Rural Unrest Research Articles

Land conflicts, rural finance and capacity of the Chinese state

AbstractThis article evaluates the capacity of the Chinese state in maintaining stability by examining the merits and limitations of its responses to the dominant form of rural unrest in recent years: conflicts over land. The current response of the Chinese state that focusses on upward accountability of state agents is misguided. We argue that the ultimate solution hinges upon the success of the Chinese state in strengthening its capacity in engaging society and capability to reformulate a new fiscal order that provides adequate resources for effective governance at rural grass roots. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Driven to Protest: China's Rural Unrest

Beijing may wish to keep the rural population as apolitical and passive as possible, but it must understand that this is fast becoming an impossible task.

Robin Hood or Al Capone? Debating Rural Unrest in Pre-famine Ireland

(2006). Robin Hood or Al Capone? Debating Rural Unrest in Pre-famine Ireland. Cultural and Social History: Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 229-236.

Uncommon trajectories: steroid hormones, Mexican peasants, and the search for a wild yam

This article analyzes how evolving pharmaceutical technology, chemical advances, and world politics created the need for an abundant and cheap supply of steroids, and how decisions made in faraway laboratories ultimately determined that a Mexican yam, barbasco, was the best possible raw material. Following this discovery, this article explores how barbasco’s exploitation impacted on the Mexican countryside and specifically the men and women hired to gather wild yams. In analyzing, for example, the peasant organizations that emerged, the use of chemical terms by barely literate peasants, and the Mexican government’s political strategy to control rural unrest by controlling barbasco production one begins to understand the unexpected consequences of the global search for medicinal plants. In this particular case, the merging of science and peasant life reshuffled social hierarchies in the countryside, granted monetary value to an erstwhile ‘weed’, and gave a novel reinterpretation to laboratory knowledge and its (social) uses.

“States of Rebellion”: Civil War, Rural Unrest, and the Agrarian Question in the American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno, 1861–1865

To date, only a handful of scholars, most notably C.L.R. James and Eugene Genovese, have seen slave rebellions and peasant revolts as having anything in common. Fewer scholars still would be prepared to accept the assumption that slaves and peasants were agrarian working classes that shared significant characteristics. Yet, the issues of rural unrest and class formation continue to haunt the historiography of both slave and peasant societies long after James' and Genovese's studies, and have forced several historians to revise and broaden their definitions of class conflict as a means to describe the social transformations of several rural regions. In this essay, I focus on the American South as a case study of a slave society and on the Italian South, or Mezzogiorno, as a case study of a peasant society. Notwithstanding the fundamental differences between the social structures of these two regions, in both cases debates on the class character of rural workers began when leftist historians raised the possibility of applying Marxist categories to their particular historical conditions. In both cases, they were dealing with a ‘south’ characterized by a preeminently agricultural economy and a persistent social and political conservatism. In both cases, too, the debate has moved from broad theoretical positions to the explanation of specific instances of class conflict in a rural setting—the slaves' resistance to their masters and the peasants' resistance to their landlords, respectively—and then on to a criticism of the Marxist approach to the problem.

The Rockite movement in County Cork in the early 1820s

Chronic rural disturbances have featured prominently in the modern history of Ireland. In particular, the period from the 1760s to the 1830s witnessed frequent and widespread disturbances, ranging over several counties and lasting for years. The disturbers — contemporaries sometimes called them ‘Whiteboys’ — were often sworn into secret societies which operated at night under the command of a mythical leader, known variously as Captain Right, Captain Steel or Captain Rock. Historical scholarship has shed light on many of these disturbances. However, the Rockites in the south of Ireland in the early 1820s remain somewhat mysterious. Although this was the only instance of rural unrest in Munster in the early 1820s, the Rockite movement nonetheless constituted one of the most extensive and serious rural disturbances in Ireland before the Famine. Five regiments of troops were dispatched from Britain, ‘for the purpose of putting down actual, & most formidable Danger in Ireland’, as the home secretary admitted. The Insurrection Act, with its curfew at night and trial without jury, was introduced into eight counties, and in its first year the act brought to trial more than 1,500 men in Munster, of whom more than 200 were convicted and transported. In County Cork, where the movement was at its most formidable, open engagements between thousands of the Rockites and the military occurred in several places, while incendiarism prevailed to an extent unprecedented in the history of Irish agrarian disturbances. The special commissions appointed in February 1822, specifically to try Rockites in the county, convicted thirty-six men of capital crimes.

Riot and Revelry in Early America

Edited by Anya labour and Revelry in Early America. Edited by William Pencak, Matthew Dennis, and Simon P. Newman. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. Pp. viii, 316. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $22.50.)Like many books that grow out of scholarly conferences, this one is hard to summarize. The book's first section, Riot and Rough Music, includes three essays on rural unrest and two on more explicitly political crowd actions in Boston and Philadelphia. The second section, simply titled Revelry, brings together five essays on diverse postrevolutionary topics. Elites and common folk, African Americans and Indians appear as historical actors in studies that use race, gender, and social rank as analytical categories. The authors employ bewildering array of terms-riot, revelry, rough music, skimmington, festivals-to describe organized public displays of opinion by people out-of-doors. Authors writing on the period before 1780 draw heavily on-and sometimes respond directly to-scholarly work on European festivals and crowds. Those whose focus is the early republic have as their chief frame of reference the wealth of recent literature on Independence Day celebrations and other civic festivals in the postrevolutionary era.There are two introductions, one by historian William Pencak and second by folklorist Roger D. Abrahams. Although historians study riots and festivals to gain political and social insights into particular times and places, Abrahams notes, folklorists seek in the same phenomena a thread leading to very ancient past (30). Pencak, who attempts to draw meaningful generalizations from the book's extremely diverse contents, suggests that, taken together, the essays reveal the of both rural and urban folk to which, in turn, explodes the notion that the 'lower sort' deferred to their 'betters' and largely allowed them to manage colonial political and economic life (14). The festivities of the early republic, though often orchestrated by elites, he notes, nonetheless revealed social tensions and conflict as women, African Americans . . . and working people modified, disrupted, or created counter-festivities that were highly political acts reflecting alternate visions of social order (14).The five essays in the book's first section amply demonstrate this propensity to riot, at least among residents of the northern colonies. Steven J. Stewart discovered nineteen instances of skimmington rides-which featured processions, insults, taunts, and the painful carrying of the victim out of town on rail-in New England and the Middle Colonies between 1733 and 1775. Colonists used this technique to punish those who repeatedly flouted social norms at time when increasingly anglicized courts were less likely to prosecute such offenses. Brendan McConville's fine analysis of rough music-which included skimmingtons and other popular extralegal methods of enforcing community norms-in eighteenth-century New Jersey suggests that such incidents occurred mainly in areas settled by New Englanders whose descendants sought to perpetuate Puritan values. In striking contrast to European crowds, New Jersey people used extralegal violence mostly against abusive and adulterous men-not women-though their activities became more unambiguously political in the context of land title disputes and imperial unrest during the 1760s. Thomas J. Humphrey's less subtle and less convincing analysis of rough music in colonial New York likewise emphasizes similarities between the Hudson Valley tenant insurgency and the Albany Stamp Act riots. …

"Origins of the New South" and the Negro Question

NOT THE LEAST REMARKABLE FACT ABOUT C. VANN WOODWARD'S Origins of New South is that, fifty years ago, Woodward knew better than to attempt what I have been asked to do: to discuss Afro-Americans as a subject apart from subjects of land, agriculture, and rural unrest; industrial development and political economy; class warfare, class alliances, and politics; and literature, sciences, and arts, that have occupied symposium thus far. Then (as now), more usual procedure was to relegate Afro-Americans to a space of their own, defined as and set apart from study of history properly so called. Woodward never fell into that trap. He understood that importance of Jim Crow as a subject in way established its validity as a method. Never at any point in Origins is Woodward unaware of Afro-Americans' entire implication within vital questions of New South. Meaningless definitions of their predicament that may pass muster today, such as marginalization and exclusion, did not fool him for a minute. (Marginalized? Excluded? When planters wanted nothing better than for them to stay conspicuously in their place, working as before?) The opening sentence of chapter I sets tone at once (and with as fine an example as I know of Woodward's flair for mischief). Right there, where one can miss it, he writes, Any honest genealogy of ruling family of Southern Democrats would reveal a strain of mixed blood. (1) The mixture in question was of Whig and Democrat, rather than of black and white. But, beyond doubt, metaphor was calculated. Trifling with hallowed conventions of racism by thus juxtaposing sacred and profane--ruling-class genealogy and mixed blood--Woodward serves early notice that, in method as in content, Origins of New South will neither fear nor respect color line. Though he may flirt occasionally with language of race relations, he only rarely makes concessions to its conceptual apparatus. (2) Race relations as an analysis of society takes for granted that race is a valid empirical datum and thereby shifts attention from actions that constitute racism--enslavement, disfranchisement, segregation, lynching, massacres, and pogroms--to traits that constitute race. For racists in New South, those traits might have included Negroes' ignorance, laziness, brutality, criminality, subjection to uncontrolled passions, or incapacity for moral and intellectual duties of civilization. For scholars in our own time who accept race, once ritually purified by incantation socially constructed, as a valid category of analysis, relevant traits are more likely to be difference, Other-ness, culture, or identity. Either way, however, objective acts, real substance of racism, take second place to subjective traits, fictive substance of race; traits that would be irrelevant to explaining racist acts even if their empirical validity could be established. Quincy Ewing, a white southerner writing in Atlantic Monthly while Woodward was an infant, refuted on empirical grounds various racial explanations of problem: Negroes' purported ignorance, laziness, criminality, and like. But such rationales, he maintained, were beside point in any case. The problem would persist even were there no shadow of excuse for conviction that Negro is more lazy, or more ignorant, or more criminal, or more brutal, or more anything else he ought not to be, or less anything else he ought to be, than other men. Nor, according to Ewing, could problem be laid to difference (an old favorite that has returned to favor in recent scholarship, often graced with a capital D): There is nothing in unlikeness of unlike that is necessarily problematical, he pointed out; it may be simply accepted and dealt with as a fact, like any other fact. (3) Like or unlike, Ewing declared, race problem arises unless the people of one race are minded to adopt and act upon some policy more or less oppressive or repressive in dealing with people of another race. …

Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State during World War II

1. A divided arsenal: the problem and its setting 2. The executive and political imperatives: presidential campaigns and race management policies on the eve of war 3. The Executive and National Security Imperatives: unrest and early struggles over racial manpower policies 4. The racial politics of industrial employment: Central State Authority and the adjustment of factory work 5. The racial politics of army service: Central State Authority and the control of black soldier resistance 6. June 9, 1943: 'Negro soldier trouble' at Camp Stewart, Georgia 7. The racial politics of urban and rural unrest: monitoring agriculture and surveilling cities 8. 'America again at the crossroads': war, the state and social conflict.

Elite perceptions of land reform in early republican Turkey

This article focuses on the land reform attempts of the single‐party regime in Turkey of the mid‐1930s through the mid‐1940s, culminating in the reform Law of 1945. Why the Turkish ruling elite wanted a land reform is still not adequately understood, and there are a number of controversial and often contradictory interpretations. The thesis here is that despite mainstream approaches to the issue in Turkish historiography, the land reform attempts during the single‐party era should be seen as part of the Kemalist project of conservative modernisation. The article argues that a variety of concerns were important in shaping the Turkish elite's thinking on land reform, including an ideology of peasantism combined with a fear of rural unrest (from sharecroppers, agricultural laborers and landless and land‐poor peasants); a fear also of urbanisation, proletarianisation and socialist ideas; a desire to strengthen Republican nationalist ideology in the countryside as a basis of regime support (with a particular emphasis on the Kurdish issue). The conclusion presents an interpretation of the Turkish land reform that connects the long‐and short‐term causes of the land reform Law of 1945.

A ‘Presbyterian insurrection’? Reconsidering the Hearts of Oak disturbances of July 1763

In the midsummer of 1763 six of the nine counties of Ulster temporarily passed out of the control of the landed élite and into that of the Hearts of Oak. People gathered in their thousands across most of Ulster, with the exclusion of Counties Antrim, Donegal and most of Down, to protest at the levels of the taxes levied by the grand juries, the collection of small dues by the clergy of the established church and the compulsory six days’ labour on the roads. At the time one Dublin newspaper expressed its horror at this outbreak among the ‘loyal Protestants of the North of Ireland’ and warned that ‘our neighbours [might] be glad to make a handle out of this to our great prejudice and scandal, as they did about the Whiteboys last year’. Among many observers the belief was that these embarrassing disturbances by Ulster’s Protestants, particularly by the Presbyterians — who had long been seen as a difficult element — should quickly be put down and the insurrection regarded as an aberration. The scale of subsequent events in late eighteenth-century Ulster made it easier to forget the Oakboy disturbances. They were neither as long-lasting as the Steelboy outrages, nor as violent as the later clashes between the Peep o’ Day Boys and Defenders. In the early nineteenth century the narrators of rural unrest, Richard Musgrave and George Cornewall Lewis, believed the Hearts of Oak disturbances to be of little importance, while historians like Lecky saw all agrarian rioters as largely cut from the same apolitical cloth. This was to remain the perception until the late 1970s and 1980s and a series of groundbreaking articles, several of them resulting from the research of James S. Donnelly. These showed a fresh insight into eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Irish agrarian troubles, accompanied by a willingness to use theoretical models of unrest in pre-industrial societies and the responses of their legal systems.

"Take Two Acres and Call Me in the Morning": Is Land Reform a Prescription for Peasant Unrest?

Although land reform is often portrayed as a remedy for rural unrest, its effectiveness at inoculating rural populations against the appeals of insurgent movements has yet to be established By comparing land reform programs in Peru and El Salvador, I assess its effects on the distribution of popular support between rebels and regime, the limits on its ability to restore support for the regime, and the impact of other counterinsurgency tactics-especially repressive violence-on the effectiveness of agrarian reform as a counterinsurgency device Both reform programs were intended to preempt popular support for insurgencies Yet, Sendero Luminoso built its civilian support base after land reform, and insurgent violence persisted for more than a decade after the initiation of land reform in El Salvador. In both cases, repressive violence by the state undermined the remedial effects of land reform on popular support for the regime.

Vietnam in 1997: A Year of Challenges

Research Article| January 01 1998 Vietnam in 1997: A Year of Challenges Mark Sidel Mark Sidel Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Asian Survey (1998) 38 (1): 80–90. https://doi.org/10.2307/2645471 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mark Sidel; Vietnam in 1997: A Year of Challenges. Asian Survey 1 January 1998; 38 (1): 80–90. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2645471 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAsian Survey Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1998 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

“The Sad Situation of Civilians and Soldiers”: The Banditry of Zapatismo in the Mexican Revolution

THROUGHOUT THE COURSE OF THE Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), Emiliano Zapata and his followers-who together formed most renowned peasant rebellion in Mexican history-were often considered bandits by those who purported to govern Mexico. That was more or less how polite society in Mexico City thought of them when, in March 1911, they rose up from their villages in south-central state of Morelos and surrounding areas against dictator Porfirio Diaz. Indeed, Diaz had ruled in name of order and progress for thirty-five years, and during that time he had often defined rural unrest as banditry and punished it accordingly. He had also enacted policies that helped produce that unrest by encouraging and assisting encroachments of large landholders on village land and water rights. Zapata's rebellion against Diaz, then, was primarily motivated by desire for a land reform that would reverse alienation of village resources. It occurred when it did largely due to opportunity provided when Francisco Madero, a member of an elite, hacienda-owning family in northern state of Coahuila, began broader revolution by calling nation to arms in late 1910 in protest of Diaz's most recent reelection. Surprisingly-given Diaz's longevity in powerMadero's insurrection toppled old regime in May 1911. But, despite participation of Zapatistas in this successful uprising, accusations of banditry against them did not end. mostly conservative Mexico City press, championing property rights of hacendados of Morelos, soon nicknamed Zapata The Attila of South and credited him with pronouncement, the only government I recognize is my pistols.1 In late August, when Francisco Leon de la Barra-the conservative interim president that Madero's revolution had

Villagers and Popular Resistance in Contemporary China

It is hardly novel to say that post-Mao rural China has seen considerable economic growth and commercialization; what is less well known, however, is that recent reforms have also, in some villages, been accompanied by worsening mass-elite relations (Tang Jinsu and Wang Jianjun, 1989; Li Xiwen, 1989; Wang Zhenyao, 1991a, 1991b). As newly autonomous farmers become more demanding, rural cadres in many locales are finding it increasingly difficult to govern.' Lacking reliable, institutionalized means to obtain funds and ensure acceptance of their commands, many grassroots leaders all too frequently turn to coercion; in response, angered villagers sometimes rise up and engage in various, often spirited forms of resistance. The result is that violent clashes and rural unrest have grown in recent years such that, in some

Land Titling and Peasant Differentiation in Honduras

Many countries of the Third World entered the fourth quarter of the 20th century essentially without having experienced the change in the structure of rural landholding that is part of the so-called revolution. State sanction of titles to land conferring on its holders the right to use and transfer it within legal limits is widely recognized to have played a key role in the penetration of the capitalist mode of production into precapitalist agriculture. In the light of this, and in the face of growing rural unrest, a restructuring of the legal bases of land tenure along liberal lines has become the policy of a number of these nations. Countries such as St. Lucia, Ecuador, Thailand, and Honduras have attempted large-scale land titling programs. This article assesses the titling program in Honduras, suggesting that it is likely to exacerbate the tendencies toward differentiation characteristic of the capitalist development of agriculture.

The Limits of Conservative Reform: Agricultural Policy in Malaysia

Many developing countries exhibit a dualistic society where a modern industrial urban sector co-exists alongside a very traditional rural sector. If the rural sector is not modernized, it becomes a significant impediment to the overall economic and political development of the nation. Political leaders in Malaysia, recognizing that a modern argicultural sector is needed to provide food for a growing population, to generate foreign exchange neededfor investment, and to maintain a stable political base for the ruling group, have constructed an agricultural reform package that was intended to eliminate rural poverty, increase productivity, and reduce inequities in the distribution of wealth. Unfortunately, the Malaysian reforms do not constitute a comprehensive agrarian reform programme. The results are massive food imports, a more unequal distribution of the wealth and a potential for rural unrest. Bruce Drury

Land, kinship and identity: The cultural roots of agrarian agitation in eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century Ireland

This paper seeks to uncover the underlying causes of agrarian agitation in eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century Ireland. It argues, in contrast to existing explanations, that rural unrest was a highly complex form of popular protest, disciplined and with clear objectives. These objectives centred on the Irish peasantry's defence of traditional rights and customs with regard to the ownership, occupation and use of the land. It is further argued that these rights and customs were in turn grounded upon a system of social norms, beliefs and obligations which governed the relationship between land, kinship and identity in Irish peasant communities.

Rural Unrest in India

Rural Unrest in India

Power and Protest in the Countryside: Studies of Rural Unrest in Asia, Europe, and Latin America.

List of Figures vii 1. Introduction: Moral Economy, Capitalism, and State Power in Rural Protest / Scott E. Guggenheim and Robert P. Weller 3 2. Routine Conflicts and Peasant Rebellions in Seventeenth-Century France / Charles Tilly 13 3. Indian Uprisings under Spanish Colonialism: Southern Mexico in 1712 / Robert Wasserstrom 42 4. Capitalist Penetration in the Nineteenth Century: Creating Conditions for New Patterns of Social Control / Joel S. Migdal 57 5. Bandits, Monks, and Pretender Kings: Patterns of Peasant Resistance and Protest in Colonial Burma, 1826-1941 / Michael Adas 75 6. Peasants, Proletarians, and Politics in Venezuela, 1875-1975 / William Roseberry 106 7. Mao Zedong, Red Miseables, and the Moral Economy of Peasant Rebellion in Modern China / Ralph Thaxton 132 8. What Makes Peasants Revolutionary? / Theda Skocpol 157 9. Afterword: Peasantries and the Rural Sector-Notes on a Discovery / Sidney W. Mintz 180 Notes 189 References 195 Index 207