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 termvillain[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 "peasant" is derived from the 15th-century French wordpaïsant, meaning one from thepays, or countryside; ultimately from the Latinpagus, or outlying administrative district.[12]
Social position
FinnishSavonian farmers at a cottage in early 19th century; by Pehr Hilleström and J. F. Martin
Peasants typically made up the majority of the agricultural labour force in apre-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 amarket economy had taken root, the termpeasant proprietors was frequently used to describe the traditional rural population in countries wheresmallholders 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.[citation needed]
Medieval European peasants
Theopen field system of agriculture dominated most of Europe during medieval times and endured until the nineteenth century in many areas. Under this system, peasants lived on amanor presided over by alord or a bishop of thechurch. 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.[14] It was gradually replaced by individual ownership and management of land.
The relative position of peasants in Western Europe improved greatly after theBlack Death had reduced the population ofmedieval 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, it became more productive for many laborers to demand wages and other alternative forms of compensation, which ultimately led to the development of widespreadliteracy and the enormous social and intellectual changes of theEnlightenment.
The evolution of ideas in an environment of relatively widespread literacy laid the groundwork for theIndustrial Revolution, which enabled mechanically and chemically augmented agricultural production while simultaneously increasing the demand forfactory workers in cities, who became whatKarl Marx called theproletariat. The trend toward individual ownership of land, typified in England byEnclosure, 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.[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
"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.[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" inLow German (pronounced in English likeboor).[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]
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 bookPeasants into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France, 1880–1914 (1976), historianEugen 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 andeconomic 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 theThird 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.
A Chinese painting depicting an agricultural scene probably during theMing dynastyChinese peasants inKunming
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 termsfengjian (封建) for "feudalism" andnongmin (农民), or "farming people", terms used in the description offeudal Japanese society.[25] These terms created a negative image of Chinese farmers by making a class distinction where one had not previously existed.[25]Anthropologist Myron Cohen considers these terms to beneologisms that represented a cultural and political invention. He writes:[26]
This divide represented a radical departure from tradition:F. W. Mote and others have shown how especially during the later imperial era (Ming andQing dynasties), China was notable for the cultural, social, political, and economic interpenetration of city and countryside. But the termnongmin did enter China in association withMarxist 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.
Writers in English mostly used the term "farmers" until the 1920s, when the termpeasant came to predominate, implying that China was feudal, ready for revolution, like Europe before the French Revolution.[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" (fromcampo—country person), but the meaning has changed over time. While mostCampesinos before the 20th century were in equivalent status to peasants—they usually did not own land and had to make payments to or were in an employment position towards a landlord (thehacienda system), most Latin American countries saw one or more extensiveland reforms in the 20th century. Theland reforms of Latin America were more comprehensive initiatives[30] that redistributed lands from large landholders to former peasants[31]—farm workers andtenant farmers. Hence, many Campesinos in Latin America today are closer smallholders who own their land and do not pay rent to a landlord, rather than peasants who do not own land.
TheCatholic 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]
Portrait sculpture of 18th-century French peasants by artistGeorge S. Stuart, in the permanent collection of the Museum of Ventura County,Ventura, California
In medieval Europe society was theorized as being organized intothree estates: those who work, those who pray, and those who fight.[33] TheAnnales School of 20th-century French historians emphasized the importance of peasants. Its leaderFernand Braudel devoted the first volume—calledThe 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 byFlorian Znaniecki andFei Xiaotong, and in the post-1945 studies of the "great tradition" and the "little tradition" in the work ofRobert Redfield. In the 1960s, anthropologists and historians began to rethink the role ofpeasant revolt in world history and in their own disciplines. Peasant revolution was seen as aThird World response to capitalism and imperialism.[34]
The anthropologistEric Wolf, for instance, drew on the work of earlier scholars in the Marxist tradition such asDaniel Thorner, who saw the rural population as a key element in thetransition from feudalism to capitalism. Wolf and a group of scholars[35][36][37][38] criticized both Marx and the field of Modernization theorists for treating peasants as lackingthe ability to take action.[39]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 thepeasant movement in India and to the theories of the revolution in China led byMao 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.[40] One important outlet for their scholarly work and theory wasThe Journal of Peasant Studies.
^Edelman, Marc (2013)."What is a peasant? What are peasantries? A briefing paper on issues of definition"(PDF).United Nations Human Rights. Retrieved11 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 fromthe original on 12 July 2019. Retrieved12 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) 1.1informal, derogatory An ignorant, rude, or unsophisticated person; a person of low social status.
^The monasteries of Bavaria, which controlled 56% of the land, were broken up by the government, and sold off around 1803. Nipperdey, Thomas (1996)Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck: 1800–1866. Princeton Univ Press. p. 59.ISBN978-0691636115
^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
^Maciak, Jill (2001). "Of News and Networks: The Communication of Political Information in the Rural South-West during the French Revolution".French History.15 (3):273–306.doi:10.1093/fh/15.3.273.
^Mei, Yi-tsi (1998).Ideology, Power, Text: Self-Representation and the Peasant 'Other' in Modern Chinese Literature. Stanford University Press. p. 26.ISBN978-0804733199
^Paraguayan Bishops' Conference, Pastoral LetterEl campesino paraguayo y la tierra (12 June 1983), quoted by Pope Francis inLaudato si', 2015, paragraph 94, accessed 1 January 2024
^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.
^Shanin, Teodor (1973). "The nature and logic of the peasant economy 1: A Generalisation".The Journal of Peasant Studies.1:63–80.doi:10.1080/03066157308437872.
Hayford, Charles W. (1997), Stromquist, Shelton; Cox, Jeffrey (eds.),The Storm over the Peasant: Orientalism, Rhetoric and Representation in Modern China, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, pp. 150–172
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
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]
.jpg)
