Did Serf Owners Control Serf Marriage? Orlov Serfs and Their Neighbors, 1773-1861
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4214531 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John Bushnell (Northwestern University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1993 |
| Volume | 52 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 419-445 |
| Publication date | 1993-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Slavic Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0037-6779 • E-ISSN: 2325-7784 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2499717 |
| OpenAlex | W2320742132 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 3 |
Historians of the Russian peasantry hold almost unanimously that serfowners routinely intervened in serf marriage: that they generally forbade serf women to leave the estate through marriage or marry at all without permission, commanded serfs to marry young, made compulsory matches when their serfs failed to marry on schedule, and otherwise prevented serfs from exercising free choice in marriage. Equally common is the assumption that the nobles' interest in serf marriage was the multiplication of human property and the number of duespaying labor units, i.e., married couples. The one exception is Steven Hoch, who found that on the Gagarin estate of Petrovskoe, Tambov province, managers never intervened, at least in first marriages. They never had to, Hoch argues, because the heads of peasant households shared the owners' interest in early and universal marriage. That was because estate managers allocated land, the only significant economic resource, to married couples on an egalitarian basis. Even Hoch accepts the standard view that, on other estates where different socioeconomic conditions held, estate authorities did have to intervene to ensure that serfs married early and universally
Economic history · Estate · Genealogy · Inheritance (genetic algorithm · Luck · Peasant · Political science · Population · Property (philosophy · Quarter (Canadian coin · Real estate · Socioeconomic status · Sociology · Theology · Demography · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Soviet and Russian History
| Citations per year | 0.19 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1994 - 2014 (21) |
| Highly cited | No |