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.

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.

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.

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.

China's agriculture and rural society has undergone rapid changes in recent years. Many poorer farmers and younger people have moved to cities, and yet China has an immense challenge to feed a growing and more affluent population. This book provides a ‘bottom-up view’ of China’s agriculture, showing how the many millions of Chinese peasants make a living. It presents a vivid description of the mechanisms used by rural households to defend and sustain their livelihoods, increase their agricultural production and improve the quality of their lives. The authors examine the newly emerging trajectories of entrepreneurial and capitalist farming and assess whether such alternatives will be able to meet the enormous social, economic and environmental challenges that China faces. The book also explores the paradigm that has underpinned the organisation and development of China’s agriculture from ancient times to the present day. This shows the importance of balancing in the Chinese model as compared to the one-sided imposition of continual modernization in the western model. It is argued that such balancing is at the core of the current Sannong policy, referring to the three ruralities of food sovereignty, wellbeing for peasant households and an attractive countryside.

Socialism and capitalism in the Chinese countryside -- Chinese agrarian change in world-historical context -- Agricultural productivity and decollectivization -- The political economy of decollectivization -- The achievement, contradictions, and demise of rural collectives