How does a frontier society have slavery?

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

I am confused by this:

“The land was thinly peopled by recent immigrants who could move again.”

If this is true, then how can this region have serfs, or slavery, or a nobility that easily dominates society? Why can’t people just run away, if they find their conditions difficult. Elsewhere I read that 50 years later the nobles began to emigrate further east, to Kuban, which was the new frontier. But why couldn’t the serfs run away in the same manner? It is interesting to realize that the mere existence of an open frontier does not offer freedom, but rather, a whole raft of circumstances need to line up before that frontier is usable.

At the time of Khmelnitsky’s death, the Cossack state had a territory of about 250,000 square miles (650,000 km2) and a population of around 1.2-1.5 million. Society consisted of the remaining non-Catholic nobles, the starshina or richer Cossacks, the mass of the Cossacks and those peasants who did not bear arms. Seventeen percent of the land was held by the Orthodox Church and 33% by local nobles. The remaining 50% had been confiscated from the Poles and was up for grabs. The land was a frontier society with no natural borders, no tradition of statehood and a population committed to Cossack liberty or anarchy. The land was thinly peopled by recent immigrants who could move again. The confiscated lands could easily change hands in any conflict. There was an unresolved conflict between the mass of poorer cossacks and the wealthier group who aspired to semi-noble status. The state was weak and needed a protector, but the Poles wanted their land back, Russian autocracy fitted ill with cossack liberty (although they were two sides of the same coin), the Crimeans were mainly interested in slave raiding and the Turks were little concerned with this barbarian frontier. The Swedes were too far away and the Don Cossacks and Kalmucks, stayed out of the conflict.

Post external references

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    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruin_(Ukrainian_history)
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