serfdom

Example Sentences

Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
Recent Examples of serfdom 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 The pandemic decreased competition among laborers, raising wages and putting the oppressive system of serfdom in a death spiral. Cody Cassidy, Smithsonian Magazine, 13 June 2023 All designed to warn us that behind the veneer of jurisprudential poise and Middle American decency, Amy Coney Barrett is some theocratic medievalist monster, primed to send women back to the kitchen, African-Americans back to the plantations, and the country back to serfdom. Gerard Baker, WSJ, 19 Oct. 2020 See All Example Sentences for serfdom
Recent Examples of Synonyms for serfdom
Noun
  • The Black community’s relationship with growing food is colored by exploitive practices, from slavery to sharecropping, tenant farming and peonage, or debt servitude.
    Lyndsay C. Green, Detroit Free Press, 27 Nov. 2024
  • Further, this much control over the autonomy of an athlete’s rights to their own NIL rights combined with a financial obligation could also trigger scrutiny under the 13th Amendment, which, in addition to abolishing slavery, placed prohibitions on peonage (i.e., working against your will).
    Joe Sabin, Forbes, 10 Oct. 2024
Noun
  • Convicted in London for conducting clandestine marriages, Grierson was sentenced to 14 years of penal servitude in the American Colonies.
    Alexandra Cox, Smithsonian Magazine, 10 Mar. 2025
  • These were the years in which capitalism shed its pitiless light on the absurd British soul, with its deep striations of caste and station, its postcolonial taint, most of all its perverted emotional core, full of love and loathing for its own extremes of domination and servitude.
    Rachel Cusk, Harper's Magazine, 19 Feb. 2025
Noun
  • The story of Freedman's Village connects Arlington to the national history of slavery and emancipation.
    Doug Melville, Forbes, 18 Mar. 2025
  • This problem dates back to the justification for slavery, when states' rights were invoked to perpetuate the brutal institution.
    David Faris, Newsweek, 17 Mar. 2025
Noun
  • That’s a world in which Democrats might be able to actually pare back the GOP majority to 51 and embolden Republican senators who are already chafing under the MAGA yoke.
    Chris Stirewalt, The Hill, 14 Mar. 2025
  • Were Cuba to throw off the yoke of dictatorship, some Cuban Americans would return to the island — or go there for the first time.
    Jay Nordlinger, National Review, 12 Mar. 2025
Noun
  • This economic bondage, called sharecropping, was a system by which tenant farmers rented land from large landowners.
    David Cason, The Conversation, 7 Mar. 2025
  • Leigh Bowery, the fashion icon and transgressive performance artist, designed several costumes (assless slacks; sparkly bondage suits) for Atlas’s video pieces and often appeared on-screen as a kind of spiritual hype man.
    Beatrice Loayza, ARTnews.com, 6 Feb. 2025

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Cite this Entry

“Serfdom.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/serfdom. Accessed 23 Mar. 2025.

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