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Almost idiotic wretchedness: a long

history of blaming peasantsJim Handy

a

aUniversity of Saskatchewan , Canada

Published online: 22 Jul 2009.

To cite this article:Jim Handy (2009) Almost idiotic wretchedness: a long history of blamingpeasants , The Journal of Peasant Studies, 36:2, 325-344, DOI: 10.1080/03066150902928306

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Almost idiotic wretchedness: a long history of blaming peasants1

Jim Handy

From the late eighteenth century in Britain to the late twentieth century inpredominantly rural societies in the global south, most descriptions of peasantsprovided by government planners or economists have been remarkably similar.These descriptions focus on five alleged elements of peasant life: (1) peasants arebackward and uncivilised one aspect of that backwardness is their inability tocontrol their sexual urges and thus their tendency to have too many children, (2)

peasants are not sufficiently enamoured with consumption and their too easilymet needs stifle economic development this is often considered to be a functionof laziness and thus peasants need to be compelled to labour harder, (3) peasantsare inefficient and do not use land effectively and thus need to be compelled tolabour more efficiently, (4) peasants get in the way of the necessary process ofallowing capital to be applied to the land and thus need to be swept from the land,(5) peasants are dangerous and difficult to incorporate into states as responsiblecitizens. This paper provides examples of the rhetoric used to describe peasants infour different periods and places: during the enclosures and the consolidation ofcapitalism in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Irish potatofamine in the middle of the nineteenth century, the spread of colonialism and atype of modernity in other than European locales in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, and the rise of development practice and nationalconsolidation in what was then called the third world after the second worldwar. The paper argues that these descriptions were both the result of faultyimaginings of peasants and deemed necessary as a way to sell economic and socialpolicies that worked to expel peasants from the land and turn them into wagelabourers.

Keywords:peasants; commons; enclosures; capital; development; Malthus; potatofamine

The most immediate food crisis has produced not very surprising responses: the

revival of fears about over population and a call for increased intensity in the efforts

to industrialise agricultural production around the world (Trewavas 2008, Zoellick

2008). These arguments fit the predominant approach to agricultural policy around

the world for much of the last three centuries: an assertion that industrial or scientific

agriculture carries with it dramatic efficiencies in production and that such

1In this article, I use peasant to mean a rural cultivator who produces both for subsistence andthe market, employing primarily family labour, very limited capital, and for whom significantnon-market considerations are in place concerning production decisions, returns to labour,and access to and disposal of land.

The author wishes to thank the organisers of the Food Sovereignty: Theory, Praxis andPower conference held at St. Andrews College, University of Saskatchewan, 1718 February,2009 and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council for its support of thatconference.

The Journal of Peasant Studies

Vol. 36, No. 2, April 2009, 325344

ISSN 0306-6150 print/ISSN 1743-9361 online

2009 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/03066150902928306

http://www.informaworld.com


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efficiencies may be our only hope to outrun population increases. It seems

appropriate therefore at this time to pause to examine the history of those ideas,

to try to understand the roots of the preference for scientific agriculture and to

determine if understanding that history helps us explain why these arguments are so

prevalent.

This paper argues that the roots for this argument can be found in a long history

of blaming peasants for economic backwardness and social underdevelopment. They

stretch back to the propaganda surrounding land enclosures in England in the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A parade of English writers sought to justify

the effects of the accumulation of private property and increased inequality by

espousing the economic and productive efficiencies of scientific agriculture on

relatively large, capital intensive estates. They also painted their opposite peasants

and commoners as backward, ignorant, rude, and lawless, a threat to the economy,

society and stability of the nation. Following the Reverend Thomas Malthus, they

crafted a confused but nonetheless powerful and enduring argument that peasants

constituted the major threat to the worlds food supplies by being the mostimmediate cause of population increase. While these works represent only one

stream of commentary on peasants between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries

in Britain, partly because they benefited powerful sectors of society and partly

because they reinforced existing cultural stereotypes, these views have proven to

be tremendously enduring, helping to determine agricultural and economic

development policy around the world.

In colonial regimes, peasants were even more thoroughly vilified. Here not only

were peasants backward, threats to economic progress, modernity, and political

authority, but they often were perceived to have the deepest attachments to the most

dangerous elements of pre-colonial society: attachments to place, community,ethnicity, and tribe. These fears were perhaps most clearly expressed about cottiersin

Englands first overseas colony, Ireland, but followed English and other European

colonizers around the world.

Elites in the former colonies, as they sought to carve modern nations and modern

economies out of the debris of empires, expressed similar sentiments. After World

War II, they were supported in these arguments by development experts. In

mainstream economic development thinking two parallel streams worked against

peasants: on the one hand, development economic theory argued that economic

growth required shifting unproductive labour from the countryside to the city, from

agriculture to industry; on the other, modernisation theory explicitly argued for the

elimination of the stultifying effects of tradition, the most obvious expression of

which was the peasantry. Both of these arguments relied on a misreading of English

economic history and a process of imagining peasants as the antithesis to modernity

and a major threat to food security.

The Goths and Vandals of the commons

Beginning in the sixteenth century, agricultural land in England began to be

enclosed into private property. Much of this land had been common or waste land

that had been used by villagers for pasturage or cultivation. A significant percentage

had been village land that was allotted to individual families for cultivation but wascontrolled by the village and reallocated every year or so, or was owned by

landlords, but long tenure contracts and custom insured that tenants had relatively

326 Jim Handy


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guaranteed access to land. Most of the land enclosed in the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries was converted to sheep grazing as wool became Englands

biggest export.

It was also during this period that the most draconian laws were passed against

vagabonds and masterless men; during the reign of Henry VIII perhaps as many as

75,000 of them were whipped, mutilated or hung (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000, 17

18). Enclosure of common lands was seen as part of the process necessary to control

these dangerous poor, as James I expressed in 1610 when urging the House of

Commons to take action against cottagers in the common forests, which were

nurseries and receptacles of thieves, rogues, and beggars (Hill 1972, 51). Those

defending enclosures talked about the dual benefits that resulted: they would both

control the poor and by taking away their access to common land, induce them to

labour. As one commentator expressed it, enclosure will give the poor an interest in

toiling, whom terror never yet could enure to travail (Hill 1972, 52).

As E.P. Thompson (1963, 218) has argued, this process was a plain enough case

of class robbery. But, by the eighteenth century, enclosure was given legal statusthrough acts of parliament. These later enclosures were more often associated with

bringing land into cultivation rather than pasture. In the best cases, the propaganda

assured people (as did later commentaries and historians who seem to have believed

the propaganda) that the landlords would benefit from higher rents, the small

farmers would benefit despite higher rents because of increased productivity, and the

country would benefit by increased production of foodstuffs. In most cases, though,

commoners were thrown off the land, sometimes with a small settlement paid to

them as part of the cost of enclosing.

The vision of a generalised benefit stemming from enclosures was promoted by

most of the Enlightenment writers, who saw improvement as a particularlyimportant practical application of Enlightenment ideas. Indeed, the enclosure of

common or open field lands in private hands became synonymous with the more

general idea of improvement in eighteenth-century Britain. Those advocating

enclosure were supported by a host of reports from the field that purported to detail

objectively and scientifically the improvements wrought through enclosure. Arthur

Young was perhaps the most important such writer. He engaged in a series of tours

through areas of Britain and Ireland in the second half of the eighteenth century,

sponsored and paid for by the Board of Agriculture. He often portrayed enclosed

fields as civilization and the commons as barbarism: in one district he reported, the

Goths and Vandals of open fields threatened the civilization of the enclosures and

commented on how when talking with commoners, I seemed to have lost a century

of time. John Sinclair, the President of the Board of Agriculture, writing in 1803,

was even more explicit. After news about further British victories abroad, he

remarked, Let us not be satisfied with the liberation of Egypt, or the subjugation of

Malta, but let us subdue Finchely Common; let us conquer Hounslow Heath; let us

compel Epping Forest to submit to the yoke of improvement (Neeson 1993, 28).

But improvement depended on the eye of the beholder. Many of the reports on

enclosure were clearly predestined by self-interest or a blinkered vision to support the

process. Many of those who wrote about the benefits of enclosure like Adam Smith

had invested in the enclosures themselves. Some of those who supported enclosures were

more honest about the expected results. The Reverend John Howlett, a friend of AdamSmith and a Chief Justice, argued in 1788 that enclosures were beneficial precisely

because this would turn poor farmers into even poorer labourers and encourage

The Journal of Peasant Studies 327


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population growth. In particular, he said, enclosure would provoke a rapid and

general increase of labouring and then of indigent poor. This would lower wages,

benefit industry, and lead to an increase in population (Neeson 1993, 27).

But as enclosures continued in the eighteenth century, some of the defenders of

enclosure changed their mind. Even Arthur Young began to have doubts about the

wisdom of enclosure by the end. The Board of Agriculture, which had sponsored all of

his tours and published his reports, refused to publish his last report because of his

description of increased poverty in rural England. In his diary he recounted how he

turned his efforts to getting land for those left landless through enclosure, commenting,

I am well persuaded that this is the only possible means of saving the nation from the

ruin fast coming on by the misery of the poor . . . (Turner 1984, 23).

By the end of the eighteenth century, the enclosure of most English and Scottish

open fields was accomplished. Still, for the next half century there were regular

campaigns designed to uproot those left landless and turn them into labourers. The

most enduring of the arguments designed to support this process was provided by

the Reverend Thomas Malthus, in a short essay first published in 1798, entitled AnEssay on the Principles of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society .

His argument was deceptively simple: there was a tendency for the population to

outstrip the means of subsistence; population levels grew geometrically (2-4-8-16-32-

etc.) while food supplies only increased arithmetically (1-2-3-4-5-etc.). This human

reproductive urge would forever doom mankind to a losing struggle between

ravenous and multiplying mouths and production.

But there was nothing simple about the intent or the impact of Malthus

argument. Malthus was not, primarily, arguing about the dangers of over

population. Rather he was defending the right of private property in the face of

poverty and participating in a political debate about policies designed to reshape theBritish countryside and free the rural poor from the binds that held them to their

locality. Malthus was concerned not about a generalised population increase but

rather about the propensity of the poor to propagate, given their rights to a level of

relief in the parish through the existing poor laws. These rights were dangerous not

only because they provided a false sense of security which prompted the poor to

marry young and, lacking moral restraint, bear excessive numbers of children, but

also because they tied the poor to the parish, maintaining their connection to the

natal soil and preventing them from leaving for the city.

Malthus arguments were reprinted numerous times through the first couple of

decades of the nineteenth century, often with slight alterations to allow them to

address more fully the political question of the time. His defence of inequality earned

him a position as the first Professor of Political Economy at the East India Company

University, where he not only educated those bound for careers in the East India

Company but kept in close contact with the more than 100 members of parliament

who were servants of the company or tied to it in various ways.2

2Along with the various editions of Malthus An essay on the principles of population as itaffects the future improvement of society, with remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M.Condorcet, and other writers (London, 1798) including most especially the 2nd ed. in 1803entitled, An essay on the principles of population or, a view of its past and present effects on

human happiness, with an inquiry into our prospects respecting its future removal or mitigationof the evils which it occasions (London, 1803), see Ross (1998), Avery (1997), and Polanyi(1957).

328 Jim Handy


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By the 1840s, another influential voice was added to those who championed the

dispossession of the rural poor still clinging to land. The Economist magazine was

started in 1843 specifically to pressure for free trade in agriculture. Along the way, in

authoritative editorials that belittled those favouring more equitable agricultural

systems, it also became the most powerful voice in favour of scientific agriculture,

against any attempt to support small holder agriculture in Britain, and most

decidedly against any form of landholding that was not private property. Indeed,

the magazine argued that the accumulation of land in private property was the first

step in the progression from barbarism. Land not held in private property was

inconsistent with a civilized state. It even railed against landlords who charged

only moderate rents to tenants, labelling them remnants of feudalism (Economist

1851a).

It was most decidedly against any form of provision of land to the rural poor.

In the late 1840s, as a movement began to try to reallocate small portions of land

to the destitute rural poor in the form of garden allotments, the Economist

opposed it vigorously, denouncing the scheme as, fraught with the most seriousand frightful consequences. In language dripping with concern for the welfare

of poor labourers, the magazine argued that welfare depended precisely on their

not being tied to the land in any particular locale; that they, therefore, should

be left free to circulate to those areas most needing their services (Economist

1844a). It even argued that history showed that providing small amounts of

land to people to meet their subsistence needs first was the primary cause of

the downfall of the Roman Empire and of the French Revolution (Economist

1844b).

TheEconomistengaged in extensive discussion about the ideal size of agricultural

enterprises. In 1851, it argued that the idea that small farms, even when cultivatedwith great industry could be as productive as large capitalist estates was

a fallacious notion . . . everywhere contradicted by facts and experience. Usually

petit-farming is a miserable affair. It was prepared to admit that small capitalist

farms of 150 acres or so could be productive and significant stepping stones allowing

energetic and educated people to begin to accumulate wealth. However, these

farmers needed to have the lessons provided by neighbouring large estates constantly

at hand (Economist1851b).

In the Economists view, the necessary companion to the natural tendency for

farm size to increase was the magic of capital. The Economist assured readers that

the great secret of farming we think is this the judicious application of a sufficient

amount of capital to the soil . . . (Economist1849). This fit well with the temper of

the times; British liberals in the first half of the nineteenth century were obsessed

with the purported magic of capital and fought ardently to remove everything

they believed stood in the way of it being employed of finding its natural level as

they were fond of saying. Not everyone was so taken with its effects; a book

written by a British author in 1821 under the pseudonym of Piercy Ravenstone

argued that:

Where reason fails, where argument is insufficient, it operates like a talisman to silenceall doubts. It occupies the same place in their theories, which was held by darkness in themythology of the ancients. It is . . . the great mother of all things, it is the cause of everyevent that happens in the world. Capital, according to them, is the parent of all industry,the forerunner of all improvements. It builds our towns, it cultivates our fields, it



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restrains the vagrant waters of our rivers, it covers our barren mountains with timber,it converts our deserts into gardens, it bids fertility arise where all before was desolation.It is the deity of their idolatry which they have set up to worship in the high places of theLord; and were its powers what they imagine, it would not be unworthy of theiradoration. (cited in Pasquino 1991, 1056)

The British experience in agriculture has developed mythic qualities. Both then

and now, historical accounts of Britains prosperity have argued that a large

portion of that economic growth was the result of such agricultural improvement,

of the victory of private property over the commons, of scientific agriculture over

the backwardness of the family farm, and of the agricultural entrepreneur over

the peasant. Such works usually point to increased agricultural productivity as a

major component in Britains ability to feed itself despite an increasing percentage

of the population engaged in non-agricultural pursuits (Fagan 2000, Bernstein

2004).

These arguments conveniently ignore the fact that through much of the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, England was importing close to 30 percent ofits foodstuffs, from the Baltic countries, from Ireland, and later in the nineteenth

century, from the Americas. Moreover, it was doing so in the context of having

retooled nascent industrial production from woolen textiles to cotton imported first

from slave America and, later in the nineteenth century, from Egypt and India,

freeing up large amounts of land for agriculture. Industrial cotton cloth required, for

the first few decades, a mixture of linen to maintain the strength of the cloth, linen

from flax grown primarily in Ireland. To a very large extent, then, English food

security was created not by the efficiency of English agricultural improvement, but

through the process of exporting famine (Ross 1998, 41, Pomeranz 2000, 227, Davis

2001).

Martyrs to the cause of human improvement: the Economist, Malthus and the Irish

famine

These arguments about the superiority of enclosed, scientific agriculture and the

danger of proliferating peasants were employed to devastating effect in Ireland. By

the beginning of the nineteenth century, over 500 years of English dominance had

insured that the Irish economy was thoroughly tied to the fortunes of England. Over

90 percent of the land in Ireland was owned by 5,000 individuals, many of them

absentee English landlords. These estates exported significant amounts of wheat,

pigs and cattle to England and the British Caribbean (Edwards 1973, 182, 21018,

Ranelagh 1994, 6470).

Increased prosperity for the landlords was directly related to heightened

levels of poverty for Irish peasant and small farmers. By 1841, there were about

2.3 million landless labourers out of a population of 8.5 million. There were a further

135,000 holdings of less than one acre, and almost half of the rest of the 440,000

farms in the country were no larger than 10 acres (Donnelly 2001, 13, OGrada

1994).

Virtually all accounts of rural Ireland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

centuries stressed this poverty. A typical cottier lived in a one room cottage, poorly

constructed, with few furnishings. Money income was desperately low and most hadonly the very tiniest amounts of land for their own cultivation. One article in a

Belfast newspaper in 1845 recounting a visit to the countryside expressed clearly the

330 Jim Handy


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sense shared by many that the cottierswere barely human. Many of the dwellings I

saw upon the road-side, the author wrote,

looked to me like the abodes of extinguished hope forgotten instincts grovelling,despairing, almost idiotic wretchedness. I did not know there were such sights in the

world. I did not know that men and women, upright, and made in Gods image, couldlive in styes like swine, with swine sitting, lying down, cooking, eating in such filth . . .(Killen 1995, 32)

While it was generally agreed that Ireland was poor, the reasons given for such

poverty were often disputed. Few commentators seemed to believe that the

dispossession of the Irish peasantry was a logical cause. Instead, most often Irish

poverty was blamed on too many people. While Ireland had traditionally been

viewed as a relatively empty land, the population began to increase rapidly in the

eighteenth century. Between 1750 and 1800, the population had grown from 2.6

million to 5 million, increasing to 7 million in 1821 and to 8.5 million by 1845 and the

beginning of the famine. This meant that Ireland was more densely populated thansome parts of Europe, but it was less so than England and Wales, and growth levels

were actually lower after 1821 than the European average. The facts seemed not to

matter to English commentators. Thomas Malthus, for one, argued in 1817 in a

letter to his friend David Ricardo, The land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled

than in England, and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country a great

part of the population should be swept from the soil (Mokyr 1983, 34). It soon

would be.

One item was mentioned more often than any other in discussions of Irelands

poverty: the potato. No other place on earth relied on the potato to the same extent.

By 1845, as many as 4.7 million of Irelands 8.5 million people depended on thepotato as the primary item in their diet (Donnelly 2001, 13, Zuckerman 1998). The

potato was a wondrous crop because it provided an enormous amount of nutrition

and calories on small amounts of bad land. The potato was considered a curse for

many of the same reasons. In the words of one commentator, If there was no potato,

there would be no cottier that foe to the agriculturalist and land would be

legitimately cultivated by capital (Stanley 1836, 16). For many contemporaries, the

potato encouraged laziness and procreation, the two greatest sins of the poor. As one

writer in 1847 suggested, The Celtic peasants . . . contentment has made him rest

satisfied with shelter and turf fire, and potatoes and water to live upon . . . and is

happy so long as he can get them (Mokyr 1983, 8).

If potato-induced laziness was not sufficient cause for alarm, the potato also

prompted the Celtic peasant to have more children. An official government report

on the state of rural Ireland in 1845 asserted, The potato enabled a large family to

live on food produced in great quantities at a trifling cost, and, as a result, the

increase of the people has been gigantic. Malthus, too, had his view of the potatos

cussedness. The cheapness of this nourishing root, he wrote, joined with the

ignorance and barbarity of the people, which have prompted them to follow their

inclinations with no prospect than immediate bare subsistence, have encouraged

marriage to such a degree that the population is pushed much beyond the industry

and present resources of the country (OGrada 1994, 4).

Thus, long before the famine of 184548, the Irish cottier and the potato wereseen as major concerns for much the same reason common lands had been

denounced in England: the potato allowed the cottier to continue to pay rents and



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maintain access to small amounts of land. His and its efficiency allowed them to

maintain a family despite their poverty and prompted them to turn a blind eye to

those who would try to get them to abandon their land and permit more widespread

agricultural improvement.

This changed in 1845. That year a fungal infection hit the potato crop

throughout Europe, including Ireland. The blight spread in Ireland, partly because

government experts had advised that blighted potatoes could be used as seed

potatoes, and devastated the potato harvest for the next four years. For many,

the resultant famine was seen as an opportunity to reshape rural Ireland along the

English model. Charles Trevelyan, the Assistant Secretary to the Treasury and the

man most responsible for British government policies in Ireland, was knighted for

his service to the crown during the famine. He was also a graduate of the East India

Company University, a student of Malthus. He argued,

The famine is a direct stroke of an all-wise and all merciful Providence, which laid bare

the deep and inveterate root of social evil [unchecked Irish population growth]. Thefamine was the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected . . .God grant that the generation to which this opportunity has been offered may rightlyperform its part. (Ranelagh 1994, 117)

During the famine, the British government provided some relief. But, this was

always given reluctantly and provided at levels designed to insure that it would not

interfere with attempts to pull out this root of social evil. Poor relief in Ireland

during the famine consisted of two types: payment for public works and food relief.

In the former, the government instituted a piece rate system of public works payment

which was calibrated to provide sufficient income for an average man to survive.

Many people argued that even with healthy men the rates the government used weretoo low by at least one-half. But, most of the people on public work relief had been

malnourished for many months. On piece work rates they made only a tiny portion

of the estimated amounts.

When concerns were raised about the level of such relief, Malthusianism and

liberalism proved to be effective counterweights. The Economistmagazine argued in

1846, in response to demands that the poor rates be raised to a living wage, that

to pay them not what their labour is worth, not what their labour can be purchased for,but what is sufficient for a comfortable subsistence for themselves and their family . . .Do they not see that to do this would be to stimulate every man to marry and to

populate as fast as he could, like a rabbit in a warren in other words that to apply thisto Ireland would be to give brandy to a man lying dead drunk in a ditch? ( Economist1846)

The other type of relief was food relief. There was strong pressure throughout

this period by landlords to use the poor laws to evict small holders and cottiers, and

by the government to use the poor laws to reshape Ireland. By 1846, the British

government began to restrict food relief only to those who moved to poor houses. In

1847, the government changed the poor laws to include a provision that insured that

no one could receive relief while they owned more than a quarter acre of land. While

the law never mentioned that cottiers needed to give up their cottages, most

landlords refused to sign the certification of compliance unless both the house andthe last quarter acre were given up as well. The cottiers were left with a terrible

decision: give up their land and rely on poor relief, provided at a level that would

332 Jim Handy


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slow death but not prevent it, or stay on the land and die more quickly. In total,

more than one million Irish died either from starvation or from hunger-related

diseases during the course of the famine and its immediate aftermath, from 1845 to

1851.

In the midst of the famine, Ireland exported close to 300,000 tons of grain to

Britain in both 1846 and 1848, and only slightly less in 1847. It exported 500,000 pigs

in 1846. Despite some calls to end the exports, the government refused to intervene in

the markets to stop them. As The Nation, a Dublin newspaper, reported in 1847

when it appeared that there would be good grain crops that year, And now the thing

for Irishmen to consider is this no people on the globe was ever put to the solution

of such a problem before how to get leave to eat the bread that God has sent them.

It went on to report that shipping Irish grain to the English is termed civilization

and the enlightened spirit of commerce and other respectable names; so that

whoever dies of it may congratulate himself that he is a martyr to the cause of human

improvement and the progress of the species (Killen 1995, 1456).

The government seemed to believe at times that emigration would allow Irelandto be remade. Over two million people left Ireland during and immediately after

the famine. But emigrating cost money. Some landlords assisted families to

emigrate and there was assistance from various charities to do so. Still the poorest

of the poor could rarely afford to go. The government was asked to assist

emigration but responded that to do so would hurt private initiative, already

responding to the famine by engaging in the business of emigration. The

moderately poor left in droves. The worst off couldnt leave; to a large extent

they stayed in Ireland to die. Nevertheless, it was to emigration that most pointed

when they remarked on the way Ireland was being cleared. As one landlord

reported, Nothing but the successive failures of the potato . . . could haveproduced the emigration which will, I trust, give us room to become civilized

(Killen 1995, 1456, Johnson 1994, 51).

Despite the predictions of spreading civilization and Malthus assurances that it

was population and potatoes that caused Irelands rural poverty, the aftermath of

the famine did little to justify that belief. For most of the nineteenth century, Ireland

was noted for both rural poverty and rural depopulation, large swathes of the

country were marked by reduced, but impoverished, populations and dying villages,

as land continued to be accumulated in the hands of fewer and fewer landlords

(Hirsch 1991, Ross 1998, 4850).

Grubby, joyless lives: colonialism, modernity and peasant rusticity

As Europeans spread their power throughout the world, similar attitudes towards

peasants were employed. Colonial rule varied tremendously from place to place and

from colonial master to colonial master. But some general patterns prevailed, at least

for the period of late colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Colonial

powers were driven by a number of imperatives: the need to extend effective control

over subject populations; the need to reconstruct colonial economies to insure they

provided Europe with necessary raw materials, most importantly cotton; colonial

rule was to be paid for by the colonised themselves whenever possible; the colonies

were meant to provide essential markets for European goods; and when it didntconflict with the other priorities colonial rule needed to provide a civilising example

to the barbarous.



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All of these imperatives affected the way colonial powers approached the

colonised peasantry. In some instances, colonial rulers strengthened peasant control

over land and curbed the demands of landlords either to pacify a restless peasantry

or to allow the peasantry to pay taxes and, thus, the costs of empire. In some isolated

examples, as among cocoa farmers in Ghana, the immediate interests of the coloniser

and the peasantry converged, leading to colonial support for voluntary, small scale

peasant involvement in export agriculture production.

But these instances were rare. More often peasants were forced from their lands

to allow for the expansion of plantation agriculture designed to meet the needs of the

coloniser. But, control over labour in plantation agriculture was a continual

headache. Despite the power of colonial states and elaborate mechanisms developed

to deliver such labour to the plantations and control it once it was there, such control

was never really satisfactory and, often, not very profitable. Plantation labourers

almost always struggled perpetually to regain peasant status; from Caribbean slaves

who fought most often and most consistently not just for freedom but for freedom to

engage in peasant agriculture, produce for their own consumption, and market theexcess; to indigo workers in Bijar who simply left the plantations whenever possible

(Schwartz 1992, Pouchepadass 1999, Dubois 2004).

Thus, more often, colonial regimes needed to rely on different mechanisms to

gain a surplus from peasant production. The most common means was to charge an

onerous tax on land. These taxes not only provided the income to operate empire but

were also meant to provide a colic of induced labour to treat perceived peasant

laziness. As an official in the Belgian Congo remarked in the early twentieth century,

The tax system is not only to reimburse the government in some measure for the

cost of occupying all the territories and of providing protection for the native

population. Taxes also have a higher purpose; which is to accustom the negro towork (Young 1994, 179).

Perhaps, the most violent colonial strategy for profiting from the peasantry was

the regime of obligatory, coerced or forced cultivation. It was used most often and to

most effect for the most important of late colonial commodities, the basis for

European industrialisation: cotton. Coerced cotton cultivation was used widely,

from the Ottoman regime in Egypt to the Portuguese in Mozambique. In all places it

functioned in a roughly similar fashion: set quotas of cotton demanded from peasant

producers to be supplied at set prices. To insure peasants would go to extraordinary

lengths to provide the requisite cotton at bad prices at the expense of peasant

agriculture, draconian levels of supervision and vigilance were created and horrific

punishment meted out.

This was, perhaps, carried to its most logical extent in the nineteenth century in

Egypt where Ottoman rulers, in association with European advisors, slowly

transformed Nile valley agriculture from an integrated, if long commercialised,

agricultural system, to one dedicated to the production of commodities for export,

focusing increasing attention as the century advanced on cotton. By the middle of

the nineteenth century, cotton made up 92 percent of Egypts experts and the

government had instituted a system of peasant control seldom matched elsewhere.

As Timothy Mitchell (1988, 3441) describes it,

In the second quarter of the nineteenth century the people of Egypt were made inmatesin their own villages . . . The village was to be run like a barracks, its inhabitants placedunder the surveillance of guards night and day, and under the supervision of inspectorsas they cultivated the land and surrendered to the government warehouse its produce.

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While this system of supervision and rapidly escalating punishment for not

tending their fields properly was designed to ensure the production and surrender of

cotton, at its heart was an underlying belief that peasant villagers needed to be

monitored, supervised, and instructed.

In virtually all locations, coerced cotton cultivation created economic and social

disarray. It so devastated peasant agriculture in Mozambique under the Portuguese

that, as peasants reported to Allen Isaacman, Cotton is the mother of poverty.

Isaacman (1996, 69) outlined the assumptions that informed coerced cotton cultivation:

It assumed that suitable land and underutilized labour were abundant. It relied on forceand terror to intimidate reluctant growers. It dismissed African agricultural practices asbackward, destructive . . . Finally it chose to overlook the deleterious effects of cottonproduction on food security, often promoting policies that necessarily exacerbated foodshortages. All were intended to increase output to meet the needs of the metropolitantextile industry.

What is most striking for our purposes about colonial relations with peasantproducers is the rhetoric that was used to justify these actions. Everywhere land

dispossession, excessive taxation, and coerced cultivation were justified in startlingly

similar ways to the arguments used about enclosures and labour in England. Thus,

colonial regimes in Africa justified these actions with arguments, as Isaacman suggests

above, that peasant agriculture was neither efficient nor an effective use of existing

labour. Labour was assumed to be abundant and resistance to these changes believed

to be a function of the backwardness, perversity, or laziness of the African peasant.

Most often, colonial officials, like those enforcing enclosures in England two

hundred years earlier, insisted on the necessity of such measures for the civilising

mission they argued they were engaged in through their colonial endeavours. Thismission required a habituation to labour. As a Portuguese government commission

in Mozambique explained it in 1899, The state, not only as a sovereign of semi-

barbarous populations, but also as a repository of social authority, should have no

scruples in obliging and if necessary forcing these rude negroes in Africa to better

themselves by work . . . to civilize themselves by work (Isaacman 1996, Mamdani

1996, 14865).

Colonial regimes were not, however, dramatically more coercive in dealing with

peasants than independent non-European countries, many furiously trying to

modernise, in the latter half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth.

Many of these regimes felt driven by the same imperatives that propelled colonial

regimes; they were also informed by the same misconceptions.

E. Bradford Burns (1980) has argued that Latin America in the nineteenth

century, newly independent from Spanish and Portuguese rulers, was marked by a

generalised cultural conflict between a Europeanising elite and traditional and

localised folk. Some of the harsh perceptions of the peasantry in nineteenth century

Latin America were the result of racial or ethnic divisions. Thus, in Guatemala by

the last third of the decade, the elite never seriously attempted to foster the spread of

coffee cultivation among a mostly indigenous peasantry. Instead they confiscated

land and introduced various forms of forced labour that both drove most Maya to

work on the coffee harvest and impoverished peasant agriculture (McCreery 1994,

Cambranes 1996). Impoverished peasant agriculture, impoverished by labourshortages created by forced labour, heightened elite perceptions of the laziness and

backwardness of the indigenous peasantry.



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In 1899, the official newspaper, using Indian and peasant interchangeably,

argued,

The Indian is a pariah, stretched out in his hammock and drunk on chichi, his naturalbeverage. His house is a pig sty; a ragged wife and six or more naked children live

beneath a ceiling grimy with the smoke of a fire that burns day and night in the middleof the floor; some images of saints with the faces of demons, four chickens and a roosterand two or three skinny dogs [etc.]. Yet in this state the Indian is happy. (McCreery1994, 175)

As this quote suggests, nothing seemed to distress commentators more about

peasant lifestyles in Latin America than the apparent ease with which they contrived

to earn a living and their apparently limited needs. A hundred years earlier, a

colonial official in Santo Domingo made much the same argument about freed

blacks. Governor Pedro Catani argued,

The ease with which the masses obtain their subsistence, especially those that live in thecountryside on root vegetables . . . and by hunting wild animals abounding in thewoods . . . makes them forget the labor of cultivation, and live in a perpetual state ofidleness. The excessive number of such freed persons living in the countryside, is one ofthe radical vices [leading to] the backwardness of agriculture. (Turitz 2003, 35)

But racial divisions were not always necessary for this cultural conflict to occur.

Domingo Sarmiento, before becoming President of Argentina, opined in his famous

work on Argentine culture, Civilization and Barbarism, that the inhabitants of the

pampas were emblematic of barbarism precisely because they felt no pressure to

better their situation, to desire and demonstrate increased wealth (Sarmiento 1868,

1723).Of course, not all the critics could identify quite so clearly what it was that

disturbed them about peasants. Sometimes they were reduced to a more generalised

exasperation, a restating of Arthur Youngs comment that commoners made him

feel like he had lost a century. As one Venezuelan historian writing in the nineteenth

century said,

The slowness and rusticity of the peasant exasperates me. They are always wrong and itis impossible that they should ever be rescued from their sad condition of inferiorbeings . . . I cannot talk to any of them for more than five minutes at a time. I can findnothing to say to them. (Burns 1980, 39)

Nor were these attitudes restricted to Latin America. In Japan, where

government officials and a modernising elite had been engaged in ongoing disputes

with peasants through much of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth

centuries, over taxes, the calendar, and such cultural practices as hair knots and

blackened teeth, there was an even more virulent reaction against the peasantry, even

though or perhaps because it was their efficiency and hard work that funded

Japanese modernisation. It is hard to find a more vicious description of peasants or

one that more fully blames the peasants themselves for the poverty imposed on them

than this provided by a Japanese doctor in the 1920s:

There is no one as miserable as a peasant, especially the impoverished peasants ofnorthern Japan. The peasants wear rags, eat coarse cereals, and have many children.They are as black as their dirt walls and lead grubby, joyless lives that can be comparedto those insects that crawl along the ground and stay alive by licking the dirt. They may

336 Jim Handy


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walk upright, but most of the time the spirit crawls along the ground. When one is in acompassionate mood, one feels sorry for them. But . . . every time I come into contactwith their musty, smelly, dull miserable existence, I feel a sense of displeasure anddistaste grounded on a hatred of ugly things. To tell the truth, there are among them,one feels, people who would have been better off had they not been born. In fact, in myopinion, the majority of them fall into this category. I dont think these impressionscome from my personal bias . . . . (Hane 1982, 345, Harootunian 2000)

Capturing imagined peasants

As World War II drew to a close, political leaders all over the world were attempting

to put into effect blueprints for the world to be. This was an immense effort in

imagining the future. The leaders of the soon to be victorious allied nations and their

advisors gathered in New Hampshire at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton

Woods Park at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference to construct

the mechanisms designed to oversee the worlds economy, creating the International

Monetary Fund, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, andthe General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. While their focus was primarily on

financial stability among and the reconstruction of the ravaged industrial economies

of Europe, there was also a clear sign most obvious in the Banks dual title role

that they would soon need to turn their attention to the economies of less wealthy

nations.

At roughly the same time, former colonies in Africa and Asia were rapidly

gaining independence. As both international advisors and national leaders sought to

build modern states out of the debris left to them by colonial masters, they engaged

in another sort of imagining: they imagined peasants and then made policy based on

those often faulty imaginings. Not surprisingly, these new images of peasants seem,in retrospect, to be startlingly familiar.

These images were drawn from three preoccupations: fostering economic growth

and modernisation in poor countries (often called development), turning peasants

into responsible citizens which would allow for the full development of national

institutions, and preventing peasants from supporting communist uprisings. Luckily,

for the most part, addressing all three of these preoccupations was often felt to

demand similar, or at least complementary, policies.

It is, perhaps, in the first quest that the most creative imaginings occurred. If

colonial regimes felt that peasants needed to be coerced into more effective labour,

tutored on proper agricultural techniques, schooled to have more needs, or forced

from the land to allow capital to work its magic, newly independent nations often

followed similar policies, often more forcefully. This is not surprising, in that they

were advised every step of the way by experts who had drawn their lessons from

misreading English economic history. One could point to any number of such

experts, but three of the most influential will help illustrate this point: Sir W. Arthur

Lewis, Walt Whitman Rostow, and Garrett Hardin.

W.A. Lewis was born in Santa Lucia. All of his university education was at the

London School of Economics, where he received his doctorate specialising in

industrial economics, and he taught at the University of Manchester. After the

independence of Ghana, he was an advisor to Kwame Nkrumah, perhaps the most

respected statesman in British Africa. Lewis was an advisor to various West Indiangovernments and headed the central bank of Jamaica. He was also the first director

of the United Nations Special Fund, the precursor to the United Nations



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Development Program, and was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics in

1979. He wrote numerous books and articles, but his most influential work was a

short article entitled Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour in

1954; it was to this model that the Nobel Committee specifically made reference

when announcing the award (Royal Swedish Academy 1979).

Lewis argument in this article is complex and deals with a range of subjects

related to economic growth and the accumulation of capital. It is written from the

perspective of a social democrat who believed in the role of the state in fostering

economic growth and was concerned with the well-being of the majority of the

population in poor countries. Still, the most striking aspect of the article is the

division between a productive, capitalist sector and an unproductive, subsistence

sector. Agricultural areas, he argued, were marked by a few highly capitalized

plantations surrounded by a sea of peasants (Lewis 1958, 408). This sea of peasants,

engaged primarily in subsistence agriculture, was the major source of the unlimited

supply of labour.

Lewis argued that the continued investment of capital was the necessaryingredient for economic growth and warned against allowing the returns to the

subsistence sector to increase. Capital was drawn to invest by low real wages. These

wages were set by the unlimited supply of labour in the countryside. According to

Lewis (1958, 448), Anything which raises the productivity of the subsistence

sector . . . will raise real wages in the capitalist sector, and will therefore reduce the

capitalist surplus and the rate of capital accumulation. One way to prevent this from

happening, he pointed out, is to prevent the farmer from getting all of his extra

production. He further explained, If the capitalist sector depends upon the peasants

for food, it is essential to get the peasants to produce more, while if at the same time

they can be prevented from enjoying the full fruit of their extra production, wagescan be reduced relative to the capitalist surplus (Lewis 1958, 434). While Lewis was

a bit dismayed at the way his argument was subsequently used by economic

planners, the implications are clear.

Lewis model of a dual economy a productive, modern, capitalised sector and

an unproductive, non-modern subsistence sector from which abundant and cheap

labour needed to be forced both reflected and reinforced the dominant approach to

backward economies in the second half of the twentieth century; they were

backward precisely and primarily because of the existence of a peasantry.

Lewis concern about capital investment and his suggestion about its

modernising effects were echoed by Walt Whitman Rostow. Rostows background

perfectly groomed him to encapsulate in one volume all the destructive trends in

development ideology of the late 1950s. His first works were on British economic

history, reinforcing a prevailing tendency in development ideology that economic

growth could be understood best through an understanding of such history. He

worked for the US Army in Eastern Europe and was a special assistant to both

President Kennedy and Johnson on national security affairs. After his works on

British economic history, he wrote books on Communist China and the challenges to

the United States in Asia. Between 1958 and 1961 he headed the Center for

International Studies at MIT, funded in part by the CIA, and it was there that he

and his colleagues worked out the major points in Rostows major contribution to

imagining peasants. The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifestowas published in 1960, drawn from a series of lectures he gave at MIT between 1958

and 1960.

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So, the major enunciation of modernisation theory within economics and

perhaps the major influence on development theory for the next 20 years at least

was written primarily as part of the cold war, a policy document designed to foster

development as a foil to prevent the spread of communism in the Third World, by

someone whose major concern was American security and whose background was in

British economic history. The result is somewhat predictable.

Stages in Economic Growth argues that all developed societies have passed

through similar, roughly equivalent historic stages. It is possible, therefore, to

identify the stage any society or economy was in and to suggest policies designed to

hurry that society along the route to development, culminating in a stage of high

mass consumption. Rostows stages are well known and do not need repeating here.

They were neither surprising nor original, having been borrowed from many

previous works imagining societal development. There are, however, a number of

things about Rostows stages that stand out. First, despite his claim to be an

economic historian, traditional society in his vision had no history. In Stages,

traditional society is marked by a never-ending struggle against scarcity, bound byideas and concepts that prevent advancement or change, marked by a long-run

fatalism, and devoid of technology that would assist in accumulation (Rostow

1960, 5).

For development to begin (in Rostows terms the Precondition for Take-off

Stage), society needed to recognise the desirability of change and economic

accumulation. This shift in perceptions would lead to a disintegration of the

traditional society and the construction of modern alternatives. To initiate this shift

in underdeveloped countries an external impetus or shock was required. The

combination of these two ideas the ahistorical conceptualisation of traditional

society and the need for an external shock to jolt them out of their primitive state led him to argue that colonisation had been a beneficial process. The major beneficial

external shock provided by colonialism was the development of nationalism and the

construction of national states. In Rostows assessment the destruction of traditional

society required the emergence of new elites, divorced from traditional society and

tied to the new beacon of modernity: the national state. The key to growth was the

ability of the national state to exert control over aspects of the traditional society and

to force agriculture to transfer a significant measure of its surplus to the state

controlled by these modernising elites (Rostow 1960, 2334).

This needed to be accompanied by changes in the beliefs and world view of those

people encased in traditional society. Most especially, perhaps, they needed to reduce

the number of children they had, needed to value the individual over broader social

connections (except, of course, the national state) and they needed to come to an

understanding of the physical world . . . as an ordered world which, if rationally

understood, can be manipulated . . . (Rostow 1960, 1821).

While Rostows work lacked much of Lewis humanity, both in practice were

used to legitimise policies in poor countries that transferred land and wealth from the

peasantry to elites as long as that elite was entrepreneurial, produced for export and,

most importantly, applied the elixir of capital to the land and to production. In this

schema the biggest enemy was the most obvious purveyor of tradition, the peasantry.

Lewis arguments were persuasive partly because of his erudition, his obvious good

intentions, and the solid grounding in economic theory. Rostows work had none ofthis; the success of his argument can be explained only if we understand that it

tapped into prevailing ideas about the stagnant nature of traditional, peasant



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society and its links to continued poverty and unrest in poor countries. The ways in

which these widespread tropes lent credibility to often very unconvincing arguments

can be understood clearly if we turn, briefly, to the work of Garrett Hardin.

Hardin, a professor of Human Ecology at the University of California at Santa

Barbara, published a short article entitled The Tragedy of the Commons in 1968.

Published at a time of increased concern, and much hysteria, over population

growth, the article was both crude and amateurish. In it, Hardin attempted to argue

that all access to common property leads to over population. He provided a series of

bizarre examples of this, ranging from the world population levels to parking spaces

in Leominster, Massachusetts; all examples, except the parking spaces, were

hypothetical. In subsequent publications most especially perhaps a short article

entitled Living on a Life Boat in which he elaborated on some of the arguments in

this essay, especially his assertion that poor people should not have the freedom to

breed (Hardin 1974) he made it clear that his central focus was world wide

population growth; like Malthus, he believed the threat stemmed primarily from

poor people and was exacerbated by every act of charity, most especially food aid.In The Tragedy of the Commons the argument that attracted the most attention

was his discussion of a hypothetical grazing commons in an unspecified undeveloped

region:

Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep asmany cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonablysatisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbersof beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day ofreckoning, that is, the day when the long desired goal of social stability becomes areality. At that point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates atragedy . . . Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own

best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.

Despite the obvious flaws, the lack of references to any actual commons (either

existing or historic), and the way the article ignored an abundant literature on the

way commons actually functioned, Hardins assessment of the inherent logic of the

commons clearly struck a chord as did his solution to the tragedy, the enclosure of

the commons through private property. Despite a chorus of academic critiques that

decried Hardins fallacious and simplistic assessment, for decades to follow it was

not uncommon to find arguments that referred to the way that Hardin had

demonstrated the natural tendency for common resources to be overexploited.

Hardins hypothetical common pasture became all the proof necessary to

demonstrate the inherent superiority of private ownership, the dangers of common

property, and the inability of traditional rural institutions to deal with changing

circumstances; in much the same way that Malthus hypothetical reflections on the

propensity of the poor to propagate if not constrained by abject poverty became the

proof necessary for over two centuries of fear of the poor.

What is most striking about most of the literature that shapes the prevailing

notions of peasant society in the latter half of the twentieth century is the almost

complete absence of any real peasants. Even when a real peasant does show up in

the literature, they often turn out to be almost completely imagined.

Timothy Mitchell has a superb discussion about the ways Egyptian peasants got

imagined in both academic and popular literature through the second half of thetwentieth century. One of the most popular and influential works on Egyptian

peasants was a book published in 1978 by the well known American writer, Richard

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Critchfield. Critchfields Shahhat: An Egyptian was taken by many to be a realistic

portrayal of the life of a young Egyptian peasant. The book depicts a deeply

traditional young peasant coming of age at a time when his village, unchanged for

centuries, is suddenly confronted by modern influences. It was the story of a young

man and a village driven by uncontrolled passions, the need to satisfy immediate

desires, and irrational violence. But, as Mitchell has pointed out, the village in which

the book is set was far from untouched, having in the course of the last

century undergone almost complete transformation: the loss of its village lands

enclosed in a sugar estate, the destruction of local textile manufacturing, its

subjugation to all the apparatuses of the modern state, and its position at the base of

Theban necropolis, one of the most visited tourist sites in Egypt. Indeed, the hamlet

in which Shahhat himself lived had been built less than 50 years previously. As

Mitchell (2002, 1278) suggests, this blindness to historical transformation is

carefully achieved, in order to have Shahhats story fit more closely the expected

image of the rural peasant.

Indeed, Critchfields book is actually largely a pastiche of earlier depictions ofpeasants. Most especially it borrows freely, in long sections drawn word for word,

from George Ayrouts 1938 work, The Egyptian Peasant. Ayrout was an Egyptian;

after growing up in Cairo he joined the Catholic Church, and spent most of his

adult life in France, where the The Egyptian Peasant was written. Ayrout wrote the

work without actually returning to Egypt for his research and had spent virtually

no time in the Egyptian countryside. Indeed, as Mitchell points out, Ayrout

also borrowed freely in constructing his image of the Egyptian peasant, from

Gustave Le Bons work on the French masses, Psychologie des foules (Mitchell

2002, 13041).

The works of both Critchfield and Ayrout were widely cited in peasant studiesand both men became expert advisors on peasants. Critchfield, particularly, seemed

to report on peasant issues almost exclusively from areas of intense interest for

American security concerns, from Vietnam, to Mauritius, to Iran, and Egypt.

Ayrout was more fixed in Egypt, but the way in which his work was perceived to be

essential in suggesting appropriate means for tying peasants to the state and to the

economy can be gleaned from The Economists review of a new English language

edition of the book in 1963. There is no better book, the magazine assured its

readers, on the magnitude of President Nassers task in rural Egypt (Mitchell 2002,

133).

Tying peasants to the state, fixing them in location and in the relationship to

the state, became a central concern in the second half of the twentieth century.

This was not just an economic imperative, but essential as a demonstration of the

authority of the modern state. There are too many examples to explore at any

length here, but two very brief arguments about the necessity to capture

peasants in the market, in the bureaucracy of the state, and in modern society

might suffice.

Keith Hart worked for the World Bank, organising the creation (in his own

words) of Papua New Guinea. He then worked as an African and Asian

development specialist for US AID. His book, The Political Economy of West

African Agriculture, was published in 1982 and quickly received favourable

attention. His central point was that the major problem facing West Africaneconomies was the prevalence of a peasantry, insufficiently coerced into producing a

surplus for the market. As he succinctly expressed it, Agricultural intensification



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means getting people to work harder, and that undertaking usually requires

coercion. Here I paraphrase his discussion of the major problems facing West

African states:

Decolonization left the successor regimes with a problem that is still poorly understood

namely, how to build modern nation-states when the bulk of the production remains in thehands of small farmers . . . The prime need is for large, capital intensive projects thatsubstantially raise the productivity of the labour force effectively controlled by the stateapparatus. Nothing can beat a big irrigation scheme from this point of view. Therequirements for capital planning, water control, and managerial supervision makegovernment central to such schemes . . . The next best thing is to organize the farmers insuch a way that they must pass over a portion of their product to the government. Theseinitiatives are normally called co-operatives. (Hart 1982, 834)

Writing at roughly the same time, Goran Hydens discussion of the problems

with the Ujamaa villagisation scheme under Julius Nyerere in Tanzania outlined the

perceived challenges in an even starker fashion. He argued that the difficulty in

Tanzania did not stem from Nyereres ill-conceived plan to fix villagers in propervillages so that they could begin to use tractors, but rather because the Tanzanian

peasantry were uncaptured by the state. Despite his sympathy for peasant

producers and the economy of affection which he suggested was the basis for social

relations in rural Africa, Hyden (1980, 9) argued that, The road to modern society

has been completed at the expense of the peasantry and through most of the

industrialised world, the history of the peasantry is a closed chapter. Hyden went

on to suggest,

So commonis this situationin Sub-SaharanAfrica that is not an exaggerationto claim thatthe principal structural constraint to development are the barriers raised against state

action by the peasant mode of production. To subordinate the peasant to the demands ofstate policies is a controversial task that all regimes in Africa face . . . In order toappropriate surplus product from the peasant more effectively there is no other waythan . . . to make him produce more than for his own domestic needs. Exploitation in thissense of the word is inevitable in the African societies if they are to develop. Such has beenthe road to progress in all other societies. (Hyden 1980, 31)

The melancholy of peasants

Two hundred years after Arthur Young was campaigning for agricultural change in

rural England, the arguments seem to have changed little. Peasants need to be

subjugated to the interests of the state, incorporated into capitalist agriculture, made

to produce more and to produce it more effectively, or need to give way to capital.

That incorporation needs to be accomplished so as to wring from them an increased

surplus and, in the process, turn them into something else. Despite all the evidence to

the contrary, they continued to be portrayed as unchanging, irrational and ornery; a

threat not just to economic development but to modernity and its companion, the

modern state. This threat is rehearsed a thousand times in literature on peasants,

retold in new but surprisingly familiar fashions, decrying their idiotic wretchedness

and proclaiming their unsuitability for the modern world. In the words of Roger

Bartra (1997, 17), talking about Mexican peasants, because they are survivors of a

period that must not return (they cast) a long shadow of nostalgia and melancholy

over modern society.In the context of this long history during which peasants have been blamed for a

litany of modern afflictions, the continued existence of peasants is not just surprising;

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it is almost miraculous. Given this context, the decision by hundreds of thousands of

agricultural producers recently organised into LaVa Campesina around the

world to proclaim their existence as peasants with pride and to declare their intention

to use their collective wisdom to construct an alternative vision of the world is an act

of immense courage (Desmarais 2007, 1957).

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Burns, E.B. 1980. The poverty of progress: Latin America in the nineteenth century. Berkeley,CA: University of California Press.

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Davis, M. 2001. Late victorian holocausts. London: Verso.Desmarais, A.A. 2007. La v a campesina: globalization and the power of peasants. Winnipeg:

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Jim Handy is Professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan and former director ofthe International Studies Program. He is the author of Gift of the Devil: a history ofGuatemala, revolution in the countryside: rural conflict and agrarian reform in Guatemala, 19441954, and numerous articles. He is currently working on a book entitled The menace ofprogress.

Corresponding author: Email: [email protected]

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