ABSTRACT
Many of the old ways of marking hierarchy and enforcing stigma were on the wane by the end of the eighteenth century. Much of the process of transforming eighteenth-century subordination into the complexly graded societies of today, freer in some important senses, but also still capable of spectacular instances of ethnic and religious violence. Most early modern commentators thought that the Ottoman Empire placed greater constraints upon women's mobility than other regions did, though some other places came close. The problem of Cypriot Christian, and later Jewish women, who preferred the Muslim courts, was still worrying the Orthodox clergy and the rabbinate in the eighteenth century. Like slavery, serfdom systematically undermined the cultural, economic and political power of those at the receiving end, though it differed from most slavery in the sense that, since serfs were supposed to be 'tied to the land', they also generally stayed connected to their kin-group.
