Die Rolle der Gutshöfe bei der Hungerhilfe für die livländischen Bauern in den Krisenjahren 1841-1847
The Role of the Landlords in Livonian Famine Relief in the Crisis Years 1841-1847

Summary/Abstract: The hunger crisis of 1841-47, with short breaks, took hold of all three Baltic provinces (Estonia, Livonia and Courland). Livonia was the most affected. The famine also brought about social disturbances and its outbreak accelerated changes in agrarian policy. This article studies the role of the landlords in fighting the hunger and examines local differences in food supply taking the example of the province of Livonia. The local dimension of the famines and the share of relief borne by local resources and central administration in Europe in the 1840s are seen as important research topics in famine historiography. This research is based on qualitative analysis of various descriptive sources. The peasant emancipation law of 1819 imposed on the community the obligation to safeguard all its members against hunger by offering advance loans to peasant farmers and taking care of the weakest members of the community. There is, however, a need to clarify the role that manor lords actually played in the crisis and contrast it with the role envisioned for them by the state authorities. Although the emancipation reform freed the manor lords from their earlier obligation to maintain their peasants by distributing enough credit to them in times of bad harvest, during the crisis of the 1840s the central authorities had to oblige the manor lords by means of several decrees to open their storehouses and disburse grain to the needy. The crisis of the 1840s demonstrates how strong the mutual interdependence of the manor and the peasant households was, in spite of formal serf emancipation: the landlords still had to maintain the peasants in order to keep the corvée-based manor economy running. Both the rural communities and manor lords, however, seemed to keep the hunger relief loans close to the minimum and thereby contributed to an increase in the number of hunger victims.

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