This book discusses the historical transformation of the destiny of Chinese peasants under the contemporary political economic conditions, and tries to explore the institutional mechanism behind the formation and maintenance of these conditions. The analysis focuses on the consequences of the great social mobilization brought about by the reform. The phenomenon of migrant workers is the most significant consequence of the change of Chinese peasants’ life courses. The destiny of migrant workers will be the destiny of Chinese peasants. The introduction chapter of this book discusses the historical context and peasants’ fates, their political participation, and citizenship of peasants after they become urban dwellers. Chapter one discusses the social implication and economic consequences of the urbanization of rural population. Chapter two discusses the living conditions for peasants that moved to work in cities, including working environments, living environments, education of their children, and their social networking. Chapter three discusses the challenges that the mobilization of peasants has posed on government policy making and urban managements. Chapter four discusses the latest development in the social mobilization of Chinese peasants.

The ever maturing art and ever more ambitious imaginative reach of Anton Chekhov, one of the world's greatest masters of the short story, led him in his last years to an increasingly profound exploration of the troubled depths of Russian society and life. This powerful and revealing selection from Chekhov's final works, made by the legendary American critic Edmund Wilson, offers stories of novelistic richness and complexity, published in the only formatp edition to present them in chronological order. Table of Contents A Woman's Kingdom Three Years The Murder My Life Peasants The New Villa In the Ravine The Bishop Betrothed

The essays in this collection examine agrarian transformation in Latin America and the role in this of peasants, with particular reference to Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Brazil and Central America. Among the issues covered are the impact of globalization and neo-liberal economic policies.

This book presents the results of the first systematic archaeological study of Roman peasants. It examines the spaces, architecture, diet, agriculture, market interactions, and movement habitus of non-elite rural dwellers in a region of southern Tuscany, Italy, during the Roman period. Volume 1 presents the excavation data from eight non-elite rural sites including a farm, a peasant house, animal stall/work huts, a ceramics factory, field drains, and a site of uncertain function, here framed as individual chapters complete with finds analysis. Volume 2 examines this data synthetically in thematic chapters addressing land use, agriculture, diet, markets, and movement. The results suggest a different, more sophisticated Roman peasant than heretofore assumed. The data suggests that Roman peasants particularly in the first century BC/AD built specialized sites distributed throughout the landscape to maximize use of diverse land parcels. This has important implications for the interpretation of field survey data, the estimate of rural demographics from that survey, and assumptions about the long-term changes to human settlement. It also points to an important moment of agricultural intensification in this period, a contention beginning to be supported by other studies. The project also identified sophisticated systems of land use, including crop rotation and an important investment in animal agriculture. This work presents the first systematic data from Roman Italy for rural consumption, tracking the fine wares made at a production site to local sites nearby. This supports the largely theoretical problematizing of the so-called consumer city model and suggests the potential importance of rural aggregate demand. Movement studies, based on finds from the sites themselves, describe a more mobile population than anticipated, engaged in quotidian and long-distance movement patterns, supported by the small but steady stream of imports and exports into and out of this seemingly liminal region. The book concludes by addressing the implications of this new data for major questions in Roman social and economic history.

First published in 2006. This classic work examines the modern history of Europe from an unusual perspective. European history has usually focussed on the urban life elite and the middle classes, but before World War II more than half of the entire population of the continent was composed of rural peasants occupying a territory stretching from the Black Seas to the Baltic forming a natural barrier between East and West. These people- Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Southern Slavs and others- are the focus of this book. First published in the 1930s, Tiltman's Peasant Europe strays from the normal look at Europe during this time period. While much of the continent is concerned with problems of international relations, industry and the future of armaments, Tiltman goes a step further than most writers and speaks with the common peasant to uncover their day-to-day concerns. He finds that most simply want consideration and a reasonable standard of living for themselves and their children. Accompanying the text are full page photographs, most of which are taken by the author himself, which offer a candid look at peasant life.

Tracing the way in which the agrarian myth has emerged and re-emerged over the past century in ideology shared by populism, postmodernism and the political right, the argument in this book is that at the centre of this discourse about the cultural identity of 'otherness'/ 'difference' lies the concept of and innate 'peasant-ness'. In a variety of contextually-specific discursive forms, the 'old' populism of the 1890s and the nationalism and fascism in Europe, America and Asia during the 1920s and 1930s were all informed by the agrarian myth. The postmodern 'new' populism and the 'new' right, both of which emerged after the 1960s and consolidated during the 1990s, are also structured discursively by the agrarian myth, and with it the ideological reaffirmation of peasant essentialism.

Jan Grevstad's second collection of nine short stories has, above all, the ambition to amuse its reader. Amid a dash of satire, his stories reflect British type of humour at its best. Mostly stories of fiction, they have strong roots in real life with compassion for the human condition and human fate. The "Edelweiss Saga" is based on an old tale and has an ecological touch, while "The New Shooting Range" is a fantasy developed from a real experience of cultural clashes in the Alps. "Don't Queue" is based on the true story of a Royal Norwegian visit to Geneva, and "A Peasant in Paris" is entirely autobiographical.