The Origins of Autocracy

7. The mir is the traditional designation for the Russian peasant commune and its governing body, the assembly of shareholding, and originally arms-bearing, males. It should be noted that the mir was not necessarily coextensive with the village; some vil­lages included two mirs, the members of which held land on different bases.

10. In Istoriia srednihh vekov, vol. 2, we read: "The lands of the clergy [in Denmark] passed to the king, and subsequently, by gift and sale, from the king to the feudal no­bility . . . the service gentry received complete police power over the holders; [they] seized the commune lands, drove off some of the peasants from the allotment land, and increased the corvee, [as a consequence of which] there was a corresponding increase in serf dependence" (pp. 354-55). "Soon after the Reformation, the Swedish kings, like the Danish, resumed the distribution ... of land to the nobility . . . the land distribu­tions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had the characteristics of naturally guaranteeing state service by the nobility, which became like the Russian service gen­try. . . . Correspondingly, corvee obligations began to grow" (pp. 361-62). Though un­doubtedly belonging geographically to the region east of the Elbe, i.e., to Eastern Eu­rope, Denmark and Sweden are for some reason excluded from consideration by historians of the region. This is a pity, since in certain circumstances it dooms the histo­rian to the same kind of bipolar view of European history which did so much harm to Wittfogel's interpretation on a global scale. A good example is Immanuel Wallerstein's model of "world-wide division of labor" designed to explain the emergence of serfdom in sixteenth-century Eastern Europe by the fatal influence of rising Western capitalism. True, there is not much evidence presented for such a model in his book The Modern World-System. In fact some experts come to quite opposite conclusions. Perry Anderson, for one, argues that "while the corn trade undoubtedly intensified servile exploitation in Eastern Germany or Poland, it did not inaugurate it in either country, and played no role at all in the parallel development of Bohemia or Russia" (Lineages of the Absolutist