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'Coerced service,' 'service coercion,' and peasant flight. Reflections on manorial estates in Old Prussian Brandenburg in the light of the history of plantation slavery in antebellum South Carolina
| This paper analyzes peasant flight in Old Prussian Brandenburg in the light of slave truancy in antebellum South Carolina. Drawing predominantly on manorial estate archives, the paper suggests a change of patterns in peasant flight during the Old Prussian period. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, it was mainly subject farmers who abandoned their homes and villages. Except for times of war and distress (above all in the seventeenth century), these cases were usually caused by financial difficulties of individual farmers and always remained relative infrequent. In the second half of the eighteenth century, however, the pattern changed. Running away now became an increasingly frequent means of resistance among young laborers at manor farms. The paper explains this new form of flight as a result of the increasing pressure on manorial workers, which found its legal expression in the development of the obligatory service of peasant youth for the lord in the mid-eighteenth century. Against the historiography, the paper argues that this obligatory service turned into a 'coerced service' ('Gesindezwangdienst') only in the course of the eighteenth century when the manorial nobility succeeded in usurping the 'Dienstzwang' or right of 'service coercion:' the prerogative, that is, to use physical force against the workers in their economies. 'Service coercion' introduced an element of true servility into subject-lord relations in Old Prussian Brandenburg and led, in so far, to an increasing similarity between the experiences of young fieldhands on demesne farms and that of slaves on South Carolinian plantations. Pursuing this comparison, the paper analyzes Southern and Old Prussian management literature and suggests that masters and lords discussed running away in similar terms, showing awareness that mismanagement contributed to flight and truancy. Planters and noblemen thus implicitly acknowledged running away as a form of resistance. The paper concludes by highlighting the political dimension of truancy and flight: It is now widely accepted that Southern runaways helped to undermine the peculiar institution as they deserted their masters, be it temporarily or permanently. Brandenburg 'coerced servants' ('Zwanggesinde'), too, threatened established power relations when they refused to submit to the bailiff's rod and absconded from their posts. The flight of laborers helped to bring the manorial regime to its end.
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