628996147

The Causes of Emancipation

The whole process of the emancipation of the serfs was a slow one, lasting for a couple of generations, but the finał and complete realization of it took place in the wake of Europe's midcentury turmoil, at almost the same time everywhere. One of the reasons for the various acts of emancipation was that each of the States that passed one had just been shaken by a disaster. For Prussia it was the battles of Jena and Auerstadt; for Russia, the January Insurrection in Congress Poland; for the Habsburg Empire, the revolutionary upheaval of 1848-49. In the case of the Danubian principalities, there had been no domestic disaster, but their hand was forced by foreign intervention anyway. Apart from these immediate causes, there were four underlying sources of pressure that led to emancipation and determined the form it took in each territory: the socioeconomic crisis of semifeudal society and second serfdom; intellectual trends, that is, the "spirit of the age”; the support for emancipation from the most influential social group, the gentry, for economic and in many cases nationalistic reasons; and peasant discontent.

The Crisis of Semifeudal Society

The semifeudal system and second serfdom were in a vicious circle of chronic crisis. Because robot was unproductive, Capital accumulation was seriously deficient, and without Capital it was impossible to find the wagę labor essential to improved work standards (handling new machinery, intensive husbandry, etc.). When there were no facilities for improving work standards, the peasant was doomed to his statute labor. The system had to change to permit social and economic progress. Internal industrialization, especially in Prussia and the Congress Kingdom, had opened brand-new domestic markets for agricultural produce, for which better tools and crops and skilled labor were necessary. These were out of the ąuestion without wagę labor and an agrarian revolution was out of the ąuestion while robot persisted. The end of second serfdom — that is, emancipation — was intimately connected with the agrarian revolution and the transition to capitalist methods of agriculture. This transformation was slow because there were serious obstacles to the growth of capitalism in the area at that time: industrialization on the whole lagged; internal trade on any scalę was lacking; the credit system was primitive and insufficient; the bourgeoisie was weak, and in some areas in this age of nationalism it was also foreign, so that it was short on political clout. Thus, unlike Western Europę, political and economic leadership in Eastern Europę was in the hands of the commercially minded gentry.⁶⁵⁾

65) A study of the crisis of agrarian society in Hungary during the first part of the nineteenth century is Mćrei, op. cit. There are also several excellent studies of particular cases or specific areas, e.g., Gyórgy Szabad, A Tatai es Gesztesi Eszterhdzy-uradalom