Peasant

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Peasants have made up the majority of humanity for most of recorded history. One estimate puts the figure at 85 percent of the population in the Middle Ages. Yet the word itself carries a strange double life: at once the plain label for an agricultural laborer and, in 21st-century English, a slur meaning "an ignorant, rude, or unsophisticated person." How did a word rooted in the Latin pagus, meaning an outlying administrative district, travel so far from its origins to become both a political symbol and an insult? And what does it reveal about the people who used it, and the people it was used against? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. A Word and Its Weight

  ›

  "Peasant" arrived in English from the 15th-century French word paisant, meaning one from the pays, or countryside. But the moment the word landed in a new language, it began to accumulate judgments that went beyond geography. As early as 13th-century Germany, the concept of "peasant" could imply "rustic" as well as "robber." The English term villain, or villein, followed the same downward slide, moving from a simple designation for a feudal tenant to a synonym for a scoundrel.

  By the 1940s-1960s, the word had been repurposed again, this time as a collective term for the rural populations of developing countries. Scholars described it as the "semantic successor to 'native', incorporating all its condescending and racial overtones." A word that began by describing where someone lived had become a way of describing what they were worth.

  Yet the word has also been reclaimed. Via Campesina, an organization claiming to represent the rights of about 200 million farm-workers around the world, self-defines as an "International Peasant's Movement." The United Nations adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas in 2018, using the term in an explicitly non-pejorative sense. Despite these efforts, general English-language literature has seen steady decline in the use of the word since about 1970.

• 3. Three Classes, One Manor

  ›

  In medieval Europe, three distinct classes of peasants existed side by side: non-free slaves, semi-free serfs, and free tenants. The system that bound them together was the open field system, which dominated most of Europe and endured until the 19th century in many areas.

  Under this arrangement, peasants lived on a manor presided over by a lord or a bishop of the church. They paid rent or labor services in exchange for their right to cultivate the land. Fallowed land, pastures, forests, and wasteland were held in common, and the whole enterprise required sustained cooperation among the peasants of the manor. Land tenure took several specific legal forms: fee simple, socage, quit-rent, leasehold, and copyhold each described a different relationship between a peasant and the ground beneath their feet.

  The mid-14th century Black Death cut through this structure with extraordinary force. By reducing the population of medieval Europe, it left more land for survivors and made labor scarce. In that new environment, many laborers found they could demand wages and other forms of compensation. The spread of those demands contributed, over time, to wider literacy and to the social and intellectual upheavals of the Enlightenment.

• 4. East and West Diverge

  ›

  Western Europe and Eastern Europe moved through the post-plague centuries on very different tracks. In the west, the trend toward individual land ownership, typified in England by the process of Enclosure, displaced many peasants from the land. Those displaced people were often compelled, unwillingly, to become urban factory-workers. Karl Marx called this new urban laboring class the proletariat, and he understood it as occupying the same socio-economic stratum that medieval peasants had once held.

  Eastern Europe had no comparable catalyst for change in the 14th century. Its peasants continued largely on the original medieval path until the 18th and 19th centuries. The proportion of serfs within the Russian empire gradually decreased, from 45-50 percent at the end of the 18th century to 37.7 percent in 1858. Serfdom was finally abolished in Russia in 1861. The change allowed for the buying and selling of lands traditionally held by peasants, and permitted landless ex-peasants to move to cities. Yet many remained where generations of their families had farmed.

  In Germany, peasants continued to center their lives in the village well into the 19th century. They belonged to a corporate body that helped manage communal resources and monitor community life. Peasant leaders supervised fields and ditches and grazing rights, maintained public order and morals, and supported a village court handling minor offenses. In Prussia specifically, peasants drew lots to choose conscripts required by the army.

• 5. France and the Question of Knowledge

  ›

  Historian Eugen Weber's 1976 book Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France, 1880-1914 reshaped how historians thought about rural populations and national identity. Weber argued that rural France moved from backward and isolated to modern and nationally conscious during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He pointed to three engines of that change: railroads, republican schools, and universal military conscription.

  Weber based his findings on school records, migration patterns, military-service documents, and economic trends. His central claim was that until around 1900, a sense of French nationhood was weak in the provinces. The policies of the Third Republic, he argued, created that identity where it had not previously existed. The book was widely praised, though some argued that a sense of Frenchness had already existed in the provinces before 1870.

  A separate line of research, by historian Jill Maciak, looked at how French peasants received information about the fast-changing events of the Revolution, including through long-established oral networks as well as official announcements. Maciak concluded that peasants "were neither subservient, reactionary, nor ignorant." The limits on political knowledge in isolated areas, she found, depended more on how much peasants chose to know than on bad roads or illiteracy.

• 6. The China Distortion

  ›

  Farmers in China have been referred to as "peasants" in English-language sources, but the traditional Chinese term nongfu simply means "farmer" or "agricultural worker." The loaded term nongmin, or "farming people," was actually a 19th-century Japanese reinvention of an older Chinese term, created to describe feudal Japanese society and then imported back into China.

  Anthropologist Myron Cohen called nongmin a neologism representing a cultural and political invention. The word entered China in association with Marxist and non-Marxist Western perceptions of the "peasant," bringing with it, as Cohen wrote, "the full weight of the Western heritage" in a new and sometimes harshly negative representation of China's rural population.

  English-language writers mostly used the term "farmers" for Chinese rural workers until the 1920s, when "peasant" came to predominate. That shift implied that China was feudal, stagnant, and ready for revolution in the way Europe had been before the French Revolution. Cohen argued that applying historically burdened Western contrasts, such as town versus country or merchant versus landlord, "serves only to distort the realities of the Chinese economic tradition." Scholars in the Ming and Qing dynasties had actually been notable for the interpenetration of city and countryside, precisely the opposite of what the peasant framing implied.

• 7. Revolt, Scholarship, and Legacy

  ›

  In the 1960s, anthropologists and historians began rethinking the role of peasant revolt in world history. Peasant revolution came to be seen as a Third World response to capitalism and imperialism. Anthropologist Eric Wolf drew on earlier Marxist scholars, including Daniel Thorner, who had seen the rural population as a key element in the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

  Wolf and others also pushed back against a tendency, shared by both Marx and modernization theorists, to treat peasants as passive objects of history rather than active participants. James C. Scott's fieldwork in Malaysia supported this view: he found that villagers were active in local politics even when they were forced to use indirect methods. Many activist scholars looked to the peasant movement in India and to Mao Zedong's theories of revolution in China, which he began developing in the 1920s.

  The Annales School of 20th-century French historians kept the subject central to academic inquiry. Its leader, Fernand Braudel, devoted the first volume of his major work Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, a volume he titled The Structures of Everyday Life, to what he called the largely silent and invisible world that existed below the market economy. Additional research came from Florian Znaniecki, Fei Xiaotong, and Robert Redfield, whose post-1945 studies of the "great tradition" and the "little tradition" opened further lines of inquiry. The Journal of Peasant Studies became one important outlet for the field. The Catholic Bishops of Paraguay offered their own framing, asserting that "every campesino has a natural right to possess a reasonable allotment of land where he can establish his home, work for the subsistence of his family and a secure life."