Peasantry
Peasantry
Political role of the peasantry
Studies of the peasantry in different places and in different eras have been made by historians, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and other scholars, all of whom use a wide variety of definitions and concepts. Some writers have employed the term “peasant” to characterize entire societies; others have dealt with the peasantry as a partsociety within a larger whole. Prevailing practice includes analysis of peasant behavior at the levels of whole social systems, nations, sectors, villages, households, and individual cultivators.
Peasants are usually seen as forming part of a structured society, within which they fall between the aristocracy or great landholders, on the one hand, and the landless, on the other. However, this definition has been stretched at both ends. Some writers include among peasants groups of cultivators with no class of landlords above them; others refer to landless peasantry.
Again, peasants are normally conceived of as settled agriculturalists. Yet in tropical Africa, Central and South America, and parts of southeast Asia, there are groups of peasants who rely on shifting cultivation of the slash-and-burn type.
With regard to the land which they till, the legal status of peasants may be that of proprietors, tenants, or crop sharers. They may or may not be free to leave the land.
In a broad sense, the peasantry has constituted the most numerous social group in all organized states, from ancient to modern times, that have rested on traditional forms of agriculture. Even in western Europe during the throes of nineteenthcentury industrialization the peasant population constituted the largest segment of society. The progressive emancipation of the peasantry from serfdom and other forms of bondage has furnished favored themes for discourses by politicians and treatises by historians. Even after World War i the agrarian problem, land reform, and peasant movements (“green risings”) continued to evoke public and scholarly interest. Most recently, however, the characteristic differences between urban and rural economic activity and social life have faded, and the peasantry as such has been in the process of disappearing. Meanwhile, in other areas—for example, sub-Saharan Africa—there are some indications of a movement from tribal to peasant societies. By contrast, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand have never had a peasantry.
The ending of European rule over many parts of Africa and Asia has led to an enormous increase in the number of studies devoted to the peasantry of the so-called “underdeveloped” areas, le tiers monde. This literature is primarily of an applied nature and is concerned with efforts to modernize peasant agriculture. Among the chief subjects are reforms in systems of land tenure and other prerequisites for rapid economic development. There are also a number of examples of fundamental research aimed at a comprehensive understanding of the structure and functioning of peasant society in these countries.
Rather than trying to define peasants or peasantry in any restrictive sense we shall indicate the main lines along which significant work on peasants has been carried forward since the 1920s. We shall quickly survey the issues which have been raised in relation to the peasantry in the following geographic and historical order: feudal Europe, modern Europe in the industrial age, tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, Japan, Indonesia, and India. Turning to more general topics, we shall take up the economics of the peasantry with particular reference to (a) recent “microanalysis,” (b) the position of the Russian school associated with the name of Chayanov, and (c) “subsistence” economics; then the political role of the peasantry, including its part in risings and revolutions; and,finally,the question of folk, or peasant, cultures.
Feudalism . One of the richest sources of literature about peasant societies continues to be the study of the agrarian aspects of feudalism in Europe from the eleventh century to the fifteenth century. There has been a remarkable flow of studies in recent decades on the kinds and conditions of the peasant classes; their ties and obligations to the seigneurs or feudal lords above them; the interplay between the peasants’ work on their own fields and their work for the lord on his demesne or home farm; systems of field cultivation; why and to what extent village lands were periodically consolidated and redistributed among the cultivators; phases of emancipation of the peasants from bondage and periods of “re-enserfment”; peasant revolts; and relations of moneyed people from the towns with the peasantry, whether by way of moneylending, buying of crops, or taking over of village land through purchase or foreclosure. [SeeFeudalism; Manorial Economy.]
Age of industrialism . Another important body of research in recent years is that devoted to the position of the peasantry in Europe since the coming of the industrial revolution. Interest has centered on such subjects as the differences from country to country in the timing and the manner in which serfdom was brought to an end. In one way or another the medieval system of agriculture, based on relations between the manor and the village community, gave way to individual farming. Large-scale cultivation with hired laborers came to predominate in certain regions, notably England and eastern Germany. France and western Germany, by contrast, continued to be lands of smallscale peasant agriculture up through World War n.
The application of modern biology and chemistry to farming led to what has been called an agricultural revolution, with unprecedented increases in productivity. The education, scientific training, technical knowledge, capital equipment, and financial resources required for carrying on the new agriculture were obviously more accessible to the large farmers than to the petty peasantry. A question which has been much discussed is how so large a number of small peasants managed nonetheless to remain in existence. The evidence suggests that they owed their survival to long hours of back-breaking toil and minimal levels of living.
The small-scale peasant agriculture of the Low Countries was distinguished for its specialization and high technical proficiency. Denmark became famous for its rural education and cooperative movements. Rack rents, poverty, crop failures, depressed prices, crowding on the land, and subdivision of holdings have been cited as factors in the great peasant migrations from Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, and Italy.
Russia and eastern Europe . In eastern Europe the progress of industry was slower and its impact on peasant society less. The aristocracy and large proprietors held on to enormous estates until the Russian Revolution in 1917, while the peasantry remained illiterate and backward in its agricultural techniques.
In its efforts to assure a low-cost food supply for the urban working classes, the new Soviet regime came into conflict with the middle ranks of the peasantry as well as the more prosperous “kulaks.” The eventual solution in the form of a thoroughgoing, rapid collectivization of agriculture, carried out from 1928 to 1934, constituted the most traumatic blow to the structure of peasant society in any country in modern history. The historical background to collectivization, the campaign itself, and its consequences for Soviet society and economy may be studied in a vast literature of absorbing interest, under such heads as: class composition of the Russian peasantry in the 1920s; the character of collectivization and its advantages and disadvantages in the light of subsequent agricultural problems; role in a socialist economy of private garden plots, peasant family livestock, and free peasant markets.
After World War n the advent of socialist regimes in the countries of eastern Europe initiated a series of campaigns designed to collectivize peasant agriculture. These attempts were less drastic than those in the Soviet Union but have nonetheless been pushed very far in Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Rumania. By contrast, they have been abandoned in Yugoslavia and Poland.
Japan . Recent studies of Asia have largely emphasized the present and the immediate past. The most reliable data and the widest range of studies of any peasant society in Asia pertain to Japan. A striking feature of Japan’s rural experience has been the impact, since 1945, of the great expansion of urban factory employment, with rising wages and improved amenities. The attraction of the towns for the country youth, especially the young men, has become very powerful. As they leave, the average age of the farm population moves up steeply. To indicate who does the work in rural areas today, the Japanese have coined the expression “grandfather-grandmother-daughter-in-law agriculture.” The demand for hired labor has become so great that agricultural wages have set new records. To hold his laborers at the busy season the employer has to feed them well and speak to them politely.
Even for small farms of barely one hectare peasant families in central Japan have been buying many small machines—multipurpose two-wheel tractors, chaff cutters, polishers, tiny pickup vans. Also, these families are each likely to have a transistor radio, a television set, a washing machine, and a refrigerator. These items are acquired not solely for economic reasons but as part of a determined effort to lighten labor and make farming more attractive to young people. What is happening is the industrialization of agriculture and the modernization of rural life. Peasant agriculture and peasant society, in central Japan at least, are disappearing.
Southeast Asia . In southeast Asia, Indonesia is the area which has been studied the longest and the most systematically. It was with reference to Indonesia that the theory of “dual economy” was developed at the beginning of the twentieth century. J. H. Boeke, in a series of writings from 1911 on, argued that the peasant sector, or what in colonial times was called the “native sector,” lived a life apart, largely unaffected by the market-oriented modern urban sector. He held that the peasants zealously guarded their own values, institutions, and way of life. He believed that this situation was desirable on grounds of imperial policy and urged that it be encouraged as much as possible. [SeeEconomy, Dual.]
This theory of dual economy was sharply criticized by other Dutch authors for seriously underestimating the impact of Dutch rule, foreign trade, and market-oriented production upon the peasant sector. Nonetheless, Boeke’s point of view has been given wide popularity in the English-speaking world by the works of Furnivall (e.g., 1939). In his studies of Burma and Indonesia, Furnivall expanded Boeke’s theory of dual economy to a concept of “plural society,” which explicitly allowed for three or more main elements. In this way Furnivall proposed a framework for the relations between the Burmese peasants, the British rulers and businessmen, and the Indian laborers and moneylenders in Burma; or, for Indonesia, between the Dutch, the Chinese, and the Indonesian peasantry.
Although the term “plural society” is widely used, it does not, in the opinion of the present author, throw much light on the peasants covered by it. The compartments into which the main elements of society are divided turn out, in practice, to be much less watertight than Boeke or Furnivall would have us believe. What is more, almost all of the great societies that have existed in history have been composed of a number of principal elements among which economic or social relations may have been severely restricted. In this sense, “plural society” becomes almost a universal phenomenon of history. What is gained in our understanding of Norman England if we call it a “plural society”?
India . Of all the countries in the nonsocialist world, India has the largest peasantry and the most deep-rooted social obstacles to agricultural development. The mixture of ancient Indian, Muslim, and British notions and practices about landholding has given the country a peculiarly complex structure of land tenure. There are no significant reserves ofgood land to be brought under cultivation, and a number of regions are already very densely populated. Agriculture is largely dependent on the monsoons, which are fickle. Many areas are chronically short of water.
All economic and social institutions in the villages are deeply affected by the divisions and sense of hierarchy connected with caste. This gives a low value to manual labor. In many regions of India those who do the bulk of the agricultural work are the most disadvantaged and the most looked down upon—the “Untouchables.”
Since the attainment of national independence in 1947, there has been remarkably free debate as to what should be done for, with, or about the Indian peasantry, and how to implement the large number of governmental measures relating to the rural population. In addition to the more narrowly technical projects involving, for example, irrigation, use of artificial fertilizers, or improvement of seeds, there has been much land reform legislation, an impressive extension of cooperatives and local self-government schemes, and a vast program of “community development,” designed to achieve the goal of over-all betterment of living conditions in the villages. Whatever the success of these various endeavors, there can be no doubt of the interest in the discussions generated at each phase of development. Since India can boast a number of first-class economists, there are a great many high-level analyses of peasant problems and suggested solutions.
Meanwhile, the way of life of India’s peasants has been affected not only by the array of governmental actions undertaken for such purposes, but also by the great growth of industry and over-all modernization of national life since the launching of the first five-year plan, covering 1951-1956. The proliferation of factories and workshops and an immense building program—new factories, government offices, schools, housing, roads, bridges, dams—have given jobs or supplementary income to millions of peasants.
Villagers are more aware of what is going on in the outside world, and they enjoy the spectacle of the city people coming to solicit their votes at election time. The hegemony of the upper-caste families within the village has been challenged. In parts of south India the Brahman landlords have been humiliated and forced out of their holdings. Throughout the countryside the spread of education has brought Untouchables’ sons and in some areas even their daughters into the schools. The foundations of traditional peasant society in India are being shaken.
Peasant economics
Most of the studies of peasant economic behavior have been carried out by persons trained in the classical and neoclassical economics developed in England, on the Continent, and in the United States. Quite naturally, the economists brought along with them the tools of their trade, the categories and concepts which they were used to working with. The underlying assumption—made explicit by a considerable number of writers—is that the prevailing economic theories and methods of the Western world are universally applicable. With suitable modifications, the argument goes, they can be utilized to explain the behavior of individual economic units in any society that has ever existed. Thus Firth, in his well-known analysis of the Tikopians in Polynesia, first explains that they have no market, no money, no cash nexus, no prices, no interest, and no “entrepreneur” class as such. Nonetheless, in default of any other suitable terms, he proceeds to analyze the behavior of the Tikopians as though they were entrepreneurs engaged in undertakings. If one man gets his neighbor to help him build a house, the first is taken as an entrepreneur who is employing the second. Similarly, Sol Tax writes of the petty traders of the Guatemalan highlands as “penny capitalists.”
When the “farm business” method is applied to analysis of peasant agriculture, the peasant’s land and livestock, equipment, and other goods are equated with those of a small firm. The peasant’s behavior is then treated in terms of the theory of the firm as developed for business enterprises. It is taken for granted that the peasant’s aim is to rationalize his operations so as to obtain the maximum profit. Accounts are drawn up for the agricultural year. The field work of the peasant’s wife, his children, his parents, and other relatives is evaluated at prevailing wages paid to hired laborers. Receipts from the sale of farm products, including an estimate of the value of food kept for the family, are totaled. Against these are set the costs incurred for agricultural purposes, which have been carefully separated out from the expenses of the family as a consumption unit. These costs of production include working expenses, rent actually paid or calculated from the value of the land owned, interest that could otherwise have been earned on the capital invested, and wages imputed for family labor. If these costs turn out to be greater than the receipts, the farm is said to be operating at a loss. If this situation goes on year after year, it is said to be an uneconomic farm. The problem then becomes one of trying to explain how peasants in countries like India, for example, go on for decade after decade engaging in so-called “uneconomic farming.”
This approach to peasant agriculture was challenged in the opening decades of the twentieth century by a group of Russian economists. The followers of the “organization and production” school—Kablukov, Kosinskii, Chelintsev, Makarov, Studenskii, and Chayanov—argued that the assumption that the peasant family should be treated as if it were a business enterprise was unsound and misleading. The primary aim of the peasant family is to feed itself and somehow manage to make whatever payments are due to the landlord, the moneylender, the merchant, or the state. The members of the peasant family have to eat throughout the year, whether or not they work. The actual work which they perform cannot be measured in money. If the family’s consumption needs and the other usual requirements are not satisfied, the members of the household will put in more labor, even if the additional product obtained is very small indeed. Similarly, the peasant family may rent or buy land at a very high price which would not be justified, according to normal business standards, by the value of the output they could hope to obtain from it. The peasants do this in order to be able to use the surplus labor of the family, which is freely available without any extra cost.
Chayanov and his colleagues insisted on treating the total returns garnered by family labor as indivisible. They analyzed the decisions of the head of the peasant household in terms of a balance between his judgment based on experience as to the total needs of the family and his subjective evaluation of the drudgery involved in agricultural work. After 1930 the work of this school was cut short in Russia, and it seems to have had little influence elsewhere except in Japan.
Subsistence
A number of somewhat different approaches to the study of peasant economics have utilized “subsistence” as the key concept. Whereas both the farm business or small entrepreneur method and the “organization and production” school concentrate on the individual peasant, subsistence has been examined on the “macro” as well as the “micro” level of analysis. Peasants who produce wholly or mainly for their own consumption are characterized as subsistence farmers, in sharp contrast to agriculturalists who produce for the market. Groups of villages, regions, or even whole countries (particularly with reference to the past) are presented as subsistence areas or subsistence economies. Sometimes we read of modern and subsistence sectors (often identified with different ethnic elements) within a country or an economy. It is also common to find discussions keyed to a threepart scheme: subsistence agriculture or economy, semisubsistence, and modern.
Generally speaking, writers who employ the term “subsistence” take as their standard of comparison the highly organized, mechanized, market-oriented agriculture of the great industrial nations. Subsistence tends to be denned negatively, by the complete absence of markets and accordingly of all commercial relations or incentives for increased production. But examples, of this purely subsistence agriculture are hard to find.
Semisubsistence fills in the gap as a transitional form between pure subsistence and the most advanced industrial economies. In practice, the largest number of historically known societies fall into this essentially teleological middle category.
Criteria of peasant societies
The present author has suggested another possible framework for studying peasant economy and society at the macrolevel. My interest is to identify whole states (either current or past) which can usefully be classed as predominantly peasant in nature. The next step, and one I believe would be fruitful, is to examine the process by which such societies have come into being, their life history, and the manner in which some have passed out of the ranks of peasant societies.
For the purpose of this analysis I have set forth five quantitative criteria that apply to the national level. (1) One half or more of the total production must be agricultural. (2) More than half of the working population must be engaged in agriculture. (3) There must be a state of at least a minimum size, and it must be organized on a territorial basis rather than as a tribal, kinship, or clan order. The administrative structure of such a state must comprise a total of at least five thousand officers, minor officials, flunkeys, and underlings. (4) A peasant society presupposes the existence of towns and a break between these towns and the countryside that is simultaneously political, economic, social, and cultural. The total urban population of the state should amount to at least half a million persons; alternatively, at least 5 per cent of the entire population of a peasant society should reside in towns. (5) The typical and most representative units of production must be family households which grow crops on their lands primarily by the physical effort of the members of these families. The household may include a slave or two, a domestic servant, or even a hired hand. But the total contribution of these nonfamily members to actual crop production must be much less than that of the family members. Half or more of all the crops grown in the society must be produced by households relying mainly on the labor of their own family members.
For the period of the past two hundred years at least 25 countries can be shown to have societies which meet all of these criteria. Many other national units, taken at different periods, will correspond only partially to this definition, but their deviations from it may also shed light on the dynamics of the constitution and dissolution of peasant societies.
Political role of the peasantry
The characteristic subjection of the peasantry in late medieval Europe gave way to sporadic uprisings and even some sustained revolts. This facet of peasant behavior has also been noted (to mention a few instances) in Tokugawa Japan, Manchu China, modern Mexico, and tsarist Russia, where major movements were led by Stenka Razin and Pugachev.
Almost always peasant uprisings have been marked by fury, desperation, and brutality. Once in motion the peasants have usually tried to destroy records, burn mansions, and, not uncommonly, put to death the landlords and their families. The upper classes have struck back ruthlessly. Because of their narrow horizons and limited resources, education, and military experience, peasants have been ill-fitted to organize and carry through successful revolts. By contrast, princes and landlords have been accustomed to the arts of politics and war. They have known how to divide a large peasant movement or overwhelm and destroy a small one. On the whole the peasants have paid dearly for their violent efforts to break their shackles.
After the French Revolution there arose a school of “romantic” political thought which idealized the peasantry as the center of conservatism in society as a whole, the stronghold of religion, and the seat of traditional values. Supporters of monarchy who wanted to stop the spread of democratic ideas exalted the peasant way of life as a counterpoise to the radical tendencies of the urban populations and called for its preservation.
Marxist views
From the opposite point of view, that of wishing to hasten the process of change, Marx and Engels concurred in conceiving of the peasantry as a bastion of reaction. Marx went so far as to term peasant life “rural idiocy.”
Marx and Engels bequeathed this prejudice to the socialist parties of western Europe. They also bequeathed to their followers the doctrine that peasant cultivation was inefficient because of the small size of the units and that it was foredoomed to be replaced by large-scale agriculture. In Marx’s eyes the growth of capitalism was certain, in the course of time, to break up the class of peasant proprietors, each with his own land, work animals, and implements. Some few of these independent proprietors would become capitalist employers relying upon hired labor to carry on their agriculture. Many more of them would lose their land and turn into agricultural proletarians who would have to go out and seek work as wage laborers.
As the socialist movement grew in Germany and France, the problem of its relation to the peasantry became pressing. To some of the socialist leaders, the process of the breakup of the peasantry which Marx had foreseen seemed to be occurring very slowly, if at all. Nonetheless, in the early 1890s, after Marx’s death, Engels insisted on the soundness of Marx’s analysis and his prediction. By his firmness on this point, Engels cut the ground out from under the socialist politicians of the day who were hoping to make an alliance with the peasantry against the landlords and industrialists.
The logical corollary of Marx and Engels’ position was that it would be wrong for the socialist parties to support measures designed to aid peasant agriculture. Such tactics could serve only to prolong artificially the existence of a stratum which was economically outmoded, socially backward, and politically conservative. Instead, the socialists should encourage the class demands of the agricultural laborers, who were the natural allies of the urban industrial workers.
Debate between Narodniks and Marxists
In tsarist Russia during the fifty years before the revolution of 1917, there took place a historic debate between the Narodniks and the Marxists. The Narodniks (Populists) believed that the mir, the typical Russian village community, was still a vital and flourishing institution. A striking feature of the mir, they held, was an old tradition of group activity in agriculture. It would be possible, the Narodniks argued, to build upon this already existing foundation and thus make a direct transition to a kind of Russian agrarian socialism without passing through a stage of capitalism.
Plekhanov and Lenin retorted that the unity of the village was a myth, since the rich and poor peasants were sharply divided by their class interests. In any case, capitalism could not be avoided, since it was already the dominant tendency in the Russian countryside as well as in the towns. The peasantry, according to Lenin, represented a form of petty-bourgeois independent production within the framework of an increasingly capitalist economy. Therefore, the class which was called upon by history to lead the way to the new socialist society was the militant industrial proletariat of the cities and not the peasants in their villages.
The peasantry as a revolutionary base
Recent decades have witnessed the development of a new and dramatically different Marxist evaluation of the political possibilities of the peasantry, particularly in reference to the Far East and Latin America. Mao Tse-tung and other communist leaders learned from their bitter experience in China in the mid-1920s how difficult it was to sustain a revolutionary movement that was centered on the city. In a country so large and so rural as China, the working classes of the towns were relatively feeble and thereby exposed to massive reprisals. The road to power, according to the theory which the Chinese communists elaborated, was no longer urban but rural. The base areas for the socialist revolution must be located in the countryside. There the discontented peasantry were to be organized, a politically conscious people’s army created, and guerrilla warfare waged until the time was ripe to shift to mobile warfare, encircle the big cities, and capture them. This new policy was not only enunciated by Mao Tse-tung but it was also effectively put into practice by the Chinese communists, who succeeded in carrying through a revolution relying much less on the industrial proletariat of the towns than on the peasant masses.
Influenced by the ideas of the Chinese and, closer to home, by the example of Fidel Castro in Cuba, guerrilla movements that are primarily peasant in composition have been organized by revolutionary parties in the rural areas of many countries in Latin America, notably Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, and Peru.
Folk society and folk culture
An important new series of contributions to the study of peasantry comes from the ethnologists and social anthropologists. In its early years as a discipline anthropology tended to emphasize the search for social origins. Field investigators accordingly directed their efforts toward studying the most primitive and most isolated human groups which could be discovered. Since World War n, in particular, anthropologists have greatly widened their sphere of interest and have produced literally hundreds of studies of peasant communities on all continents.
The shift from dealing with secluded entities about which little or no previous information was at hand to peasant villages embedded in countries with well-known cultures and long histories posed new problems of methodology and theory. One key question that the anthropologists found they had to grapple with was the place of the small community in the context of the society as a whole. They began to explore the extent to which the peasants shared in the “high” culture of the areas in which they lived and the extent to which they could be said to have a folk society, folk culture, or folk religion of their own. Redfield, in his work on Mexico, was one of the first to call attention to this relationship between the little community and the larger world, the small and the great traditions. Later studies have explored more complicated patterns of interconnection of village and national culture, as found, for example, in India.
The spread of modern industrial society as a world-wide phenomenon is changing the conditions of life for the peasantry every day. It may be unwise, however, to expect any early disappearance of the peasants from the international scene. For more than one hundred years we have been told that the peasantry is doomed, and we have been presented with exhaustive lists of the hardships which plague peasants. Nonetheless, they and their problems are still very much with us. The lasting power of the peasantry should not be underestimated.
Daniel Thorner
[See alsoAsian Society, article onSoutheast Asia; Economy, Dual; Land; Land Tenure; Modernization; Village; and the guide underAgriculture.]
bibliography
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Bloch, Marc (1931) 1952-1956 Les caracteres originaux de Vhistoire rurale frangaise. 2 vols. New ed. Paris: Colin. ? Volume 2, Supplement etabli d’apres les travaux de Vauteur: (1931-1944), was written by Robert Dauvergne; it is one of the most influential discussions of how best to treat the broad evolution of the French peasantry. An English translation was published in 1966 by the University of California Press as French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics.
The Cambridge Economic History of Europe From the Decline of the Roman Empire. 1941 Cambridge Univ. Press. ? The most authoritative work on the subject, with a magnificent bibliography. A second, revised edition is in preparation.
Chayanov, A. V. 1966 The Theory of Peasant Economy. Edited by Daniel Thorner, B. Kerblay, and R. E. F. Smith. Homewood, III.: Irwin. ? A major theoretical work and important synthesis of Russian research from the 1880s to the 1920s.
Desai, Akshayakumar R. (editor) (1953) 1961 Rural Sociology in India. 3d ed., rev. & enl. Bombay: Indian Society of Agricultural Economics. ? First published as Introduction to Rural Sociology in India. A comprehensive collection of readings.
Dore, Ronald P. 1959 Land Reform in Japan. London and New York: Oxford Univ. Press. ? The best treatment of the subject; based on field work.
Duby, Georges 1962 L’economie rurale et la vie des campagnes dans Voccident medieval (France, Angleterre, Empire, IXe-XVe siecles): Essai de synthese et perspectives de recherches. 2 vols. Paris: Aubier. ? A good account of the peasantry in the medieval world; it reprints in French much source material and has an excellent bibliography.
Eicher, Carl; and Witt, Lawrence (editors) 1964 Agriculture in Economic Development. New York: McGraw-Hill. ? A useful collection of readings on post-1945 developments.
Fei, Hsiao-T’ung (1939) 1962 Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley. London: Routledge. ? A classic study by one of Malinowski’s students.
Firth, Raymond W. (1939) 1965 Primitive Polynesian Economy. 2d ed. Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press. ? Primitive Polynesians as seen by an anthropologist trained in neoclassical economics.
Firth, Raymond; and Yamey, B. S. (editors) 1964 Capital, Saving, and Credit in Peasant Societies: Studies From Asia, Oceania, the Caribbean and Middle America. London: Allen & Unwin; Chicago: Aldine. ? Attempts to apply the concepts of neoclassical microeconomics to primitive and peasant peoples.
Forde, Daryll 1956 Primitive Economics. Pages 330-344 in Harry L. Shapiro (editor), Man, Culture, and Society. Oxford Univ. Press. ? Perhaps the best brief discussion of the subject; written in collaboration with Mary Douglas.
Franklin, S. H. 1962 Reflections on the Peasantry. Pacific Viewpoint (Wellington) 3, no. 1:1-26.
Furnivall, John S. (1939) 1944 Netherlands India: A Study of Plural Economy. Cambridge Univ. Press. ? Applies and broadens J. H. Boeke’s theory of the dual economy.
Gerschenkron, Alexander 1943 Bread and Democracy in Germany. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. ? A succinct discussion of the controversy among the German socialists on the peasant question.
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Institute of Pacific Relations 1939 Agrarian China: Selected Source Materials From Chinese Authors. London: Allen & Unwin.
Kautsky, Karl 1899 Die Agrarfrage: Eine Ubersicht iiber die Tendenzen der modernen Landwirtschaft und die Agrarpolitik der Sozialdemokratie. Stuttgart: Dietz. ? The classic discussion from the point of view of orthodox Marxism.
Koninklijk Institut Voor De Tropen 1961 Indonesian Economics: The Concept of Dualism in Theory and Policy. Edited by W. F. Wertheim et al. The Hague: Van Hoeve. ? Presents J. H. Boeke’s theory of the dual economy and criticisms of it by Dutch authors.
Lenin, Vladimir I. (1899) 1960 The Development of Capitalism in Russia: The Process of the Formation of a Home Market for Large-scale Industry. Volume 3, pages 23-607 in Vladimir I. Lenin, Collected Works. 4th ed. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. ? Lenin’s first and most comprehensive book on the peasantry.
Lewis, Oscar 1951 Life in a Mexican Village: Tepoztlan Restudied. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. ? Study of a Mexican village after land reform.
Lichtheim, George (1961) 1964 Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study. 2d ed., rev. London: Routledge. ? A paperback edition was published in 1962 by Praeger. See especially Part 5 for a useful discussion of Kautsky and the peasant question.
Marriott, Mckim (editor) 1955 Village India: Studies in the Little Community. Univ. of Chicago Press. ? Also published as Memoir No. 83 of the American Anthropological Association, which was issued asAmerican Anthropologist, Volume 57, No. 3, Part 2, June 1955.
Mitrany, David 1951 Marx Against the Peasant: A Study in Social Dogmatism. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press. ? A paperback edition was published in 1962 by Collier. A critique of Marx and a good illustration of the point of view of Balkan peasant parties.
Moore, Barrington JR. 1966 Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston: Beacon. ? An unusually comprehensive discussion of the role of peasantry in modern Europe and Asia, including an excellent bibliography.
Redfield, Robert 1956 Peasant Society and Culture: An Anthropological Approach to Civilization. Univ. of Chicago Press. ? A paperback edition, bound together withThe Little Community, was published in 1961 by Cambridge University Press.
Sorokin, Pitirim A.; Zimmerman, Carle C ; and Galpin, Charles J. (editors) (1930-1932) 1965 A Systematic Source Book in Rural Sociology. 3 vols. New York: Russell. ? Presents perhaps the best set of readings on the peasantry available up to 1931.
Thorner, Daniel 1965 Peasant Economy as a Category in Economic History. Pages 287-300 in International Conference on Economic History, Second, Aix-en-Provence, 1962, Contributions. The Hague and Paris: Mouton.
Volin, Lazar 1960 The Russian Peasant: From Emancipation to Kolkhoz. Pages 292-311 in Cyril E. Black (editor), The Transformation of Russian Society: Aspects of Social Change Since 1861. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. ? A useful summary of a vast literature.
Warriner, Doreen (1939) 1965 The Economics of Peasant Farming. 2d ed. New York: Barnes & Noble. ? Focuses on eastern Europe in the 1930s, with an important new preface surveying postwar developments.
Wolf, Eric R. 1966 Peasants. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. ? A compact synthesis by an anthropologist.