Short answers, pulled from the story.
"Peasant" derives from the 15th-century French word paisant, meaning one from the pays, or countryside, which in turn comes from the Latin pagus, meaning an outlying administrative district. The word entered English carrying geographic meaning before accumulating social and pejorative overtones.
In medieval Europe, three classes of peasants existed: non-free slaves, semi-free serfs, and free tenants. They might hold land under various forms of tenure including fee simple, socage, quit-rent, leasehold, and copyhold.
Serfdom was abolished in Russia in 1861. Before abolition, the proportion of serfs within the Russian empire had already declined from 45-50 percent at the end of the 18th century to 37.7 percent in 1858. Abolition allowed lands traditionally held by peasants to be bought and sold, and permitted landless ex-peasants to move to cities.
In his 1976 book Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France, 1880-1914, historian Eugen Weber argued that rural France transformed from backward and isolated to modern and nationally conscious during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He identified railroads, republican schools, and universal military conscription as the primary engines of this change, and contended that a sense of French nationhood was weak in the provinces until around 1900.
Anthropologist Myron Cohen argued that the Chinese term nongmin was a 19th-century Japanese neologism representing a political and cultural invention, not a traditional Chinese distinction. Applying Western peasant framing to Chinese farmers imposed a town-versus-country divide that did not reflect China's historical reality, in which especially during the Ming and Qing dynasties, city and countryside were notably interpenetrated.
The Black Death in the mid-14th century reduced the population of medieval Europe, leaving more land for survivors and making agricultural labor scarce. This shift gave many laborers leverage to demand wages and alternative forms of compensation, which contributed over time to the spread of literacy and to the social and intellectual changes of the Enlightenment.