A study of peasant land-owning and its attendant social and economic changes during the making of modern Egypt. This digital edition was derived from ACLS Humanities E-Book's (http: //www.humanitiesebook.org) online version of the same title

In the modern imagination the peasant survives as a creature of the land, suspicious of the outside world and resistant to change, either the repository of pristine innocence and virtue or the manifestation of everything nasty, brutish, and at best dull. The Land and the Loom replaces this picture with a richly textured, deeply researched portrait of the peasant's life and world in northern France in the early modern period. Supported by evidence culled from parish registers, notarial records, and judicial archives, this masterful depiction of village life, detailing the development of the linen weaving trade in Montigny, revises accepted notions of the peasant's place in rural industry. The peasants emerging from Liana Vardi's study are not the figures of tradition, driven solely by symbolic attachment to the land and unreasonably devoted to village solidarities. Instead they reveal remarkable flexibility and diversity, a readiness to adapt to changing incentives. As Vardi shows, they not only improved farming methods and raised yields during the eighteenth century, but also used land to finance investments in industry and to develop local business, far-flung commercial networks, and complex credit mechanisms. Vardi reveals how the peasants' responses to market opportunities depended largely on their status, with the very poor and the well-off staying out of the linen business, while a broad middle group leaped into the trade, setting in motion a gradual shift of wealth and power within the community. As this analysis makes clear, the importance of patrimony and tradition had much more to do with economic interests and common sense than with deep-seated cultural and emotional constraints. The eighteenth-century French countryside emerges as a region of capitalist experimentation, cut short by pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary crises. Meticulously documented, broadly interpretive, and beautifully written, this fascinating book will permanently alter conventional perceptions of peasant life and rural industry and, ultimately, the way ordinary people are seen in seemingly distant times and places.

The fall of the Soviet Union was a transformative event for the national political economies of Eastern Europe, leading not only to new regimes of ownership and development but to dramatic changes in the natural world itself. This painstakingly researched volume focuses on the emblematic case of postsocialist Romania, in which the transition from collectivization to privatization profoundly reshaped the nation’s forests, farmlands, and rivers. From bureaucrats abetting illegal deforestation to peasants opposing government agricultural policies, it reveals the social and political mechanisms by which neoliberalism was introduced into the Romanian landscape.

Field study of the impact of land reform on living conditions of peasant farmers and rural communitys in Ethiopia - comments on the 1975 legislation; gives a historical account of the evolution of social structures, agrarian structures, commerce and customary law towards a capitalist rural economy; analyses the role of social movements and starvation in the revolutionary process, land allotment, creation of farmers associations and womens organizations, etc.; includes three case studies of land reform patterns. Bibliography, statistical tables.

Scholars who study peasant society now realize that peasants are not passive, but quite capable of acting in their own interests. But, do coherent political ideas emerge within peasant society or do peasants act in a world where elites define political issues? Peasant Intellectuals is based on ethnographic research begun in 1966 and includes interviews with hundreds of people from all levels of Tanzanian society. Steven Feierman provides the history of the struggles to define the most basic issues of public political discourse in the Shambaa-speaking region of Tanzania. Feierman also shows that peasant society contains a rich body of alternative sources of political language from which future debates will be shaped.

3 Framework for research