cen-

172 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE trifugal in tendency, but essentially as an integrating force in the service of the central government. Without the dyan and their Christian counterpart, the ¢orbacis, the Ottoman command economy would not have functioned. Regarding the sociopolitical rise of the dyan, Huri Islamoglu and Caglar Keyder speak in a similar vein of “the localization of power, [which] did not indicate a transition to feudalism.” See “Agenda for Ottoman History,” Review 1:1 (1977), 46.

163. On questions of periodization in Ottoman economic history of the nineteenth century see Sevket Pamuk, “Kapitalist dinya ekonomisi ve Osmanh dis ticaretinde uzun dénemli dalgalanmalar,” ODTU Gelisme Dergisi 1979-80 Ozel

Sayist, pp. 161~204, and “World Economic Crises and the Periphery: The Case of Turkey,” in Ascent and Decline in the World-System, Edward Friedman, ed. (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1982), pp. 147-161. 164. For a monographic treatment of the subject see Mtibahat S. Kutikoglu, Osmanh-Ingiliz iktisadi miindsebetleri, II (1838-1850) (Istanbul: Istanbul Universitesi Yayinlani, 1976). On negative effects of free trade see Salgur Kangal, “La conquéte du marché interne ottoman par le capitalisme industriel concurrentiel (1838—1881),” in Economie et société dans Empire ottoman, pp. 355-409. The argu-

ment about the disastrous effects of the treaty of 1838 has been critically reviewed by Orhan Kurmus, “The 1838 Treaty of Commerce Re-Examined,” Economie et société dans Empire Ottoman, pp. 411-417.

165. Tevfik Gtran, “Tanzimat déneminde tarim politikasi, 1839-1876,” in Osman Okyar and Halil Inalcik, eds. Tiirkiye’nin sosyal ve ehonomik tarihi/Social and

Economic History of Turkey (1071-1920) (Ankara: Meteksan, 1980), pp. 271-277.

On the Ottoman reform movement see, apart from the classical work of R. H. Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856—1876 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), two interesting recent studies: Marija Todorova, Anglija, Rusija 1 Tanzimatit (Sofija: Nauka i izkustvo, 1980), and Irma L’vovna Fadeeva, Osmanskaja imperija 1 anglo-tureckte otnoseniya v seredine XIX v. (Moskva: Nauka, 1982).

166. Pamuk, Osmanl: ekonomisi ve diinya kapitalizmi (Ankara: Yurt, 1984), pp. 42, 46f. 167. Text in Belin, “Etude sur la propriété fonciére,” pp. 291~358. For an

analysis of the new law see Omer L. Barkan, “Turk toprak hukuku tarihinde Tanzimat ve 1274 (1858) tarihli arazi kanunnamesi,” in Maarif Vek4leti, Tanzimat, I. Yiiztincii yldniimii miinasebetiyle (Istanbul: Maarif Basimevi, 1940), pp. 321~421. See also Halil Inalcik, “Tanzimatin uygulanmasi ve sosyal tepkileri,” Belleten 28 (1964), 623-690; Fani Ganeva Milkova, “Razvitie i charakter na osmanskoto pozemleno zakonodatelstvo ot 1839 do 1878 g.,” Istoriceski pregled 21:5 (1965), 31-55; Louba Belarbi, “Les mutations dans les structures fonciéres dans l’Empire ottoman a l’époque du Tanzimat,” in Economie et société dans (Empire ottoman, pp. 251-259.

168. Giran, “Tanzimat déneminde tarim politikasi,” p. 74f. 169. Fadeeva, Osmanshaja imperiyja, pp. 75ff.; Orhan Kurmus, Emperyalizmin Tiirkiye’ye girisi (Istanbul: Bilim Yayinlari, 1974), pp. 76ff.

170. Giiran, “Tanzimat déneminde tarim politikasi,” p. 276.

TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 173 171. Pamuk, Osmanl: ekonomisi ve diinya kapitalizmi, p. 80. 172. Pamuk, Osmanl: ekonomisi ve diinya kapitalizmi, pp. 18~36. 173. Christo Gandev, Zarazdane na kapntalisticeski otnosenija vu cifliskoto stopanstvo na Severozapadna Biilgarya prez XVIII vek (Sofija: Bulgarska akademija na

naukite, 1962); K. Iretek, and M. K. Sarafov, Raport na komisijata, izpratena v Kjustendilskija okrug da izutit polozenieto na bezzemlenite seljani (Sofija: J. S. Kovacek, 1880).

174. Stra3imir Dimitrov, “Kim vuiprosa za otmenjavaneto na spachijskata sistema v naSite zemi,” Istorigeski pregled 12:6 (1956), 27-58, especially 55-58. On

gospodarlik see Halil Inalcik, Tanzimat ve Bulgar meselesi (Ankara: Tirk Tarih Kurumu, 1943), pp. goff. On the juridical aspect of the gospodartk relationship see also Fani G. Milkova, Pozemlenata sobstvenost v biilgarskite zemi prez XIX vek (Sofija: Nauka 1 izkustvo, 1970), pp. 214-226.

175. See Stra8imir Dimitrov, “Cifliskoto stopanstvo prez 50~7ote godini na XX v.,” Istoriceskt pregled 11:2 (1955), 3-34, and “Za klasovoto razsloenie sred seljanite v severoiztotna Bilgarija prez 70-te godini na XIX v.,” Izvestija na Instituta za istorya prt Bilgarskata akademija na naukite 8 (1960), 225-271; N. G. Levintov, “Agrarnye otnoSenija v Bolgarii nakanune osvoboZdenya i agrarnyj perevorot 1877—1879 godov,” in L. B. Valeva, S. A. Nikitina, P. H. ‘Tretiakov, eds. Osvoboidenie Bolgari ot turechkogo iga: Sbornik state} (Moskva: Izd-vo Akademii

nauk SSR, 1953), pp. 199-221; S. A. Nikitin, “Materialy russkoj agrarnoj perepisi 1879 g. v Bolgarii i ich nauénoe znacenie,” in Ezegodnik po agrarnoj istortt vostocnoj Evropy 1964 god. (KiSinev, 1966), pp. 769-779; R. J. Crampton, “Bulgarian Society in the Early 19th Century,” in Balkan Society in the Age of Greek

Independence, Richard Clogg, ed. (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 157-204; Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, p. 134f. 176. See Fikret Adanir, Die Makedonische Frage. Ihre Entstehung und Entwicklung bis 1908. (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1979), pp. 24-42, “Zum Verhaltnis von Agrarstruktur und nationaler Bewegung in Makedonien 1878—1908,” and “The

Macedonian Question: The Socio-economic Reality and Problems of Its Historiographic Interpretation,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 3:1 (Winter, 1984-1985), 43-64. 177. James Lewis Farley, The Resources of Turkey, considered with espectal refer-

ence to the profitable investment of capital in the Ottoman Empire... (London: Longman, 1863), p. 149. 178. McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe, pp. 121-170.

179. See Donald Quataert, “The Commercialization of Agriculture in Ottoman Turkey, 1800-1914,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 1:2 (Autumn, 1980), 38-55. 180. McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe, p. 165. 181. The plain of Salonica gets less than 45 centimeters of rain annually; that of Seres 55, centimeters; and that of Skopje 45 centimeters. See Makedonzya kako prirodna 1 ekonomska celina (Skopje: Institut za nacionalna istorija, 1978), pp. 60, 108, 172. 182. Edwin Fels, Landgewinnung in Griechenland (Gotha: J. Perthes, 1944),

174 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE p. 25. The corresponding figures for the plain of Seres in 1933 were 437 sq km out of 1180 sq km; see p. 40. 183. A salt content in the coastal plains of Salonica and Seres even higher than that of sea water was not unusual. See D. S. Catacousinos, “Les sols de

, Gréce,” Science du Sol 1 (mai, 1963), p. 4. On the question of salinity see further Gj. Filipovski, “Resultati od pedoloSkite ispituvanja vo. Gevgelisko pole,” Godisen zbornik na Zemjodelsko-sumarskiot fakultet na Universitetot Skopje: Zemjodelstvo 8-9 (1954/55—-1955/56), 209-284; I. M. Kalovoulos and S. A. Paxinos, “Paratéréseis epi allouviak6n tip6n edaf6n tés Voreiou Ellados,” in: Aristoteleion Panepistémion Thessalontkés. Epetéris tés gedpontkés kai dasologikés scholés (1962), pp. 123-137.

184. George Bouyoucos, “A Study of the Fertility of the Soils of Greece,” Soil Science 13 (1922), 63—79.

185. See Gj. Filipovski, “Poévite na Strumickoto pole. (Uslovi za poévoobrazuvanje, pocvi i melioracija na Strumickoto pole),” Godisen zbornik na ZemjodelskoSumarskiot fakultet na Universitetot Skopje: Zemjodelstvo 2 (1948-1949), 57-325;

Miladin Mickovski, “Azotofiksaciona mona nekoi poéveni tipovi vo Skopsko,” ibid. 5 (1951-1952), pp. 207-232; Angelina Stojkovska, “Agrochemiska karakteristika na skeledoidniot deluvium vo Polog (Zemjodelsko uéiliste),” zbid. 12 (1958-1959), pp. 201-225.

186. This explained why the peasants left “beautiful valleys and plains [...in order] to farm these rock mountains,” as Bouyoucos expressed it. See “A Study of the Fertility of the Soils of Greece,” p. 64. 187. A. Sopov, who served as the official agent (de facto general consul) of the Bulgarian Government in Salonica during the first decade of the twentieth century, published a statistic on social relations in Macedonian villages under the jurisdiction of the Bulgarian Exarchate, classifying them into three groups: independent, partly ¢zfthk, and ¢2ftlzk. This statistic showed only about half of the vil-

lages as independent. See A. Sopov, “Bulgarskoto kulturno delo v Makedonija v cifri,” Biilgarska sbirka 18:5 (1911), 307. Sopov’s article has been used by Ch. Christov, Agrarnite otnosenija v Makedonya, p. 121, and by Danéo Zografski, Razvitokot na kapitalistickite elementi vo Makedonija za vreme na turskoto vladeenje (Skopje:

Kultura, 1967), pp. 129—130. 188. Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, p. 136. The authors quote Christov, Agrarnite otnosenya v Makedonya, p. 86f., as their source. 189. Christov, Agrarnite otnosenya v Makedoniya, p. go. Admittedly, neither the geographic area, nor the period serving as the basis of calculation in these differ-

ent sources are identical. Nevertheless, in view of the fact that the border of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia runs barely 4o miles north of Salonica and that only a decade or two separate the periods in question, such a fantastic divergence between the two sets of data quoted does not seem plausible to me. 190. The Macedonian output was about gooo tons in 1780, two-thirds of which were exported. See Issawi, The Economic History of Turkey, p. 233.

191. See Traian Stoianovich, “Pour un modéle du commerce du Levant: économie concurrentielle et économie de bazar, 1500-1800,” AIESEE Bulletin

TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE 175 12:2 (1974), 61-120, particularly 106-109; Michel Palairet, “Désindustrialisation

a la périphérie: études sur la région des Balkans au XIX* siécle,” Hustorre, Economie et Société 4 (1985), 253-274; see especially 257f. 192. Douglas E. Farnie, The English Cotton Industry and the World Market 1815-

1896 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 83. 193. The decade after 1812 saw also the decay of the textile manufacturing

centers of Thessaly. See M. Palairet, “Désindustrialisation 4 la périphérie,” P- 259. 194. On the “cotton famine” see D. E. Farnie, The English Cotton Industry, pp.

135-170. Ottoman dependence on the world market is stressed by D. Quataert, “The Commercialization of Agriculture,” p. qef. 195. Issawi, The Economic History of Turkey, p. 234.

196. See Davis Trietsch, ed., Levante-Handbuch (Berlin: Gea Verlag, 1914), pp. 271 ff.; Leonhard Schultze, Makedonien. Landschafts-und Kulturbilder (Jena:

G. Fischer, 1927), p. 202; D. Iaranoff, La Macédoine économique (Sofia: P. Glouchoff, 1931), p. 69; Zografski, Razuitokot na kapitalistickite elementi, pp. 148156, 164f.

| 197. “Tabakanbau und Tabakausfuhr der europaischen Tirkei,” Osterreichische Monatsschrift fiir den Orient 33, (1907), 43f. See also Issawi, The Economic

History of Turkey, pp. 249-257. 198. Jovan HadzZi-Vasiljevic, Skoplje 1 njegova okolina. Istoriska, ethografska i kul-

turno-politicka izlaganja (Beograd; Stamparija ‘Sv. Sava,’ 1930), p. 214. 199. “Wages in Turkey,” in: Tiirkzye’nin sosyal ve ekonomik tarihi, pp. 263-270.

200. High wages and cheap land are cited by M. Palairet as causes for the decline of the manufacturing centers in Thessaly. See “Désindustrialisation a la périphérie,” p. 263f. 201. “Wages in Turkey,” p. 265. 202. Quoted in Issawi, The Economic History of Turkey, p. 225. See also Draganoff’s calculations from the beginning of the twentieth century, which support the thesis that small holdings were economically more viable than the ¢ifilkk farms, in La Macédoine et les réformes (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1906), pp. 48-53. 203. Issawi, The Economic History of Turkey, p. 24. 204. See Jacques Ancel, La Macédoine. Son évolution contemporaine (Paris: Delagrave, 1930); Dimitri Pentzopoulos, The Balkan Exchange of Minorities and Its Impact Upon Greece (Paris-The Hague: Mouton, 1962).

205. “The point is that ‘relations of production’ that define a system are the ‘relations of production’ of the whole system, and the system at this point in time is the European world-economy.” Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, p. 127. 206. “The seventeenth-century crisis was a distribution crisis, not a production crisis.” Niels Steensgaard, “The Seventeenth-Century Crisis,” in The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, p. 42.

207. I do not attribute to the demographic factor a determining role, but I feel obliged to take into account the results of sound scholarship, which seem to me, furthermore, conducive to a comparatistic approach in historical re-

176 TRADITION AND RURAL CHANGE search. Cf. Guy Bois, “Against the Neo-Malthusian Orthodoxy,” Past and Present

_ 79 (May 1978), 60-69. 208. Robert Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” Past and Present 97 (November 1982), 16. 209. See Pamuk, Osmanl: ekonomisi ve diinya kapitalizmi, pp. 1 26ff.

210. With this I do not want to imply that anyone has made such a direct assertion, but I do not know how else to interpret the statement that between 1750 and 1815, “the Ottoman state was also being incorporated into the interstate

system, the other important dimension of the capitalist world-economy.” See Wallerstein and Kasaba, “Incorporation into the World-Economy,” p. 3532.

STIX

Imperial Borderlands or Capitalist Periphery? Redefining Balkan Backwardness, 1520-1914 John R. Lampe

What exactly do Western scholars mean when they describe the Balkan

economies of the early modern period and the nineteenth century as “packward”? Clearly, at the end of those four centuries, the real per capita income of the four independent Balkan states was barely onequarter of the average for the industrialized economies of Western Europe. This disparity admittedly falls far short of the present-day gap between European levels of income and much of the Third World. The fact remains that the pre-1914 Balkan economies were based overwhelmingly on small-scale peasant agriculture and were only beginning

the process of large-scale industrialization, which has been the hallmark | of modern growth. Structural shifts of labor and financial or human capital into advanced technology, which turns such growth into sustained development, were just starting to occur. To the extent, a lesser extent than we used to think, that Western industrialization has not been the result of exceptional geographic and political advantages, we may then speak of the Balkan experience as a case of “delayed development” or

“arrested modernization” along an ascending path open to all. Two questions follow: how far back do we trace the delay and what were the arresting agents? Both questions have generated increasing controversy. Most scholars,

East and West, Marxist and non-Marxist, would agree that the delay began no later than the several centuries of Ottoman subjugation or domination which preceded national independence, at least for some Balkan lands, in the nineteenth century. Western historians have typically stressed the last century of disintegrating Ottoman rule as the most 177

178 REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS damaging to economic development. Native Balkan scholars have char-

acterized the entire Ottoman period as an unbroken interruption. But both groups have tended to agree that Ottoman hegemony has been the principal disadvantage unfairly imposed on the Balkan economies and the main barrier to following the Western path. One Western school of neo-Marxist scholarship has now challenged this consensus. The American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein has examined early modern Europe in order to apply dependency theory. This approach blames limited Latin American development in the modern period on capitalist “core states” exploiting the cheap labor of the “periphery” to extract its raw materials.' Wallerstein’s eye soon fell on some speculation about the Balkan’s—one hesitates to call it more—by the eminent French historian, Fernand Braudel. According to Braudel,

rising British and French demand for primary products (here corn, cotton, and tobacco) prompted the appearance in the Ottoman Balkans of something like the “second serfdom,” which is described in detailed research by Matowist and other Polish researchers of the 1950s who studied the early modern period of Northeastern Europe. Several

Turkish scholars have been attracted to Wallerstein’s approach and argue with him for the elaboration of this Braudelian notion.’ In the process, Ottoman hegemony is largely absolved of its retarding effect on Balkan (and Anatolian) development.

This notion of a malignant world system has gathered momentum from its nationalistic appeal to Third World scholars, from its resonance in the Marxist tradition, and from Wallerstein’s own energy and erudition. Much of this essay will be devoted to demonstrating how such an approach, however satisfying emotionally, flies in the face of existing research on Balkan economic history. It also fails to identify the real restraints on the area’s development. Some alternate explanation of Balkan “backwardness” must therefore be spelled out here as well. The work of native Marxist scholars, overwhelmingly unresponsive to the Wallerstein approach, is helpful. They have presented fresh evidence that the nature of Ottoman hegemony must after all bear a heavy share of the responsibility.* So, the present writer argues, must the neighboring Habsburg monarchy. The military rivalry and fiscal imperatives of the two empires had a retarding effect, demographic as well as economic, on the Balkan borderlands that they shared. Western European economic “penetration,” a sinister word suggesting direct control but in fact meaning foreign trade and investment, was conspicuous by its relative absence. Separate sections will examine Balkan trade and the changing agricultural regime during the period

REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS 179

1500 to 1800, another the impact of the Habsburg economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a final one the experience of the independent Balkan states in comparison with a reduced Ottoman Empire until the First World War. An initial section must however begin with the question of where we are to place the Balkan economies within the European spectrum on the eve of the Ottoman conquest. If we are to accept Wallerstein’s inclusion

of the area in Eastern Europe and his schema for the early modern “development of underdevelopment,” we should find only a “slight difference,” in his words, between East and West by the end of the fifteenth century.* THE BALKANS BEFORE THE OTTOMAN CONQUEST

Like the rest of Eastern Europe, the Balkan territories shared a longer, more fateful experience as borderlands to militarily powerful, imperial states than did Western Europe. The northwestern part of the continent was effectively more of a secure peninsula (and less of a vulnerable cross-

roads) than the southeastern part from the fall of the (western) Roman Empire forward. The northwest’s agricultural geography was also more favorable, as we shall see. The Balkan experience stands apart from the rest of Eastern Europe’s, moreover, in its early juxtaposition to two successive colossi, the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. The power of Byzantium was based not only on its military capacity but also on its centralized political and religious structure. Its monetized economy rested in turn on both market trade between urban centers, in and outside the empire, and also on state commands. Guild-regulated artisan shops provided most manufactures; only arms came from state factories. The stature of the Byzantine gold solidus as the most stable and sought-after coinage even in Western European commerce symbolizes the relatively higher level of economic development maintained by this eastern Roman Empire through at least the eleventh century.* Yet this higher level of Byzantine development so close to Bulgaria probably dis-

couraged advancement beyond a natural economy for this first and nearest of the emerging Balkan states. Robert Browning’s useful study of the tenth century Bulgarian kingdom reveals a state without its own coinage, still dependent on taxes in kind for the support of its towns as well as its army.® The very Bulgarian word for “price,” cena, then meant “taxation.” The neighboring Byzantine colossus helped to perpetuate this natural economy. Its constant military pressure kept the army’s provisioning paramount for the Bulgarians. Byzantine traders or traveling

180 REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS artisans even supplied them with arms and urban luxuries. Here was real dependence. The contemporary experience of the several emerging centers of trade and artisan production in Northwestern Europe was different, despite the existence of much more developed Italian commercial cities to the south. The greater distances, the barrier of the Alps, and the division

of Italian armed power all permitted the northwestern centers to link up with each other and with the Italian cities on a market rather than a military basis. Together these towns formed a growing commercial network. The eminent French medievalist Georges Duby fixes this West-

ern linkup in the 1180s and calls it one of the “main turning points in European economic history.”’ No such network of commercial centers connected Balkan and Byzantine territory by that date or afterwards. Fewer navigable rivers and a less accessible coastline surely help to explain this relative deficiency.

If the lack of urban markets restrained the early Balkan economy, rural depopulation dealt it another serious setback in the late medieval period. By the thirteenth century the revived Bulgarian state was admittedly issuing its own coinage, collecting money taxes, producing artisan manufactures, and exporting grain from the Black Sea; the Serbian state would soon follow suit. But problems were building in the countryside there, and on Byzantine territory as well, before the advent of the Black Death.

The so-called Agricultural Revolution of the Twelfth Century had brought deep-furrowing iron plows pulled by collared horses to North-

western Europe. Cultivated area expanded significantly. Such techniques had not spread to the southeast. The greater, more consistent rainfall and heavy, fertile soil of the northwest were partly responsible for this advantage. Lighter lowland soil and a far larger proportion of unarable upland terrain discouraged coordinated cropping of large fields in the southeast. It may also have encouraged the native nobility to be more independent of a lowland base. The second Bulgarian and first Serbian states were too consumed with fighting Byzantine and then

Ottoman forces for survival to pursue such peaceful changes. Their feudal nobility imposed labor days on the peasantry at the very time that their Western European counterparts were reacting to growing popula-

tion and markets by commuting such obligations to money rents. In Byzantine Macedonia, meanwhile, the rise of state taxes and the spread

of church estates only prompted peasant migration into the uplands, away from such impositions.? As in Western Europe, the bubonic plague of the fourteenth century

REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS 181 may have carried away one-quarter of the population, a drop on Balkan

territory from perhaps 6 to 4.5 million. Both a relatively arid climate and the absence of plague references in primary sources raise doubts about applying this Western level of loss to the Balkans. More certainly the countryside was hit harder than the towns, unlike Western Europe. Falling birthrates and increased peasant migration followed the pestilence. Viticulture declined; more grain-growing land was left fallow.'° After the Black Death, as before, Balkan status as primarily a military

frontier kept the countryside from expanding its agricultural frontier in French fashion. Italian, Norman, and Hungarian incursions had joined with the Bulgaro-Byzantine battles of the earlier period to discourage such expansion. From the fourteenth century forward, the new Serbian state and the Ottoman presence, which had spread from Anatolia a century before the fall of Constantinople in 1453, kept the Balkan

borderlands in turmoil. Bulgarian Marxist historians have rightly disputed the Braudelian assumption that the final Ottoman conquest of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was passively and painlessly accepted. Few would go so far as to speak of a “demographic catastrophe.”” But if the loss of life was limited and only the large towns were sacked, local native resistance to Ottoman forces was still sufficient to delay full control for a century or more. Moving to higher ground and raising livestock now seemed safer, especially in the Serbian and Greek lands. The motive was survival, not commercial advantage. All this helps us to understand the pattern of Balkan settlement predominant by the eighteenth century: “loosely nucleated” upland villages strung out over several miles. Such a pattern would deprive the Balkan peasantry of an “institutional center” of the sort that Robert Brenner has identified as an advantage for commercial growth enjoyed by West over East German villages of the same period.”? We are left to conclude, with the British Marxist Perry Anderson, that the principal economic re-

sult of centuries of struggle on the Balkan borderlands prior to 1500 was the “slow... reciprocal exhaustion” of the native as well as the Byzantine adversaries.'* This process helped to create a gap between the Balkan and Western European economies which was already significant, and not slight, by 1500. BALKAN TRADE FROM 1500 TO 1800

The long period of unchecked Ottoman hegemony over all Balkan ter-

ritories except the western Yugoslav lands and the Romanian principalities stretched from the fifteenth until the nineteenth century. By

182 REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS most standards of economic comparison to Western Europe, the Ottoman Balkans lost more ground during this period. Wallerstein and his followers suspect Western European penetration, specifically the spread of sharecropping estates in response to a growing export market. But detailed research by native Marxist scholars stresses instead the feudal features of the Ottoman system of administration and is reluctant to emphasize capitalist growth. The most recent Western research looks to Malthus rather than the marketplace, that is, to demographic restraints rather than to commercial integration, to explain the region’s relative decline during the seventeenth century. All sides neglect the aforementioned limits of physical geography. The ongoing debate in and out of the Marxist spectrum about what to call the initial Ottoman system of land administration need not be resolved in order to agree with the compelling case for demographic restraint even before 1600. The stpahi system of permanent postings for cavalry officers to collect fixed taxes in kind from the Balkan peasantry to provision the army and Constantinople survived much of the sixteenth century without becoming a process of exorbitant exactions from heritable holdings. Its outlines were clearly similar to the pronoia regime imposed earlier by an equally powerful Byzantine state. Was this Ottoman system “feudalism,” as Bulgarian scholarship has long maintained, or an “Asian mode of production,” as some Hungarian and Turkish his-

torians have recently argued? Or was it a command economy on a politico-military pattern not compatible with Marxist categories of class origins, as several Western scholars including myself have suggested?

Both Bulgarian and Hungarian schools of thought would probably agree with Sir John Hicks that important elements of peasant custom, or “belowness,” were mixed with the “aboveness” of the ruling land regime.'* They readily admit that urban markets occupied a significant, if hardly predominant, place in the early Ottoman economy. Theoretical constructs aside, what picture do we have of actual conditions in the urban and rural economies of the Ottoman Balkans during this initial period? Recent Bulgarian scholarship probably provides the most comprehensive view, drawing not only on the considerable Ottoman records in Bulgarian archives but also on new research in the vast, uncharted Turkish holdings in Istanbul. This view of the sixteenth century finds more dynamic commerce and credit among urban Moslems

and a less fair agricultural regime for the Bulgarian peasantry than Western Ottomanists have generally recognized.'® The crucial institution for commercial development was the vakif, or religious inheritance under Moslem law. Ostensibly “owned only by god”

REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS 183 and dedicated to some charitable or religious purpose, the vakif quickly became the principal means for Ottoman notables to endow their children with almost private property of enduring, if limited financial value. Through this device, an tmaret system of urban properties collected rents for shops, fees from inns and other commercial facilities, and even interest for credit, at otherwise forbidden market rates. Profits could not go directly into private hands, but beneficiaries of the inheritance often

administered the property. Internal trade benefited, although not to the extent of including manufactured goods, whose traffic was discouraged by the guild system. Not many non-Moslems were involved at this early stage. Foreign trade flourished for a time, especially through the Adriatic entrepot of Dubrovnik. But the Ottoman orientation to overland expansion and the military conflicts with Venice and the Western

European maritime powers eventually cut into Mediterranean trade, even through Dubrovnik, by the last decades of the sixteenth century. At the same time, rural disorder and unreliable army units also made internal trade less attractive, a phenomenon long recognized by West-

ern Ottomanists from the seventeenth century forward. Even at the start of the sixteenth, moreover, the famous t2mar system of noninheritable occupation and tax collection by the Sultan’s sipahi cavalry officers did not ensure a strong rural regime in every region. This was an improvement on peasant obligations under the native medieval states. First, the amount of agricultural land under the tzmar system was quickly approached by rural vakif land. No limits on collections from the native peasantry applied to these vakif holdings. They were not miri, that is, state land. Second, the small sum constituting a tamar was collected from an even smaller territory, typically part of a village. Collections of the annual grain harvest included not only 10 percent taken in tax but also larger additional amounts purchased at low, fixed prices to feed Istanbul or the army. Further, irregular collections of grain accompanied the frequent sixteenth-century European campaigns of the massive Ottoman army. (Some 300,000 men besieged Vienna in 1529.) The weight of these impositions helps explain population growth for the sixteenth-century Ottoman Balkans, which the best Bulgarian estimates now regard as low, less than 20 percent. This is significantly under the increment of one-half posited for the empire as a whole between 1530 and 1600 by Omer Barkan, the preeminent Turkish Ottomanist. Barkan’s pioneering estimates reflect an 80 percent urban increase, but mainly because Istanbul doubled, and a 40 percent rural increase, but mainly from Anatolia. The lack of a specifically Balkan benchmark

- for the end of the century and uncertainty about when tax registers

184 REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS . switched from counting households to adult males, or adopted some combination of the two, leaves any precise estimate in doubt. But even if we accept Barkan’s increment, from 5.3 million in 1530 to 8 million by 1600, the striking fact remains that the density of Balkan population at the end of this advance remained well below the Western European average, for example, less than one half of the French figure.’ As in Northeastern Europe, this low density encouraged only extensive cultivation with existing agricultural technology and discouraged specialized trade. The Balkan lack of coastal access or navigable rivers

combined with the Ottoman wheat monopoly, designed to provision Constantinople at artificially low prices, to keep other urban grain markets from becoming integrated into a “national market.” It typically cost more than the purchase price to transport 100 kilograms of wheat just 100 kilometers. Bulk trade could hardly flourish under these conditions. Little wonder that the coefficient of variation (that is, the standard deviation divided by the mean) between wheat prices in Sofia and Constantinople never fell below 0.5 and in bad harvest years jumped to 3 or even as high as 4.” The seventeenth century saw this unusually low-density and limited trade network reduced still further. While the same worsening of climatic conditions apparently struck Western Europe as well, the Balkan incidence of warfare, disease, and migration was replicated only in the

German lands. French population rose slightly, the British total by perhaps one-third, but the German not at all. Like the latter area, the Balkan lands faced hunger, typhus, recurring warfare, and local disorder. Much of this misfortune was caused by the revival of OttomanHabsburg warfare, which carried on into the eighteenth century. Even rough estimates of Balkan population of the early eighteenth century are perilous, but it is impossible to construct a case for more than 6 or 7 million souls. This total may well reflect no “demographic catastrophe” for the seventeenth century, as Bruce McGowan and others have argued on the questionable assumption of 8 million for 1600. It does, however, suggest a total absence of population growth and a declining economy." The blame for this decline lay primarily with the failure of the Ottoman

land regime to withstand these exogenous shocks. The introduction of

corn (maize) cultivation in the seventeenth century, much heralded in the Braudelian literature, served mainly to feed a greater number of livestock and in any case did not extend into the southern Balkans, except for the eastern Greek coast, because of its more arid climate. Wheat cultivation seems to have declined by one-third between the late sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries.'®

REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS 185

How much should this broad picture of demographic decline and rural distress be explained or modified by the pattern of Ottoman foreign trade? The Wallerstein school holds that almost any pattern of foreign trade between a developed economy selling manufactures and

a less developed economy, offering only its primary products, will exploit the latter. The “terms of trade” for primary products presumably decline. Any export surplus that the less developed economy receives only results in extractive foreign investment. This approach has been challenged with evidence that the terms of trade (indices of export versus import price) do not consistently favor manufactures.” The Wallersteinians also deny the neoclassical theory of the “gains from trade” which posits an advantage for both trading partners until their endow-

ments in labor, capital, and other factors of production have been equalized. But given the differences in tastes and technology between Western Europe and the Ottoman Balkans, it would be difficult to measure these gains even with fully accurate trade figures. What figures we do have nonetheless make a strong case against the Wallerstein view, derived from dependency theory, of increasingly large and disadvantageous trade with Western Europe during the eighteenth century. Despite a twofold jump in cotton sold to France and England,

Ottoman exports to Europe as a whole did not increase even a little in real terms between the late seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries.”' While Constantinople consistently ran an import surplus, the empire as a whole and its Balkan lands apparently continued to record an export surplus throughout the period. Were capitalist penetration increasing, on the trade pattern suggested by André Gunder Frank, the Ottoman export surplus should have been increasing. Instead, according to painstaking Bulgarian research into the constant silver value of Ottoman trade, that surplus was shrinking from the early seventeenth century forward.” Ottoman wheat exports increased enough in price after 1600 to eliminate the advantage that had attracted Italian purchases in the late sixteenth century. As Ottoman terms of trade improved, the export surplus declined. Rising artisan and mineral prices within the Empire attracted more Western European imports and trimmed the surplus still further until the mid-seventeenth century. A subsequent fall in those domestic prices cut back on demand for Western European imports. Canceling out this implied boost to the Ottoman export surplus by the early eighteenth century was a renewed surge in the level of local prices for most major export commodities. They rose to or slightly past Western European levels. The one set of precise trade figures we have for the Ottoman Balkans

186 REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS in particular, a contemporary accounting by Boujour for Salonika, does show a large export surplus, of 8.8 million piastres versus 5 million in imports in 1798. This was of course an exceptional wartime year, hardly

suitable to stand for the eighteenth century as a whole. But the distribution of trade is probably representative of the last decades of the century in that exports overland to Austrian or German destinations accounted for over half of all exports and virtually all of the surplus.” The prominence of French traders in buying cotton and tobacco, the new cultivations heralded by Braudel, had faded by the 1770s, long before revolutionary turmoil and war. The contribution of Ottoman trade to French and especially British commercial profit and capital formulation was clearly miniscule during the eighteenth century. Let us accept the recent reckonings by a British economic historian Patrick O’Brien, that foreign trade profits of this era averaged 10 percent of export or import prices and that these aggregate profits were also 10 percent of gross investment for Western Europe (perhaps 15 percent for England). The small fractions to which Ottoman exports and imports had shrunk in French and English trade (respectively 5 and 1 percent by the 1780s) therefore made tiny contributions to capital formation in these “core states,” 0.5 and 0.15 percent respectively. O’Brien’s conclusion that “for the economic growth of the core, the periphery was peripheral,” seems particularly accurate for the Ottoman Empire.” Trade profits aside, Western Europe does not appear to have gained any significant advantage from the shrinking import surplus maintained in its trade with the Ottoman Empire into the eighteenth century. Payment for the excess of Ottoman exports could hardly come from returns on direct investment, because there were none. The larger surpluses of the period 1550-1700 had been covered, in the face of the Ottoman ban

on silver export, by an influx of European silver coins, minted fresh from the new American sources of supply. Some European traders undoubtedly balanced their books by speculating in the sale of these coins and even in counterfeiting them. But this speculation and counterfeiting discouraged the further growth of trade and soon led to the illegal flight of silver metal out of the Ottoman economy. The debasement of silver content in Ottoman coinage which began during the Price Revolution of 1550—1650 (a twofold increase in the price index, versus debasement barely half of that) continued beyond the original stimulus of the European silver influx. And, as in Western Europe, the pressures of population growth and rising state expendi-

tures played a powerful role in price increases and coin debasement.

REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS 187 Earl Hamilton’s original emphasis on an exaggerated quantity of new money had tended to neglect these two pressures.” The rise in Ottoman budget expenditures after 1550 only accelerated in the seventeenth century. Expenses, which were three-quarters military, tripled from 1630 to 1691. Revenues barely doubled. These deficits added to the “perpetual money shortage” that the Greek historian Svoronos has called the greatest single obstacle to the development of Ottoman commerce by the eighteenth century.” European traders could not count on either the availability or the stable, undiscounted exchange value of Ottoman coin-

age. Here was a major reason that first English and Dutch and then French merchants had increasingly turned to the more profitable and predictable Atlantic-centered trade. CHANGING AGRICULTURAL REGIMES OF THE BALKANS

The changing structure of the Ottoman land regime provides one final place to seek empirical support for the Wallerstein hypothesis that the capitalist Western European core “underdeveloped” the Ottoman periphery to the former’s advantage. What specifically were the dimensions and the dynamics of the giftlk sharecropping estates that spread across some parts of the Ottoman Balkans? Their appearance cannot be denied. But to what extent were they a Balkan response to the perception, if not the reality, of European market demand and commercial penetration, a response based on the native exploitation of a cheap labor supply for staple export production which Wallerstein has called the key to peripheral undevelopment? This section suggests another explanation that better conforms with the trade patterns just noted and also with

the principal economic dynamic within the Ottoman Empire, fiscal rivalry between the imperial core and periphery. The location of the ¢iftlk estates constitutes the strongest argument

for their commercial character. They spread most widely along the Black Sea coast and inland near the Danube, as well as in the coastal areas and up the river valleys of northern Greece and Macedonia. Their sites were well placed for wheat, cotton, or tobacco export, to Constantinople or across the Mediterranean or up the Danube. Such export usually ensued, especially in the 1790s when the turmoil in France created shortages and extra demand across Europe. Yet the dates of origin, the size of the typical gifthk holding, and the nature of their owners and their means of acquisition all suggest an in-

ternal Ottoman dynamic more fiscal than commercial, more military

188 REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS than civilian in character. This last characteristic is the basis for the unvarying but increasingly well-supported argument by Bulgarian Marxist scholarship that we can only call this ¢iftl:k regime “feudal,” with “semicapitalist” features in some regions, and not virtually capitalist as suggested by Wallerstein. First, there is the matter of timing. The ¢iftlk holdings of private land, subject only nominally to the Porte’s desperate arrangements for taxfarming, appeared first in the Black Sea area in the early seventeenth

century. They had reached almost their full extent by 1700.”” Their numbers did not, in other words, increase during the eighteenth century when the export of cotton and tobacco from the Ottoman Balkans was becoming significant for the first time. Neither did the size of the typical gzftik holding increase during this period from 20~g30 hectares, composed of two or three taxable units from the old sipahi regime.” Larger holdings surpassing 500 hectares have been recorded, but they were isolated exceptions. Even these remained a series of separate villages farmed on the basis of household sharecropping, rather than by several days a week in coordinated labor on the owner’s demesne. The more typical smaller agglomerations were farmed almost as often by upland peasants who came down to the lowlands only on a seasonable basis to raise wheat or cotton for market sale. They paid a semiannual money rent. Thus the Braudelian speculation that this was a “second serfdom,” prompted by widening export markets and comparable to the much-discussed transition from Grundherrschaft to Gutsherrschaft in the Polish and East German lands, simply does not stand up to empirical scrutiny. Local Turkish or Albanian military officers and minor officials were overwhelmingly the typical owners of what had been the Sultan’s land. It now became private property, but far more because of fiscal than market incentives. Owners had rarely achieved the authority or made the initial decision to acquire this ¢iftl4k holding on any kind of commercial basis. Seizure by force was overwhelmingly the most common method of acquisition; purchase or foreclosure because of peasant debt was the least common. Peasant tax arrears did, however, play a role in some of the seizures. As the original Ottoman system of specified t#mar tax collec-

tion through sipahi cavalry officers broke down during the seventeenth century, the Porte resorted to tax-farming, or miiltezim, arrangements to the highest bidder, which left collection in a larger number of hands. These mainly Turkish, always Moslem, officers and officials used the privilege of tax collection for the central government to expand provincial and local taxes greatly throughout the century, despite the Porte’s

REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS 189 protests. Support for their own local mercenary force was the major purpose for these new revenues. Moslem peasants had only to learn the use of firearms to join.

Recent research by Bulgarian, Turkish, and American scholars in Ottoman archival sources suggests the variety of ways this curious process of feudal evolution and fiscal conflict led to the seventeenth-century

expansion of ¢iftlik holdings.” Joining the seizure of former timar demesnes (hassa lands) or village commons in the Macedonian, southwest-

ern Bulgarian, and northern Greek lands was the takeover of peasant holdings, even whole villages deserted in the face of a growing tax bur-

den and growing disorder. As disorder and banditry spread with the mercenary recruitment of the seventeenth century, those peasants who would or could not flee to the towns returned to their own or another ¢iftltk village in return for physical security. Here was a classic feudal bargain, although without the hierarchy of feudal authorities familiar from early medieval Europe. Bruce McGowan’s careful case study of the Monastir region in southern Macedonia reveals that rising opportunities

for the export of cotton from the start of the American Revolution (1776) and for the export of wheat from the French Revolution (1789) came too late to explain the origins and even the spread of this ¢iftlik

regime.” Indeed, as Fikret Adanir notes elsewhere in this volume, a majority of ¢iftlkk land was probably used for grazing livestock rather than for raising crops. Khristo Gandev’s extensive research on the Vidin area of northwestern Bulgaria, near the Danube, adds only the seizure of previously empty, uncleared land to the varieties of ¢iftl#k expansion.*'

Another leading Bulgarian scholar, Strashimir Dimitrov, reckons that in any case the ¢iftlskk regime in the Bulgarian lands covered no more than 20 percent of cultivated land where it was widespread and less than 5 percent elsewhere by the end of the eighteenth century, with barely 10 percent of the Bulgarian population under its obligations.”

The predominant land regime in the eighteenth century Ottoman Balkans was instead the upland village, especially in the Serbian and Greek lands. Like many of the ¢zftlk, it raised livestock more than it cultivated crops. It paid its taxes to the Sultan through a single annual payment collected by its own Christian elders, now sanctioned by the Porte’s recognition of local notables, or dyan, as tax collectors without the cor-

rupting need to bid against all comers in Constantinople.* Although such villages and their ruling family networks did lack “institutional strength,” in Robert Brenner’s phrase, for commercial modernization, they were well suited to maintaining a military force sanctioned by some sort of local assembly. Here, for instance, were the earliest origins, en-

190 REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS

tirely non-Western, of what many Serbs rightly regard as their own

democratic tradition.* In summary, this potential for military, or at least guerilla, action in their upland retreats combined with the low density of lowland population to give the Balkan peasantry some leverage in a three-cornered struggle for power between themselves, the Ottoman central government, and the local Moslem military and judicial authorities. The result of this struggle before the nineteenth century was not clear-cut victory for any side but rather another case of “reciprocal exhaustion,” to use Perry Anderson’s phrase for the last stages of the borderland struggle between the Byzantine Empire and the medieval Balkan states. The principal Ottoman weakness in this struggle was not the nature of its trade relations with Western Europe but rather the rigidity of the Sultan’s bureaucracy and the hostility of an increasingly powerful Moslem clergy—as well as the artisan janissaries—to modern technology, even for military purposes. The debilitating dynamics of this class-like struggle, between what Alfred Lybyer identified before the First World War as the Ruling and Moslem Institutions, have recently received renewed endorsement from such disparate Western scholars as Eric L. Jones, Perry Anderson, and William H. McNeill.** Perhaps most costly was the Porte’s failure to pursue any improvements in military weaponry or organization until the eighteenth century and then to break off the several starts abruptly. Here resistance to change by the janissary infantry, military artisans in peacetime, clearly played a part. So did periodic victories over European armies despite the Ottoman disadvantages. Tactics In any case remained unchanged until the nineteenth century. The local Moslem military and other notables could not, for their part, extract enough income from the growing export wheat, of cotton or tobacco from their ¢iftlk holdings to consolidate their political power in any enduring way over a wide area. But their military power was at least sufficient, along with that of the Porte, to discourage any Great Power

partition of the Ottoman lands on the Polish pattern, in the unlikely event that the Western seapowers (England and France) and the Eastern land powers (Austria and Russia) could have come to terms. The Balkan peasantry retained two alternatives to ¢iftlikk sharecropping. Most chose the first of these, upland retreat into livestock raising. Terrain and their own guerilla tactics provided protection. But the rise of French trade in the Greek lands, followed from Salonika northward through Serbia by the increase in Habsburg trade later in the eighteenth century, offered some Balkan peasants the opportunity to join the nucleus of a native merchant class, the “wandering, Orthodox Balkan mer-

REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS 19] chants” so well-described by Traian Stoianovich.* In this fashion, the early modern growth of European trade offered some small numbers of the native population a way out of the disruption that recurrent warfare and a growing political stalemate was spreading across the Ottoman Balkans. It was in part the absence of Western European investment or immigration which opened the way for this option. IMPACT OF THE HABSBURG ECONOMY

The responsibility of Habsburg relations with the Ottoman Empire for most of the large-scale warfare and then for the majority of the foreign trade in the Balkan lands during the early modern period leads us ines-

capably to some separate treatment of this other imperial state. The Habsburg empire had assumed its own sort of non-Western identity by the seventeenth century. It became a state based on the religious imperatives of an incomplete Counter-Reformation and the military imperatives of an insecure border with an Islamic rival.*” Our concern in this section is nonetheless commercial and comes later. How did Ottoman trade and Habsburg economic policy affect those borderlands under Austrian or Hungarian control after the last Ottoman advance on Vienna had been turned back in 1683? The passive nature of that policy during the eighteenth century probably contributed more to the commercial development of the northern Yugoslav lands and of Transylvania than did the more active policies of economic integration during the nineteenth century.

We must be careful, however, not to exaggerate the importance of foreign trade for the Habsburg economy in either century. OttomanHabsburg trade doubled between 1711 and 1788 to reach one-fifth of the latter’s exports and imports combined. Yet that combined Habsburg total was itself only one-fifth the value of France’s total foreign trade. The Habsburg aggregate shrinks by almost one-half when we subtract commerce between the Austrian and Hungarian lands. This internal

commerce was included in imperial statistics for foreign trade. Trade between the two Habsburg lands accounted for 45 percent of the monar-

chy’s recorded foreign trade by 1780 and 70 percent by 1880. Thus trade actually outside the monarchy’s borders never got past 10 percent of the French per capita total. The monarchy was after all a largely landlocked territory without an overseas empire or oceanic ports to encourage commercial growth on the French, let alone the British, pattern. Its two Mediterranean ports of Trieste and Ryeka did export a large three to one surplus over im-

192 REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS ports from the Ottoman Levant by the 1780s, mainly textiles, prompting some protoindustrial growth in the Slovenian economy. The two ports were also the beneficiary of official support and some investment capital

from the Austrian Netherlands for sugar refining and shipbuilding, as well as the textile trade.*? But most Habsburg imports from the Ottoman Empire, enough to keep their growing trade of the 1780s in rough balance, were traveling neither to Trieste or Rijeka but overland across the Ottoman Balkans or the Romanian principalities. Habsburg economic policy along its southeastern border during the eighteenth century was primarily concerned with military security, not

mercantilist export promotion or even cameralist pursuit of tax revenues. Its overriding policy can best be called “populationism,” supported

by relatively free trade in order to provision the growth of permanent settlement as the best barrier against a renewed Ottoman offensive. The last major incursion had after all reached the outskirts of Vienna in 1683. Only its repulse saw the southern Hungarian lands and the Vojvodina recaptured after a century and half of Ottoman occupation. Austrian authorities thereupon extended the regime of the Habsburg Military Border into the Vojvodina from the Croatian lands, where it had been established as a barrier to Ottoman expansion in the sixteenth century. The border regime was extended to Transylvania from 1762. The detailed research of Gunther Rothenberg and Carl Géllner makes clear the low priority that Austrian officials attached to the commercial development of the wide band of territory that comprised the Military Border.* Grants of free land did attract permanent settlers, many from the Ottoman Balkans if not from the Romanian principalities. Yet the upland location of settlements, chosen for tactical advantage, and the long years of army service required of grantees in return hardly augured well for agricultural advance. Nor do we find the credit or educational facilities forthcoming which might have spread modern methods.

In the so-called civil areas of Slavonia and the Vojvodina, the record of agricultural modernization is much better, and the land was much

better. After harrowing initial hardships, primarily German colonists

succeeded in using their initial grants of land and three years’ tax exemption to expand the cultivated area and to introduce iron ploughs, _ fodder crops, and deep wells. Their favored position derived largely from an Austrian desire to prevent the return of Hungarian noble landowners to the area. Their grain, plus timber from Croatia-Slavonia, were in fact the major Habsburg exports overland to the Ottoman Balkans by the late eighteenth century. These were hardly the processed

REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS 193 manufactures whose export a proper mercantilist policy would have promoted. Instead, textiles and even some ironware accompanied the cotton, tobacco, hides, and livestock that were the principal imports from the Ottoman Balkans. Their total value swamped that of Habsburg exports over this route by 5 to 1.4! The exchanges remained largely in the hands of Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, and other Ottoman subjects throughout the century. An official

campaign in the 1770s to force those residing or even trading on the Habsburg side of the border to become subjects of the monarchy, and thereby pay the large 30-40 percent turnover taxes placed on internal trade, was too difficult to enforce and was soon abandoned. Stoianovich’s “wandering, Balkan Orthodox merchants” were left to pay only the low 3 percent tariff ad valorem on Ottoman exports, extended to the Porte by Vienna in 1774 as an economic concession for political advantage. The following year all tariffs were removed between the various Austrian lands, further opening the way for Balkan exports to Vienna and the industrially developing Czech lands. The Habsburg import surplus with the Balkan borderlands of the Ottoman Empire thus had an effect the reverse of what Frank’s assumptions would suggest. The surplus promoted processed exports and commercial modernization more

for the Ottoman than for the Habsburg periphery.” What can we make of the better record of Austro-Hungarian economic growth during the nineteenth century and its effect on the Balkan borderlands? The next section will consider the case of the newly independent Balkan states. Here the experience of the southern and eastern Habsburg periphery suggests that these borderlands did not share fully in the monarchy’s fairly impressive economic growth and integration between 1815 and 1914.

Recent Western and Hungarian research has built a strong case against the old notion of the Habsburg monarchy as a feudal economy tied to backward peasant agriculture. The picture drawn by this wealth of new quantitative analysis is instead one of slow but relatively steady growth for Austrian and Czech industry, on the French pattern, increasingly accompanied by rapid increase in Hungarian industrial production and agricultural productivity.** David Good’s judicious new synthesis of these findings offers as its own original contribution some persuasive evidence for the accelerating integration of most of the monarchy’s regions into a single national economy by the last prewar decades. In order to demonstrate integration, Good documents converging levels of staple

prices, of industrial wages, of interest rates, of savings deposits per

194 REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS capita, of infant mortality rates, and of literacy.** Direct evidence of regional income or industrial production is far less complete. The Balkan borderlands do not emerge, even from these findings, as having shared in integration much more than they did in modern industrial growth. Good’s listing of towns from which wheat, beef, and wine prices, and interest rates were surveyed does not include Zagreb or any other town in Croatia-Slavonia. No wage rates are offered for any Croatian, Slovenian, or Hungarian town, including Transylvania. Savings

deposits per capita rose marginally for Croatia-Slavonia and Transylvania between 1890 and 1910 but still were barely one-third of the monarchy’s average. Only literacy rates made a clear advance, to threequarters of the monarchy’s average level. Evidence that I have presented elsewhere suggests that, were the missing indicators available for Croatia-Slavonia and Transylvania, they would not reveal the convergence that Good posits.** The movement of

capital southward and labor northward was simply too small to have begun equalizing factor returns and spreading industrialization more widely. The migration of the young Josip Broz, later Tito, northward to Vienna and Prague for factory employment from his native Croatia was the exception, not the rule. Most young males who left the borderlands, and there were many, went to the United States or other distant locations. Investment capital from the large Austrian or Czech banks found its way into Hungarian industry but rarely went further afield. The average size of a Croatian manufacturing enterprise on the eve of the First World War was just thirty-four employees, less than the average

in any of the independent Balkan states.

Agriculture throughout the Habsburg borderlands, like industry,

faced the further problem of rapid Hungarian development after 1880. Hungarian crops enjoyed the advantages of better soil and ail Hungarian goods were closer to the monarchy’s major urban markets in the Austrian and Czech lands. Budapest had, as noted by other authors in this volume, matched Minneapolis as the world’s largest milling center by 1910. It was also the center of the rail network for all the Habsburg borderlands save Slovenia. Thus the greater rail density cited by Good as an advantage over the independent Balkan states did not in fact assist borderland producers in selling their goods in the Austrian or Czech lands.* When we add the borderlands’ lack of self-government, and with it the lack of control over the use of tax revenues and lack of the power to seek foreign capital, we see a certain case emerging for the peripheral retardation of these southern and eastern borderlands by the AustroHungarian core.’

REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS 195 THE NEWLY INDEPENDENT BALKANS

Can the same sort of peripheral retardation by another imperial but less

capitalist core be found for the Ottoman Balkans during the period 1860-1914? The following comparison of these shrinking Ottoman lands, minus Thessaly and all of Bulgaria by 1886, with the newly inde-

pendent Balkan states suggests that it can, although not much to the core’s advantage. This comparison also suggests that the difference in levels of development between the independent Balkan states and the | Western European “capitalist core” was not increasing significantly; the former were not being drained, as Wallerstein would argue, by trade with or investment from the latter. Indeed, the lack of Western European investment in productive Balkan projects was one of the principal barriers to more rapid development in the independent states. Another, as we Shall see, was the lure for Balkan governments of paper currency not just convertible but virtually equal to the French franc. Even then, the independent Balkan states stayed closer to the level of the developed European economies than did any of the Ottoman lands, losing little if

any ground during this period. Just what were the Balkan rates of economic growth for the period 1860-1914? To what level of national income, compared to the Western European average, did they bring their respective states by the last prewar years? These are unresolved questions. The eminent economist Paul Bairoch attempted to settle them almost a decade ago. His bold effort to calculate annual rates of growth in national income for all European countries for the period 1860-1910 yields a continental average of 1.0 percent, slightly more for France and Germany (1.2 and 1.4 percent),

but barely 0.5 percent for Serbia and Bulgaria and 0.69 for Greece; Romania does somewhat better at 0.86 percent a year. Yet his sources for these Balkan figures attach only secondary importance to export data and rely instead on more doubtful indicators for national income

and for agricultural and industrial production. Bairoch’s only estimate of national income before 1g00 comes from

the crude calculations made in 1894 by the English observor Mulhall, on the basis of a personal formula that double-counted half of State revenues. Mulhall’s totals for national income per capita were therefore exaggerated, almost equaling our best estimates for 1911 to 1913.” Bairoch’s agricultural data rest on the current value, rather than the volume of production, thus understating the real value of output during the period of sharply falling grain prices from 1870 to 1895. Industrial output is calculated mainly in terms of iron and coal

196 REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS

production, neglecting the rise in their import and in production in

other branches. My own estimates of Balkan national income, jointly prepared with Marvin Jackson, are confined to the last prewar decade. Rough bench-

mark figures for the last prewar year of 1911 are reckoned at over goo franc equivalents per capita for Romania, over 250 for Serbia, and nearly 250 for Bulgaria. These averages do not compare badly with over 400 francs per capita for the Hungarian lands, over 700 for the Czech lands, and nearly 1000 for industrialized Germany.” More to the point at hand, the 250-300 franc average recorded by the independent Balkan states stands well ahead of the 150 franc equivalent calculated by

Vedat Eldem for the Ottoman Empire in 1907.°' The Salonika area barely met this average, according to his calculations, and the rest of the Ottoman Balkans fell slightly short of it. An additional question thus presents itself. When had this gap between the income of the independent Balkan states and the Ottoman Balkans appeared? Available statistics of agricultural and industrial output, export value, and population growth combine to suggest that this gap appeared precisely during the period 1860—1910. It opened up not just because of relatively poor Ottoman performance. It was also the result of enough economic growth in the independent Balkan states to cast doubt upon Bairoch’s argument for the latter’s growth rates lagging significantly behind the European average of 1 percent a year for 1860 to 1910. Agriculture and exports were responsible for almost all of the growth before the turn of the century. Wheat area cultivated per rural inhabit-

ant nearly doubled for Romania and Serbia between 1862-1866 and 1901—1905, despite, and actually in partial response to, rising population. By 1900 the tonnage harvested, here a more reliable indicator of economic growth than risky estimates of national income, had more than doubled from the 1860s, again in rural per capita terms. Rates of growth exceeded 2 percent a year. The Bulgarian figures may have risen even faster and, unlike the other two, continued to climb after 1900.” Independent Bulgaria’s rapid increase must, however, be measured from a low starting point in the 1880s, lower by one-third than the grain production derived for the mid-1860s and again in the mid-1870s according to recent British research on Ottoman Bulgaria.** The nominal value of Romanian and Serbian exports had tripled between the 1850s and 1880, and they had tripled again by 1911. The Bulgarian increment over the latter period was higher still, but once again the result of a decline during the 1880s from the previous two decades. The luster of the post-1g00 surge dims for all three economies when

: REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS 197 we adjust for rising domestic population and for international prices. In real per capita terms, each of these export totals turned slightly downward after 1900.™ Also, the overdependence of Romania and Bulgaria on wheat sales, for 80 percent and 70 percent of their respective export totals, did not bode well in an international market that was becoming saturated even before the First World War. In per capita terms at current prices, however, the exports of the independent Balkan states grew at nearly 2 percent a year from 1900 to 1911.

Their industrial growth during this last prewar decade probably made up for stagnating grain output and cultivated area. Both of these agricultural indicators had almost ceased to grow on a per capita basis, with the exception of Bulgaria’s cultivated area. Average annual growth rates for modern industry which averaged 10 percent even in real per capita terms, more for Bulgaria and less for Romania, would by themselves have added nearly 1 percent a year to national income,

, given manufacturing and mining sectors whose value added made up almost 10 percent of that aggregate.® The tonnage of coal mined, it should be added, more than doubled for all three states after 1900; imports of coal rose even faster to draw nearly even with the domestic total.°° Thus, coal consumption, a better indicator of industrial activity than output mined, was also increasing at about 10 percent a year. The experience of the Ottoman Balkans was less promising in all respects. Export from the Macedonian lands had reached only 31 francs equivalent per capita by 1911, well below the figures for the Habsburg

borderlands and less than the 4o and 42 francs recorded by Serbia and Bulgaria. The absence of a surge in wheat production and export throughout the Ottoman Balkans during the last decades of the nineteenth century was largely responsible. Edirne had been lost as a river port to the Aegean since the silting up of the Maritsa River in 1817. Salonika had given way to Varna and Burgas as the principal ports for Bulgarian wheat export by the late nineteenth century. Rising tobacco exports, one-half of the Macedonian total after 1900, were not sufficient to prevent the opening up of the same import surplus that distinguished Ottoman foreign trade as a whole from that of the independent Balkan states. Exports for the empire barely grew at all in current prices from 1873-1877 to 1900.°’ While reliable data on grain output are lacking, the Macedonian area under wheat cultivation was less than the total for Serbia, which had half of the area and a better climate for the rival grain,

corn.” Macedonia’s population like that of the rest of the Ottoman Balkans and the entire empire failed to grow as fast as that of the independent

198 REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS Balkan states, despite an even lower density of population, 36 per square

kilometer. The Macedonian rate of increase, 1.24 percent a year for 1900 to 1910, was ahead of the Ottoman pace but still lagged behind the 1.5 percent average of Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia, the region’s major grain producers and wheat exporters. After 1900, internal unrest and emigration undoubtedly helped to account for the slower pace of population growth in Macedonia, and also in some Habsburg borderlands. Before 1900, however, a slower rate of agricultural growth was

largely responsible.

Modern manufacturing and mining cannot have added much to the

Ottoman Balkans’ overall economic growth after the turn of the century. Although the value of output remains unknown, the number of employees has been put at only 10,000 (or less than 0.2 percent of the population) versus Serbian and Bulgarian totals of 16,000 each (or 0.5 and 0.35 percent of their populations). Coal consumption, despite a large fraction used. for ships, was less than half of the per capita averages for the independent Balkan states.™ According to the argument of André Gunder Frank for precisely this

period, the larger agricultural production and export of the independent Balkan states ought to have made their prospects for industrial growth worse than those of the Ottoman Empire. Worsening terms of trade for primary products would not prevent increasing export surpluses; they would attract private Western European capital whose investment would siphon profits as well as raw materials out of the defenseless economy.”

What appears to have been happening does not fit Frank’s schema for exploitation; but neither does it suggest that the rise in Balkan agricultural exports was an “engine of growth.” According to this staple theory of export-led growth, early cotton exports had greatly accumulated capital in the United States and wheat exports had done the same in pre-1914 Canada.® In the Balkans, the export surpluses were surprisingly small for Romania and Serbia, inconsistent for Bulgaria, and entirely absent for Greece. Despite what Bairoch has shown us about improving terms of trade for agricultural exporters after 1895, even the Romanian and Serbian surpluses exceeded imports by just one-fifth.” In addition, only the Romanian and Bulgarian totals relied heavily on wheat sales to Western Europe. And they, like Serbia and Greece, received the largest part of their imports from Central Europe, that is, Germany and Austria-Hungary, from which came little investment for infrastructure to aid exports, let alone for manufacturing, to compete with their own imports.

REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS 199 The major source of capital for the independent Balkan states was instead the Paris banks. They were willing to follow the suggestions of the French foreign ministry and raise loans for the respective governments. The burden of repaying this debt had risen past 30 percent of Balkan state expenditures by 1go00. It threatened them all with the Western supervision of their debt repayment. Such supervision had befallen

the Ottoman Empire in 1881 and Greece in 1897.% Native budgetary reforms as well as taxes from rising export earnings allowed the governments of Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia to stave off this explicitly perceived threat by 1905. By 1911, the first two had trimmed the share of debt repayment in their state budgets to about 20 percent and Serbia to

28 percent; the Ottoman figure still stood at 31 percent. Balkan state

revenues had doubled during this last prewar decade, as they had also : doubled during the period 1880—1900. This accelerating growth stood in contrast to Ottoman revenues, stagnant during the earlier period and then rising just 60 percent from 1900 to 1910. By this time per capita revenues for all of the Balkan states had surpassed the Ottoman figure of about 30 francs equivalent by at least one-half.

If European debt repayment was not then an increasingly onerous burden for the independent Balkan states, neither was the penetration of private foreign investment. As I have argued elsewhere, there was simply too little of it, German oil investment in Romania aside.” Nor was its control coordinated between European financial centers (such as Berlin and Vienna, let alone Paris) or even within individual Great Powers. Witness the initiatives of Prague banks which frustrated the AustroHungarian government’s efforts to subdue Serbia during and after the Tariff War of 1906-1911. European-style commercial codes were admittedly appearing in all the Balkan states, first on the French model. They were revised in the 1890s with Italian-type provisions to facilitate joint-stock incorporation.

But the codes favored native entrepreneurs at least as much as foreigners. Their provisions and the considerable response of native industrial entrepreneurs after 1900 may be contrasted with the absence of such encouragement and the continuing reliance on concessions to Western European financial, commercial, and mining interests, which did indeed characterize the Ottoman economy.” CONCLUSION

Despite these relative advantages and the right to adopt protective tariffs, the economies of the independent Balkan states can hardly be said

200 REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS to have embarked on a genuine Industrial Revolution or to have “takenoff” into self-sustaining growth by the last prewar decade. The requisite structural shifts of labor and capital into the most modern, generally industrial forms of production were simply not taking place, nor were they likely to had war not intervened. I have maintained this view from my earliest publications to my most recent, although the rationale for it has grown more complex.® Briefly, the following major obstacles stood in the way of structural change. First came the statistical barrier that would stand in the way of a small modern sector in any largely traditional and agricultural economy. Even

the most rapid growth in a small sector would normally require several generations to absorb a majority of the factors of production. Recent Western research finds that the British economy, supposedly in the throes of rapid industrialization after 1760, had not shifted its factors of production decisively to industry by 1830, often cited as an end-date for this first Industrial Revolution.” The developed European economies were responsible for two particular Balkan obstacles. First was the relative absence of foreign invest-

ment in the private sector, whether direct or portfolio. In contrast to most other foreign recipients of pre-1914 European investment, the Balkan states received primarily portfolio purchases of state bonds.” Modernizing manufacture or improving agriculture would be the last sort of

purpose to which proceeds from state bonds would typically be put. Second was the attraction of native governments to restraining their currency emissions enough to make their own denominations not just convertible but also equal to the French gold franc. This policy was successful across the region by the last prewar decade. It not only restricted credit for new investment but also overvalued exports, primarily agricul-

tural goods, and undervalued imports, primarily manufactures. The Balkan governments initial, relatively moderate tariffs for protecting na-

tive manufactures were thereby undercut. Export surpluses were reduced, though it is not yet clear by how much. The only sizable amounts of European capital attracted in return for this restrictive monetary policy came, as already noted, in the form of state loans. The well-known failure of these governments to use more than one-

fifth of the effective loan amounts for productive purposes, primarily for railway construction, must rest with the governments themselves. The loans’ use to expand state bureaucracies and military establishments

exceeded even the fraction for debt repayment as the largest single drain on these funds and on the state budgets. At least the share of those budgets spent on public works (alas, including grandiose official build-

REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS 201 ings) and education exceeded the Ottoman share handily, by 19-36 percent to just 5-10 percent. In any case, as Gale Stokes has rightly argued elsewhere in this volume, the pre-1914 educational systems taught nationalistic consciousness more than they provided technical training and helped to make positions in the state bureaucracy more attractive than any effort at private entrepreneurship.”’ The peasant majorities of the Balkan populations were also able to join, although not to initiate themselves, organizations effective enough in Serbia (the Radical party) and in Bulgaria (the Agrarian Union) to restrict even the modest tariff and tax exemptions for native manufacturing. Such legislation was the prin-

cipal form of industrial encouragement, other than protective tariffs, known to any pre-1914 government. Two final barriers helped to keep the independent Balkan states from closing the gap between themselves and the developed European economies: the limited size of domestic markets and the shortage of industrial labor. Neither can be blamed on foreign capitalists or native governments. Population density remained relatively low across the region, from 61 per square kilometer for Serbia down to 45 for Bulgaria, ver-

sus 76 for Austria-Hungary and over 120 for Western Europe. The Balkan capitals grew severalfold in size between 1880 and 1910 but drew mainly on migration from smaller towns. The urban share of population, everywhere decisive for mass marketing, remained about 12 percent. Serbian meat-packing grew during the Tariff War with AustriaHungary only because of access to the German market. Tobacco produced for domestic consumption struggled under the double burden of limited domestic demand and state monopolies which kept prices high to earn more tax revenues. The lack of urban migration also bid up wages for the small force of

existing industrial labor when food prices responded to international increases. These domestic prices surged forward even more than wages during the last prewar decade.” The costs of new industrial investment rose in the process. Michael Palairet had described how Bulgarian artisan labor totaling some 60,000, sufficiently large to have eliminated a subsequent shortage in Sofia, had already been attracted from their upland towns to newly available grain-growing areas in the lowlands during

the 1870s and 1880s. The resulting shortage of artisan labor (and of sheep bred for wool manufacture) led to both higher costs for this native manufacture and greater peasant reliance on self-consumption. These pressures and the post-1878 loss of tariff-free access to the large Ottoman market appear to have done far more by 1900 to reduce Bulgaria’s artisan production of woolen textiles than did the arrival of competing

202 REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS goods machine-made in Western or Central Europe.” Once again, the relatively greater availability of agricultural land combined with a less favorable climate to discourage native economic development, as it had throughout the thousand years surveyed above. We find the same sort of several-sided stalemate confronting Balkan prospects for future economic development as we had before and during the Ottoman era. Local Byzantine or Moslem landlords had long since been eliminated, and “reciprocal exhaustion” is too dark a descrip-

tion of the play of forces. Political dynamics were too promising for that. A powerful native bureaucracy had nonetheless replaced the Porte. European financial pressures now played a significant role in shaping

the policies of native governments that needed loans to grow. These regimes also supported their own, class-like interests by offering the peasant majority some support against the expensive prospect of rapid

industrialization. Despite these limitations, the economies of the independent Balkan states of the nineteenth century probably kept pace with the developed European economies during the last prewar decades. This was at least more than the imperial borderlands had been able to do for the previous five centuries or more. The new momentum would not lead directly to

modern economic development, as it undeniably did do in the British and other Western European economies in the nineteenth century. The sweeping structural changes that turn growth into development would not appear in the Balkans until after the Second World War. But the pre-1914 momentum nurtured the prospect of modern development in the framework of the nation-state and placed its desirability irrevocably in the national consciousness of these states. NOTES 1. For an overview of his approach, see Daniel Chirot and Thomas D. Hall, “World System Theory,” in Annual Review of Sociology (Palo Alto: Annual Reviews, 1982), 8:31—106; and Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 1-164. See also Wallerstein’s “The Ottoman Empire and the Capitalist World-Economy: Some Questions for Research,” Review 2:3 (Winter 1979): 389-398. 2. Fernand Braudel, Le Temps du Monde, vol. 3 of his Civilization materielle, économie et capitalisme, XV-XVIII* stécle (Paris: A. Colin, 1979), pp. 402-417.

3. Huri Islamoglu and Caglar Keyder, “An Agenda for Ottoman History,” Review 1:1 (Summer 1977): 31-55. Also see the articles by Murat Cizk¢a and by Korkut Boratav, A. Gunduz Okctin, and Sevket Pamuk in Review 8:3 (Winter 1985): 353-406.

REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS 203 4. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System. vol. 1: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New

York: Academic Press, 1974), pp. 98-99. 5. For a recent survey, see Michael F. Hendy, Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy, c. goo—1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

6. Robert Browning, Byzantium and Bulgaria (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 102-115. Also see Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: NLB, 1974), pp. 265-293. 7. Georges Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 257-270, a concluding chapter entitled “Take-off.” Also see Chris Wickham, “The Other Transition: From the Ancient World to Feudalism,” Past and Present 103 (May 1984): 3-36. 8. Nikolai Todorov et al., Stopanska istoriia na Bulgariia 681-1981 [An Economic History of Bulgaria, 681-1981] (Sofia: Dirzh. izd-vo Nauka i izkustvo, 1981), pp. 64-67; Vera Mutafchieva, Poslednite shishmanovitst [The Last Shishmani] (Sofia: Izd-vo Otechestveniia Front, 1982); Vasil Giuzelev, Srednovekouna

Bulgaria v svetlnata na novi izvort [Medieval Bulgaria in the Light of New Sources] (Sofia: Diizh izd-vo Nar. prosveta, 1981). On Serbia, see Milo’ Blagojevic, Zemljoradnje u srednovekovnoj Srbijt [Agriculture in Medieval Serbia] (Belgrade: Istoriski institut, 1973), pp. 355-402. g. Angeliki E. Laiou-Thomadakis, Peasant Society in the Late Byzantine Empire

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 144-145. On Balkan economic geography and its limitations, see George W. Hoffman, Regional Development Strategy in Southeastern Europe (New York: Praeger, 1972), pp. 3-22. 10. Laiou-Thomadakis, Peasant Society, pp. 204-208, 221-222. On agricul-

ture in Western Europe, see B. H. Slicher von Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe, 500-1850 (London: Edward Arnold, 1963), pp. 77-170. On estimates of population, J. C. Russell, “Population in Europe, 500-1500” in Carlo Cipolla, ed., Fontana Economic History of Europe. vol. 1: The Middle Ages

(London: Collins/Fontana, 1972), pp. 25-70. 11. Khristo Gandev, Bulgarskata narodnost prez XV v. [The Bulgarian People in the 15th Century] (Sofia: Nauka i izkustvo, 1972) has advanced an argument

for such a catastrophe, the death or forced deportation of some 30 percent of ethnic Bulgarians. Detailed responses from Vera Mutafchieva, in [storicheski pregled 4 (1973): 133-141, and Str. Dimitrov, in Vekove 6 (1973): 50-65, have tellingly questioned both the sources and the sense of this argument. Evidence that most of the lands identified by Gandev as depopulated were in fact largely empty may be found in a discussion by Al. Grigorov in Istoricheski pregled 3 (1980): 85-95. 12. Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe,” Past and Present 70 (Feb. 1976): 57-60. On Balkan patterns of village settlement, see Roy E. H. Mellor, Eastern Europe: A Geography of the Comecon Countries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), p. 176. 13. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: NLB, 1974), pp. 370-375, and his Passages from Antiquity, pp. 285-293.

204 REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS 14. Sir John Hicks, A Theory of Economic History (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 16-20. Also see John R. Lampe and Marvin R. Jackson, Balkan Economic History, 1550-1950. From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 33—39; Anderson, Lineages, pp. 400-407, and the paper by Péter Gunst in the present volume. 15. On urban commercial development, see Vera Mutafchieva, Le vakif—Un aspect de la structure socio-économique de l'empire Ottoman (XV°—XVII s.) (Sofia: Acad-

émie bulgare des sciences, 1981), pp. 7-66. On the rural burden of peasant obligations, see Elena Grozdanova, Bulgarska selska obshtina prez XV-XVIII vek [The

Bulgarian Village Community during the XV—XVIII Centuries] (Sofia: Izd-vo Builgarska Akadimiia naukite, 1979), pp. 22—30. 16. Barkan’s and Braudel’s estimate is 41 persons per square mile for European Turkey in 1600, versus the Mols’ estimates of 86 for France, 97 for Italy, and 112 for the Low Countries. Omer L. Barkan, “Essai sur les données statistiques des registres de recensement dans l’empire Ottoman aux XV“ et XVI‘ siécles,” The Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient I (1957): 9-36; Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip

If (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 2: 395-402; Roger Mols, “Population in Europe, 1500-1700,” C. M. Cipolla, ed., Fontana Economic History of Europe. vol. 2: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Collins/Fontana, 1974), pp. 38—40. These figures for Western Europe were of course well below the dis-

advantageously large figure for China, India, and some other Asian territories by this time. On the lower Bulgarian estimate for Balkan population growth dur-

: ing the sixteenth century, see Maria Todorova’s review article in Etudes Bal-

kaniques 2 (1983): 111-116. 17. Liuben Berov, “Changes in Price Conditions and Trade between Turkey and Europe in the 16th—1gth Centuries,” Etudes Balkaniques 2-3 (1974), 169— 174. David F. Good, The Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire 1750-1914 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 116-117, puts the coefficient of variation at only 0.27 for wheat prices between the main Austrian Habsburg cities by the 1830s. 18. Bruce McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe Taxation, Trade and

the Struggle for Land, 1600-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 83-89; Leila Erder, “The Measurement of Pre-industrial Population Changes: The Ottoman Empire from the 15th to the 17th Centuries,” Middle Eastern Studies 11: 3 (Oct. 1975): 184-202; Todorova, Etudes Balkaniques, pp. 114-116. ig. Felix Boujour, A View of The Commerce of Greece, 1787-1797 (London, 1800), pp. 87-88. 20. See the exchange between André Gunder Frank and Paul Bairoch in the Journal of European Economic History 5: 2 (1976): 407-438, 469-474. For the several definitions of the “terms of trade,” see Charles P. Kindleberger, /nternational Economics (Homewood, Ill.: Richard W. Irwin, 1973), pp. 45-46, 70-87. 21. McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe, pp. 15-18. For a contrary

REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS 205 view, based only on rising cotton exports from several Ottoman ports during

| the eighteenth century, see Mehmet Geng, “A Comparative Study of the Tax Farming Data and Commercial Activities in the Ottoman Empire during the Second Half of the 18th Century,” in La révolution industrielle dans les pays sud-est euro-

péens—XIXs. (Sofia, 1976), pp. 243-279. The Ottoman share of French foreign trade dropped from 50 to 5 percent between 1600 and 1800, while the Ottoman share of British trade fell from 10 to 1 percent. Charles Issawi, The Economic Htstory of Turkey, 1800-1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 3; Ralph Davis, “British Imports from the Middle East, 1580—1780,” in M. A. Cook, ed., Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East (London: Oxford University

Press, 1970), pp. 193-205. 22. Liuben Berov, “Changes in Price Conditions,” pp. 26g—278; and Berov, Dvizhenieto na tsenite na Balkanite prez XVI-XIX v. 1 evropeiskata revolutsua na tsenite

[The Movement of Prices in the Balkans during the 16th—19th Centuries and the European Price Revolution] (Sofia: Btlgarska akademiia na naukite, 1976), PP. 317-322. 23. French trade was still 37 percent of the total in 1784. The English and Dutch shares had slipped to 9 and 18 percent, respectively, while the Habsburg fraction had risen to 24 percent. Nikos G. Svoronos, Le commerce de la Salonique au XVIIIe siécle (Paris: 1956), pp. 213, 320-223; Boujour, Commerce of Greece, 343-356. 24. Patrick O’Brien, “European Economic Development: The Contribution of the Periphery.” The Economic History Review 35: 1 (Feb. 1982): 1-18. Robert Mantran, Istanbul dans le seconde moitié du XVIle siécle (Paris: A. Maisonneuve, 1962), pp. 601, 617, finds 10 percent to be the average profit in transactions of Ottoman foreign trade as well. 25. For research on the so-called Price Revolution since Hamilton, see Fer-

nand Braudel and Frank Spooner, “Price Inflation in Europe from 1450 to 1750, Cambridge Economic History of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 4: 378-486; Berov, Duizhenteto, pp. 5-60; Mantran, Istanbul, pp. 238-248, 262-269; Davis, “British Imports from the Middle East,” pp. 193—194. 26. Svoronos, Le commerce de la Salonique, pp. 114-120; Mantran, Istanbul, pp.

250-261. 27. McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe, pp. 76-77 (map), 163. 28. Ibid., p. 79; Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, pp. 33-37. 29. See Khristo Khristov, Agrarnite otnoshente v Makedonua prez XIX vek 1 nachalata XXv. [Agrarian Relations in Macedonia during the 19th Century and the Start of the 2zoth Century] (Sofia: Izd-vo Bilgarskata akedemiia na naukite, 1964); McGowan, Economic Life in the Ottoman Balkans, pp. 152-172; Halil Inal-

cik, “Military and Fiscal Transformation in the Ottoman Empire, 1600-1700,” Archivum Ottomanicum 6 (1980): 283-337. 30. McGowan, Economic Life in the Ottoman Balkans, pp. 134-141. 31. Khristo Gandev, Zarazhdane na kapitalisticheshite otnoshenia v chiflishkoto stopanstvo na severnozapadna Bulgaria prez XVIII vek [The Origin of Capitalist

206 REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS | Relations in the Chiflick Economy of Northwest Bulgaria during the 18th Century] (Sofia: Bulgarska akademiia na naukite, 1962), pp. 36—45.

32. Strashimir Dimitrov, “Kum vuprosa za otmeniavaneto na_ spahiska sistema v nashete zemi,” [Concerning the Question of the End of the Sipahi System in Our Lands] Istoricheshi pregled 12 (1956): 27-58. 33. Halil Inalck, “Centralization and Decentralization in Ottoman Administration,” in Thomas Naff and Roger Owen, eds., Studies in 18th Century Ottoman History (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), pp. 27-52. 34. Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure,” pp. 5'7—60; Michael Boro Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia, 1804-1918 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976), 1: 16—19.

35. Eric L. Jones, The European Miracle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 175-191; William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 120, 134-135, 147; Anderson, Lineages, pp. 361-366; Alfred H. Lybyer, The Government of the Ottoman Empire tn the Time

of Suleiman the Magnificent (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1913), pp. 148-195.

36. Traian Stoianovich, “The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant,” Journal of Economic History 20:2 (June 1960): 234—-313.

37. On the neglected role of the Counter-Reformation in shaping the Habsburg empire see Robert J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy,

1550-1700 (London: Oxford University Press, 1979). 38. Good, Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, pp. 30-32, 110. 39. Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, pp. 56—59. 40. Gunther E. Rothenberg, The Austrian Military Border in Croatia, 1522— 1747 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960) and his The Military Border in Croatia, 1'740—1881 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Carol Gollner, Die Siebenbiirgische Militérgrenze (Munich, 1974). 41. Slavko Gavrilovi¢, Prilog istorye trgovine i migracye Balkan-podunavlje, XVITI-XIX v. [Contribution to the History of Trade and Migration in the Danubian Balkans, 18th—19th Centuries] (Belgrade: Srpska akademija nauka 1 umetnosti, 1969), pp. 15-46; Sonja Jordan, Die Katserliche Wirtschaftspolitth in Banat im 18 Jahrhundert (Munich, 1967), pp. 148-155. 42. Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, pp. 57-66. Frank’s schema

rests on his research for the later 19th and early 2oth century, primarily concerning British trade with India. See André Gunder Frank, “Multilateral Merchandise Trade Imbalances and Uneven Economic Development,” Journal of European Economic History 5:2 (1976): 407-438.

43. See Nachum Gross, “The Industrial Revolution in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1750-1914,” in Cipolla, ed., Fontana Economic History of Europe. vol. 4: The Emergence of Industrial Societies (London: Collins/Fontana, 1973), pp. 228-278;

Richard Rudolph, “The Pattern of Austrian Industrial Growth from the 18th to the Early goth Century,” Austrian History Yearbook 1 (1975), 3-25; David F. Good, “Modern Economic Growth in the Habsburg Monarchy,” East Central Europe, vol. 6, pt. 1 (1980), pp. 248-268; Scott Eddie, “Agricultural Production

REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS 207 and Output per Worker in Hungary, 1870-1913,” Journal of Economic History 28:

2 (June 1968): 197-222; Laszlo Katus, “Economic Growth in Hungary during the Age of Dualism, 1867-1913: A Quantitative Analysis,” in Ervin Pamlényi, ed., Social and Economic Researches on the History of East-Central Europe (Budapest:

Akadémiai Kiad6, 1970), pp. 35-128; John Komlos, ed., Economic Development in the Habsburg Monarchy in the 19th Century (Boulder, Colo.: East European Monographs, 1983). 44. Good, Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, pp. 96-161, 261-266. 45. Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, pp. 287-322. 46. To resolve this issue properly, however, we would need to have the same precise data on grain and other unprocessed exports from the borderlands to the rest of the monarchy that we do for manufactured exports from Croatia-

Slovania. The otherwise useful compendium of prewar Croatian statistics, Rudolph Signjar, Statistith atlas Kr. Hrvatske i Slavonye, 1875-1915 (Zagreb, 1915), affords no indication of the amount or value of unprocessed exports. 47. Even Good, Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, pp. 157—161, grants this

possibility for the Hungarian lands, while correctly arguing that the Magyar core

did not drain its periphery of primary products.

, 48. Paul Bairoch, “Europe’s Gross National Product: 1800-1975,” Journal of European Economic History 5:2 (1976): 275-331, and his “Niveau de developpement de 1810 a 1910,” Annales 20:6 (1965): 1091-1117. 49. Michael G. Mulhall, Industries and the Wealth of Nations, (London: Longmans, 1896), pp. 270-273. 50. Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, pp. 160—165; John R. Lampe, “Debating the Balkan Potential for Pre-1914 Development,” Journal of European Economic History 12:1 (1985): 187-196. 51. Vedat Eldem, Osmanl Imparatorlugunun iktisadi sartlari hakkinda bir tetkik [A Study of Economic Conditions in the Ottoman Empire] (Istanbul: Turkiye Is Bankasi Kilttir Yaymlari, 1970). Issawi, Economic History of Turkey, pp. 6-7, 13. 52. Tables 6.7 ANp 6.8, Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, pp. 1'71— 172.

53. The pre-Liberation level was by this reckoning not regained until the mid-18g0s. See Michael Palairet, “Farm Productivity under Ottoman Rule and Self-Government: Bulgaria, 1860-1926,” paper for I[Ird World Congress of Soviet and East European Studies, Wash., D.C., Nov. 1-4, 1985. His calculations of high per capita output in the late Ottoman period disputes the much lower estimate by Liuben Berov, “Ravnishte na ikonomichesko razvitie na Bulgarskite zemi po vreme na osvobozhdenieto [The Level of Economic Development in the Bulgarian Lands in the Era of Liberation],” Trudove na V.I.I. Karl Marks 1 (1979), 13~-44-

54. Real per capita export values for Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria from the period 1886—18g90 forward ‘peaked during 1901-1905. The unadjusted aggregates continued to climb through 1911, the last prewar year. Tables 6.5 and 6.9, Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, pp. 168, 174. 55. Tables 6.1 and 6.2, Balkan Economic History, pp. 162-163.

208 REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS 56. Brian R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, 1750-1970 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), pp. 362-364, 409-411. 57. Recent Turkish research suggests that Ottoman exports were substantially undervalued in order to evade taxation. Issawi, Economic History of Turkey, pp. 74-82, 103-109, 138, 199-202. 58. Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, pp. 279-284. Even for wheat, as Fikret Adanir notes elsewhere in this volume, the unfortunate Macedonian combination of limited rainfall and marshy lowlands discouraged cultivation. 59. Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, pp. 279-284. 60. Issawi, Economic History of Turkey, pp. 2go—291; L. Sokolov, Industrijata na

NR Makedonya (Skopje, 1961), pp. 13-23.

61. Frank, “Multilateral Merchandise Trade Imbalances,” pp. 407-438. 62. Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790-1860

(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961); Trevor O. Dick, “Frontiers in Canadian Economic History,” Journal of Economic History 36:1 (March 1976): 34— 39-

63. Paul Batroch, The Economic Development of the Third World since 1go0o

(Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1975), pp.111117; John R. Hanson II, Trade in Transition: Exports from the Third World, 1840— _

1g00 (New York: Academic Press, 1980), pp. 121-122; table 6.11, Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, p. 182. 64. The standard works are still Donald C. Blaisdell, European Financial Con-

trol in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), and William H. Wynne, State Insolvency and Foreign Bondholders, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951).

65. Stanford J. Shaw, “The igth Century Ottoman Tax Reforms,” Iniernational Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 6:2 (Oct. 1975): 422-430; Issawi, Economic History of Turkey, pp. 353-355. The per capita averages in Franc equivalents were

46 for Serbia and Bulgaria, 80 for Greece, and 95 for Romania in 1911; table 7.8, Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, p. 234. 66. Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, pp. 217-236, 260-264.

67. Substantial, sometimes successful local resistance to these enterprises is described in Donald Quataert, Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881-1908 (New York: New York University Press, 1983).

68. John R. Lampe, “Serbia, 1878-1912,” in Rondo Cameron, ed., Banking and Economic Development: Some Lessons of History (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1972), pp. 122-167; Marvin R. Jackson and John R. Lampe, “The Evidence of Industrialization in Southeastern Europe before the Second World War,” East European Quarterly 16:4 (Jan. 1983): 385-415. 69. European investment in the private sector might or might not have facili-

tated some structural change in the Balkan economies, but on the basis of its record elsewhere before the First World War, it at least stood a chance of doing so. For a brief review of the record, see James Foreman-Peck, A History of the World Economy (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble Books, 1983), pp. 127-144.

REDEFINING BALKAN BACKWARDNESS 209 70. For a comprehensive, cogent review of recent Western research, see Joel Mokyr, “The Industrial Revolution and the New Economic History,” in Mokyr, 3 ed., The Economics of the Industrial Revolution (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & AIlanheld, 1985), pp. 1-51. Mokyr points out that a modern sector accounting for 10 percent of national product would require half a century of 4 percent annual growth, versus 1 percent in the traditional sector, just to raise its share of national product to one third. 71. Also see Charles Jelavich, “Serbian Textbooks: Toward Greater Serbia or Yugoslavia?” Slavic Review 42:4 (Winter 1983): 601-619. On the achievements of the pre-1914 educational systems, see Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, pp. 276—277, 651.

72. John R. Lampe, “Varieties of Unsuccessful Industrialization: The Balkan States Before 1914,” Journal of Economic History 35:1 (March 1975): 65-68.

73. Michael Palairet, “The Decline of the Old Balkan Woollen Industries, 1870-1914,” Vierteljahrschrift fiir Sozial und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 70:3 (June 1983):

331-362.

SEVEN

The Social Origins of East European Politics* Gale Stokes

In considering the problem of how East European societies have been transformed in the past two centuries it is proper to start with the fundamental impact of external influences, particularly the Industrial and French Revolutions, as well as to take into account the state system within which Eastern Europe awakened to these two revolutions. There is nothing demeaning in this, even though such analysis sometimes goes

by the name dependency theory, because every society in the world, even including to a certain extent the core countries of Northwestern Europe, has had to participate in this same confrontation. Despite the well-deserved criticisms that modernization theory has undergone, it remains true that the history of most societies includes a lengthy period that precedes the coming of industrialization, a brief transitional period of initial contact and confrontation, and the present, which contains the first moments in what may be another lengthy period of a new relation-

ship between man and nature.' It goes without saying, therefore, that the most fundamental questions of modern history are those surrounding the main developments in Northwestern Europe since 1500. But when we turn to the specifics of each society’s confrontation with the inevitable, endogenous factors must receive equal attention to exogenous ones. When industrialism forced its way unwanted, uninvited, and unexpected into the kitchens of every society in the world, the soups that resulted, while all created from the same stock, each had their own individual flavors. This is certainly the case in Eastern Europe, where the gamut of political cultures in the first half of the twentieth century included function210

SOCIAL ORIGINS 211 ing democracy in Czechoslovakia, vigorous peasant political parties in Serbia and Bulgaria, aristocratic bureaucratism in Hungary, and authoritarian governments in Poland and elsewhere. Despite the normal drive of contemporary scholars to find coherence in diversity, students of Eastern Europe have not often transcended these differences. It has proven difficult to avoid simply marking off each East European example as a special case, so that individual scholars working separately have produced what amounts to a listing of instances rather than an overall analysis.

The problem is not limited to Eastern Europe, of course, and only the greatest synthesizers or theorists have dealt with real diversity successfully. One of these successes has been Barrington Moore’s Social Ongins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Why, Moore asks, did the Industrial and French Revolutions create such dramatically different political so-

lutions as English and French parliamentary government, aristocratic monarchy in Germany, communism in Russia and China, and militarist dictatorship in Japan? His answer is that the political outcome of development is dependent on the relationship among three main classes at the moment when a society has to confront industrialization. The existence of a strong and independent urban commercial class that can seize

control over national policy will result in democratic capitalism. If a strong bourgeoisie is lacking and the landed class sponsors the commercialization of agriculture while at the same time taking control of the state, a fascist style will emerge. If the landed class fails to commercialize

agriculture before market relations intrude into the countryside, however, peasant revolution is likely, but only where the relationship between the landlord and the peasant ts weak. This last is likely to produce a communist society, with the leadership in the hands of the intellectual elite that provided the peasants with the organizational skills needed to run their revolution.

In working out this system in detail Moore does not discuss small

countries, such as those in Eastern Europe, because, as he puts it, “the decisive causes of their politics lie outside their own boundaries.” Moore’s assumption, apparently, is that only large countries have a social system of sufficient autonomy to affect decisively the structure of posttransition political organization. Germany provides the example of a landed upper class in position to introduce capitalist agriculture before a bourgeoisie could establish itself strongly, with a conservative political result. The English bourgeoisie was already in place by the time industrialization began, so the tendency was toward democratic results. In China, peasant, or communist, revolution resulted when capitalist rela-

212 SOCIAL ORIGINS tions were introduced into the countryside under conditions of weak landed upper class control. And yet in a fundamental way large countries and small countries do not differ in the era of transformation: they must face the pressures of exogenous change, whenever it comes, with a given set of social arrangements. There seems to be no a prori reason the critical elements at work in Moore’s model might not have their impact on small entities as well as large ones. At least it seems plausible that democracy in Czechoslovakia, aristocratic bureaucratism in Hungary, peasantism in Bulgaria, and perhaps even mixed results elsewhere may be in part the result of the social configuration in those countries when they entered into the not-too-warm embrace of the state system. That is the hypothesis of this article. To test it I will discuss briefly five examples of East European development: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia. Those who do not wish to follow the argument through the thickets of factual material may turn to the end of the article, where conclusions as to Moore’s applicability to Eastern Europe may be found. In several regards the political and social history of the Czech lands was

not favorable for the creation of democracy. Urban development of Bohemia and Moravia lagged, servile labor requirements were abolished only as late as 1848, well after the initial mechanization of the Bohemian

textile industry, and land in Bohemia was maldistributed. As of 1757 only 0.5, percent of Bohemian land was held in freehold, and a report of 1902 showed that the 0.5 percent of the rural population with farms larger than 100 hectares owned almost one-third of the land, whereas smallholders with farms under 5 hectares, who comprised 71.6 percent of the population, owned a total of only 14.7 percent of the land (medium-sized farms constituted 28 percent of the farmers and about 50 percent of the land).’ The political arrangements of the empire in the nineteenth century reflected this relationship, with the emperor and aristocracy holding the major reins of power. Nonetheless, after World War I Czechoslovakia became, by general consensus, “the most prosperous, progressive, and democratic state of East Central Europe.”* Led by a number of unusually balanced and statesmanlike figures, such as Tomas Masaryk, Eduard Bene$, and Antonin Svehla, the new republic of Czechoslovakia constructed a political

democracy that was able to take difficult steps, such as devaluation of its currency in 1919, while at the same time providing for the participation of even the communist party in public life. Czech democracy may

SOCIAL ORIGINS 213 not have been perfect in its ability to deal with national minorities or in

the strictness with which party discipline and presidential leadership were enforced, and it was swept away by events beyond its control, but a great many Czechs, both within the intelligentsia and among the public

: at large, believed by the twentieth century in the virtues of parliamentary life.° Czech nationalists claim that this was the result of the Czech national character, formed by history from the time of Jan Hus into a democratic spirit of moderation. An explanation more in the spirit of Barrington Moore, however, would be that Czechs achieved national consciousness in the nineteenth century at a time when industrialization and social differentiation were already relatively advanced. Textiles were a major industry in which mechanization took place in Bohemia in the nineteenth century, but textiles were not a new industry to the Czech lands. The flax-growing areas of the mountainous parts of Bohemia had produced linens since the Middle Ages. With the creation of a world market in the sixteenth century, Bohemia began to enter that market not only through German traders in Nuremberg and Augsburg, but directly through Milan, Spain, and Portugal. The prosperity this trade brought to Bohemia was destroyed when the Czech nobility revolted against their Habsburg king in 1618. Suffering definitive defeat at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, the Czech nobility found itself deposed and its estates parceled out over the next century to aristocrats from other parts of the Habsburg realm. This disaster for the Czech no_bility was accompanied by the terrible destruction of the Thirty Years _ War. Whereas it is fashionable now to discount the casualties of that war in the German lands, Czech scholars still estimate that in Bohemia as much as half of the population perished.® The change in aristocracy and the demographic disaster, however, did not alter the pattern of social stratification. In fact, as the postwar population grew (it increased by a factor of about 2.5 in the 130 years following the Thirty Years War), the new nobility succeeded in imposing ever stricter work requirements on their serfs. This second enserfment was not related directly to foreign trade in grain, as it may have been in Poland, but it does seem to have had a relationship to the restoration of the linen trade. Prior to the Thirty Years War German firms made arrangements with urban craft guilds in the Czech lands to purchase their entire linen output, thus preserving the guild system of skilled craftsmen even while involving them in significant international trade. After the devastation of the Thirty Years War, however, much of the linen industry moved into the countryside, where German firms and their agents (factors) estab-

lished a putting-out system. A firm (or entrepreneur, or factor) pro-

214 SOCIAL ORIGINS cured raw materials for the peasant spinners or weavers, or lent the money needed to purchase such materials, and then bought back all of the production. Feudal landlords were more than happy for the linen industry to shift to the countryside, even if it was organized industrially, since their increasing power included an obligation by their serfs to provide a certain amount of spinning or weaving. An increase in the sales of flax profited the lord also, as did the payments made to him by his serfs for permission to do extra spinning or weaving and the percentage paid the lord on every piece produced. This system did not preserve the concept of individual craftsman but resembled a wage system, and therefore has been called proto-industrialism.’ Created for purposes of foreign trade, the system worked well internally also. The mountainous, less agriculturally productive areas became heavily involved in linen production, which was sold to the lowlanders for agricultural produce, thus creating a relatively complex division of labor in Austria. English and Dutch traders in linens penetrated into Saxony and Bohemia by 1660. Raw Bohemian linens were sent up the Elbe to Hamburg and thence to Holland or England, where they were dyed, made into garments, and re-exported. Seventeenth-century Austrian mercantilists realized that this trade was disadvantageous to the crown, since Bohemia was merely supplying the raw linen (or raw wool) to others, who manufactured it into more profitable finished products. Already in 1664 P. W. Hoérnigk insisted in his treatise Osterreich iiber alles wann es nur will

that Austria could greatly prosper if, among other things, she would process her raw materials at home.® For Hérnigk and the other mercantilists, this meant not only prohibiting the export of raw materials and the import of finished products, but encouraging manufactories and discouraging guilds, which were seen as a brake on industrial development. It took a long time for mercantilist ideas to be put into practice, however. Not until 1702 were imports of foreign linen forbidden, and only in 1731 and 1739 were the rights of craft guilds curtailed. But by the time of Maria Theresa, mercantilist ideas had become the entrenched orthodoxy.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, English entrepreneurs saw the potential profitability of conducting all phases of linen production in Bohemia itself and began to establish bleaching and dying factories. ArnoSt Klima describes the enormous success of a certain Robert Allason, who established a very large manufacturing system in Rumburk in 1713.° One local nobleman, Count Filip Josef Kinsky, became so enamored of industrial methods that he signed a contract with Allason, be-

SOCIAL ORIGINS 215 coming in effect an entrepreneur. This was not at all unusual. In the eighteenth century nobility played the major entrepreneurial role in the growing Bohemian proto-industries."° Austrian defeat in the War of the Austrian Succession, coupled with the pressures of population growth, brought important changes to the Habsburg lands. When Frederick II seized Silesia, Maria Theresa began to seek ways of centralizing her state and strengthening her economy, not only because Prussia alarmed her, but because the declining prosperity of the peasantry due to population growth made her realize that the stability of the crown might depend on ameliorating the economic condition of the increasingly restive peasants.'' Under the influence of Kaunitz, who as administrator of Milan had come into contact with a successful liberal economy and who knew the ideas of the physiocrats, Maria

Theresa agreed to the introduction of free trade in the Austrian lands." Until this point linen manufacturers in Bohemia had been able to prohibit the production of cotton goods, but in 1763 the prohibition was lifted. In 1775, after a particularly large peasant uprising clarified the danger presented by an impoverished peasantry, Maria Theresa went further, limiting the labor services of the serf population. By a decree of that year obligations were divided into eleven categories so that peasants with the largest holdings had to provide substantial labor services, whereas peasants at the other end of the scale without land, who constituted from 40 to 60 percent of the rural population depending on region, were required to work for the lord only thirteen days a year, thus

freeing them for other labor.'* The new rules provided that “no one should force a spinner to work against his will for an entrepreneur under conditions disadvantageous to the employee. It was further decreed that the relationship between the domestic worker and his employer should be based on contract. Should one party not fulfill the contract the second party could no longer be held to be bound by it.”"* The decree on labor reflected Maria Theresa’s desire, as she expressed it a year later, “to promote as much freedom in trade and industry as possible in all my lands,” but its result was to permit the peasantry to increase its income, and thus stave off the Malthusian threat, by participating in proto-industry.’° Joseph II was influenced more by the entrenched ideas of mercantilism than by the new ideas of free trade, but he did continue the trend toward creating a more mobile labor force in 1781 with his so-called lib_ eration of the serfs. Servile labor obligations were not finally abolished

216 SOCIAL ORIGINS until 1848, but Joseph’s decree permitted serfs to marry, move if they were not indebted to their lord, and learn trades and arts without pay-

| ment or permission."

The influx of foreign traders, entrepreneurs, and technicians, the interest of the Bohemian nobility in the textile trade, the lifting of the restrictions on cotton manufacturing, and the increase in labor mobility

brought about by the reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II led to the creation of a substantial proto-industry in textiles in Bohemia in the eighteenth century. By 1789 the number of persons employed in cotton

spinning and weaving grew to more than 528,000, with a somewhat smaller number of persons in linens, an indication of the enormous development of textiles in Bohemia even before the introduction of mechanical devices. In Moravia the city of Brno underwent such a rapid transformation in the 1780s that Czech scholars have called it the “Man-

chester of Central Europe.”’’ By the end of the century non-noble entrepreneurs began to overtake the nobility, hitherto dominant among

: native entrepreneurs. A growing number of merchants, rich peasants, successful factors, and prosperous artisans began to take the aristocracy’s place. Capital was scarce, and no banking system supported their efforts, but the experience and earnings of factors and small-scale traders during the proto-industrial era created a growing group with many of the characteristics of a bourgeoisie. Mechanization of this already advanced industry began at the turn of the nineteenth century when an Englishman named John Thornton set up a spinning mill in Pottendorf. By 1805 Bohemia had 18,000 mechanical spindles; by 1827, 47,000; by 1850, 550,000; by 1880, 1.6 million; and by 1914, 4.9 million.” The introduction of cotton-weaving machinery began in 1815 and mechanized means of spinning and weaving first wool and then flax and linen were introduced as the century wore on. In imitation of Britain’s classic example, the mechanization of the textile industry called forth concomitant growth in coal mining and machine production, and innovations began to appear in other industries as well. Among these was the introduction of sugar beets, which after 1848 became one of Bohemia’s most advanced and lucrative industrial enterprises. By 1880 more than half a million persons in Austria and Bohemia were employed in modern industrial enterprises, and by 1913 the number was 2.3 million.’

This impressive development, which put Bohemia at a level only somewhat below Germany but above France and Italy in some sectors, was not entirely without problems. Urbanization lagged in part because traditionally the textile industries were located in the countryside, in

: SOCIAL ORIGINS 217 part because the sugar beet industry was rural, and in part because of the lateness of completely relieving the serfs of their obligations. Despite

the appearance of many capable native entrepreneurs, there remained a shortage of entrepreneurial talent. The important point, however, is that at the moment when national consciousness arose in Bohemia, industrial development with its concurrent social differentiation was already well under way. When the intelligentsia necessary for political action began to consider the Czech situation, it had at its disposal a growing class of persons economically outside the lord—serf nexus.

In a curious way the aristocracy, and the emperor who relied on it, were instrumental both in creating an economically independent class and in providing that class with its political education. Both the Bohemian nobility and the crown encouraged proto-industrialization in eighteenth-century Bohemia, Maria Theresa to strengthen her realm and the aristocracy to increase its income, and proto-industrialization acted as a substitute for England’s mixed system in creating the beginnings of an independent class of entrepreneurs in Bohemia. In the nineteenth century, when the number of entrepreneurs had become significant and a working class was emerging, the emperor and the landed aristocracy acted again in a way that permitted middle-class elements to gain a political education. By the Manifesto of 1868 Franz Josef created a two-track system of government for Austria. This system placed a provincial governor in charge of “internal security, taxation, military affairs, the census, judicial administration, and surveillance of self-governmental bodies” in every province. Each governor appointed a district captain to supervise these activities in the districts and communes.”° The broad authority of these officials derived solely from the emperor. At the same time, however, Franz Josef created a second administrative track, consisting of communal and district governing boards, provincial diets, and executive committees, that was in charge of all local affairs not directly given over to the captains. Although in theory any decisions of local agencies could be overruled by the central bureaucracy, in practice their activities quickly became too varied and broad for real supervision. Local agencies concerned themselves with schools, roads, hospitals, poor relief, and similar matters, and many municipalities went further, establishing public transportation systems and even food-processing plants.”! The Austrian two-track system can be contrasted with the Russian zemstvo movement, which was established at about the same time. In comparison to Austria, Russian authorities gave the zemstva, which were to deal with the same type of problems as Austrian local governments,

218 SOCIAL ORIGINS little leeway, so that efforts of the zemstvo workers to enter political life could be repudiated by Nicholas II as “senseless dreams.” The Bohemian economy was much more developed in the 1870s and 1880s than the Russian economy, the educational level of the Czech population was higher, and the tradition of local self-administration, a holdover from the era of the Stdndestaat, was much stronger. As a result, in contrast to their Russian contemporaries, liberal Czechs gained real political experience in local government. “Of forty-five Young Czech deputies elected to the Reichsrat in 1897,” says Garver, “at least thirty had entered politics through communal or district political organizations.” The freer situation in Austria even permitted the emergence of a legal socialist party to represent the growing working class, although the party had to en-

dure persecution analogous to that suffered by the German Social Democrats until 1890. The development of a peasant party completed the picture, so that when universal manhood suffrage for the lower house of the Reichsrat was introduced in 1907, Bohemian politicians were prepared to make use of the opportunity. This is not the place to enter into the details of Czech political life in the decade preceding World War I, nor into the creation of the Czechoslovak state in its aftermath. A great many factors entered into that success, not least the powerful personality of Tomas Masaryk. It seems clear, however, that Masaryk’s success was due in significant measure to

the existence of middle-class norms of democratic behavior that had been tested by Czech participants in Habsburg politics. Strong parties, all committed to national democracy, provided the creators of the Czechoslovak state with the raw material of democracy. These parties existed because Czech economic development proceeded from a long history of proto-industry and industrialization that created an alert middle-class able to take advantage of the relatively narrow niche as-

signed to it by the dominant landowning class and its emperor. Although the members of this landowning class participated heavily in the initial introduction of both proto-industry and industrialization into the Czech lands, they did not undertake Moore’s “revolution from above.” By the time Czech industrialization was accelerating rapidly in the last half of the nineteenth century, middle-class competitors were elbowing noble

entrepreneurs aside. Furthermore, no modern state existed for the landed nobility to seize. Instead they participated in the Habsburg system, leaving middle-class Czech politicians to educate themselves in the new norms of democratic behavior in local and regional politics. Therefore the demise of the centralized Viennese apparatus in 1918 did not

create a vacuum of experience, but opened an opportunity to a pre-

SOCIAL ORIGINS 219 pared stratum. A group of middle-class parties existed that could seize power and introduce a democratic political solution. This result has a strong resonance with Moore’s analysis. Central European industrialization was strongest in the Czech lands; it grew out of a developed protoindustrial tradition; it produced a middle class with substantive political experience; and interwar Czechoslovakia became a democracy. Only a good deal of further work could lend substance to this syllogism, but it is a plausible sequence, one suggestively close to what Moore’s model might lead us to anticipate. If Czechoslovakia was the most democratic state in interwar East Central Europe, Hungary was the least democratic. When in October 1918 the Habsburg empire disintegrated, one of Hungary’s few truly democratic politicians, Mihaly Karolyi, sought to form a liberal government that the Western democracies would see as moderate, but he received almost no support from the public or from Hungarian political elites. Under severe pressure from foreign invasion and leftist revolutionaries, Karolyi lasted only until March 1919. The Soviet Republic of Béla Kun stayed in power until August, when an invading Romanian army permitted a counter-revolutionary regime under the leadership of Admiral Miklos Horthy to assume power. After the consolidation of this conservative regime by means of a massive bloodletting, stability was restored in 1921 when Stephen Bethlen became premier and established control over the political system through fixed elections and strict direction of his own personal party. When the conservative Bethlen left power in 1931 and Hungary began to suffer the full effects of the depression, its government came increasingly into the hands of men and movements whose policies approached fascism, although extremists achieved power only at the very end of World War II. No real controversy exists as to why Hungary’s political culture was so inhospitable to democracy. Hungarian politics was dominated by the landowning aristocracy. By the fourteenth century the king and noble

estates had become equal partners in sovereignty, and from 1608 a bicameral Diet exercised the rights of the nobility. Locally elected noble-

men ran the Hungarian counties, while a relatively large number of free towns were self-governed. In the Middle Ages, Hungary exported significant amounts of copper and livestock, and imported quality textiles from Western Europe.” Paradoxically, when Hungary came under _ Ottoman rule in the sixteenth century, exports actually increased, especially cattle. In the middle of the sixteenth century Hungary was supply-

ing 100,000 head of oxen or more to the prosperous south German

cities through the Viennese market. Imports of textiles, on the other ,

220 SOCIAL ORIGINS hand, shifted to the Balkans and Near East, distancing Hungary from Western influence in this key sector. In the seventeenth century, when an increase in Atlantic trade changed the structure of the West European economy and the south German towns began to decline, cattle trade slumped and the Hungarian nobility, which had not abandoned its property rights despite the Ottoman occupation, increasingly had to rely on Austria for its cattle market.” Therefore, despite a temporarily

favorable moment for capital accumulation in the sixteenth century when cattle exports were prospering, Hungary’s isolation from the centers of the new world economic system by the seventeenth century left it unintegrated into that system and permitted the social organization of the aristocracy to remain intact. Unlike in Bohemia, few manufactur-

ing enterprises penetrated into Hungary, so that when the Habsburgs achieved control over Hungary at the end of the seventeenth century the social dominance of the landowning and cattle-raising nobility, with ' its traditional political practices, was fully reestablished.

Three eighteenth-century processes assured the continued social dominance of the Hungarian aristocracy. The first grew out of economic decline and the policies adopted in Vienna to cope with it. Warfare, the lessening of foreign markets, rapid population growth, and practices de-

signed to protect large landholders all contributed to a decline in the eighteenth century.” Maria Theresa’s trade policies insured that Hungary would not attempt to solve this problem by turning to manufactur-

ing or industry, which the empress reserved for Austria. In 1756 the crown established a differential tariff for finished goods moving between Austrian and Hungarian lands that favored Austrian finished products and Hungarian agricultural goods. When later in the century

: Chancellor Kaunitz encouraged the construction of canals and the dredging of waterways to facilitate the export of Hungarian grain to Austria, grain began to overtake cattle, wool, and wine as the main Hun-

garian agricultural export. In 1783 Hungarian livestock exports still were valued at about 1.6 times grain exports, but by 1834 the ratio had changed to almost 4 to 1 in favor of grain.?” The growth rate in Hungarian cereal production from the 1780s to 1850 approximated 1.2 percent per year, a significant achievement, but precisely because this success removed any need for innovation it was not matched by industrial development, even of the proto-industrial type.** Transportation

remained poor, town life declined, peasant life stagnated, and the landed aristocracy remained in control. A second feature of the eighteenth century was the struggle between the ruler and the Hungarian estates for control of the Hungarian polit-

SOCIAL ORIGINS 221 ical process. In 1687, after his initial victories over the Ottomans, Leopold I forced the Diet to recognize him as Hungary’s hereditary ruler,

thus breaking the electoral tradition dating from 1301. It appears that ) the Habsburgs hoped to Austrianize the Hungarian nobility as they had the Bohemian aristocracy after White Mountain. But the Hungarian nobles resisted, even revolted, and by 1723 Charles VI had to swear to uphold the Hungarian constitution (that is, to leave the Hungarian nobility alone) in return for the Diet’s acceptance of the hereditary right of the Habsburgs, male or female, to rule. Maria Theresa wooed the Hungarians when she needed them to fight Frederick the Great, but she also did her best to weaken them. After 1764 she dispensed with the Diet, simply not calling it into session, and ruled by decree. At the same time, she attracted many of the greatest of the Hungarian nobility to Vienna, where they became closely attached to the crown. Joseph II went even further than his mother in his efforts to emasculate the Hungarian nobility when he attempted to abolish the traditional county governments. Maria Theresa’s neglect and Joseph’s antipathy provoked a so-called feudal reaction after Joseph’s death that succeeded in securing from Leopold II renewed guarantees of the nobility’s ancient privileges. The success of the Hungarian nobleman in retaining his traditional political dominance was matched, especially after the Napoleonic era, by

a third development, the subduing of the peasant population. Until about 1750 labor was in short supply in Hungary while abandoned lands were repopulated, and until 1790 a great deal of land clearing and reclamation was carried out, often by independent peasants. In 1767 Maria

Theresa issued an urbarial patent defining peasant work obligations. She intended to limit excessive demands on the peasants, but in fact the

patent helped the landlords in Hungary to extend labor and cash requirements to peasants who formerly did not owe service. In the period 1790 to 1830 the largest Hungarian magnates expropriated tens of thousands of hectares of land cleared in the previous generation by free peasants. The result of the three interrelated processes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—the relatively smooth transition to grain production, the nobles’ success in defending their - political rights, and subjection of the peasantry—was that at the time Bohemia was changing from proto-industrial patterns to industrialization through the introduction of textile machinery, Hungary was becoming an almost completely agrarian economy under the full control of the landed aristocracy. Austrian and Bohemian industrialization did not spread to Hungary directly, but the increasing urbanization of the Cisleithenian lands did

222 SOCIAL ORIGINS increase the demand there for agricultural products, which Hungary supplied. There appears to be a direct link, therefore, between Austrian

industrialization and the expansion of Hungarian cereal production, which grew in the nineteenth century more or less concomitantly with Austrian industrial development.” The growth of the Austrian market, which came about in part because Austria constructed military highways. that facilitated grain transport, induced Hungarian landlords, especially the magnates, to improve their agricultural techniques, to establish small local industries such as glassmaking, and to increase their consumption

of luxury goods as they sought to keep pace with the wealthy urban populations of Vienna and other European cities they wanted to emulate, but it did not induce them to industrialize. On the contrary: by the middle of the nineteenth century manufacturing equaled only 7 to 8 percent of Hungary’s national product. Contrary to earlier belief, the final liberation of the Hungarian serfs from labor commitments in 1848 and the creation of a customs union between Hungary and Austria in 1850 had little impact on changing the economic and social structure of Hungary.” Industrialization began in

Hungary after the crash of 1873, when the Hungarian government began floating large state bond issues. Austrian investors, in order to se-

cure a Safe and lucrative return, began to pour funds into Hungary. The government turned this capital influx into infrastructure and agricultural improvements, thus fueling an industrial boom. This spurt lasted until the 1890s, when Austrian investment returned to Cisleithenia. Hungarian development leaped forward again after 1906 in concert with a second major influx of Austrian capital. Hungarian industrialization did not begin in textiles in the classic — manner. Instead entrepreneurs took advantage of Hungary’s relative strength in grain to make flour her most important manufactured good. By the 1890s Budapest was, along with Minneapolis, the greatest flourmilling city in the world.*' Other successful areas of development included food processing, machine building, electrical and chemical industries, and railroad building.” In the period 1870 to 1913 Hungary’s industrial product, albeit starting from a very low base, increased at a rate equivalent to that of Germany and substantially exceeded that of

France and Italy.” By 1913 one-quarter of the Hungarian national product was in manufacturing, not a truly developed amount, but enough to have pushed the population of Budapest to “more than a million in the half century preceding World War I.”*

Hungarian industrialization, therefore, was quite adequate to produce a bourgeoisie capable of entering politics, which in fact it did. But

SOCIAL ORIGINS 223 the entry of this new class was conditioned by two fundamental factors: the social structure of Hungarian politics, and the character of the leading stratum of the Hungarian bourgeoisie. Two main social groups created the modern state in Hungary. The first consisted of the approximately 160 families that made up the great aristocratic clans of Hungary, Croatia-Slavonia, and Transylvania and which in the eighteenth century owned about 4o percent of the seigneu-

rial fiefs in the lands of the Crown of St. Stephen. The second group consisted of a much larger number of well-to-do gentry noblemen, constituting approximately 1 percent of the population (another 5 to 6 per-

cent of the Hungarian population claimed noble status but were too poor to play a major political role). While not fabulously rich, as the great magnates were, members of the gentry were nonetheless usually substantial landholders. Other privileged groups existed, such as the clergy and the free townspeople, but the aristocrats were the leaders of Hungarian society, especially in its relations with Vienna, and the gentry dominated county politics and the lower house of the Diet. Nineteenth-century Hungarian political development can be divided into two general periods, the era during which gentry reformers sought either by action of the Diet or by revolution to establish Hungarian autonomy or even independence, and the era in which this gentry entered government service under the leadership of the magnates, who by the second half of the century had solidified their political control. In neither case, despite the use of liberal rhetoric and the espousal of principles taken from contemporary liberal political theory, did either branch of the Hungarian nobility envisage relinquishing its control of the political machinery. The first period began with the calling of the Diet of 1825. Despite the crown’s promises after the feudal reaction of 1790-1792, during the Napoleonic period Franz I called the Diet only infrequently, and then mainly to pass appropriation bills. After 1811 he did not call it at all. When the Diet finally reconvened in 1825 a group of young gentry, many of whom were impoverished by their unsuccessful efforts to maintain a lifestyle the new fashions of industrializing Europe demanded, began to strike out against what they considered Habsburg oppression. Not only did they express an antagonism to Vienna traditional among some elements of the Hungarian nobility, but they also used the new ideas of romantic nationalism generated by the French Revolution. They were modernizers in one sense, since they sought to rework Hungary’s laws to be more in accord with nineteenth-century principles, but they were not entrepreneurs or incipient capitalists. Instead they were seek-

224 SOCIAL ORIGINS ing an arena of public life consistent with their dignity that would enable them to achieve power without having to become businessmen. As Andrew Janos puts it, they were “a class desperately searching for alternatives to economic entrepreneurship.”* The gentry reform movement culminated in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, which at one point briefly succeeded in creating an inde-

pendent Hungarian Republic under gentry leadership. Repression of the revolution quieted Hungary temporarily, but by 1867 it proved pos-

sible to reach an agreement with Vienna that permitted Hungary to . develop her own internal political system. In 1875, after a brief flurry of experimentation with ideas like the Law on Nationalities that might have lessened the influence of the landed class, Kalman Tisza, a gentry nobleman whose personal wealth and prominent marriage brought him the respect of the highest aristocracy, established his personal control over the political process and instituted a regime of narrow class domination. Tisza perfected the technique of rigging elections, so that even while the urban vote grew more hostile and opposition parties appeared, control of the countryside through the mechanisms of open voting, indirect elections, and brute force made it possible for the government, which always kept the interests of the aristocratic landed class uppermost in its mind, to dominate Hungarian politics until World War I. Whereas after 1867 local government in Bohemia provided a training ground for middle-class politicians, in Hungary local politics either remained in the hands of a fractious but conservative gentry, or came more and more under the control of the central government, which is to say increasingly into the hands of a more educated and more sophisticated but no less conservative arm of the same gentry. The salient characteristic of the bourgeoisie that confronted the aristocratic political leaders and their gentry government was that in significant measure it was Jewish. In the early nineteenth century Jewish traders, many of them recent immigrants into Hungary, replaced the Greeks who had conducted Hungarian mercantile activities in the eighteenth century. Virtually monopolizing the carrying trade in grain, Jews acted as estate managers and often were the tavern owners and money

lenders of the provincial towns and villages. From this base Jewish entrepreneurs came, in the second half of the century, to dominate Hungary’s largest manufacturing enterprise, flour milling, to control much of the grain trade, and to run the Budapest banks. As McCagg puts it, the most successful Jews became “not only members of Hungary’s urban middle class, but . . . the capitalist elite of that class.”** Un-

restricted by the aristocratic or gentry ethic that kept those classes

SOCIAL ORIGINS 225 from entrepreneurial success, Jews were at the same time outsiders, nonHungarians. When the industrialization of the 1870s and later led to the creation of opposition parties, the Jews became vulnerable to the threat of attack by anti-Semitic populists. But Kalman Tisza, looking for allies in his constant effort to keep his political machine intact, rejected antiSemitism, even recommending to Franz Josef the ennoblement of a significant number of leading Jewish capitalists.*” Later, between 1900 and World War I, over 200 Hungarian Jewish families were ennobled. Alone among the minority peoples of the empire Jews took to learning Magyar.

Some of the new Jewish nobility converted to Christianity in order to join the exclusive clubs of Budapest. Enthusiastic in their support of the government and anxious to put their pariah status behind them, many of the richest Jewish families allied themselves with the great landowning nobility in maintaining the dominance of the aristocracy over the political process, while middle-class Jews showed the strongest tendency toward assimilation of any Jewish community in Eastern Europe.”

The tutorial function the landed class maintained over Hungarian industrialization, its domination of capitalist agriculture from the late eighteenth century, and the alliance it forged with a significant element

of the bourgeoisie all are characteristics of the process Barrington Moore calls “the revolution from above.” The Hungarian nobility, both aristocratic and gentry, succeeded in maintaining a repressive labor sys-

tem into the twentieth century. The formal freeing of the Hungarian serfs in 1848 left 60 percent of them landless. Liberation did eventually permit a minor consolidation of moderately prosperous Hungarian smallholders by World War I, but this development came relatively late,

taking hold only with the industrialization of the 1870s, and was offset by the large number of landless agricultural laborers who remained available for cultivating the landlords’ fields and by the enormous increase in the amount of land in the hands of the great magnates.*°

The revolution that wracked Hungary halfway through the nineteenth century was not a bourgeois revolution, but an effort to exchange

Habsburg rule for liberal étatism under the control of the gentry. It changed the legal status both of the nobles, who no longer enjoyed seigneurial rights and were made technically equal to other citizens, and of the peasants, who no longer owed compulsory labor; but it did not abolish nobility as an honor, did not redistribute the land, and did not create a bourgeoisie.*° Thus while some reforms of 1848, such as the repeal of the prohibition on mortgaging homesteads, affected Hungarian agricultural development, the main burst of Hungarian industrialization was tied to the industrialization of Austria. Austria provided the market that

226 SOCIAL ORIGINS created a profit-oriented agriculture late in the eighteenth and early in the nineteenth century, and in the 1870s Austria provided the capital for industrialization. At both moments political power was in the hands of the great landowning magnates, in the second instance supported by a gentry-run state. The magnates remained in power during the latter phases of this process in part by working out an accommodation with the most successful members of the Jewish bourgeoisie, who traded their pariah status for admission to the ruling elite. Just as in Prussia the Junkers found a way to come to an agreement with certain industrialists in order to preserve

both their property and their status, so in Hungary the landed elite found a way to entice a significant number of a pariah bourgeoisie into an alliance by raising them up to the highest social level.*! Considerable political skill went into this accommodation, which like those in Germany

and Japan meant establishing a government separate from the people it ruled, but it created a Hungarian political culture in which democracy was considered an inappropriate option. Urban and peasant parties emerged, as did even a social democratic party, but in all segments of society, except perhaps the relatively small working class, acceptance of the aristocratic ideal was widespread. Thus in 1918 the democratic Karolyi stood alone, and even Kun could muster only a fitful spasm of rage. In the interwar years Hungary found itself in the ever more uncomfortable position of drifting toward the fascism that Moore’s model predicts for it, even though the most extreme propositions of that faith accorded neither with the noble ethic nor with the interests of its Jewish adherents. Romanian social structure had a good deal in common with that of Hungary. Romanian landholding at the turn of the twentieth century was at least as concentrated as it was in Hungary;*? the liberal reformers _ of the period came from a declining class of gentry boyars;* the great

Romanian boyars made their fortunes from huge landholdings turned to grain trade; and Jews were an important element in commerce, banking, and industry before World War I. But Romanian political development did not proceed as it did in Hungary. The richest boyars were not able to maintain their position by 1900, being outflanked not only by the Romanian king but by the bureaucracy of the central government. After World War I, instead of a cosmetic agrarian reform, the Ro-

manians undertook a massive land redistribution that eliminated the great landlords as a class. While Romania was not a model of democracy in the interwar period, it did take genuine steps toward creat-

SOCIAL ORIGINS 227 ing a democratic system. In the end, of course, led by a willful king, beset by the economic pressures of the Depression, and pressured by the expansionist policies of Hitlerite Germany, Romania drifted into dictatorship.“

The origins of the Romanian landowning elite, the boyars, are wrapped in obscurity. Before the coming of the Ottomans, the Romanian lands were not exploited agriculturally by a feudal nobility, but consisted of communal villages making moderate payments to an upper class that made its living from control of the international trade that passed through the principalities.** When the Ottoman conquest disrupted and transformed this trade the boyars could not impose serfdom on the Romanian peasantry because of the low population density and the ability of the peasants to flee to mountainous regions. The necessity to supply Istanbul with livestock and grain, however, encouraged boyars to attempt to secure rights to the agricultural production of villages, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a good deal of the plains area came under boyar control, although not in the form of ownership. Boyars had very little land that elsewhere would have been called demesne. Instead they were said to “control” a village, or to be its “master,” which meant they had the right to collect a tithe from those who worked the land. The Romanian peasant also owed a labor service, but in the eighteenth century it amounted to no more than six days a year, a very small amount. The fact that a good deal of the trade of the principalities was in livestock, including sheep that were raised by transhumance, kept the Romanian peasants in motion and made it difficult for the boyars to settle them in one place for long. An even more important hindrance to Romanian enserfment was a demographic decline of the eighteenth century that resulted from a series of wars and from the inability of the weak political system to control the countryside. The population of the principalities was only about a half million in 1750, and most of the Wallachian boyars who could afford it moved to Bucharest for their own safety.

Bucharest was a real city already in the eighteenth century for two reasons. First, it was the trading center for the significant Romanian exports to Istanbul. Second, it became the center of administration for foreign princes installed by the Ottoman government after 1711. These phanariot Greeks from Istanbul constituted the top aristocracy of the principalities in the eighteenth century, with the boyars that surrounded them constituting the next social level. Some of the phanariot families endured to remain powerful landlords and political figures in the nine-

228 SOCIAL ORIGINS teenth century, but the extremely short tenure of most hospodars led to chaotic political intrigues in Bucharest and a constant turnover in the composition of the Romanian elite. From a low point in the mid-eighteenth century, Romanian population increased rapidly, as did the interest of the boyars in cereal production. Accordingly, in the last half of the eighteenth century the number of labor days that could be required of a peasant was raised substantially in Moldavia, and even a modest amount in the more open Wallachia.** Shortages during the Napoleonic period created a demand for cereal products that encouraged the boyars into further tightening their control over the peasantry. By 1818 settlement on lands controlled by

a boyar became a privilege, not a right, and the tithe to be paid for working such land was raised from one-tenth to one-fifth. At the same

time, the eighteenth-century tendency of the boyars to leave the actual running of their estates to leasing agents while they themselves resided in Bucharest intensified. When in the nineteenth century the boyars in Bucharest began to find it necessary to emulate the ever more wealthy lifestyle of Vienna and especially Paris, their need for income increased.*’ Profit-oriented lessors tended to enforce rules concerning peasant obligations more strictly than had the traditional boyars in the first place, and when the boyars’ need for income increased, pressure on the peasantry redoubled.

The peculiar vagueness of the Romanian concept of ownership, which was limited to the right of the boyar to collect both labor (often

transmuted into cash) and a tithe, led to the proliferation of sharecropped holdings rather than the consolidation of latifundia. In the middle of the nineteenth century the area directly exploited by the boyars constituted only about 5 percent of cultivated lands.** During the

second half of the century, however, the tendency was for the portion

| cultivated directly by the boyars to increase. The global demand for grain exports, including those to the Habsburg lands and to the Mediterranean, pushed more and more of the fertile Moldavian and Wallachian lowlands into cereal production. Concurrently, despite occasional forays into reform and land distribution, the boyars continued to find ways to increase their control over the Romanian peasantry and to increase their own holdings. The reform of 1864, for example, which was intended to relieve peasants of their obligations for servile labor and was bitterly opposed by the boyars, actually increased the landlord’s leverage considerably. For the first time the concept of ownership was spelled out in law,

with the boyar receiving outright one-third of the property formerly under his stewardship and the peasantry the remaining two-thirds in

SOCIAL ORIGINS 229 plots of limited size. By prohibiting peasants from selling their small holdings, the reform prevented the development of a middling peasantry. The new law further restricted the peasant owner by requiring him to pay the state over a fifteen-year period for his liberation from tithe and labor payments. Since the payment usually was set at a level greater than the net income from small holdings, peasants had to work the boyars’ land to raise money to pay their debts, which increased stead-

ily nonetheless. The law of 1864 also put outside of the state’s concern a type of contract that became very common by the end of the century whereby in order to be permitted to sign a sharecropping contract for use of a portion of the landlord’s land a peasant had to work another portion for free. By 1900, therefore, the most powerful Romanian boyars controlled huge estates divided into tiny sharecropped holdings plus a growing demesne worked by a peasantry not far removed from serfdom. Despite the size of the holdings of the greatest boyar families, which approximated those of the grandest Hungarian aristocrats, the peculiar history of Romanian agrarian development did not create a rural proletariat, but rather a peasantry of subjugated smallholding sharecroppers. A few aggressive landlords answered the demand for cereal crops in the nineteenth century by turning to wheat production and by introducing mechanization, but by and large the Romanian boyar remained a renter. Living in Bucharest, the boyar leased his land to a manager for a set fee. The lessor then extended a contract to the peasantry on the most advantageous terms he could, extracted the payments from the sharecropper, and sent the grain on its way into the international market through a network of merchants and traders who often were not Romanian but Greek, Armenian, German, or Jewish. Even though this process constituted a capitalist system of markets, and even though capital accumulation proceeded among those who organized this trade, neither the peasant nor the boyar felt much effect from it. Relying on sharecroppers who usually paid in kind, lessors who insured that income for life in Bucharest would be forthcoming, and a state that made sure this cozy relationship would continue, the Romanian landlords prospered, but they did not mature. Indeed, this system of neoserfdom was their undoing. Since the great boyars did not enter into the world market as profitseeking farmers but as tribute-exacting rentiers, they had small interest in creating the revolution from above that Moore identifies as the key modernizing element in the maintenance of landed power into the modern age. Romania did have its revolution from above in the nineteenth cen-

230 SOCIAL ORIGINS tury, but it was conducted by a state dominated by liberal nationalists who emerged from the middling boyars, not by the great landlords. Under pressure like their Hungarian counterparts to maintain new standards of living, but with neither the wealth nor the cultural tools to do so, many middling boyar activists entered public life in the middle third of the nineteenth century. Their first goal in the 1830s and 1840s was simply to make themselves socially equal to the twenty or so great boyar

. families that dominated political life under the Organic Statutes, but after they had more or less accomplished this goal, the second genera-

tion of reformers undertook to make Romania a “modern” state in

which they could find employment, dignity, and worth. Ion Bratianu, the main liberal leader of the independence period, organized the new Romanian state on the basis of the French model, with Bucharest playing the role of Paris. Whereas the landlords controlled the’ peasantry through their domination of the local communes, after 1878 many other aspects of local administration came into the hands of men appointed by and loyal to Bucharest. At first the centralized state bureaucracy contained a high number of prominent old boyars, but by 1900 the dominant stratum in the state administration consisted of professional bureaucrats whose loyalties were to the state itself and to their careers within it.‘ This did not mean that the state became interested in upsetting the asymmetrical social relations of the countryside. On the contrary, both major political parties, the liberals and the conservatives, the first being the party of the middling gentry and the second being the party of the old boyars, agreed on the necessity of keeping the peasant laboring on his small sharecropped holding. But in contrast to the conservatives, the liberals took up the cause of modernization. Their method was not to introduce capitalism to the countryside, but to introduce it to the towns and cities by industrializing, by encouraging the growth of a Romanian middle class, and by creating a state machinery that would be a loyal arm of liberal policies. Thus, although the liberals had no intention of limiting the rights of the landlords, neither did they see themselves primarily as the landlords’ protectors. Instead they were modernizers, national enthusiasts whose support came from the urban professional and official class.*°

The contrast between Romanian and Hungarian development is nowhere clearer than in the matter of how the modernizing leadership generated electoral support for itself. Hungarian aristocrats entered into capitalist agriculture and used the large number of landless Hungarian peasants to work their lands. Tisza, who represented these landlords, insured his majorities by mobilizing massive pluralities of the

SOCIAL ORIGINS 231 landless peasants to offset his weakness in the developing urban areas. In Romania the small sharecroppers were not only difficult to mobilize, but Bratianu did not represent the interests of the large landlords directly. By a law of 1884 he structured his voting system to emphasize the strength of the urban professionals that his policy of modernization

and state formation was creating, rather than the mass of subjugated . peasants that his developmental plan ignored. A second difference between the Hungarian and Romanian cases was perhaps even more salient. Control of the state apparatus was vital for the Romanian liberals not only because it could be used to assist modernization, but also because it could be used to channel the fruits of that modernization into the hands of ethnic Romanians. Romanian economic growth in the last third of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth century took place in two parallel currents. First, with state encouragement, ethnic Romanian industry and banking grew to the extent that by World War I a Romanian banking system had been created and of more than 600 industrial enterprises in the country a majority were in Romanian hands. At the same time, however, without help from

the state and indeed usually in conflict with it, a naturally evolving Jewish sector of the economy grew up. As of 1800 there were only a few Jews in Moldavia and almost none in Wallachia. But as the century wore

on many Jews from the Russian Empire entered the principalities, especially Moldavia. Since they were denied the right of citizenship even if they were born in Romania, denied the right to own land, and denied the right to settle in the countryside, they were forced into the towns and cities, where they became artisans, traders, administrators, and bankers, not to mention peddlers, tailors, and other traditional craftsmen at the low end of the social scale. By 1900 less than 5 percent of Romania’s population was Jewish (Moldavia 10.5 percent; Wallachia 1.8 percent), but almost all of that percentage was urban, so that Jews constituted about 50 percent of the population of Iasi and more than one-third of that of Bucharest.*' Furthermore, Jews were overwhelmingly employed in the more developed sectors of the economy. Whereas only 13.7 percent of the Romanian work force was employed in industry, trade, and credit, 79.1 percent of the Jewish work force was employed in those areas.™

From the beginning of the Romanian national movement liberals struggled against the increasing success of enterprising Jews. When lib-

erals obtained control of the state they made every effort to restrict Jewish activities, even among the vast majority of Romanian Jews who were impoverished artisans and small traders. For example, when com-

232 SOCIAL ORIGINS plaints were received from villages about competition from Jewish ped-

diers, the government forbade Jews to pursue this miserable trade, thereby putting some 5000 itinerant peddlers out of work.®? On the other hand, a few Jews became very successful, especially in those businesses in which contacts abroad were useful, such as the grain trade and banking.™* Despite an ingrained anti-Semitism, the large landowning boyars were aware that many of their most efficient lessors were Jewish, that they needed Jewish grain merchants, and that financing was often more secure from Jewish banks. Accordingly, conservative politicians were more restrained than the liberals in their application of anti-Jewish policies.** But in contrast to Hungary, the greatest Romanian boyars did not achieve control over the state mechanism and did not produce any leaders of the stature of Kalman Tisza. The liberals, on the other hand, saw the Jews as serious economic rivals and used the state to give them-

selves as many fair and foul advantages as they could against their enemy. The complete lack of desire of the liberals to work out a compromise with the Jewish middle class, and the conservatives’ inability to do so, left the Romanian body politic splintered and made it impossible for the landlords to control the development of social forces to the same extent as in Hungary. Another factor that prevented the old boyars from decisively shaping Romanian political culture was the active role played in Romanian politics by King Carol. Carol was Romania’s largest landowner and pursued an enlightened policy of agricultural improvement on his lands, including even education for the peasantry. In politics he preferred the liberals, not the conservatives, in part perhaps because of the strong personal

influence exercised over him by Ion Br&tianu. But Carol was not an ideologue. To insure his dominance over Romanian politics he alternated conservative and liberal governments with only minimal regard to their ostensible ideologies or to public opinion. Hungarian politicians had to deal only with the far-off Franz Josef, who in any event had guaranteed them internal autonomy. The Romanian conservatives had to deal with a king who replaced them with their rivals when he deemed

it necessary. Thus, whereas in Hungary a handful of the most prominent landowners exercised ultimate control over the system, in Romania the king did so, and the old boyars were never able to sustain the same confident dominance as their Hungarian counterparts.

The final element that prevented the landowning class from maintaining itself after World War I was the peasantry itself. By bursting into ferocious revolt in 1907 and by making its discontent known while un-

der arms in 1917, the Romanian peasantry convinced even diehards

SOCIAL ORIGINS 233 that without agrarian reform an enormous social upheaval would result. Agrarian reform became possible particularly in Moldavia also because the Moldavian upper classes allowed their anti-Russian feelings to make them pro-German during World War I, thus destroying their credibility and making them fair game after 1918. Therefore, although the postwar land reforms were inadequate because of population growth, and

they never went beyond land distribution to achieve agricultural improvement, they did have the remarkable result of destroying the landlords as a class; this was the final price the large boyars paid for their unwillingness, or perhaps their inability, to seize control of the prewar Romanian state. All of these factors produced in Romania a situation in which a statist middle class dominated politics, at least for the first ten years of the in-

terwar period. The liberals, under Ion C. Bratianu, created the same sort of centralized regime that the elder Bratianu had established in the old kingdom in the 1880s, but two strong parties, the Peasant Party of Transylvania and the National Party of the Regat, provided effective opposition under the protection of a new constitution. The merger of these parties into the National Peasant Party led in 1928 to the coming to power of Iuliu Maniu. Despite its name, Maniu’s party remained under middle-class leadership, and Maniu himself took important steps toward creating a real constitutional regime in Romania. Maniu’s efforts were short-lived, however, because when King Carol II returned

democracy. :

from exile in 1930 he gathered more and more power into his own hands, until by 1938 his dictatorship ended Romania’s flirtation with

The Romanian case is less clear than the Czech or Hungarian ones in terms of Moore’s model. A landowning class did “use a variety of political and social levers to hold down a labor force on the land,” but the result, at least immediately after World War I, was not fascism. Instead a recognizable, if weak, tendency toward democracy emerged. It is true that a native fascist movement of some importance arose also, but this Legion of Archangel Michael was a mystical movement of regener-

ation that concentrated in its early phases on mobilizing the neglected peasants rather than on maintaining control over them through a decaying landed elite.*’ The Legionaires’ anti-Semitism fed on traditions introduced by the liberals, so that when Romania fell under the shadow of German Nazism the already insecure position of Romanian Jewry turned to catastrophe. Stull, genuine efforts toward democratization were made in the first decade of the interwar years in Romania. In signficant measure this

234 SOCIAL ORIGINS modest result was possible because the landlords’ social dominance was completely shattered by the postwar agricultural reforms, which in turn came about in part because of pressure from a revolutionary peasantry,

exactly the sort of pressure, if not mechanism, predicted by Moore in the case of a landed elite that responds weakly to commercial impulses.* This pressure did not result in an actual revolution and the installation of a communist dictatorship, as Moore also predicts, because agrarian reform temporarily mollified the peasantry. But reform itself was possi-

ble only because the old boyars had not succeeded in translating their social dominance in the prewar years into control of the state. That control was exercised by the liberals, who, despite their unwillingness to permit full entry into their midst of the powerful Jewish bourgeoisie, represented nonetheless a Romanian urban class in which not only merchants, bankers, and industrialists played a role, but most importantly members of the free professions and state employees. ‘This group, which included even Maniu’s peasant party, was not able, as Moore puts it, “to cope with the severe problems of the day” and was swept aside by events originating beyond the Romanian borders.*? Unable or unwilling to find a way to change the peasants into something other than smallholding sharecroppers, the Romanian state bureaucracy simply left them for the post-World War II regime to digest, which has been found exceedingly

difficult.

It would be charmingly symmetrical at this juncture if we could find

that Serbia and Bulgaria represented mature examples of Moore’s

revolutionary communist type that Romania does not quite achieve. Unfortunately, one of the requirements of Moore’s third type of social situation, which he sees exemplified in the cases of Russia and China, is the presence of an old-fashioned landed elite. The salient fact of both Bul-

garian and Serbian development, however, is precisely that in both countries the landed elite, which had existed for several centuries, was ejected just before the beginning of the modern era. Both Serbia and Bulgaria had a medieval nobility, but the conquering Ottomans annihilated it. In its place came Ottoman stpahis, who held their land and the produce of the peasants on it in return for service, and janissaries, who were at first members of a military elite but by the late eighteenth century degenerated into marauding raiders under the leadership of local strongmen.” Disruptive conditions in Serbia prevented the creation of

an enserfed peasantry there in the eighteenth century, but the legal right to extract dues and tribute remained firmly in Ottoman hands. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, however, the First and

SOCIAL ORIGINS 235 Second Serbian Uprisings (1804-1830) forced the Turkish landowners out of Serbia. During this revolutionary moment the Serbian peasant changed from an encumbered second class citizen to the free owner of a private holding. During the First Uprising local Serbian military and religious leaders acted as if they might establish themselves as a new Ser-

bian nobility by stepping into the places held by the departing Turks, but Milo’ Obrenovic, the wily leader of the less bloody but more success-

ful Second Uprising, was determined that no one other than himself achieve power over the Serbian peasant. He succeeded to such an extent that he became perhaps the richest man in the Balkans, but at the same time he steadfastly refused to permit the creation of large landed estates or the entry of peasants into servile relations. Therefore, when Milos was overthrown by a handful of notables, he left a country made up socially of only one class, a highly undifferentiated peasantry. None of the few distinguished individuals who took power in the 1840s owned more than

a few hundred acres of land at most, none tried to trace their lineage to noble forbears, none had aristocratic lifestyles, and none were more than barely removed from their peasant backgrounds. Despite the efforts of some Serbian historians to show class differentiation in Serbia in the 1840s, by the normal standards applied to other European societies we are dealing with an essentially classless system. In Bulgaria a similar situation obtained, but later and under slightly different circumstances. Bulgarian commercial interests were somewhat better developed than those of Serbia. As early as the eighteenth century a small class of successful Bulgarian traders, known as chorbadjis, estab-

lished themselves in the Ottoman Empire, perhaps the most important group of them in Istanbul. Nonetheless, when the Bulgarian renascence

began in the middle of the nineteenth century, Bulgaria was a completely rural country, run by Turkish landlords and their Grecified or Turkified Bulgarian allies. A sense of Bulgarian national consciousness began to emerge among some educated Bulgarians only in the 1850s, taking the form of a struggle for the independence of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and the promulgation of its liturgy among Bulgarians

in Macedonia. But when the Russian victory over the Turks in 1878 created an independent Bulgaria, neither the chorbadjis nor the churchmen took the lead. Instead a group of liberal intelligentsia dominated the constitutional convention at Turnovo that wrote Bulgaria’s new basic law in 1879. It took some time to rid Bulgaria finally of the Turkish land-

lords, but the process continued over the next generation in such a way that Bulgaria, like Serbia, became and remained largely a land of

236 SOCIAL ORIGINS smallholding peasants. Not sharecroppers, not a rural proletariat, these independent subsistence producers were only slowly drawn into a minimally complex local system of production and trade.*®

Both Serbia at the beginning of the 1840s and Bulgaria at the end of the 1870s experienced a situation almost outside our definitional categories: a social vacuum. And in both instances, a class emerged to fill that vacuum: the state. The most coherent institution in both Serbia and Bulgaria, far richer, far more organized, and far better supported by ideological justifications than any other social organizations, the state itself became the dominant class otherwise missing from the experiences of both countries. By the time of independence in 1878, Serbia already had a state. After the departure of Prince Milo’ in 1838 his successors created a strongly hierarchical bureaucracy based on the idea that the educated, those with znanje, or knowledge, should administer the state for the benefit of the nation by the use of a strictly controlled bureaucracy. Starting in 1858, however, liberal elements began agitating for a constitutional regime. When the assassination of Prince Michael Obrenovi¢ in 1868 brought a fourteen-year-old prince to the throne, the most prominent statist liberal of the era, Jovan Risti¢, pushed through a constitutional law that he hoped would permit him and his allies to govern while a docile legislature provided the assent of the nation. By formalizing the institution of a legislature, Risti¢ laid the groundwork for the emergence of vocal public factions. When in 1880 Risti¢ fell and a group that favored the creation of formal parties came to power, Serbian politics began to take on the aspect of a rough and ready parliamentary system. Three competitors vied for control of this system. One remained the bureaucracy, a second became the politicians who achieved prominence through success in the electoral process and in party politics, and the third was the prince. Just as in Romania, but unlike in Hungary and the Czech lands, the prince of Serbia (king after 1882) constantly interfered

in the political process, preventing the development of a bona fide democracy. Political parties became important, nevertheless, after the achievement of Serbian independence. The most formidable of these was the Serbian Radical Party founded in 1881 and led from that time until 1926 by Nikola PaSi¢. The Radicals were the first in Serbia to create local clubs linked together by a national organization, the first to enroll

peasants with party cards, and the first to mobilize a sizable electorate on the basis of a program rather than on the basis of police interference.

In the era of independence after 1878, the state over which these

SOCIAL ORIGINS 237 three elements struggled was able to extract and spend in its own interest

ever-increasing amounts of resources from the productive groups in Serbia, namely the peasantry and a growing urban stratum. This was not simply a history of corrupt, political figures who used the state to feather

their own nests, although there was a good deal of that. Instead the state | spent the resources it raised on extremely expensive projects that were designed to increase its own wealth, power, and ability to act but were only marginally useful to the peasants. These projects included the creation of a diplomatic service, construction of railroads, expansion of the army, and growth of the bureaucracy.” Improving agriculture, an activity that might have benefited the numerically overwhelming producing class, was not a priority. In 1908, for example, Serbia boasted only three agricultural schools training 222 students.® All the funds spent on agricultural schools, plant breeding experiments, and agricultural stations

came to 3 percent of the Ministry of Agriculture’s budget for 1910, which itself was only 3 percent of the state budget. The same budget allocated 23 percent for direct military expenditures and 28 percent for debt service, the vast majority of which was interest on loans used to build railroads and improve the army.” The ideology that fit these policies best was nationalism, which justified both the expansion of state activities and the extraction of evergreater amounts from society to pay for them. One area in which the population at large benefited from state policy was education, by which the state could build support for itself. ‘Those who pushed for an expansion of Serbian education doubtlessly thought in terms of enlightening the nation, but they also designed an educational system that inculcated a point of view from which the state’s expenditures would be deemed appropriate.© As Charles Jelavich put it in a study of Serbian textbooks, “Right up to the eve of World War I Serbian students were taught Ser-

bian nationalism.”

After the assassination of Alexander Obrenovi¢ in 1903, Serbia actu-

| ally achieved a working, albeit turbulent, constitutional monarchy. King Peter I was by disposition a pacific man who believed in constitutionalism, and this was sufficient to permit it to prosper. At the same time,

the political struggle continued to revolve around control of the political mechanism. In the five years preceding the outbreak of World War I, the contenders became the elected party politicians led by Pasi¢, the state-employee and bureaucratic group, now embodied in dissident military officers led by Dragutin Dimitrijevi¢é-Apis, and a crown prince with autocratic ambitions, Alexander Karadjordjevi¢c. The two branches

238 SOCIAL ORIGINS of the Radical Party retained the loyalty of the peasantry, as did in a cer-

tain sense the army, even though in important ways the peasant remained outside the reward structure of Serbian society. Why was the Serbian peasantry relatively so docile in comparison with the Romanian or even Bulgarian peasantry?®’ The most convincing answer has been put forward by Michael Palairet, who has shown that from

the 1860s to about 1910 the main burden of taxation shifted from the peasantry to the non-peasants.® During this period the per capita tax burden of peasants actually decreased relative to income, while the nonpeasants saw their taxes increase in real terms by a factor of almost four. This occurred because the state began to rely more heavily on indirect taxes on goods which the peasants purchased only rarely. Far from being powerless, therefore, the Serbian peasantry was able, either through influence with its advocate the Radical Party or by threats against its opponent the Liberal Party, to prevent the state from unduly oppressing it. But alongside the economic answer there must be a political answer as well, since the Bulgarian peasantry eventually became much more obstreperous than the Serbian, even though it too found its tax burden declining and its real income increasing in the twentieth century. The key element seems to be the moment at which the peasantry was mobilized politically. In Serbia the Radical Party was successful in presenting itself as the defender of the peasant’s interests from the early days of Serbian independence. Basing its program on the semi-populist views of Serbia’s first socialist, Svetozar Markovic, the Radicals propagated an ideology of anti-bureaucratism and self-administration that claimed as its goal the lessening of state intervention into the life of the peasantry. On the basis of this program and of vigorous opposition to Milan Obrenovi¢ in the early 1800s, the Radicals achieved widespread sympathy among

the peasantry. But the Radical Party was not a peasant party. It was created and administered by intellectuals and professional politicians. When it finally gained power in 1889 it continued its normal transition to membership in the state class that had begun a decade before. During a short tenure in power until 1892, the Radicals pursued a tax-collection policy that Palairet characterizes as “positively cavalier” to-

ward the peasantry, in the sense that the party did not push to apply tax rules to the countryside nor to collect arrears. From that moment no government found it politically expedient to enforce the collection of taxes in the countryside, and the burden of supporting the state’s expansiveness began to shift rapidly to the non-peasant sector. Out of power from 1892 to 1900, the Radicals maintained in the eyes of the

SOCIAL ORIGINS 239 peasantry their image as the anti-bureaucratic party. When they finally emerged in the decade before World War I to assume leadership of the state class, albeit in the form of two competing wings, the Radicals had a long record of peasant confidence behind them, so that even though the party now fully entered the state class it was at the same time able to retain the loyalty of the Serbian peasantry. In other words, the Radical Party gained the confidence of the peasantry soon after Serbian independence and retained it into the twentieth century, even as the party itself became more and more state-oriented. The Serbian peasant con-

tinued to believe in the party that had helped him in the past, even though the Serbian state run by those Radicals did little to help the peasantry cope with the problems brought on by impinging capitalism. In Bulgaria, the peasantry was able to prosper moderately in the two decades before World War I by finding ways to retain livestock for its

own consumption. But it was only then that the first political party gained the loyalty of the Bulgarian peasantry, long after the formation of Bulgaria’s state class. Unlike Serbia, Bulgaria did not have a ready-

made state structure available when it achieved its independence in 1878. Instead a congress of the nation’s notables dominated by a small national intelligentsia wrote a constitution for the new country. From the

beginning there were two main views as to how this new state should work. The conservatives believed the educated or administratively experienced elite should dominate politics and run the state in a patriarchal manner, whereas the liberals believed in “full political equality which, they argued, was only natural for a people which was blessedly free of major social divisions.”® After a brief flirtation with the latter possibility,

Alexander Battenberg, Bulgaria’s first prince, established his own personal power in cooperation with the conservatives. In 1885 a war with Serbia and unification with Rumelia led to Alexander’s downfall and a turbulent period of instability. By 1890 the political skills of Stefan Stambulov restored stability, but at the price of completely undermining the liberal provisions of the Turnovo Constitution. In the early years of Bulgarian statehood Stambulov used dictatorial methods because threats of assassination, public disor-

der, international humiliation, and financial disaster had required them. , But when these problems diminished Stambulov did not dismantle his oppressive machinery, rather the contrary. He also perfected the familiar system of civil-service bribery and election fraud common to Serbia, Romania, and Hungary, which in Bulgaria is called partisantstvo. Right after liberation, as the Bulgarians refer to the establishment of independence in 1878, the new state needed qualified administrators. To get

240 SOCIAL ORIGINS them, it paid excellent salaries, so that by the 1880s educated Bulgarians came to believe that high-paying state jobs were their right, often refusing to serve in lower ranking jobs. Those among this “civil-service proletariat,” as one Bulgarian called them in 1886, who did not get jobs were attracted to opposition parties, so that when a new party achieved power it would sweep all the adherents of the former government out of office

and install its own people, whose first job would be to begin ensuring the success of the new incumbents in any future elections. Under Stambulov, partisantstvo turned Bulgaria’s political system into “almost the sole property of a small minority of self-seeking politicians” who were almost totally divorced from the peasantry they governed.” Like its Serbian counterpart, the Bulgarian state pursued expensive projects that enhanced state power but were of little use to the peasantry, paying for these accoutrements of power by taxing the countryside. Not only did peasants pay a great deal more in taxes per capita in the 1890s than did other categories of citizens, especially the privileged civil servants, but those taxes increased dramatically during the Stambulov era. As Stambulov put it, “the peasant can still pay.””' Stambulov’s success in creating a stable system ruled by a small clique of professional politicians in control of a responsive bureaucracy was itself his downfall, because once Prince Ferdinand stabilized his position

he was able to establish supremacy over that highly centralized apparatus. When Stambulov fell in 1894, not only was he disgraced but actually murdered by vengeful Macedonians in retribution for what they

interpreted as an accommodating policy toward the Ottoman Empire and the mistreatment of Macedonians. Elimination of the only other politician of real note in the country permitted Ferdinand to consolidate his personal rule to such an extent that it continued without regard to political parties, governments, peasant unrest, or diplomatic and military defeats right to the end of World War I.

Unlike in Serbia, therefore, the struggle for control of the state | reached a definite conclusion in Bulgaria. The prince won. Political parties became nothing more than groups of the educated bickering to gain Ferdinand’s favor so that they could get into office and enrich themselves. Just as in Serbia, the general ideology that justified this system was nationalism, although in Bulgaria’s case nationalism was directed toward a specific and emotional goal, the acquisition of Macedonia. Originally part of the San Stefano territory of Bulgaria but not included in the Berlin settlement of 1878, Macedonia has remained to this day the touchstone of Bulgarian national policy, even though her greatest politicians, Stambulov and Stamboliski, understood that blind pursuit of that

SOCIAL ORIGINS 241 goal was not in the true interest of Bulgaria. Mobilization of national opinion over Macedonia was, however, in the interest of the state class _ because it justified expenditures that strengthened the state, especially those on the army. In both Bulgaria and Serbia, nationalism was the ideology of the state class’s supremacy at least as much as it was the _ romantic unifying code that nationalists claim it was. Two important political movements opposed Ferdinand’s personal rule and criticized Bulgaria’s state class. The first was the left, which developed in Bulgaria into two sectarian movements of so-called narrows

and broads that eventually became irrelevant to Bulgarian politics because their fiercely ideological devotion to purity prevented them from making the practical political alliances that might have permitted them to share power after World War I.” The other party was the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union, or BANU, which began to organize the Bulgarian peasantry in 1899 in reaction to popular outrage over unfair tax policies. The great leader of the BANU was Alexander Stamboliski. This daring “child of the new Bulgaria,” as John Bell calls him, did not accept the government's view that national policy demanded a strong military, a dictatorial prince, and a heavily taxed peasantry.” On the contrary, he believed that Bulgaria should pursue a pacific foreign policy with a view toward Balkan federation, that the army should be cut down to size, that the prince was an irresponsible burden, and that the peasantry was oppressed by the state class. Under Stamboliski’s dynamic leadership, the BANU rallied the middling and poorer peasantry to its banner to become by 1909 the strongest non-government party in Bulgaria, despite an increase in peasant prosperity after 1900.4 Calling for neutrality in World War I, Stamboliski accurately predicted Bulgaria could expect no good result from that conflict. Vindicated by Bulgaria’s humiliating defeat, he achieved power in 1919, whereupon he attempted to create a peasantist state, that is, one in which the independent peasant, owner of his small private plot, could prosper without having to shoulder the

burdens of overly rapid industrialization, excessive military expendi- , tures, or an extravagant court. Stamboliski’s temporary success in postwar Bulgaria has a curious resonance with Moore’s categories. Bulgaria did not have a decaying class of old landlords with weak links to the countryside. It did not have any landlords at all. On the other hand, the state that was created in the absence of a dominant class, and which assumed its role, itself had very weak links to the countryside, running the society simply in its own interest. Thus the door was open to the mobilization of peasant discontent by a radical intelligentsia. In Bulgaria, most of the intelligentsia chose

242 SOCIAL ORIGINS to side with the state class, while socialists and communists who opposed

the entire system were too doctrinaire to grasp the utility of mobilizing the peasantry. That left Stamboliski and the BANU. When the war completely discredited Ferdinand’s personal rule and briefly brought chaos to Bulgaria, Stamboliski used the moment to come to power on behalf of the peasantry. This is close to the result Moore might predict, but it was not the same result as in Russia and China for two reasons. First, Stamboliski was not a modernizer in the statist mold of Russian and Chinese intellectuals. He did not oppose industrialization, only industrialization at the expense of the peasantry and through the mechanism of a state class. Bulgaria could have both a prosperous peasantry and industrialization, he believed, if it would stop spending a third of its

budget on the military, if it would protect the right of the peasant to live a satisfying and fulfilling life on his small holding, and if it would guarantee that exploitation of one estate by another would cease. Neither Chinese nor Russian revolutionaries believed peasant life as it was lived under the old regime could be modern or satisfying. Stamboliski did not care so much about modern; he was willing to settle for satisfying. Second, Stamboliski’s regime was not politically revolutionary. Alone

among the defeated powers in World War I, Bulgaria did not change its political structure with defeat. Stamboliski had to try to work his revolution in the framework created by the state class and the prince, and still dominated by them. Unable to break through these restraints, in 1923 he was deposed and murdered like his predecessor Stambulov. Restoration of the state class led Bulgaria into the familiar pathways of nationalism, centralization, militarism, and a mild form of dynastic authoritarianism.

What has been the outcome of this survey of such different East European experiences as the Bulgarian and the Czech? Do Moore’s analytic categories describe these small countries? Despite the fact that the typology does not exactly fit any of the experiences, it comes very close to some of them. The Czech history of proto-industry and industrialization

does seem to be related to the appearance of a Czech democracy in the interwar years; the dominance of the Hungarian magnates when capitalist agriculture and then industry came to Hungary seems to have led to a conservative result there in the interwar years; and in Bulgaria the separation of the state from the nation offered at least a temporary

opportunity for the BANU to attempt the creation of a peasant state.

SOCIAL ORIGINS 243 The record in Romania and Serbia is more mixed. In Romania a socially dominant landowning elite found itself outmaneuvered by the gentry and the state class and eliminated after World War I, whereas in Serbia the success of the Serbian Radical Party in securing the loyalty of the Serbian peasantry at approximately the same time it was integrating itself into the state class resulted in a docile peasantry, even though the Serbian state did not act any more in the peasantry’s interest than did other East European states. Moore’s analysis leads also to useful speculations on the role of the peasantry. Only in the Czech lands, which became relatively highly in-

dustrialized, did the peasantry not play a central political role, even though none of the newly created states saw themselves as advocates of peasant interests. The question was rather in what ways the state managed to subdue or use peasants, and who controlled this state. In Hun-

gary and Serbia the government mastered the peasantry, although by different means and in different socioeconomic circumstances. In Hungary the landed aristocrats maintained control over an agriculture that included a large number of landless peasants and succeeded in imbuing the entire political process with a sense of the rightness of this control. In Serbia, the political professionals mobilized the smallholding peasantry by nationalizing them, that is, by convincing them that the national interests as defined by the state were also the interests of the peasants,

although in fact they were not. This produced a rough and ready democracy in Serbia, but not a democracy that threatened the dominance of the state class. In both Romania and Bulgaria, on the other hand, the revolutionary potential of the peasantry came much closer to the surface. The Romanian middle class constrained the peasantry to its own advantage first by permitting it to fall into neoserfdom, and then, when the peasantry’s revolutionary potential became all too clear, by eliminat-

ing the class of large landowners through an agrarian reform that did not actually increase either peasant productivity or influence, a truly remarkable turn of events. In Bulgaria the state did not nationalize the peasantry as successfully as did the Serbian Radicals, so that when the BANU arose in opposition an agrarian revolution such as Moore predicts was at least possible. Inability of the Bulgarian left to react to the situation, along with the inertia of the old system, which World War I did not destroy, led however to the victory of the state class. In at least two areas, however, Moore’s analytical hints are not of great

help. The first concerns the role of individuals. In each of the countries discussed certain individuals emerged who had an enormous impact on the outcomes. Is it possible to imagine an outcome in Czechoslovakia

244 SOCIAL ORIGINS quite the same without Masaryk? In Bulgaria the BANU was failing until

Stamboliski rescued it and drove it to temporary success through his own courage and brilliance. Would not the election of the democratically inclined Peter Karadjordjevié to the Serbian throne in 1868 instead of the erratic, insecure spendthrift Milan Obrenovi¢ have dramatically changed the course of Serbian development? What if Kalman Tisza had been a poor gentry politician rather than the wealthy husband of a baroness, or Ion Bratianu a magnate rather than a gentryman? In each instance a key element in the working out of the equation seems to be the personal success of a particular individual. Social historians, while not

ignoring the obvious fact that public affairs are conducted by people, not abstractions, are not inclined to grant a truly defining autonomy to individuals, and maybe a closer investigation would sustain that point in Eastern Europe. At this level of generalization it does seem curious that

in each country a strong, opinionated, even ruthless individual is as-

sociated with the outcome. The Balkan rulers provide a good linkage point between personal and structural determinants. Coming from, or in the case of Milan aspiring to acceptance by, a dynastic aristocracy not indigenous to the Balkans, these rulers were imbued with a mentality entirely unsuited to the creation of systems consistent with the more or less liberal constitutions with which their new countries presented them.” It is not surprising, therefore, that they constantly interfered in the day-to-day operation of poli-

tics, sought to create personal regimes they felt were consistent with their aristocratic honor, and favored the military in an effort to create support not offered them by an indigenous social class. In a sense the Balkan rulers were a class in themselves, an anomalous extension of the

European aristocracy acting in what they perceived as the interests of that class, but within societies where in actuality the state, not social relations, was the dominant element. This brings us to Moore’s greatest lack, his discounting of the state as an autonomous actor.” In all the countries discussed in this article except Czechoslovakia it is how one stands in relation to the state apparatus that constitutes the fundamental social datum. This is true not only in the cases of social vacuum in Serbia and Bulgaria, but in Romania

and Hungary as well. At the beginning of this article it was suggested that the small countries of Eastern Europe did not differ from the large countries dealt with by Moore, since every country has to confront exogenous forces with the social structure it has at the moment of impact. These exogenous forces normally are summed up as the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, or the Dual Revolution as Hobs-

SOCIAL ORIGINS 245 bawm calls it.”” But what this analysis suggests is that a third exogenous factor is at least as important as the first two—the European state system

that was already in existence when both the French and the Industrial Revolutions occurred. It is not possible here to go into an exposition of the emergence of this system, or even its main features. But it is a fact that when the East European countries came to political consciousness they had very little choice as to the style of organization their new nations would adopt—it would be the modern state, with its legislature, courts, centralized bureaucracy, and intrusive mentality. By the time the Czechs were able to establish such an entity, their long socioeconomic development had prepared them for bringing the state’s power under the control of a pluralist democracy. In Hungary, on the other hand, the magnates accepted the state as their own and used it for their own purposes. In both instances the socioeconomic situation was not entirely

different from that of Western Europe, where similar outcomes transpired. In the Balkans, however, introduction of a state on the European model occurred in a social situation that was almost completely unprepared for it.” The state, being the most developed institution in Balkan society, became also the dominant element, but whereas it operated using the same forms as its models in the West, the actual content of political activity was more consistent with traditional status societies than with

the more legalistic societies from which the state forms were copied. While it 1s not possible to discuss this point in any detail here, it is clear

that these aspects of the turn of Eastern Europe toward modernity are not easily subsumed under Moore’s model. In the social sciences, however, a theory is judged not only by how well it explains data, although it must be able to do that to a significant extent, nor by how universal it is in providing explanations under all circumstances. In good measure theories are judged by how fruitful they are in suggesting ways to approach problems. If a theory pushes us in the direction of seeing an old situation in a new light, of discerning new concordances or new discords, then it is useful. In Eastern Europe, Bar-

rington Moore’s explication of the social origins of dictatorship and democracy well fulfills that function. NOTES * I would like to thank Péter Gunst and the late Stanley Pech for their comments on an earlier version of this article. 1. Ernst Gellner, Thought and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1965). 2. Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins and Dictatorship and Democracy (Bos-

246 SOCIAL ORIGINS ton: Beacon Press, 1966), p. xii. For a recent discussion of Moore’s work see Dennis Smith, Barrington Moore, Jr.: A Critical Appraisal (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1983). 3. Ivan T. Berend and Gyérgy Ranki, Economic Development in East Central Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), p. 32; and Arnogt Klima, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Bohemia,” Past and Present 35 (1979): 53. The work of Berend and Ranki provides a solid basis for the discussion of economic development in East Central Europe. See especially Berend and Ranki, East Central Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Budapest: Akademiai Kaido, 1977); Berend and Ranki, The European Periphery and Industrialization, 1780-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Berend and Ranki, “Un-

derdevelopment in Europe in the Context of East-West Relations in the Nineteenth Century,” Studia historica 158 (1980). 4. Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974), p. 134.

5. For a discussion of Czech democracy after World War I, see Gregory F. Campbell, “Empty Pedestal?” with comments by Gale Stokes, “Czech National Democracy: A First Approximation,” and by Roman Szporluk, “War by Other Means,” followed by Campbell’s reply “Politicized Ethnicity—a Reply,” Slavic Review 44 (1985): 1-29. 6. ArnoSt Klima, “Industrial Development in Bohemia, 1648-1781,” Past and Present 11 (1957), 87. 7. Franklin Mendels, “Proto-Industrialization: The First Phase of the Industrialization Process,” Journal of Economic History 32 (March, 1972): 241-261; Eckart Schremmer, “Proto-Industrialization: A Step toward Industrialization>” The Journal of European Economic History 10 (1981): 653-670; Herbert Matis, “Proto-Industrialization, Industrialization, and Economic Development in the Habsburg Monarchy: A Commentary,” East Central Europe 7 (1980): 269-278;

John Komlos, “Thoughts on the Transition from Proto-Industrialization to Modern Industrialization in Bohemia, 1795-1830,” East Central Europe 7 (1980):

198-206; and Richard L. Rudolph, “The Pattern of Austrian Growth from the Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century,” Austrian History Yearbook 11 (1975):

11-20. For the implications of Mendels’ idea, see Charles Tilly and Richard

(1979): 184-198.

Tilly, “Agenda for European Economic History,” Journal of Economic History, 31

8. Arno&st Klima, “Mercantilism in the Habsburg Monarchy—wWith Special Reference to the Bohemian lands,” Historica 11 (1965): 95-119.

g. Arnost Klima, “English Merchant Capital in Bohemia in the Eighteenth Century,” Economic History Review 12 (1959): 23-48.

10. Richard L. Rudolph, “Social Structure and the Beginning of Austrian Economic Growth,” East Central Europe 7 (1980): 217. See also Jan Zak, “The

Role of Aristocratic Entrepreneurship in the Industrial Development of the Czech Lands, 1750—1850.” In Miloslav Rechcigl, Jr., ed., Czechoslovakia Past and

SOCIAL ORIGINS 247 Present, vol. 2 (The Hague and Paris; Mouton, 1968); and Arno&t Klima, “The Role of Rural Domestic Industry in Bohemia in the Eighteenth Century,” Economic History Review 2'7 (1974): 48—56.

11. For an excellent discussion of how the standard of living was dropping in mid-century due to population growth, see John Komlos, “Stature and Nutrition in the Habsburg Monarchy: The Standard of Living and Economic Development in the Eighteenth Century,” American Historical Review go (1985): 1149-1161. Komlos suggests that by the 1750s the Habsburgs “perceived this decline in the standard of living and adopted countermeasures,” p. 1157. 12. Franz A. J. Szabo, “Kaunitz and the Reforms of the Co-Regency of Maria Theresa and Joseph II, 1765-1780,” Ph.D. diss., University of Alberta, 1976, pp. 270~291. Maria Theresa decided free trade was to be “the fundamental rule and unyielding guiding principle,” but Joseph II remained a mercantilist and protectionist who believed in self-sufficiency. 13. Arnost Klima, “Agrarian Class Structure,” and William E. Wright, Serf, Seigneur, and Sovereign: Agrarian Reform in Eighteenth-Century Bohemia (Minne-

apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966), pp. 50-52. 14. Arnost Klima, “Industrial Development in Bohemia,” p. 97. 15. Helen P. Liebel, “Free Trade and Protectionism under Maria Theresa and Joseph II,” Canadian Journal of History 14 (1979): 366. 16. Wright, Serf, Seigneur, and Sovereign, p. 75. 17. David F. Good, “Modern Economic Growth in the Habsburg Monarchy,” East Central Europe 7 (1980): 252. 18. Berend and Ranki, Economic Development, pp. 112, 114, and 116. 19. Ibid., Economic Development, pp. 115~118. See also Arnost Klima, “The Beginning of the Machine-Building Industry in the Czech Lands in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of European Economic History 4 (1975): 49-78; Arnost Klima, “Industrial Growth and Entrepreneurship in the Early Stages of Industrialization in the Czech Lands,” The Journal of European Economic

History 6 (1977): 549-574; and Jaroslav Pur8, “The Industrial Revolution in the Czech lands,” Historica 2 (1960): 183-272. 20. Bruce M. Garver, The Young Czech Party 1874-1901 and the Emergence of a Multi-Party System (New York and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), P- 37-

21. Ibid., Young Czech Party, p. 91. 22. Ibid., Young Czech Party, p. 96. 23. Zigismund P. Pach, “The Transylvanian Route of Levantine Trade at the Turn of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” Studia historica 138 (1980). See also Ingomar Bog, ed., Der Aussenhandel Ostmitteleuropas, 1450-1650 (Vienna and Cologne: Béhlau Verlag, 1971).

24. Zigismund P. Pach, “The Role of East-Central Europe in International Trade (XVI-XVII Centuries),” Etudes historiques, 4 (Budapest, 1970): 217-264; Zigismund P. Pach, “The Shifting of International Trade Routes in the 15th and 16th Centuries,” Acta historica, 14 (1968): 287-321; Laszlo Makkai, “Der Un-

248 SOCIAL ORIGINS garische Viehhandel, 1550-1650.” In Bog, Aussenhandel Ostmitteleuropas, pp. 483-506; and Krystyna Kuklinska, “Central European Towns and the Factors of Economic Growth in the Transition from Stagnation to Expansion between the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” The Journal of European Economic History 11 (1982): 105-115. 25. Peter Sugar, Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354-1804 (Seattle:

University of Washington Press, 1977), p. 20; and Istvan N. Kiss, “Die demo-

graphische und wirtschaftliche Lage in Ungarn vom 16.18. Jahrhundert,” Stidost-Forschungen 42 (1983): 212.

26. Kiss, “Die demographische und wirtschaftliche Lage,” p. 219. See also I. Kallay, “Management of Big Estates in Hungary Between 1711 and 1848,” Studia historica 146 (1980).

27. Andrew C. Janos, The Politics of Backwardness in Hungary, 1825-1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 36. 28. John Komlos, The Habsburg Monarchy as a Customs Union (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 54. 29. Ibid., Habsburg Monarchy as Customs Union, p. 52.

30. Ibid., Habsburg Monarchy as Customs Union, pp. 25-51; John Komlos, “Economic Growth and Industrialization in Hungary, 1830-1913,” The Journal of European Economic History 10 (1981): 5-46; and John Komlos, “Austro-Hungarian Agricultural Development, 1827-1877,” Journal of European Economic History

8 (1979): 37-60. For a discussion of some of the issues involved see Richard L. Rudolph, “The New versus the Old in Austrian Economic History,” Austrian History Yearbook 11 (1975): 35-43; David F. Good, “Issues in the Study of Habsburg Economic Development,” East Central Europe 6 (1979): 47-62; and David F. Good, “Stagnation and Take-off in Austria, 1873—1913,” Economic History Review 27 (1974): 72-87; as well as Richard L. Rudolph, Banking and Industrialization tn

Austria-Hungary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); and Thomas Huertas, Economic Growth and Economic Policy in a Multi-National Setting, 184 1-

1865 (New York: Arno Press, 1977). g1. William O. McCagg, Jewish Nobles and Geniuses in Modern Hungary (Boul-

der: East European Quarterly Press, 1972), p. 31. See also Joseph Held, ed., The Modernization of Agriculture: Rural Transformation in Hungary (Boulder: East European Quarterly Press, 1980). 32. Scott M. Eddie, “The Changing Pattern of Landownership in Hungary, 1867-1914,” The Economic History Review 20 (1967): 294. 33. Brian R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 35534. Janos, Politics of Backwardness, p. 151. See also Nachum Gross, “Die Stellung der Habsburgermonarchie in der Weltwirtschaft,” in Die Habsburgermonarchie. Vol. 1, Die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung, Alois Brusatti, ed. (Vienna: Verlag der

ésterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1973), pp. 1-28; and Peter Sugar, “Railroad Construction and the Development of the Balkan Village in the Last Quarter of the Nineteenth Century.” In Ralph Melville, and Hans-

SOCIAL ORIGINS 249 Jurgen Schréder, eds., Der Berliner Kongress von 1878 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner

Verlag, 1982), pp. 485-498. 35. Janos, Politics of Backwardness, p. 65. See also Peter I. Hidas, The Metamorphosis of a Social Class in Hungary during the Reign of Young Franz Josef (Boulder:

East European Quarterly Press, 1977). For a discussion of this period see Thomas Spira, “Problems of Magyar National Development under Francis | (1772—1835),” Stidost-Forschungen 30 (1970): 51-73. 36. McCagg, Jewish Nobles and Geniuses, p. 27. See also his earlier articles, Wil-

liam O. McCagg, “Ennoblement in Dualistic Hungary,” East European Quarterly 5 (1971): 13-26; and William O. McCagg, “Hungary’s ‘Feudalized’ Bourgeoisie,” Journal of Modern History 44 (1972): 65-78. 37. Hanak has pointed out that this produced a cognitive dissonance not only among the Jews, but among the Hungarian upper class as well, which wished

to emphasize the Christian nature of the Hungarian state. See Péter Hanak, “Problems of Jewish Assimilation in Austria-Hungary in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Pat Thane, Geoffrey Crossick, and Foderick Floud, eds., The Power of the Past: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm (Cambridge University Press,

1984), Pp. 235-250. 38. George Barany, “‘Magyar Jew’ or: ‘Jewish Magyar’? (To the Question of Jewish Assimilation in Hungary),” Canadtan-American Slavic Studies 8 (1974): 144. For several good articles on Jews in Eastern Europe, including a reprint of Barany, see Bela Vago and George L. Mosse, eds., Jews and non-Jews in Eastern Europe, 1918-1945 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974).

39. Scott M. Eddie, “Agricultural Production and Output per Worker in Hungary, 1870-1913,” Journal of Economic History 23 (1968): 220-221; Antal

Voros, “The Age of Preparation: Hungarian Agrarian Conditions between 1848-1914,” in Held, Modernization of Agriculture, pp. 21-129; Ivan T. Berend, and Gyérgy Ranki, Hungary: A Century of Economic Development (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974), pp. 40-48; and Eddie, “Landownership in Hungary,” pp. 293~—310. The area covered by farms over about 15,000 acres (10,000 holds) increased from 1867 to 1914 from about 2.25 million hectares to almost 5.5, million (i.e., from 8.5 percent of the area of landed property to 19.4 percent). This distribution did not differ markedly from that in Germany or Romania. Eddie, “Landownership in Hungary,” pp. 302-303. 40. Hungarian historians hold that 1848 constituted a bourgeois revolution because noblemen lost their privileges and henceforth had to pay taxes, while all citizens received the right to own land.

41. Austrian industrialists cooperated with Hungarian grain growers and millers to sell textiles in Hungary and wheat in Austria. Eddie calls this the “marriage of textiles and wheat.” Scott M. Eddie, “The Terms and Patterns of Hungarian Foreign Trade, 1882-1913,” Journal of Economic History 37 (1977): 351. See also Scott M. Eddie, “Farmer’s Response to Price in Large-Estate Agriculture: Hungary and Germany, 1870-1913,” Economic History Review 24 (1971):

571-588; and Scott M. Eddie, “The Terms of Trade as a Tax on Agriculture:

250 SOCIAL ORIGINS Hungary’s Trade with Austria, 1883-1913,” Journal of Economic History 32

(1972): 298-315. , 42. Daniel Chirot, Social Change in a Peripheral Society (New York: Academic

Press, 1976), p. 1477; and Eddy, “Land Ownership,” p. 296. 43. Andrew C. Janos, “Modernization and Decay in Historical Perspective: The Case of Romania.” In Kenneth Jowitt, ed., Social Change in Romania 1860—

1940 (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1978), p. 82. 44. Henry Roberts, Rumania: Political Problems of an Agrarian State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951). 45. Chirot, Social Change. 46. David Mitrany, The Land and the Peasant in Rumania (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), pp. 7-21. 47. The Hungarian gentry had a similar sense of inferiority and need. Janos, Politics of Backwardness, pp. 44-50. 48. John R. Lampe and Marvin R. Jackson, Balkan Economic History 1550— 1950: From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-

versity Press, 1982), pp. 84, 93. .

49. Janos, “Modernization and Decay,” p. go. 50. R. W. Seton-Watson, History of the Roumanians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), p. 354. For a thorough discussion of Romanian industrialization see David Turnock, “The Industrial Development of Romania from the Unification of the Principalities to the Second World War.” In Francis W. Carter, ed., An Historical Geography of the Balkans (London: Academic Press, 1977). , hi . Carol L[ancu, Les juifs en Roumanie (1866—1919): de l’exclusion a l’Emancipa-

tion (Editions de Université de Provence, 1978), p. 143. 52. Nicholas Spulber, The State and Economic Development in Eastern Europe (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 144. 53. Simon Dubnov, History of the Jews, 4th rev. ed. (New York: Yoseloff, 1973), 5:6g0. 54. Spulber, State and Economic Development, pp. 100-102. 55. Dubnov, History of the Jews, p. 633.

56. Moore, Dictatorship and Democracy, p. 420. | 57. Eugen Weber, “Romania.” In Hans Rogger and Eugen Weber, eds., The

European Right (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965). 58. Moore, Dictatorship and Democracy, p. 420. 59. Ibid., Dictatorship and Democracy, p. 438.

6o. Deena R. Sadat, “Rumeli Ayanlari: The Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Modern History 44 (1972), 346-363.

61. For an excellent discussion of Bulgarian history from the achievement of independence to World War I see Richard J. Crampton, Bulgaria 1878-1918: A History (Boulder: East European Quarterly Press, 1983). 62. For an excellent discussion of the deleterious effect of railroad building on the Balkan peasantry, see Sugar, “Railroad Construction.”

SOCIAL ORIGINS 251 63. Statistickt godiinjak kraljevine Srbye, Knj. 12. 1907-08 (Belgrade, 1913), pp.

277-290. 64. Situation financiére et économique du Royaume de Serbie (Belgrade, 1910), pp.

14-15. 65. On the fundamental nature of this process, see Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nattonalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983). 66. Charles Jelavich, “Serbian Textbooks: Toward Greater Serbia or Yugo-

slavia?” Slavic Review 42 (1984): 618. | 67. Andrija Radeni¢ has chronicled the lessening intensity of peasant disturbances in Serbia as urban parties took leadership of the peasantry over from the patriarchal leaders of the first half of the nineteenth century. A summary

statement of his view is Andrija Radeni¢, “Karakteristi¢ne crte buntovnih pokreta,” in his /z istorije Srbije 1 Vojvodine, 1834-1914 (Novi Sad and Belgrade: Matica srpska and Istorijski institut, 1973), pp. 359-366. 68. Michael Palairet, “Fiscal Pressure and Peasant Impoverishment in Serbia before World War I,” The Journal of Economic History 39 (1979): 719-740.

69. Crampton, Bulgaria, pp. 30-31. 70. Ibid., Bulgaria, pp. 158-160. 71. The 1879-1883 index of 100 became 154 by 1889—1892. Crampton, Bulgaria, pp. 149, 208. 72. Joseph Rothschild, The Communist Party of Bulgaria: Origins and Development, 1883-1936 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). 73. John D. Bell, Peasants in Power: Alexander Stamboliski and the Bulgarian “Agrarian National Union, 1899-1923 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), P- 55-

74. Michael Palairet, “Land, Labour and Industrial Progress in Bulgaria and Serbia before 1914,” The Journal of European Economic History 12 (1983): 177; and

Crampton, Bulgaria, p. 358. 75. Dimitrije Djordjevic, “Foreign Influences on Nineteenth-Century Balkan Constitutions.” In Kot K. Shangriladze and Erica W. Townsend, eds., Papers for

pp. 72-102. |

the Fifth Congress of Southeast European Studies (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1985),

76. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). For an expansion of Skocpol’s emphasis on the state into the sphere of ideas see William H. Sewell, Jr., “Ideologies and Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case,” Journal of Modern History 57 (1985): 57-85. 77. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, Ltd., 1962), p. xv.

78. Kenneth Jowitt, “The Sociocultural Bases of National Dependency in Peasant Countries.” In Kenneth Jowitt, ed., Social Change in Romania, 1860-1940 (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1978), pp. 1-30.

BLANK PAGE

Contributors

Fikret Adanir is Professor of History at the University of Bochum, Germany. Robert Brenner is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Daniel Chirot is Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Péter Gunst is Professor of Economic History at the University of Debrecen and at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. Jacek Kochanowicz is Professor of Economic History at Warsaw University.

John R. Lampe is Professor of History at the University of Maryland

in College Park and Secretary of the East European Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. Gale Stokes is Professor of History at Rice University in Houston.

253

| BLANK PAGE

INDEX

Abel, Wilhelm, 97 Augsburg, 213

Absolutist state, 40-41, 48 Austria, 5, 12, 142, 144, 186, 190-194,

Adrianople, Treaty of (1829), 72 214, 216-218, 220-222, 225-226. See

Africa, 10; north, 55, 59, 154 also Habsburg Empire

Agriculture, 93, 121, 132—135; commer- Austro-Hungarian Empire. See Habsburg

cial, 9; organization, 54-55, 57, 178; Empire production, 150-151, 155-156; pro-

ductivity, 26-28, 41-44, 46—48, 50, Bairoch, Paul, 195-196, 198 195; revolution, 26, 49, 180; technol- Balkans, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12, 55-60, 78, 81, ogy, 9, 46, 54, 63, 66, 74-75, 79-83, 133-138, 140, 142—147, 151-152, 177—

107-108, 180, 184, 192, 220, 222 2O2, 220, 235, 241, 244-245

Albania, 3—4, 188 Barkan, Omer, 183-184

Aleksinac, 142 Battenburg, Alexander, 239 Algeria, 154 Bavaria, 5 Allason, Robert, 214 Beer, 70, 75

: Alsatian, 154 Belgium, 6, 192 America, north, 1; south, 178 Belgrade, 142, 144 Amsterdam, 96 Bell, John, 241

Anatolia, 55, 59, 132, 135, 138-143, 148, BeneS, Eduard, 212

150-151, 154, 178, 181, 183 Berend, Ivan, 3 Anderson, Perry, g8—99, 110, 115, 181, Berlin, 199, 240

190 Bethlen, Stephen, 219

Antwerp, 96 Biatystok, 121 Arabs, 58 Black Death, 180-181

Armenians, 58, 229 Black Sea, 180, 187-188 Artisans, 180, 190, 201 Blum, Jerome, 99

Asia Minor. See Anatolia Bohemia, 5, 8, 61-62, 64-70, 72, 75-80, Asian mode of production, 182 111, 117-119, 212-218, 220-221, 224

Atceken nomads, 134 Boujour, Felix, 186 255

256 INDEX Boyars, 227-230, 233 Corvée labor, 9, 68-69, 71, 73 Brandenburg, 68-69, 113 Cossacks, 108 Bratianu, Ion, 230-233, 244 Cotton, 147, 149, 153, 185-190, 216 Bratianu, Ion C., 233 Counter-Reformation, 191 Braudel, Fernand, 178, 181, 184, 186,188 | Croatia-Slavonia, 59, 60, 65, 192, 194, 223

Brenner, Robert, 2, 4, 98, 181, 189 Cvetkova, Bistra, 137, 138, 145

Brno, 216 Czechoslovakia, 193-194, 196, 211-213, Browning, Robert, 179 216-219, 233, 236, 242-245 Broz, Josip, 194

Bucharest, 227-231 Debt, 199-200

Budapest, 194, 222, 224 Demesne, 44, 48, 96-98, 102—104, 188—

Bukharin, Nikolai, 2 189, 229 Bukovina, 64 Demirhisar, 152

Bulgaria, 77, 133-134, 138, 144-145, 151, Dependency, 7-8, 10-12, 95-96, 118-119,

179-183, 185, 188-189, 193, 195-199, 178, 180, 185, 210

201, 211-212, 234-236, 238-244 Diet, 219, 221, 228

Burgas, 197 Dimitrijevic-A pis, Dragutin, 237

Burghers, 111-117 Dimitrov, Stragimir, 138, 151, 189

Burgundy, 6 Domar, Evsey, 110

Burszta, J6zef, 105 Dopsch, Alfonse, 35,

Bystron, Jan, 105 Dragoman, 144 Byzantine Empire, 55, 133, 179-182, 190, Dubrovnik, 183

202 Duby, Georges, 180

145 Canada, 198 Dutch. See Durazzo, Netherlands Capitalism or capitalists, 147, 154, 156. See

Carolingian Enpine a9 capitalist Economic growth, theories of, 1-14, 70

Castellan, 23 aie ‘97 Celts, 54-55, 57-58) 65 Elden. Vedat. 106 Central Europe, 6, 50, 61-66, 74, 82, 198, em, vec at, 19

202, 219 Emancipation (of serfs), 78

China, 4, 5, 9, 211, 234, 242 England, 1, 4, 29, 47-59, 95, 149, 153, Christian, 143-144, 149, 189, 225; Catho- 185-187, 190-191, 200, 202, 210-211,

lic, 57, 59, 64; Orthodox, 55, 64 214, 216-217, 244-245

Christov, Christo, 152

Church estates, 180 Faroghi, Suraiya, 138, 141, 144-145 Ciftlik, 133, 146-154, 187-190 Fascism, 219, 233 Cisleithenian lands, 221 Fashions, Western, 62

Class struggle, 146 Fekete, Lajos, 137-138

Coal, 195, 197-198, 216. See also Mining Ferdinand, prince, 240, 242 Coinage, 179-180, 186-187, 195~196, Feudal Crisis, 30—31

200. See also Inflation Feudalism, 24-26, 56, 60, 146, 182, 188—

Colonialism or colonization, 25, 27, 44, 46, 189, 214, 221, 227. See also Feudal

65-66, 69, 77, 95-96 Crisis; Property Relations, Feudal

Constantinople, 46, 181-182, 184-185, Fief, 28, 223

189. See also Istanbul Fish, 70

Cook, M. A., 141 Flanders, 30

Copper, 219. See also Mining Folwark, 94, g6—104

Core, 117, 194-195, 210 France, 6, 40-42, 47-48, 145, 149, 153-

INDEX 257 154, 184-187, 189-191, 193, 195, 199, _—_—‘ India, 149, 153

210-211, 216, 222—223, 230, 244-245 Industrialization, 1, 10, 73, 77-78, 82-83,

Frank, André Gunder, 185, 193, 198 120—122, 155, 177, 200

Franz I, 223 Inflation, 141, 153. See also Coinage; Price Franz Josef, 217, 225, 232 Revolution Frederick II, the Great, 215, 221 Inheritance, 40, 56, 148

Intelligentsia, 213, 217, 235, 241-242

Galicia, 64, 121 Iron, 195

Gandev, Christo, 137-138, 189 Issawi, Charles, 153

Garver, Bruce M., 218 Istanbul, 140, 144, 148, 151, 182-183, Gdansk, 96, 109-111, 113, 117 227, 235. See also Constantinople Gentry, 104~—105, 112, 224, 226, 244 Italy, 30, 140, 149, 180-181, 216, 222 Germany, 6, 8, 40-42, 48, 54-55, 59, 63, Ivan IV, 57

65-66, 80, 154, 181, 184, 188, 192, Izmir, 154 195—196, 199, 201, 211, 213, 216, 218—

219, 226-227, 229, 233. See also Jackson, Marvin, 152, 196

Bavaria; Mecklenburg; Prussia Janos, Andrew, 224

Gnezno, 64 Japan, 9, 211, 226

Géllner, Carl, 192 Jelavich, Charles, 237

Good, David, 193-194 Jews, 58, 112, 224~226, 229, 231-234

Gostamski, Anzelm, 105, Jones, Eric L., 190

Grain, 46, 62, 66, 68, 70~—71, 139-140, Joseph II, 215-216, 221 143, 147-149, 151, 153, 180-181, 183— Jowitt, Ken, 3 185, 187~188, 190, 192, 194-198, 201, Junkers, 226 220, 222, 224, 227-229, 231

Greece, 54, 58, 152, 181, 184, 187, 189— Kahan, A., 111 190, 193, 195, 198—199, 224, 227, 229 Kaminski, A., 108-109

Grodecki, Roman, 100 Karadjordjevic, Alexander, 237 Guilds, 183, 213-214 Karadjordjevi¢, Peter, 244

Gunst, Petér, 5, 6 Karoly, Mihaly, 219, 226 Kemler, Marcin, 101

Habsburg Empire, g, 80, 118, 145, 178— Kinsky, Count Filip Josef, 214 179, 184, 190-194, 197-199, 201, 213, Kjustendil, 151

215, 218-219, 221, 223, 225, 228 Kligman, Gail, 3

Hamburg, 214 Klima, Arno&t, 214

Hicks, John, 110, 182 Kochanowicz, Jacek, 6, 8

Hobsbawm, Eric, 3, 143, 244-245 Koleradov, Petir, St., 138

Hornigk, P. W., 214 Konigsberg, 64

Horthy, Admiral Miklos, 219 Kula, Witold, 100, 104, 106 Hungary, 5—7, 9, 62-69, 71-72, 80-81, Kun, Béla, 219, 226 111, 117, 145, 181-182, 191-192, 194, 196, 199, 201, 211~—212, 219-225, 22g—- Lampe, John, g—10, 152

233, 236, 239, 242-245. See also Habs- Land rents, 48

burg Empire Latvia, 69

Hus, Jan, 213 Law, 112; Church, 57; Ducale, 93; Ger-

Hiitteroth, Wolf-Dieter, 138 man, 42-43, 63-64, 66, 69; Hungarian, 224; Muslim, 182; Ottoman, 140, 146,

Ideology, 104—106 150; Polish, 107-108; Roman, 57, 65;

Imperialism, 47, 132. See also Colonialism Romanian, 229, 231; Theotonicum, 93;

Inalak, Halil, 137, 139, 140-150 Wallachian, 134, 139

258 INDEX Lemberg, 64 144, 148, 179-183, 187-192, 217, 219, Leopold I, 221 222, 234, 237-238, 241 Leopold II, 221 Mining, 59, 61-62, 69, 216

Levant, 192 Minneapolis, 222

Literacy, 194 Moldavia, 6, 9, 58, 72, 228, 231-233. See Lithuania, 6, 95, 109, 115 also Romania Livestock, 56, 139, 143-148, 150, 173- Monarchy, 40—42, 47 174, 184, 189-190, 193—194, 201, 219— Moore, Barrington, 12, 108, 120, 211—

220, 227 213, 218-219, 225-226, 229, 233-234,

Livonia, 69 241-245

L.6dzZ, 121 Moravia, 64, 212, 216 Lords’ monopolies, 71, 73,75, 194 Mulhail, M. G., 195

Love, Joseph, 3 Muslims, 149, 182-183, 188-191, 202

Lubecki-Drucki, Prince Ksawery, 120

Luxemburg, Rosa, 2 Netherlands, 6, 50, 66, 95, 109, 187, 214

222 Nichtweiss, J., 97

Luxuries, consumption of, 104, 117, 180, Nicholas II, 2147

Lybyer, Alfred, 190 NiS, 144

Normans, 181

McGowan, Bruce, 142, 145, 148, 184, 189 North, Douglass C., 111

McNeill, William H., 190 Northeastern Europe, 39, 42—45, 48, 178, Macedonia, 134, 139, 144, 151, 154, 180, ~ 184 187, 189, 197-198, 235, 240, 241 Northwestern Europe, 39, 40-42, 180, 210

Maczak, Antoni, 95-96, 109 Nuremberg, 213 Magnates, 102—103, 115-116

Magyar, 225 Obrenovi¢, Alexander, 237 Matowist, Marion, g5, 178 Obrenovié, Milan, 238, 244

Malthus, Thomas, 28, 30-31, 42, 46, 50, Obrenovic¢, Prince Milo8, 235—236

182, 215 O’Brien, Patrick, 186

Manastir, 142, 148, 151 Opium, 153

Maniu, luliu, 233-234 Ottoman Empire, 9, 45—47, 71, 131-176,

Manufacturing, 112, 120 177-202, 220-221, 227, 234, 240

Maria Theresa, 214-217, 220-221 Markets, 8, 58, 62, 7o~-71, 178-180, 182, Palairet, Michael, 201, 238

184, 187, 194, 197, 225, 229. See also Palmer, R. R., 115

Trade; World Market Parker, Jason, 4

Markovic, Svetozan, 238 Paris, 228, 230

Marx, Karl, 1, 2, 35 Pagic, Nikola, 236

Masaryk, Tomas, 212, 218, 244 Pastoralism, 5, 134-135, 138. See also

Mecklenburg, 68, 97 Transhumance

Mediterranean Sea, 187, 228 Peasant proprietorship, 40-42

Mehmed II, 135 Periphery, 114, 194-195. See also Core

Melnik, 152 Peter I, king, 237 Mercantilism, 214, 215, 224 Peter the Great, 56-57, 83 Mercenaries, 189 Petri, 152 Middle East, 132, 161 Pirenne, Henri, 35 Milan, 213, 215 Pirot, 144 Military, 28-30, 41, 45-48, 115-116, 141— — Plovdiv, 144

INDEX 259 Poland, 5-8, 42—45, 58, 60-61, 63-64, 66—- —- Russia, 6, 8, 12, 56, 59-61, 63-64, 69, 72—

70, 72, 75, 78-81, 92-130, 143, 147, 73, 75, 77-81, 190, 211, 217~218, 231—

188, 190, 211, 213 232, 234-235, 242

Polish Partitions, 103, 114 Rutkowski, Jan, 98

Population, g2, 111, 119, 121-122, 137, 140-142, 148, 152-155; density, 54— Salonika, 152, 186, 190, 196

55, 76; fluctuation, 27, 30-31, 41-43, Saxony, 214 46, 49-50, 133—-134, 181-182, 184— Schneider, Jane, 3 186, 192, 196, 213, 215, 220, 227; mi- Segedin, 138 gration, 63, 80, 181, 184, 191, 194, 201 Seigneurial revenue, 31, 40, 48, 225

Porte, 131, 142, 188-190, 193, 202 Sejm, Polish, 107, 113, 115-116

Portugal, 213 Semendire, 138

Potatoes, 73, 76 Sendlirme, policy, 46

Pozega, 140 Serbia, 77, 133, 151, 180-181, 189~190,

Poznan, 109, 120 193, 195—199, 201, 211, 234-241, 243-

Prague, 194, 199 244

Price Revolution, 186 Seres, 153

Pronoia, 182 Serfdom, 8, 59-60, 69, 71, 94, g6—104,

Property relations, 18—50, 67—69; 106-111, 213-217, 225, 229. See also capitalist, 18, 20, 32-33, 36~39, 80, Corvée labor; Emancipation 211; communal, 56~—57, 61; feudal, 22— Seventeenth Century crisis, 31, 47, 50,

31, 34, 40-50; Ottoman, 45-47, 135- 103, 143, 182, 184 141, 144, 146-155, 183, 188—189; Sharecropping, 228-229, 234 Polish, 102—104; precapitalist, 20-24, Shipbuilding, 192, 198

31-39; private, 54-55 Silesia, 63-64, 113, 121-122, 215 Prussia, 8, 12, 68—69, 115, 215, 226 Silk, 149 Putting-out system, 110, 112, 213 Sipahi, 45, 136, 140-142, 146, 182-183, 188, 234

Ragusa, 145 Silver, 186 Railroad, 222, 237 Sirem, 137, 138 Reaya, 135-136, 140, 143, 145, 149 Skopje, 153 Rebellion, 66, 76, 81, 108, 142, 148 Slankamen, 144

Reichsrat, 218 Slavery, 59 Reis, Jaime, 3 Slavonia, 192

Rej, Mikotaj, 105 Slovenia, 59, 60, 65, 192, 194

Rice, 139, 144-145, 147 Smith, Adam, 2, 16—18, 32, 50

Rijeka, 191 Smithians, 33, 35-36

Riga, 64 Smyrna, 154

Ristic, Jovan, 236 Sofia, 144, 184, 201

Roman Empire, 54—55 Southeastern Europe, 39, 45-47 Romania, 8~9, 57, 60-61, 72, 77-78, 81, Spain, 6, 213 181, 192, 195-199, 212, 219, 226~-234, Stahl, Henri, 96-97 238~239, 243-244. See also Moldavia; Stamboliski, Alexander, 240-242, 244

Wallachia Stambulov, Stefan, 239, 240, 242

Rottenberg, Gunther, 192 Standestaat, 5, 60, 218

Rumburk, 214 State-building, 8, 10-12, 28-31, 81, 114— Rumelia, 134, 146, 239 119, 146. See also Absolutist state Rusinski, Wtadystaw, 97 Stettin, 64

260 INDEX Stoianovich, Traian, 191, 193 Trieste, 191 Stokes, Gale, 10-12, 201 Topolski, Jerzy, 100, 104~105

Suez Canal, 153 Tymieniecki, Kazimierz, 99 Sugar, 192, 216-217 Svehla, Antonin, 212 Ukraine, 6, 58

Svronos, Nikos G., 187 United States, 153, 189, 194, 198

Sweden, 58 Urbanization, 216, 221 Sweezy, Paul, 35

Switzerland, 3—4, 6, 154 Vakif, 134, 182-183

Syria, 138 Varangians, 58 Varna, 197

Targowica, Confederation of (1792), 116 Veinstein, Gilles, 150

Tariffs, 199-201, 220 Venice, 183

Taxation, 22, 40-42, 45, 47-50, 115, 120, Vidin, 151 136~—137, 140-150, 179-180, 182, 183, Vienna, 144, 183, 191-194, 199, 218-224,

188—189, 192-194, 201, 217, 228-220, 228

234, 238, 240 Vistula, 103

Tazbir, Janusz, 106 Viticulture, 144-145, 181-194, 220 Textiles, 192-193, 201, 212-216, 219, 221 Vodka, 104 Thessaly, 194, 151, 153 Voisé, Waldemar, 3

Thirty Years War, 213 Vojvodina, 192

Thomas, Robert P., 111

Thornton, John, 216 Wallachia, 6, 9, 72, 135, 227-228, 231. See Thrace, 134, 1399, 144, 151, 154 also Romania

Timber, 192 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 6, 36, 97, 101,

Tisza, Kalman, 224-225, 230, 232, 244 13.2, 155, 178, 182, 185, 187-188, 194—

Tithes. See Taxation 195 Tito. See Josip Broz _ War, 42-43, 45, 47-48, 71, 73, 103, 113,

Tobacco, 149, 153, 186-188, 190, 193, 143-144, 150, 152-155, 181-182, 184,

197; 201 186, 190-191, 200, 220, 227. See also Torun, 113 Military

Towns, 4, 7-8, 30, 43, 57-59, 62, 66, 94, Warsaw, 113-114 99-100, 101, 111—114, 148, 180~—181, Weber, Max, 1

194, 224 Wool, 73, 145, 149, 220

Trade, 30, 36, 42, 62, 94, g6-g7, 112-113, | World Market, 66-83 117, 140, 145, 147, 149-151, 153,155, | Wyczariski, Andrzej, 101, 116 178-180, 183~—187, 190-193, 195, 197—

198, 213-215, 219~-220, 224, 229, 231— Yugoslavia, 181, 191 232, 234, 236. See also Markets; World

Market Zagreb, 194

Transhumance, 134, 138 Zamosé, 113

Transportation, 151, 217, 222 Zemstvo movement, 217—218 Transylvania, 67, 191-192, 194, 223 Zitkowicz, Leonid, 110