Corvée

Corvée (French:  (listen)) is a form of unpaid, unfree labour, which is intermittent in nature and which lasts limited periods of time: typically only a certain number of days' work each year.He (pharaoh) decreed:—Behold, not is permitted to be pressed men of the sailors.There was the introduction of equitable taxation, so vital from the financial point of view; but also of such great political, moral and economic importance. It was the tangible proof of French authority having come to stay; it was the stimulus required to make an inherently lazy people work. Once they had learned to earn they would begin to spend, whereby commerce and industry would develop.C. 1000 BC clay bowl, one day corvée ration(?)Marlik, IranAmarna letter 365, Nuribta Corvée (French:  (listen)) is a form of unpaid, unfree labour, which is intermittent in nature and which lasts limited periods of time: typically only a certain number of days' work each year. Statute labour is a corvée imposed by a state for the purposes of public works. As such it represents a form of levy (taxation). Unlike other forms of levy, such as a tithe, a corvée does not require the population to have land, crops or cash. It was thus favored in historical economies in which barter was more common than cash transactions or circulating money was in short supply. The obligation for tenant farmers to perform corvée work for landlords on private landed estates was widespread throughout history before the Industrial Revolution. The term is most typically used in reference to medieval and early modern Europe, where work was often expected by a feudal landowner (of their vassals), or by a monarch of their subjects. However, the application of the term is not limited to that time or place; corvée has existed in modern and ancient Egypt, ancient Sumer, ancient Israel under Solomon, ancient Rome, China and Japan, everywhere in continental Europe, the Incan civilization, Haiti under Henri Christophe and under American occupation (1915–1934), and Portugal's African colonies until the mid-1960s. Forms of statute labour officially existed until the early twentieth century in Canada and the United States. The word 'corvée' itself has its origins in Rome, and reached the English language via France. In the Late Roman Empire the citizens performed opera publica in lieu of paying taxes; often it consisted of road and bridge work. Roman landlords could also demand a number of days' labour from their tenants, and also from the freedmen; in the latter case the work was called opera officialis. In Medieval Europe, the tasks that serfs or villeins were required to perform on a yearly basis for their lords were called opera riga. Plowing and harvesting were principal activities to which this work was applied. In times of need, the lord could demand additional work called opera corrogata (Latin corrogare, 'to requisition'). This term evolved into coroatae, then corveiae, and finally corvée, and the meaning broadened to encompass both the regular and exceptional tasks. This Medieval agricultural corvée was not entirely unpaid: by custom the workers could expect small payments, often in the form of food and drink consumed on the spot. Corvée sometimes included military conscription, and the term is also occasionally used in a slightly divergent sense to mean forced requisition of military supplies; this most often took the form of cartage, a lord's right to demand wagons for military transport. Because corvée labour for agriculture tended to be demanded by the lord at exactly the same times that the peasants needed to attend to their own plots – e.g. planting and harvest – the corvée was an object of serious resentment. By the 16th century its use in agricultural setting was on the wane; it became increasingly replaced by money payments for labour. It nevertheless persisted in many areas of Europe until the French Revolution and beyond. The word survives in modern usage, meaning any kind of 'inevitable or disagreeable chore'. Corvée labour (specifically: Socage) was essential in the feudal economic system of the Habsburg monarchy – later Austrian Empire – and most German states that have belonged to the Holy Roman Empire. Farmers and peasants were obliged to do hard agricultural work for their nobility. When a cash economy became established, the duty was gradually replaced by the duty to pay taxes. After the Thirty Years' War, the demands for corvée labour grew too high and the system became dysfunctional. The official decline of corvée is linked to the abolition of serfdom by Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor and Habsburg ruler, in 1781. Corvée labour continued to exist, however, and was only abolished during the revolutions of 1848, along with the legal inequality between the nobility and common people. Bohemia (or Czech lands) were a part of the Holy Roman Empire as well as the Habsburg monarchy and corvée labour itself was called 'robota' in Czech. In Russian and other Slavic languages, 'robota' denotes any work but in Czech, it specifically refers to unpaid unfree work, corvée labour, serf labor, or drudgery. The Czech word was imported to a part of Germany where corvée labour was known as Robath, and into Hungarian as robot. The word 'robota' turned out to be optimal for Czech writer Karel Čapek who, after a recommendation by his brother Josef Čapek, introduced the word 'robot' for (originally anthropomorphic) machines that do unpaid work for their owners in his 1920 play R.U.R..