Agrarian Class Structure Research Articles

The Missing Agrarian Middle Class

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, Puerto Rico embarked on one of the most rapid processes of industrialization and economic development the world had ever seen. Yet the industrial economy that this process produced had two fundamental flaws: it featured little by way of local capital formation in the manufacturing sector, and it was incapable of producing sufficient employment for the island’s labor force. What explains these flaws? This article seeks to answer this question by drawing on the rich literature on development in East Asia. I engage with four theories that explain successful East Asian development on the basis, respectively, of unique insertion into the international political economy, robust industrial policies, economic nationalism, and agrarian reform processes that preceded industrialization. While Puerto Rico benefited from all of these factors—which may explain the relative success of development on the island—they differed qualitatively from the East Asian cases, with the possible exception of international political economy. I suggest that these differences might in turn be explained by substantial differences in pre-existing agrarian class structure. The absence of a significant stratum of smallholding agricultural producers in Puerto Rico distinguished the island from East Asian societies. It also helps explain the lack of local capital formation and employment generation built into the Puerto Rican development model, as well as the shape of industrial policy and agrarian reform and the ultimate weakness of nationalist impulses.

Understanding food rationing in colonial India: a prelude to the formation of public distribution system

The paper presents an alternative theoretical framework to deliver a historical account of the formation of public distribution system (PDS) in India as a wartime food rationing system under colonial rule. It is argued that the origins of food rationing in India can be traced to the historical coagulation of class and non-class effects/struggles arising from colonial-era agrarian class structure, including differential British policy toward the English and Indian poor populations respectively, its response to the agrarian and food crises and the social movements to recognize food security as social need. It follows that the public policy of PDS is not a mere benevolent gesture but the result of contestation and conflict over class and need spaces that make the relation of the state to PDS contingent. Our analysis shows that class matters in explaining PDS. Class struggles and needs struggles spanning the triad of production, distribution and redistribution shape the history and constitution of PDS.

A methodology for class analysis: Agricultural investments and agrarian change in South Africa

AbstractThis paper presents a class‐analytic approach, which combines a “labour exploitation criterion” with class typologies developed for the South African context and the author's additions. The labour exploitation criterion distinguishes between rural classes based on the degree to which one employs others, works for others, or works for oneself. I combine the principal indicator of “labour exploitation” with the income contributions of social grants, ownership of farming assets and livestock, and the contribution of agricultural production to simple or expanded reproduction. Debates around class formation are explored in the context of a comparative analysis of two joint venture (JV) dairy farms, located in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, which involve residents as both landowners and workers. A class‐analytic approach illuminates the emerging agrarian class structure that a JV‐type intervention both reflects and in turn conditions, in dialectical fashion, with important implications for debates around agrarian change in South Africa.

Status and Participation of Nepali Women in Agrarian Class Structure in the Himalayan and Sub-Himalayan Region of West Bengal: An Empirical Study

Status and Participation of Nepali Women in Agrarian Class Structure in the Himalayan and Sub-Himalayan Region of West Bengal: An Empirical Study

The Agrarian Question and Coffee in Costa Rica

This article traces the agrarian transition to capitalism in Costa Rica to identify the factors and dynamics that have contributed to the current persistence of the coffee producing peasantry. The case study reveals that the agrarian transition to capitalism and the persistence of the coffee commodity producing peasantry are both products of certain historical and political circumstances. The pro-smallholder politics of the post-revolution Costa Rican state and its emphasis on a particular form of agro-input-substituting industrialization, combined with the unique and historically contingent relations that have developed between landed agrarian and industrial capitalist classes and the peasantry, have led to an agrarian class structure which lacks a substantial landed capitalist coffee producing class. Instead agrarian capital has relegated itself to the processing and input spheres where the ‘real’ subsumption of nature and the ‘formal’ subsumption of peasant labour to agrarian capital occurred.

From feudal colonization to agrarian capitalism in Mallorca: Peasant endurance under the rise and fall of large estates (1229–1900)

The colonization of Mallorca gave rise to a late‐feudal agrarian society that evolved towards capitalism based on large estates owned by noblemen who hired large numbers of wage labourers from among smallholders living in agro‐towns, the dispossessed remnants of a formerly wealthier peasantry. These well‐off peasants originated from when the colonization frontier was open in the 13th and 14th centuries, but had been defeated when three peasant–plebeian revolts were crushed. Afterwards, Mallorca followed a latifundist transition towards agrarian capitalism similar to southern Italy or Spain, in sharp contrast with the middle‐peasant paths seen in Catalonia or Valencia. The land rent rose, while agricultural wages fell from 1659 to 1800. Peasant families could not survive, and had to supplement wages with the products of their own plots. This set a socio‐agroecological limit to growth in this agrarian class structure. The agrarian crisis at the end of the 19th century bankrupted the Mallorcan nobility. Bankers bought much of the land and sold it on as small allotments. This expanded the intensive cropping formerly limited to agro‐town belts, giving rise to a new “peasantization”. Despite their subordination, Mallorcan peasants had survived and created complex agroecological landscapes endowed with a rich biocultural heritage.

Smallholder Irrigation Schemes, Agrarian Reform and ‘Accumulation from Above and from Below’ inSouthAfrica

A key issue in debates on agrarian reform inSouthAfrica is the potential for small‐scale farming, in conjunction with redistributive land reform, to make a significant contribution to employment creation and poverty reduction. Two problems hinder these debates – the paucity of reliable data on small‐scale agriculture, and lack of clarity on the meaning of terms such as ‘smallholder’ and ‘small‐scale farmer’. This paper applies class‐analytic perspectives on social differentiation to critically examine these terms, and explores the prospects for ‘accumulation from above and from below’ through agrarian reform, drawing on wider debates within theSouthernAfrican region. It focuses in particular on smallholder irrigation schemes, potentially a key focus of policy, and presents research findings on production and marketing of fresh produce in one such scheme inTugelaFerry,KwaZulu‐Natal. Survey data show that farming households combine agriculture and various forms of off‐farm labour, as is often the case throughout the region, and that accumulation in small‐scale agriculture is constrained by a number of factors, including the inherited and largely untransformed agrarian class structure ofSouthAfrica. In this context, expanded access to land and water is a necessary but not sufficient condition for such accumulation; wider structural change is also required.

Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Colonial British North America: The Place of the American Revolution in the Origins of US Capitalism

Social and economic historians have debated whether the rapid growth of agricultural and industrial commodity production in the United States was a continuation of or a radical break with the economic and social patterns of British colonial North America. At issue is whether the social and economic preconditions for capitalist industrialization existed before, or emerged only after the American Revolution and the establishment of an independent US state. The two major interpretive models – the ‘staples/commercialization’ and ‘frontier/demographic’ models – provide insights into the process of economic development in colonial North America. However, their inability to root their analyses in specificities of different forms of social labour leave them inadequate. This essay attempts to root the patterns of economic growth and development in the dynamics and transformation and preservation during the American Revolution of different social property relations (independent household production, petty‐commodity production, plantation slavery) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Political Foundations of Post-communist Regimes

This article explores the causes of differing post-communist regime transitions in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, emphasizing the increasingly prominent thesis that economic liberalization promotes political democratization. We explore this argument in light of findings from other regions that have emphasized modernization, agrarian class structure, and international influences. Our results are based on a multilevel design strategy, first analyzing data on 26 post-communist countries over a 7-to 9-year period using time-series/cross-sectional methods and then turning to a comparative analysis of four purposively selected cases to explore the causal mechanisms implied but not tested in the quantitative analysis. Our results suggest that faith in economic liberalization as a cause of democratization may be misplaced. However, there is support for the notion that large agrarian sectors are unfavorable to democratic development, whereas positive democratic conditionality from outside agents can play an important role in transition dynamics.

Aid to Sharecroppers: How Agrarian Class Structure and Tenant-Farmer Politics Influenced Federal Relief in the South, 1933-1935

Aid to Sharecroppers: How Agrarian Class Structure and Tenant-Farmer Politics Influenced Federal Relief in the South, 1933-1935

Capitalism, Merchants and Bourgeois Revolution: Reflections on the Brenner Debate and its Sequel

The “Brenner Debate” launched by Past and Present in 1976 was about “agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe”. Robert Brenner's recent book, Merchants and Revolution, has opened a new front in the debate by introducing merchants and “commercial change” into the equation. Although the book's massive Postscript carefully situates Brenner's analysis of commercial development in the context of his earlier account of the agrarian transition from feudalism to capitalism, this is unlikely to foreclose debate about how, or even whether, his more recent argument about the role of merchants in the English revolution can be squared with the original Brenner thesis. What is at issue here is not just divergent interpretations of historical evidence but larger differences about the nature of capitalism. The following argument has more to do with the latter than with the former, and it will be concerned with Brenner's work and the debates surrounding it not just for their own sake but for what they reveal about the dominant conceptions of capitalism, in Marxist and non-Marxist histories alike.

Through a divided glass: Dualism, class and the Agrarian question in Mozambique

This article argues that if we look at rural differentiation not only as emerging class stratification but also as changing divisions of labour, expressed in the diversification of rural livelihoods, we can see that proletarianisation in Mozambique was a deeply rooted process at Independence. The Frelimo party's vision of agrarian class structure was, however, based on a dualist model of a homogeneous subsistence‐oriented peasantry opposed to an enterprise sector. Strategic options based on this vision proved to be economically unworkable and politically compromising. Subsequent years of war have neither levelled class stratification nor reduced rural livelihoods to homogeneous subsistence production. Hence the dualist premises underlying the smallholder model now projected by critics of Frelimo's socialist options are similarly flawed.

English society in the later Middle Ages: class, status and gender

CONTENTS: Preface - Abbreviations - Introduction: Social Structure as Social Closure - PART 1: CLASS STRUCTURE AS SOCIAL CLOSURE - Agrarian Class Structure: Exclusion and Dual Closure - Agrarian Class Structure and the Forces for Change (I) Trade, Population and the Money-supply - (ii) Usurpationary Closure - Urban Class Structure and Usurpationary Closure - PART 2: ORDER, GENDER AND STATUS-GROUP AS SOCIAL CLOSURE - Order as Social Closure (I) the Nobility - Order as Social Closure (ii) the Clergy - Gender as Social Closure: Women - Status-group as Social Closure: the Jews - Social Ideology: Closure Legitimated? - Conclusion - Select bibliography - Bibliography of references

What does agrarian wage‐labour signify? Cotton, commoditisation and social form in Gokwe, Zimbabwe

In the decade following Zimbabwe's Independence, the idea of a homogeneous, subsistence peasantry was soon dissolved by the ‘discovery’ of agrarian wage relations in the former African reserves. Simultaneously, residual collective labour forms were identified both as signs of a pre‐capitalist past and as institutional templates out of which a socialist future in agriculture might be imagined and constructed. In this article, I examine the complex history of commodity production, domestic relations and labour forms in Gokwe ‐ a particularly intense and recent venue of agrarian commoditisation focused around cotton in the north‐west. In Gokwe, an idealised contrast between collective and wage labour — taken as tokens of a historical sequence —fails to capture either the variety of labour forms, their interrelationship over time, or their relation to shifts in the regional agrarian class structure. Indeed, the increase in intensity of agrarian commodity production has been accompanied by an efflorescence of ...

Rural employment and agrarian markets in transition: Nicaragua (1979–89)

The article deals with state intervention in agrarian produce markets and the rural labour market in post‐revolutionary Nicaragua. Basing itself in the debate about the Nicaraguan agrarian class structure, it analyses the development of the internal terms of trade, the rapid integration of the peasantry in the market and its positive response to recent liberalisation measures. The labour market seems to show developments contrary to economic logic. Detailed analysis concludes that labour demand declined more slowly than supply. However, only recently this led to higher real wages after a long period of deterioration. Further income differentiation also seems a possible unwanted outcome.

Tenure and the land market in early modern England: or a late contribution to the Brenner debate

B renner's purpose in his original article in Past and Present was to explain the various routes and speeds by which different European regions developed capitalist forms of agricultural organization.2 In doing so, he argued for the centrality of the 'agrarian class structure', that is the balance of class relationships within the countryside, in dictating developments. This article will not attempt to discuss the whole model but will offer a critique of Brenner's account of the English experience in the early modern period (and suggest that agrarian class structure alone is not an adequate explanatory device) before proposing an alternative route to the future which, in one sense, turns Brenner's views upside down. I shall probe the limits of our knowledge and, where knowledge fails, offer speculation as a stimulus to future research. The speculation may prove to be ill founded. As Shaw remarked when championing Elgar and Cockaigne, to offer it may be to damn myself 'to all critical prosperity with a gaffe that will make your grandson blush for you'.3 But the risk is one I am happy to take. Brenner regarded the existence of large commercial farms, held on lease from absentee rentier landlords and worked by hired wage labour, as the distinctive feature of the eighteenth-century English countryside. He accepted the estimate of Mingay and Thompson that by c. I700 English landlords controlled 70-75 per cent of the cultivable area of England and he equated this with the area farmed by large, market-orientated enterprises.4 These farms produced for a national if not an international market. They represented a marked contrast with French agriculture in which peasants, that is small scale, subsistence farmers, continued to predominate until a much later date. The large English farms were, in Brenner's analysis, created by a deliberate landlord policy which was aided if not abetted by the Crown, which was permitted by the destruction of the property rights of the English peasantry, and which entailed the expropriation of their land. 'With the peasants' failure to establish essentially freehold control over the land, the landlords were I An earlier version of this paper was read to the seminar on late medieval and early modern economic history, All Souls College, Oxford in i987: in making revisions I am grateful for the comments I received then and for the criticisms of Drs Joan Thirsk and Bridget Taylor and Professor D. M. Palliser. Many of the issues raised in this paper form the subject of the writer's continuing research. 2 Brenner, 'Agrarian class structure'. 3 Shaw's Music III (i893-1950), ed. Laurence, p. 722. 4 While the figure is perhaps of the right order (though it conceals large regional variations), the equation of landlord control with a specific type of farm is unsound.

Agrarian class structure in Nicaragua in 1980: A new interpretation and some implications

The processing and analysis of a family rural survey which covered more than 50,000 families is used to reinterpret Nicaraguan agrarian class structure in 1980, the starting point of the agrarian reform. The author contrasts his results with those of a prior processing and the conclusions of other analysts. The article concludes by considering the implications of the work for present agrarian class structure and for social and economic policies in agriculture, particularly those affecting the middle peasantry.

The Agrarian Path to Capitalism?

In 1976 an article by the American Marxist historian Robert Brenner inaugurated a debate in Past and Present on the relationship of agrarian conditions and structures to the differing rates and forms of capitalist development in Europe. He was especially concerned to challenge what he termed ‘neo‐Malthusianism’. Exemplified in the work of M.M. Postan and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie this explained the decline of feudalism in terms of impersonal economic and demographic forces. In stressing instead the role of class struggle between lords and peasants, Brenner brought critical responses not just from this school, but also from Marxists who considered his explanation too ‘super‐structural’. The publication of the critical pieces and of Brenner's response in a single book provided an opportunity to take an overview of a major and stimulating debate which can be considered still very much alive. The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre‐Industrial Europe, edited by T.H. Ashton an...

The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe. Edited by T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (Cambridge, London, New York: Cambridge University Press, 'Past and Present Publications', 1985, viii + 341 pp.)

The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe. Edited by T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (Cambridge, London, New York: Cambridge University Press, 'Past and Present Publications', 1985, viii + 341 pp.)

The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe

Preface Introduction R. H. Hilton 1. Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe Robert Brenner 2. Population and class relations in feudal society M. M. Postan and John Hatcher 3. Agrarian class structure and the development of capitalism: France and England compared Patricia Croot and David Parker 4. Peasant organization and class conflict in Eastern and Western Germany Heide Wunder 5. A reply to Robert Brenner Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie 6. Against the neo-malthusian orthodoxy Guy Bois 7. A crisis of feudalism R. H. Hilton 8. In search of agrarian capitalism J. P. Cooper 9. Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial bohemia Arnost Klima 10. The Agrarian roots of European capitalism Robert Brenner Index.