France achieved national unity much later than is commonly supposed. For a hundred years and more after the Revolution, millions of peasants lived on as if in a timeless world, their existence little different from that of the generations before them. The author of this lively, often witty, and always provocative work traces how France underwent a veritable crisis of civilization in the early years of the French Republic as traditional attitudes and practices crumbled under the forces of modernization. Local roads and railways were the decisive factors, bringing hitherto remote and inaccessible regions into easy contact with markets and major centers of the modern world. The products of industry rendered many peasant skills useless, and the expanding school system taught not only the language of the dominant culture but its values as well, among them patriotism. By 1914, France had finally become La Patrie in fact as it had so long been in name.

This is an ethnographic analysis of how the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was deployed by policy makers and elites in the first year after EU membership, and how it shaped peasant livelihoods. Given the polarised nature of Romania's postsocialist agrarian structure, the CAP excluded peasants from its policies, and demanded they change their subsistence farms into commercial farms. Arguing from the premise that subsistence farms are actually peasant households working on different principles from farms altogether, it was possible to inquire into the resourceful strategies people deployed in their everyday lives.

Since his first article in 1976 the American historian Robert P. Brenner has tried to come to terms with an issue first raised two centuries ago: how can we explain the differences in growth-patterns of North Western European countries in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In a frontal attack on both the '(homeostatic) demographic' and 'commercialisation' models, Brenner traced the roots of the divergent evolutions back to rural and feudal 'social-property relations'. In the debate that immediately followed Brenner's first article, and in subsequent exchanges, the Low Countries were significantly neglected, although areas such as Flanders and Holland played a decisive role in the economic development of Europe. This was partly because of too few publications in international languages on the relevant Dutch rural history. This important book, edited by two of the most respected Dutch rural historians, and with contributions by several distinguished historians, seeks to fill this lacuna. It draws upon substantial research, and confronts the Brenner thesis with new results and hypotheses; and it contains a powerful and detailed response by Brenner himself.

Peasants and the Art of Farming: A Chayanovian Manifesto focuses on the structure and dynamics of peasant farms and the historically highly variable relations that govern the processes of labour and production within peasant farms. Jan Douwe van der Ploeg argues that peasant agriculture can play an important, if not central, role in augmenting food production and creating sustainability. However, peasants today, as in the past, are materially neglected. By building on the pioneering work of Chayanov, this book seeks to address this neglect and to show how important peasants are in the ongoing struggles for food, food sustainability and food sovereignty. Full Text - Short description/annotation (Text)

With this book, Allan Kulikoff offers a sweeping new interpretation of the origins and development of the small farm economy in Britain's mainland American colonies. Examining the lives of farmers and their families, he tells the story of immigration to the colonies, traces patterns of settlement, analyzes the growth of markets, and assesses the impact of the Revolution on small farm society. Beginning with the dispossession of the peasantry in early modern England, Kulikoff follows the immigrants across the Atlantic to explore how they reacted to a hostile new environment and its Indian inhabitants. He discusses how colonists secured land, built farms, and bequeathed those farms to their children. Emphasizing commodity markets in early America, Kulikoff shows that without British demand for the colonists' crops, settlement could not have begun at all. Most important, he explores the destruction caused during the American Revolution, showing how the war thrust farmers into subsistence production and how they only gradually regained their prewar prosperity.

This book examines a trans-Atlantic chain migration from a Norwegian fjord district to settlements in the nineteenth-century rural Upper Middle West and considers the social and economic conditions experienced in Europe as well as the immigrants' cultural adaptations to America.

ÿThis book explores the interrelated campaigns of agricultural collectivization in the USSR and in the communist dictatorships established in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. Despite the profound, long-term societal impact of collectivization, the subject has remained relatively underresearched. The volume combines detailed studies of collectivization in individual Eastern European states with issueoriented comparative perspectives at regional level. Based on novel primary sources, it proposes a reappraisal of the theoretical underpinnings and research agenda of studies on collectivization in Eastern Europe.The contributions provide up-to-date overviews of recent research in the field and promote new approaches to the topic, combining historical comparisons with studies of transnational transfers and entanglements.