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This article identifies some of the sources that are helpful for the study of peasant society in mid-nineteenth-century Egypt. In describing each of these sources, which involves specifying the nature of the data documented by a source, it highlights the potential use of each source and its limitations. It concludes that the examination of a combination of archival sources, rather than just one, enables the researcher to address some of the limitations of a particular source, and moreover to avoid developing distorted interpretations.

Local governments at the lower level mediate between the state and peasants. Successive Ethiopian regimes weakened 'autonomous' rural elites, preferring cadres dependent on them to run local governments, and fostering 'upward accountability'. The Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front (1991-2018) used local governments, such as Kebeles and Woredas, to control peasants. Few studies exist on state-peasant relationships in Oromia, the largest regional state where the EPRDF faced serious legitimacy issues. This study examines rural governance in Oromia by analyzing two case studies: Dawo Woreda and Sululta town. Interviews, Focus Group Discussions, and consultation of secondary sources were used to collect the data. The study found EPRDF did not allow local governments to become site of self-rule, rather used them to dominate the peasantry. However, there are improvements in local governance after the contentious election of 2005. Afterward, there was a push to use 'model farmers' in rural governance to solidify support for the regime. These created some acceptance of rural policies of the regime, despite continued skepticism due to the perception of Tigrean dominance and repression under EPRDF. The study suggests we need to look beyond formal institutions to understand the exercise of power at the local level in peasant societies.

The inherent complexity of early medieval rural society is now widely recognised by scholars; this is in no small part thanks to the transformative effect that archaeology has had on our understanding of many aspects of peasant life. Yet it is only in the last twenty years that an archaeology of peasant society of early medieval Christian Iberia has emerged to challenge the supremacy of deeply entrenched historiographical motifs, explored in detail herein, which underplay peasant agency, confine peasants to familiar contextual paradigms (poverty, risk-aversion, resistance), and treat the peasantry as an undifferentiated mass of largely passive ‘recipients’ of History. This article focuses upon a case study – early medieval northern Iberia – to show that, far from an auxiliary discipline used to bolster or reject interpretations founded upon documentary analysis, archaeology now underpins our efforts to understand complex aspects of the society and economy of the early medieval countryside.

In the realm of aesthetics, tragedy is known as “the highest stage and crown”, and its artistry is difficult to describe in simple words, as it mostly touches our senses and reveals the supreme value of beauty. Cao Yu wrote his play Yuanye against the backdrop of rural feudal society. The thesis will be based on Aristotle’s theory of tragedy and will talk about its tragic nature from three aspects. Firstly, Cao Yu has created many vivid and tragic minor characters; secondly, the realism and tragedy of the plot details build up multiple dramatic conflicts, amplifying the tragedy and giving the audience strong sensory stimulation to achieve resonance; finally, its profound theme of revenge is a manifestation of the inferiority of the Chinese peasants under the feudal society the - absurd tradition of “ The son must pay his father’s debts”, which amplifies the tragic effect of the whole play.

In this article we analyse the root causes of the high level of resilience of one particular peasant society: the Campine area. While peasant societies have often been deemed one of the most vulnerable societies in the face of crises and disasters, because of their lack of capital, technology and power, we show that peasant communities possessed some important weapons of the weak. Thanks to strong property rights, collective action, a diverse economic portfolio and inclusive poor relief institutions the Campine peasants were able to weather both the late medieval crises, harvest failures as well as the threat of sand drifts between the fourteenth and nineteenth century.

This article proposes to interpret the impact that the use of the concept of the peasant mode of production, as theorised by Chris Wickham, has had on Iberian historical writing on the early Middle Ages. To that end, studies on different regions of the peninsula (from Galicia to Aragon, and from the Algarve to the Cantabrian zone), published by historians and archaeologists over the last few years, will be analysed in what follows. The objective of this article is to make sense of the historiographical dynamics underpinning a complex concept which has, with few exceptions, been employed more as a useful interpretative shortcut made necessary by the lack of empirical evidence, than as a research strategy in its own right, operative within the broader Marxist framework for which it was originally devised.

When a populist movement elected Thaksin Shinawatra as prime minister of Thailand in 2001, many of the country’s urban elite dismissed the outcome as just another symptom of rural corruption, a traditional patronage system dominated by local strongmen pressuring their neighbors through political bullying and vote-buying. In Thailand’s Political Peasants , however, Andrew Walker argues that the emergence of an entirely new socioeconomic dynamic has dramatically changed the relations of Thai peasants with the state, making them a political force to be reckoned with. Whereas their ancestors focused on subsistence, this generation of middle-income peasants seeks productive relationships with sources of state power, produces cash crops, and derives additional income through non-agricultural work. In the increasingly decentralized, disaggregated country, rural villagers and farmers have themselves become entrepreneurs and agents of the state at the local level, while the state has changed from an extractor of taxes to a supplier of subsidies and a patron of development projects. Thailand’s Political Peasants provides an original, provocative analysis that encourages an ethnographic rethinking of rural politics in rapidly developing countries. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in Ban Tiam, a rural village in northern Thailand, Walker shows how analyses of peasant politics that focus primarily on rebellion, resistance, and evasion are becoming less useful for understanding emergent forms of political society.

Two worldviews are now contending for cultural dominance: the open-system model long promoted by economists, here called the “image of unlimited good,” and a more traditional closed-system view, Foster’s “image of limited good,” still widely found among peasant societies today. The former rests on the assumption that people “create” wealth, an illusion that conflates the properties of wealth’s real and virtual forms while ignoring the economy’s extreme reliance on fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources. The laws of thermodynamics dictate that as “growth” occurs in such a system, it fundamentally destroys; thus the net sum cannot be positive, and the system is not expanding but steadily running down. The latter rests on the assumption that most of the “goods” valued by people in life are scarce, being derived from finite raw materials through the expenditure of human labor and extrasomatic energy. Such goods are therefore “subtractable,” their limited supply forming a commons that must somehow be shared. Based on an ethnological argument centering on the successful management of scarce water for irrigation, a shift toward the closed-system worldview is shown to be necessary if people are to act collectively to limit their expanding consumption, a change already widely underway, particularly in the global South.

This article looks at how rural inhabitants navigated state power under a regime led by a former socialist party that negotiated its conversion to a market economy while keeping tight control on the whole society. In that regard, it addresses adjustment in a very specific context, by analysing a distinctive chronology, raising the ruling party's ability to negotiate with the international financial institutions, and considering popular reactions from a rural point of view. The regime led by the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) managed to delay measures of structural adjustment during the 1990s and 2000s while deepening structures of state control it partly inherited from the former military junta. Brutal structural adjustment plans were refused, while international financial institutions were kept away from the Ethiopian government's policy mix, by way of elaborate ideological and institutional arrangements. The EPRDF coined its own version of the “developmental state” and renewed state control of the economy while deepening its articulation to global markets. Under the EPRDF, all sectors of society and especially peasantries were closely monitored and mobilized in the name of development. But although the open expression of dissent remained rare, peasants resorted to many strategies to cope with political control and to some extent divert it. By taking agricultural policies as a case study, the article describes peasant practices and questions differences between resistance, false compliance, and diversion, underlining how blurred such labels can actually be.

In 2016, M. Laborda-Pemán and T. De Moor issued a call to advance the conversation between commons scholars and historians. This paper argues that in order to further this conversation, in the case of Western Europe more attention needs to be paid to the centuries preceding the blossoming of the commons in the high Middle Ages. It focuses on NW Iberia to show that in this case, as in others, such developments need to be assessed against the processes triggered by the collapse of the Roman Empire. On the basis of the extant sources, and building upon some of the concerns of critical institutionalism, it then considers some of the theoretical avenues that could facilitate such a dialogue: addressing the multifunctional, socially embedded nature of institutions; the weight of social inequalities and power relations in their configuration and functioning; the role of conflict in the definition of norms and their transformation over time; and the discursive practices aimed at legitimising specific institutional arrangements.