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.

Distraught over her father's death, Zan wanders into the forest and into a fantasy world where she becomes involved in the Orathi's fight to save their homeland from invaders.

The idea for this volume arose out of a need for a treatment of the interplay between language and ethnonationalism within both formal and nonformal educational settings. In no way intended to be exhaustive in scope, the contents give the reader a critical overview of issues related to language, cultural identity formation, and ethnonationalism. The chapters within this work deal with the effects of different language groups with differing amounts of power within society coming into contact with one another, and provide insight into how language is both utilized by and affected by processes such as colonialism, post-colonialism, acculturation, and ethnonationalism. Language is central to culture—indeed houses cultural understandings and allows generational transfer of key aspects of a group’s heritage.

​This volume decentres the view of urbanisation in India from large agglomerations towards smaller urban settlements. It presents the outcomes of original research conducted over three years on subaltern processes of urbanization. The volume is organised in four sections. A first one deals with urbanisation dynamics and systems of cities with chapters on the new census towns, demographic and economic trajectories of cities and employment transformation. The interrelations of land transformation, social and cultural changes form the topic of the “land, society, belonging” section based on ethnographic work in various parts of India (Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu). A third section focuses on public policies, governance and urban services with a set of macro-analysis based papers and specific case studies. Understanding the nature of production and innovation in non-metropolitan contexts closes this volume. Finally, though focused on India, this research raises larger questions with regard to the study of urbanisation and development worldwide.