Zoom-Link: https://univienna.zoom.us/j/67936569525?pwd=dXQrT0VtUzRoZ1RrbUFQbXVYSWZuZz09 


How do formal systems of property rights emerge? This lecture offers an example from an unlikely source: estate documents for one of imperial Russia’s largest landholding families. Proprietary serfs in Russia had no formal property rights until the mid-nineteenth century. The wealthy Sheremetyev family helped their enserfed peasants (around 300,000 of them) circumvent these restrictions, creating an elaborate institutional framework that enabled peasants to extend their market activities well beyond the borders of their home estates. This research traces the evolution of this system between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, noting changes over time in the estate archive that indicate innovation in forms of contracting and other estate practices. In particular, the paper highlights the interaction between serfs’ demands for more formalized property rights and enforcement mechanisms and the Sheremetyevs’ willingness and ability to provide those (in the absence of the state). Finally, it is suggested that the Sheremetyev example might shed interesting light on the European past and raise more general questions about the ways in which institutional systems emerge and evolve.  

Tracy Dennison is Professor of Social Science History at California Institute of Technology (Caltech). She studies institutions and their effects on long-term growth and development and is especially interested in the roots of economic divergence between east and west Europe, and uses serfdom as a lens through which to examine institutional change over time.