1

Alessandro Stanziani

EHESS and CNRS, Paris

Alessandro.stanziani@ehess.fr

Reciprocal comparison and history. A few proposals based on

the case of Russia1.

In a recent article, Gareth Austin took up the proposal put forward a few years ago by

Kenneth Pomeranz and Bing Wong to develop a form of “reciprocal comparison” in which

Africa (Austin’s case) and China (Pomeranz and Wong) would not be compared exclusively

to the Western model as the exemplary scenario and exclusive yardstick.2 The fundamental

aim of these proposals was to break free from the “Eurocentrism” underlying most economic

history analysis. The solutions presented were arrived at in an unusual way in that they

authors did not claim the “specificity” of China or Africa in relation to the West. As Austin

1 For a full development se Alessandro Stanziani, After Oriental Despotism. Eurasian Growth in Global Perspective (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

2Gareth Austin, “Reciprocal Comparison and African History: Tackling Conceptual Eurocentrism in the Study of

Africa’s Economic Past,” African Studies Review, 50, 3 (2007),1-28. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great

Divergence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8; Bin Wong, China Transformed (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1997).

2

asserts, the point is not to reject any general model of economic development, but rather to

widen the definitions of city, market and private property to include practices found in non-

European worlds. In particular, we will consider the economic and social history of Russia

(eighteenth-nineteenth centuries); we will avoid comparing the Russian case exclusively to

an ideal model of the West and at the same time examine a given “Western” region against

the yardstick of Russian practices.

We would like to discuss these proposals in this article. The rejection of Eurocentrism

and the available alternative solutions (use a more general model or, on the contrary, identify

regional specificities) deserve closer examination. We wish to consider here a new definition

of reciprocal comparison, different from that of the authors just mentioned: the goal of our

approach is not to develop a new “general model”, but to reconcile the differences between

the historical paths specific to particular regions with their connections, transfers and overall

dynamics. Such a comparison is reciprocal in the sense that, after initially identifying the

characteristics of a given region, we use these same elements to re-examine other regions. For

example, we will avoid comparing the Russian case exclusively to an ideal model of the West

and at the same time examine a given “Western” region against the yardstick of Russian

practices. This questioning can be developed in three steps. First we will show that the notions

of city, bourgeoisie or private property arising from their main features found, let us say, in

mid-nineteenth century Great Britain, cannot be used to explain social and economic relations

in Russia. In the second part, we shall see that it is impossible to identify the characteristics of

these notions in the Russian context without considering the circulation that took place

between England (and Europe in general) and Russia. Finally, this approach will allow us to

show that the Russian ways of incorporating these notions in social relations provide a

heuristic framework for re-examining a given region in Europe, Asia or Africa. Why were the

3

commons eliminated in Great Britain, whereas in other contexts they provided long-term

support for the rise of markets?

Our final interpretation flows from an iterative process in which the cases studied are not

compared using an ideal type or a static form of opposition (Russia versus the West), but on

the contrary, by bringing out phenomena of circulation and reciprocal borrowing. Unlike

Austin and Pomeranz, our aim is not to show that China, Africa or Russia were in fact far

more developed and integrated in their trade relations than traditional interpretations claim,

but rather to understand which historically situated form of “market” was involved. Once the

form was identified, it seemed necessary to study its historical dynamics, which reflected its

ongoing efforts to interact with other regions. No doubt this approach owes a great deal to

l’histoire croisée;3 we will take the main contributions of this approach into account, but our

position is not as strictly opposed to comparison. Comparison can have a role to play in

analysis, provided it gives rise to a genuine iterative, reciprocal process in terms of historical

dynamics and the construction and use of sources. Though interaction and circulatory

phenomena help us to understand a number of important questions, they cannot explain

everything. Why, for example, did China under the Ming dynasty in the sixteenth century go

back on its promise to engage in long-distance navigation, when Bengal merchants and

European trading companies insisted on it?

It is precisely through the contribution of l’histoire croisée that new forms of

comparison, as I understand it, can be practised. These remarks can be divided into four main

questions:

3 Michael Werner, Bénedicte Zimmermann (eds.), De la comparaison à l’histoire croisée (Paris : Seuil, 2004).

4

1 How can the specificities of cultural areas or of a given region be reconciled with

comparative analyses?

2 How can common waves of capitalism (to borrow Braudel’s expression) be reconciled with

local dynamics, i.e. local temporalities in a history that is nevertheless global?

3 How is it possible to take the specificity of the production of sources (a specificity at once

historical, geographical, etc. – in short, the context of the sources) into consideration without

abandoning points 1 and 2?

4 How can we avoid two pitfalls of comparison, namely resorting to tautological models or

simply juxtaposing two different cases?

As these questions are interrelated, instead of examining them separately, outside any

historiographical context, we will view them against this backdrop. It is essential to grasp

their historiographical context, referring to comparative practices and their empirical

evolution. These discussions will be linked as far as possible to changes in comparative

practices in recent decades. We will devote special attention to my research field, i.e. Russian

history from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

We will show how Gershenkron’s conception of comparison is linked to

(under)development studies in the 1960s and 1970s, before going on to talk about recent neo-

institutional interpretations. Then, in opposition to these approaches, we will discuss the

contributions of the cultural turn, anthropology and subaltern studies and finally conclude

with reciprocal comparison.

5

The historical dimension of economic backwardness

Alexander Gershenkron is justly famous for Economic Backwardness in Historical

Perspective. Yet these two terms – the notions of backwardness and historical temporalities –

are hardly compatible. In reality, economic backwardness refers to logical time. From the

eighteenth century to today, comparisons between the Russian economy and the economies of

Europe’s main countries have been part of a broader debate over the notion of

“backwardness”. It involves proposing a scale of comparison to account for economic growth

as well as for so-called “obstruction” factors. The framework of comparison is created by

drawing up a list of elements based on a standard Western ideal. We will not recount the

history of this model4 here but simply mention its main components.

In this sense, Gershenkron offers an excellent example of how the approach was

applied to the case of Russia. Indeed, like Max Weber and others before him, Gershenkron

began by drawing up the list of Western characteristics on which his comparison would be

based; he too emphasised cities, the bourgeoisie, markets and private property. Yet unlike

Marx and to some extent Weber, he thought it was possible to arrive at industrialisation (but

not capitalism) without a bourgeoisie. In place of this component, “backward” countries (to

4 Cf. my “Free Labour-Forced Labour: An Uncertain Boundary? The Circulation of Economic Ideas between

Russia and Europe from the 18th to the Mid-19th Century,” Kritika. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian

History, 9,1 (2008),1-27.

6

use the jargon of the 1960s and 1970s) such as Prussia and Russia had “substituting factors”,

notably the state. This is a very clever solution to the problem raised by the need to reconcile

particular features, historical specificities and general dynamics. If backwardness and

diversity go together, then it is possible to conceive of alternative paths.5

One might wonder, however, if this solution really eliminates the confusion between

historical time and logical time. Contrary to appearances, Gershenkron does not compare

Russia to England in specific historical contexts. Instead he opposes an ideal image of the

West (and of England in particular) to an equally ideal image of nineteenth century Russia.

English economic development is associated with the early introduction of a Parliament,

privatisation of the commons and hence the formation of a proletariat available for agriculture

and industry. In contrast, Russia is associated with market towns – and therefore with a

bourgeoisie – as well as the presence of an absentee landed gentry living off serfdom.

These interpretations stemmed from the research work on England and Russia

available at the time Gershenkron was writing, starting with more general works from Marx to

Polanyi that stressed those characteristics in describing the English industrial revolution.

Soviet and Western historiographies also concurred on the limits of the 1861 Russian reforms

(abolition of serfdom), the ensuing impoverishment of the peasants and the extent of Czarist

industrialisation.6 Like these authors, Gershenkron put great trust in the economic and

5 Alexander Gershenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard

University Press 1962).

6 Just a few examples: Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasants in Russia from the Ninth though the 19th century (New

York: Atheneum, 1964); Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago and London:

The University of Chicago Press, 1971); Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labour: American Slavery and Russian

Serfdom, Cambridge (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); Daniel Field, The End of Serfdom:

Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855-1861 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1976); Ivan D.,

Koval’chenko Russkoe krepostnoe krest’ianstvo v pervoi polovine XIX v. (The economics of serfdom in

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statistical research produced in Russia between 1870 and 1930. Though indeed these works

contained a wealth of information, it is nevertheless important, as we have shown elsewhere,

to understand the conditions under which it was produced. Our aim is not to invalidate turn-

of-the-century Russian statistics, let alone “correct” them in line with a given statistical

history, but rather to take the empirical methods and the intellectual and political challenges

of the period into account so their conclusions may be used later on.7 In particular, the

economic and social statistics produced in Russia at the turn of the century were, for the most

part, the work of intellectuals, specialists and sometimes merely activists employed by the

zemstvo, local self-government organisations. These authors were quick to reveal the

inadequacies of the reforms, the limits of autocracy and the impoverishment of the peasantry.

Above and beyond their considerable differences, “Marxists” and “populists” agreed on this

aspect. They selected typical cases and variables to confirm their hypotheses. Kablukov, a

professor of economics and statistics at the University of Moscow in charge of statistics for

the Moscow region in the early twentieth century, thus stated that a peasant should be

classified as a meshchane (petit-bourgeois) as soon as he bought land for himself.8 By

definition, a peasant was someone who did not have enough land to satisfy the needs of his

family.9 These were the sources Gershenkron used in his work, which were hence doubly

decontextualised: he took out context turn-of-the-century sources, which in turn were the

result of a particular empirical clarification.

Russia during the first half of the nineteenth century), (Moscow: Nauka, 1967).

7 Alessandro Stanziani, L’économie en révolution. Le cas russe, 1870-1930 (Paris : Albin Michel, 1998).

8 Nikolai Kablukov, Posobie pri mestnykh statistichekikh obsledovaniiakh (Remarks for local statistical

surveys), (Moscow, 1910), 8-10.

9 Alessandro Stanziani, “Les enquêtes orales en Russie,1861-1914,” Annales HSS, 1 (2000), 219-241.

8

At the same time, this approach completely dominated in the 1960s: a certain historical

situation could fit into a more general pattern of economic development, drawing comparisons

by analogy without worrying too much about the conditions in which the sources were

produced. This explains how it eventually became possible to use Russian development and

the debate between “populists” and “Marxists” from 1870 to 1914 in discussions about which

type of development policies were best suited to Asia, Africa or South America during the

1960s.10 The notion of history as a magistra vitae and the resulting normative temptations

were at the root of these analyses, which acquired “contemporary relevance” but lost their

historical specificity. The comparisons were not so much anachronistic as a-temporal.

***

Such approaches were not abandoned when colonialism and the cold war came to an end; on

the contrary, those historical processes even encouraged their use. The “transition” to

capitalism in the former Soviet-bloc countries as well as in Latin America and of course

China and India became the inevitable outcome of an economic model considered to be valid

everywhere. Neo-institutional economics, developed in the 1970s by Douglass North among

others, became the dominant paradigm in comparative economic history.11 Instead of evoking

an ideal competitive market, like liberal, neoclassical theory, neo-institutional thought took

seriously the criticism of those who viewed the market economy as a particular historical

construction. It incorporated institutional phenomena in the neo-liberal approach, maintaining

10 Alexander Mendel, Dilemmas of Progress in Tsarist Russia. Legal Marxism and Legal Populism (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press 1961); Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, “Problems of Industrialization of Eastern and

Southeastern Europe,” Economic Journal, June-September, 53 (1943), 202-211; Gunner Myrdal, Economic

Theory and Underdeveloped Regions (London: Duckworth, 1956).

11 Douglass North and Robert Thomas, The Rise of Western Civilization: a New Economic History (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1973).

9

that institutions were efficient insofar as they offered a means to cope with “market

imperfections”.

According to this approach, the commons, which had been criticised since the eighteenth

century as a source of inefficiency, were viewed as a safeguard against risk at a time when the

markets were still so imperfect they prevented rapid compensation for poor harvests in one

region by the surplus from other regions.12 In this way, “market imperfections” were the

explanation for Russian peasant districts and even serfdom in eastern Europe.13 In other

words, there was an economic explanation for every institution present in the history of

humanity.

The only difference in relation to previous approaches was that henceforth the list of

development factors was drawn up on the basis of one and only one criterion: efficiency and

minimized transaction costs. The pattern has been applied to all sorts of historical

experiments, including in Russia and the USSR. Using the theory of transaction costs and the

information economy, Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, revealed the limits

of free market equilibrium along with the distortions produced by the Soviet bureaucracy and

by managed economies in general.14 The same model is employed to talk about the market in

nineteenth century Africa, serfdom in Russia or fairs in Europe in the modern period: it is no

accident that neo-institutional economics speaks less about capitalism than about the market

economy. This approach calls into question the classifications of economic systems proposed

12 Deidre McCloskey, “The Open Fields of England: Rent, Risk, and the Rate of Interest, 1300-1815” in David

Galenson (ed.), Markets in History: Economic Studies of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1989), 5-51; Randall Nielsen, “Storage and English Government Intervention in Early Modern Grain

Markets,” The Journal of Economic History, 57,1 (1997),1-33.

13 Tracy K., Dennison “Did Serfdom Matter? Russian Rural Society, 1750-1860”, Historical Research, 79,203,

(2003), 74-89.

14 Joseph Stiglitz, Whither Socialism? (Harvard: MIT Press, 1994).

10

by traditional neo-classical and Marxist literatures (capitalism, peasant economy, feudalism,

etc.). Instead we find a typology of organizations that evolve strictly in relation to the

institutional context. Hence, the approach cannot explain the relationship between

institutional changes and forms of market organization: are institutions the result or the source

of economic behavior?

In the case of the USSR, did economic weakness cause political decline or, on the

contrary, did Soviet institutions close the market and thereby bring about its inevitable

collapse?

This question, which may seem innocuous to historians, was important for

development policy insofar as the debate, especially in the 1990s, was focused on knowing

whether it was first necessary to set up market institutions and a democratic political system

in order to have a market, or conversely whether the market would give rise through its very

development to adequate institutions. The issue appears to have been resolved since then

because, contrary to the politically correct arguments that always sought to link capitalism to

democracy, the experiences in China and Russia in recent years confirm that this equation is

by no means obvious from the standpoint either of political philosophy or historical

observation.

We can therefore understand more fully Gareth Austin’s observations mentioned at the

beginning of this article: the importance of markets in Africa testifies to the fact that

differences from Europe are not linked to an anti-market mentality hostile to profit, but simply

to institutional pressures from inside as well as outside (corruption, colonialism, etc.).15 No

doubt this reflects the author’s good intentions: he is looking for a way out of the insoluble

internal contradictions of a fundamental difference in the African “mentality”, for which

15 Austin, “Reciprocal” .

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relativist and cultural approaches are always on the lookout. In the process, however,

everything pertaining to economic anthropology is swept outside the historian’s vision:

according to the neo-institutional approach in any case, whether it is applied to Russia in the

eighteenth century, the USSR in the twentieth century, or China and Latin America,

“mentalities” have little influence on economic behavior, which stems solely from

institutional constraints.16

These observations may seem far removed from the historian’s approach; they are probably

often tautological and keep us from grasping the full complexity of historical transformations.

Yet the question remains as to whether or not recourse to mentalities, to forms of “non-

optimizing rationalities,” and to anthropology in general can yield less mechanical

comparisons.

The contribution of anthropology and the cultural turn

Economic history in its most economist form has been the constant target of critics who

brought out the fundamental differences between societies and thus the impossibility of using

a single model to explain different socio-economic dynamics in time and space.17 Starting in

the 1970s, in particular, this argument was joined to a more general one consisting in

revealing the irreducible difference between history and the social sciences on the one hand,

and natural sciences on the other. This approach was widely acclaimed by those who thought

16 Alessandro Stanziani, “Information, institutions et temporalités. Quelques remarques critiques sur l’usage de

la nouvelle économie de l’information en histoire”, Revue de synthèse, 1-2 (2000), 117-155.

17 Bernand, Lepetit “Une logique du raisonnement historique”, Annale ESC, 5 (1993) 1209-1219; special issue

“Histoire et sciences sociales”, Annales ESC, 38, 6 (1983); and Jean-Claude Passeron, Le raisonnement

sociologique (Paris : Nathan, 1991).

12

that proposed modalities of development had to be suited to each country. Economic and

social policies should be adapted to the local “context”. This relativism, in large part anti-

imperialist, but also anti-industrialist, had a twofold advantage over the approaches mentioned

earlier: it avoided taking a mythical West as model and reintroduced a “superstructure” in the

objects of comparative analysis. Foucault and Clifford Geertz took the lead among historians

and many of them talked about “kidnapped language” and language-based or “cultural”

dependence, etc. In Said’s orientalism, these constructions were part of a long-term

intellectual and political context: Western domination implied above all the invention of a

backward Orient.18. Wolff extended the pattern to Russia, insisting that the invention of

eastern Europe in eighteenth century discussions in France, Prussia and England created a

division between liberal, capitalist Western Europe and despotic, feudal eastern Europe. This

opposition was ultimately seen as a tool of European political and economic domination over

Russia.19

Michael Confino nevertheless observed that the expression “eastern Europe” was not adopted

in European debates until very late, towards the end of the nineteenth century, more than a

century after the period discussed by Wolff. As a result, the chronology of a cultural invention

hardly coincided with that of comparative economic and political dynamics.20 This

observation led to a thorough review and brought the discussion back to its starting point: how

did European observers view Russia and serfdom in the eighteenth century?

What were the repercussions of that view in economic, political and cultural terms?

18 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York : Vintage, 1979).

19 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, The map of civilization on the mind of enlightenment (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1994).

20 Michael Confino, “Reinventing the Enlightenment: Western Images of Eastern Realities in the eighteenth

century,” Canadian Slavonic Papers, 36, 3-4 (1994), 505-522.

13

In the end, are we sure that during this period Russia was “virtually the periphery of Europe”?

In reality, in the eighteenth century, the most commonplace images of Russia in

Europe referred to two interrelated elements: despotism and serfdom. These topics were

examined in connection with broader discussions of freedom and labor and hence the problem

of slavery in the colonies and guilds in France, and of course in relation to the evolution of the

French monarchy.21 In 1763, Voltaire finished his history of Peter the Great and sent a copy

to Catherine II.22 In this work, as well as in his letters to Catherine, he adopted a prudent

attitude towards Russian serfs, considering it premature to free them before they had been

enlightened.23

Diderot, flattered by the attention Catherine reserved for him, asked: “Does the serfdom of

farmers have an influence on culture? Does the peasants’ lack of property have any ill

effects?”

Catherine answered tersely: “I don’t know if there is a country where farmers love the land

and their homes more than in Russia. Our free provinces have almost as much grain than

those that are not”. 24 At the time, Diderot believed Catherine and the French monarchy were

21 Albert Lortholary, Le mirage russe en France au XVIII siècle (Paris : Éditions contemporaines, 1948), 14; Jan

Struys, Les voyages en Moscovie, en Tartarie, Perse, aux Indes et en plusieurs pays étrangers (Amsterdam :

Van Meers, 1681); Pierre de la Martinière, Voyage des païs septentrionaux (Paris : L. Vendame, 1671); John

Perry, État présent de la grande Russie (La Haye : H. Dusanzet, 1717).

22 Voltaire, Histoire de l’Empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand, Paris, 1763, reproduced in Oeuvres

historiques, Paris, Pléiade, 1957.

23 François-Marie Voltaire, “Lettres à Catherine II en 1762, 1765, 1766”, in Correspondance (Genève :

Bastermann, 1953-1965).

24 Denis Diderot, “Questions a Catherine II sur la situation économique de l'Empire de Russie”, in Diderot et

Catherine II, Maurice Tourneux (ed.) (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1899). Reproduced in Denis

Diderot, Mémoires pour Catherine II, Edited by Paul Vernière (Paris: Garnier, 1966), vol.

14

both capable of achieving reform. Operating on this assumption, he distinguished nations that

reached the peak of civilization and began to decline from those which, being closer to nature,

could civilize themselves by avoiding the evils of civilization. He put America and Russia in

the latter category.25

His ideas changed during the 1770s on account of the weak reforms in France and Russia.

Beginning in the 1780s, Diderot, like Condillac, combined his skepticism regarding

enlightened despotism26 with a more general critique of European civilization. As Condillac

suggested, “Too much communication with Europe was less likely to civilize the Russians

than to pass on to them the vices of civilized nations”.27 From this point of view, the reforms

in Russia called for similar reforms in France and its colonies. The same attitude was shared

by a great majority of philosophers. 28

Though eighteenth century thought was ultimately rather uncertain about its relationship to

absolutism and (forced) labor, it would be wrong to assert that the Russians misinterpreted

these approaches and transformed the liberalism and Enlightenment of Europe into reforms

aimed at reconciling serfdom, the market, autocracy and reforms. Indeed, the question that

arose in Russia was the same as the one that crystallized in France around slavery: should the

legal status of serfs be radically abolished or merely modified? And from there, does

11, 813-817.

25 Denis Diderot, “Observations sur le Nakaz de Catherine II”, in Œuvres politiques (Paris : Garnier 1963), 365.

26 Michel Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières (Paris : Albin Michel, 1971), 134 sq.

27 Bonnot-Etienne Condillac, Œuvres complètes (Paris : PUF, 1947), vol. XX, (original published in 1798), 63-

64.

28 On Condorcet cf.: Yves Benot, “Condorcet journaliste et le combat anti-esclavagiste”, in Condorcet

mathématicien, économiste, philosophe et homme politique (Paris : Minerve, 1989), 376-384; Joseph Jurt,

“Condorcert : l’idée de progrès et l’opposition à l’esclavage”, in Condorcet mathématicien, économiste,

philosophe et homme politique (Paris : Minerve, 1989) 385-395.

15

economic condition alone, together with the free market, determine political and social status

or is it part of a more complex political and moral order? No doubt the influence of more

radical or even revolutionary thinking was shown, for example by Nikolai Radishchev (after a

careful reading of Raynal).29 It is nevertheless interesting to note that the most radical Russian

approaches to serfdom often included an analysis of the American experience rather than the

French or European one.30 Reciprocity, when indeed it exists, is never perfect and must be

sought in three-way or even multiple comparisons. The Russian authors indeed underwent the

influence of the Enlightenment, but they interpreted it through the prism of German

cameralism. In any event, the invention of Eastern Europe did not take place at this time.

Were there other notions in circulation that could have ensured European hegemony over

Russia?

Dependence

29 On Raynal’s influence on Radishchev: Vladimir I. Moriakov Iz istorii evoliutsii obshchstvenno-

politiceheskikh vzgliadov prosvetitelei kontsa XVIII veka: Reinal’ i Radishchev .

On the history of the evolution of the socio-political orientations of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century)

(Moscow: Nauka, 1981); Allison Blakely, “American Influences on Russian Reformists in the Era of the

French Revolution,” Russian Review, 52,4, (1993) 451-471.

30 On the impact of the American case on Russia at the time: Richard Hellie, Slavery in Russia, 1450-1723

(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982). The link between events in the Americas and radical reformism

survived until the beginning of the century when the slave revolt in Santa-Domingo aroused the enthousiasm

of Karamzin (Nikolai Karamzin, “Hronika”, Vestnik Evropy 4 (1802), 83-84; cf. also Nicholas Karamzin, A

Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia: the Russian Text, ed. Pipes Richard (Cambridge: Harvard Studies,

1959), 45.

16

In the wake of Gramsci, the authors claiming to adhere to subaltern studies insisted first of all

that language was a component of power and a factor in hierarchies, and second, that

subaltern classes and colonized peoples were not necessarily passive in their interactions with

the colonizers. Thus, the British exercised their power in colonial India by controlling and

modifying the language, as the case of the Zamindars clearly illustrates. The Zamindars, who

were income tax administrators under the Moguls, were considered landowners by the British.

This issue subsequently paved the way for British territorial control.

The same process could be easily discerned in other contexts, and indeed, translations, media,

the circulation of legal rules and the language of international organizations have all been

designated as instruments of power and domination of the “South” by the “North”. Notions

such as market, trade, family, child, property, inheritance, peasant, worker, etc. therefore

acquired specific local features that were irreducible to a more general model.31 No doubt this

approach was more nuanced and differentiated and enabled a more complex arborescence of

societies and cultures than the ones we discussed earlier, resulting in both differentiation and

comparison between different operating methods. From then on, dependence was

decompartmentalized, along with the history of elites and dominant groups.

There are nevertheless several problematic aspects in these approaches, beginning with the

interaction between elites and subaltern groups. Fred Cooper has highlighted the fact that

Africans, Indians and colonized populations were far less passive than subaltern studies

assert, despite their Gramscian premise. Colonized peoples had significant impact on their

colonisers, whose violence and flagrant programs did not always reflect real control over the

colony.32

31 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

32 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question. Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California

17

The same question arose more than once with regard to Russia: to what extent did Europe’s

identification of Russian autocracy and serfdom as ideal types play a part in its domination of

Russia?

Similarly, to what extent does exporting a-temporal economic notions today (e.g. balanced

budget, private property, privatization, etc.) by the IMF contribute to Russia’s dependence on

the West?

Let us look at the first point: the analyses cited by Wolff regarding the invention of Eastern

Europe, together with those of orientalism and subaltern studies, form a sort of complement to

theories of dependence in the 1970s. Some emphasize domination through knowledge, others

through the economy; in any case, “peripheral areas” are indeed identified and world history

recounts the emergence of Western capitalism dominating the rest of the world.

We will not dwell on the methodological criticisms (determinism and historical finalism,

circular reasoning, etc.) levelled against these patterns by numerous authors,33 but we will

examine their empirical validity. One well-known argument borrowed from other authors by

Wallerstein consisted in showing that the expansion of Western capitalism was the cause of

the second serfdom in Russia: increased demand for wheat in Europe prompted Russian lords

to coerce peasants into producing the amount of wheat required for export. This was said to

have resulted in an international division of labour: England produced textiles using wage

labor, whereas Russia sold grain by resorting to serfdom. In reality, the situation was quite

different. Russian serfdom was introduced in the fifteenth century in connection with the

consolidation of Muscovite power; restrictions on peasant mobility were a factor in complex

agreements and tensions between state elites and various categories of landowners.34 The

Press, 2005).

33 A brilliant summary of criticisms of both subaltern studies and Wallerstein in Frederick Cooper, Colonialism.

34 Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago and London: The University of

18

issue revolved around identifying which social groups should be allowed to own inhabited

estates and transfer possession to their heirs. What was really at stake in the rules limiting

peasant mobility was the social, political and institutional difference between old aristocracy

and nobility resulting from state service, and later between these two categories and others

(merchants, ecclesiastics, workers, peasants).35 These transformations took place between the

sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, well before English industrialization, and had little to

do with the West. The identification of social groups in Russia consequently had to do with

establishing state power in the Muscovite expansion to the steppes, on the one hand, and

against Poland and Lithuania on the other.36

The increase in labor service (la corvée) in the eighteenth century, so frequently mentioned by

Wallerstein, therefore takes on a whole new meaning. According to the traditional analysis of

serfdom, the rapid development of labor service was linked to a drop in commodity sales,

causing the estates to fall back on their own resources and exert greater pressure on the

peasants. The dynamics of Russian estates at the time does not confirm this argument. Wheat

exports, which were relatively insignificant until the middle of the century, continued to rise

and reached about 20 percent of Russia’s total exports in the late eighteenth century.37 This

Chicago Press, 1971).

35 Daniel Kaiser, The Growth of Law in Medieval Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Dmitri

Grekov, Sudebniki XV-XVII vekov (Precis of laws, 15th-16th centuries), (Moscow, Leningrad: Akademia Nauk

SSSR, 1952).

36 Alessandro Stanziani, “Serfs, Slaves, or Wage Earners? The Legal Statute of Labour in Russia from a

Comparative Perspective, from the 16th to the 19th century,” Journal of Global History, 3, 2 (2008) 183-202.

37 Boris N Mironov., “Eksport russkogo khleba vo vtoroi polovine 18 v.-nachale 19e v.” (Exports of Russian

wheat during the second half of the nineteenth century), Istoricheskie zapiski, 93 (1974), 149-88; Boris Mironov,

Rossii vo vtoroi polovine 18 veka-pervoi polovine 19e v.(The Russian domestic market during the second half of

the eighteenth century-first half of the nineteenth century), (Leningrad: Nauka,1981).

19

growth did not take place at the expense of local and national markets, however. Beginning in

the 1760s, growing demand for wheat in local and national markets pushed up prices,38 which

in turn helped to integrate local channels in the national market.39 The landed gentry sought to

reverse the situation produced during the first half of the century, when urban merchants had

taken over grain markets in the cities and the country. The noble landowners regained control

over the sale of products from their estates and firmly took their place in urban markets. At

the beginning of the 1760s, 413 of the 1,143 country fairs (36 percent) still took place on

noble estates; by 1800 the percentage had risen to 51% (1,615 of 3,180 fairs).40 This rapid

development can be attributed not only to the nobles but also and above all to the peasants,

who were increasingly involved in selling wheat and proto-industrial products.41

To sum up, the economic dynamics of eighteenth century Russia cannot be explained by an

increase in serfdom in response to European growth, but on the contrary by a relaxation of the

labor constraints weighing on peasants and their gradual integration, together with noble

landowners, in trade networks. These dynamics went beyond the official rules governing

“serfdom”, which were increasingly overtaken by social and economic changes. It is just as

hard if not harder to find confirmation of Russia’s dependence on the West as it is in the case

of India or colonial Africa. Finalism and historical determinism keep us from seeing the

temporal dynamics specific to the Russian context. In that sense, these questions bring us

back to the continuities and breaks in comparative history.

38 Mironov, Vnutrennyi rynok.

39 Boris N Mironov. and Carol S., Leonard, “In Search of Hidden Information: Some Issues in the Socio-

Economic History of Russia in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Social Science History, 9, 4,

(1985), 339-359.

40 Mironov, Vnutrennyi rynok,153-4.

41 Alessandro Stanziani, “Revisiting Russian Serfdom: Bonded Peasants and Market Dynamics, 1600-1800.”

International Labor and Working Class History,” 78, 1 (2010), 12-27.

20

The question of continuity in history

Gershenkron (among many others) discussed the question of continuities and breaks in history

in a now famous article. He thought it was impossible to resolve the question once and for all

and that how it was viewed depended on the object under study, the historical materials used

and the questions asked. He believed on the contrary in the need for comparison based on an

analytical model outside the object of analysis. His model of the factors of substitution led

him to see the 1861 reforms as an incomplete break from previous periods. The problem was

that, in the case of Russia, the model did not withstand epistemological challenges or

empirical validation. In particular, over the last few decades, a number of works have

reworked the famous argument of peasant impoverishment following the abolition of serfdom

and the stagnation of the Russian economy as a whole,42 which were at the core of

Gershenkron’s analysis. Historical demography, for example, has observed a significant

decline in mortality, above all in relation to access to resources, and an increase in the height

of conscripts.43 Detailed analyses of the evolution of privately owned land distribution have in

42 Esther Kingston-Mann, “Marxism and Russian Rural Development: Problems of Evidence, Experience and

Culture,” American Historical Review, 84, Oct. (1981),731-52;. James Y. Simms Jr., “The Crisis in Russian

Agriculture at the End of the Nineteenth Century: A Different View,” Slavic Review, 36, Sept.(1977), 377-98;

James Y. Simms Jr, “The Crop Failure of 1891: Soil Exhaustion, Technological Backwardness, and Russia's

Agrarian Crisis,” Slavic Review, 41, Summer (1982), 236-50.

43 Steven Hoch, “Famine, Disease and Mortality Patterns in the Parish of Boshervka, Russia, 1830-1932”,

Population Studies, 52,3 (1998), 357-368. Steven Hoch, “On Good Numbers and Bad: Malthus, Population

Trend and Peasant Standard of Living in Late Imperial Russia”, Slavic Review, 53, 1 (1994), 41-75. Steven

21

turn revealed a sizeable amount of land purchased by peasants (both individuals and

communities).44 Finally, careful studies of industrial45 and proto-industrial46 organizations

show that these sectors were far more dynamic than traditional historiography had thought.

Given what we have observed for the period prior to 1861, the elements of continuity would

appear to carry the day; instead of a shift from feudalism to capitalism, from serfdom to wage

labor, we find a collection of common elements (the continuation of proto-industry and of

peasant communities, a long-term trend in the development of agricultural markets and of

markets in general). Instead of creating a clear-cut divide, the abolition of serfdom gave a

further push to a trend already under way in peasant economies, which were by no means

“immobile”. At the same time, the reforms introduced a substantial new feature: access to

land ownership and the transfer of inhabited estates were no longer reserved for nobles but

extended to merchants and Russian “bourgeois”. In other words, the difference lay not in the

relationships between nobles and peasants, but as before, in the complex interaction among

lords, peasants, landowners and state elites, each one a highly composite group differentiated

Hoch, “Serfs in Imperial Russia: Demographic Insights,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 13, 2 (1982),

221-246.

44 Judith, Pallot Land Reform in Russia 1906-1917: Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of Rural

Transformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); Cathy A. Frierson “Razdel: The Peasant Family Divided.”

Russian Review 46,1 (1987), 35-51; Robert Bideleux, “Agricultural Advance Under the Russian Village

Commune System.” In Roger Bartlett (ed.), Land Commune and Peasant Community in Russia: Communal

Forms in Imperial and Early Soviet Society (London: MacMillan, 1991), 196-218; Steven Nafziger,

Communal Institutions, Resource Allocation, and Russian Economic Development (Unpublished Ph.D.

dissertation: Yale University. 2006).

45 Paul Gregory, Russian National Income, 1885-1913 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 126-

130; 168-194.

46 Dave Pretty, Neither Peasant nor Proletarian: The Workers of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk Region, 1885–1905

(Ph.D. dissertation: Brown University, 1997).

22

by its income, origin and degree of social inclusion. This image of Russia is totally different

from the one conveyed by traditional historiography; it is the fruit of questioning that avoids

studying the country solely by the yardstick of an idealized West. That is why it seems

especially useful to take a fresh look at this object through reciprocal comparison in order to

better understand it.

Reciprocal comparison and a heuristic approach to Russia

Like theories of dependence, comparisons made on the basis of ideal types or general models

of historical economic development have trouble explaining historical dynamics, as the case

of Russia shows. Russian “serfdom” was, in reality, a set of relatively flexible rules and

norms that operated on a foundation of interacting landowners, managers, peasant elites

(elders) and the rural community as a whole. There were no classes in the Marxist sense of the

term; however, even the orders of the old regime, often mentioned in discussing Russia, were

in fact much more porous than is usually affirmed. Russian peasants were no more like “serfs

bound to the land” (serfs de la glebe) than slaves in the United States were like Africans; they

were peasants who were sometimes subjected to extreme forms of dependence. Consequently,

the legal constraints on labor were not opposed to the development of markets. Russia’s

seigniorial regime did not correspond to the Witold Kula’s model47 nor did the peasants

conform to Chayanov’s depiction of them. Nobles and peasants took part in trade and proto-

industrial activities that were hardly as residual as these models suggest. The fact that the

dynamics did not correspond to those at work in England or France at the time in no way

47 Witold Kula, Théorie économique du système féodal (Paris, La Haye : Mouton, 1970, original in Polish

published in 1962).

23

implies they were incompatible with the development of markets and industry, but simply that

those results can be achieved by following different historical paths. Neither the formal status

of Russian peasants nor common property was in itself a source of what the West sees as

backwardness. We would therefore be tempted to reverse the Eurocentric approach by re-

examining the West, or one of its components, starting from a revised view of the Russian

case. This might be described as “reciprocal comparison”.

1) If the formal and legal expressions of dependence were not incompatible with the

growth of markets, why were they abolished in Western Europe?

In recent years, this questioning has led researchers to re-examine the passage from

“feudalism” to “capitalism”. On the one hand, European serfdom has been challenged in

the sense that it did not operate according to ideal types of serfs, and still less to serfs

bound to the land, but on the contrary demonstrates that indeed dependence and markets

coexisted in some forms.48

Conversely, the components of so-called wage labor are being increasingly re-evaluated.

In Great Britain, for example, under the Masters and Servants Acts, wage laborers were

subject to considerable criminal sanctions and constraints on their mobility until almost

the end of the nineteenth century.49 This in turn raises the question of the shift, both in

48 Edgar Melton, “Population Structure, the Market Economy and the Transformation of Gutsherrschaft in East

Central Europe, 1650-1800: the Cases of Brandenburg and Bohemia,” German History, 16, 3 (1998), 297-324;

Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change Through Law in the Germanies and

Russia, 1600-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Christoph Shmidt, “Uber die bezeichnung des

stände (sostojanie-soslovie) in Russland seit dem. 18 Jahrhundert”, Jahrbucher für Geschichte Oesteuropas, 38

(1990), 199-211; William Hagen, Ordinary Prussians: Brandenburg Junkers and Villagers, 1500-1840

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002).

49 Stanley Engerman (ed.), Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom and Free Labor (Stanford: Stanford University

24

categories and practices, in the forms of forced labor and the boundary line between “free

labor” and “wage labor”.

2) If noble privileges were not opposed to the market, then we can no longer study the

history of pre-industrial worlds starting with ideal types such as the Junker, the

pomeshchik (noble landowner), the latifondista or the rentier. Historians have claimed

these actors were the opposite of English entrepreneurs and American farmers. Recent

studies have shown, however, that the first group did not always make use of

compulsory labor and was not made up solely of absentee landowners, whereas the

second often tried to impose rules and criminal sanctions on wage earners, who were

in fact journeymen and servants whose status and working conditions were often

tantamount to bondage. In other words, the Russian case encourages us to adopt a new

comparative history of social groups and their economic practices.

3) There is no clear empirical evidence to support the argument according to which

coercion (bondage and slavery) was due to population scarcity. The Russian sources

never mention this aspect to explain the rules of bondage. The cases of Australia and

Canada – scarce populations but hardly any slavery – confirm this point. Conversely,

the case of England clearly shows that the legal constraints and criminal sanctions on

workers increased in the eighteenth century during the first industrial revolution, at a

time when demographic growth was already under way. How can we explain these

constraints, if they were not due to population scarcity? Were they the result of non-

economic elements (political factors, a culture of bondage) or a different type of

market functioning at the time?

Press, 1999); Robert Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: the Employment Relation in English and

American Law and Culture, 1350-1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Michael L.

Bush, Servitude in Modern Times (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).

25

4) If we accept the previous points, then capitalism cannot necessarily be associated with

proletarization and the formation of a market of “free” labor. As more and more

studies on the United States in the mid-nineteenth century have come to acknowledge,

southern landowners were probably far more capitalistic in their approach than

individual farmers in the North. Similarly, the English case (privatization of the

commons and proletarization) was no doubt an exception, and the peasant-worker

continued to be the rule in Europe, at least until almost the turn of the nineteenth

century.50 The question is thus to determine if – and when – the “wage earner” and a

labour market in the strict sense were introduced. For many countries of Western

Europe, this process took place only at the turn of the nineteenth century, and even

later for other regions.

5) These elements, added to the dynamics of non-European worlds and Russia, suggest

that, contrary to neo-institutional and traditional Marxist arguments, privatization was

not the necessary and sufficient condition for the rise of capitalism. The legal defense

of private property was still subject to caution in the nineteenth century, particularly in

the face of arguments in favor of “public utility”, not only in France and Germany, but

even in Great Britain and the United States.51 In a more radical way, the examples of

Russia in the nineteenth century and China today show that very particular notions of

property are not opposed to market development.

50 Sheilagh Ogilvie, Markus Cerman, (eds.), European Proto-industrialization (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1996); Peter H. Lindert, Geoffrey Williamson, “Revising England’s Social Tables, 1688-

1812,” Explorations in Economic History, XIX (1982), 385-408.

51 Alessandro Stanziani, Rules of Exchange. French capitalism in comparative perspective, 18th-20th centuries,

Cambridge (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

26

6) If Russia and Eastern Europe did not make up the virtual periphery of Europe, then

what sort of relationships existed between these regions from the seventeenth to the

nineteenth century? Did they manifest different kinds of market or perhaps even

capitalist growth?

Recent colonial history teaches us that the colonies brought to Europe more political status

than natural resources;52 Europe exported more capital to its colonies than it took from

them. Even the recent argument of Pomeranz, which tends to re-evaluate the “imperialist”

view from a new angle (i.e. American resources serving England53) is difficult to quantify

and hence to confirm. On the other hand, we now know that Russia and China relied to a

large extent on their interior borders for their development beginning in the seventeenth

century.54 A comparative history of colonialisms is therefore necessary.

7) Just as the contribution of the colonies to the accumulation of European capital seems

doubtful, the role of labor in the colonies and in Europe itself remained crucial at least

until the second half of the nineteenth century (for Europe) and much later in the

colonies. The unequal legal status separating masters (the term “employers” came into

use later on) and laborers continued until the late nineteenth century, owing precisely

to the important role of labor in supporting economic expansion from the seventeenth

to the nineteenth centuries.55 Russia was therefore not an exception from this point of

52 Cooper, Colonialism.

53 Pomeranz, The Great.

54 Peter Perdue, China Marching West (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2005).

55 Sidney Pollard, “Labour in Great Britain” in the Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. VII: The

Industrial Economies: Capital, Labour and Enterprise, (eds.) Peter Mathias and Michael Postan (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press 1978) 97-179; Nicolas Crafts, British Economic Growth during the Industrial

27

view, as the development of capitalism remained labor-intensive in Europe until at

least the mid-nineteenth century.

8) If the preceding points are confirmed, then the international division of labor between

advanced industrial regions and “backward” agricultural regions – the former resorting

to wage labor, the others to continuing forms of service in husbandry or even bondage

(in Russia) and slavery (in the colonies and much of Asia, Africa and Latin America)

– has to be qualified and carefully defined. It is thus possible to rethink the theories of

(under)development, the division of labor and international trade and its effects.

Within this framework, studying the development of African and Asian economies

and societies becomes an essential step.

Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).