peasantry

1. The social class constituted by peasants.
2. The condition, rank, or conduct of a peasant.

Class of people, of low social status, who depend mainly on agricultural labour for subsistence.

Peasants work the land, but even where they do not own the land they work they are distinguished from serfs by their freedom to move and to dispose of at least a part of any surplus output through the market. Still of great consequence in populous Asiatic societies such as India, they are a much diminished class in Europe. Their political role was problematic for the victorious Bolsheviks in Russia after 1917 since Marx had envisaged socialism growing out of the clash of bourgeoisie and proletariat in industrialized societies where the peasantry were of little account. After an initial attempt to present their regime as one legitimated by an alliance of workers and peasants, the Bolsheviks effectively destroyed the Russian peasantry or kulaks through collectivization of agriculture. For Chinese Communists, a generation later, the rural population was of such overwhelming importance that peasants had to be given greater ideological recognition in Maoism, but they were once again deprived of effective access to markets by collectivization of agriculture until 1978. In both the Soviet Union and China the fall in agricultural output following collectivization and its subsequent resurgence provided a cogent empirical critique of practical socialism. In Western Europe and North America, by contrast, the productivity of peasant and family farming has been far outpaced by larger-scale corporate agriculture, although peasant politics persisted (for instance, in the Fourth Republic).

— Charles Jones

Medievalists have questioned whether Britain ever had a social group to which the word peasant was applicable, and would certainly question the continued existence of such a group beyond the Middle Ages. In literary sources the term was occasionally used of labourers, implying someone of low birth and inferior standing. The term also acquired romantic overtones, with the peasantry depicted as the humble members of a fast-disappearing rural society, a Hardy-esque chorus.

As a result, it has been employed as a useful shorthand term without specific definition. Most historians use the term to mean small landowners and/or small farmers, but it can also be used loosely to include the cottager, the commoner, and the squatter.

The term has also become a catch-all for the social group largely displaced through the economic conditions prevailing in the post-Restoration period, or at enclosure. Some have argued that the term is inappropriate after 1750 because by then England had no peasantry in the continental sense of the word. However, it is accepted that peasants survived in Ireland and in thinly populated parts of Wales and Scotland.

The original agriculturists of the northern Eurasian plain lived a communal, seminomadic existence, based on slash-and-burn cultivation. By the time of Kievan Rus, the defining characteristics of a peasantry were in already in evidence: an agricultural population bound by trade and tribute to a wider world, but in an incomplete and dependent way. Princes imposed taxes and compulsory services, but only with the rise of Muscovy (from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries) were peasants enserfed - permanently bound to their lords or lands. Despite periodic revolts, this condition continued until 1861.

Peter I inaugurated a campaign of Westernization that imitated European modes of life and government. Perhaps ironically, in an age when Western Europe was abandoning serfdom, these initiatives increased the exploitation, as well as the traditionalism, of Russian peasants. St. Petersburg's Italianate palaces were built with conscripted peasant labor, and Russia's new Western-style army and bureaucracy were supported by a range of new taxes, among them the "soul tax" that was now demanded of peasants on top of the dues they paid their lords. Exploitation, however, was often indirect. The village commune (obshchina) distributed lands and obligations among its members, serving as a buffer between peasants and the outside world.

Although peasants generally regarded the cities and the Europeanized elite with suspicion, they were not totally isolated from urban society. Permanently bound to the soil, they could still depart temporarily to earn money in crafts, trade, or wage employment. In some provinces more than half the adult males engaged in work away from villages. A few even became millionaires.

Peasant agriculture flourished among the Slavic (and mainly Orthodox Christian) population of the Russian Empire. During the eighteenth century arable cultivation expanded into the steppe grasslands of the south and southeast, and some serfowners tried to introduce new crops and systems of cultivation into these regions. Most, however, left peasants to organize and cultivate the land according to traditional norms. Under communal tenure, which flourished among Russian peasants but not among Ukrainians and other non-Russians, each household received strips of land in many different fields. The number of these could be increased or decreased to match a family's ability to work. Grains were planted in a fixed rotation, and crop yields were often disappointing, even in areas of higher fertility.

Russia's defeat in the Crimean War (1855) convinced its leaders to modernize, and the result was a vast array of reforms, foremost among them emancipation of the serfs in 1861. For the sake of social stability, former serf owners were generously compensated, retaining a substantial share of the land. Freed peasants had to reimburse the state for their land. The commune kept the job of distributing lands and tax obligations. This arrangement produced little innovation and less prosperity, though migration to Western Siberia during the later nineteenth century did offer some hopeful signs of change. At the end of the nineteenth century crop yields grew more rapidly than the population, and the Russian Empire became a major exporter of grain and other agricultural products.

In the general census of 1897, the empire had a population of 125,000,000, of whom roughly three-fourths were legally classified as peasants, and an even greater proportion resided in rural areas. Peasant unrest was endemic, and in the revolution of 1905 - 1907 peasants rose up to confiscate private lands and drive off their former lords. Harsh punishment was followed by a new ("Stolypin") land reform promoted by Prime Minister Peter Stolypin, designed to replace communal tenure with private ownership, but the outbreak of World War I prevented its full implementation. In 1917, unrest returned. Private lands were seized and redistributed and manor houses destroyed. The village commune took on a new life.

At this time peasants were roughly eighty percent of Russia's population, impoverished, tradition-minded, and suspicious of outsiders. Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik (Communist) Party tried to enlist them in its revolution, but needed their grain and labor power more than their goodwill. During the Civil War of 1917 - 1922 and later during the industrialization drive of the 1930s the Party resorted to confiscation and coercion. Poor and landless peasants were thought to be natural allies of the urban proletariat, but efforts to promote class warfare in the villages produced instability and food shortages. Under Josef Stalin's leadership collective agriculture was forcibly introduced, but instead of producing efficiency it caused disruption and starvation, with the loss of millions of lives. After several years of turmoil peasants were assured the right to cultivate small private plots alongside their duties to the collective farm (kolkhoz). Throughout the following decades these plots produced a vastly disproportionate share of the country's food.

The Soviet Union became an urban industrial society, but its rural roots were poorly nourished. At the time the USSR ceased to exist, some twentyfive percent of Russia's population continued to lived on the land, resistant (for the most part) to privatization or economic reform.

Bibliography

Blum, Jerome. (1961). Lord and Peasant in Russia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Moon, David. (1999). The Russian Peasantry, 1600 - 1930: The World the Peasants Made. New York: Addison-Wesley.

Robinson, Geroid T. (1932). Rural Russia Under the Old Regime: A History of the Landlord-Peasant World and a Prologue to the Peasant Revolution of 1917. London and New York: Longmans, Green and Company.

Shanin, Teodor. (1985). The Roots of Otherness: Russia's Turn of Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

—ROBERT E. JOHNSON

The existence of a European peasantry did not change fundamentally between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, but during those three hundred years significant shifts in the status, occupation, and livelihood of peasants occurred at various times and places. Generally speaking, the fortunes of Europe's agriculturalists conformed to a cycle of upswing until the later sixteenth century, followed by depression or even crisis, which lasted in some parts of Europe until the late seventeenth century, to be succeeded by a recovery in the eighteenth. Although Europe's peasantries had been the prisoners of Malthusian checks—with war, famine, and disease serving to restore a population in danger of outgrowing available resources to a new homeostatic balance—by the eighteenth century substantial and sustainable population growth in the countryside was being achieved by means of improved crop rotations, the planting of new crops (not least potatoes, which in many instances replaced grain as the staple of subsistence), and some technological innovations. But the pace of change was slow and incremental: there was no "agricultural revolution," and it is doubtful whether changes in the rural economy were responsible in any direct fashion for the supposed industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. Rather, the increased stratification of rural society, above all the emergence of a sizeable class of cottars and landless, which is an almost universal feature of early modern Europe, created pressures for employment that were often satisfied by the rise of "proto-industries" based in the countryside; the alternative, especially in much of southern Europe, was seasonal mass migration into towns, with peasants returning to their fields during the months of plowing, sowing, and harvesting.

Tenancy and Inheritance

Two contrary strands can be observed in the pattern of farm-holding peasants' stake in the land after 1500: their rights of tenancy became generally more secure, even if hereditary leases were often reduced to term-leases, but their possession of the land (outright ownership was rare) was progressively eroded by nobles' and bourgeois' acquiring extensive estates, on which the peasants might continue as rent-paying smallholders, but where they were frequently employed as wage-laborers or obliged to enter into sharecropping agreements. The classic instance is France, where generally favorable rights of tenancy were powerless to prevent a decline in peasant landholding in the face of purchases by the administrative nobility (noblesse de robe), so that by the eighteenth century peasants held no more than one-third of the land. A similar tale unfolded in southern Italy, though here it was nobles of the blood who became major latifundistas. On a parallel track, in Spain the common land (forest and pasture) at the disposal of the peasant community was sold to meet growing tax demands; after 1570, 40 percent of commons, known as baldíos, were alienated, ending up in the hands of the aristocracy or the church, which came to own two-thirds of all agricultural land in the peninsula. Secure rights of tenure were to be found in parts of the Holy Roman Empire (with peasants holding up to 90 percent of the land in western Germany, around 70 percent in Austria, and even 60 percent east of the Elbe River in Brandenburg), as well as in much of Scandinavia, or else—under a commercial agrarian regime—in parts of the Low Countries (where hereditary leases were common, even if farms were often very small), and in Catalonia. In England, where the yeoman paying a market-determined ground rent to a capitalist landlord is supposed to have displaced the traditional peasant, customary tenures of manorial provenance in fact persisted well into the seventeenth century. The beginnings of capitalist agriculture were as likely to be driven by such peasants (who in any case had long been able to dispose of their customary tenancies on the open market) as by freeholders or "yeoman" leaseholders. Indeed, contrary to received opinion, security of tenure may have stimulated a land market and agricultural investment by peasants, as has been argued for western Brabant within the orbit of Antwerp, or for many areas of France, where village elites embraced specialized crops and complex crop rotations.

The efforts by landlords to shorten leases after 1500, however, can be seen in France, in Italy (where short-term contracts replaced customary leases), or in Spain (though emphyteutic leases, that is, perpetual leases at fixed rents, were common in the north), and, under a harsher sign, in the German lands east of the Elbe, where hereditary tenures were relegated to leases revocable at will. Although the boundaries between areas of partible and impartible inheritance customs throughout Europe barely shifted over the centuries, landlords in southern Germany, a region poised between the two, showed some willingness after 1500 to encourage impartibility in place of equal division of the farm and its inventory among the heirs, not least in order to underpin the peasantry as a fiscal and economic resource. An ideological variant of this policy was pursued by the Austrian Habsburg rulers of the Tyrol, who, in one alpine valley on the linguistic borderland with Italy, promoted impartibility among their ethnic German full-holding peasants in order to shore up their role as local agents of state policy, but who allowed their Romance-speaking subjects, an underclass of cottars and migrants, to cleave to partibility. Where partibility was practiced (as in all of Mediterranean Europe), the size of farms tended to decline; in France, most holdings were less than five hectares (about twelve acres), with up to 90 percent of the rural population having to seek alternative employment as manual laborers. But the consequence was not invariably the rise of a rural proletariat, as shown by the example of western Germany, where the manpower required by agrarian regimes such as viticulture could absorb (at least seasonally) the labor of members of the peasant household otherwise destined for impoverishment.

Serfdom

After 1500 the burdens and restrictions upon European peasants are held to have followed two sharply diverging paths: the disappearance of servile obligations in the west, whether negotiated or achieved by popular resistance (as in the remenças revolt in Old Catalonia before 1486), and their intensification in northeastern and east-central Europe. Although broadly accurate, this verdict is open to misinterpretation. It elides the distinction between personal and tenurial serfdom: even in England, where serfdom is supposed to have vanished by 1500, the East Anglian rebels in Kett's Rebellion of 1549 well knew the difference between bondmen and "bondy lands."

Forms of tenurial unfreedom persisted in parts of northwestern Germany, while in southern Germany lords before and after 1500 deployed personal or residential serfdom as an instrument to consolidate small or fragmented territories. East of the Elbe, by contrast, a "second serfdom" became prevalent, whose hallmark has been taken as hereditary personal subjection, placing severe restrictions upon movement and marriage, ultimately coupled with onerous labor-services and the expropriation of peasant farms. In fact, the origins of a revived serfdom in eastern Europe were identical to those in the west: the lords' attempts against the background of the late medieval demographic and economic downturn to find tenants for abandoned farmsteads. Only gradually and much later, in the seventeenth century, did serfdom as a personal disability with degrading connotations become widespread, often, but not always, linked to the rise of large cereal-producing commercial latifundia under aristocratic control, which relied upon the corvées of unpaid (sometimes paid) forced labor. But a settled peasantry, working its own farms, by no means disappeared east of the Elbe; demesne farming, with attendant labor-services, was slow to develop, especially in Russia (in Belarus it was even abandoned in the later seventeenth century in the wake of the Northern Wars). Moreover, in the case of Denmark, labor services on demesne estates were embedded in a form of personal subjection (vornedskab) that granted peasants security of tenure but no freedom to move.

Peasant Economic Activity

The image of peasants as possessing tenants, farming their lands with family labor within a nuclear household, underwent much retouching in early modern Europe. In many areas peasants turned their hand to alternative employment such as rural crafts or petty dealing, to the point where, as with the maritime provinces of the northern Netherlands, a traditional peasantry is supposed to have disappeared—or, rather, to have subsisted as one rural class alongside other groups no longer defined by agricultural livelihoods. The marked recovery in European population from the late fifteenth century onward certainly put pressure on land and resources, squeezing the chances of heirs inheriting farms that were viable in their own right, yet the spread of rural manufacturing and the growth of an underclass of landless or wage-working hired hands were not, contrary to expectations, seriously interrupted by the renewed economic and demographic calamities of the early seventeenth century. In some areas the need for peasant by-employment was obviously shaped by ecological constraints independent of secular cycles (the harsh climate of Scandinavia, for instance, or the poor soils of upland Castile). In others, such as many parts of Germany, France, northern Italy, and, somewhat later, Russia, a dense urban network together with constraints on manufacturing capacity within towns created a demand for goods that could be produced more cheaply and flexibly in the countryside, commonly through outwork by means of the "putting-out system." Urban capitalists and entrepreneurs advanced money, raw materials, or tools of trade to dependent piece-workers ("outworkers") in return for delivery of finished or semi-finished goods. Such a system was particularly applied to the production of textiles—linen, fustian (a linen/cotton blend, which required merchants north of the Alps to supply Mediterranean cotton to peasants who locally could only grow flax), the woolen and worsted "new draperies," or silk.

But a distinction needs to be drawn between such put-out by-employments, controlled by urban entrepreneurs, and the subsequent growth of genuine proto-industries in the countryside that were able to flourish precisely because they evaded urban supervision (as with Italian silk-weaving, or Bohemian and Silesian textile production). State authorities did not always look kindly upon unregulated rural manufacturing; in France, the textile boom of the sixteenth century gave way to decline in the seventeenth, as state manufactories were set up with strict quality controls. Nevertheless, no matter how far the peasant economy was penetrated by crafts and manufacturing, the essential structure of peasant society remained unaltered (barring the northern Netherlands, and ultimately, for different reasons, England). A switch to the secondary sector and production for market should not be taken as automatic solvents of the peasant household and economy; indeed, it has been argued (for France and the southern Netherlands, for instance) that such diversification provided the very safety-valve that allowed traditional peasant social structures to survive.

From the time of the late medieval economic depression onward, these influences set their stamp on the peasant economy as a whole. There were few regions of Europe that did not witness a diversification into new crops, especially fodder plants grown as catch crops (so-called green manures), which restored nitrogen to the soil, and the cultivation of industrial crops such as flax, dyestuffs (saffron and madder, but especially woad) and, by the seventeenth century, tobacco. The initiative for the development of commercial farming lay as often as not with the peasants themselves, especially in urbanized areas such as the Low Countries, where a ready-made consumer market and good communications (via canals, and latterly paved roads) enabled peasants with holdings of five hectares or less to survive and prosper, not least because they were able to raise crop yields appreciably. A similar story unfolded in Catalonia, where advanced agriculture benefited from the stimulus of Barcelona as a major outlet. In both cases, the resilience of a diversified peasant agriculture was underpinned by long-term leases and moderate ground rents. The advantages of land drainage and reclamation, moreover, so evident in the Low Countries, were matched elsewhere, as in the Lombard plain, by irrigation systems that allowed peasants to dispense with fallowing altogether. The prevalence in much of northern Italy of intercropping or particulture (coltura promiscua), with grain, olives, and vines grown intermingled, allowed peasants to seize regionally or seasonally varying market opportunities and so to spread their risk.

Nevertheless, such agrarian regimes were often managed by sharecropping, in which a proportion of the harvest (usually half) was surrendered to a bourgeois or noble landowner. The general verdict on sharecropping, whether in France (where it was prevalent beyond the northern cereal-growing plains), Iberia, or Italy, is entirely negative: it is regarded as economically backward, encouraging risk-aversion, and a lack of investment and innovation. While it is possible to qualify this verdict (especially for parts of Lombardy), there is no denying that agricultural diversification as such, whatever its initial responsiveness to market demand, might in certain circumstances prove a blind alley. But it posed less of a hazard to the autonomous peasant household than the appearance in early modern Europe of latifundia, large estates devoted to agricultural specialization (usually a cereal monoculture), which sprang up in southern Italy, Iberia, and above all in east Elbia. Here large sections of the peasantry were reduced to the status of laborers, with little economic independence (though in Spain latifundistas also resorted to sharecropping), a development that might lead to enserfment (east of the Elbe), but need not (as in the Mediterranean). The fortunes of the peasantry of early modern Europe were in the end adversely affected, not so much by the accumulation of land in the hands of noble or ecclesiastical magnates as such, as by the latter's unwillingness to invest in their huge estates (unlike the aristocracy in England), preferring instead the life of the rentier, who viewed his lands as a vehicle of social prestige.

Peasants and the State

By the late sixteenth century, however, peasants in many countries of Europe were faced with an additional threat: the burden of state taxation. The costs of war, bureaucracy, and representation fell most severely on the mass of the population as peasants, except in England (where the aristocracy was not exempt from taxation) and the northern Low Countries (where commerce was taxed and towns obliged to purchase state loans). The level of public taxation was already rising before 1500 (provoking tax revolts in Italy, for instance), but it was in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the state's fiscal appetite unleashed popular uprisings across a broad swathe of Europe—France, Italy again, the German lands (especially in the north), and Russia, where up to half the peasants' income was swallowed up by the state in the wake of Ivan the Terrible's wars. But there was another side to this coin. Rulers were often just as concerned to protect their peasants for reasons of state: Bauernschutz, the maintenance of viable peasant households with a measure of civil legal protection, was practiced by the Austrian Habsburgs, not least on their mortgaged estates where state revenues must not be allowed to diminish by destructive exploitation of the peasantry, and in Brandenburg-Prussia, notwithstanding the spread of serfdom. And that policy was extended to the peasant commune itself, which, contrary to older views, was far from crushed east of the Elbe; in Russia, it was actively promoted by the tsars as an agent of local policing in a country vast and difficult to govern. The peasant household and commune indeed became upholders of social discipline and morals at the village level, as the welter of "housefather" literature in western Germany attests. At all times in early modern Europe, lordship, state authority, could only be exercised effectively with, rather than simply over, peasants, who remained the bedrock of ancien régime society.

Bibliography

Du Plessis, Robert S. Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, U.K., 1997.

Epstein, Stephan R., ed. Town and Country in Europe, 1300–1800. Cambridge, U.K., 2001.

Hoppenbrouwers, Peter, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, eds. Peasants into Farmers? The Transformation of Rural Economy and Society in the Low Countries (Middle Ages–19th Century) in the Light of the Brenner Debate. Turnhout, Belgium, 2001.

Kriedte, Peter. Peasants, Landlords and Merchant Capitalists: Europe and the World Economy, 1500–1800. Leamington Spa, U.K., 1983.

Langton, John. "The Origins of the Capitalist World Economy." In Companion Encyclopedia of Geography: The Environment and Humankind, edited by Ian Douglas, Richard Huggett, and Mike Robinson, pp. 206–227. London and New York, 1996.

Ogilvie, Sheilagh C., and Markus Cerman, eds. European Proto-Industralization: An Introductory Handbook. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996.

Overton, Mark. Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500–1850. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996.

Rösener, Werner. The Peasantry of Europe. Translated by Thomas M. Barker. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1994.

Scott, Tom, ed. The Peasantries of Europe: From the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries. London and New York, 1998.

Völgyes, Ivan, ed. The Peasantry of Eastern Europe. New York, 1979.

Wallerstein, Immanuel M. The Modern World-System. Vol. 1, Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York, 1974.

—TOM SCOTT