as in peonage
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Recent Examples of serfdom
That book, Caliban and the Witch, traces the emergence of witch hunts throughout medieval Western Europe amid the transition from serfdom to proto-capitalism.
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Hazlitt, 4 Sep. 2024
As the Big Three continue to drive down the road to serfdom, car production will continue in the United States.
—The Editors, National Review, 18 Sep. 2023
Following Mexico's independence in 1821, a small landowning elite replaced the colonial rulers, and most of the farmers (except those who joined farming collectives) transitioned from slavery to serfdom.
—Travel + Leisure Editors, Travel + Leisure, 22 June 2023
Russian officers still treated their peasant soldiers as little better than serfs (and serfdom would not be abolished in Russia for another 50 years).
—Antony Beevor, Foreign Affairs, 29 Dec. 2022
See All Example Sentences for serfdom
Recent Examples of Synonyms for serfdom
Noun
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Roughly 12% were of African descent — newly unshackled, technically free and already being legally recaptured under other names: peonage, vagrancy laws, convict leasing.—
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Ryan Coogler didn’t want to hide anymore The film conveys two forms of peonage prominent in the 1930s South—labor arrangements not far removed from slavery.—
Noun
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Usually, their earnings help — but when such women are trapped in servitude, those gaps become all but impossible to fill.—
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While some people also practiced goddess worship or wiccan spiritualism, for many the witch was simply a cultural display of joy and a rejection of domestic servitude.—
Noun
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Fulton County Reparations Task Force, a volunteer group in Georgia’s most populous county, recently submitted a 636-page report on the harms the municipality dealt through slavery and discrimination against Black residents.—
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When Connecticut receives a report of human trafficking – or modern slavery – multiple agencies collaborate to determine the situation, rescue the victim and provide necessary services like housing, health care and mental health support, and prosecute the offender.—
Noun
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By the early 20th century, after several centuries of rape, disease, enslavement, and land confiscation by colonizers, rubber barons, and loggers, their numbers had been reduced to 300.—
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National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Xiaolu Guo recasts Ishmael as a 17-year-old girl disguised as a cabin boy and Ahab as a Black freedman named Seneca, haunted by his father’s legacy of enslavement.—
Noun
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Both suits have sleeveless coveralls with yokes, front and back, of Lycra stretch knit.—
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Other Foods That Are Rich in Vitamin D Vitamin D is found naturally in few foods, including fish (like those above), beef liver, egg yoke, and cheese.—
Noun
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Where there was once bondage, there is now liberation.—
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Women often totter along a delicate line between beauty and torture, femininity and the bondage of expectation.—
Cite this Entry
“Serfdom.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/serfdom. Accessed 13 Jan. 2026.
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