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A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or a farmer 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 ...
under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord. In Europe, three classes of peasants existed: slave, serf, and free tenant. Peasants might hold title to land either in fee simple or by any of several forms of land tenure, among them socage, quit-rent, leasehold, 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 ...
. 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/ villein. 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 for the rural population in the poor and developing countries of the world. Via Campesina, an organization claiming to represent the rights 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 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. 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 had taken root, the term ''peasant proprietors'' was frequently used to describe the traditional rural population in countries where smallholders 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 popula ...
, 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 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 acr ...
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 (social and political), power over others, acting as a master, chief, or ruler. The appellation can also denote certain persons who hold a title of the Peerage ...
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 * Chri ...
. 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 had reduced the population of medieval Europe 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 and the enormous social and intellectual changes of the Enlightenment. The evolution of ideas in an environment of relatively widespread literacy laid the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution, which enabled mechanically and chemically augmented agricultural production while simultaneously increasing the demand for factory workers 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 trend toward individual ownership of land, typified in England by Enclosure, 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 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 (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 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 trends. 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 prehistoric times around 30,000 BC. The Jōmon period, named after its cord-marked pottery, was followed by the Yayoi period in the first millennium BC when new inven ...
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 Myron Cohen considers these terms to be
neologism A neologism Ancient_Greek.html"_;"title="_from_Ancient_Greek">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_com ...
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 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 system), most Latin American countries saw one or more extensive land reforms in the 20th century. The land reforms of Latin America were more comprehensive initiatives that redistributed lands from large landholders to former peasants— farm workers 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: 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 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 and Fei Xiaotong, and in the post-1945 studies of the "great tradition" and the "little tradition" in the work of Robert Redfield. 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 response to capitalism and imperialism. The anthropologist Eric Wolf, 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. 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'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 in India and to the theories of the revolution in China led by Mao Zedong 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''.


See also

* Agrarianism * Cudgel War *
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 *
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 tales, legends, proverbs and jokes. They include material culture, ranging fro ...
* Land reform * Land reform by country * List of peasant revolts *
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 * Petty nobility *
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 ...
* Serfdom * Via Campesina


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 ...
* 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 * Contadino * Cotter * Fellah * Free tenant * Honbyakushō * Kulak *
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 * Peon * Serf * Sharecropper *
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 Kie ...
* * Tenant farmer *
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 historica ...
* Villein


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

{{Authority control Medieval society Early Modern period History of agriculture Feudalism Social history Rural economics Estates (social groups) Social classes ca:Camperol