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Household formation, institutions, and economic development: Evidence from imperial Russia
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History of the Family 16 (2011) 456 – 465
Household formation, institutions, and economic development: Evidence from imperial Russia Tracy Dennison ⁎ Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, MC 101-40, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
Abstract Household formation patterns have been adduced in recent years by historians and other social scientists to account for the economic development of western Europe. The so-called European Marriage Pattern, which prevailed throughout northwest Europe, is viewed as having been particularly conducive to early industrialisation and economic growth. But to what extent were household formation systems exogenous to the broader economic and social context in which they were located? Evidence from nineteenth-century Russia indicates that family systems were influenced by the same variables that determined the shape of the local economy; they were part of a complex web of institutions and thus cannot be viewed as independent determinants of economic development. © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Marriage; Households; Institutions; Economic development; Europe; Russia
1. The European Marriage Pattern and economic development The characteristics of the ‘European Marriage Pattern’ (EMP) were first outlined by John Hajnal in a seminal article in 1965. For Hajnal, the EMP was defined mainly by three properties: high age at first marriage, the establishment of a separate household at marriage, and a substantial number of people who never married at all. This pattern was thought to have prevailed in all parts of pre-industrial Europe to the west of an invisible line drawn from Trieste in the south to St Petersburg in the north. Accordingly, marriage patterns to the east of this line were referred to as ‘nonEuropean’, since, in Hajnal's early formulation, they ⁎ Tel.: +1 626 395 1742. E-mail address: [email protected]. 1081-602X/$ - see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.hisfam.2011.07.001
were thought to have resembled those found in Asian and African societies more closely than those in Europe (Hajnal, 1965, pp 102–6). This characterisation inspired a great deal of subsequent research on marriage patterns across European societies, east and west, in the pre-modern period. Detailed local studies largely confirmed that the EMP, as described by Hajnal, predominated in much of northwestern and central Europe. However, it soon emerged that southern Europe was not so firmly located in the EMP zone as implied in Hajnal's, 1965 paper. Research on societies in Spain, Italy, and Portugal revealed significant regional variation in family forms in these areas (Benigno, 1989; Kertzer & Hogan, 1989; Reher 1997; Viazzo, 2003). Whilst there were parts of southern Europe where the EMP was indeed prevalent, there were also regions where marriage was universal and a significant proportion of the population lived in
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complex households. The extent of variation across these regions was much greater than that found for areas to the north, where complex households rarely comprised more than 3–5% of all households. Taking this evidence into account, Hajnal (1982), in a later article, made an explicit distinction between Northwest Europe, where household patterns conformed to the so-called ‘European’ pattern, and the rest of the continent (and indeed elsewhere), where a ‘non-European’ pattern was thought to have predominated. Not surprisingly, this distinction led to a great deal of speculation amongst demographic and family historians about the relationship between marriage patterns and economic growth. That a system of late, non-universal marriage and nuclear family households was prevalent in precisely those parts of Europe that experienced early economic development seemed to some more than a coincidence. Indeed Peter Laslett, surveying the evidence on European family forms, suggested ‘that the remarkable difference between Europe and the rest of the world in matters of industry, commerce, and perhaps political aggrandisement may have been to some extent due to an entirely individual familial system’ (Laslett, 1989, p. 234). Hajnal himself had advanced a similar hypothesis several years earlier, in the context of the east–west divide (Hajnal, 1982, p. 476). Upon closer examination, though, the relationship between household formation patterns and economic development began to look much more complicated. Not all areas where the EMP was dominant were economically precocious. Central Europe was, for instance, a notable exception; industrialisation came, after all, relatively late to the German-speaking lands. And in some parts of eastern Europe, such as Prussia and Bohemia, the EMP even co-existed with a resurgence of serfdom in the seventeenth century (Cerman, 1997; Hagen, 2002). The existence of such extensive variation within Europe soon had researchers calling for new investigations into the relationship between household and family patterns and social and economic institutions (Benigno, 1989; Viazzo, 2003). This is a timely demand, since family forms are once again in the spotlight. Economic historians are the most recent group to take an interest in household patterns and the extent to which they might explain the so-called ‘Great Divergence’ and the economic success of Europe. Some of these have emphasised a link between late marriage and female labour force participation, with late marriage implying greater economic autonomy for women (de Moor & van Zanden, 2010). Others have argued that late marriage and lower fertility meant greater potential for human capital formation (via
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increased investment in children) and, consequently, for economic growth (Foreman-Peck, 2011). Still others have maintained that the cultural implications of the EMP – especially ‘individualism’ in demographic behaviour – had important effects on western economic development (Greif, 2006). In all of these accounts, family patterns appear to hold the key to understanding economic development in western Europe. Moreover, in this view, family patterns are treated as an exogenous variable, derived from cultural norms, which influences local economic conditions, but is not influenced by them (at least not to the same degree). But was the relationship between household formation patterns in the past and local economies as straightforward as this new literature implies? The great variation in economic experiences within western Europe indicates that it was not. As already noted, evidence from Europe east of the river Elbe shows that the very marriage pattern economic historians have attempted to link with economic precocity could also be consistent with a system of unfree labour. Differences such as these suggest a more intricate relationship between economy and family forms. In this paper, evidence from a society to the east of Hajnal's imaginary line – rural Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – will be used to examine this relationship at the micro level. The Russian case is a particularly interesting one, since large, complex Russian peasant households have long been viewed as representative of a particular ‘Slavic’ family type. Indeed, in his 1982 article, Hajnal suggested that similarities in household structure in premodern Croatia and imperial Russia might be indicative of a shared ‘Slavic tradition’ (Hajnal, 1982, p. 469). He goes on to suggest that northwest Europeans, especially in comparison to eastern Europeans, ‘must have differed fundamentally in their economic behavior […], a difference that must be of great significance for economic development’ (Hajnal, 1982, p. 476). And in fact, European Russia before the abolition of serfdom in 1861 offers an excellent test case for questions about the role of culture versus institutions, since it is a culturally homogeneous area characterised, as we shall see, by significant institutional variation. The evidence presented here suggests that family forms were not culturally determined; both household formation practices (marriage, specifically) and the economy (labour markets, in particular) were shaped by local institutions – in this case by estate and communal policies. Constraints on serfs' — and especially women's — labour allocation decisions, along with specific demographic restrictions, affected marriage
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decisions and household structure. Thus it would appear that the same institutions that discouraged an EMP in Russia – landlords (serfdom) and rural communes – also undermined economic development. A broader application of these findings would suggest that the EMP in northwest Europe was probably not the cause of industrialisation, but the artefact of an existing institutional matrix, which also happened to favour economic development. In other words, people in societies on both sides of the Hajnal line were making demographic choices in response to the incentives and constraints they faced. We do not need to posit a ‘fundamental difference’ in the cultures underlying economic behaviour of west and east Europeans. Instead, we should try to understand the institutional framework within which these economic and demographic decisions were taken.
2. Family formation in the Russian context Early and universal marriage, especially for women, and joint-family households are thought to have been the prevailing norms in Russian peasant society, placing Russia firmly outside the EMP zone under any definition. 1 Evidence from the pioneering studies of Peter Czap and Steven Hoch on serf households in the southern agricultural zone of central Russia has largely supported this view. On the estates they studied, where roughly three-fourths of peasant households were complex, serf women consistently married, on average, before the age of 20 (Czap, 1983, pp. 118–9; Hoch, 1986, p. 76). The proportion of women who never married was extremely small – well below 5% – as was, similarly, the number of solitary householders. According to Czap, universal marriage for women was such an established practice on the Mishino estate (Riazan province) that reasons were often given in the documents when a woman was listed as unmarried. In most of these cases the women were said to have had physical handicaps that made them unsuitable for marriage (Czap, 1983, pp. 120–1). Hoch quotes a nineteenth-century ethnographer who noted, with reference to the area near the Petrovskoe estate (Tambov), that ‘only freaks and the morally depraved do not marry’ (Hoch, 1986, pp. 76–7). Such findings led Czap to posit the possible existence of a specifically ‘eastern European family type’ (Czap, 1983, p. 145). 1 Universal marriage, according to John Hajnal, was characteristic of a ‘joint-family household system’, where marriage occurred early in the lifecycle, nearly all members of the society married, and newlyweds co-resided with parents rather than establish a new independent household (Hajnal, 1982)
In more recent years, further studies have complicated this picture of a specific Slavic family type, revealing instead a substantial amount of variation in household formation patterns even within imperial Russia, including variation in the marriage age and marital status of women. For instance, Michael Mitterauer and Alexander Kagan have presented evidence for nineteenth-century Yaroslavl' province, in the northern industrial zone of central Russia, which indicates that peasant women in this area married significantly later than those at Mishino and Petrovskoe, and that the proportion of simple family households was much greater than on these estates (Mitterauer & Kagan, 1982, esp. p. 118). Herdis Kolle, too, in her study of households in nineteenth-century Moscow province (also in the CIR), has found a later age at first marriage for women (21.7 in 1834 increasing to 23.1 by 1869), as well as a significant proportion of never married females (4–10%) (Kolle, 2006, pp. 190–1, 193–4). Such variation is often attributed to regional differences (see Dennison, 2011, pp. 50–3). The estates of Mishino and Petrovskoe, studied, respectively by Czap and Hoch, were located in the so-called Central Black Earth region (CBE), where, because of fertile soil and a (slightly) more temperate climate, an agricultural economy prevailed. The societies studied by Mitterauer and Kagan and Kolle were located in the Central Industrial Region (CIR), which comprised the provinces to the north of the CBR (including Moscow Province). The soil in this region was less fertile and the growing season shorter than in the agricultural zone to the south. Whilst agriculture was practised in the CIR, these provinces were also characterised by a considerable amount of industry and trade. The existence of labour markets in the CIR has been cited as a critical factor in accounting for observed differences in household structure. This is, for instance, the argument of Kolle, who notes that women in the CIR, such as those in the proto-industrial society studied by Kolle herself, had the opportunity to work for wages, and could thus earn an independent living, unlike women in the agricultural zone to the south, who were obligated to work on demesne land or cultivate communal garden plots. This argument is consistent with some recent accounts of the emergence of the EMP in pre-industrial northwest Europe, where the EMP and labour markets are thought to have worked together in a virtuous feedback cycle. The EMP, in this view, created a need for labour markets in northwest Europe to balance land to labour ratios, and these labour markets in turn bolstered the EMP by providing women with wage opportunities and thus greater bargaining power vis-à-vis parents and
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marriage partners. The result was a system of delayed marriage and a higher incidence of lifetime celibacy (see de Moor & van Zanden, 2010, pp. 11–15). Whilst it is certainly plausible that labour markets and household formation patterns dovetailed to some degree, the relationship implied by these views may be overly simplistic. In the EMP literature, the family system shaped the labour market, whilst in the literature on Russian households, regional ecological differences gave rise to (or precluded the emergence of) labour markets, which, in turn, influenced the shape of family systems. But labour markets and household structure were not independent variables; both were embedded in institutional frameworks that determined their specific local character. Estate policies, communal practices, and local interest groups all affected local labour markets as well as decisions about household formation. To make this case, this paper draws on evidence from estates of two of Russia's wealthiest landholding families: the Sheremetyevs and the Gagarins. 3. Institutions and demography Roughly half of the peasant population in the CIR and CBE region in the first half of the nineteenth century was enserfed. 2 Proprietary estates are usually classified as either ‘quitrent’ estates (obrok), where serfs paid feudal dues in cash or kind, or ‘corvee’ estates (barshchina), where serfs owed labour obligations on the lord's demesne. Quitrent estates seem to have predominated in the CIR (where they were just over half of all estates), and ‘corvee’ estates predominated in the more agricultural CBE region, where they were roughly two-thirds of all estates. But, like serfdom itself, these were not monolithic categories; many estates were a mixture of both types. Moreover, landlords had considerable freedom in management of their estates and of the serfs residing on them. They not only had the power to levy taxes and dues and mete out punishments for violating estate rules, they could also control the distribution of local resources. Serfs had few formal rights; they were forbidden by law to seek justice in civil courts and had limited recourse against their landlords (Blum, 1961, chap. 21; Bartlett, 2003). Thus even within the broad categories of ‘quitrent’ and ‘corvee’ estates, there was significant scope for variation in local practices. The following discussion focuses on the estate management practices of the Sheremetyev and Gagarin 2 They were proprietary, or seigniorial, serfs; i.e., they belonged to private landlords. Serfs on state lands – ‘state peasants’ – comprised a separate category. For an overview, see Blum (1961), chaps. 20–23.
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families. Like many of Russia's wealthiest serfowners, these families held numerous estates, dispersed throughout the empire. To oversee their far-flung holdings, they devised centralised administrative systems, implemented locally by hired stewards or by officials selected from amongst the serf population. This form of centralised administration generated detailed records on a wide range of areas related to estate management and serf life. The Sheremetyevs and Gagarins, like most large estate holders in Russia, had explicit demographic policies, which they enforced in different ways. These policies were usually motivated by the belief that larger households were economically more stable and so better able to meet their feudal and state obligations, especially the provision of recruits for the Russian army, which will be considered in greater detail below. Femaleheaded households and unmarried women were often viewed as liabilities. Thus many landlords encouraged early and universal marriage, especially for women, and multi-generational households (Aleksandrov, 1984; Avdeev, Blum, & Troitskaia, 2004; Bushnell, 1993; Czap, 1983; Dennison, 2003; Hoch, 1986). The estate instructions for the Sheremetyevs' Voshchazhnikovo estate (in Yaroslavl' province) contain several points related to marriage and household formation. First, it is noted that an annual tax was to be levied from all unmarried persons (single or widowed) between the ages of 20 and 40, explicitly in order to ‘compel them to marry’. The tax was progressive: richer serfs were to pay six rubles per year, middling serfs four rubles per year, and the poorest serfs two rubles per year. Sheremetyev specifically included solitary female householders amongst those subject to the tax, noting in 1796 that ‘as a woman can earn some 15 rubles per year in textile manufacturing, she is able to pay feudal levies’ (RGADA, f. 1287, op. 3, ed. khr. 555). Since women on this estate had fewer earning opportunities than men (for reasons described in the next section), this tax would have been especially onerous for them. In addition, a fee was levied for the marriage of female serfs to other landlords' serfs or free persons, i.e. to anyone from outside the Voshchazhnikovo estate. The families of serf women who wished to marry nonestate grooms had to petition the landlord for permission. If it was granted, they then had to pay an up-front fee before the marriage could take place. 3 Wealthy 3 This was similar to merchet in medieval England. Generally, marriage fines were not an uncommon practice in serf societies throughout Europe.
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families were charged 150 rubles, middling peasants 100 rubles, and poorer ones 50 rubles. Serf men, who brought wives into their households in this patrilocal system, were not subject to this constraint. When a male serf married, an additional labourer was brought to the estate, along with a dowry and the promise of additional labourers in the form of offspring. Women, on the other hand, joined their husbands' households. If their husbands were not the Count Sheremetyev's serfs, he lost the female serf, her labour, her dowry, and her potential offspring. It was thus in his interest to impose marriage fees to make marriage to outsiders less appealing for serf women. Another important demographic constraint was the discouragement of household division. On the Voshchazhnikovo estate, all households were to contain at least 2 adult males (between the ages of 17 and 65). This regulation was probably related to state conscription levies, which required landlords to send a certain number of serfs to the tsar's army each year. Landlords did not want to undermine the economic viability of households (and their ability to pay feudal dues and taxes) by conscripting a household's only adult male worker. If a serf and his wife wished to separate from his father's or brother's household, he first had to petition the landlord for permission. If a household divided without permission, a fine was levied. If a household was unable to pay the fine, its adult males were to be conscripted to do hard labour. And if a household could not provide a conscript for the army when its turn in the queue came up (places in the queue were assigned by lottery), then that household was to be fined the price of a recruit on the market. The documents in the Voshchazhnikovo archive indicate that these policies were enforced, and not merely on the books, at least between the years 1750 and 1860. Amongst the surviving records are petitions from serfs to marry their daughters to non-estate grooms, with notations by local officials regarding the requisite fees to be paid. There are also formal petitions from serfs to divide from their fathers' households, along with responses to these requests from estate and communal officials. Some documents related to changes – usually temporary adjustments – in the fees and fines to be levied have also survived. (See Dennison, 2011, esp. pp. 62–5). The Gagarin family was likewise concerned about household formation practices amongst their serfs. But, in contrast to the Sheremetyevs' system of incentives, they employed blunt instruments to achieve compliance. At the Mishino estate (Riazan province) in 1817, the landlord issued an order giving households the option of
arranging marriages for their unmarried daughters over 15 or sending them to work in a textile mill on another estate. Estate household registers studied by Czap show that the majority of serf families made arrangements to have their daughters wed by Easter of that year (Czap, 1983, pp. 120–1). A similarly coercive approach was taken by the Gagarin family (and their officials) towards household fission. At the Petrovskoe estate (Tambov province), serfs who separated from their families without approval were subjected to corporal punishment and then forced back into the extended family unit (Hoch, 1986, pp. 87–8). At Manuilovskoe estate (Tver' province) widows who refused to remarry were threatened with exile to a paper mill in a neighbouring province (Bohac, 1991, pp. 111–2). These pressures were often reinforced by local communes, 4 whose more powerful members shared the landlords' concern about the economic viability of serf households. On Russian estates, feudal obligations and state taxes were usually assessed collectively. Landlords would, for instance, levy quitrents as a lump sum, which communal officials were required to come up with by a given date. These officials would then allocate the collective burden amongst member households. If poorer households were unable to pay their share, the better-off households in the commune would be forced to subsidise them. On the Voshchazhnikovo estate, this concern over viability can be seen in communal resolutions on petitions from serfs for permission to establish separate households (all such petitions required both landlord and communal approval). Communal officials would often grant permission for the households to divide physically, but insisted that they remain together on paper as a single tax unit (Dennison, 2003, pp. 402–3). This functioned as a way of forcing serfs to subsidise their poorer relatives. The Voshchazhnikovo commune discouraged female-headed households by withholding assistance. Although welfare provision was a recognised function of the commune, communal authorities were nonetheless reluctant to provide relief, often denying even temporary assistance to widows with young children (Dennison, 2011, pp. 113–7). This unwillingness to extend relief may have discouraged the formation of nuclear-family households more generally as it raised the risk to young couples who wished to establish their own, smaller units.
4 On the nature and functioning of Russian peasant communes, see Bartlett (1990) and Moon (1999, pp. 199–236). On peasant communes on Sheremetyev estates, see Dennison (2011), chap. 4.
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Communal practices on the Gagarin estates also constrained demographic decisions. Steven Hoch notes that on the Petrovskoe estate, the ‘patriarchs’ who headed multi-generational households and held power in the commune cooperated with the landlord to keep households on the estate large and complex, for many of the same reasons as in Voshchazhnikovo (Hoch, 1986, p. 86–9, 131–2). In addition, the system of communal land tenure, with periodic repartition, is thought to have encouraged early and universal marriage on estates such as Petrovskoe and Mishino, since the commune was supposed to distribute land in accordance with the number of able-bodied workers in a household. Sons were thus encouraged to bring wives into the household, and start new families, as soon as possible. At Manuilovskoe, as on many other estates, the commune monitored household size in relation to conscription policies; as noted for Voshchazhnikovo, it was easier – and more desirable – for officials to select recruits from larger households (Bohac, 1988). 4. Institutions and local markets It has been suggested that geography played a significant role in determining the extent to which such policies and practices were enforced. The idea is that more attention was given (by landlords and communes) to household formation patterns in the CBE region, since a large household was supposed to have been critical to economic viability in an agricultural region with few opportunities for wage employment. In the CIR, on the other hand, wage labour was widespread, due to the inhospitable soil and climate, and thus household structure is thought to have been somewhat less important to viability. In other words, it is held that households were relatively less complex in the CIR because labour market opportunities made diversification of household economies possible. The main drawback of this approach is that it neglects the endogeneity of those labour market opportunities. The very same institutions that constrained household formation decisions also shaped local labour markets and serfs' labour allocation decisions. The Sheremetyevs, for instance, allowed their serfs to engage in markets to a greater extent than many other landlords. They allowed serfs to work as migrant labourers in towns and cities throughout European Russia. They permitted their serfs to hire labourers to work their communal allotments or perform their corvee obligations. Moreover, they shaped local markets by allowing their serfs to establish manufacturing and retail enterprises of various sizes, for which
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hired labour was required. Serfs on the Voshchazhnikovo estate (or at the Sheremetyevs' Ivanovo or Iukhotskoe or Pavlovo estates) were not simply taking advantage of existing labour market opportunities. Their brick manufactories, paper and textile mills, and metalworking industries were also creating a demand for wage labour in these regions (see Dennison, 2011; Gestwa, 1999; Prokof'eva, 1981; Shchepetov, 1947). But permitting serfs to engage in markets was not the only way the Sheremetyevs influenced the local economy. They also shaped local markets by constraining serfs' participation in them. Policies related to the levying of travel fees on migrant labourers, the collection of additional annual taxes from craftsmen and owners of rural industries, and additional fees from those who hired labourers, would have affected the price of labour locally. In addition, estate policy dictating that those who engaged full time in wage work should still cultivate their communal allotments created a local market in agricultural labour. Even more restrictive policies governed female labour force participation. Female serfs at Voshchazhnikovo were rarely allowed to leave their villages of residence. The few Voshchazhnikovo women granted permission to engage in migrant labour were married or widows over the age of 40. Any serf wishing to hire a female labourer, especially if she were going to be resident on the estate, required special permission. 5 Women were permitted to engage in wage work locally (i.e., on the Voshchazhnikovo estate), but restrictions such as these constrained their choices and almost certainly lowered their wages. 6 The policies of the Gagarin family also shaped local labour markets, but with very different results. The Gagarins appear to have strongly discouraged serfs from participating in markets. On the Manuilovskoe estate, serfs were subject to ‘forced migration’; the terms of their employment were arranged by the landlord's officials and their wages were paid directly to the estate management instead of to them (Bohac, 1982, ch. 3). At Petrovskoe, bailiffs disliked serfs renting out their land or hiring others to work their allotments. In a report from 1834, the Petrovskoe estate manager expressed his concern over serfs' ‘giving over their own lands to [outsiders] to sow’ (Hoch, 1986, p. 55). According to Hoch, Petrovskoe serfs were punished by the estate 5 Such policies were probably motivated by fear of illegitimate pregnancies, which were viewed as a burden on the community. See the discussion in Dennison (2011, pp. 175–6). 6 A more detailed account of restrictions can be found in Dennison (2011), esp. chap. 6. Unfortunately it is difficult to test effects on wages systematically, since rural wage data for this period are so few and far between.
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management for hiring labourers, renting out land, selling grain, and other market activities which might have ‘contributed to economic differentiation’ (Hoch, 1986, pp. 125–6). It was thus not the case that there were simply no markets for Gagarin serfs to engage in. Rather, estate policies themselves undermined the development of local markets by penalising those households that sought to take advantage of them. Communes, too, shaped local markets, just as they influenced household formation decisions. At Voshchazhnikovo, all migration decisions had to be approved by the commune. Again, collective responsibility for feudal and state obligations played a role; communal officials were reluctant to let tax-paying members leave the estate (see Dennison & Ogilvie, 2007, pp. 534–8). Ironically, a household in arrears in feudal dues was unlikely to be granted permission to migrate for wage work. And, like estate authorities, the commune took a restrictive approach to female participation in markets, limiting women's mobility and their access to local resources (as discussed in Dennison, 2011, ch. 6). The commune was thus unwilling to provide relief to poor women, as noted earlier, but at the same time actively constrained their possibilities for earning a living. A similar phenomenon has been reported for the Gagarins' Manuilovskoe estate, where widows were deprived of communal land and subjected by the commune to other economic pressures to induce them to remarry (Bohac, 1991, pp. 102–3). On both families' estates, communal officials had control over the distribution of local resources: i.e., which households had access to communal land, forest, pasture, and what could be done with these resources (including decisions about renting or selling rights to them, building on them, grazing animals, or employing labourers to cultivate land or tend livestock). At Voshchazhnikovo, serfs were required to offer any land they wished to sell to members of the commune first; outside offers could only be considered if none of the local serfs was interested (Dennison & Ogilvie, 2007, p. 530). It has been argued in recent accounts of the EMP that the decline of kinship groups in northwest Europe gave rise to strong corporate entities and, ultimately, in places like England, to economic growth (Greif, 2006). It is worth noting the contrast in this account of northwest European development with the evidence for imperial Russia. As described here, the existence of strong corporate groups in Russia – especially rural communes – appears to have hindered, through restrictions on demographic decisions and resource allocation, the emergence of anything like an EMP in rural Russia, and, at the same time, undermined economic growth. And
Table 1 Household size and structure on three serf estates c. 1850 a.
MHS % Complex % Solitaries a
Mishino
Petrovskoe
Voshchazhnikovo
8.8 72.7 1.2
8.3 74.0 7.0
5.2 57.0 20.0
Figures from Czap (1982); Hoch (1986); Dennison (2003).
even within Russia, communal strength appears to have varied significantly across settlements (Dennison, 2011, pp. 127–31). This contrast, and the extent of internal variation, offers another indication of the complexity of interactions between household formation decisions and the local institutional framework.
5. Marriage and household structure: Variation in outcomes But how can we be sure that the estate management approaches described above had any effect in practice? Evidence of household formation patterns for several of these landlords' estates is highly suggestive. It would appear that household structure at the Sheremetyevs' Voshchazhnikovo estate differed markedly from that at the Gagarins' Mishino and Petrovskoe estates, as indicated in Table 1. One of the most remarkable differences concerns the incidence of so-called ‘solitary’ households. Solitaries, in the Laslett–Hammel classification scheme, were separate households, composed of only a single person. The proportion of solitary households at Voshchazhnikovo in the nineteenth century (5 to 20% between 1816 and 1858) was much larger than on the Gagarin estates. At Mishino, the range was 0 to 2.3% between 1814 and 1858. On the Petrovskoe estate, solitaries comprised 0 to 9% of households over the same period. Even more interesting is the fact that the majority of solitary householders on the Voshchazhnikovo estate were female. Of the 34 solitaries counted in the village Voshchazhnikovo in 1850, 24 (70%) were women who were either widowed or had never married (RGADA, f. 1287, op. 3, ed. khr. 1941). Voshchazhnikovo was different in other ways, too. Women on this estate married at a later age than did serfs on the other estates. The Singulate Mean Age at Marriage (SMAM) 7 in the nineteenth century (1816– 7 The singulate mean age at marriage (SMAM) is an estimate of the mean number of years lived be a given cohort before their first marriage, and is calculated from the proportion of unmarried males or 32 females in successive age groups as provided in a census or other similar document. See Hajnal (1953).
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1858) ranged from 18.3 to 22.0 for Voshchazhnikovo women, and from 22.1 to 26.4 for men (Dennison, 2003, p. 414). This is broadly similar to the range found by Kolle for Bunkovskaia volost' in Moscow province (Kolle, 2006, p. 90), but differs significantly from the pattern found on the Black Earth estates. At Mishino, in the period 1782–1858, the SMAM varied from 16.6 to 19.0 for women, and from 17.0 to 19.7 for men (Czap, 1982, p. 10). The average age at first marriage at Petrovskoe (1813–1856) was between 18.4 and 19.5 for women and between 18.8 and 20.1 for men, (Hoch, 1986, p. 76). Nor was marriage universal for women in Voshchazhnikovo village. Between 1816 and 1858, 5 to 21% of serf women never married; the village average for the period was 14%. This was even higher than that in the proto-industrial community of Bunkovskaia, where never-married women comprised some 4–10% in the period 1834–69 (Kolle, 2006, p. 194). It was substantially higher than on the Mishino estate, where the figure was consistently under 5% in the nineteenth century (Bohac, 1991, p. 99; Czap, 1983, p. 119). At Petrovskoe, a household listing for 1851 indicates that only about 2% of women on this estate remained unmarried (Bohac, 1991, p. 99). At first glance, these patterns are consistent with evidence of regional or geographical differences in household patterns. Voshchazhnikovo was in the CIR, whilst Mishino and Petrovskoe were in the CBE region. But the case for regional differences is complicated by Bohac's findings for the Gagarins' Manuilovskoe estate in Tver' province. At Manuilovskoe, mean household size in the nineteenth century was 7.9 and 90% of households were multi-generational. Between 1813 and 1861, the proportion of solitary households on this estate ranged from 0 to 1.4%. The proportion of females on this estate who never married ranged from 6 to 8% (Bohac, 1982). In other words, Manuilovskoe was located in the CIR, where labour markets were widespread, yet the household formation patterns on the estate are indistinguishable from those reported for the two estates in the CBE region (and significantly different from those found for Voshchazhnikovo). It is hardly a coincidence that Manuilovskoe belonged to the same landlord as Mishino and Petrovskoe. It seems plausible that the institutional framework established by the Gagarins generated similar outcomes regardless of geography. In particular, their coercive approach to the regulation of serfs' demographic and economic behaviour – close scrutiny, corporal punishment, forced labour – resulted in more uniform behaviour across their holdings. On the other
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hand, the Sheremetyevs' willingness to tolerate market participation, and their use of targeted incentives to encourage behaviours they thought desirable (and maximise their own income), mitigated some of their more coercive policies. For instance, whilst Sheremetyev policies made it more difficult for local serf women to find husbands (men were free to marry outsiders, women were not), their willingness to allow women to work locally as labourers or in rural industry made it possible for unmarried women to support themselves as solitary households rather than remain as dependents in the households of male relatives. Similarly, their willingness to allow households to separate physically but continue to be assessed as a single tax unit made smaller family units possible on their estates. Whilst we should be careful not to overstate the advantages of life under Sheremetyev rule, it does seem as if the approach we observe for Voshchazhnikovo may have offered serfs greater scope for demographic and economic choice, and thus resulted in a wider range of outcomes than the cowed uniformity observed on Gagarin estates. 6. Conclusion Until fairly recently, researchers tended to view household formation patterns in Russia – and in eastern Europe more generally – as monolithic, and as artefacts of underlying cultural preferences. More recent research has cast doubt on the notion of a monolithic household formation system in Russia (Kolle, 2006; Mitterauer & Kagan, 1982; Nosevich, 2004). The evidence presented here is consistent with these findings, in that it, too, reveals significant variation within rural Russia. The findings for the Gagarin and Sheremetyev estates also cast doubt on cultural explanations for such variation, since the cultural characteristics of the serf population on these estates were broadly similar. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that geography was the primary determinant of demographic behaviour – specifically, household formation practices – amongst Russian serfs, given that we find significantly different patterns within the same region. Nor can we attribute the variation we have observed to a marriage pattern as an exogenous influence. Marriage and household patterns appear to have responded to differing institutional environments much more than to geographical differences or any other specific variable. 8 There was no single ‘Russian’ 8 This is consistent with the conclusions of Matti Polla (2003), who, in his study of households in Karelia (Oulanka), concluded that the existence of the Russian judicial system in this region in the nineteenth century had significant effects on local economy and family forms.
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marriage or household pattern, since there was no single ‘Russian’ institutional environment. The overarching framework of serfdom put the power to determine the local institutional environment, within certain limits, in the hands of the landlord. In the case of larger landlords, the institutional environment evolved by each appears to have had some relatively fixed character across their many scattered holdings and even over time, from one landlord generation to the next. 9 It is certainly possible that other patterns held amongst smaller landlords, or even that there was a customary default pattern towards which smaller holdings gravitated in the absence of the kind of institutional inertia prevailing in operations with large centralised bureaucracies. Literary sources seem to hint at such a default pattern. However, we have little hard evidence of it, and given that smaller landlords kept fewer and less systematic records, it may be a long time before any evidence comes to light. Meanwhile, though, we can improve our insight into the relative sensitivity of demographic and economic variables to landlord policy and other influences by comparing the serf behaviour observed in local studies of different landlords within the same region (or with the same other hypothesised variable held constant), and of the same landlord across many regions (or across other variables of interest). Regarding the larger question about the interrelations of demography and economic growth, the Russian evidence suggests that any proposal to make the European Marriage Pattern responsible for economic development is too simple. It seems likely that what we have found in Russia applies to other areas as well: variations in both marriage patterns and local economy resulted from differences in institutional structure. A place like England was relatively unique in having a largely homogeneous (centrally imposed) institutional structure across a substantial land area over a long period of time, and it happened to be one that, like that arrived at fortuitously by the Sheremetyevs, was relatively conducive to economic growth — as well as being conducive to simpler family structures and higher ages at first marriage. Other parts of Europe varied widely; in some there was an institutional structure not unlike that of England; in others (such as southern Italy 9 Relatively fixed should be emphasized, since the enforcement of the landlord's objectives on the ground would have been a critical determinant of the outcome. If estate management varied considerably from location to location we might expect to see diverse outcomes even across the estates of one particular landlord. Melton's analysis of Rastorg (Kursk province) suggests that other family patterns were possible, even on Sheremetyev family estates (Melton, 1987).
or central Europe) the institutions favoured simpler families but not economic development. The family system in any given location was thus embedded in a set of institutions that shaped the demographic, economic, and social behaviour of local inhabitants. Whilst all these components were evidently in some sort of equilibrium with each other in any given society at a given time, the evidence presented here suggests that institutions related to law and the economy may have shaped demographic behaviour more than such behaviour influenced them. 10 Hajnal's conjecture of an EMP turns out to be robust, though perhaps not quite in the form in which he first put it forth. A hypothesised cultural explanation for different family forms (such as the ‘Slavic pattern’) does not hold up against detailed micro-level evidence. References Aleksandrov, V. A. (1984). Obychnoe pravo krepostnoi derevni Rossii, XVIII-nachalo XIX v. Moscow. Avdeev, A., Blum, A., & Troitskaia, I. (2004). Peasant marriage in nineteenth-century Russia. Population, 59, 721–764. Bartlett, R. (Ed.). (1990). Land commune and peasant community in Russia: Communal forms in imperial and early Soviet society. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bartlett, R. (Ed.). (2003). Serfdom and state power in imperial Russia. European history quarterly, 33. (pp. 29–64). Benigno, F. (1989). The southern Italian family in the early modern period: a discussion of co-residence patterns. Continuity and Change, 4(1), 165–194. Blum, J. (1961). Lord and peasant in Russia from the ninth to the nineteenth century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bohac, R. (1982). Family, property, and socioeconomic mobility: Russian peasants on Manuilovskoe estate 1810–1861. Unpublished PhD dissertation. University of Illinois at ChampaignUrbana. Bohac, R. (1988). The ‘mir’ and the military draft. Slavic Review, 47, 652–666. Bohac, R. (1991). Widows and the Russian serf community. In B. E. Clements, B. A. Engel, & C. D. Worobec (Eds.), Russia's women: Accommodation, resistance, Transformation. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bushnell, J. (1993). Did serf owners control serf marriage? Slavic Review, 52, 419–445. Cerman, M. (1997). Mitteleuropa und die ‘europäischen Muster’. Heiratsverhalten und Familienstruktur in Mitteleuropa, 16.-19. Jahrhundert. In J. Ehmer, T. Hareven, & R. Wall (Eds.), Historische Familienforschung. Ergebnisse und Kontroversen (pp. 327–346). Frankfurt/Main and New York. Czap, P. (1982). The perennial multiple family household, Mishino, Russia 1782–1858. Journal of Family History, 5–26. Czap, P. (1983). A large family: the peasant's greatest wealth: Serf households in Mishino, Russia 1814–1858. In R. Wall, P. Laslett, 10 When serfdom was abolished in 1861, it was frequently noted by contemporaries that peasant families quickly divided into smaller, simpler units (Frierson, 1992).
T. Dennison / History of the Family 16 (2011) 456–465 & J. Robin (Eds.), Family forms in historic Europe (pp. 105–151). Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. de Moor, T., & van Zanden, J. L. (2010). Girl power: The European marriage pattern and labour markets in the North Sea region in the late medieval and early modern period. The Economic History Review, 63(1), 1–33. Dennison, T. (2003). Serfdom and household structure in central Russia: Voshchazhnikovo 1816–1858. Continuity and Change, 18(3), 395–429. Dennison, T. (2011). The institutional framework of Russian serfdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dennison, T., & Ogilvie, S. (2007). Serfdom and social capital in Bohemia and Russia. The Economic History Review, 60(3), 513–544. Foreman-Peck, J. (2011). The western European marriage pattern and economic development. Explorations in economic history, 48(2), 292–309. Frierson, C. (1992). Razdel: The peasant family divided. In B. Farnsworth, & L. Viola (Eds.), Russian peasant women (pp. 73–88). Oxford University Press: Oxford. Gestwa, K. (1999). Protoindustrialisierung in Russland: Wirtschaft, Herrschaft und Kultur in Ivanovo und Pavlovo 1741–1932. Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Greif, A. (2006). Family structure, institutions, and growth: the origins and implications of western corporations. American economic review, 96(2), 308–312. Hagen, W. (2002). Ordinary Prussians. Brandenburg Junkers and villagers 1500–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hajnal, J. (1953). Age at marriage and proportions marrying. Population studies, 7, 111–136. Hajnal, J. (1965). European marriage patterns in perspective. In D. V. Glass, & D. V. E. Eversley (Eds.), Population in history: Essays in historical demography (pp. 101–146). London: E. Arnold. Hajnal, J. (1982). Two kinds of preindustrial household formation system. Population and development review, 8, 449–494.
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Hoch, S. (1986). Serfdom and social control in Russia: Petrovskoe, a village in Tambov. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kertzer, D. I., & Hogan, D. P. (1989). Family, political economy and demographic change: The transformation of life in Caselecchio, Italy 1861–1921. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Kolle, H. (2006). Social change in nineteenth-century Russia: Family development in a proto-industrial community. Bergen: University of Bergen. Laslett, P. (1989). The European family and early industrialization. In J. Baechler, J. Hall, & M. Mann (Eds.), Europe and the rise of capitalism (pp. 234–241). London: Blackwell Publishers. Melton, E. (1987). Proto-industrialisation, serf agriculture and agrarian social structure: two estates in nineteenth-century Russia. Past and present, 69–106. Mitterauer, M., & Kagan, A. (1982). Russian and central European family structures: A comparative view. Journal of family history, 103–131. Moon, D. (1999). The Russian peasantry 1600–1930: The world the peasants made. London: Addison Wesley. Nosevich, V. (2004). Traditsionnaia belorusskaia derevnia v evropeiskoi perspective Tekhnalogia: Minsk. Polla, M. (2003). Peasant and hunter households in Oulanka, northern Russia, 1710–1910. History of the Family, 8, 163–181. Prokof'eva, L. S. (1981). Krest'ianskaia obshchina v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVIII-pervoi polovine XIX v. Leningrad. Reher, D. (1997). Perspectives on the family in Spain past and present (Oxford, 1997). RGADA, f. 1287, op. 3, ed. khr. 1941 (Soul revision for 1850). RGADA, f. 1287, op. 3, ed. khr. 555 (Estate instructions, 1796–1800). Shchepetov, K. N. (1947). Krepostnoe pravo v votchinakh Sheremetyevykh. Moscow. Viazzo, P. (2003). What's so special about the Mediterranean? Thirty years of research on household and family in Italy. Continuity and change, 18, 111–137.
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Household formation, institutions, and economic development: Evidence from imperial Russia Tracy Dennison ⁎ Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, MC 101-40, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
Abstract Household formation patterns have been adduced in recent years by historians and other social scientists to account for the economic development of western Europe. The so-called European Marriage Pattern, which prevailed throughout northwest Europe, is viewed as having been particularly conducive to early industrialisation and economic growth. But to what extent were household formation systems exogenous to the broader economic and social context in which they were located? Evidence from nineteenth-century Russia indicates that family systems were influenced by the same variables that determined the shape of the local economy; they were part of a complex web of institutions and thus cannot be viewed as independent determinants of economic development. © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Marriage; Households; Institutions; Economic development; Europe; Russia
1. The European Marriage Pattern and economic development The characteristics of the ‘European Marriage Pattern’ (EMP) were first outlined by John Hajnal in a seminal article in 1965. For Hajnal, the EMP was defined mainly by three properties: high age at first marriage, the establishment of a separate household at marriage, and a substantial number of people who never married at all. This pattern was thought to have prevailed in all parts of pre-industrial Europe to the west of an invisible line drawn from Trieste in the south to St Petersburg in the north. Accordingly, marriage patterns to the east of this line were referred to as ‘nonEuropean’, since, in Hajnal's early formulation, they ⁎ Tel.: +1 626 395 1742. E-mail address: [email protected]. 1081-602X/$ - see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.hisfam.2011.07.001
were thought to have resembled those found in Asian and African societies more closely than those in Europe (Hajnal, 1965, pp 102–6). This characterisation inspired a great deal of subsequent research on marriage patterns across European societies, east and west, in the pre-modern period. Detailed local studies largely confirmed that the EMP, as described by Hajnal, predominated in much of northwestern and central Europe. However, it soon emerged that southern Europe was not so firmly located in the EMP zone as implied in Hajnal's, 1965 paper. Research on societies in Spain, Italy, and Portugal revealed significant regional variation in family forms in these areas (Benigno, 1989; Kertzer & Hogan, 1989; Reher 1997; Viazzo, 2003). Whilst there were parts of southern Europe where the EMP was indeed prevalent, there were also regions where marriage was universal and a significant proportion of the population lived in
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complex households. The extent of variation across these regions was much greater than that found for areas to the north, where complex households rarely comprised more than 3–5% of all households. Taking this evidence into account, Hajnal (1982), in a later article, made an explicit distinction between Northwest Europe, where household patterns conformed to the so-called ‘European’ pattern, and the rest of the continent (and indeed elsewhere), where a ‘non-European’ pattern was thought to have predominated. Not surprisingly, this distinction led to a great deal of speculation amongst demographic and family historians about the relationship between marriage patterns and economic growth. That a system of late, non-universal marriage and nuclear family households was prevalent in precisely those parts of Europe that experienced early economic development seemed to some more than a coincidence. Indeed Peter Laslett, surveying the evidence on European family forms, suggested ‘that the remarkable difference between Europe and the rest of the world in matters of industry, commerce, and perhaps political aggrandisement may have been to some extent due to an entirely individual familial system’ (Laslett, 1989, p. 234). Hajnal himself had advanced a similar hypothesis several years earlier, in the context of the east–west divide (Hajnal, 1982, p. 476). Upon closer examination, though, the relationship between household formation patterns and economic development began to look much more complicated. Not all areas where the EMP was dominant were economically precocious. Central Europe was, for instance, a notable exception; industrialisation came, after all, relatively late to the German-speaking lands. And in some parts of eastern Europe, such as Prussia and Bohemia, the EMP even co-existed with a resurgence of serfdom in the seventeenth century (Cerman, 1997; Hagen, 2002). The existence of such extensive variation within Europe soon had researchers calling for new investigations into the relationship between household and family patterns and social and economic institutions (Benigno, 1989; Viazzo, 2003). This is a timely demand, since family forms are once again in the spotlight. Economic historians are the most recent group to take an interest in household patterns and the extent to which they might explain the so-called ‘Great Divergence’ and the economic success of Europe. Some of these have emphasised a link between late marriage and female labour force participation, with late marriage implying greater economic autonomy for women (de Moor & van Zanden, 2010). Others have argued that late marriage and lower fertility meant greater potential for human capital formation (via
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increased investment in children) and, consequently, for economic growth (Foreman-Peck, 2011). Still others have maintained that the cultural implications of the EMP – especially ‘individualism’ in demographic behaviour – had important effects on western economic development (Greif, 2006). In all of these accounts, family patterns appear to hold the key to understanding economic development in western Europe. Moreover, in this view, family patterns are treated as an exogenous variable, derived from cultural norms, which influences local economic conditions, but is not influenced by them (at least not to the same degree). But was the relationship between household formation patterns in the past and local economies as straightforward as this new literature implies? The great variation in economic experiences within western Europe indicates that it was not. As already noted, evidence from Europe east of the river Elbe shows that the very marriage pattern economic historians have attempted to link with economic precocity could also be consistent with a system of unfree labour. Differences such as these suggest a more intricate relationship between economy and family forms. In this paper, evidence from a society to the east of Hajnal's imaginary line – rural Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – will be used to examine this relationship at the micro level. The Russian case is a particularly interesting one, since large, complex Russian peasant households have long been viewed as representative of a particular ‘Slavic’ family type. Indeed, in his 1982 article, Hajnal suggested that similarities in household structure in premodern Croatia and imperial Russia might be indicative of a shared ‘Slavic tradition’ (Hajnal, 1982, p. 469). He goes on to suggest that northwest Europeans, especially in comparison to eastern Europeans, ‘must have differed fundamentally in their economic behavior […], a difference that must be of great significance for economic development’ (Hajnal, 1982, p. 476). And in fact, European Russia before the abolition of serfdom in 1861 offers an excellent test case for questions about the role of culture versus institutions, since it is a culturally homogeneous area characterised, as we shall see, by significant institutional variation. The evidence presented here suggests that family forms were not culturally determined; both household formation practices (marriage, specifically) and the economy (labour markets, in particular) were shaped by local institutions – in this case by estate and communal policies. Constraints on serfs' — and especially women's — labour allocation decisions, along with specific demographic restrictions, affected marriage
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decisions and household structure. Thus it would appear that the same institutions that discouraged an EMP in Russia – landlords (serfdom) and rural communes – also undermined economic development. A broader application of these findings would suggest that the EMP in northwest Europe was probably not the cause of industrialisation, but the artefact of an existing institutional matrix, which also happened to favour economic development. In other words, people in societies on both sides of the Hajnal line were making demographic choices in response to the incentives and constraints they faced. We do not need to posit a ‘fundamental difference’ in the cultures underlying economic behaviour of west and east Europeans. Instead, we should try to understand the institutional framework within which these economic and demographic decisions were taken.
2. Family formation in the Russian context Early and universal marriage, especially for women, and joint-family households are thought to have been the prevailing norms in Russian peasant society, placing Russia firmly outside the EMP zone under any definition. 1 Evidence from the pioneering studies of Peter Czap and Steven Hoch on serf households in the southern agricultural zone of central Russia has largely supported this view. On the estates they studied, where roughly three-fourths of peasant households were complex, serf women consistently married, on average, before the age of 20 (Czap, 1983, pp. 118–9; Hoch, 1986, p. 76). The proportion of women who never married was extremely small – well below 5% – as was, similarly, the number of solitary householders. According to Czap, universal marriage for women was such an established practice on the Mishino estate (Riazan province) that reasons were often given in the documents when a woman was listed as unmarried. In most of these cases the women were said to have had physical handicaps that made them unsuitable for marriage (Czap, 1983, pp. 120–1). Hoch quotes a nineteenth-century ethnographer who noted, with reference to the area near the Petrovskoe estate (Tambov), that ‘only freaks and the morally depraved do not marry’ (Hoch, 1986, pp. 76–7). Such findings led Czap to posit the possible existence of a specifically ‘eastern European family type’ (Czap, 1983, p. 145). 1 Universal marriage, according to John Hajnal, was characteristic of a ‘joint-family household system’, where marriage occurred early in the lifecycle, nearly all members of the society married, and newlyweds co-resided with parents rather than establish a new independent household (Hajnal, 1982)
In more recent years, further studies have complicated this picture of a specific Slavic family type, revealing instead a substantial amount of variation in household formation patterns even within imperial Russia, including variation in the marriage age and marital status of women. For instance, Michael Mitterauer and Alexander Kagan have presented evidence for nineteenth-century Yaroslavl' province, in the northern industrial zone of central Russia, which indicates that peasant women in this area married significantly later than those at Mishino and Petrovskoe, and that the proportion of simple family households was much greater than on these estates (Mitterauer & Kagan, 1982, esp. p. 118). Herdis Kolle, too, in her study of households in nineteenth-century Moscow province (also in the CIR), has found a later age at first marriage for women (21.7 in 1834 increasing to 23.1 by 1869), as well as a significant proportion of never married females (4–10%) (Kolle, 2006, pp. 190–1, 193–4). Such variation is often attributed to regional differences (see Dennison, 2011, pp. 50–3). The estates of Mishino and Petrovskoe, studied, respectively by Czap and Hoch, were located in the so-called Central Black Earth region (CBE), where, because of fertile soil and a (slightly) more temperate climate, an agricultural economy prevailed. The societies studied by Mitterauer and Kagan and Kolle were located in the Central Industrial Region (CIR), which comprised the provinces to the north of the CBR (including Moscow Province). The soil in this region was less fertile and the growing season shorter than in the agricultural zone to the south. Whilst agriculture was practised in the CIR, these provinces were also characterised by a considerable amount of industry and trade. The existence of labour markets in the CIR has been cited as a critical factor in accounting for observed differences in household structure. This is, for instance, the argument of Kolle, who notes that women in the CIR, such as those in the proto-industrial society studied by Kolle herself, had the opportunity to work for wages, and could thus earn an independent living, unlike women in the agricultural zone to the south, who were obligated to work on demesne land or cultivate communal garden plots. This argument is consistent with some recent accounts of the emergence of the EMP in pre-industrial northwest Europe, where the EMP and labour markets are thought to have worked together in a virtuous feedback cycle. The EMP, in this view, created a need for labour markets in northwest Europe to balance land to labour ratios, and these labour markets in turn bolstered the EMP by providing women with wage opportunities and thus greater bargaining power vis-à-vis parents and
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marriage partners. The result was a system of delayed marriage and a higher incidence of lifetime celibacy (see de Moor & van Zanden, 2010, pp. 11–15). Whilst it is certainly plausible that labour markets and household formation patterns dovetailed to some degree, the relationship implied by these views may be overly simplistic. In the EMP literature, the family system shaped the labour market, whilst in the literature on Russian households, regional ecological differences gave rise to (or precluded the emergence of) labour markets, which, in turn, influenced the shape of family systems. But labour markets and household structure were not independent variables; both were embedded in institutional frameworks that determined their specific local character. Estate policies, communal practices, and local interest groups all affected local labour markets as well as decisions about household formation. To make this case, this paper draws on evidence from estates of two of Russia's wealthiest landholding families: the Sheremetyevs and the Gagarins. 3. Institutions and demography Roughly half of the peasant population in the CIR and CBE region in the first half of the nineteenth century was enserfed. 2 Proprietary estates are usually classified as either ‘quitrent’ estates (obrok), where serfs paid feudal dues in cash or kind, or ‘corvee’ estates (barshchina), where serfs owed labour obligations on the lord's demesne. Quitrent estates seem to have predominated in the CIR (where they were just over half of all estates), and ‘corvee’ estates predominated in the more agricultural CBE region, where they were roughly two-thirds of all estates. But, like serfdom itself, these were not monolithic categories; many estates were a mixture of both types. Moreover, landlords had considerable freedom in management of their estates and of the serfs residing on them. They not only had the power to levy taxes and dues and mete out punishments for violating estate rules, they could also control the distribution of local resources. Serfs had few formal rights; they were forbidden by law to seek justice in civil courts and had limited recourse against their landlords (Blum, 1961, chap. 21; Bartlett, 2003). Thus even within the broad categories of ‘quitrent’ and ‘corvee’ estates, there was significant scope for variation in local practices. The following discussion focuses on the estate management practices of the Sheremetyev and Gagarin 2 They were proprietary, or seigniorial, serfs; i.e., they belonged to private landlords. Serfs on state lands – ‘state peasants’ – comprised a separate category. For an overview, see Blum (1961), chaps. 20–23.
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families. Like many of Russia's wealthiest serfowners, these families held numerous estates, dispersed throughout the empire. To oversee their far-flung holdings, they devised centralised administrative systems, implemented locally by hired stewards or by officials selected from amongst the serf population. This form of centralised administration generated detailed records on a wide range of areas related to estate management and serf life. The Sheremetyevs and Gagarins, like most large estate holders in Russia, had explicit demographic policies, which they enforced in different ways. These policies were usually motivated by the belief that larger households were economically more stable and so better able to meet their feudal and state obligations, especially the provision of recruits for the Russian army, which will be considered in greater detail below. Femaleheaded households and unmarried women were often viewed as liabilities. Thus many landlords encouraged early and universal marriage, especially for women, and multi-generational households (Aleksandrov, 1984; Avdeev, Blum, & Troitskaia, 2004; Bushnell, 1993; Czap, 1983; Dennison, 2003; Hoch, 1986). The estate instructions for the Sheremetyevs' Voshchazhnikovo estate (in Yaroslavl' province) contain several points related to marriage and household formation. First, it is noted that an annual tax was to be levied from all unmarried persons (single or widowed) between the ages of 20 and 40, explicitly in order to ‘compel them to marry’. The tax was progressive: richer serfs were to pay six rubles per year, middling serfs four rubles per year, and the poorest serfs two rubles per year. Sheremetyev specifically included solitary female householders amongst those subject to the tax, noting in 1796 that ‘as a woman can earn some 15 rubles per year in textile manufacturing, she is able to pay feudal levies’ (RGADA, f. 1287, op. 3, ed. khr. 555). Since women on this estate had fewer earning opportunities than men (for reasons described in the next section), this tax would have been especially onerous for them. In addition, a fee was levied for the marriage of female serfs to other landlords' serfs or free persons, i.e. to anyone from outside the Voshchazhnikovo estate. The families of serf women who wished to marry nonestate grooms had to petition the landlord for permission. If it was granted, they then had to pay an up-front fee before the marriage could take place. 3 Wealthy 3 This was similar to merchet in medieval England. Generally, marriage fines were not an uncommon practice in serf societies throughout Europe.
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families were charged 150 rubles, middling peasants 100 rubles, and poorer ones 50 rubles. Serf men, who brought wives into their households in this patrilocal system, were not subject to this constraint. When a male serf married, an additional labourer was brought to the estate, along with a dowry and the promise of additional labourers in the form of offspring. Women, on the other hand, joined their husbands' households. If their husbands were not the Count Sheremetyev's serfs, he lost the female serf, her labour, her dowry, and her potential offspring. It was thus in his interest to impose marriage fees to make marriage to outsiders less appealing for serf women. Another important demographic constraint was the discouragement of household division. On the Voshchazhnikovo estate, all households were to contain at least 2 adult males (between the ages of 17 and 65). This regulation was probably related to state conscription levies, which required landlords to send a certain number of serfs to the tsar's army each year. Landlords did not want to undermine the economic viability of households (and their ability to pay feudal dues and taxes) by conscripting a household's only adult male worker. If a serf and his wife wished to separate from his father's or brother's household, he first had to petition the landlord for permission. If a household divided without permission, a fine was levied. If a household was unable to pay the fine, its adult males were to be conscripted to do hard labour. And if a household could not provide a conscript for the army when its turn in the queue came up (places in the queue were assigned by lottery), then that household was to be fined the price of a recruit on the market. The documents in the Voshchazhnikovo archive indicate that these policies were enforced, and not merely on the books, at least between the years 1750 and 1860. Amongst the surviving records are petitions from serfs to marry their daughters to non-estate grooms, with notations by local officials regarding the requisite fees to be paid. There are also formal petitions from serfs to divide from their fathers' households, along with responses to these requests from estate and communal officials. Some documents related to changes – usually temporary adjustments – in the fees and fines to be levied have also survived. (See Dennison, 2011, esp. pp. 62–5). The Gagarin family was likewise concerned about household formation practices amongst their serfs. But, in contrast to the Sheremetyevs' system of incentives, they employed blunt instruments to achieve compliance. At the Mishino estate (Riazan province) in 1817, the landlord issued an order giving households the option of
arranging marriages for their unmarried daughters over 15 or sending them to work in a textile mill on another estate. Estate household registers studied by Czap show that the majority of serf families made arrangements to have their daughters wed by Easter of that year (Czap, 1983, pp. 120–1). A similarly coercive approach was taken by the Gagarin family (and their officials) towards household fission. At the Petrovskoe estate (Tambov province), serfs who separated from their families without approval were subjected to corporal punishment and then forced back into the extended family unit (Hoch, 1986, pp. 87–8). At Manuilovskoe estate (Tver' province) widows who refused to remarry were threatened with exile to a paper mill in a neighbouring province (Bohac, 1991, pp. 111–2). These pressures were often reinforced by local communes, 4 whose more powerful members shared the landlords' concern about the economic viability of serf households. On Russian estates, feudal obligations and state taxes were usually assessed collectively. Landlords would, for instance, levy quitrents as a lump sum, which communal officials were required to come up with by a given date. These officials would then allocate the collective burden amongst member households. If poorer households were unable to pay their share, the better-off households in the commune would be forced to subsidise them. On the Voshchazhnikovo estate, this concern over viability can be seen in communal resolutions on petitions from serfs for permission to establish separate households (all such petitions required both landlord and communal approval). Communal officials would often grant permission for the households to divide physically, but insisted that they remain together on paper as a single tax unit (Dennison, 2003, pp. 402–3). This functioned as a way of forcing serfs to subsidise their poorer relatives. The Voshchazhnikovo commune discouraged female-headed households by withholding assistance. Although welfare provision was a recognised function of the commune, communal authorities were nonetheless reluctant to provide relief, often denying even temporary assistance to widows with young children (Dennison, 2011, pp. 113–7). This unwillingness to extend relief may have discouraged the formation of nuclear-family households more generally as it raised the risk to young couples who wished to establish their own, smaller units.
4 On the nature and functioning of Russian peasant communes, see Bartlett (1990) and Moon (1999, pp. 199–236). On peasant communes on Sheremetyev estates, see Dennison (2011), chap. 4.
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Communal practices on the Gagarin estates also constrained demographic decisions. Steven Hoch notes that on the Petrovskoe estate, the ‘patriarchs’ who headed multi-generational households and held power in the commune cooperated with the landlord to keep households on the estate large and complex, for many of the same reasons as in Voshchazhnikovo (Hoch, 1986, p. 86–9, 131–2). In addition, the system of communal land tenure, with periodic repartition, is thought to have encouraged early and universal marriage on estates such as Petrovskoe and Mishino, since the commune was supposed to distribute land in accordance with the number of able-bodied workers in a household. Sons were thus encouraged to bring wives into the household, and start new families, as soon as possible. At Manuilovskoe, as on many other estates, the commune monitored household size in relation to conscription policies; as noted for Voshchazhnikovo, it was easier – and more desirable – for officials to select recruits from larger households (Bohac, 1988). 4. Institutions and local markets It has been suggested that geography played a significant role in determining the extent to which such policies and practices were enforced. The idea is that more attention was given (by landlords and communes) to household formation patterns in the CBE region, since a large household was supposed to have been critical to economic viability in an agricultural region with few opportunities for wage employment. In the CIR, on the other hand, wage labour was widespread, due to the inhospitable soil and climate, and thus household structure is thought to have been somewhat less important to viability. In other words, it is held that households were relatively less complex in the CIR because labour market opportunities made diversification of household economies possible. The main drawback of this approach is that it neglects the endogeneity of those labour market opportunities. The very same institutions that constrained household formation decisions also shaped local labour markets and serfs' labour allocation decisions. The Sheremetyevs, for instance, allowed their serfs to engage in markets to a greater extent than many other landlords. They allowed serfs to work as migrant labourers in towns and cities throughout European Russia. They permitted their serfs to hire labourers to work their communal allotments or perform their corvee obligations. Moreover, they shaped local markets by allowing their serfs to establish manufacturing and retail enterprises of various sizes, for which
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hired labour was required. Serfs on the Voshchazhnikovo estate (or at the Sheremetyevs' Ivanovo or Iukhotskoe or Pavlovo estates) were not simply taking advantage of existing labour market opportunities. Their brick manufactories, paper and textile mills, and metalworking industries were also creating a demand for wage labour in these regions (see Dennison, 2011; Gestwa, 1999; Prokof'eva, 1981; Shchepetov, 1947). But permitting serfs to engage in markets was not the only way the Sheremetyevs influenced the local economy. They also shaped local markets by constraining serfs' participation in them. Policies related to the levying of travel fees on migrant labourers, the collection of additional annual taxes from craftsmen and owners of rural industries, and additional fees from those who hired labourers, would have affected the price of labour locally. In addition, estate policy dictating that those who engaged full time in wage work should still cultivate their communal allotments created a local market in agricultural labour. Even more restrictive policies governed female labour force participation. Female serfs at Voshchazhnikovo were rarely allowed to leave their villages of residence. The few Voshchazhnikovo women granted permission to engage in migrant labour were married or widows over the age of 40. Any serf wishing to hire a female labourer, especially if she were going to be resident on the estate, required special permission. 5 Women were permitted to engage in wage work locally (i.e., on the Voshchazhnikovo estate), but restrictions such as these constrained their choices and almost certainly lowered their wages. 6 The policies of the Gagarin family also shaped local labour markets, but with very different results. The Gagarins appear to have strongly discouraged serfs from participating in markets. On the Manuilovskoe estate, serfs were subject to ‘forced migration’; the terms of their employment were arranged by the landlord's officials and their wages were paid directly to the estate management instead of to them (Bohac, 1982, ch. 3). At Petrovskoe, bailiffs disliked serfs renting out their land or hiring others to work their allotments. In a report from 1834, the Petrovskoe estate manager expressed his concern over serfs' ‘giving over their own lands to [outsiders] to sow’ (Hoch, 1986, p. 55). According to Hoch, Petrovskoe serfs were punished by the estate 5 Such policies were probably motivated by fear of illegitimate pregnancies, which were viewed as a burden on the community. See the discussion in Dennison (2011, pp. 175–6). 6 A more detailed account of restrictions can be found in Dennison (2011), esp. chap. 6. Unfortunately it is difficult to test effects on wages systematically, since rural wage data for this period are so few and far between.
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management for hiring labourers, renting out land, selling grain, and other market activities which might have ‘contributed to economic differentiation’ (Hoch, 1986, pp. 125–6). It was thus not the case that there were simply no markets for Gagarin serfs to engage in. Rather, estate policies themselves undermined the development of local markets by penalising those households that sought to take advantage of them. Communes, too, shaped local markets, just as they influenced household formation decisions. At Voshchazhnikovo, all migration decisions had to be approved by the commune. Again, collective responsibility for feudal and state obligations played a role; communal officials were reluctant to let tax-paying members leave the estate (see Dennison & Ogilvie, 2007, pp. 534–8). Ironically, a household in arrears in feudal dues was unlikely to be granted permission to migrate for wage work. And, like estate authorities, the commune took a restrictive approach to female participation in markets, limiting women's mobility and their access to local resources (as discussed in Dennison, 2011, ch. 6). The commune was thus unwilling to provide relief to poor women, as noted earlier, but at the same time actively constrained their possibilities for earning a living. A similar phenomenon has been reported for the Gagarins' Manuilovskoe estate, where widows were deprived of communal land and subjected by the commune to other economic pressures to induce them to remarry (Bohac, 1991, pp. 102–3). On both families' estates, communal officials had control over the distribution of local resources: i.e., which households had access to communal land, forest, pasture, and what could be done with these resources (including decisions about renting or selling rights to them, building on them, grazing animals, or employing labourers to cultivate land or tend livestock). At Voshchazhnikovo, serfs were required to offer any land they wished to sell to members of the commune first; outside offers could only be considered if none of the local serfs was interested (Dennison & Ogilvie, 2007, p. 530). It has been argued in recent accounts of the EMP that the decline of kinship groups in northwest Europe gave rise to strong corporate entities and, ultimately, in places like England, to economic growth (Greif, 2006). It is worth noting the contrast in this account of northwest European development with the evidence for imperial Russia. As described here, the existence of strong corporate groups in Russia – especially rural communes – appears to have hindered, through restrictions on demographic decisions and resource allocation, the emergence of anything like an EMP in rural Russia, and, at the same time, undermined economic growth. And
Table 1 Household size and structure on three serf estates c. 1850 a.
MHS % Complex % Solitaries a
Mishino
Petrovskoe
Voshchazhnikovo
8.8 72.7 1.2
8.3 74.0 7.0
5.2 57.0 20.0
Figures from Czap (1982); Hoch (1986); Dennison (2003).
even within Russia, communal strength appears to have varied significantly across settlements (Dennison, 2011, pp. 127–31). This contrast, and the extent of internal variation, offers another indication of the complexity of interactions between household formation decisions and the local institutional framework.
5. Marriage and household structure: Variation in outcomes But how can we be sure that the estate management approaches described above had any effect in practice? Evidence of household formation patterns for several of these landlords' estates is highly suggestive. It would appear that household structure at the Sheremetyevs' Voshchazhnikovo estate differed markedly from that at the Gagarins' Mishino and Petrovskoe estates, as indicated in Table 1. One of the most remarkable differences concerns the incidence of so-called ‘solitary’ households. Solitaries, in the Laslett–Hammel classification scheme, were separate households, composed of only a single person. The proportion of solitary households at Voshchazhnikovo in the nineteenth century (5 to 20% between 1816 and 1858) was much larger than on the Gagarin estates. At Mishino, the range was 0 to 2.3% between 1814 and 1858. On the Petrovskoe estate, solitaries comprised 0 to 9% of households over the same period. Even more interesting is the fact that the majority of solitary householders on the Voshchazhnikovo estate were female. Of the 34 solitaries counted in the village Voshchazhnikovo in 1850, 24 (70%) were women who were either widowed or had never married (RGADA, f. 1287, op. 3, ed. khr. 1941). Voshchazhnikovo was different in other ways, too. Women on this estate married at a later age than did serfs on the other estates. The Singulate Mean Age at Marriage (SMAM) 7 in the nineteenth century (1816– 7 The singulate mean age at marriage (SMAM) is an estimate of the mean number of years lived be a given cohort before their first marriage, and is calculated from the proportion of unmarried males or 32 females in successive age groups as provided in a census or other similar document. See Hajnal (1953).
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1858) ranged from 18.3 to 22.0 for Voshchazhnikovo women, and from 22.1 to 26.4 for men (Dennison, 2003, p. 414). This is broadly similar to the range found by Kolle for Bunkovskaia volost' in Moscow province (Kolle, 2006, p. 90), but differs significantly from the pattern found on the Black Earth estates. At Mishino, in the period 1782–1858, the SMAM varied from 16.6 to 19.0 for women, and from 17.0 to 19.7 for men (Czap, 1982, p. 10). The average age at first marriage at Petrovskoe (1813–1856) was between 18.4 and 19.5 for women and between 18.8 and 20.1 for men, (Hoch, 1986, p. 76). Nor was marriage universal for women in Voshchazhnikovo village. Between 1816 and 1858, 5 to 21% of serf women never married; the village average for the period was 14%. This was even higher than that in the proto-industrial community of Bunkovskaia, where never-married women comprised some 4–10% in the period 1834–69 (Kolle, 2006, p. 194). It was substantially higher than on the Mishino estate, where the figure was consistently under 5% in the nineteenth century (Bohac, 1991, p. 99; Czap, 1983, p. 119). At Petrovskoe, a household listing for 1851 indicates that only about 2% of women on this estate remained unmarried (Bohac, 1991, p. 99). At first glance, these patterns are consistent with evidence of regional or geographical differences in household patterns. Voshchazhnikovo was in the CIR, whilst Mishino and Petrovskoe were in the CBE region. But the case for regional differences is complicated by Bohac's findings for the Gagarins' Manuilovskoe estate in Tver' province. At Manuilovskoe, mean household size in the nineteenth century was 7.9 and 90% of households were multi-generational. Between 1813 and 1861, the proportion of solitary households on this estate ranged from 0 to 1.4%. The proportion of females on this estate who never married ranged from 6 to 8% (Bohac, 1982). In other words, Manuilovskoe was located in the CIR, where labour markets were widespread, yet the household formation patterns on the estate are indistinguishable from those reported for the two estates in the CBE region (and significantly different from those found for Voshchazhnikovo). It is hardly a coincidence that Manuilovskoe belonged to the same landlord as Mishino and Petrovskoe. It seems plausible that the institutional framework established by the Gagarins generated similar outcomes regardless of geography. In particular, their coercive approach to the regulation of serfs' demographic and economic behaviour – close scrutiny, corporal punishment, forced labour – resulted in more uniform behaviour across their holdings. On the other
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hand, the Sheremetyevs' willingness to tolerate market participation, and their use of targeted incentives to encourage behaviours they thought desirable (and maximise their own income), mitigated some of their more coercive policies. For instance, whilst Sheremetyev policies made it more difficult for local serf women to find husbands (men were free to marry outsiders, women were not), their willingness to allow women to work locally as labourers or in rural industry made it possible for unmarried women to support themselves as solitary households rather than remain as dependents in the households of male relatives. Similarly, their willingness to allow households to separate physically but continue to be assessed as a single tax unit made smaller family units possible on their estates. Whilst we should be careful not to overstate the advantages of life under Sheremetyev rule, it does seem as if the approach we observe for Voshchazhnikovo may have offered serfs greater scope for demographic and economic choice, and thus resulted in a wider range of outcomes than the cowed uniformity observed on Gagarin estates. 6. Conclusion Until fairly recently, researchers tended to view household formation patterns in Russia – and in eastern Europe more generally – as monolithic, and as artefacts of underlying cultural preferences. More recent research has cast doubt on the notion of a monolithic household formation system in Russia (Kolle, 2006; Mitterauer & Kagan, 1982; Nosevich, 2004). The evidence presented here is consistent with these findings, in that it, too, reveals significant variation within rural Russia. The findings for the Gagarin and Sheremetyev estates also cast doubt on cultural explanations for such variation, since the cultural characteristics of the serf population on these estates were broadly similar. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that geography was the primary determinant of demographic behaviour – specifically, household formation practices – amongst Russian serfs, given that we find significantly different patterns within the same region. Nor can we attribute the variation we have observed to a marriage pattern as an exogenous influence. Marriage and household patterns appear to have responded to differing institutional environments much more than to geographical differences or any other specific variable. 8 There was no single ‘Russian’ 8 This is consistent with the conclusions of Matti Polla (2003), who, in his study of households in Karelia (Oulanka), concluded that the existence of the Russian judicial system in this region in the nineteenth century had significant effects on local economy and family forms.
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marriage or household pattern, since there was no single ‘Russian’ institutional environment. The overarching framework of serfdom put the power to determine the local institutional environment, within certain limits, in the hands of the landlord. In the case of larger landlords, the institutional environment evolved by each appears to have had some relatively fixed character across their many scattered holdings and even over time, from one landlord generation to the next. 9 It is certainly possible that other patterns held amongst smaller landlords, or even that there was a customary default pattern towards which smaller holdings gravitated in the absence of the kind of institutional inertia prevailing in operations with large centralised bureaucracies. Literary sources seem to hint at such a default pattern. However, we have little hard evidence of it, and given that smaller landlords kept fewer and less systematic records, it may be a long time before any evidence comes to light. Meanwhile, though, we can improve our insight into the relative sensitivity of demographic and economic variables to landlord policy and other influences by comparing the serf behaviour observed in local studies of different landlords within the same region (or with the same other hypothesised variable held constant), and of the same landlord across many regions (or across other variables of interest). Regarding the larger question about the interrelations of demography and economic growth, the Russian evidence suggests that any proposal to make the European Marriage Pattern responsible for economic development is too simple. It seems likely that what we have found in Russia applies to other areas as well: variations in both marriage patterns and local economy resulted from differences in institutional structure. A place like England was relatively unique in having a largely homogeneous (centrally imposed) institutional structure across a substantial land area over a long period of time, and it happened to be one that, like that arrived at fortuitously by the Sheremetyevs, was relatively conducive to economic growth — as well as being conducive to simpler family structures and higher ages at first marriage. Other parts of Europe varied widely; in some there was an institutional structure not unlike that of England; in others (such as southern Italy 9 Relatively fixed should be emphasized, since the enforcement of the landlord's objectives on the ground would have been a critical determinant of the outcome. If estate management varied considerably from location to location we might expect to see diverse outcomes even across the estates of one particular landlord. Melton's analysis of Rastorg (Kursk province) suggests that other family patterns were possible, even on Sheremetyev family estates (Melton, 1987).
or central Europe) the institutions favoured simpler families but not economic development. The family system in any given location was thus embedded in a set of institutions that shaped the demographic, economic, and social behaviour of local inhabitants. Whilst all these components were evidently in some sort of equilibrium with each other in any given society at a given time, the evidence presented here suggests that institutions related to law and the economy may have shaped demographic behaviour more than such behaviour influenced them. 10 Hajnal's conjecture of an EMP turns out to be robust, though perhaps not quite in the form in which he first put it forth. A hypothesised cultural explanation for different family forms (such as the ‘Slavic pattern’) does not hold up against detailed micro-level evidence. References Aleksandrov, V. A. (1984). Obychnoe pravo krepostnoi derevni Rossii, XVIII-nachalo XIX v. Moscow. Avdeev, A., Blum, A., & Troitskaia, I. (2004). Peasant marriage in nineteenth-century Russia. Population, 59, 721–764. Bartlett, R. (Ed.). (1990). Land commune and peasant community in Russia: Communal forms in imperial and early Soviet society. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bartlett, R. (Ed.). (2003). Serfdom and state power in imperial Russia. European history quarterly, 33. (pp. 29–64). Benigno, F. (1989). The southern Italian family in the early modern period: a discussion of co-residence patterns. Continuity and Change, 4(1), 165–194. Blum, J. (1961). Lord and peasant in Russia from the ninth to the nineteenth century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bohac, R. (1982). Family, property, and socioeconomic mobility: Russian peasants on Manuilovskoe estate 1810–1861. Unpublished PhD dissertation. University of Illinois at ChampaignUrbana. Bohac, R. (1988). The ‘mir’ and the military draft. Slavic Review, 47, 652–666. Bohac, R. (1991). Widows and the Russian serf community. In B. E. Clements, B. A. Engel, & C. D. Worobec (Eds.), Russia's women: Accommodation, resistance, Transformation. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bushnell, J. (1993). Did serf owners control serf marriage? Slavic Review, 52, 419–445. Cerman, M. (1997). Mitteleuropa und die ‘europäischen Muster’. Heiratsverhalten und Familienstruktur in Mitteleuropa, 16.-19. Jahrhundert. In J. Ehmer, T. Hareven, & R. Wall (Eds.), Historische Familienforschung. Ergebnisse und Kontroversen (pp. 327–346). Frankfurt/Main and New York. Czap, P. (1982). The perennial multiple family household, Mishino, Russia 1782–1858. Journal of Family History, 5–26. Czap, P. (1983). A large family: the peasant's greatest wealth: Serf households in Mishino, Russia 1814–1858. In R. Wall, P. Laslett, 10 When serfdom was abolished in 1861, it was frequently noted by contemporaries that peasant families quickly divided into smaller, simpler units (Frierson, 1992).
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