European Peasantry Research Articles

Local Migration of Peasants in the Late Middle Ages: a Quantitative Analysis of the Cheb City-State 1442–1456

Abstract Many scholars have proved statistically that the migration of the Early Modern European peasantry was predominantly local and socially conditioned. This article tries to expand our quantified knowledge of the Late Medieval period using the unique documentary evidence from the Cheb city-state (Czech Republic). Based on a detailed analysis, we show that the migration pattern of the Late Medieval Cheb peasantry was similar to the Early Modern one despite very different demographic, economic and social conditions. The strength of the ties to the land increased with wealth; the better the property often among rural landholdings, gaining a better position. The wealthier the peasants status of the household, the lower the rate of replacement on the landholding. Poorer peasants migrated relatively more to the city, where they were among the wealthier burghers. Even though peasant migration took place over short distances, it brought about fundamental changes for many peasants.

The Operation Successful, But the Patient Died. The Gradual Elimination of the Central European Peasantry in the Light of Globalization and Interwar Processes

In terms of “depeasantisation," it was with the EU accession in 2004 when Central Europe – including Hungary – reached the stage where England had already arrived in the 18th and Germany in the 19th century. The gradual disappearance of the peasantry in the continent is doubtless in connection with the tendencies of globalization, a phenomenon that could not be stopped even by the authoritarian regimes of the interwar period – the time period examined by the dissertation. However, in a latent way, the question had already arisen at the time: is peasantry necessary at all? Nevertheless, as a consequence of the defeat in World War I, there were important national political arguments for the preservation of peasantry in the region, together with the rise of peasant ideologies. After 1945 – as Barrington Moore, the ideologist of the Cold War, pointed out – the huge peasant masses meant the precondition for not only the creation of fascism but also for Eastern European socialism. Therefore, many problems had to be swept under the carpet. But the issue can be better understood once it is examined along the “development slope." In this aspect, many experts in new comparisons drew attention to the key role of Germany. Following the footsteps of the Canadian historian Scott M. Eddie, the author of this article compares the agrarian societies of two areas dominated by large estates, Pomerania and Somogy county, with a special focus on the significance of identity. The research questions were the following: what were the chances of the peasantry in those areas in the grip of modernity and large estates? To what extent had this process altered identity? In order to map the latter methodologically, the study required a wide interdisciplinary examination.

Investigating oral history

This interview with Professor Jan Vansina, conducted in the mid-1980s by Szilárd Biernaczky, is the result of extensive correspondence between the two. After a brief introduction to the achievements of the distinguished and pioneering scholar of African history, the interview addresses the following issues: 1. the current status of oral history research; 2. new theories in the field of oral history research; 3. ethno-history versus oral history; 4. ethnography, ethnology, European peasantry, and oral history; 5. the mythical dimension of the “beginning” and its inherent historical models (“outbound” segments, migration, new conquest, first ancestors, etc.); 6. oral history as a source of nationalist movements in Africa; 7. the appreciation of oral history (and its research) and African cultural movements.

Last hunter-gatherers and first farmers of Europe

The Neolithisation of Europe has seen the transformation of hunting-gathering societies into farming communities. At least partly exogenous in its origins, this process led to major transformations in many aspects of life-styles, such as social structures, land use or diet. It involved the arrival of new human populations and gave way to the importation, intentional or unwanted of many non-European animal and plant species. It also provoked important changes in interactions between humans and natural environments. In many respects, it set the foundations of long-term European peasantry developments and prefigured later agropastoral colonizations. As such, it must be seen as a major turning point in the history of European populations.

Leaseholders in Capitalist Arcadia: Bourgeois Hegemony and Peasant Opportunities in the Valencian Countryside during the Nineteenth Century

Translated by Laura CunniffScholars tend to interpret the European peasantry's incorporation into mass politics at the beginning of the twentieth century in terms of two equally extreme situations, citing either the peasantry's support for traditional oligarchies, or its anti-capitalist radicalism. By contrast, this article explores how the confluence between a broad network of peasant families and leased agricultural properties in the Valencian region of Spain helped generate mass support for an anti-liberal (and eventually Francoist) legal system. The authors highlight the uniqueness of the social and productive context of Valencian agriculture during the late 1800s and early 1900s, as well as the tensions that existed between landowners and tenants. Such tensions, they argue, did not stop these two groups from efficiently collaborating in favour of an economic orientation that was both developmentalist and politically anti-liberal.

The Persistence of Subsistence and the Limits to Development Studies: The Challenge of Tanzania

AbstractThere are two general approaches to assessing what is known as ‘development’. First, there are classical accounts focusing on Europe's development during the industrial revolution. They describe how urban areas expanded at the expense of the social and economic resources of the rural areas, disrupting an independent subsistence peasantry. A major consequence is that today all Europeans are dependent socially, politically, and economically on the modern capitalist system. The second (more common) approach to development focuses on the modern Third World. This approach assumes that, as with Europe, the entire Third World is dependent on the modern capitalist system. Development studies focus on the assessment of how Third World countries can most effectively engage world capitalism. Discussion is typically reduced to comparisons between world systems theory and neoclassical economics. The Tanzanian government has used standard policies grounded in neoclassical and world‐system assumptions since independence. But both policies failed to produce the predicted economic growth. This article argues that both policies failed because the Tanzanian peasantry, like the early modern European peasantry, is not dependent on the operation of world capitalism for basic subsistence. In fact, as studies have shown, rural Tanzania is only weakly incorporated into the capitalist world system, and in consequence has not been an easy target for what world‐system theorists call ‘peripheral integration’. What makes Tanzania different is the fact that the rural peasantry do not use market mechanisms in the distribution of the ‘means of production’, especially arable land for swidden agriculture, or, for that matter, labour or cattle.

In Pursuit of Refinement: Charlestonians Abroad, 1740-1860

In Pursuit of Refinement: Charlestonians Abroad, 1740-1860. Edited by Maurice D. McInnis in collaboration with Angela D. Mack with essays by J. Thomas Savage, Robert A. Leath, and Susan Ricci Stebbens. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Pp. xix, 352. Illustrations, color plates. $75.00.) Science, Race, and Religion in American South: John Bachman and Charleston Circle of Naturalists, 1815-1895. By Lester D. Stephens. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. xviii, 338. Illustrations. $39.95.) Colonial Charleston, William Francis Guess notes in South Carolina: Annals of Pride and Protest (1956), considered itself London of Southern Coast. As these two books illustrate, this attraction to European-and especially British-ideas and taste continued into antebellum period, shaping elite's notion of what it meant to be cultured. For wealthy Charlestonians, education and travel abroad provided opportunity to acquire manners and appurtenances of Europe's aristocracy. Among most important of these indicators of cultural refinement was appreciation for fine arts. In Pursuit of Refinement, a collaborative project of Gibbes Museum of Art and Historic Charleston Foundation, examines European experiences and purchases of Charleston's elite and, through these, chronicles creation of the most Anglophilic urban culture in America (63). The volume begins with a description of colonial and antebellum milieu; continues with essays on various Charleston collectors and collections; and finishes with an annotated catalogue of 1999 exhibition. As both essays and illustrations suggest, cultural horizons of elite Charlestonians extended far beyond borders of their state. The catalogue is beautifully illustrated and meticulously researched, containing many items from private collections never before exhibited in public. It convincingly demonstrates that not only were Charlestonians great patrons of European culture, but also that their own creative works were influenced by European motifs and styles. John Izard Middleton, for example, attended Cambridge and spent extended periods of his life studying art and architecture on continent. According to Susan Ricci Stebbins, he ranks as of first American landscape watercolorists and draftsmen and one of great art collect[ors] in America (82). Theodore Stebbins similarly describes Washington Allston as the most sophisticated American of his generation, a master of classical landscape before becoming first great American romantic painter (158). Because In Pursuit of Refinement is primarily a catalogue of an exhibition, it contains little analysis or criticism of art itself beyond broad generalizations. Nor does it consider impact of European models on city's artisans and laborers, majority of whom were black. It is important to remember that although Charleston's oligarchy may have emulated British aristocracy, it was an African workforce, not a European peasantry, that provided basis for its prosperity and leisure. In his examination of Charleston's naturalists, historian Lester D. Stephens argues that antebellum city was remarkable for its scientific achievements as well as its material culture. Stephens focuses on Lutheran theologian and naturalist John Bachman and five contemporaries -Edmund Ravenel, John Edwards Holbrook, Lewis Reeve Gibbes, Francis Simmons Holmes, and John McCrady-who shared his interest in natural history. These six individuals made Charleston a recognized center of natural history in antebellum South. John Bachman is pivotal figure in Stephens's study, and his work illustrates intersection of science, race, and religion in culture of region. A native of New York, Bachman's poor health led him to Charleston in 1815, where he became pastor of St. …

A Question of History: John Berger's Labours

Abstract John Berger's work of the past dozen years, bearing witness to the disappearance of the European peasantry and seeking to rescue the practice of storytelling that it might be renewed and turned against the cultural amnesia of both industrial capitalism and State socialism, has represented a further articulation of his commitment to the necessity of critical historical thought and consciousness. This essay reviews Berger's earlier work and considers his most recent writings in terms of his commitment to historical remembrance and imagination. Though Berger's project is still found to be extremely compelling, the author finds Berger's formulation of the question of 'survival’ as the central question of contemporary history problematic.

Amoral Familism and the Image of Limited Good: A Critique from a European Perspective

Foster's analysis of the image oflim ited good (which also seeks to subsume the concept of amoral familism) is still frequently referred to in studies of the European peasantry, although it has also been criticised in various ways as a predictive model of behaviour. Without entering the issue of prediction, the present study considers whether the image of limited good does in fact accurately reflect the thinking of a classic peasant village in Greece. It emerges that limited goods, which are necessarily viewed as commodities, are not easily discriminated in village thinking from other kinds ofgoods, which are not so viewed, and whether in regard to land, the family, hospitality or economic improvement, the meaning of village behaviour depends less on images of limited good than on images of other goods which accord with, oppose, or complement them. While Foster's analysis has contributed interesting insights on the way values can be defined as co nmodities, it is better to view European peasant societies within a more comprehensive framework which is sensitive to the other ways in which peasant values can be defined. [amoralfamilism, entrepreneurs, Greece, limited good, peasants]

Custom and Law in the Social Order: Some reflections upon French Catalan peasant communities

Until assuming the violent form most strikingly exemplified in France by the explosions of 1789 and 1848, the century-long movement of resistance and emancipation of the European peasantry mainly occurred in the legal domain. The focus of opposition was towards the attempt to impose a normative system which sought to undermine the working rules of peasant communities. It was carried through, for example, by protesting against seignorial obligations or by asserting claims to the free use of forests and communal pastures. In such actions the peasant will, revitalized by periodic subsistence crises, tried to maintain control over legal institutions, and therefore to retain relative social autonomy.

Of white whale and countrymen in the eighteenth‐century Maratha Deccan. extended class relations, rights, and the problem of rural autonomy under the old regime1

The problem is simply stated, but resists solution. We begin with the classical historiographic images of Old Regime societies of South Asia and suggest that beneath the surface of abstract formulations for and against these images, unrecognised difficulties of assumption and method allow them to persist in the contemporary imagination. This not only hampers understanding of historic societies, taken individually, but prevents proper assessment of their comparative significance on an international plane. The relationship between these images of discontinuity and similar sociological images of European peasantry is not coincidental. The errors of the latter are demonstrable through an abundant historiography; the burden of this essay is directed towards a solution to the former. We provide an empirically‐based structural study of social relationships in the countryside of Maharashtra in the 150 years preceding European occupation: a) to begin the accumulation of examples that contradict the received images; b) to provide an analysis of one Old Regime society for its own comparative sake. By examining the social distribution of certain types of right and of access to control of land, we demonstrate the existence of powerful forms of social dominance transcending the frontiers of the village, and strongly influencing the organisation of social, economic and political life in the countryside. Whilst we focus on a specific structural problem (namely, the conception of social totality and its internal ordering), the conclusion and footnotes permit the actual dynamism of the forms of relationship studied to emerge in incipient statement on social change under the old order.†

The Condition of the European Peasantry on the Eve of Emancipation

In 1770 about two-thirds of the population of Europe, or about 100 million people, lived in lands in which custom and law had organized society into a hierarchical structure of orders. Custom and law had also established a hierarchy of rights and obligations for each order. Vertical mobility was possible but was an exceptional and unimportant perturbation of the rigid social structure. These 100 or so million people lived in France, Savoy, certain cantons of Switzerland, the many states that made up Germany, Denmark, Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, Poland, Lithuania, Livonia, Estonia, and Russia. Between 70 and 95 percent of them, depending upon the country, lived on the land. They belonged to the lowest order of society, the peasantry. Through the accident of their birth into this order, the society in which they lived denied them certain freedoms and privileges enjoyed by those who belonged to higher orders, and compelled them to be dependent upon and subservient to persons of the higher estates. The degree of their subservience and the extent of their dependence formed a spectrum that ranged from light but often bitterly resented restrictions and impositions in western European lands to a serfdom that was scarcely distinguishable from slavery in some of the lands of eastern Europe. But whether light or heavy, servility-submissiveness of the great majority of the population to a few-characterized the societies of these lands, and so I will call them collectively the servile lands. -The first break in the old order came in 1771 when the duke of Savoy ordered the emancipation of the peasants of that small duchy. Baden was next in 1783, then Denmark in 1787, France in 1789, Switzerland in 1798, and then back and forth across central and eastern Europe until in 1864 the peasants of Romania, the last unfree people in Europe, were given their freedom. In less than 100

Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth-Century France, Russia, and China. By Roland Mousnier. Translated by Brian Pearce. New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1970. xx, 358 pp. $10.00. - The European Peasantry: The Final Phase. By S. H. Franklin.London: Methuen & Co., 1969. xvi, 256 pp. $8.00.

Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth-Century France, Russia, and China. By Roland Mousnier. Translated by Brian Pearce. New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1970. xx, 358 pp. $10.00. - The European Peasantry: The Final Phase. By S. H. Franklin.London: Methuen & Co., 1969. xvi, 256 pp. $8.00. - Volume 31 Issue 2

Peasantries in Anthropology and History [and Comments and Replies

This paper describes three sequential stages of West European peasantry (feudal, early modern, late modern) in order to establish a basis for comparison with the peasantries currently studied by anthropologists in Third World countries (almost all of which are in the early stage of economic development and cultural modernization). The village-community peasantries of the Third World may be regarded either as varying mixtures of tribal and some stage(s) of European peasantry (hybrids) or as combinations of institutions and technology from two, or all three, stages of European peasantry (composites).

REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article:GEOGRAPHY AND RETAILING. By Peter Scott.LANDFORMS OF COLD CLIMATES. By J. L. Davies.ATLAS OF BUNDALEER PLAINS AND TATALA. By F. M. Rothery. (Introduction by N. G. Butlin and J. N. Jennings.)THE EUROPEAN PEASANTRY: THE FINAL PHASE. By S. H. Franklin.AUSTRALIA WET OR DRY? THE PHYSICAL AND ECONOMIC LIMITS TO THE EXPANSION OF IRRIGATION. By B. R. Davidson.THE SEARCH FOR THE ISLANDS OF SOLOMON 1567–1838. By Colin Jack‐Hinton.CAPITALISM PRIMITIVE AND MODERN. By T. Scarlett Epstein.PACIFIC MARKET PLACES. Edited by H. C. Brookfield.WEST AFRICA. By W. B. Morgan andj. C. Pugh.STATISTICAL ANALYSIS IN GEOGRAPHY. By Leslie J. King.PATTERNS OF INDUSTRIES. By R. S. Mathieson.PATTERNS OF CITIES. By A. J. Rose.ADMINISTRATION IN NEW ZEALAND'S MULTI‐RACIAL SOCIETY. Edited by R. H. Brookes and I. H. Kawharu.ANTARCTIC MAP FOLIO SERIES. Folio 7, Glaciers of the Antarctic. By J. Mercer; and Folio 8, The Antarctic Atmosphere: Climatology of the Surface Environment. By W. S. Weyant.THE ARID ZONES. By K. Walton.LAND USE CAPABILITY SURVEY HANDBOOK. Water and Soil Division, Ministry of Works, WellingtonQUANTITATIVE GEOGRAPHY. By John P. Cole and Cuchlaine A. M. King.AN INTRODUCTION TO QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS IN ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY. By Maurice H. Ycatcs.URBAN AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND: A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY TO 1966. By G. Breese.ARID LANDS OP AUSTRALIA. Edited by R. O. Slatyer and R. A. Perry.GROWTH OF THE WORLD'S URBAN AND RURAL POPULATION, 1920–2000.READINGS IN CANADIAN GEOGRAPHY. Edited by Robert M. Irving.CANADA: A GEOGRAPHICAL INTERPRETATION. Edited by John Warkentin.PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED: Notice of a book on these pages does not preclude its subsequent review in New Zealand Geographer or New Zealand Journal of Geography Australia New Zealand and the South‐West Pacific. By J. H. Holmes. North West England. By W. E. Marsden. Geographical Digest. Edited by Harold Fullard. Landscape Studies. By J. H. Shaw and F. G. Kirkwood. Antarctica. By John Bechervaise. Hong Kong and the Philippines. By John Whiteley. The European Peasantry. By S. H. Franklin. Physical and Information Models in Geography. Edited by Richard J. Chorley and Peter Haggett. Integrated Models in Geography. Edited by Richard J. Chorley and Peter Haggett. Mt. Wilhelm Studies I: The Alpine and Subalpine Vegetation. By L. K. Wade and D. N. McVean. World Problems: A Topic Geography. By M. Long and B. S. Roberson. Matupit: Land, Politics and Change among the Tolai of New Britain. By A. L. Epstein. Brother Wohlers. By Sheila Natusch. The Camel in Australia. By Tom. L. McKnight. South Australia From the Air. Edited by Michael Williams. Fiji in the Pacific. By G. T. A. Kerr and T. A. Donnelly. North West Europe. By F. R. Dobson and H. E. Virgo. Senior Geography. By V. G. Honour, D. Hopley and A. R. Dyer. Macquarie Island. By J. S. Compston. Atlas Four. Edited by J. David Thompson. Europe in Maps. By R. Knowles and P. D. E. Stowc. The Arid Lands. R. L. Heathcote and C. R. Twidale. Fishing. By R. S. Mathieson. Wheat. By Hylda A. Rolfe.

The European Peasantry: The Final Phase

The European Peasantry: The Final Phase

The European Peasantry

The European Peasantry

The European Peasantry

The European Peasantry

The Apulia Expedition: An Interim Report

The first (1949) season of archaeological reconnaissance on the Foggia Plain in South Italy has confirmed, in the most striking manner, the existence of one of the densest concentrations of ancient sites to be identified in Europe in an area of comparable size. For readers of ANTIQUITY, their nature had already been foreshadowed in these pages.These discoveries were first made from British air photographs taken in June 1945, which revealed the plans of settlements, farms, roads and field-systems existing below the surface of the ground or clearly visible to the air camera. They were distributed across 3000 years of Italian history, from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages, and illustrate from the archaeological record three principal stages in the rise of a European peasantry. This is a theme that affords ideal ground for the conjunction of Archaeology and Ethnology ; and it is appropriate that the Expedition should be based on the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford, which was founded on this very principle.Now, thanks to the Apulia Committee, set up under the auspices of the Society of Antiquaries and representing the University of Oxford and learned societies, it has been possible to proceed to the second and fundamental stage:—namely, to carry out the first systematic programme of archaeological investigation based on air photographic data ever conducted in Italy. This also included the first British excavations there for a number of years, with the permission and helpful co-operation of the Italian authorities, and the support of the British School at Rome.

Pyrenean Festivals

MISS ALFORD is well known as a student of the folk-dance and song of European peasantry, but the Pyrenees is a region which in this subject she has made peculiarly her own province. In this volume, æsthetically delightful, as well as scientifically valuable, she has reviewed the results of some years of observation on both sides of the political frontier among the inhabitants of the Pyrenean regions from Catalonia on the east to the Basque country in the west. Nor has she confined her studies to dance and song, for she deals here with some remarkable forms of custom and magical belief which serve to throw light on the main theme.