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Candidate no. A F 4 8 0 3 9 (This is two letters followed by five digits,

Module Title: Making the Modern World

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4AAH0004
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2000-word essay
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Deadline: 08/01/25

Date Submitted: 08/01/25

Word Count: 1910

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 "Was the nineteenth century characterized by the emancipation
of labour?"

On the eventful day of January 1st, 1863, the Emancipation

Proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln, which declared "that all persons
held as slaves" within rebellious states "are, and henceforth shall be free",
ascribed a moral character to the Union's cause. 1 Though its effects were still
limited, it nevertheless marked a significant milestone in human
emancipation throughout modern history. This proclamation symbolized a
broader global shift in the 19th century towards the emancipation of labour,
encompassing the abolition of slavery, the end of serfdom, and the growing
recognition of workers' rights in industrial economies. The emancipation of
labour refers to liberating individuals from forced or exploitative labour
systems and granting them the autonomy to work as free individuals under
equitable conditions. Across different societies, from the United States to
Russia and beyond, reforms have helped liberate labourers from systems of
forced or exploitative work. Yet, these advances were frequently
accompanied by significant limitations, such as economic dependencies,
exploitative conditions in industrial workplaces, and systemic inequalities
that constrained the realization of true freedom. This essay examines the
extent to which the 19th century can be truly characterized by the
emancipation of labour or just carrying the husk of it, analyzing the
achievements and the enduring challenges that tempered these milestones
in human progress. Overall, although emancipatory efforts were apparent, it
would be hard to say the outcomes achieved were labour relations free of
coercion and exploitation, much less about equality, especially in the
colonies.

The 19th century saw numerous political legislations passed which

outlawed slavery. In 1833, the British Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition
Act, which abolished slavery throughout the British Empire, excluding the
Indian subcontinent, impacting around 800,000 people across the empire. A
decade later, the Indian Slavery Act of 1843 abolished slavery in India and

1
National Archives, “The Emancipation Proclamation,” National Archives, January 5, 2018,
https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation.
was extended to Ceylon one year later.2 This effort was paralleled across the
Atlantic through the Emancipation Proclamation during the American Civil
War, transforming the nature of the war into a moral crusade. Though its
immediate effect was limited to the Confederate States, it laid the foundation
for the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1865 during the
post-war Reconstruction era, which constitutionally outlawed slavery
throughout the United States. As for the more common serfdom present in
Continental Europe, Imperial Russia had remained the last bastion for the
practice. Yet it too, in 1861, declared the end to the feudal practice which
had lasted over 600 years by Tsar Alexander II, liberating over 23 million
serfs and granting them legal freedom and the ability to purchase land. 3

However, this positive image of the emancipation of all coercive labour

practices is far from the more complex situation where legal freedom was
often accompanied by persistent economic, social, and political constraints
that tempered the ideal of universal liberty. In the case of the British Empire,
slavery was indeed nowhere to be seen in the British Isles, yet not the same
could be said for its colonial regime, notably the East India Company.
Although the Indian Slavery Act of 1843 abolished slavery in India, the
indentured wage labour system which presented itself as the alternative to
slavery is still not close to the state of emancipation. Debt repayment
schemes were in place to drive indenture. With colonial policies of increased
taxation, commercialisation of crops and other measures, many had to resort
to such schemes. Worsened by the 1859 Workman's Breach of Contract Act
which empowered creditors and weaked debtors, it had turned these
indebted into bonded labourers.4 Now, instead of the physical violence
inflicted upon them by whips and chains, it became state provisions which
enclosed them geographically and ledgers which effectively locked them into
financial servitude.

The emancipation of slavery in the United States following the Civil War
was undoubtedly a massive leap in terms of civil rights from before, yet it
was still marked by significant limitations in establishing truly free labour
relations. In the Reconstruction era, freedmen found themselves in labour
2
Vasuki Nesiah, “Slavery’s Afterlives: Humanitarian Imperialism and Free Contract,” AJIL
Unbound 117 (January 1, 2023): 66–68, https://doi.org/10.1017/aju.2023.7.
3
Serge A. Zenkovsky, “The Emancipation of the Serfs in Retrospect,” Russian Review 20, no.
4 (October 1961): 280, https://doi.org/10.2307/126692.
4
Nesiah, “Slavery’s Afterlives: Humanitarian Imperialism and Free Contract,” 68-69.
systems that perpetuated economic dependence and exploitation. Due to
the federal land seizure and redistribution program collapsing in late 1865,
coupled with the fact that they never had the opportunity to receive
education to equip them for skilled jobs, most freedmen remained in
agriculture labour jobs.5 Against the former restricting and oppressive gang
system, these freedmen turned to sharecropping as a more independent
form of labour, which the landowners eventually gave into. 6 While this
arrangement offered some autonomy compared to gang labour, it left many
trapped in cycles of debt and poverty, particularly due to exploitative credit
systems controlled by rural merchants once the credit loaning to landowners
by Southern Banks ceased with the capital shortage due to the war. 7 Even
when freedmen sought economic agency by frequently changing employers
to secure better conditions, they were met with widespread resistance and
legal challenges aimed at restricting their mobility. 8 For many, this system
mirrored the subjugation of slavery, as they were left with little to no
economic mobility and remained tied to the land they worked for. The only
difference is this coercion is now through the system of wage labour instead
of slavery. These structural and systemic limitations ensured that the post-
emancipation labour systems replicated many features of slavery, leaving
African Americans in a state of quasi-freedom that fell far short of the ideal of
labour emancipation.

When looking at the problem of serfdom in Russia, it seems to be even

greater than in the British Empire and the United States. First, because the
formal Emancipation Edict was only delivered a decade after the middle of
the nineteenth century, it would seem unjustified to say "the nineteenth
century was characterized by the emancipation of labour" even if labour
relations became thoroughly free after the edict. Thus, it would be fitting to
examine the conditions of labour for the majority of the century in Russia, i.e.
before the abolition of serfdom.

5
John T. O’Brien, review of Review of After Slavery: Black Labour and the Postwar Southern
Economy, by Leon F. Litwack et al., Labour / Le Travail, 1981: 287-288,
https://doi.org/10.2307/25140088.
6
Ibid., 287; Eric Foner, “Rights and the Constitution in Black Life during the Civil War and
Reconstruction,” The Journal of American History 74, no. 3 (December 1987): 871,
https://doi.org/10.2307/1902157.
7
O’Brien, review of Review of After Slavery: Black Labour and the Postwar Southern
Economy, 289.
8
Foner, “Rights and the Constitution in Black Life during the Civil War and Reconstruction,”
871.
 Under the system of serfdom, peasants were legally bound to the land
owned by noble landlords and obligated to provide either labour services or
payments in kind. They lacked personal freedom, were subject to their
landowner's authority, and could be bought, sold, or transferred along with
the estate. While outright emancipation was elusive for most of the century,
manumission offered a potential avenue for serfs to escape their servile
status. However, the manumission of a serf rests entirely on the authority of
either the serf owner or the law. 9 The serf himself is not able to plead to the
state for emancipation. Any sort of pleading would be a transactional one
towards their owners in some sense of self-purchase. 10 Even in the case of
self-purchasement of freedom, these sometimes came at absurdly high
prices, with one owner gaining 5,000 paper rubles for freeing two serf
families, the amount which could build two houses in the provincial capital at
the time.11 One could hardly believe such costly amounts wouldn't burden
manumitted serfs to the point where the extent of their emancipation is
doubted. This sense of absolute authority over serf as property by their
masters, which can only be resolved by the one-side release, suggests more
of the opposite of the emancipation of labour.

Furthermore, even after manumission, freed serfs were forced into

social societies as the Russian state declared these men could not choose to
remain idle. They were to "choose a new way of life" and if not, face legal
consequences.12 The Russian state's disdain for the concept of freedom
makes the regulations which require citizens' inseparability from membership
to large social groups questionable for the emancipation of labour. 13
Therefore, while serfs were no longer legally bound to their landlords, these
new obligations ensured that their autonomy remained heavily restricted.
Such conditions highlight the incomplete nature of emancipation in Russia,
where systemic constraints on personal liberty persisted long after serfs
were formally freed.

Yet even after the emancipation in 1861, the image of liberation still
does not seem to present itself fully. Because of the strong reactionary

9
Alison K. Smith, “Freed Serfs without Free People: Manumission in Imperial Russia,” The
American Historical Review 118, no. 4 (2013): 1035, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23785433.
10
Ibid., 1041.
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid., 1046.
13
Ibid., 1049
voices in government as well as to pacify the nobility for losing their unpaid
workforce, concessions were made which put freed serfs in a similar situation
to their Indian counterparts. The landlords could keep up to half of the
peasant's land allotment after the land dividing process, provided that the
peasant retained a "legal minimum of land". 14 On top of this, the peasants
would be required to pay for the land they ended up with as redemptive
payment, while the government compensated the landlord for the land given
away according to the price of the land. To avoid the financial burden of
paying for the land, some peasants instead chose the option of "grant
allotments". This allotment would be given to the peasants without paying
for the land. However, though the land is debt-free, it is much smaller than a
regular allotment, and thus, half a million peasants who chose this option
had barely enough to maintain their subsistence. As a result, the so-called
liberation left many former serfs economically constrained and reliant on
minimal resources, perpetuating a cycle of hardship and indebtedness rather
than granting them genuine freedom and autonomy.

To evaluate, although emancipation was carried out in name, the

systems and structures that followed often failed to align precisely with the
ideals of true freedom and autonomy. In the British Empire, slavery was not
an issue on the British Isles, but indentured labour just substituted slavery in
its colonial regimes, such as in the East India Company. In the United States,
the abolition of slavery through the 13th Amendment and subsequent
Reconstruction efforts provided significant legal and symbolic advancements.
However, the economy and government still furthered conditions that
resembled slavery. Similarly, in Russia, the Emancipation Edict of 1861
formally freed millions of serfs but imposed burdensome redemption
payments and rendered peasants economically dependent and socially
constrained. This is not to say there were no improvements as there
undoubtedly were; they just did not seem substantive enough to emancipate
the coerced from their coercive labour relations. That said, while these
emancipations fell short of fully emancipating labourers, their significance
cannot be understated. These reforms, though imperfect, established a
foundation for future emancipatory efforts by creating a crack in the
entrenched systems of labour exploitation. By doing so, they set historical
precedents that inspired subsequent movements toward social and economic
justice, paving the way for more substantive progress in the future.

14
Zenkovsky, “The Emancipation of the Serfs in Retrospect,” 288.
Bibliography:

Foner, Eric. “Rights and the Constitution in Black Life during the Civil War and
Reconstruction.” The Journal of American History 74, no. 3 (December 1987): 863–83.
https://doi.org/10.2307/1902157.

National Archives. “The Emancipation Proclamation.” National Archives, January 5, 2018.

https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation.

O’Brien, John T. Review of Review of After Slavery: Black Labour and the Postwar Southern
Economy, by Leon F. Litwack, Roger L. Ransom, Richard Sutch, Daniel A. Novak, Jay
R. Mandle, and Jonathan M. Wiener. Labour / Le Travail, 1981.
https://doi.org/10.2307/25140088..
Smith, Alison K. “Freed Serfs without Free People: Manumission in Imperial Russia.” The
American Historical Review 118, no. 4 (2013): 1029–51.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23785433.

Vasuki Nesiah. “Slavery’s Afterlives: Humanitarian Imperialism and Free Contract.” AJIL
Unbound 117 (January 1, 2023): 66–70. https://doi.org/10.1017/aju.2023.7.

Zenkovsky, Serge A. “The Emancipation of the Serfs in Retrospect.” Russian Review 20, no. 4
(October 1961): 280–93. https://doi.org/10.2307/126692.