Peasantry refers to peoples and communities who are peasants. The modern English term peasant comes from French and Latin terms referring to residents of an administrative district. In modern times the term has come to refer primarily to small-scale agriculturalists who live in villages and small towns in rural areas. Peasant communities are typically based economically on the cultivation of grains and other high yielding plant foods. Wheat, barley, and oats were first domesticated in the area where Syria, Palestine, and adjacent areas of Northern Iraq are now located and the first peasants appeared in Ancient Mesopotamia (present day Iraq).
The basis of peasant agriculture began with varieties of rice and wheat in Asia, corn and beans in what is now Southern Mexico, and potatoes in the Central Andes (Peru). The grains of Mesopotamia spread into Europe; rice spread into other areas of Asia; the cultivation of corn and beans spread north and south from their centers of origin; and potatoes and some grains domesticated in the Central Andes spread throughout the Andean region. These areas became the bases for the growth of peasantries. Peasants typically produce their crops with simple technology in which the work is done by human labor and the use of farm animals. Unlike farmers who usually employ some hired labor to cultivate large crops primarily for sale in markets, peasants are typically small-scale producers who consume much of each crop that they produce.
The rise of the first civilizations and the economies of most urban areas throughout history were primarily dependent in three ways on rural peasantries. The first way was for food. Due mainly to market systems and taxation, surplus peasant production was typically transferred from rural production areas to towns and cities where food was consumed by non-peasants. The second way in which urban areas were dependent on peasants was demographic. Prior to the development of modern public health practices in the nineteenth century, more people tended to die in cities than were born in them. Throughout history peasants have tended to have relatively high death rates, but have offset their death rate by an even higher birth rate. But due mainly to the inability of peasant communities to economically support growing populations, some percentage of every generation typically migrated to cities and maintained urban populations or caused them to grow. The third form of urban dependency on peasants was for labor. When peasants migrated into cities, they usually occupied the lowest rungs of the social order and provided much of the cities’ manual labor and menial services.
CLASS AND CLASS RELATIONS
An essential component in the sociology, economics, and politics of peasants is the way in which they are positioned in relation to non-peasants. In terms of social class relations, peasants tend to be at or near the lower end of socioeconomic hierarchies and related to non-peasants by forms of uneven exchange whereby they render up more economic value to non-peasants than they receive in exchange. One of the basic features that make possible such uneven exchange between peasants and non-peasants is land tenure. The political importance of land tenure to peasants is expressed in the slogan of the Mexican Revolution, "Tierra y Libertad," which signals that access to land (tierra) takes precedence over liberty (libertad).
Because they make their living as small-scale cultivators, peasants must have access to land on which to grow crops and raise animals. There is wide variation in the legal, political, and economic aspects of land tenure. The concept of private property, in which land can be bought and sold in a real estate market, is a modern concept. Throughout history it has been common for peasants to live on and work land that is controlled by non-peasants and to whom the peasants are politically subordinate. In non-capitalist state societies the land is typically controlled by a central government that levies taxes on its rural communities. In many other societies, peasant lands are controlled by landlords who charge rent.
State governments also extract surplus from peasants in a number of ways. One of the most common ways is taxation on the crops that the peasants produce or on the land that they use. But taxation of peasants also takes other forms. For example, the monumental architecture of ancient societies, such as the great pyramids of Egypt and Mexico, were built mainly by peasants who had to work on them, typically without pay or other compensation. In feudal societies, peasants may have labor obligations to their lords, whereby they are required to work so many days each year on their farmland or render other services to their landlords. Sharecropping is another form of rent, whereby peasants are given access to land controlled by a landlord, who then receives some fraction of each crop that the peasants working that land produce. In economies with well-developed markets, the peasants may sell part of their harvests to raise money to pay their rents or taxes. In some societies, peasants are required to work lands of the government and also possibly render other services. Also, until recently, peasant conscripts were required to do military service in the armies of kingdoms and states, and of feudal lords. Indeed, until modern times, most of the rank and file members of armies have been of peasant origin.
POLITICS AND THE FUTURE OF PEASANTRIES
Peasants periodically rise up against the lords and governments that impose taxes and rent and other forms of uneven economic exchange on them. However, the potential for peasant rebellions and political organizing in general is often weakened by internal competition and distrust, which is a result of struggle for scarce resources within peasant communities. Indeed, it was these characteristics that moved German revolutionary Karl Marx (1818-1883) to refer to peasants as like "potatoes in a sack" ([1852] 1972) implying that they were too individualistically oriented to organize as revolutionaries.
But peasantries have on a number of occasions been involved in large-scale regional and national rebellions and revolutions. For example, from 1524 to 1526 German peasants in Franconia, Swabia, and Thuringia joined with impoverished town dwellers (many of whom were no doubt of peasant origin) to mount the "Peasant War," to redress exploitive relations with non-peasants. This movement was largely unsuccessful, but peasants have been major actors in other major conflicts that have had varied outcomes in the twentieth century, such as the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, the formation of contemporary China, and the Vietnam War of independence against France and the United States.
Until the mid-twentieth century, most of the world’s population could be characterized as peasant, but since that time peasant communities have tended to become more complex, due largely to ever increasing rates of permanent and circular migration from agricultural communities to urban areas. It became common for many formerly-peasant households to be largely dependent on seasonal migration of some of their members who seek salaried work or self-employment. Much of this migration is across national borders, typically from areas and nations of lesser to higher levels of economic development. Such high rates of migration have increased social, economic, and cultural complexity in formerly peasant communities.
