Editing Eastern Europe (section)

===Serfdom===
[[Serfdom]] was a prevalent status of agricultural workers until the 19th century. It resembled slavery in terms of lack of freedom, with the distinction that the landowners could not buy and sell serfs separately from the specific plots of land to which they were permanently attached. The system emerged in the 14th and the 15th centuries while it was declining in Western Europe.<ref>[[Jerome Blum]], "The Rise of Serfdom in Eastern Europe" ''American Historical Review'' 62#4 (1957), pp. 807-836 [https://www.jstor.org/stable/1845515 Online] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200207063533/https://www.jstor.org/stable/1845515 |date=2020-02-07 }}</ref> The climax came in the 17th and 18th century. The early 19th century saw its decline, marked especially by the abolition of serfdom in Russia in 1861. Emancipation meant that the ex-serfs paid for their freedom with annual cash payments to their former masters for decades. The system varied widely by country and was not as standardized as in Western Europe. Historians until the 20th century focused on master-serf economic and labor relations, portraying the serfs as slave-like, passive, and isolated, and 20th-century scholars downplayed the evils and emphasized the complexities.<ref>Boris B. Gorshkov, "Serfdom: Eastern Europe" in Peter Stearns, ed., ''Encyclopedia of European Social History'' (2001) 2:379-88; [https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3460500100/GPS?u=wikipedia&sid=GPS&xid=e29075bb Online] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240330042426/https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&u=wikipedia&id=GALE%7CCX3460500100&v=2.1&it=r&sid=GPS&asid=e29075bb |date=2024-03-30 }}.</ref><ref>David Moon, "Reassessing Russian Serfdom." ''European History Quarterly'' 26 (1996): 483–526.</ref>