Ludwig von Mises’s study traces the transformation of relations between landlords and peasants in Galicia from the province’s annexation by Austria in 1772 to the abolition of feudal obligations in 1848. He begins by describing the deeply unequal agrarian order inherited from the Polish Commonwealth, in which most peasants were bound to the soil, lacked secure ownership of the land they cultivated, owed extensive corvée labor and other dues, and possessed little effective legal protection against their landlords. Manorial authorities exercised economic, administrative, and judicial powers, making the estate resemble a small state controlled by the landowner. Austrian rule gradually challenged this arrangement by bringing landlords and peasants under a stronger central administration and introducing early protections against abuses.
The most ambitious changes came under Joseph II. His reforms attacked hereditary subjection, restricted peasant obligations, strengthened peasants’ rights to their holdings, reorganized manorial administration, and attempted to replace compulsory labor services with monetary payments. The Corvée Patent of 1786 became a central foundation of Galicia’s rural constitution, while subsequent measures gave peasants increasingly secure, eventually hereditary, rights to the land they occupied. Joseph’s broader tax and urbarial reform sought to dismantle the economic foundations of corvée-based manorial agriculture, but resistance from the nobility, practical difficulties, and political changes after his death led to the abandonment of the most sweeping measures. For much of the first half of the nineteenth century, therefore, Galicia remained caught between the surviving manorial system and a state bureaucracy that continued to regulate and limit it.
The crisis of 1846 exposed how unstable this compromise had become. Peasant unrest and conflict between rural subjects and the Polish landowning class persuaded Austrian officials that further regulation of corvée obligations would not resolve the underlying problem; an attempted urbarial settlement dissatisfied both peasants and landlords. After the revolutionary upheavals of 1848, the government moved to abolish the relationship altogether: an April 1848 decree ended all corvée and other subject services in Galicia effective May 15, with compensation provisions for landlords. Mises concludes that the old agrarian constitution disappeared not simply because it violated abstract principles of freedom, but because it had become incompatible with changing economic conditions. Emancipation removed the legal structure of serfdom and compulsory labor, yet it did not by itself end rural poverty or economic dependence, and Mises cautions against blaming the later difficulties of the Galician peasantry on the emancipation settlement itself.
