Hostname: page-component-6766d58669-rxg44 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-17T23:26:24.440Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Global Enclosure and the Remaking of Peasantries, 1870–1950

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2024

Eric Vanhaute  and
Claudia Bernardi Open the ORCID record for Claudia Bernardi [Opens in a new window]
Eric Vanhaute*
Affiliation:
History Department, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
Claudia Bernardi
Affiliation:
Political Science Department, University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy
*
Corresponding author: Eric Vanhaute; Email: eric.vanhaute@ugent.be
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Peasant transformation has often been framed in dichotomous, linear, and predominantly a-historical models. This article adopts a dynamic perspective and shows how the developments that have often been regarded as constituent to the long-term process of the decline of agriculture and peasant worlds were in fact part of the spread of more diversified labour and income strategies of the peasantries. In the movement towards a worldwide enclosure of the rural worlds after 1870, a global peasantry emerged through a wide range of regional trajectories and narratives. By the first half of the twentieth century, peasant households all over the world had become heavily involved in the capitalist market economy. In this article, we argue that the (re)creation of peasantries as a social group is part of a diverse complex of reciprocal exchanges, regional and extra-regional market transactions, actions of public forces, and social conflict. Also we stress that social class formation should be understood in its specific world-historical co-ordinates using a particular set of transhistorical concepts like (re)peasantization, peasant frontiers, and peasant regimes.

Information

Type
Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 67 , Special Issue 4: Global Social History: Class and Social Transformation in World History , September 2024 , pp. 785 - 802
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

1 Maier, Charles S., Once within borders: territories of power, wealth, and belonging since 1500 (Cambridge, MA, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bernstein, Henri, Class dynamics of agrarian change (Halifax and Winnipeg, 2010), p. 43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 McMichael, Philip, ‘Peasant prospects in the neoliberal age’, New Political Economy, 11 (2006), pp. 407–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Araghi, Farshad, ‘The great global enclosure of our times: peasants and the agrarian question at the end of the twentieth century’, in Magdoff, Fred, Foster, John Bellamy, and Buttel, Frederick H., eds., Hungry for profit: the agribusiness threat to farmers, food and the environment (New York, NY, 1999), pp. 145–60Google Scholar; Wallerstein, Immanuel, Historical capitalism with capitalist civilization (London and New York, NY, 1995), pp. 13–43Google Scholar.

3 Wolf, Eric, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1966)Google Scholar; Vanhaute, Eric, Peasants in world history (London and New York, NY, 2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vanhaute, Eric, ‘Peasants, peasantries and (de)peasantization in the capitalist world-system’, in Babones, Salvatore J. and Chase-Dunn, Christopher, eds., Routledge handbook of world-systems analysis (London and New York, NY, 2012), pp. 313–21Google Scholar.

4 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), State of food and agriculture 2015; www.fao.org/publications/sofa/2015/en; FAO, Towards stronger family farms, 2014; www.fao.org/3/a-i4171e.pdf; Sarah K. Lowder, Marco V. Sánchez, and Raffaele Bertini, Farms, family farms, farmland distribution and farm labour: what do we know today? (Rome, 2019).

5 Vincent Ricciardi et al., ‘Higher yields and more biodiversity on smaller farms’, Nature Sustainability, 4 (2021); Paul Hebinck, ‘De-/re-agrarianisation: global perspectives’, Journal of Rural Studies, 61 (2018), pp. 227–35.

6 Vanhaute, Peasants in world history; Paul Brassley and Richard Soffe, Agriculture: a very short introduction (Oxford, 2016); Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart, A history of world agriculture: from the Neolithic Age to the current crisis (London and Sterling, VA, 2006).

7 Vanhaute, Eric, ‘Agriculture’, in Hofmeester, Karen and Van der Linden, Marcel, eds., Handbook: global history of work (Berlin, 2017), pp. 217–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Van der Linden, Marcel, Workers of the world: essays toward a global labour history (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2008), pp. 291–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Van der Linden, Workers of the world, pp. 33–5.

9 Vanhaute, ‘Agriculture’; Hebinck, ‘De-/re-agrarianisation: global perspectives’; Deborah Fahy Bryceson, Cristobal Kay, and Jos Mooij, eds., Disappearing peasantries? Rural labour in Africa, Asia and Latin America (London, 2000).

10 Ellis, Frank, ‘Agrarian change and rising vulnerability in rural Sub-Saharan Africa’, New Political Economy, 11 (2006), pp. 387–97, at p. 393CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Van der Ploeg, Jan Douwe, ‘From de-to repeasantization: the modernization of agriculture revisited’, Journal of Rural Studies, 61 (2018), pp. 236–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bryceson, Deborah Fahy, African rural labour, income diversification and livelihood approaches: a long-term development perspective (Leiden, 1999), p. 175Google Scholar.

11 Vanhaute, Peasants in world history, pp. 6–8.

12 Jason W. Moore, ‘Cheap food and bad money: food, frontiers, and financialization in the rise and demise of neoliberalism’, Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 33 (2010), pp. 225–61, at p. 245; Edward B. Barbier, Scarcity and frontiers: how economies have developed through natural resource exploitation (Cambridge, 2011); Hanne Cottyn, ‘A world-systems frontier perspective to land: exploring the uneven trajectory of land rights standardization in the Andes’, Journal of World-Systems Research, 23 (2017), pp. 515–39; John F. Richards, The unending frontier: an environmental history of the early modern world (Berkeley, CA, 2003).

13 Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the web of life: ecology and the accumulation of capital (London, 2015), pp. 144–58; Sven Beckert et al., ‘Commodity frontiers and the transformation of the global countryside: a research agenda’, Journal of Global History, 26 (2021), pp. 435–50.

14 Philip McMichael, Food regimes and agrarian questions (Halifax and Winnipeg, 2013), pp. 1–12; Guy Robinson, Geographies of agriculture: globalisation, restructuring and sustainability (Harlow, 2004); Moore, Capitalism in the web of life, pp. 158–65.

15 Mats Widgren, ‘Four myths in global agrarian history’, in M. Bondesson, A. Jarrick, and J. Myrdal, eds., Methods in world history: a critical approach (Lund, 2016), pp. 85–106.

16 Vanhaute, Peasants in world history, pp. 87–112.

17 Bas van Bavel and Richard Hoyle, eds., Social relations: property and power (Turnhout, 2010).

18 John C. Weaver, The great land rush and the making of the modern world, 1650–1900 (Montreal and Kingston, 2003); Andro Linklater, Owning the earth: the transforming history of land ownership (New York, NY, 2013).

19 Sven Beckert, Empire of cotton: a global history (New York, NY, 2014), pp. 184, 297.

20 The next paragraphs are inspired by, amongst others, Barbier, Scarcity and frontiers; Beckert, Empire of cotton; Bernstein, Class dynamics of agrarian change; Christopher Isett and Stephen Miller, The social history of agriculture: from the origins to the current crisis (Lanham, MD, 2017); Robert B. Marks, The origins of the modern world: a global and ecological narrative from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century (Lanham, MD, 2007); Mazoyer and Roudart, A history of world agriculture; Richards, The unending frontier; Mark B. Tauger, Agriculture in world history (London and New York, NY, 2011). Regional studies include Jan Breman, Of peasants, migrants and workers: rural labour circulation and capitalist production in West India (Oxford, 1985); Jan Breman, Labour migration and rural transformation in colonial India (Amsterdam, 1990); Fred Cooper et al., Confronting historical paradigms: peasants, labour, and the capitalist world system in Africa and Latin America (Madison, WI, 1993); Gareth Austin, Labour, land and capital in Ghana: from slavery to free labour in Asante, 1807–1956 (Woodbridge, 2005).

21 This section is based on Vanhaute, Peasants in world history, pp. 87–103. Supporting literature includes: Ulbe Bosma, The making of a periphery: how Island Southeast Asia became a mass exporter of labour (New York, NY, 2019); Francesca Bray, The rice economies: technology and development in Asian societies (Oxford, 1986); Breman, Labour, migration and rural transformation in colonial India; Leslie Dossey, Peasant and empire in Christian North Africa (Berkeley, CA, 2010); Penelope Francks, Rural economic development in Japan: from the nineteenth century to the Pacific War (Abingdon, 2006); David Ludden, India and South Asia: a short history (Oxford, 2002); David Ludden, Early capitalism and local history in South India (Oxford, 2005); B. B. Mohanty, Agrarian transformation in Western India: economic gains and social costs (London and New York, NY, 2019); James C. McCann, Green land, brown land, black land: an environmental history of Africa, 1800–1990 (Portsmouth, NH, 1999); Alessandro Stanziani, Bondage: labour and rights in Eurasia from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries (New York, NY, and London, 2014); Peer Vries, Averting a Great Divergence: state and economy in Japan, 1868–1937 (London, 2019); Mats Widgren and John E. G. Sutton, Islands of intensive agriculture in Eastern Africa: past and present (London and Stockholm, 2004).

22 Bosma, The making of a periphery, p. 142; Maria Mies, Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale: women in the international division of labour (London, 1986).

23 Sven Van Melkebeke, ‘Divergence in rural development: the curious case of coffee production in the Lake Kivu region (first half twentieth century)’, African Economic History, 46 (2018), pp. 117–46, at p. 134; Patrick Mbataru, ‘Women in the coffee society: the case of Nyeri, Kenya’, Études Rurales, 180 (2007), pp. 101–16.

24 Rachel Kurian, ‘Labour, race, and gender on the coffee plantations in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), 1834–1880’, in William Gervase, Clarence-Smith, and Steven Topik, eds., The global coffee economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1500–1989 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 181–2.

25 Ibid., p. 185.

26 Verena Stolcke, ‘Coffee planters, workers and wives: class conflict and gender relations on São Paulo plantations, 1850–1980’ (New York, NY, 1988), pp. 231, 239.

27 William Roseberry, ‘Beyond the agrarian question in Latin America’, in Cooper et al., eds., Confronting historical paradigms, pp. 321–3.

28 Eduardo Devés-Valdés, ‘The world from Latin America and the peripheries’, in D. Northrop, ed., A companion to world history (Chichester, 2012), pp. 466–74; James V. Fenelon and Thomas D. Hall, Indigenous peoples and globalization (Boulder, CO, 2009); Walter D. Mignolo, The darker side of Western modernity: global futures, decolonial options (Durham, NC, 2011); María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Indian given: racial geographies across Mexico and the United States (Durham, NC, 2016).