Among the notable surviving works of that period are A Meeting of the Four Years' Sejm (1793) and Kościuszko's Oath at Kraków's Old Town Market (1797), Lithuanian Peasants, Freeing Peasants from Serfdom in Merkinė.
From 1553 until the abolishment of serfdom by Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor in 1781 Hertník belonged for the most part to the Forgách (Forgáč, Forgács) family.
Tibetologist Melvyn Goldstein wrote in 1971 that "Tibet was characterized by a form of institutionalized inequality that can be called pervasive serfdom".
Ilya Ulyanov was born in Astrakhan, to Nikolai Vasilievich Ulyanov (1765—1838) (sometimes as Ulyanin), a port-city tailor and a former serf who came from Sergachsky District, Nizhegorod Governorate and received his freedom from an landowner Stepan Mikhailovich Brekhov; and Anna Alekseyevna Smirnova (1793—1871), a daughter of a rich city-dweller Aleksei Lukianovich Smirnov (a son of Lukian Smirnov who hailed from rich Oirats of Middle Asia).
Jakub Szela (was born 1787, Smarżowa, in Galicia - died 1862 or 1866, Vicşani, in Bukovina, now Romania) was a Polish leader of a pro-Austrian peasant uprising against the Polish gentry in Galicia in 1846; directed against manorial property and oppression (for example, the manorial prisons) and rising against serfdom; scores of manors were attacked and their inhabitants murdered.
Pico Iyer, a journalist whose father is a friend of the Dalai Lama and who has himself been in private conversation with him for over thirty years writes: "Almost as soon as he came into exile, in 1959, the Dalai Lama seized the chance to get rid of much of the red tape and serfdom that had beset Tibet in the past".