How to Use serfdom in a Sentence

serfdom

noun

• Passing it would help keep the state off the well-trod road to fiscal serfdom.
  — James Freeman, WSJ, 9 Sep. 2022
• The gentry is lighter-toned and obsessed with skin bleaching, and the maji have been reduced to serfdom and slavery.
  — Vann R. Newkirk Ii, The Atlantic, 6 Mar. 2018
• The labor system changed—but only from slavery to serfdom.
  — Allen Guelzo, WSJ, 18 Aug. 2017
• When, in 1861, serfdom was abolished in the rest of Russia, millions of the newly free but landless flocked there, assisted by the Russian state.
  — The Economist, 21 Dec. 2019
• Some on the nationalist right have switched their allegiance from the market to the state, but that hardly changes much — it’s a form of serfdom either way.
  — Cameron Hilditch, National Review, 1 May 2021
• African Americans were thus moved from slavery to serfdom.
  — Kevin Baker, The New Republic, 17 May 2018
• Turgenev’s book did much to stoke the fast-growing criticism of serfdom, which was abolished nine years later, in 1861, by the progressive Czar Alexander II.
  — Karl Ove Knausgaard, New York Times, 14 Feb. 2018
• The shift in power set into motion by the black death—the opportunity that came when the world split open—led to money replacing obligation and the abolition of serfdom in much of the West.
  — Kevin Baker, Harper's Magazine, 23 June 2020
• Will Afghan women be subjugated in a 21st-century serfdom of the Taliban?
  — Time, 19 Jan. 2023
• Its peasants had been freed from serfdom only a decade before, nearly a century late by the Western European clock.
  — David Sessions, New Republic, 20 Sep. 2017
• Much of the population, just a couple of generations away from serfdom, lived in abject poverty.
  — Keith Gessen, The New Yorker, 21 Feb. 2023
• Slavery had existed for millennia in ways akin to medieval serfdom.
  — Washington Post, 1 Apr. 2022
• Illinois property taxpayers, with their home values dropping and their taxes constantly rising, have been on the road to serfdom for far too long.
  — John Kass, chicagotribune.com, 18 Oct. 2019
• The novel wasn't just controversial in America: It was also reputedly banned in Czarist Russia, which was in the process of ending its own system of serfdom.
  — Joel Mathis, The Week, 22 Sep. 2022
• In Europe, this started to change after the French Revolution, which abolished feudalism and serfdom.
  — Robert Sullivan, Vogue, 30 Nov. 2018
• But that would not address the fundamental goal of the protests: to end the totalitarian stranglehold that has subjected the Cubans to an unbearable serfdom.
  — Néstor T. Carbonell, National Review, 16 July 2021
• Among Czar Alexander II’s sweeping reforms—including, most notably, the abolition of serfdom—were overhauls to the criminal justice system and greater freedom of the press.
  — Jennifer Wilson, The New Republic, 28 Dec. 2021
• Without that system, there is only serfdom, permanent underclass status for the poor or the violent reordering of things by taking wealth from those who have it.
  — WSJ, 23 June 2019
• Called the Nakaz, or Instruction, the 1767 document outlined the empress’ vision of a progressive Russian nation, even touching on the heady issue of abolishing serfdom.
  — Meilan Solly, Smithsonian Magazine, 15 May 2020
• When gold was discovered on Hispaniola, the native population was forced into serfdom to mine it.
  — Longreads, 5 Feb. 2021
• His arrival saw the military subjugation of the tribes, mass death in the pandemic that accompanied the Spanish occupation and the enforced serfdom of free Indians.
  — WSJ, 20 May 2021
• Bubonic plague killed half the population of full continents and, therefore, had a tremendous effect on the coming of the industrial revolution, on slavery and serfdom.
  — Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker, 3 Mar. 2020
• But gradually in the course of the nineteenth century, more European countries abolished serfdom, including in Russia, in 1861.
  — Robert Sullivan, Vogue, 30 Nov. 2018
• My thinking about Tibet had been fully shaped by Chinese propaganda, which held that China had freed Tibetans from serfdom and brought them prosperity and happiness.
  — Yaqiu Wang, Twin Cities, 27 Aug. 2019
• Those who forego or simply can’t afford it are essentially consigning themselves to economic serfdom.
  — New York Times, 23 Feb. 2021
• Slavery advocates, meanwhile, found common cause with defenders of serfdom.
  — Frederic J. Frommer, Smithsonian Magazine, 30 Aug. 2022
• The pivotal issues over the years have been deeper: slavery, serfdom, Jim Crow laws in the South, school segregation, housing, employment and voting discrimination—the consequences of white resistance, conscious or not, to black advancement.
  — Edward Kosner, WSJ, 2 Mar. 2018
• During the Civil War, Lincoln saw political advantage in comparing serfdom and slavery.
  — Frederic J. Frommer, Smithsonian Magazine, 30 Aug. 2022

Last Updated: 15 Nov 2024