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"Peasants"
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The Local Community After the Empire: Peasants and the Economy in Late Roman North Africa and
Wickham's definitions of economic structures as tributary, feudal, and peasant modes of production offer an ideal framework to appreciate the divergent trajectories of early medieval peasantries in the transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. In this arc of time, differences emerge in how peasants related to the state, landlords, and the market. Through an analysis of the early medieval rural communities from North Africa and Egypt, this article shows that different segments of the peasantry —rich, middle-class, and poor peasants— coexisted in every post-imperial society, just as divergent economic trajectories —market-oriented economy, mixed farming, and subsistence agriculture— were not specific to a certain area but were found coexisting even within a small group of cultivators. In these communities, peasant protagonism worked as an economic engine that led to two different outcomes. When peasants prioritised the subsistence of their household, the community remained cohesive and mutually supporting, notwithstanding the existing social differentiation between its members. Conversely, when peasants engaged in commercialized agriculture, it resulted in deep social polarization, with peasant farmers who became similar to landowners, and lesser peasants who were reduced to tenants.
Journal Article
The Art of Not Being Governed
For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them-slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an \"anarchist history,\" is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states.
In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of \"internal colonialism.\" This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott's work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.
eBook
The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom
Russian rural history has long been based on a 'Peasant Myth', originating with nineteenth-century Romantics and still accepted by many historians today. In this book, Tracy Dennison shows how Russian society looked from below, and finds nothing like the collective, redistributive and market-averse behaviour often attributed to Russian peasants. On the contrary, the Russian rural population was as integrated into regional and even national markets as many of its west European counterparts. Serfdom was a loose garment that enabled different landlords to shape economic institutions, especially property rights, in widely diverse ways. Highly coercive and backward regimes on some landlords' estates existed side-by-side with surprisingly liberal approximations to a rule of law. This book paints a vivid and colourful picture of the everyday reality of rural Russia before the 1861 abolition of serfdom.
eBook
Rural Women in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia
This is the first full-length history of Russian peasant women in the 20th century in English. Filling a significant gap in the literature on rural studies and gender studies of the twentieth century Russia, it is the first to take the story into the twenty-first century. It offers a comprehensive overview of regulations concerning rural women: their employment patterns; marriages, divorces and family life; issues with health and raising children. Rural lives in the Soviet Union were often dramatically different from the common narrative of the Soviet history, and even during the Khrushchev \"Thaw\" in the late 1950s and early 1960s, rural women were excluded from its reforms and liberating policies.
The author, Luibov Denisova - a leading expert in the field of rural gender history in Russia - includes material from previously unavailable or unpublished collections and archives; interviews; sociological research and oral traditions. Overall, the book is a history of all rural women, from ordinary farm girls to agrarian professionals to prostitutes and paints a unique picture of rural women’s life in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia.
PART I. Employment patterns among rural women 1. Unskilled labor in the countryside 2. Female mechanics and machines operators 3. Women at the animal wards 4. Women as collective farm leaders and agricultural specialists 5. Rural intelligentsia 6. Migration to cities and the position of newcomers PART II. Private Life 7. The politics of private life: the evolution and transformation of the Soviet Family Code 8. Marriages 9. Conflicts and divorces 10. Domostroi 11. Alcoholism in the countryside 12. The female face of the criminal world 13. Women of the oldest profession 14. Religion 15. Triple-burden lifestyle 16. Household chores 17. The special environment of the village life 18. Protection of childhood and motherhood in the countryside 19. Abortions
Liubov Denisova is Professor of History at the Russian State University of Oil and Gas. Her books include the bestselling Zhenshchiny russkikh selenii (Women of Russian Villages) and Sud’ba russkoi krestianki (The Fate of Russian Peasant Women).
Irina Mukhina is Assistant Professor of History at Assumption College, Massachusetts, USA. She is author of The Germans of the Soviet Union (also published by Routledge).
eBook
Remembering peasants : a personal history of a vanished world
\"A landmark new history of the peasant experience, exploring a now neglected way of life that once encompassed most of humanity but is vanishing in our time. For over the past century and a half, and still more rapidly in the last seventy years, the world has become increasingly urban, and the peasant way of life--the dominant way of life for humanity since agriculture began well over 6,000 years ago--is disappearing. In this new history of peasantry, social historian Patrick Joyce aims to tell the story of this lost world and its people, and how we can commemorate their way of life. In one sense, this is a global history, ambitious in scope, taking us from the urbanization of the early 19th century to the present day. But more specifically, Joyce's focus is the demise of the European peasantry and of their rites, traditions, and beliefs. Alongside this he brings in stories of individuals as well as places, including his own family, and looks at how peasants and their ways of life have been memorialized in photographs, literature, and in museums. Joyce explores a people whose voice is vastly underrepresented in human history and is usually mediated through others. And now peasants are vanishing in one of the greatest historical transformations of our time. Enlightening, timely, and vitally important, this book commemorates an extraordinary culture whose impact on history--and the future--remains profoundly relevant\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
When Food Became Scarce
When Food Became Scarce is
about the Great Leap Famine of 1958-61. Yixin Chen adopts
a grassroots level analysis to explore an existential question
concerning hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants: why did some
peasants perish while others from the same villages facing the same
collective problems of food scarcity survive?
Viewing the famine as a persistent ordeal, Chen identifies
environment and lineage as two pivotal factors that influenced the
rural populace's destiny. When food quotas under the Maoist
communal dining system plummeted below subsistence or came to a
halt, most individual villagers in the mountainous regions of
southern China turned to their environment for alternative
sustenance, ensuring their survival. More remarkably, across the
nation, more peasants united in self-preservation strategies,
concealing grains to elude excessive state requisitions,
orchestrating food and crop riots, and collectively combating
desperation. Given that the majority of Chinese villages were
historically established on the foundation of consanguine
relationships, creating an obligation among villagers to support
one another due to shared ancestry, lineage emerged as a microlevel
social mechanism that activated diverse forms of collective
resistance. In villages where peasants effectively upheld their
lineage organizations and adopted self-protective measures, their
survival rates exceeded those of villages where the enforcement of
Maoist Great Leap initiatives disrupted the lineage structure,
leaving the communities more vulnerable. When Food Became
Scare reorients the famine narrative, unpacking its
intricacies from the perspective of the survival side.
eBook