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The Global Enclosure and the Remaking of Peasantries, 1870–1950

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2024

Eric Vanhaute  and
Claudia Bernardi Open the ORCID record for Claudia Bernardi [Opens in a new window]
Eric Vanhaute*
Affiliation:
History Department, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
Claudia Bernardi
Affiliation:
Political Science Department, University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy
*
Corresponding author: Eric Vanhaute; Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Peasant transformation has often been framed in dichotomous, linear, and predominantly a-historical models. This article adopts a dynamic perspective and shows how the developments that have often been regarded as constituent to the long-term process of the decline of agriculture and peasant worlds were in fact part of the spread of more diversified labour and income strategies of the peasantries. In the movement towards a worldwide enclosure of the rural worlds after 1870, a global peasantry emerged through a wide range of regional trajectories and narratives. By the first half of the twentieth century, peasant households all over the world had become heavily involved in the capitalist market economy. In this article, we argue that the (re)creation of peasantries as a social group is part of a diverse complex of reciprocal exchanges, regional and extra-regional market transactions, actions of public forces, and social conflict. Also we stress that social class formation should be understood in its specific world-historical co-ordinates using a particular set of transhistorical concepts like (re)peasantization, peasant frontiers, and peasant regimes.

Type
Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 67 , Special Issue 4: Global Social History: Class and Social Transformation in World History , September 2024 , pp. 785 - 802
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press.

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21 This section is based on Vanhaute, Peasants in world history, pp. 87–103. Supporting literature includes: Ulbe Bosma, The making of a periphery: how Island Southeast Asia became a mass exporter of labour (New York, NY, 2019); Francesca Bray, The rice economies: technology and development in Asian societies (Oxford, 1986); Breman, Labour, migration and rural transformation in colonial India; Leslie Dossey, Peasant and empire in Christian North Africa (Berkeley, CA, 2010); Penelope Francks, Rural economic development in Japan: from the nineteenth century to the Pacific War (Abingdon, 2006); David Ludden, India and South Asia: a short history (Oxford, 2002); David Ludden, Early capitalism and local history in South India (Oxford, 2005); B. B. Mohanty, Agrarian transformation in Western India: economic gains and social costs (London and New York, NY, 2019); James C. McCann, Green land, brown land, black land: an environmental history of Africa, 1800–1990 (Portsmouth, NH, 1999); Alessandro Stanziani, Bondage: labour and rights in Eurasia from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries (New York, NY, and London, 2014); Peer Vries, Averting a Great Divergence: state and economy in Japan, 1868–1937 (London, 2019); Mats Widgren and John E. G. Sutton, Islands of intensive agriculture in Eastern Africa: past and present (London and Stockholm, 2004).

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23 Sven Van Melkebeke, ‘Divergence in rural development: the curious case of coffee production in the Lake Kivu region (first half twentieth century)’, African Economic History, 46 (2018), pp. 117–46, at p. 134; Patrick Mbataru, ‘Women in the coffee society: the case of Nyeri, Kenya’, Études Rurales, 180 (2007), pp. 101–16.

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25 Ibid., p. 185.

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