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Closed Corporate and Open Peasant Communities: Reopening a Hastily Shut Case

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

A. Terry Rambo
Affiliation:
University of Malaya

Extract

In a provocatively entitled article, “Chinese Peasants and the Closed Community: An Open and Shut Case,” Professor G. William Skinner has raised a number of important issues regarding the closed corporate and open peasant community types first formulated by Eric Wolf (1955, 1957). Skinner questions Wolfs assumption (1957: 8) that closed corporate communities developed in areas where society became dualized “…into a dominant entrepreneurial sector and a dominated sector of native peasants,” whereas open peasant communities arose in the new, market-production oriented settlements budded off from Europe “ …in response to the rising demand for cash crops which accompanied the development of capitalism in Europe” (Wolf, 1955: 462).

Type
The Accommodation to Capitalism in Peasant Societies
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1977

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References

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