What Did Ukrainian Peasant Statuses and Hierarchies Mean? Looking Across the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Hetmanshchyna and Rzeczpospolita

A lecture by Peter B. Brown, Professor Emeritus, Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies, Department of History, Rhode Island College.

Moderated by Kelly O'Neill, Director, Imperiia Project / Lecturer on History, Harvard University.

About the Lecture

This investigation’s premise is that in order to better comprehend the Early Modern Ukrainian peasantries and arrive at more nuanced interpretations, one must more closely organize the terminologies of the times. This endeavor hopefully will augment our understanding of rural life on the Early Modern Eastern Plain and in Western Eurasia in general.

"What Did Ukrainian Peasant Statuses and Hierarchies Mean?” will deliver a detailed, comparative study of rural designations, occupations, and associated social ladders or hierarchies. To do so, this talk will analyze types of peasant lands and villages, dependent and independent statuses, ratio of lords to agrarian workers, grain yields, famine and disease, and household composition.

Scrutinizing the Hetmanshchyna and Rzeczpospolita is essential as the former was once part of the latter and after 1648 becomes the Commonwealth’s neighbor. Making comparisons to the ladders of peasant statuses in ethnic Lithuania, Belarus, and Poland will alert the audience to different approaches contemporaries took to categorizing what was mostly hereditary unfree labor (HUL), in order to illuminate Ukraine’s situation. One conclusion to be drawn is that the term “serfdom” needs to be parsed carefully and that considerable variations existed to make it more elastic than is generally assessed. Another conclusion is that Ukraine’s 1760s absorption into the Russian Empire placed Ukraine into a colonial situation corresponding to that of Colonial Brazil in relation to Portugal, and fruitful comparisons emerge from this parallel. 
 

About the Speaker

Peter Brown received his Ph.D. in Russian History at the University of Chicago and worked with the late Richard Hellie. His fields include Muscovy; Rus'; the Russian Empire; the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; pre-Commonwealth Poland, Belarus, and Lithuania: Ukraine and the Cossack Commonwealth. Comparative history, the sociology of complex organizations; law; historical linguistics and its relation to the study of social evolution; and Finno-Ugric studies. 

Currently, Dr. Brown is completing a manuscript on hereditary unfree labor in Western Eurasia and the Americas, 1400-1800. Russia, Ukraine, Poland-Lithuania, and Belarus figure significantly in this effort. He then will complete a monograph, heavily reliant on quantitative study, on the lower-ranking servitors in the seventeenth-century Moscow service class. Two studies bearing upon these topics are “Russian Serfdom’s Demise and Russia’s Conquest of the Crimean Khanate and the Northern Black Sea Littoral: Was There a Link?,” in Eurasian Slavery, Ransom and Abolition in World History, 1200-1860 (Farnam, Surrey, United Kingdom: Ashgate, 2015): 335-66 and “Muscovite Arithmetic in Seventeenth-Century Russian Civilization: Is It Not Time to Discard the ‘Backwardness’ Label,” Russian History 39, no. 4 (2012): 393-459.

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This event is organized by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) as part of the Seminar in Ukrainian Studies event series.

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