Peasant Proprietors Research Articles

Peasant proprietors, social mobility and risk aversion in the early Middle Ages: an Iberian case study

ABSTRACT This article investigates an important but neglected question concerning the social and economic dynamics of village communities in early medieval north-western Iberia: why did ‘medium owners’ – that is, peasants who accumulated significant landed holdings – assemble portfolios of property large enough to produce significant surpluses in an age in which the institutional infrastructure needed to marketise such surpluses was rudimentary? The pursuit of upward social mobility is most commonly posed as the answer to this question; but how exactly did medium owners stand to gain? After all, north-western Iberia in the early Middle Ages was a scarcely monetised society in which would-be medium owners could not expect to be paid in coin for the sale of their surplus and consequently see their options as buyers increase. Why, then, assume the risks involved in expanding one’s farming operation? Certainly, the acquisition of landed wealth brought with it clear advantages, including symbolic prestige and an expanded client network. Yet this article suggests that we can better understand why socially mobile peasants sought to own landed resources capable of producing significant surpluses only if we are prepared to re-examine important historiographical motifs, including peasant risk aversion, and the culturally constituted nature of the subsistence minimum.

Territory, enclosure, and state territorial mode of production in the Russian imperial periphery

Abstract. After the imperial land consolidation acts of 1906, the Russian land commune became a center of territorial struggle where complex alliances of actors, strategies, and representations of territory enacted land enclosure beyond the exclusive control of the state. Using original documentation of Russian imperial land deals obtained in the federal and municipal archives, this study explores how the Russian imperial state and territories in the periphery were dialectically co-produced not only through institutional manipulations, educational programs, and resettlement plans but also through political and public discourses. This paper examines how coalitions of landed nobility and land surveyors, landless serfs, and peasant proprietors used enclosure as conduits for property violence, accumulation of capital, or, in contrast, as a means of territorial autonomy. Through this example, I bring a territorial dimension into Russian agrarian scholarship by positioning the rural politics of the late imperial period within the global context of capitalist land enclosure. At the same time, by focusing on the reading of territory from the Russian historical perspective, I introduce complexity into the modern territory discourse often found in Western political geographic interpretations.

From the Cult of Chivalry to the Cult of Personality: The Seventh-century Transformation in Pallava Statecraft

Between the fourth and sixth centuries ce, Pallava statecraft in South India revolved largely around the practice of making land grants to brāhmaṇa beneficiaries. These activities were concentrated in the rural agrarian belts of coastal Andhra and parts of Karnataka. The image of the king in these grants was stereotypical: a chivalrous ruler, wedded to the ideals of valour, protecting his people and swearing devotion towards his father and god. These were ideals that might have appealed to the imagination of a rural world in an agrarian milieu. However, in the early seventh century ce, when South Asia witnessed a ‘third phase of urbanization’, the Pallavas turned towards Tamil Nadu, where a powerful class of peasant proprietors, the nātṭṭār, existed. In this changed historical setting, the Pallavas moved away in a significant manner from the practice of awarding land grant and making interventions into the production relations and other regimes of agrarian control. Instead, they turned towards the creation of a refined urban aesthetic infrastructure centring on the cult of the royal personality. This involved the propagation of newer images of the king, extending patronage to literary practices, drama and music, and building temples for āgamic deities such as Śiva and Viṣṇu on a scale large enough to promote ingenious forms of architecture and iconography. This new aesthetic infrastructure was widely influential, eventually spread to other parts of the subcontinent, transforming the practice of statecraft in South Asia.

AFTER THE FREEHOLDER: REPUBLICAN AND LIBERAL THEMES IN THE WORKS OF SAMUEL LAING

Samuel Laing was a key figure in propagating both an academically respectable defense of peasant proprietors and a critique of bureaucratic central government in Victorian Britain, his writings cited and argued with by John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Walter Bagehot, and John Austin (among others). This article corrects misapprehensions that Laing was a libertarian apologist for unfettered commercialism and complacent patriotism. It situates Laing in his argumentative contexts to show him as a critic of conventional political economy who called for a “natural” society of self-governing freeholders like that he observed in Norway, but who gradually became ambivalently caught between a British commercial and aristocratic order and a Continental model of greater property diffusion and strong central government. Laing's story sheds new light on the complex afterlives of republican and civic themes in nineteenth-century Britain, and their interaction with emergent concerns over the dangers to active citizenship of both wage labor in international markets and centralizing bureaucracies.

Property rights and the first great divergence: Europe 1500–1800

Recent literature on developing countries has revived interest in structural change involving the reallocation of resources from agriculture to industry. Here, we focus on the first such historically important structural transformation in which some parts of Europe escaped from the Malthusian trap centuries earlier than the Industrial Revolution, while others stagnated. There is as yet no consensus as to the causes of this First Great Divergence. The paper advances the thesis that what lies at the root of different paths is the type of property rights inherited. As populations everywhere in Europe recovered from the catastrophes of the late medieval period, what mattered for the direction taken was the size of the landlord class and their landholdings. In Western Europe where peasant proprietors tilled small plots, increases in population levels led to lower real wages. Given the low incomes of landlords and peasants, demand for manufactured goods remained low. At the other extreme, in eastern Europe, second serfdom kept wages low, and rents high. Yet given the small size of the land-owning class, these rents could not generate enough demand for high-end manufacturing processes either. Northwestern Europe, being in the middle in terms both of the size of the landholding classes and their properties, prospered as wages failed to decline even when population levels rapidly rose. Combined demand from landlords and workers kindled an expansion of the manufacturing sector.

Free Peasants and Large Landowners in the West

Comparison of Brittany and northern Iberia shows that there was little of the classical bi-partite estate in either. In both regions the systems of exploitation were mixed, with free peasant proprietors, large and small estates, tenants and some tied labour. In both the estate was usually an accumulation of separate units, worked and managed by peasant households paying rent. Despite many strong similarities, there were differences between the regions for northern Iberia had many mills, and some element of labour service, while Brittany seems to have had neither at the end of the first millennium.

William Thomas Thornton’s ‘The True Consequences of the Repeal of the Corn Laws’ with an Introduction and Annotations

In early 1841, William T. Thornton (1813-1880) accepted an invitation to address members of the Travellers' Club on the divisive issue of the repeal of the Corn Laws. Until his return to England in 1835, Thornton had led a peripatetic life, initially travelling to Malta in the 1820s where he resided with a well-connected relative, Sir William Henry Thornton, the Auditor-General, before sallying off to the Ottoman capital, Constantinople, where he secured employment on the staff of the British Consul, John Cartwright. When he returned from the Levant he settled in London where he gained employment at the East India Company, a position secured through family connections. Thornton had been appointed to the lowest rung within the Company's administrative structure, but he was now confidently making his way in the world and seemed destined for bigger things. At some stage between his return to London in 1835 and his presentation to the Travellers' Club in 1841 the foundation for his life-long interest in political economy was laid. This interest led initially to his embarking upon an examination of the economic impact of the Corn Laws, followed by the Travellers' Club presentation and finally the penning of a little-known pamphlet titled The True Consequences of the Repeal of the Corn Laws (1841), judiciously published by Effingham Wilson, a London bookseller renowned for issuing material other London publishers were reluctant to handle. This pamphlet, which has never before been republished, is reproduced in full below. Its publication can be justified on several grounds. First, even though the pamphlet constitutes Thornton's earliest efforts as an economic writer it has only ever been acknowledged in the literature by Grampp (1956), whose passing reference to it was accompanied by a very peculiar reading of Thornton on the Corn Laws and money wages. Second, it should be understood that the pamphlet is a piece of comparative juvenilia that contributed to the wider economic debate on agricultural protection along partisan lines. For example, Thornton's use of a simplistic wage fund construction to determine money wages allows the reader to better gauge how far he had travelled by the 1860s when he presented a more sophisticated critique of the wage fund in terms of supply and demand theory. Third, the impression of juvenilia is reinforced by tracing the approach that Thornton adopts when accounting for changes in the pattern of trade after repeal. His study is quite compatible with, and the language indicates that it was constructed in terms of, an absolute advantage argument rather than along Ricardian comparative advantage lines. Fourth, his view of the incidence of tax, although largely correct, is open to criticism due to the narrowness of its premise. Fifth, the pamphlet anticipates a number of economic topics that Thornton canvassed more thoroughly in his Overpopulation and Its Remedy (1846) and A Plea for Peasant Proprietors (1848), both of which received handsome notices in the leading Victorian periodicals of the day. From this perspective, Thornton's pamphlet may be seen as representing a capsule summary of the two more assured works he published during the late 1840s which announced his arrival as both an important and a new economic voice.

James M. Brophy . Popular Culture and the Public Sphere in the Rhineland, 1800–1850.(New Studies in European History.)New York : Cambridge University Press . 2007 . Pp. xvi, 365. $99.00.

The Rhineland holds a special place in German history as the region in which its national political culture received early liberal and democratic impulses. From the influence of the French Revolution in the 1790s through the democratic tumult of the Hambach Festival of 1832, the Rhineland and the neighboring Palatinate evidenced a degree of politicization and radicalism in stark contrast to the Prussian east and the Bavarian south. The forms of political organization that took shape in Rhenish cities and villages throughout the 1840s were a harbinger of both the 1848 Revolution and the further development of Germany's national party-political landscape. James M. Brophy's new book explores what he calls the “prehistory” of the 1840s by analyzing the role played by non-bourgeois and non-elite actors in the formation of political communities and politicized subjectivities during the first fifty years of the nineteenth century. When looking at the making of the public sphere, he asks, how did “peasant proprietors, tenant farmers, day laborers, artisans or the urban underclasses participate in this transformative process” (p. 19)?

The Legal Status of Tenants and Sharecroppers in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France and Ottoman Syria

By the middle of the sixteenth century, the role of the tenant farmer and sharecropper in both Syria and France witnessed important transformations which lent increasing relevance to the social and legal status enjoyed by these cultivators. In various regions of France after the sixteenth century, a rising class of bourgeois landholders increasingly appropriated agricultural lands from both peasant proprietors and nobles, leading to the spread of both sharecropping and leasing contracts. In Ottoman Syria, the appropriation of peasant lands and proliferation of tenancy arrangements was linked to an expanding state which sought to consolidate power and ensure the consistent flow of revenue. Thus, this paper will address how the socio-legal discourse on tenants and sharecroppers differed in a context where arable lands were appropriated by private rather than public forces. Issues that are examined include: perceptions of agricultural innovation; possession rights; and payment of rent and other dues.While Islamic legal scholars articulated a discourse which sought to incorporate tenants and sharecroppers, French legal and social thinkers of the day championed the rights of the landlord above all else. Unlike their Syrian counterparts, French thinkers linked agricultural development and efficient production to private ownership of land. In Syria, on the other hand, jurists advocated a land tenure system in which the possession rights of cultivators were supported while landlord interests were not jeopardised. Thus, agricultural development in the Syrian case was articulated within a framework which conceded multiple layers of ownership. These ideas would have an important impact on nineteenth-century developments in both regions.

Merchants and peasants in the Nazareth region, 1922 – 47

In Nazareth, the wholesale merchants of agricultural commodities made every effort to acquire crops during harvest time, when commodity prices were at their lowest, and to sell them a few months later when demand (and prices) had increased. To facilitate this, merchants established close economic ties with peasant proprietors, in particular by providing them with a ‘safety net’ in lean years in the form of loans at comparatively attractive rates. An unwritten part of this arrangement was that a peasant in such a relationship with a merchant would market most of the surplus of his cash crops at harvest time. A contract in the credit market was thus simultaneously a contract in the goods market, ensuring that merchants would receive payment in crops, while peasants were paid in advance for their produce. It was also the custom that in cases of default, the merchant became the owner of the mortgaged land and the former landowner became the tenant. In such circumstances, the new tenancy agreement was usually interlinked with other agreements, especially in regard to animal husbandry.

Conservatives and the Politics of Land: Lord Winchilsea's National Agricultural Union, 1893–1901*

The ‘land question’ played a major part in late Victorian British politics. This article focuses on Conservative engagement with land politics, paying particular attention to a pressure group that has yet to receive serious attention from scholars: the earl of Winchilsea's National Agricultural Union (NAU). Established in 1893, the NAU had a significant impact on English agrarian politics in the 1890s. Its membership open to landlords, farmers and labourers, the NAU sought to mobilise mass support behind a legislative programme, which included tax relief for agricultural land, the reduction of railway rates and old age pensions. Within two years the Union claimed over 50,000 members. At the 1895 general election, 364 candidates backed all or parts of its programme. Winchilsea tried to organise his parliamentary supporters into an ‘Agricultural Party’ to promote NAU proposals at Westminster, but this effort failed. Moreover, outside parliament, success was limited. Notwithstanding NAU claims, membership probably never exceeded about 30,000, the spread of branches was uneven, and supporters proved reluctant to contribute time or money. After 1896, the NAU declined, not long surviving Winchilsea's death in September 1898. The Union's failure sheds light on contemporary Conservatism. Winchilsea's message of cross-class unity in defence of crisis-hit agriculture sprang from an out-of-date social vision, which cast the landed elite as exemplars of chivalrous noblesse oblige. By the 1890s, this had little resonance with the Conservative party, which in terms of land politics was moving towards reform, and specifically measures for the creation of peasant proprietors.

“They Call Us Thieves and Steal Our Wage”: Toward a Reinterpretation of the Salvadoran Rural Mobilization, 1929–1931

“They Call Us Thieves and Steal Our Wage”: Toward a Reinterpretation of the Salvadoran Rural Mobilization, 1929–1931

Ecology, History, and Development: A Perspective from Rural Southeast Asia

The process by which different ecological conditions and historical trajectories interacted to create different social and cultural systems resulted in major differences in economic development performance within Southeast Asia. In the late 19th century, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand commonly experienced vent-for-surplus development through exploitation of unused lands. Nevertheless, different agrarian structures were created. Indonesia’s development was mainly based on the exploitation of tropical rain forest under Dutch colonialism. It resulted in the bifurcation of the rural sector between rice-farming peasant proprietors and large plantations for tropical export crops based on hired labor. In the Philippines, exploitation of the same resource base under Spanish rule resulted in pervasive landlessness among the rural population. Relatively homogeneous landowning peasants continued to dominate in Thailand, where delta plains that were suitable only for rice production formed the resource base for development. These different agrarian structures associated with different social value systems have accounted for differential development performance across the three economies in the recent three decades.

The Rise of the Other Backward Classes in the Hindi Belt

The rise of the other backward classes (OBCs) is certainly one of the main developments in the Hindi-belt politics over the last ten years. The OBCs are castes in the Indian social system that are situated above the Untouchables but below the forward castes (the “twice born,” Brahmins, Kshatriyas [warriors] and Vaishyas [merchants]) and the intermediate castes (mostly peasant proprietors and even dominant castes). They form the bulk of the Shudras—the fourth category (varna) of the classical Hindu social arrangement. The OBCs, whose professional activity is often as field-workers or artisans, represent about half of the Indian population, but they have occupied a subaltern position so far. Their rise for the first time seriously questions upper-caste domination of the public sphere.

The Limits to Land Reform: The Land Acts in Ireland, 1870–1909*

Ireland experienced two great waves of land reform during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Land reform was a central demand of Irish political factions of the time and by acceding to this demand successive British governments hoped to pacify Ireland. This article reconsiders the economic significance of the several Irish land-reform measures by examining them in the context of economic theory and by comparing them to other land-reform episodes in currently developing countries and in European history. The Irish reforms contained little that could better the allocation of resources and so had little impact on economic efficiency, even though the end result was the creation of a class of peasant proprietors operating in a free market. The analysis focuses on the structure of the laws and their relation to Irish institutions, although we also discuss the aggregate evidence on the evolution of agricultural efficiency following the reforms. Moreover, the Irish legislation missed an important opportunity to improve smallholders’ access to credit. Some facets of the land legislation, interacting with some unusual institutional features of land tenure in Ireland, made credit conditions worse. Land reform in Ireland was much more a wealth-redistribution program financed by Britain than a serious effort to improve the efficiency of agriculture. Land tenure and land reform occupy central roles in both the history and historiography of the political struggles that culminated in the partition of Ireland in the 1920s. Successive waves of Irish politicians sought to harness essentially nationalist ambitions to the more mundane dissatisfactions of the Irish farmer, convincing the latter that economic prosperity required alterations to or complete abolition of an agrarian system

How Chesterton read history

Chesterton was a serious and even excellent philosopher, whose reputation has suffered because his style was so striking, and his conversion to Catholicism so unpopular with Whiggish Britons. He had many ‘politically incorrect’ opinions, but those ‘faults’ were symptoms of a greater virtue, his insistence that ‘the whole object of history is to make us realize that humanity can be great and glorious, under conditions quite different and even contrary to our own’. His desire for a United Europe was not for a larger, self‐willed State, but for a continent of peasant proprietors, workers owning their own tools, citizens alive to their own local heritage. What he distrusted was the Laodicean mood that best defines modernity, that nothing is worth dying for but life is not worth living. What he consistently opposed was the power of businessmen and aristocrats, and their Whiggish supporters’ habit of supposing that the actual course of history was inevitable. Speculation about might‐have‐beens (including the gr...

The Punjab Land Alienation Act and the Professional Moneylenders

Following its annexation by the British in 1847 the Punjab province witnessed several significant developments—individualization of property rights in land, fixation and rigorous collection of land revenue in cash, introduction of a new legal-administrative system, construction of a road and railway network, canal-building activities and a colonization programme, commercialization of agriculture and increased monetization of economic transactions. These developments created a situation which, in turn, gave rise to two related problems –agricultural indebtedness and land transfer.1 These problems were not entirely unknown in the province in the earlier period, but during the last quarter of the nineteenth century indebtedness became so widespread and land transfer increased to such an extent that these became a matter of concern and embarrassment to many officials. For the magnitude of these problems seemed to contradict the colonial government's claimthat under its paternal care the province was enjoying agricultural prosperity, and the land revenue rates were moderate. Simultaneously some officials warned that there was a political danger in the situation. For a substantial part of the land sold and mortgaged by the cultivators was going to the moneylenders, and this meant the dispossession of the peasant proprietors. If no remedial steps were taken, it was argued, the animosity of the peasant population towards the moneylenders (sahukar) would ultimately be direted against the government.2 Initially the government refused to take any steps, arguing that the facts were insufficient 'to warrant interference by legislature to restrict the transfer of land'.3 But ultimately the contention that the problem posed a political danger gained ground and the Punjab Land Alienation Act was passed in1900 (and came into effect in 1901).4

Political economy of class struggle and economic growth in China, 1950–1982

The Chinese economic cycle is both a cycle of accumulation and construction activity and a political cycle exercising its influence by trial-and-error methods and changes from voluntarist to pragmatic planning approaches. As a result of some excessive accumulation in the form of net investment in non-productive sectors, there was a lag in infrastructures like energy and transport and trade-off against consumption more severe than expected. Structural imbalances in the economy would have had to have been tackled after 1976, even if the voluntarists had been in office. The eclipse of central planning supporters was of 1979–1980 duration only. Thereafter the line on ‘planning and the market’ became less enthusiastic as the concept of ‘market socialism’ faded. ‘Stabilization’ of the relative growth rates of heavy industry and light industry was compatible with both the programme of the Chen Yun reformers and those reluctant to give ground from ‘realistic plans’ to the ‘law of value’. In agriculture, the masses of small peasant proprietors rather than Party factions decided the shift to the new system of material incentives based on households. In this, weaknesses of Maoist practice in solving rural poverty played a role. Nevertheless, the left can defend collectivist ownership to some extent by adopting a more reasonable programme than in 1966–1976.

Dispossession and differentiation of the peasantry in the Punjab during colonial rule

The Punjab has often been described as a land of small peasant proprietors. This description may have been true when the British completed the colonization of India by conquering the Punjab in 1850. But this certainly was not the case at the end of British rule a hundred years later when less than four per cent of the agricultural population owned more than 50 per cent of the land while poor peasants, landless sharecroppers and agricultural labourers accounted for 80 per cent of the population. This paper documents this dramatic transformation and examines the process by which it came about.

Small Traders and Rural Marketplaces in North-East Brazil: A Reply to Forman and Riegelhaupt

Forman and Riegelhaupt (1970a; 1970b) have offered a broad overview of changes in the marketing system for food staples in North-east Brazil.1 We shall limit ourselves to considering one element in that system, the rural marketplace (feira), examining critically the proposition that 'development in the marketing system is often accompanied by the displacement of peasants and local middlemen from the increasingly commercialised rural economy' (170a, p. 189). Forman and Riegelhupt (henceforth F-R) begin their analysis by emphasizing the historical importance of independent smallholders as suppliers of food staples to the plantations and towns of the North eastern coast zone. The physical surpluses of these peasant proprietors moved via the feira to regional market centres and then to the coastal capitals. A multiplicity of channels linked rural producer to urban consumer, these being broken at several points by middlemen who made small profits from the goods that they handled. F-R maintain that in recent years improved storage and transportation facilities have facilitated bulk handling and a reduction in the number of intermediate assembly points. With the rapid growth of urban food demands a new commercial elite has emerged, partly comprised of truck-owning wholesalers who, in the interests of cost minimization, prefer to buy in bulk at the farm gate, cutting out middlemen. The authors are primarily concerned with the supply lines linking rural producers with consumers in the North-eastern cities. They indicate that the feira occupies an increasingly marginal place in the metropolitan supply system, an observation with which we agree. Clearly, the feira is no longer a necessary link in this distribution chain, nor does it handle a very large proportion of the food staples that ultimately reach the major urban centres. However, the rural market for staples must be considered separately from the urban market. This distinction is not clearly made by F-R who imply that the nationalization of supply lines to the big towns has led to a general reduction in the number of middlemen, severely reducing the survival prospects of peasant traders. We shall argue that this is not the case in the market formed by the rural population and the inhabitants of small country towns. The survival of small-scale trading has important income and employment consequences for the members of this market.