Ep. 6 — The Word That Wasn't "Slave": Class, Councils and the Circassian Social Order

For two hundred years European travelers looked at a Circassian class called the Pshitl and wrote down one word: slaves. But the Pshitl carried weapons, fought in the ranks, kept their own homes, land and livestock, and held the right to take their own master to court. In this episode we open Part Two of Volume One and go inside the machinery of Circassian society itself.We start in the middle of the second millennium BCE, when the plough arrives and quietly invents private property, wage labour, and the first division between those who own land and those who work it. From there we reach what Barzaj called the war democracies, where tribal alliances forged organized authority out of necessity. Then the fork: from the 4th century CE the nation runs two systems side by side. The hereditary system of princes among the Kabardians, Besleney and Bjedugh, and the system of equality, ruled by popular councils under elected Thamadas, where no law became binding until a general assembly approved it.We walk the full hierarchy. The Pshih, the Warq retainers, the Tlaqotal free peasants who were the overwhelming majority and who among the Abzakh and Shapsugh answered to almost no one, down to the Wona-ot house servants. We sit inside the madafa, the guest house, where prince and follower alike had the right to walk through the door. And we test the classifications outsiders imposed, from Danilevsky, Lapinsky and Bell, against Circassian historians like Khan Kray and Shura Naghmoka.Then the ending most people don't know. In 1767, ten thousand peasants rise against the Kabardian lords and lose. In 1770, revolt becomes civil war lasting twenty years. Between 1790 and 1810, running almost exactly parallel to the French Revolution, the Circassian people dismantle their own feudal system from the inside. Not conquered out of it. They ended it themselves.Support the show