‘A large family
The peasant's greatest wealth’: serf households in Mishino, Russia, 1814–1858
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23733166 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peter Czap (Amherst College, corresponding author), Peter Czap Jr |
| Year | 1983 |
| Pages | 105-152 |
| Publication date | 1983-03-10 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Family Forms in Historic Europe (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1017/cbo9780511897535.004 |
| OpenAlex | W2989893522 |
| ISBN | 9780511897535 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 34 |
Introduction ‘Nowhere is a large family a greater blessing than among the Russian peasants. Sons always mean additional shares of land for the head of the family ... In western Europe a large family is an immense burden and nuisance for the lower classes; in Russia a large family represents the peasant's greatest wealth’ So observed the German political economist August von Haxthausen of the peasantry of the central provinces of European Russia in the 1840s. Publication of the journal of his travels is credited with awakening the interest of educated Russian society in the peasantry, and leaving with Russian intellectuals the suggestion that Russia retained features of the traditional society that had disappeared in western Europe. Haxthausen attributed the large and complex households of central Russia to a unique cultural configuration and a peculiar Russian need for ‘secure family ties’. Frederick Le Play, travelling in the province of Orenburg in 1853, was also struck by the large size and complexity of serf households, which he attributed to the implacable authority of the peasant family patriarch. These descriptions of the peasant family by two eminent western European observers, while arresting the attention of Russians and non- Russians alike, were not, however, the first to be written. One of the earliest published descriptions of serf peasant households appeared in Russia in 1829. It signalled growing awareness by gentry landlords that to improve rural estates something must be known about their basic units of labour and taxation – the serf family/household.
Blessing · Development economics · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Geography · German · Peasant · Political science · Politics · History · Law · Regional Socio-Economic Development Trends · Soviet and Russian History
Quantifying patriarchy
European Family History
Velikorusskii Pakhar' at the global village
Hypothesis on the Origins of the Communal Family System
The Joint Family Household Revisited
Turkish Families and Households in Historical Perspective
Servants and youth
Old issues and new perspectives
Family and economy in an early-nineteenth-century Baltic serf estate
New evidence and old theories
Sweeping Changes in Marriage, Cohabitation and Childbearing in Central and Eastern Europe
Household composition in post‐socialist Eastern Europe
Does the European Marriage Pattern Explain Economic Growth
Power and inheritance
Historical family systems and contemporary developmental outcomes
Family systems in central Russia in the 1830s and 1890s
Nuptiality and family reproduction in male-inheritance systems
Three kinds of preindustrial household formation system in historical Eastern Europe
Infant and child sex ratios in late Imperial Russia
Mosaic
Peasant and hunter households in Oulanka, northern Russia, 1710–1910
The history of migration as a chapter in the history of the European rural family
The influence of emancipation reforms on the Polish rural family in western provinces of the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th century
Household formation, institutions, and economic development
Eastern Finnish families on the borderland of historical family forms
The extended family in the Finnish Karelia. The family system in Ruokolahti 1750–1850
The Pre‐history of Demographic Regions in Traditional Europe
How not to measure the standard of living
Life-cycle service and family systems in the rural countryside
Did abolition of serfdom affect the position of the elderly people in peasant families in the polish lands of the western part of the Russian Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries
Fertility and Culture in Eastern Europe
Migration Patterns During Italian Urbanization, 1865-1921
Historic European Household Structures and the Capitalist World-Economy
The Social Demography of Hungarian Villages in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (With Special Attention To Sárpilis, 1792-1804)
| Unique citing works | 34 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,83 |
| Citation span | 1985 - 2025 (41) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 21 |