Peasants and politics

This paper discusses the political relations of ‘traditional’ peasants to groups and institutions outside their local community, with special reference to situations in which they encounter the political movements and problems of the twentieth century. It stresses the separation of peasants from non‐peasants, the general subalternity of the peasant world, but also the explicit confrontation of power which is the framework of their politics. The relative isolation of local communities, and their consequent ignorance, does not confine peasant politics only to parish pump or undefined millennial universality. However, it makes certain forms of nation‐wide peasant action without outside leadership and organisation difficult and some, like a general ‘peasant revolution’, probably impossible. The political problems of a ‘modern’ peasantry are briefly touched upon in conclusion.     

Sentences by Mexican Indian Peasants

Much of the existing literature on the replacement of sharecropping by wage labour in the cotton South during the post‐Depression era tends to focus on developments internal to the United States and to the South as a region. As such, it fails to provide a more global analysis which takes into account the fact that Southern cotton production was integrally tied to a world economy. This article addresses these shortcomings by examining how changes in the class structure of Southern cotton production had an impact on both foreign cotton production and the rise of the man‐made fibre industries between 1930 and 1950. This analysis attempts to avoid some of the major criticisms levelled against dependency theories and world‐system approaches, while showing how a global approach provides a more complete understanding of the relationships between the internal and external socio‐conomic factors which contributed to this historical transformation.     

A victor's history: a comparative analysis of the labour historiography of Indonesia's New Order

Some observers have identified a common pattern in developing countries whereby unions are transformed from a political force valued for their contribution to the struggle for independence to a state-sponsored ‘tool of development’. A less well-explored question concerns the harnessing of labour historiography to justify such transitions. As this article shows, Suharto's New Order (1966–98) undertook a conscious and purposeful rewriting of Indonesian labour history in support of a single vehicle of labour representation organized around a narrative of the dangers of political unionism and designed to control and harness the industrial workforce in the name of economic development.     

Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-39: Resistance and Adaptation

This article re-evaluates the widely held view that Soviet peasants responded only or predominantly with resistance to collectivization and work in Soviet collective farms. It analyses key examples of the evidence for this 'resistance interpretation' to show that the evidence is not representative of most peasants' actions. It presents new evidence and analysis to show that peasant responses cannot be reduced to resistance, that more often they adapted to the new system, and that they worked hard within the system to overcome famines.     

Peasants and labourers in Southern Spain,Cuba, and Highland Peru

This paper discusses some of the differences and similarities between a peasantry and an agricultural proletariat and considers the economic relations between peasants or labourers and landowners. The examples are drawn mainly from studies of Southern Spain, Cuba and Peru. The paper de‐emphasises the specificity of ‘peasant society’ as an object of study both from the economic and the socio‐political point of view.     

Peasants and the redshirt movement in Thailand: some dissenting voices

The ‘redshirt’ movement in Thailand is commonly portrayed in media and scholarly accounts as a class-based, pro-Thaksin social movement that draws fervent support from the poor rural-born masses, especially peasants, in the north and northeast. The movement leaders, including Thaksin, have supposedly won these people's support by framing urban-based political elites as ammart (aristocrats) who have stakes in suppressing the needs of phrai (serfs) – a contrasting label for the rural-born poor. I question this analysis that highlights the polarisation of Thai society along class lines. Combining data from election results and fieldwork in Chiang Mai Province – Thaksin's birthplace and the putative redshirt heartland – I show that despite their relative poverty, some peasants remain cynical opponents of the redshirt movement. They have autonomy to penetrate and reinterpret the redshirts' class-centric collective action frame – a fact that cautions us against linking rural poverty causally to rural support for redshirts. Peasants are a more diverse, politically divided lot than we are led to believe.     

Witchcraft and history

Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: studies in culture and belief JONATHAN BARRY, MARIANNE HESTER & GARETH ROBERTS (Eds), 1996 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xiv + 368 pp., ISBN 0-521-55224-9 hardback £40.00, ISBN 0-521-63875-5 paperback £15.00     

Permanent transition or permanent revolution: Peasants,proletarians, and politics

David Goodman and Michael Redclift, From Peasant to Proletarian: Capitalist Development and Agrarian Transitions, Oxford: Blackwell, 1981. Pp. xii + 244, £15 (cloth).

This review article considers a book which attempts to present and evaluate Marxist debates on agrarian transition without at first clarifying its own position on Marxist theory and concepts. It is suggested here that this omission, combined with a compressed treatment of complex arguments, results in misinterpretations and misrepresentations of some of these debates, together with a devaluation of the significance of their political inception.     

Lesbian and gay history

The Lesbian History Sourcebook: love and sex between women in Britain from 1780-1970 ALSION ORAM & ANNMARIE TURNBULL (Eds), 2001 New York & London: Routledge, xix + 292 pp., £16.99 ISBN: 0415114853     

Women and American history

Psychoanalysis and Feminism, by Juliet Mitchell. New York : Pantheon Books. 435 pp. $8.95.     

Resisting the New State: Peasants and Pastoralists in Iran, 1921-41

This article examines the responses of the rural poor, both settled peasants and pastoral nomads, to the upheavals unleashed in the Iranian countryside by Riza Shah's adoption of a programme of authoritarian state-building and rapid modernization. The article shows how, contrary to the conventional assumptions of rural passivity held by both Western scholarship and Iranian nationalism, peasant and nomad communities in fact generated a variety of active responses to the regime's initiatives, both on their own account and in combination with other social forces, aimed at defending themselves and resisting unfavourable changes in their relations with landlords and state officials.     

Feminist biography and feminist history

Abstract

This article seeks to explore the relationship between biography and the many new developments evident in feminist history. Taking as its particular focus the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English feminism, it looks at the divergence between an approach to biography which assumes it to be concerned with the lives of exceptional individuals and an interest in the history of feminism which has ceased to regard it as being the story of heroic victories on the way to women's emancipation. The growing interest in the lives, experiences and activities of past feminists who were not the leaders of major national campaigns suggests a new approach in general to the biographies of feminists – exploring how they lived and understood the broader situation of women     

Peasants,grapes and corporations: The growth of contract farming in a Chilean community

This article examines the social implications of contract farming promoted in smallholding areas. It is argued that rather than resulting in overall proletarianisation of the local peasantry, contract farming may accelerate its differentiation and disintegration by converting rich peasants into peasant capitalists. The argument is supported by a historical analysis of socio‐economic and organisational processes in a Chilean smallholding community which experienced two consecutive waves of agribusiness expansion: a tobacco boom in the 1950s and a fruit export expansion in the 1970s and 1980s.     

women's history,oral history and active learning: an experience from southern England

Abstract

This article aims to open up a discussion on teaching methodologies in history and women's studies, particularly in relation to oral history as a form of ‘active learning’. It contains an account of a course in which a group of third-year history students undertook a joint research project on domesticity in Britain in the 1930s and the 1950s.     

Borders and frontiers in women's history

Abstract

This article, based largely on London material, seeks to explore the interaction of various pressures from home, from school and from domestic education advocates on girls in their last two years at elementary school before leaving at fourteen. It examines in particular the extent and nature of resistance from some teachers and other educationists to overmuch domestic tuition for pupils, seeing this as leading to a narrowed perspective and as an unwarranted interference with the girls' right to a good general education. Given the strong official backing and widespread public agreement in the early twentieth century for the need to domesticate girls at school along approved lines, the determination of teachers and others to uphold the counter-claims of general education deserves detailed study.