The Date of the End of Serfdom in Yugoslavia

One of the many problems I have with the debate over slavery is that with its concentration on Black transatlantic, and particularly American and Caribbean slavery, it ignores the fact that White Europeans were also subjected to various forms of unfreedom, from slavery to serfdom. In Britain, slavery had died out by the 12th century, hence Lord Mansfield was able to give his famous judgement on the Somerset case that slavery did not exist in English law. However, serfdom persisted until it finally withered away completely by the mid-17th century. A form of serfdom, or something very like it, continued in the Scots mining industry in the 18th and 19th centuries. Scottish miners were bondsmen, tied to working for their masters and were forced to wear neck rings bearing their names, just like Roman and medieval slaves. On the continent serfdom persisted until the Revolution in France, the early 19th century in Prussia, and the 1860s in Russia. This, however, was not the end of this form of unfreedom in the backward parts of Europe. Thomas Sowell, in the chapter on the Slavs in his book Conquests and Cultures, notes the geographical obstacles to development the Slavs and other eastern Europeans, such as the Hungarians, and Romanians, faced to their social, economic and technological development. These were a lack of navigable rivers, which tended to flow, in the case of Russia, into inland lakes or seas rather than the ocean, or else the flowed into the Baltic and were frozen and thus unusable for part of year. The result was that communication and the transport of goods was far more difficult and expensive than in the western part of the continent. In the Balkans these factors were exacerbated by high mountain ranges which cut communities off from each other. As a result of this and the long dominance of the Turkish empire, which cut the region off from western cultural advancements, the area remained very backward compared to the west. An example of this backwardness is the date when serfdom was abolished in Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina: 1919, a year after Yugoslavia had become an independent state. (p. 203).

I really do feel that the history of slavery and serfdom, and its long persistence in White European nations as well as in the rest of the world, should be better known in order to halt the grotesque distortion of history that appears to be held by some activists, which presents slavery as something White Europeans and Americans did to Black Africans.

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2 Responses to “The Date of the End of Serfdom in Yugoslavia”

  1. Mark Pattie Says:

    A good critique as always. The British *did* stamp out much of the slave trade of indigenous tribes in East Africa (I think that was one of David Livingston’s good points) in about the 1860s/1870s- although the British were still sending Indians and Malays to be “indentured labourers” on Trinidad and Fiji until much later. I think it possibly ended about 1910. As for Labour not caring about modern slavery, that is also bullshit. Claudia Webb MP was clearly very concerned about the sweatshops in Leicester (much to a certain right-wing Tuber’s apparent surprise), and Yvette Cooper is far more sincere about tackling the Channel migrants than Priti Insincere is.

  2. Brian Burden Says:

    I’m not sure your analogy holds. There were plenty of poor whites in the American South both before and after emancipation, yet they never made common cause with the blacks to my knowledge.

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