Owning the Earth

That was how the system was supposed to work, and it demonstrates the profoundly contradictory nature of Peter the Great’s reforms. To make Russia modern, he saddled it with an administrative system akin to those of Ivan the Terrible and Süleyman the Magnificent. His insistence that possession of land should be linked to government service was not just a disastrous attempt to turn back the clock, it flew in the face of human nature by denying the possibility of even family possession of land.

They were ready to pay for Britain’s wars—more than a hundred during the century—because they believed them to be not only in the national interest but necessary to protect the particular kind of freedom that went with private property.

By the early eighteenth century, two thirds of the thirteen million inhabitants of Russia were serfs, with over half belonging to the nobility and the remainder to the church and the state, meaning the tsar

“When a family buys a home, the ripple effect is enormous,” President Clinton explained in 1995. “It means new homeowner consumers. They need more durable goods, like washers and dryers, refrigerators and water heaters. And if more families could buy new homes or older homes, more hammers will be pounding, more saws will be buzzing. Homebuilders and home fixers will be put to work. When we boost the number of homeowners in our country, we strengthen our economy, create jobs, build up the middle class, and build better citizens.”

Each of the three tsars who have had the accolade “the Great” added to their names—Ivan, Peter, and Catherine—put the distribution of land at the heart of their policy of government. None did so to more dramatic effect than Peter in 1722. As part of his violent campaign to wrench Russia into becoming a Western power, he had already founded a new capital, Saint Petersburg, on the banks of the Baltic, imported Dutch, German, and British merchants and craftsmen to modernize industry and production methods, and put swingeing taxes on Russian smocks and beards in order to force changes in dress and appearance. As a clean-shaven youth with dark wavy hair, Peter himself had resembled a Western romantic hero, but now in his fifties his face was deeply lined and his determination to drag his country into the current of European affairs had grown ruthless. He had executed by the thousands any who resisted him, and flogged to death his own son, Alexis, in rage at his disobedience.
The land autocracy that the Romanov dynasty had inherited from Ivan the Great had not only grown in size as the empire expanded, but changed in nature. In less than a century, estates originally tied to imperial service had come to be treated as family possessions that could be inherited, leased, and exchanged. In 1649, an attempt had been made to reverse the trend. A great compilation of laws known as the Ulozhenie specified that whoever had the privilege of holding

A peasant could not conceive, as Shakespeare did, that all his land would pass intact to one male heir at the expense of others. As Alexander Chayanov, the leading twentieth-century authority on the nature of the peasant economy, pointed out, in the struggle to survive, members of a peasant family were prepared to accept such tiny rewards for their unremitting labor that it amounted to “self-exploitation.” The sheer hard work fostered an outlook that was crippling compared to the capitalist model. Chayanov’s extensive research in both tsarist and Soviet Russia showed that peasants had no incentive to produce a surplus beyond what they needed to meet the needs of their family. Thus a peasant economy would always tend toward subsistence farming rather than profit and growth. The increase in productivity achieved by French peasants was driven by the growth of population and the burden of higher taxes that Louis XIV’s glittering, expensive reign imposed. There was no gain to the peasants themselves. Indeed the demand for land from a growing population in the eighteenth century undermined the little liberty they had won for themselves.

vital was serfdom to Russia’s mainly rural economy that estates were measured not by size, but by the number of “souls” or serfs they supported. It was reckoned that the labor of a hundred souls was needed to let an aristocratic family live comfortably, but most of the lesser nobility on the Table of Ranks possessed fewer than twenty serfs. Out in the provinces, there were even noblemen dressed in woollen smocks and felt boots who were no wealthier than their richest serfs. At the other end of the scale, more than three million of Russia’s serfs belonged to a tiny elite, mostly of the old court nobility, each of whom owned at least one thousand souls.

German Mennonites who migrated to the Volga valley in 1763 at the invitation of Catherine the Great. Like their fellow emigrants to Pennsylvania, the Germans were skilled and successful farmers who grew rye as well as wheat, alternated cereal crops with roots and clover, and employed teams of powerful horses rather than a few plodding oxen to pull their iron-tipped plows through the matted, black earth. Within a generation, they created a mini-Pennyslvania of neat fields, red barns, and white, clapboard houses beside the Volga.
“Why I asked myself would our peasants not want to imitate these settlers?” demanded Judge Pavel Sumarokov after touring the Volga valley in 1803. “Why would they not prefer profit and tranquillity to filth and disorder? Would it not be better for them to live in airy and sunny rooms rather than to suffocate in smoke, breathe foul air, and share their dwellings with cattle?”
The answer went to the heart of Russia’s land-autocracy. So far as it was possible for people who were not high-ranking nobles, the Germans could own the land. They were permitted to inherit the fields they cultivated, and, with local variations decided by each settlement, they could buy and sell the ground they had improved. Only the rough pasture, woods, and waterholes were owned in common.

BC ethical master K’ong, better known in the West as Confucius, the Latin name given him by the Jesuits. It was not by chance that in Confucian texts the character representing “harmony” was made up of two parts, “grain” and “mouth”—without an adequate supply of food, harmony was impossible. Indeed the very mandate from heaven, the moral authority that gave an emperor sovereignty over his subjects, depended on his ability to preserve harmony. As generations of Confucian scholars pointed out, hunger was so destructive of harmony that its existence suggested the emperor had lost the trust of heaven. When the failure of the monsoon devastated food supplies in 1744, Qianlong himself had not only prayed for rain but publicly fasted in order to regain “the grace of Heaven” and restore the harmony that had been lost.

With communal ownership disappeared the bardic schools and the land-reading Brehon law and the power of the sept. Before 1641, Catholics had owned almost two thirds of the land in Ireland, but 90 percent was in the hands of Protestants by 1659. The revolution was complete. Or appeared to be.
Anti-Catholic legislation ensured that Protestant landowners controlled the administration of government in Ireland, enforcing the law, raising taxes, and securing the peace. But they had no political power.