Peasant
English feudalism |
---|
Manorialism |
Feudal land tenure in England |
Feudal duties |
Feudalism |
Rural Society |
---|
A peasant is a
In some contexts, "peasant" has a pejorative meaning, even when referring to farm laborers.[4] As early as in 13th-century Germany, the concept of "peasant" could imply "rustic" as well as "robber", as the English term villain[5]/villein.[6][7] In 21st-century English, the word "peasant" can mean "an ignorant, rude, or unsophisticated person".[8] The word rose to renewed popularity in the 1940s–1960s[9] as a collective term, often referring to rural populations of developing countries in general, as the "semantic successor to 'native', incorporating all its condescending and racial overtones".[4]
The word peasantry is commonly used in a non-pejorative sense as a
Etymology
The word "peasant" is derived from the 15th-century French word païsant, meaning one from the pays, or countryside; ultimately from the Latin pagus, or outlying administrative district.[12]
Social position
Peasants typically made up the majority of the agricultural labour force in a pre-industrial society. The majority of the people—according to one estimate 85% of the population—in the Middle Ages were peasants.[13]
Though "peasant" is a word of loose application, once a
Medieval European peasants
The
The relative position of peasants in Western Europe improved greatly after the
The evolution of ideas in an environment of relatively widespread literacy laid the groundwork for the
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.[15] 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."[16]
Early modern Germany
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.[17] 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).[18]
In most of Germany, farming was handled by tenant farmers who paid rents and obligatory services to the landlord—typically a nobleman.[19] 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.[20]
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."[21]
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.[22] 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.[23] The book was widely praised, but some[24] argued that a sense of Frenchness existed in the provinces before 1870.
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
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.[27] This Western use of the term suggests that China is stagnant, "medieval", underdeveloped, and held back by its rural population.[28] 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".[29]
Latin American farmers
In Latin America, the term "peasant" is translated to "Campesino" (from campo—country person), but the meaning has changed over time. While most
The Catholic Bishops of Paraguay have asserted that "Every campesino has a natural right to possess a reasonable allotment of land where he can establish his home, work for [the] subsistence of his family and a secure life".[32]
Historiography
In medieval Europe society was theorized as being organized into
Other research in the field of peasant studies was promoted by
The anthropologist
See also
- Agrarianism
- Cudgel War
- Family economy
- Feudalism
- Folk culture
- Land reform
- Land reform by country
- List of peasant revolts
- Peasant economics
- Peasant Party (political movements in various countries)
- Peasants' Republic
- Peasants' Revolt
- Petty nobility
- Popular revolt in late-medieval Europe
- Serfdom
- Via Campesina
Related terms
- Aloer
- Boor
- Bracciante
- Campesino
- Churl
- Contadino
- Cotter
- Fellah
- Free tenant
- Honbyakushō
- Kulak
- Muzhik
- Pagesos de remença
- Pawn
- Peon
- Serf
- Sharecropper
- Smerd
- Șerb
- Tenant farmer
- Terrone
- Villein
References
- ^ "peasant". Wiktionary.
- ^ "peasant". Merriam-Webster online.
- ISBN 978-1-4191-1711-4. Retrieved 3 June 2012.
- ^ ISBN 978-0521271028.
- ^ "villain". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
- ^ "villein". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
- ^ Edelman, Marc (2013). "What is a peasant? What are peasantries? A briefing paper on issues of definition" (PDF). United Nations Human Rights. Retrieved 11 September 2019.
Very early on, both the English 'peasant,' the French 'paysan' and similar terms sometimes connoted 'rustic,' 'ignorant,' 'stupid,' 'crass' and 'rude,' among many other pejorative terms. [...] The word could also imply criminality, as in thirteenth-century Germany where '"peasant"' meant 'villain, rustic, devil, robber, brigand and looter.'
- ^ "peasant | Definition of peasant in English by Lexico Dictionaries". Lexico Dictionaries | English. Archived from the original on 12 July 2019. Retrieved 12 July 2019.
1 A poor farmer of low social status who owns or rents a small piece of land for cultivation (chiefly in historical use or with reference to subsistence farming in poorer countries)
1.1 informal, derogatory An ignorant, rude, or unsophisticated person; a person of low social status. - ^ "Google Ngram Viewer". books.google.com. Retrieved 12 July 2019.
- ^ "Via Campesina – Globalizing hope, globalizing the struggle !". Via Campesina English. Retrieved 12 July 2019.
- ^ "Google Ngram Viewer". books.google.com. Retrieved 12 July 2019.
- ISBN 978-0877795094
- ^ Alixe Bovey (30 April 2015). "Peasants and their role in rural life". The British Library. British Library. Retrieved 4 July 2020.
- ISBN 978-0060920463
- ISBN 9780582294868
- ISBN 978-0140247688.
- ISBN 978-0416776201
- ^ Wedgwood, Hensleigh (1855). "English Etymologies". Transactions of the Philological Society (8): 117–118.
- ISBN 978-0691636115
- ^ For details on the life of a representative peasant farmer, who migrated in 1710 to Pennsylvania, see Bernd Kratz, he was a farmer, "Hans Stauffer: A Farmer in Germany before his Emigration to Pennsylvania", Genealogist, Fall 2008, Vol. 22 Issue 2, pp. 131–169
- .
- JSTOR 3788392.
- JSTOR 286349.
- ^ Margadant, Ted W. (1979). "French Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: A Review Essay". Agricultural History. 53 (3): 644–651.
- ^ a b Cohen, p. 64
- ^ Cohen, p. 65
- ^ Cohen, p. 68
- ISBN 978-0804733199
- ^ Cohen, p. 73
- ^ "The Agrarian Reform Law" (PDF). Central Intelligence Agency. Retrieved 26 July 2022.
- ISBN 978-980-11-1939-5.
- ^ Paraguayan Bishops' Conference, Pastoral Letter El campesino paraguayo y la tierra (12 June 1983), quoted by Pope Francis in Laudato si', 2015, paragraph 94, accessed 1 January 2024
- Southern, Richard(1952) The Making of the Middle Ages.
- ISBN 978-0136554561.
- ^ Van der Ploeg, Jan Douwe (2012). The new peasantries: struggles for autonomy and sustainability in an era of empire and globalization. Routledge.
- ^ Moore, Barrington (1993). Social origins of dictatorship and democracy: Lord and peasant in the making of the modern world. Vol. 268. Beacon Press.
- .
- ^ Alves, Leonardo Marcondes (2018). Give us this day our daily bread: The moral order of Pentecostal peasants in South Brazil. Master's thesis in Cultural Anthropology. Uppsala universitet.
- ^ Wolf, Eric R. (1969) Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper & Row.
- JSTOR 20027171.
Cited sources
- Cohen, Myron L. (2005). Kinship, Contract, Community, and State Anthropological Perspectives on China. Basel/Berlin/Boston: Stanford University Press. S2CID 246207129.
Bibliography
- Bix, Herbert P. Peasant Protest in Japan, 1590–1884 (1986)[ISBN missing]
- Evans, Richard J., and W. R. Lee, eds. The German Peasantry: Conflict and Community from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries (1986)[ISBN missing]
- Figes, Orlando. "The Peasantry" in Vladimir IUrevich Cherniaev, ed. (1997). Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914–1921. Indiana UP. pp. 543–53. ISBN 0253333334.
- Hobsbawm, E. J. "Peasants and politics", Journal of Peasant Studies, Volume 1, Issue 1 October 1973, pp. 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).[ISBN missing]
- Kingston-Mann, Esther and Timothy Mixter, eds. Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia, 1800–1921 (1991)[ISBN missing]
- 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.[ISBN missing]
- Wolf, Eric R. Peasants (Prentice-Hall, 1966).[ISBN missing]
Recent
- Akram-Lodhi, A. Haroon, and Cristobal Kay, eds. Peasants and Globalization: Political Economy, Rural Transformation and the Agrarian Question (2009)[ISBN missing]
- 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)[ISBN missing]
- Brass, Tom, ed. Latin American Peasants (2003)[ISBN missing]
- Scott, James C. The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (1976)[ISBN missing]