Tracy K. Dennison's Research
My research has been focused on how certain fundamental institutions (households, communities, landlords, and local government) shaped the pre-emancipation rural economy of imperial Russia. The role of landlords’ policies has been of particular interest, especially the quasi-formal contract enforcement mechanisms established by some wealthy landlords, which made it possible for the serfs of those lords to engage in property and credit transactions despite their ambiguous legal status. These questions are the subject of a recently published book: The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
This focus on institutions will be expanded in a new research project on Russian rural society in the post-Emancipation period. This project explores the nature and extent of institutional change in the Russian countryside after the abolition of serfdom, as well as the terms of the 1861 Emancipation Act itself and the motivations of those who designed it. The starting point of the inquiry is the recognition that this event remains deeply mysterious. Why was the legislation not better informed by empirical accounts of rural life? (They certainly existed – much data for serf estates were gathered in the 1850s.) What was the role of Romantic ideology in political discussions at the time? Such issues must be addressed in order to consider basic questions about the way in which the new post-Emancipation legal framework functioned, and about the role of the commune and rural markets in post-Emancipation society. This project also encompasses the broader intellectual history of the 1861 Act by comparing views of the peasantry held by ruling elites (and influenced by German Romanticism) with the empirical reality in the Russian countryside.
Last updated: June 13, 2011 15:27
