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A peasant is a
pre-industrial Pre-industrial society refers to social attributes and forums of political and cultural organization that were prevalent before the advent of the Industrial Revolution, which occurred from 1750 to 1850. ''Pre-industrial'' refers to a time before ...
agricultural laborer or a
farmer A farmer is a person engaged in agriculture, raising living organisms for food or raw materials. The term usually applies to people who do some combination of raising field crops, orchards, vineyards, poultry, or other livestock. A farmer mig ...
with limited land-ownership, especially one living in the
Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire a ...
under
feudalism Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was the combination of the legal, economic, military, cultural and political customs that flourished in medieval Europe between the 9th and 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a way of structur ...
and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord. In Europe, three classes of peasants existed:
slave Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to perf ...
,
serf Serfdom was the status of many peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to manorialism, and similar systems. It was a condition of debt bondage and indentured servitude with similarities to and differences from slavery, which developed ...
, and
free tenant Free tenants, also known as free peasants, were tenant farmer peasants in medieval England who occupied a unique place in the medieval hierarchy. They were characterized by the low rents which they paid to their manorial lord. They were subj ...
. Peasants might hold title to land either in
fee simple In English law, a fee simple or fee simple absolute is an estate in land, a form of freehold ownership. A "fee" is a vested, inheritable, present possessory interest in land. A "fee simple" is real property held without limit of time (i.e., perm ...
or by any of several forms of
land tenure In common law systems, land tenure, from the French verb "tenir" means "to hold", is the legal regime in which land owned by an individual is possessed by someone else who is said to "hold" the land, based on an agreement between both individual ...
, among them
socage Socage () was one of the feudal duties and land tenure forms in the Feudalism, English feudal system. It eventually evolved into the freehold tenure called "free and common socage", which did not involve feudal duties. Farmers held land in excha ...
,
quit-rent Quit rent, quit-rent, or quitrent is a tax or land tax imposed on occupants of freehold or leased land in lieu of services to a higher landowning authority, usually a government or its assigns. Under feudal law, the payment of quit rent (Latin ...
,
leasehold A leasehold estate is an ownership of a temporary right to hold land or property in which a lessee or a tenant holds rights of real property by some form of title from a lessor or landlord. Although a tenant does hold rights to real property, a l ...
, and
copyhold Copyhold was a form of customary land ownership common from the Late Middle Ages into modern times in England. The name for this type of land tenure is derived from the act of giving a copy of the relevant title deed that is recorded in the man ...
. In some contexts, "peasant" has a pejorative meaning, even when referring to farm laborers. As early as in 13th-century Germany, the concept of "peasant" could imply "rustic" as well as "robber", as the English term
villain A villain (also known as a "black hat" or "bad guy"; the feminine form is villainess) is a stock character, whether based on a historical narrative or one of literary fiction. ''Random House Unabridged Dictionary'' defines such a character a ...
/
villein A villein, otherwise known as ''cottar'' or ''crofter'', is a serf tied to the land in the feudal system. Villeins had more rights and social status than those in slavery, but were under a number of legal restrictions which differentiated them ...
. In 21st-century English, the word "peasant" can mean "an ignorant, rude, or unsophisticated person". The word rose to renewed popularity in the 1940s–1960s as a collective term, often referring to rural populations of developing countries in general, as the "semantic successor to 'native', incorporating all its condescending and racial overtones". The word peasantry is commonly used in a non-pejorative sense as a
collective noun In linguistics, a collective noun is a word referring to a collection of things taken as a whole. Most collective nouns in everyday speech are not specific to one kind of thing. For example, the collective noun "group" can be applied to people (" ...
for the rural population in the poor and developing countries of the world.
Via Campesina La Vía Campesina (from es, la vía campesina, ) is an international farmers organization founded in 1993 in Mons, Belgium, formed by 182 organisations in 81 countries, and describing itself as "an international movement which coordinates peas ...
, an organization claiming to represent the
rights Rights are legal, social, or ethical principles of freedom or entitlement; that is, rights are the fundamental normative rules about what is allowed of people or owed to people according to some legal system, social convention, or ethical the ...
of about 200 million farm-workers around the world, self-defines as an "International Peasant's Movement" . The United Nations and its
Human Rights Council The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), CDH is a United Nations body whose mission is to promote and protect human rights around the world. The Council has 47 members elected for staggered three-year terms on a regional group basis. ...
prominently uses the term "peasant" in a non-pejorative sense, as in the UN ''Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas'' adopted in 2018. In general English-language literature, the use of the word "peasant" has steadily declined since about 1970.


Etymology

The word "peasant" is derived from the 15th-century French word ''païsant'', meaning one from the ''pays'', or countryside; ultimately from the Latin ''pagus'', or outlying administrative district.


Social position

Peasants typically made up the majority of the agricultural labour force in a
pre-industrial society Pre-industrial society refers to social attributes and forums of political and cultural organization that were prevalent before the advent of the Industrial Revolution, which occurred from 1750 to 1850. ''Pre-industrial'' refers to a time before ...
. The majority of the people—according to one estimate 85% of the population—in the Middle Ages were peasants. Though "peasant" is a word of loose application, once a
market economy A market economy is an economic system in which the decisions regarding investment, production and distribution to the consumers are guided by the price signals created by the forces of supply and demand, where all suppliers and consumers ...
had taken root, the term ''peasant proprietors'' was frequently used to describe the traditional rural population in countries where
smallholder A smallholding or smallholder is a small farm operating under a small-scale agriculture model. Definitions vary widely for what constitutes a smallholder or small-scale farm, including factors such as size, food production technique or technology ...
s farmed much of the land. More generally, the word "peasant" is sometimes used to refer pejoratively to those considered to be "lower class", perhaps defined by poorer education and/or a lower income. In the
Christian religion Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. It is the world's largest and most widespread religion with roughly 2.38 billion followers representing one-third of the global popul ...
, Agricultural spiritual have influenced the manner in which human interactions with land, soil, and plants are manifested, both as a historical interplay between Christianity and land, and more contemporary movements where diverse sets of biblical readings, theological interpretations and
Christian ethics Christian ethics, also known as moral theology, is a multi-faceted ethical system: it is a virtue ethic which focuses on building moral character, and a deontological ethic which emphasizes duty. It also incorporates natural law ethics, whic ...
are manifested in Christian approaches to
food production The food industry is a complex, global network of diverse businesses that supplies most of the food consumed by the world's population. The food industry today has become highly diversified, with manufacturing ranging from small, traditional, ...
.


Medieval European peasants

The
open field system The open-field system was the prevalent agricultural system in much of Europe during the Middle Ages and lasted into the 20th century in Russia, Iran, and Turkey. Each manor or village had two or three large fields, usually several hundred acre ...
of agriculture dominated most of Europe during medieval times and endured until the nineteenth century in many areas. Under this system, peasants lived on a manor presided over by a
lord Lord is an appellation for a person or deity who has authority, control, or power over others, acting as a master, chief, or ruler. The appellation can also denote certain persons who hold a title of the peerage in the United Kingdom, or ar ...
or a bishop of the
church Church may refer to: Religion * Church (building), a building for Christian religious activities * Church (congregation), a local congregation of a Christian denomination * Church service, a formalized period of Christian communal worship * Chris ...
. Peasants paid rent or labor services to the lord in exchange for their right to cultivate the land. Fallowed land, pastures, forests, and wasteland were held in common. The open field system required cooperation among the peasants of the manor. It was gradually replaced by individual ownership and management of land. The relative position of peasants in Western Europe improved greatly after the
Black Death The Black Death (also known as the Pestilence, the Great Mortality or the Plague) was a bubonic plague pandemic occurring in Western Eurasia and North Africa from 1346 to 1353. It is the most fatal pandemic recorded in human history, causi ...
had reduced the population of
medieval Europe In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire a ...
in the mid-14th century, resulting in more land for the survivors and making labor more scarce. In the wake of this disruption to the established order, it became more productive for many laborers to demand wages and other alternative forms of compensation, which ultimately led to the development of widespread
literacy Literacy in its broadest sense describes "particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing" with the purpose of understanding or expressing thoughts or ideas in written form in some specific context of use. In other words, huma ...
and the enormous social and intellectual changes of the
Enlightenment Enlightenment or enlighten may refer to: Age of Enlightenment * Age of Enlightenment, period in Western intellectual history from the late 17th to late 18th century, centered in France but also encompassing (alphabetically by country or culture): ...
. The evolution of ideas in an environment of relatively widespread literacy laid the groundwork for the
Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going f ...
, which enabled mechanically and chemically augmented agricultural production while simultaneously increasing the demand for
factory workers A factory, manufacturing plant or a production plant is an industrial facility, often a complex consisting of several buildings filled with machinery A machine is a physical system using power to apply forces and control movement to per ...
in cities, who became what
Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...
called the
proletariat The proletariat (; ) is the social class of wage-earners, those members of a society whose only possession of significant economic value is their labour power (their capacity to work). A member of such a class is a proletarian. Marxist philo ...
. The trend toward individual ownership of land, typified in England by
Enclosure Enclosure or Inclosure is a term, used in English landownership, that refers to the appropriation of "waste" or " common land" enclosing it and by doing so depriving commoners of their rights of access and privilege. Agreements to enclose land ...
, displaced many peasants from the land and compelled them, often unwillingly, to become urban factory-workers, who came to occupy the socio-economic stratum formerly the preserve of the medieval peasants. This process happened in an especially pronounced and truncated way in Eastern Europe. Lacking any catalysts for change in the 14th century, Eastern European peasants largely continued upon the original medieval path until the 18th and 19th centuries.
Serfdom Serfdom was the status of many peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to manorialism, and similar systems. It was a condition of debt bondage and indentured servitude with similarities to and differences from slavery, which develop ...
was abolished in Russia in 1861, and while many peasants would remain in areas where their family had farmed for generations, the changes did allow for the buying and selling of lands traditionally held by peasants, and for landless ex-peasants to move to the cities. Even before emancipation in 1861, serfdom was on the wane in Russia. The proportion of serfs within the empire had gradually decreased "from 45–50 percent at the end of the eighteenth century, to 37.7 percent in 1858."


Early modern Germany

In Germany, peasants continued to center their lives in the village well into the 19th century. They belonged to a corporate body and helped to manage the community resources and to monitor community life. In the East they had the status of serfs bound permanently to parcels of land. A peasant is called a "Bauer" in German and "Bur" in
Low German : : : : : (70,000) (30,000) (8,000) , familycolor = Indo-European , fam2 = Germanic , fam3 = West Germanic , fam4 = North Sea Germanic , ancestor = Old Saxon , ancestor2 = Middle L ...
(pronounced in English like ''boor''). In most of Germany, farming was handled by tenant farmers who paid rents and obligatory services to the landlord—typically a nobleman. Peasant leaders supervised the fields and ditches and grazing rights, maintained public order and morals, and supported a village court which handled minor offenses. Inside the family the patriarch made all the decisions, and tried to arrange advantageous marriages for his children. Much of the villages' communal life centered on church services and holy days. In Prussia, the peasants drew lots to choose conscripts required by the army. The noblemen handled external relationships and politics for the villages under their control, and were not typically involved in daily activities or decisions.


France

Information about the complexities of the French Revolution, especially the fast-changing scene in Paris, reached isolated areas through both official announcements and long-established oral networks. Peasants responded differently to different sources of information. The limits on political knowledge in these areas depended more on how much peasants chose to know than on bad roads or illiteracy. Historian Jill Maciak concludes that peasants "were neither subservient, reactionary, nor ignorant." In his seminal book ''Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France, 1880–1914'' (1976), historian
Eugen Weber Eugen Joseph Weber (April 24, 1925 – May 17, 2007) was a Romanian-born American historian with a special focus on Western civilization. Weber became a historian because of his interest in politics, an interest dating back to at least the age ...
traced the modernization of French villages and argued that rural France went from backward and isolated to modern and possessing a sense of French nationhood during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He emphasized the roles of railroads, republican schools, and universal military conscription. He based his findings on school records, migration patterns, military-service documents and
economic trend *all the economic indicators that are the subject of economic forecasting **see also: econometrics *general trends in the economy, see: economic history. *general trends in the academic field of economics, see: history of economics History ...
s. Weber argued that until 1900 or so a sense of French nationhood was weak in the provinces. Weber then looked at how the policies of the Third Republic created a sense of French nationality in rural areas. The book was widely praised, but some argued that a sense of Frenchness existed in the provinces before 1870.


Chinese farmers

Farmers in China have been sometimes referred to as "peasants" in English-language sources. However, the traditional term for farmer, ''nongfu'' (), simply refers to "farmer" or "agricultural worker". In the 19th century, Japanese intellectuals reinvented the Chinese terms ''fengjian'' () for "feudalism" and ''nongmin'' (), or "farming people", terms used in the description of
feudal Japan The first human inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago have been traced to Japanese Paleolithic, prehistoric times around 30,000 BC. The Jōmon period, named after its cord-marked pottery, was followed by the Yayoi period in the first millenni ...
ese society. Cohen, p. 64 These terms created a negative image of Chinese farmers by making a class distinction where one had not previously existed.
Anthropologist An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms and ...
Myron Cohen considers these terms to be
neologism A neologism Greek νέο- ''néo''(="new") and λόγος /''lógos'' meaning "speech, utterance"] is a relatively recent or isolated term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but that has not been fully accepted int ...
s that represented a cultural and political invention. He writes: Modern Western writers often continue to use the term ''peasant'' for Chinese farmers, typically without ever defining what the term means. This Western use of the term suggests that China is stagnant, "medieval", underdeveloped, and held back by its rural population. Cohen writes that the "imposition of the historically burdened Western contrasts of town and country, shopkeeper and peasant, or merchant and landlord, serves only to distort the realities of the Chinese economic tradition".


Latin American farmers

In Latin America, the term "peasant" is translated to "Campesino" (from ''campo''—country person), but the meaning has changed over time. While most :es:campesino, Campesinos before the 20th century were in equivalent status to peasants—they usually did not own land and had to make payments to or were in an employment position towards a landlord (the
hacienda An ''hacienda'' ( or ; or ) is an estate (or ''finca''), similar to a Roman ''latifundium'', in Spain and the former Spanish Empire. With origins in Andalusia, ''haciendas'' were variously plantations (perhaps including animals or orchards), ...
system), most Latin American countries saw one or more extensive
land reform Land reform is a form of agrarian reform involving the changing of laws, regulations, or customs regarding land ownership. Land reform may consist of a government-initiated or government-backed property redistribution, generally of agricultural ...
s in the 20th century. The land reforms of Latin America were more comprehensive initiatives that redistributed lands from large landholders to former peasants—
farm worker A farmworker, farmhand or agricultural worker is someone employed for labor in agriculture. In labor law, the term "farmworker" is sometimes used more narrowly, applying only to a hired worker involved in agricultural production, including harv ...
s and
tenant farmers A tenant farmer is a person (farmer or farmworker) who resides on land owned by a landlord. Tenant farming is an agricultural production system in which landowners contribute their land and often a measure of operating capital and management, ...
. Hence, many Campesinos in Latin America today are closer smallholders who own their land and don't pay rent to a landlord—rather than peasants who don't own land.


Historiography

In medieval Europe society was theorized as being organized into
three estates The estates of the realm, or three estates, were the broad orders of social hierarchy used in Christendom (Christian Europe) from the Middle Ages to early modern Europe. Different systems for dividing society members into estates developed and ...
: those who work, those who pray, and those who fight. The Annales School of 20th-century French historians emphasized the importance of peasants. Its leader
Fernand Braudel Fernand Braudel (; 24 August 1902 – 27 November 1985) was a French historian and leader of the Annales School. His scholarship focused on three main projects: ''The Mediterranean'' (1923–49, then 1949–66), ''Civilization and Capitalism'' ...
devoted the first volume—called ''The Structures of Everyday Life''—of his major work, ''Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century'' to the largely silent and invisible world that existed below the market economy. Other research in the field of peasant studies was promoted by
Florian Znaniecki Florian Witold Znaniecki (15 January 1882 – 23 March 1958) was a Polish philosopher and sociologist who taught and wrote in Poland and in the United States. Over the course of his work he shifted his focus from philosophy to sociology. H ...
and
Fei Xiaotong Fei Xiaotong or Fei Hsiao-tung (November 2, 1910 – April 24, 2005) was a Chinese anthropologist and sociologist. He was a pioneering researcher and professor of sociology and anthropology; he was also noted for his studies in the study o ...
, and in the post-1945 studies of the "great tradition" and the "little tradition" in the work of
Robert Redfield Robert Redfield (December 4, 1897 – October 16, 1958) was an American anthropologist and ethnolinguist, whose ethnographic work in Tepoztlán, Mexico, is considered a landmark of Latin American ethnography. He was associated with the University ...
. In the 1960s, anthropologists and historians began to rethink the role of
peasant revolt This is a chronological list of conflicts in which peasants played a significant role. Background The history of peasant wars spans over two thousand years. A variety of factors fueled the emergence of the peasant revolt phenomenon, including: ...
in world history and in their own disciplines. Peasant revolution was seen as a
Third World The term "Third World" arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO or the Warsaw Pact. The United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Western European nations and their allies represented the " First ...
response to capitalism and imperialism. The anthropologist
Eric Wolf Eric Robert Wolf (February 1, 1923 – March 6, 1999) was an anthropologist, best known for his studies of peasants, Latin America, and his advocacy of Marxist perspectives within anthropology. Early life Life in Vienna Wolf was born in Vi ...
, for instance, drew on the work of earlier scholars in the Marxist tradition such as
Daniel Thorner Daniel Thorner (1915–1974) was an American-born economist known for his work on agricultural economics and Indian economic history.Easterlin, RA. 2004 ''The Reluctant Economist: Perspectives on Economics, Economic History and Demography'' Cambr ...
, who saw the rural population as a key element in the
transition from feudalism to capitalism The history of capitalism is diverse and the concept of capitalism has many debated roots. The history of the past 500 years is concerned with the development of capitalism in its various forms. Capital accumulated by a variety of methods, at a ...
. Wolf and a group of scholarsAlves, Leonardo Marcondes (2018)
''Give us this day our daily bread: The moral order of Pentecostal peasants in South Brazil''
Master's thesis in Cultural Anthropology. Uppsala universitet.
criticized both Marx and the field of Modernization theorists for treating peasants as lacking the ability to take action.
James C. Scott James C. Scott (born December 2, 1936) is an American political scientist and anthropologist specializing in comparative politics. He is a comparative scholar of agrarian society, agrarian and non-state societies, Subaltern (postcolonialism), ...
's field observations in Malaysia convinced him that villagers were active participants in their local politics even though they were forced to use indirect methods. Many of these activist scholars looked back to the
peasant movement A peasant movement is a social movement involved with the agricultural policy, which claims peasants rights. Peasant movements have a long history that can be traced to the numerous peasant uprisings that occurred in various regions of the world ...
in India and to the theories of the revolution in China led by
Mao Zedong Mao Zedong pronounced ; also romanised traditionally as Mao Tse-tung. (26 December 1893 – 9 September 1976), also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary who was the founder of the People's Republic of China (PRC) ...
starting in the 1920s. The anthropologist Myron Cohen, however, asked why the rural population in China were called "peasants" rather than "farmers", a distinction he called political rather than scientific. One important outlet for their scholarly work and theory was ''
The Journal of Peasant Studies ''The Journal of Peasant Studies'', subtitled ''Critical Perspectives on Rural Politics and Development'', is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal covering research into the social structures, institutions, actors, and processes of change in ...
''.


See also

*
Agrarianism Agrarianism is a political and social philosophy that has promoted subsistence agriculture, smallholdings, and egalitarianism, with agrarian political parties normally supporting the rights and sustainability of small farmers and poor peasants ...
*
Cudgel War The Cudgel War (also Club War, fi, Nuijasota, links=no, sv, Klubbekriget, links=no) was a 1596–1597 peasant uprising in Finland, which was then part of the Kingdom of Sweden. The name of the uprising derives from the fact that the peasants ar ...
*
Family economy The term Family Economy can be used to describe the family as an economic unit. The early stages of development in many economies are characterized by family based production.Parente, S.L., Rogerson, R. & Wright, R., (2000). Homework in Development ...
*
Feudalism Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was the combination of the legal, economic, military, cultural and political customs that flourished in medieval Europe between the 9th and 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a way of structur ...
*
Folk culture Folklore is shared by a particular group of people; it encompasses the traditions common to that culture, subculture or group. This includes oral traditions such as Narrative, tales, legends, proverbs and jokes. They include material culture, r ...
*
Land reform Land reform is a form of agrarian reform involving the changing of laws, regulations, or customs regarding land ownership. Land reform may consist of a government-initiated or government-backed property redistribution, generally of agricultural ...
*
Land reform by country Agrarian reform and land reform have been a recurring theme of enormous consequence in world history. They are often highly political and have been achieved (or attempted) in many countries. Latin America Brazil Getúlio Vargas, who rose to presi ...
*
List of peasant revolts This is a chronological list of conflicts in which peasants played a significant role. Background The history of peasant wars spans over two thousand years. A variety of factors fueled the emergence of the peasant revolt phenomenon, including: ...
*
Peasant economics Peasant economics is an area of economics in which a wide variety of economic approaches ranging from the neoclassical to the marxist are used to examine the political economy of the peasantry. The defining feature of the peasants are that they ar ...
* Peasant Party (political movements in various countries) * Peasants' Republic *
Peasants' Revolt The Peasants' Revolt, also named Wat Tyler's Rebellion or the Great Rising, was a major uprising across large parts of England in 1381. The revolt had various causes, including the socio-economic and political tensions generated by the Black ...
*
Petty nobility The petty nobility is the lower nobility classes. Finland Petty nobility in Finland is dated at least back to 13th century and was formed by nobles around their strategic interests. The idea was more capable peasants with leader roles in local c ...
*
Popular revolt in late-medieval Europe Popular revolts in late medieval Europe were uprisings and rebellions by (typically) peasants in the countryside, or the bourgeois in towns, against nobles, abbots and kings during the upheavals of the 14th through early 16th centuries, part of a l ...
*
Serfdom Serfdom was the status of many peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to manorialism, and similar systems. It was a condition of debt bondage and indentured servitude with similarities to and differences from slavery, which develop ...
*
Via Campesina La Vía Campesina (from es, la vía campesina, ) is an international farmers organization founded in 1993 in Mons, Belgium, formed by 182 organisations in 81 countries, and describing itself as "an international movement which coordinates peas ...


Related terms

*
Aloer ''Aloers'' (the word is originally Catalan) were independent peasant proprietors of ''alous'' in what is now Catalonia, especially during the years between the Carolingian reconquest of the Hispanic Marches from the Moors in the late 9th century a ...
* Boor * Bracciante *
Campesino ''Campesino'' means 'farmer' or 'peasant' in Spanish. Campesino may refer to: * Tenant farmer or farm worker in Latin America * Los Campesinos!, an indie pop band from Cardiff, Wales * Teatro Campesino, a theater group founded by the United Farm ...
*
Churl A churl (Old High German ), in its earliest Old English (Anglo-Saxon) meaning, was simply "a man" or more particularly a "free man", but the word soon came to mean "a non-servile peasant", still spelled , and denoting the lowest rank of freemen. Ac ...
* Contadino * Cotter *
Fellah A fellah ( ar, فَلَّاح ; feminine ; plural ''fellaheen'' or ''fellahin'', , ) is a peasant, usually a farmer or agricultural laborer in the Middle East and North Africa. The word derives from the Arabic word for "ploughman" or "tiller". ...
*
Free tenant Free tenants, also known as free peasants, were tenant farmer peasants in medieval England who occupied a unique place in the medieval hierarchy. They were characterized by the low rents which they paid to their manorial lord. They were subj ...
*
Honbyakushō ''Honbyakushō'' (本百姓) were a type of peasant (''hyakushō''; 百姓) in pre-modern Japan. They were the owners of farmland in villages, and it fell to them to pay taxes for the village. This made them very active in village government. F ...
*
Kulak Kulak (; russian: кула́к, r=kulák, p=kʊˈlak, a=Ru-кулак.ogg; plural: кулаки́, ''kulakí'', 'fist' or 'tight-fisted'), also kurkul () or golchomag (, plural: ), was the term which was used to describe peasants who owned ove ...
*
Muzhik Agriculture in the Russian Empire throughout the 19th-20th centuries Russia represented a major world force, yet it lagged technologically behind other developed countries. Imperial Russia (officially founded in 1721 and abolished in 1917) was am ...
* Pagesos de remença *
Pawn Pawn most often refers to: * Pawn (chess), the weakest and most numerous piece in the game * Pawnbroker or pawnshop, a business that provides loans by taking personal property as collateral Pawn may also refer to: Places * Pawn, Oregon, an his ...
*
Peon Peon (English , from the Spanish ''peón'' ) usually refers to a person subject to peonage: any form of wage labor, financial exploitation, coercive economic practice, or policy in which the victim or a laborer (peon) has little control over emp ...
*
Serf Serfdom was the status of many peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to manorialism, and similar systems. It was a condition of debt bondage and indentured servitude with similarities to and differences from slavery, which developed ...
*
Sharecropper Sharecropping is a legal arrangement with regard to agricultural land in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land. Sharecropping has a long history and there are a wide range ...
*
Smerd A smerd ( orv, смердъ) was a free peasant and later a feudal-dependent serf in the medieval Slavic states of East Europe. Sources from the 11th and 12th centuries (such as the 12th-century ''Russkaya Pravda'') mention their presence in K ...
* *
Tenant farmer A tenant farmer is a person (farmer or farmworker) who resides on land owned by a landlord. Tenant farming is an agricultural production system in which landowners contribute their land and often a measure of operating capital and management, ...
*
Terrone is an Italian term to designate, in an often pejorative manner, people who dwell in Southern Italy or are of Southern Italian descent. History The term comes from an agent noun formed from the word (Italian for "land"). In fact it was historic ...
*
Villein A villein, otherwise known as ''cottar'' or ''crofter'', is a serf tied to the land in the feudal system. Villeins had more rights and social status than those in slavery, but were under a number of legal restrictions which differentiated them ...


References


Cited sources

*


Bibliography

* Bix, Herbert P. ''Peasant Protest in Japan, 1590–1884'' (1986) * Evans, Richard J., and W. R. Lee, eds. ''The German Peasantry: Conflict and Community from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries'' (1986) * Figes, Orlando. "The Peasantry" in * Hobsbawm, E. J. "Peasants and politics," ''Journal of Peasant Studies,'' Volume 1, Issue 1 October 1973, pp. 3–22 – article discusses the definition of "peasant" as used in social sciences * Macey, David A. J. ''Government and Peasant in Russia, 1861–1906; The Pre-History of the Stolypin Reforms'' (1987). * Kingston-Mann, Esther and Timothy Mixter, eds. ''Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia, 1800–1921'' (1991) * Thomas, William I., and Florian Znaniecki. ''The Polish Peasant in Europe and America'' (2 vol. 1918); classic sociological study
complete text online free
* Wharton, Clifton R. ''Subsistence agriculture and economic development''. Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co., 1969. * Wolf, Eric R. ''Peasants'' (Prentice-Hall, 1966).


Recent

* Akram-Lodhi, A. Haroon, and Cristobal Kay, eds. ''Peasants and Globalization: Political Economy, Rural Transformation and the Agrarian Question'' (2009) * Barkin, David. "Who Are The Peasants?" ''Latin American Research Review'', 2004, Vol. 39 Issue 3, pp. 270–281 * Brass, Tom. ''Peasants, Populism and Postmodernism'' (2000) * Brass, Tom, ed. ''Latin American Peasants'' (2003) * Scott, James C. ''The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia'' (1976)


External links

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