The End of Peasantries? Rethinking the Role of Peasantries in a World-Historical View

Vanhaute, Eric (2008): The End of Peasantries? Rethinking the Role of Peasantries in a World-Historical View. Published in: Review Fernand Braudal Center , Vol. 31, No. 1 (2008): pp. 39-59.

Abstract

This tentative essay tries to understand today's concerns about the decay of the peasantries and the loss of food security on a massive scale within a long-term and global perspective. Guiding questions are: How to handle the local scale of the peasant with the global scale of societal transformations? How to define peasantries? How is the fate of peasantries linked to economic development and social inequality? What can new research on the success and decline of peasantries learn us? Understanding the old and new 'agrarian questions' calls for new historical knowledge of the role of peasantries within capitalist transformations. The existing knowledge is all to often deformed by a twofold myopia, the English Road to capitalist agriculture, and the European Experience of the dissolution of the peasantries within the industrial and post-industrial economies. Laying down the old premisses of westernized development reveals a different picture of a highly productive family based agriculture, promoting local and regional income and survival systems, and internalizing costs of production and reproduction, contrary to the dominant and ultimatelly dead end tendency within historical capitalism.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Peasantries, depeasantization
• Subjects: N - Economic History > N5 - Agriculture, Natural Resources, Environment, and Extractive Industries > N50 - General, International, or Comparative; N - Economic History > N0 - General

References

Altieri, Miguel & Nicholls, Clara (2005). Agroecology and the Search for a Truly Sustainable Agriculture. Berkeley & Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press.

Amin, Samir (2003). “World Poverty, Pauperization and Capital Accumulation,”Monthly Review, LV, 5, 1–9. http://www.monthlyreview.org/1003amin.htm.

Amin, Samir (2005). “China, Market Socialism, and U.S. Hegemony,” Review, XXVIII,3, 259–79.

Braudel, Fernand (1977). Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.

Braudel, Fernand (1981). Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, I: The Structures of Everyday Life, S. Reynolds, trans. New York: Harper & Row.

Brenner, Robert (1997). “Property Relations and the Growth of Agricultural Productivity in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” in A. Badhuri & R. Skarstein, eds., Economic Development and Agricultural Productivity. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 9–41.

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). http://www.fao.org/corp/statistics.

Institute for Food and Development Policy. http://www.foodfirst.org.

International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (2008). Report on the State of Global Agriculture, April 2008. http://www.agassessment.org.

Kautsky, Karl (1966). Die Agrarfrage: eine Übersicht über die Tendenzen der modernen Landwirtschaft und die Agrarpolitik der Sozialdemokratie. Hannover: Verlag J. H. W. Dietz (orig. 1899).

Manning, Patrick (2003). Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past. New York: Palgrave McMillan.

McMichael, Philip (2006). “Peasant Prospects in the Neoliberal Age,” New Political Economy, XI, 3, 407–18.

McNeill, William (2006). “Afterword: World History and Globalization,” in A. G. Hopkins, ed., Global History: Interactions Between the Universal and the Local. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave McMillan, 285–90.

Moore, Jason W. (2003). “The Modern World-System as Environmental History? Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism,” Theory and Society, XXXII, 307–77.

O’Grada, Cormac; Paping, Richard & Vanhaute, Eric (2007). When the Potato Failed: Causes and Effects of the “Last” European Subsistence Crisis, 1845–1850. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers.

Polanyi, Karl (1957). The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press (orig. 1944).

Pomeranz, Kenneth (2007). “Social History and World History: From Daily Life to Patterns of Change,” Journal of World History, XVIII, 1, 69–98.

Sassen, Saskia (2007). “The Places and Spaces of the Global: An Expanded Analytic Terrain,” in D. Held & A. McGrew, eds., Globalization Theory: Approaches and Controversies. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 79–105.

Scott, Tom (1988). “Introduction,” in T. Scott, ed., The Peasantries of Europe from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Centuries. London & New York: Longman, 1–19.

Shanin, Teodor (1980). “Measuring Peasant Capitalism: The Operationalization of Concepts of Political Economy,” in E. J. Hobsbawm, ed., Peasants in History: Essays in Honour of Daniel Thorner. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 89–104.

Shanin, Teodor (1986). “Introduction,” in D. Thorner, B. Kerblay, R. E. F. Smith, eds., A. V. Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.

Smith, Joan & Wallerstein, Immanuel (1992). Creating and Transforming Households: The Constraints of the World-Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Thoen, Erik (2001). “A ‘Commercial Survival Economy’ in Evolution: The Flemish Countryside and the Transition to Capitalism (Middle Ages–19th century),” in P. Hoppenbrouwers & J. L. Van Zanden, eds., Peasants into Farmers? The Transformation of Rural Economy and Society in the Low Countries (Middle Ages–19th Century) in Light of the Brenner Debate. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 102–57.

United Nations Human Settlements Programme (2006). The State of the World’s Cities 2006–2007: The Millenium Development Goals and Urban Sustainability: 30 Years of Shaping the Habitat Agenda. Sterling, VA: Earthscan.

Vanhaute, Eric (1993). “Processes of Peripheralization in a Core Region: The Campine Area of Antwerp in the ‘Long’ Nineteenth Century,” Review, XVI, 1, 57–81.

Vanhaute, Eric (2001). “Rich Agriculture and Poor Farmers: Land, Landlords and Farmers in Flanders in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Rural History: Economy, Society, Culture, XII, 1, 19–40.

Wallerstein, Immanuel (2003). Historical Capitalism: With Capitalist Civilization. London: Verso (orig. 1995).

Wolf, Eric (1966). Peasants. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

World Bank (2006). World Development Report 2006: Equity and Development. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. http://econ.worldbank.org.

World Bank (2008). World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. http://econ.worldbank.org