In the Middle Ages, eighty-five percent of all people were peasants, yet their lives were largely silent in the historical record. These agricultural laborers formed the bedrock of pre-industrial society, working the land that sustained kings, nobles, and clergy alike. They lived on manors presided over by lords or bishops, paying rent and labor services in exchange for the right to cultivate small plots. The open field system dominated Europe for centuries, requiring cooperation among peasants to manage fallowed land, pastures, and forests. Despite making up the vast majority of the population, they were often invisible to the chroniclers who recorded the deeds of the elite. Their existence was defined by the land they tilled and the obligations they owed, creating a world that existed below the market economy. This silent majority would eventually become the catalyst for profound social and intellectual changes, from the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution.
The Black Death and Labor
The mid-14th century brought a catastrophe that would fundamentally alter the fate of the peasantry. The Black Death reduced the population of medieval Europe, leaving more land for the survivors and making labor scarce. In the wake of this disruption, peasants found themselves in a position to demand wages and alternative forms of compensation. This shift in power dynamics made it more productive for laborers to negotiate their terms, leading to the development of widespread literacy and the enormous social changes of the Enlightenment. The evolution of ideas in this environment of relative literacy laid the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution. Mechanically and chemically augmented agricultural production increased, while the demand for factory workers in cities grew. Karl Marx would later call these displaced urban workers the proletariat, a new socio-economic stratum that replaced the medieval peasant. This process happened in an especially pronounced and truncated way in Eastern Europe, where serfdom persisted until the 18th and 19th centuries.
The German Village Life
In Germany, peasants continued to center their lives in the village well into the 19th century, belonging to a corporate body that managed community resources. They monitored community life, supervised fields and ditches, and maintained public order and morals. A village court handled minor offenses, while the patriarch made all family decisions and arranged advantageous marriages for his children. Much of the communal life centered on church services and holy days. In Prussia, peasants drew lots to choose conscripts required by the army, while noblemen handled external relationships and politics. The monasteries of Bavaria, which controlled 56 percent of the land, were broken up by the government and sold off around 1803. Inside the family, the patriarch held authority, but the community relied on collective decision-making for daily survival. This structure persisted until the encroachment of modern state systems and the shifting economic tides of the 19th century.
Information about the complexities of the French Revolution reached isolated areas through official announcements and long-established oral networks, yet peasants responded differently to these sources. Historian Eugen Weber traced the modernization of French villages, arguing that rural France went from backward and isolated to modern and possessing a sense of French nationhood during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He emphasized the roles of railroads, republican schools, and universal military conscription in creating this national identity. Until 1900, a sense of French nationhood was weak in the provinces, but the policies of the Third Republic created a sense of French nationality in rural areas. Historian Jill Maciak concluded that peasants were neither subservient, reactionary, nor ignorant, challenging the notion that they were merely passive recipients of history. The limits on political knowledge in these areas depended more on how much peasants chose to know than on bad roads or illiteracy.
The Chinese Invention
Farmers in China have been sometimes referred to as peasants in English-language sources, but the traditional term nongfu simply refers to farmer or agricultural worker. In the 19th century, Japanese intellectuals reinvented the Chinese terms fengjian for feudalism and nongmin for farming people, creating a negative image of Chinese farmers by making a class distinction where one had not previously existed. Anthropologist Myron Cohen considers these terms to be neologisms that represented a cultural and political invention. Writers in English mostly used the term farmers until the 1920s, when the term peasant came to predominate, implying that China was feudal and ready for revolution. This Western use of the term suggests that China is stagnant, medieval, underdeveloped, and held back by its rural population. The imposition of the historically burdened Western contrasts of town and country, shopkeeper and peasant, or merchant and landlord serves only to distort the realities of the Chinese economic tradition.
The Latin American Land
In Latin America, the term peasant is translated to Campesino, but the meaning has changed over time. While most Campesinos before the 20th century were in equivalent status to peasants, usually not owning land and making payments to landlords under the hacienda system, most Latin American countries saw one or more extensive land reforms in the 20th century. These land reforms were more comprehensive initiatives that redistributed lands from large landholders to former peasants, farm workers, and tenant farmers. Hence, many Campesinos in Latin America today are closer to smallholders who own their land and do not pay rent to a landlord. The Catholic Bishops of Paraguay have asserted 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 live a secure life. This transformation from tenant to owner represents a significant shift in the historical trajectory of rural populations in the region.
The Silent Historians
In medieval Europe, society was theorized as being organized into three estates: those who work, those who pray, and those who fight. The Annales School of 20th-century French historians emphasized the importance of peasants, with leader Fernand Braudel devoting the first volume of his major work, Civilization and Capitalism 15th, 18th Century, to the largely silent and invisible world that existed below the market economy. Other research in the field of peasant studies was promoted by Florian Znaniecki and Fei Xiaotong, and in the post-1945 studies of the great tradition and the little tradition in the work of Robert Redfield. In the 1960s, anthropologists and historians began to rethink the role of peasant revolt in world history and in their own disciplines. Peasant revolution was seen as a Third World response to capitalism and imperialism, challenging the notion that peasants were merely passive subjects of history.
The Revolutionary Voice
The anthropologist Eric Wolf drew on the work of earlier scholars in the Marxist tradition, such as Daniel Thorner, who saw the rural population as a key element in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Wolf and a group of scholars criticized both Marx and the field of Modernization theorists for treating peasants as lacking the ability to take action. James C. Scott's field observations in Malaysia convinced him that villagers were active participants in their local politics even though they were forced to use indirect methods. Many of these activist scholars looked back to the peasant movement in India and to the theories of the revolution in China led by Mao Zedong starting in the 1920s. The anthropologist Myron Cohen asked why the rural population in China were called peasants rather than farmers, a distinction he called political rather than scientific. One important outlet for their scholarly work and theory was The Journal of Peasant Studies, which continues to explore the struggles for autonomy and sustainability in an era of empire and globalization.