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

This article examines the emergence of coercive labour institutions using the case of serfdom in early modern Russia. We argue that serfdom consolidated under the pressure of landholding military elites who gained political influence due to the prolonged struggle with steppe nomads. To contain nomadic raids, the Russian state erected defence lines on the southern frontier, and granted land in the area to soldiers in charge of its defence. The soldiers could not farm while on defence duty, nor could they compete in the market for peasant labour, as the land had been selected for its defensive rather than agricultural value. The system was therefore only sustainable by restricting labour 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 defence 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 defence line using topographic data. Our results highlight the primacy of political economy factors over purely economic ones, such as the land–labour 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.