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
  • For them, freedom meant ending serfdom too.
    — Literary Hub, 25 Sep. 2025
  • 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
  • Slavery had existed for millennia in ways akin to medieval serfdom.
    — Washington Post, 1 Apr. 2022
  • 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 advocates, meanwhile, found common cause with defenders of serfdom.
    — Frederic J. Frommer, Smithsonian Magazine, 30 Aug. 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
  • Those who forego or simply can’t afford it are essentially consigning themselves to economic serfdom.
    — New York Times, 23 Feb. 2021
  • 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
  • When gold was discovered on Hispaniola, the native population was forced into serfdom to mine it.
    — Longreads, 5 Feb. 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
  • Will Afghan women be subjugated in a 21st-century serfdom of the Taliban?
    — Time, 19 Jan. 2023
  • In Europe, this started to change after the French Revolution, which abolished feudalism and serfdom.
    — Robert Sullivan, Vogue, 30 Nov. 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • During the Civil War, Lincoln saw political advantage in comparing serfdom and slavery.
    — Frederic J. Frommer, Smithsonian Magazine, 30 Aug. 2022
  • Or that Franciscan fathers — members of an order dedicated to lives of poverty and humility — forced tribes to give up their foods, customs and religion in the name of Christ, rewarding them with serfdom.
    — Gustavo Arellano, Los Angeles Times, 4 July 2026
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • Datebook Picks If Firs is a vestige of serfdom, Joseph O’Malley as eternal graduate student Pétya forecasts the coming revolution.
    — Theater Critic, San Francisco Chronicle, 5 Feb. 2026
  • 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
  • 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

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'serfdom.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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