Between 1780 and 1787 Samuel and Jeremy Bentham were asked to manage a large Russian estate owned by Prince Grigorii Potemkin, one of the closest advisors of Catherine II. They had to face two related but distinct problems: Russian peasants were unskilled, while British skilled workers and supervisors were hard to control. It was the problem of controlling skilled English workers in Russia (and not the Russian serfs) that led the Bentham brothers to reflect on the relation between free and forced labor, and then between labor and society. Before and after Foucault, 1 the Panopticon has been seen as a response to social deviance, and in relation to prisons and the emergence of a global surveillance system in modern societies. According to Foucault, the Panopticon is not just a model for institutions, but something whose principles are those of power in society at large. 2 I want to challenge this view by arguing that the Panopticon Acknowledgments: I would like to thank for their helpful comments on and suggestions for previous versions. I am also indebted to anonymous CSSH referees who provided highly qualified and stimulating suggestions. landowners and peasants. From the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the state promoted peasants' mobilization of state rules in order to change their legal status. Estate archives show the complexity of legal and economic relationships between landlords, bailiffs, and peasants. Rather than a stylized serf de la glebe, the main features of this system were different gradations of servitude within a pluralistic legal system.Let me be clear: I am not saying that "serfs" were free men and English workers were slaves. More modestly, I maintain that we need to compare these systems not through an opposition between ahistorical categories of "free" and "unfree" labor, but rather in terms of notions and practices of labor found in Britain and in Russia at that time. These were global in their intellectual and economic origins, but they were also embedded in local legal and economic foundations and practices. Russian serfdom was an extreme solution to an economic and institutional problem wrestled with throughout Europe and its colonies in modern times: the proper status of labor in an increasingly market-dominated world. Unlike most systems of classifying labor, I do not oppose slavery and serfdom on one hand to "free" labor on the other. Rather I consider that, at least for the period that concerns us here-the seventeenth through mid-nineteenth centuries-a variety of forms of bondage and labor constraint were in play and they must be clearly separated from slavery. 5 During this period, a similar evolution of labor and labor institutions occurred in Russia, Britain, and most of Eurasia. The increasing limits to labor mobility known as the "second serfdom" emerged in Russia and several other countries of eastern and central Europe, while, at the same time in Britain and France a growing attention was devoted to labor institutions, such as the first poor laws, guilds, and increa...
