Scholarly distinctions between serfdom and slavery were blurred in practice

Evidence

Wallerstein wishes to distinguish between the economic and legal-political conditions of New World slavery and a capitalist “serfdom” (“coerced cash crop labour”) in eastern Europe and among “natives” of the New World (the encomienda) of the sixteenth century. His definition of “coerced cash-crop labour” (“a system of agricultural labour control wherein peasants are required by some legal process enforced by the state to labour at least part of the time on a large domain producing some product for sale on the world market” p. 91) would appear to serve as well as a description of slavery. The point is that alone it does not distinguish the presumably distinct forms of forced labor. David Brion Davis observes that for at least the medieval era, the distinctions were not as clear-cut in daily life as modern scholars would suggest. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1470

Categorization

• DEFINE: Test the boundary between slavery and coerced cash-crop labor as distinct categories.
• QUESTION: If serfdom and slavery blur in daily life, what force kept their legal and ideological separation so powerful in the era of capitalism?