The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (The Penguin History of Europe Book 7)

by Richard J. Evans

The scale of these measures was vast. In East-Elbian Prussia, 480,000 peasants became free proprietors in the wake of the emancipation edicts of the early nineteenth century. Even in a small country such as Romania, more than 400,000 peasants received ownership of their land, and another 51,000 households were given land enough for a house and garden. Nearly 700,000 peasants in Poland became landowners. In the German and Slav provinces of the Habsburg Empire, the emancipation involved more than two and a half million peasant households indemnifying nearly 55,000 landowners for the loss of 39 million days of labour services without animals and 30,000 days with them, plus over 10 million florins’ worth of annual fees and tithes and nearly 4 million bushels of dues in kind. In Russia the emancipation was even more gargantuan in its effects, with some 10 million peasants on private estates receiving title to nearly 100 million acres of land,