Origins of debt,mortgage and alienation of land in early modern Punjab

The agrarian structure of the Punjab in Pakistan and India was fashioned by the socio‐economic and legal institutions established by the British after their annexation of the Province in 1849. One of the consequences of this was an increase in usury/money‐lending capital and a resultant rise in endemic debt among the peasantry and alienation of proprietors’ land by money‐lenders. These changes alarmed the colonial authorities who attempted to deal with the situation simply through legislation, without addressing the complexities of Punjab's political economy. The problem of debt and the reliance of cultivators on the moneylenders for finance continued after 1947. Based on evidence from settlement reports and other original documents this article explores the origin of this problem.     

The peasant mode of production in the work of A. V. Chayanov

Is there a peasant mode of production? Chayanov's work can be construed as a theory of the peasant mode of production at the level of the labour process. This labour process is analysed in terms of the forces of production, the relationship between the peasant and the means of production, and that between the peasant and the product. When subjected to an historical critique, from the point of view of the formation and decomposition of the peasantry, Chayanov's theory of a peasant mode of production yields to the idea of peasantry as a specific combination of structures.     

Antonio Garcia: A Mexican peasant,poet and revolutionary

In this article, a letter and poems written by Antonio Garcia Gonzáles, a Mexican peasant from Ixtlán, Mexico, are translated. The letter was written in October, 1971, a few weeks after his arrest for involvement in certain revolutionary activities, and the poems during the early years of his imprisonment (1971–73). They are introduced by some biographical remarks about Antonio and accompanied by a commentary.     

The nature and logic of the peasant economy 1: A Generalisation 1

This article discusses the major specific aspects of a general type of peasant economy: the family farm production‐consumption unit, the village as an economic organisation, the market and money in the peasant economy, the political economy of peasant societies. It concludes with an examination of the differing ideas of analysts who agree on the existence of a specific peasant economy but disagree on the relative importance of its characteristics. The aim is to provide a starting‐point for a systematic discussion of the general, the diverse, the relatively stable and the changeable in peasant economy, and the way in which it is affected by state policies; the latter aspects are dealt with in part II?.     

Dorset,Kincardine and peasant crisis: A comment on David Craig

David Craig's paper ‘Novels of Peasant Crisis’ is to be warmly welcomed. But Craig provides no adequate analysis of the peasant crises underlying the novels which he considers. This paper considers one of Craig's novels; Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song. Craig's explanation of this book in terms of depopulation and the destruction of the Kincardine peasantry from outside is seen to be inadequate. Sunset Song is about the crumbling of a peasant mode of production through the working out of internal contradictions within that mode of production. As an introduction to this discussion of Sunset Song Craig's dismissal of the utility of Thomas Hardy's work for the analysis of rural class relations is argued to be distinctly premature.     

Islam,the Mappilas and peasant revolt in Malabar

Stephen Frederic Dale, Islamic Society on the South Asian Frontier: The Mappilas of Malabar, 1498–1922, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980, pp. 290, £17.50.

The Mappila outbreaks of the nineteenth century, culminating in the rebellion of 1921, have usually been seen as fundamentally either economic or religious phenomena, and have been treated in isolation from rural protest and revolt elsewhere in India. It is argued here that the outbreaks can best be understood in a specifically peasant context and constituted only one of several forms or strategies of Mappila peasant mobilization and protest: they shared, moreover, characteristics with many other peasant movements in India. In such a context religion and economics are not alternative causations, but intimately interwoven elements of peasant perceptions and self‐expression.     

Rural artisans and peasant mobilisation in the socialist international: The fasci siciliani

This article explores the conditions under which peasant cultivators and rural artisans participate in movements of social transformation, a case in point being the Fascio movement of Sicily in the late nineteenth century. It analyses the reasons why artisans could play a critical role in politicising local protest and articulating it with pan‐European socialist movements, by describing their relations to other classes in a differentiated peasant community.     

Passive revolution meets peasant revolution: Indian nationalism and the Telangana revolt

An explanation of how the struggles by villagers in the region of Telangana in the 1940s evolved into the largest rural armed conflict in twentieth‐century India, requires an understanding not just of property relations in the region (the focus of most previous studies of the revolt), but also of the nationalist movement there, and the political conjuncture at the time of Indian independence. As much a nationalist mobilization as a revolt over land and grain, the Telangana struggle attained its success because the enemy was a decrepit sultanate ‐ the princely state of Hyderabad attempting to remain outside an independent India — against whom followers of both the CPI and the Indian National Congress fought.     

Marriage and the crisis of peasant society in Gujarat,India

ABSTRACT

This contribution takes marriage as the example of a crisis of production and reproduction in rural India. Through the juxtaposition of ethnography separated by six decades, we detail a shift away from land and agriculture as the primary markers of status among the Patidars of central Gujarat, western India, in favour of a hierarchical understanding of international migration. The paper discusses the disconnect between a cultural revolution in favour of migration, and the failure of many to live up to their own cultural standards. More broadly, we reflect on the forces that simultaneously strengthen and dissolve caste inequality in the context of India's uneven growth.     

Capitalist development,peasant differentiation and the state: Survey findings from West Bengal

The analysis which follows examines the structure of investment and production taking place in West Bengal, the reference point being the debate between Marxism and populism about peasant differentiation. The process of socio‐economic differentiation has not stopped, but in methodological terms farm size alone fails to register its extent. The main claim advanced by populism — Chayanov's argument concerning demographic differentiation, that rising consumer/worker ratios are accompanied by higher family labour input — was found to be inapplicable. Of particular interest is the role during the last quarter century of the Left Front government in the process of agrarian transformation, and the extent to which its pro‐poor policy interventions have stabilized smallholding peasant production. Among the effects of state intervention in the agrarian sector have been declines in (a) the number of holdings above ten acres (b) in the extent of sharecropping contracts, and (c) in the incidence of absolute landlessness. Although producers under 2.5 acres have been the main beneficiaries of institutional credit provision by the state, distress sales (in the form of marketed surplus) by poorer farmers are still evident.     

A political ecology of socio-economic differentiation: debt,inputs and liberalization reforms in southwestern Burkina Faso

This paper builds on work from the agrarian change and political ecology literatures to analyze the process of agrarian change among smallholder cotton farmers in southwestern Burkina Faso. Specifically, we use a rural survey of 72 heads of household in three villages to examine whether and how (1) access to agricultural inputs, (2) debt and (3) liberalization reforms combine to produce rural socio-economic differentiation based on wealth. We find that wealthier farmers use more mineral fertilizer and manure inputs than their poorer counterparts. Wealthier farmers are also better able to remain debt-free as cotton prices drop and input prices rise. Moreover, they are able to take advantage of the neo-liberal restructuring of cotton cooperatives to change polices on debt repayment and input provisioning to their favor. This growing divide has large implications for rural food security, particularly as land becomes scarcer, fallows disappear and the need to intensify production grows. This research addresses two gaps in the agrarian change literature in relating how liberalization reforms and biophysical elements drive rural socio-economic differentiation. This work also shows that merging the concerns of political ecology with the agrarian change literature allows for a deeper examination of rural socio-economic differentiation.     

Peasant insurrection in China reconsidered: A preliminary examination of the Jun Mountain peasant rising,Nantong county, 1863

Focusing on a concrete historical example ‐ the Jun Mountain Peasant Rising, a small‐scale, mid‐nineteenth century insurgency in the Yangzi delta region ‐ this article re‐evaluates standard interpretations of peasant action and resistance in China. Although obscure and abortive, the Jun Mountain rising illuminates the developing role and interpenetration of ‘outsider’ communities, sectarian ideology/organisation, class formation, and long‐term trends in peasant culture in the emergence of an insurgent politics which at once built upon and transcended local ties. Preliminary examination of these politics thus contributes to current debate about the nature of Chinese peasant rebellions.     

Ned Cobb's children: A new look at white supremacy in the rural southern US

Many scholars regard segregation in the US South as part of urbanization and modernization. Yet few have examined race relations in the countryside. The Rural Face of White Supremacy shows that absolute separation based on race proved poorly adapted to rural life. Inspired by the sociological studies of the rural South done in the 1930s and the 1940s, this book uses oral history to show that interracial social life in mid-twentieth century rural Georgia was ‘marked by intimacy as well as white supremacy.’ Race relations reflected the paternalism and dependence of an agrarian labour system that reduced black workers to the status of a peasantry.     

Daniel Offer,M.D.: A Narrative of the Life of an Empiricist

Journal of Youth and Adolescence -