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Young women offer berries to visitors to their izba home, 1909. Those who had been serfs among the Russian peasantry were officially emancipated in 1861. Photograph by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky.

A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or farmer, especially one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord.^[1][2] In Europe, peasants were divided into three classes according to their personal status: slave, serf, and free tenant. Peasants either hold title to land in fee simple, or hold land by any of several forms of land tenure, among them socage, quit-rent, leasehold, and copyhold.^[3]

The word peasantry is commonly used in a non-pejorative sense as a collective noun for the rural population in the poor and under-developed countries of the world.

Etymology

A farm in 1794

The word "peasant" is derived from the 15th century French word païsant (compare Italian paesano), meaning one from the pays, or countryside; ultimately from the Latin pagus, or outlying administrative district.^[4]

Social position

Peasants typically made up the majority of the agricultural labour force in a pre-industrial society. The majority of the people in the Middle Ages were peasants.

Though "peasant" is a word of loose application, once a market economy had taken root, the term peasant proprietors was frequently used to describe the traditional rural population in countries where smallholders farmed much of the land. More generally, the word "peasant" is sometimes used to refer pejoratively to those considered to be "lower class", perhaps defined by poorer education and/or a lower income.

Medieval European peasants

The open field system of agriculture dominated most of northern Europe during medieval times and endured until the nineteenth century in many areas. Under this system, peasants lived on a manor presided over by a lord or a bishop of the church. Peasants paid rent or labor services to the lord in exchange for their right to cultivate the land. Fallowed land, pastures, forests, and wasteland were held in common. The open field system required cooperation among the peasants of the manor.^[5] It was gradually replaced by individual ownership and management of land.

The relative position of peasants in Western Europe improved greatly after the Black Death had reduced the population of medieval Europe in the mid-14th century: resulting in more land for the survivors and making labor more scarce. In the wake of this disruption to the established order, later centuries saw the invention of the printing press, the development of widespread literacy and the enormous social and intellectual changes of the Enlightenment.

The evolution of ideas in an environment of relatively widespread literacy laid the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution, which enabled mechanically and chemically augmented agricultural production while simultaneously increasing the demand for factory workers in cities, who became what Karl Marx called the proletariat. The trend toward individual ownership of land, typified in England by Enclosure, displaced many peasants from the land and compelled them, often unwillingly, to become urban factory-workers, who came to occupy the socio-economic stratum formerly the preserve of the medieval peasants.

This process happened in an especially pronounced and truncated way in Eastern Europe. Lacking any catalysts for change in the 14th century, Eastern European peasants largely continued upon the original medieval path until the 18th and 19th centuries. Serfdom was abolished in Russia in 1861, and while many peasants would remain in areas where their family had farmed for generations, the changes did allow for the buying and selling of lands traditionally held by peasants, and for landless ex-peasants to move to the cities.^[6] Even before emancipation in 1861, serfdom was on the wane in Russia. The proportion of serfs within the empire had gradually decreased "from 45-50 percent at the end of the eighteenth century, to 37.7 percent in 1858."^[7]

Early modern Germany

"Feiernde Bauern" ("Celebrating Peasants"), artist unknown, 18th or 19th century

In Germany, peasants continued to center their lives in the village well into the 19th century. They belonged to a corporate body and helped to manage the community resources and to monitor community life.^[8] In the East they had the status of serfs bound permanently to parcels of land. A peasant is called a "Bauer" in German and "Bur" in Low German (pronounced in English like boor).^[9]

In most of Germany, farming was handled by tenant farmers who paid rents and obligatory services to the landlord—typically a nobleman.^[10] Peasant leaders supervised the fields and ditches and grazing rights, maintained public order and morals, and supported a village court which handled minor offenses. Inside the family the patriarch made all the decisions, and tried to arrange advantageous marriages for his children. Much of the villages' communal life centered on church services and holy days. In Prussia, the peasants drew lots to choose conscripts required by the army. The noblemen handled external relationships and politics for the villages under their control, and were not typically involved in daily activities or decisions.^[11]

France

Information about the complexities of the French Revolution, especially the fast-changing scene in Paris, reached isolated areas through both official announcements and long-established oral networks. Peasants responded differently to different sources of information. The limits on political knowledge in these areas depended more on how much peasants chose to know than on bad roads or illiteracy. Historian Jill Maciak concludes that peasants "were neither subservient, reactionary, nor ignorant."^[12]

In his seminal book Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France, 1880–1914 (1976), historian Eugen Weber traced the modernization of French villages and argued that rural France went from backward and isolated to modern and possessing a sense of French nationhood during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.^[13] He emphasized the roles of railroads, republican schools, and universal military conscription. He based his findings on school records, migration patterns, military-service documents and economic trends. Weber argued that until 1900 or so a sense of French nationhood was weak in the provinces. Weber then looked at how the policies of the Third Republic created a sense of French nationality in rural areas.^[14] The book was widely praised, but some^[15] argued that a sense of Frenchness existed in the provinces before 1870.

Use of the term for Chinese farmers

Farmers in China have been sometimes referred to as "peasants" in English-language sources. However, the traditional term for farmer, nongfu (农夫), simply refers to "farmer" or "agricultural worker". In the 19th century, Japanese intellectuals reinvented the Chinese terms fengjian (封建) for "feudalism" and nongmin (农民), or "farming people," terms used in the description of feudal Japanese society.^[16] These terms created a negative image of Chinese farmers by making a class distinction where one had not previously existed.^[16]Anthropologist Myron Cohen considers these terms to be neologisms that represented a cultural and political invention. He writes:^[17]

This divide represented a radical departure from tradition: F.W. Mote and others have shown how especially during the later imperial era (Ming and Qing dynasties), China was notable for the cultural, social, political, and economic interpenetration of city and countryside. But the term nongmin did enter China in association with Marxist and non-Marxist Western perceptions of the "peasant," thereby putting the full weight of the Western heritage to use in a new and sometimes harshly negative representation of China's rural population. Likewise, with this development Westerners found it all the more "natural" to apply their own historically derived images of the peasant to what they observed or were told in China. The idea of the peasant remains powerfully entrenched in the Western perception of China to this very day.

Modern Western writers often continue to use the term peasant for Chinese farmers, typically without ever defining what the term means.^[18] This Western use of the term suggests that China is stagnant, "medieval", underdeveloped, and held back by its rural population.^[19] Cohen writes that the "imposition of the historically burdened Western contrasts of town and country, shopkeeper and peasant, or merchant and landlord, serves only to distort the realities of the Chinese economic tradition".^[20]

Historiography

Portrait sculpture of 18th-century French peasants by artist George S. Stuart, in the permanent collection of the Museum of Ventura County, Ventura, California

In medieval Europe society was theorized as being organized into three estates: those who work, those who pray, and those who fight.^[21] The Annales School of 20th century French historians emphasized the importance of peasants. Its leader Fernand Braudel devoted the first volume—called The Structures of Everyday Life—of his major work, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century to the largely silent and invisible world that existed below the market economy.

Other research in the field of peasant studies was promoted by Florian Znaniecki and Fei Xiaotong, and in the post-1945 studies of the "great tradition" and the "little tradition" in the work of Robert Redfield. In the 1960s, anthropologists and historians began to rethink the role of peasant revolt in world history and in their own disciplines. Peasant revolution was seen as a Third World response to capitalism and imperialism.^[22]

The anthropologist Eric Wolf, for instance, drew on the work of earlier scholars in the Marxist tradition such as Daniel Thorner, who saw the rural population as a key element in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Wolf and a group of scholars^[who?] criticized both Marx and the field of modernization theorists for treating peasants as lacking the ability to take action.^[23]James C. Scott's field observations in Malaysia convinced him that villagers were active participants in their local politics even though they were forced to use indirect methods. Many of these activist scholars looked back to the peasant movement in India and to the theories of the revolution in China led by Mao Zedong starting in the 1920s. The anthropologist Myron Cohen, however, asked why the rural population in China were called "peasants" rather than "farmers", a distinction he called political rather than scientific.^[24] One important outlet for their scholarly work and theory was the Journal of Peasant Studies.

See also

The Peasant Wedding, by Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1567 or 1568

"Peasants in a Tavern" by Adriaen van Ostade (c. 1635), at the Alte Pinakothek, Munich

• Agrarianism


• Family economy


• Feudalism


• Folk culture


• Peasant economics


• 
  Peasant Party (political movements in various countries)


• Peasants' Revolt


• Petty nobility


• Popular revolt in late-medieval Europe


• Serfdom

Related terms

• Gopnik


• Aloer


• Boor


• Bracciante


• Campesino


• Churl


• Contadino


• Cotter


• Fellah


• Free tenant


• Hari


• Honbyakushō


• Kotsias


• Krestyanin


• Kulak


• Muzhik


• Nóngmín


• Pagesos de remença


• Peon


• Serf


• Sharecropper


• Smerd


• Ṭǎran


• Tenant farmer


• Vecin


• Villein

References

Bibliography

• Bix, Herbert P. Peasant Protest in Japan, 1590-1884 (1986)


• Cohen, Myron. "Cultural and Political Inventions in Modern China: The Case of the Chinese 'Peasant'", Daedalus 122.2 (Spring 1993): 151-170.


• Evans, Richard J., and W. R. Lee, eds. The German Peasantry: Conflict and Community from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries (1986)


• Hobsbawm, E. J. "Peasants and politics," Journal of Peasant Studies, Volume 1, Issue 1 October 1973, pages 3 – 22 - article discusses the definition of "peasant" as used in social sciences


• Macey, David A. J. Government and Peasant in Russia, 1861-1906; The Pre-History of the Stolypin Reforms (1987).


• Thomas, William I., and Florian Znaniecki. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (2 vol. 1918); classic sociological study; complete text online free
  


• Wharton, Clifton R. Subsistence agriculture and economic development,. Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co., 1969. Print.o.


• Wolf, Eric R. Peasants (Prentice-Hall, 1966).


• Wolf, Eric R. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (Harper & Row, 1969).

Recent

• Akram-Lodhi, A. Haroon, and Cristobal Kay, eds. Peasants and Globalization: Political Economy, Rural Transformation and the Agrarian Question (2009)


• Barkin, David. "Who Are The Peasants?" Latin American Research Review, 2004, Vol. 39 Issue 3, pp. 270–281


• Brass, Tom. Peasants, Populism and Postmodernism (2000)


• Brass, Tom. Class, Culture and the Agrarian Myth (2014)


• Brass, Tom, ed. New Farmers' Movements in India (1995)


• Brass, Tom, ed. Latin American Peasants (2003)


• 
  Scott, James C. The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (1976)

External links

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