All Along the Watchtower: Military Landholders and Serfdom Consolidation in Early Modern Russia

This article examines the emergence of extractive institutions using the case of serfdom in early modern Russia. We argue that serfdom consolidated under the pressure of landhold ing military elites who gained political influence due to the prolonged struggle with steppe nomads. To contain nomadic raids, the Russian state erected defense lines on the southern frontier, and granted lands in the area to soldiers in charge of its defense. The soldiers could not farm while on defense duty, nor could they compete in the market for peasant labor, as the land had been selected for its defensive rather than agricultural value. The system was therefore only sustainable by restricting labor mobility. In response to the volume of landholders’ collective petitions, the Russian state gradually tied peasants to the land and institutionalized serfdom in the written law. Using newly digitized population data from the 17th century, we show a higher prevalence of serfs and military landholders in districts on the defense line. We also find a higher prevalence of small estates – up to 25 serf households sufficient to support a soldier and his family. Placebo tests show that these patterns do not hold for non-serf peasants, or for merchants and artisans. To ensure causality, we develop a novel algorithm that reconstructs the optimal invasion routes for nomads and pinpoints the optimal location of the defense line using topographic data. Our results highlight the primacy of political economy factors over purely economic ones, such as the land-labor ratio or the grain trade, in the development of serfdom. This sheds new light on the possible mechanisms of institutional divergence between Eastern and Western Europe in the early modern period.