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Peasant
A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or
farmer, especially one liv ing in the Middle Ages under
feudalism and pay ing rent, tax, fees, or serv ices to a
landlord. [1 ][2] In Europe, peasants were div ided into
three classes according to their personal status: slav e,
serf, and free tenant. Peasants either hold title to land in
fee simple, or hold land by any of sev eral forms of land
tenure, among them socage, quit-rent, leasehold, and
copy hold. [3]

The word peasantry is commonly used in a non-

pejorativ e sense as a collectiv e noun for the rural
population in the poor and under-dev eloped countries of
the world.

Young women offer berries to visitors to their izba home,

1909. Those who had been serfs among the Russian
Contents peasantry were officially emancipated in 1861.
Photograph by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky.
Etymology
Social position
Medieval European peasants
Early modern Germany
France
Use of the term for Chinese farmers
Historiography
See also
Related terms
References
Bibliography
Recent
External links

Etymology
The word "peasant" is deriv ed from the 15th century French word païsant (compare Italian paesano), meaning one
from the pays, or country side; ultimately from the Latin pagus, or outly ing administrativ e district. [4]

Social position

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Peasants ty pically made up the majority of the

agricultural labour force in a pre-industrial society . The
majority of the people 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
pejorativ ely to those considered to be "lower class",
perhaps defined by poorer education and/or a lower
income.

A farm in 1794
Medieval European
peasants
The open field sy stem of agriculture dominated most of northern Europe during mediev al times and endured until
the nineteenth century in many areas. Under this sy stem, peasants liv ed on a manor presided ov er by a lord or a
bishop of the church. Peasants paid rent or labor serv ices to the lord in exchange for their right to cultiv ate the land.
Fallowed land, pastures, forests, and wasteland were held in common. The open field sy stem required cooperation
among the peasants of the manor. [5] It was gradually replaced by indiv idual ownership and management of land.

The relativ e position of peasants in Western Europe improv ed greatly after the Black Death had reduced the
population of mediev al Europe in the mid-14th century : resulting in more land for the surv iv ors and making labor
more scarce. In the wake of this disruption to the established order, later centuries saw the inv ention of the printing
press, the dev elopment of widespread literacy and the enormous social and intellectual changes of the
Enlightenment.

The ev olution of ideas in an env ironment of relativ ely widespread literacy laid the groundwork for the Industrial
Rev olution, which enabled mechanically and chemically augmented agricultural production while simultaneously
increasing the demand for factory workers in cities, who became what Karl Marx called the proletariat. The trend
toward indiv idual ownership of land, ty pified 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 preserv e of the mediev al peasants.

This process happened in an especially pronounced and truncated way in Eastern Europe. Lacking any cataly sts for
change in the 14th century , Eastern European peasants largely continued upon the original mediev al 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 buy ing and selling of lands traditionally
held by peasants, and for landless ex-peasants to mov e to the cities. [6] Ev en 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."[7 ]

Early modern Germany

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In Germany , peasants continued to center their liv es in the v illage well into
the 19th century . They belonged to a corporate body and helped to
manage the community resources and to monitor community life. [8] 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). [9]

In most of Germany , farming was handled by tenant farmers who paid rents
and obligatory serv ices to the landlord—ty pically a nobleman. [1 0] Peasant
"Feiernde Bauern" ("Celebrating
leaders superv ised the fields and ditches and grazing rights, maintained
Peasants"), artist unknown, 18th or
public order and morals, and supported a v illage court which handled 19th century
minor offenses. Inside the family the patriarch made all the decisions, and
tried to arrange adv antageous marriages for his children. Much of the
v illages' communal life centered on church serv ices and holy day s. In Prussia, the peasants drew lots to choose
conscripts required by the army . The noblemen handled external relationships and politics for the v illages under
their control, and were not ty pically inv olv ed in daily activ ities or decisions. [1 1 ]

France
Information about the complexities of the French Rev olution, 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 subserv ient, reactionary , nor ignorant."[1 2]

In his seminal book Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France, 1880–1914 (197 6), historian
Eugen Weber traced the modernization of French v illages 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. [1 3]
He emphasized the roles of railroads, republican schools, and univ ersal military conscription. He based his findings
on school records, migration patterns, military -serv ice documents and economic trends. Weber argued that until
1900 or so a sense of French nationhood was weak in the prov inces. Weber then looked at how the policies of the
Third Republic created a sense of French nationality in rural areas. [1 4] The book was widely praised, but some [1 5]
argued that a sense of Frenchness existed in the prov inces before 187 0.

Use of the term for Chinese farmers

Farmers in China hav e been sometimes referred to as "peasants" in English-language sources. Howev er, the
traditional term for farmer, nongfu ( 农夫), simply refers to "farmer" or "agricultural worker". In the 19th century ,
Japanese intellectuals reinv ented the Chinese terms fengjian (封建) for "feudalism" and nongmin (农民), or "farming
people," terms used in the description of feudal Japanese society . [1 6] These terms created a negativ e image of
Chinese farmers by making a class distinction where one had not prev iously existed. [1 6] Anthropologist My ron
Cohen considers these terms to be neologisms that represented a cultural and political inv ention. He writes:[1 7 ]

This div ide represented a radical departure from tradition: F.W. Mote and others hav e shown how
especially during the later imperial era (Ming and Qing dy nasties), China was notable for the cultural,
social, political, and economic interpenetration of city and country side. But the term nongmin did
enter China in association with Marxist and non-Marxist Western perceptions of the "peasant," thereby
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putting the full weight of the Western heritage to use in a new and sometimes harshly negativ e
representation of China's rural population. Likewise, with this dev elopment Westerners found it all the
more "natural" to apply their own historically deriv ed images of the peasant to what they observ ed or
were told in China. The idea of the peasant remains powerfully entrenched in the Western perception of
China to this v ery day .

Modern Western writers often continue to use the term peasant for Chinese farmers, ty pically without ev er defining
what the term means. [1 8] This Western use of the term suggests that China is stagnant, "mediev al", underdev eloped,
and held back by its rural population. [1 9] Cohen writes that the "imposition of the historically burdened Western
contrasts of town and country , shopkeeper and peasant, or merchant and landlord, serv es only to distort the
realities of the Chinese economic tradition". [20]

Historiography
In mediev al Europe society was theorized as being organized into three estates:
those who work, those who pray , and those who fight. [21 ] The Annales School of
20th century French historians emphasized the importance of peasants. Its leader
Fernand Braudel dev oted the first v olume—called The Structures of Everyday Life
—of his major work, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century to the largely
silent and inv isible 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 rev olt in world history and in their
own disciplines. Peasant rev olution was seen as a Third World response to
capitalism and imperialism. [22]
Portrait sculpture of 18th-
The anthropologist Eric Wolf, for instance, drew on the work of earlier scholars in
century French peasants by
the Marxist tradition such as Daniel Thorner, who saw the rural population as a key artist George S. Stuart, in
element in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Wolf and a group of scholars the permanent collection of
criticized both Marx and the field of modernization theorists for treating peasants the Museum of Ventura
as lacking the ability to take action. [23] James C. Scott's field observ ations in County, Ventura, California
Malay sia conv inced him that v illagers were activ e participants in their local
politics ev en though they were forced to use indirect methods. Many of these
activ ist scholars looked back to the peasant mov ement in India and to the theories of the rev olution in China led by
Mao Zedong starting in the 1920s. The anthropologist My ron Cohen, howev er, asked why the rural population in
China were called "peasants" rather than "farmers", a distinction he called political rather than scientific. [24] One
important outlet for their scholarly work and theory was the Journal of Peasant Studies.

See also
Agrarianism
Family economy
Feudalism
Folk culture
Peasant economics
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Peasant Party (political movements in various countries)

Peasants' Revolt
Petty nobility
Popular revolt in late-medieval Europe
Serfdom

Related terms
Gopnik The Peasant Wedding, by Flemish
Aloer painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder,
Boor 1567 or 1568
Bracciante
Campesino
Churl
Contadino
Cotter
Fellah
Free tenant
Hari
Honbyakushō
Kotsias
Krestyanin
Kulak "Peasants in a Tavern" by Adriaen
Muzhik van Ostade (c. 1635), at the Alte
Nóngmín Pinakothek, Munich
Pagesos de remença
Peon
Serf
Sharecropper
Smerd
Ṭǎran
Tenant farmer
Vecin
Villein

References
1. peasant, def. A.1.a. n. OED Online. March 2012. Oxford University Press. 28 May 2012 (http://www.oed.com/view/Entr
y/139355?rskey=ke8Dz2&result=1&isAdvanced=false)
2. Merrian-Webster online "peasant" (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/peasant)
3. Webster, Hutton (1 June 2004). Early European History (https://books.google.com/books?id=1rpEHPuAgncC&pg=PA44
0). Kessinger Publishing. p. 440. ISBN 978-1-4191-1711-4. Retrieved 3 June 2012.
4. Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary p. 846, 866.
5. Gies, Frances and Joseph. Life in a Medieval Village New York: Harper, 1989, pp 12-18
6. David Moon, The abolition of serfdom in Russia, 1762-1907 (2001) pp. 98–114
7. Pipes, Richard (1995) [1974]. Russia Under the Old Regime: Second edition. p. 163. ISBN 978-0140247688.
8. Eda Sagarra, A Social History of Germany: 1648-1914 (1977) pp. 140-54

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9. Wedgwood, Hensleigh (1855). "English Etymologies" (https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3924121;view=1up;seq

=127). Transactions of the Philological Society (8): 117–118.
10. The monasteries of Bavaria, which controlled 56% of the land, were broken up by the government, and sold off around
1803. Thomas Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck : 1800-1866 (1996), p. 59
11. For details on the life of a representative peasant farmer, who migrated in 1710 to Pennsylvania, see Bernd Kratz, he
was a farmer, "Hans Stauffer: A Farmer in Germany before his Emigration to Pennsylvania," Genealogist, Fall 2008, Vol.
22 Issue 2, pp. 131-169
12. Jill Maciak, "Of News and Networks: The Communication of Political Information in the Rural South-West during the
French Revolution." French History 15.3 (2001): 273-306.
13. Joseph A. Amato, "Eugen Weber's France", Journal of Social History, Vol. 25, 1992, pp. 879–882.
14. Eugen Weber, "The Second Republic, Politics, and the Peasant", French Historical Studies Vol. 11, No. 4 (Autumn,
1980), pp. 521–550 (in JSTOR (https://www.jstor.org/stable/286349)).
15. Ted W. Margadant, "French Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: A Review Essay", Agricultural History, Summer
1979, Vol. 53 No. 3, pp. 644–651.
16. Myron Cohen, Kinship, Contract, Community, and State: Anthropological Perspectives on China. 2005. p. 64
17. Myron Cohen, Kinship, Contract, Community, and State: Anthropological Perspectives on China. 2005. p. 65
18. Myron Cohen, Kinship, Contract, Community, and State: Anthropological Perspectives on China. 2005. p. 68
19. Mei, Yi-tsi. Ideology, Power, Text: Self-Representation and the Peasant 'Other' in Modern Chinese Literature. 1998. p. 26
20. Myron Cohen, Kinship, Contract, Community, and State: Anthropological Perspectives on China. 2005. p. 73
21. Richard Southern: The Mak ing of the Middle Ages (1952)
22. Wolf, Eric R. (1965). Peasants. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. ISBN 978-0136554561.
23. Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York,: Harper & Row, 1969).
24. Myron Cohen, "Cultural and Political Inventions in Modern China: The Case of the Chinese 'Peasant'", Daedalus 122.2
(Spring 1993): 151-170.

Bibliography
Bix, Herbert P. Peasant Protest in Japan, 1590-1884 (1986)
Cohen, Myron. "Cultural and Political Inventions in Modern China: The Case of the Chinese 'Peasant'", Daedalus 122.2
(Spring 1993): 151-170.
Evans, Richard J., and W. R. Lee, eds. The German Peasantry: Conflict and Community from the Eighteenth to the
Twentieth Centuries (1986)
Hobsbawm, E. J. "Peasants and politics," Journal of Peasant Studies, Volume 1, Issue 1 October 1973, pages 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).
Thomas, William I., and Florian Znaniecki. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (2 vol. 1918); classic sociological
study; complete text online free (http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/3074959.html)
Wharton, Clifton R. Subsistence agriculture and economic development,. Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co., 1969. Print.o.
Wolf, Eric R. Peasants (Prentice-Hall, 1966).
Wolf, Eric R. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (Harper & Row, 1969).

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. Class, Culture and the Agrarian Myth (2014)

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Brass, Tom, ed. New Farmers' Movements in India (1995)

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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