Between Clan and Crown: The Struggle to Define Noble Property Rights in Imperial Russia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lee A. Farrow. Between Clan and Crown: The Struggle to Define Noble Property Rights in Imperial Russia. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Cloth.After a long famine of work on imperial Russian law, we are able to enjoy a feast of two monographs in the space of two years. Lee Farrow's book on noble rights follows the publication of a path-breaking monograph on women and in imperial Russia by Michelle Marrese (A Woman's Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia 1700-1861 [Cornell, 2002]). Farrow's study covers a shorter period of time and rests on a thinner source base than Marrese's but is nevertheless useful for setting out the basic contours of law in the eighteenth century.Farrow concentrates on two aspects of Russian law-redemption and confiscation-that she believes were especially salient and consequential in imperial Russia. This study, she writes, seeks to demonstrate two things-that noble life, including possession and control of the all-important resource of land, was inextricably intertwined with clan life, and that this often stifling influence combined with the significant power of the ruler to restrict the of private and political freedom. What she means by the growth of private property is the individual's right to dispose freely of his or her property, a right that was hedged round in Russia by the claims of members of one's extended family to redeem land sold or mortgaged to others and by the ruler's right to confiscate land (and other property) on a number of pretexts.Farrow walks the reader through the seventeenth-century legal background and the changes introduced in the period of Peter the Great's reign. She has a chapter on the Single Inheritance Law and, more important, on the legislation passed in the subsequent reigns of Catherine I and Anna that refined and partially overturned it. The Single Inheritance Law is well known to historians. The details of the legislation that altered it are less well understood and well worth knowing better. We are in Farrow's debt for clarifying them.The chapter on Catherine the Great's legislation is titled Fool's Gold. Farrow argues here that the nobles did not wrest any great concessions out of Catherine on rights and that the Charter to the Nobility, despite the claims of historians about a new plateau of rights, provided no guarantee of property.The core of Farrow's book and its thesis about the insecurity of nobles' control of lies in her discussion of redemption and confiscation. The source base for the first is redemption suits. While Farrow references her cases, she does not tell us how typical they were. It is hard to provide a balanced view of noble rights on the basis of a limited number of purely conflictual instances. It would be interesting to know the proportion of redemption challenges that occurred in what was a highly active market in property. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".