This chapter addresses a central tension between two sides of rural history – one stressing peasant choices, the other the constraints on those choices. For the one side, key concepts are ‘individualism’, ‘autonomy’, ‘rationality’, ‘voluntarism’, and ‘agency’. For the other, they are ‘class struggle’, ‘exploitation’, ‘extra-economic coercion’, ‘social structure’, and ‘institutions’. This chapter argues that both strands of analysis can deepen our understanding of the pre-industrial countryside – not just in England but in many other societies. But pursuing the one and ignoring the other can lead us astray. Only by attentiveness both to people’s choices and to the constraints on those choices can we arrive at a just understanding of the particular rural society we are studying and of rural development more widely.

Choices

Let us begin by considering whether rural people in pre-industrial societies really did have choices, in the sense of deciding, as individuals, between two or more possibilities. It is surprising how often one still encounters views to the contrary, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit and hardly recognised by the scholars who enunciate them. These views take four main forms.

First is the view put forward by Alexander Chayanov and his modern followers, that peasants were governed by a mentality that did not view certain aspects of life as choice variables. So in the Chayanovian view, peasants do not make individual choices about labour, capital, farm size, technology, market participation, or consumption style. Instead, their cultural norms cause them to engage in self-exploitation (i.e., to go on putting labour into the farm past the point at which an individual agent making rational choices would stop), avoid debt and credit (i.e., to accept the ups and downs of consumption and production and not try to smooth them by borrowing or lending), retain the family farm at all costs (i.e., not buy or sell land to adjust to changes in prices or technology), avoid markets (i.e., not choose between self-consumption or market sales), and consume only traditional goods (i.e., not choose new consumer objects even when they are available).

According to this view, a deeply rooted peasant mentality so strongly guided rural people’s behaviour that they could not – or at least did not – make individual choices about labour, capital, land, technology, markets or consumption. These assumptions are still often applied to rural societies, both historical and modern.