Corvée
Corvée is a form of unpaid forced labour that is intermittent in nature, lasting for limited periods of time, typically only a certain number of days' work each year. Statute labour is a corvée imposed by a state for the purposes of public works. As such it represents a form of levy. Unlike other forms of levy, such as a tithe, a corvée does not require the population to have land, crops or cash.
The obligation for tenant farmers to perform corvée work for landlords on private landed estates was widespread throughout history before the Industrial Revolution. The term is most typically used in reference to medieval and early modern Europe, where work was often expected by a feudal landowner of their vassals, or by a monarch of their subjects.
The application of the term is not limited to feudal Europe; corvée has also existed in modern and ancient Egypt, ancient Sumer, ancient Rome, China, Japan, the Incan civilization, Haiti under Henry I and under American occupation, and Portugal's African colonies until the mid-1960s. Forms of statute labour officially existed until the early 20th century in Canada and the United States.
Etymology
The word corvée has its origins in Rome, and reached English via French. In the later Roman Empire the citizens performed opera publica in lieu of paying taxes; often it consisted of road and bridge work. Roman landlords could also demand a certain number of days' labour from their tenants, and from freedmen; in the latter case the work was called opera officialis. In medieval Europe, the tasks that serfs or villeins were required to perform on a yearly basis for their lords were called opera riga. Plowing and harvesting were principal activities to which this applied. In times of need, the lord could demand additional work called opera corrogata. This term evolved into coroatae, then corveiae, and finally corvée, and the meaning broadened to encompass both the regular and exceptional tasks. The word survives in modern usage, meaning any kind of inevitable or disagreeable chore.History
Egypt
From the Egyptian Old Kingdom onward, corvée contributed to government projects. During the times of the Nile River floods, it was used for construction projects such as pyramids, temples, quarries, canals, roads, and other works.The 1350 BC Amarna letters, mostly addressed to the pharaoh of Ancient Egypt, have one short letter on the topic of corvée. Of the 382 Amarna letters, there is an undamaged letter from Biridiya of Megiddo entitled "Furnishing corvée workers".
Later, during the Ptolemaic dynasty, Ptolemy V in his Rosetta Stone Decree of 196 BC listed 22 accomplishments to be honored and ten rewards granted to him for the former. One of the shorter accomplishments, near the middle of the list, is:
The statement implies it was a common practice.
Until the late 19th century, many of the Egyptian Public Works, including the Suez Canal, were built using corvée. Legally, the practice ended in Egypt after 1882, when the British Empire took control of the country and opposed forced labour on principle, but its abolition was postponed until Egypt had paid off its foreign debts. During the 19th century corvée had expanded into a national program. It was favoured for short-term projects such as building irrigation works and dams. However, Nile Delta landowners replaced it with cheap temporary labour recruited from Upper Egypt. As a result, it was used only in scattered locales, and even then there was peasant resistance. It began to disappear as Egypt modernized after 1860, and had fully vanished by the 1890s.
Europe
Medieval agricultural corvée was not entirely unpaid. By custom the workers could expect small payments, often in the form of food and drink consumed on the spot. Corvée sometimes included military conscription, and the term is also occasionally used in a slightly divergent sense to mean forced requisition of military supplies; this most often took the form of cartage, a lord's right to demand wagons for military transport.Because agricultural corvée tended to be demanded by the lord at the same time that the peasants needed to tend their own plotse.g. at planting and harvestit was an object of serious resentment. By the 16th century its use in agricultural settings was on the decline and it became increasingly replaced by paid labour. It nevertheless persisted in many areas of Europe until the French Revolution and beyond.
Austria, the Holy Roman Empire, and Germany
Corvée, specifically socage, was essential to the feudal system of the Habsburg monarchy and later Austrian Empire, and most German states that belonged to the Holy Roman Empire. Farmers and peasants were obliged to do hard agricultural work for their nobility, typically six months of the year. When a cash economy became established, the duty was gradually replaced by the duty to pay taxes.After the Thirty Years' War, the demand for corvée grew too high and the system became dysfunctional. Its official decline is linked to the abolition of serfdom by Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor and Habsburg ruler, in 1781. It continued to exist however, and was only abolished during the revolutions of 1848, along with the legal inequality between the nobility and common people.
Bohemia was a part of the Holy Roman Empire as well as the Habsburg monarchy, and corvée was called robota in Czech. In Russian and other Slavic languages robota denotes any kind of work, but in Czech it specifically refers to unpaid unfree work, corvée or serf labour, or drudgery. The Czech word was imported to part of Germany where corvée was known as Robath, and into Hungarian as robot. The word robota was later used by Czech writer Karel Čapek, who after a recommendation by his brother Josef Čapek introduced the word robot for machines that do unpaid work for their owners in his 1920 play ''R.U.R.''
France
In France corvée existed until 4 August 1789, shortly after the beginning of the French Revolution, when it was abolished along with a number of other feudal privileges of the French landlords. At that time it was usually directed mainly towards improving the roads. It was greatly resented, and contributed to the widespread discontent that preceded the revolution. Counterrevolution revived corvée in France in 1824, 1836, and 1871, under the name prestation. Every able-bodied man had to give three days' labour or its money equivalent in order to vote. It also continued to exist under the seigneurial system in what had been New France, in British North America.In 1866, during the French occupation of Mexico, the French Army under Marshal François Achille Bazaine set up a corvée system to provide labour for public works instead of a system of fines.
Romanian principalities
In Romania, corvée was called clacă. Karl Marx described the corvée system of the Danubian Principalities as a pre-capitalist form of compulsory over-work. The labour the peasants needed for their own maintenance was distinctly separate from the work they supplied to the landowner as surplus labour. The 14 days of labour due to the landowneras prescribed by the corvée code in the Regulamentul Organicactually amounted to 42 days, because the working day was considered the time required for the production of an average daily product, "and that average daily product is determined in so crafty a way that no Cyclops would be done with it in 24 hours." The corvée code was supposed to abolish serfdom, but did not achieve anything toward this goal.A land reform took place in 1864, after the Danubian Principalities unified and formed the United Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, which abolished corvée and turned the peasants into free proprietors. The former owners were promised compensation, which was to be paid from a fund the peasants had to contribute to for 15 years. Besides the annual fee, the peasants also had to pay for the newly owned land, although at a price below market value. These debts made many peasants return to a life of semi-serfdom.
Russian Empire
In the Russian Tsardom and the Russian Empire there were a number of permanent corvées called , which included carriage corvée, coachman corvée, and lodging corvée, among others.In the context of Russian history, the term corvée is also sometimes used to translate the terms barshchina or boyarshchina, which refer to the obligatory work that the Russian serfs performed for the pomeshchik on their land. While no official government regulation on the duration of barshchina labour existed, a 1797 ukase by Paul I of Russia described a barshchina of three days a week as normal and sufficient for the landowner's needs.
In the Black Earth Region, 70% to 77% of the serfs performed barshchina and the rest paid levies.
England
The Highways Act 1555 required the householders of each parish to provide four days of labour each year for maintenance of public streets. This system of statute labour was gradually replaced by payment of money.Haiti
The independent Kingdom of Haiti based at Cap-Haïtien under Henri Christophe imposed a corvée system upon the common citizenry which was used for massive fortifications to protect against French invasion. Plantation owners could pay the government and have labourers work for them instead. This enabled the Kingdom of Haiti to maintain a stronger economic structure than the Republic of Haiti based in Port-au-Prince in the South under Alexandre Pétion which had a system of agrarian reform distributing land to the labourers.After deploying to Haiti in 1915 as an expression of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. Armed Forces enforced a corvée system in the interest of making improvements to infrastructure.