Critical Perspectives in Rural Development Studies

Saturnino Borras Jr.

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415552448
• eBook ISBN: 9781317988557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Agrarian transformations within and across countries have been significantly and dynamically altered during the past few decades compared to previous eras, provoking a variety of reactions from rural poor communities worldwide. The recent convergence of various crises – financial, food, energy and environmental – has put the nexus between 'rural development' and 'development in general' back onto the center stage of theoretical, policy and political agendas in the world today. Confronting these issues will require (re)engaging with critical theories, taking politics seriously, and utilizing rigorous and appropriate research methodologies. These are the common messages and implications of the various contributions to this collection in the context of a scholarship that is critical in two senses: questioning prescriptions from mainstream perspectives and interrogating popular conventions in radical thinking.

This book focuses on key perspectives, frameworks and methodologies in agrarian change and peasant studies. The contributors are leading scholars in the field of rural development studies: Henry Bernstein, Terence J. Byres, Saturnino M. Borras Jr, Marc Edelman, Cristóbal Kay, Benedict Kerkvliet, Philip McMichael, Shahra Razavi, Ian Scoones and Teodor Shanin.

This book was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

The landlord class, peasant differentiation, class struggle and the transition to capitalism: England, France and Prussia compared

Terence J. Byres

The three examples considered – England, France and Prussia – are all very important instances of capitalist agrarian transformation. They illustrate, moreover, strikingly different paths of agrarian transition. These are termed, respectively, landlord-mediated capitalism from below, capitalism delayed, and capitalism from above, and an explanation is offered of how these different outcomes came to pass and of why there was such a marked divergence in the nature of agrarian transition. It is argued that the character of the landlord class and of class struggle have determined both the timing of each transition and the nature of the transition. Both the quality of the landlord class and the manner and outcome of the class struggle have sometimes delayed, perhaps for prolonged periods, and sometimes hastened transition; and have had profound implications for the nature and quality of the transformation and how reactionary or progressive it has been. In this the state has always played a prominent part. It is further argued that differentiation of the peasantry is central to transformation: it is not an outcome but a determining variable, a causa causans rather than a causa causata. Differentiation of the peasantry feeds into and interacts with the landlord class and class struggle, these three being critical to the eventual outcome. The distinctly varying trajectories in the three crucial instances are explained in these terms.

Introduction

The three examples I have chosen to consider are all very important instances of agrarian transformation. They illustrate, moreover, strikingly different experiences of transformation: differing paths of agrarian transition.

England, the first historical example of such transformation, of ‘capitalism triumphant’, one might describe as landlord-mediated capitalism from below (that, at least, is how I would choose to describe it). The former feudal landlord class became a capitalist landlord class, letting its land to capitalist tenant farmers on fixed-term leases at ‘competitive’ rents: and ‘English farming came to be dominated by the triple division into landlords, [capitalist] tenant farmers and hired labourers’ (Hobsbawm and Rudé 1973, 6). The transition to capitalist agriculture proceeded vigorously in Tudor England, in the sixteenth century, and was completed during the seventeenth. Not everyone would accept such a characterisation. Brenner, for example, would dispute both its historical priority, arguing (2001) that this, in fact, belongs to the Low Countries; or any suggestion of its representing capitalism from below.

In Prussia, by contrast with England, the class of feudal landlords – the Junkers – had ceased, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, to be feudal landlords. Prussian feudalism gave way to a distinctive form of agrarian capitalism, in the wake of the ‘freeing’ of Prussian serfs in 1807: a transition to capitalism that came some three centuries after the English transition. Prussian feudal landlords ceased to be a landlord class and became a class of capitalist farmers, working the land with an oppressed force of wage labour, who had formerly been serfs. Here was Lenin's celebrated ‘capitalism from above’: the impulse was an exclusively landlord one, accompanied by ‘the degradation of the peasant masses’ (Lenin 1964, 33). There was no question of capitalism from below.

France embodies, one might say, ‘capitalism delayed’. Here, the capitalist impulse in the countryside was frustrated, or, at least, significantly delayed. At the end of the nineteenth century, France could still be portrayed as ‘the classical land of small peasant economy’ (Engels 1970, 460) – a land, one might say, dominated by poor and middle peasants. Here we have a stubbornly enduring peasantry: a peasantry that refused to go. Sharecropping was still widespread, and persisted well into the twentieth century. The French landlord class at no point, either before or after 1789, had shown any significant move of either the English kind or the Prussian. There was no dominant ‘capitalism from above’ and no broad progressive landlord role; and there was no ‘capitalism from below’, from within the ranks of the peasantry.

In this paper, I offer an explanation of how these different outcomes came to pass and of why there was such a marked divergence in the nature of agrarian transition. I do so in terms of the kind of landlord class, the kind of class struggle and the kind of peasant differentiation that were integral to ‘agrarian transformation’. I argue that the character of the landlord class and of class struggle have determined both the timing of each transition and the nature of the transition. Both the quality of the landlord class and the manner and outcome of the class struggle have sometimes delayed, perhaps for prolonged periods, and sometimes hastened transition; and have had profound implications for the nature and quality of the transformation and how reactionary or progressive it has been. In this the state has always played a prominent part. I further argue that differentiation of the peasantry is central to transformation: it is not an outcome but a determining variable, a causa causans rather than a causa causata. My argument is that differentiation of the peasantry feeds into and interacts with the landlord class and class struggle, these being critical to the eventual outcome. Such is the theme of the present paper. Differentiation is no mere outcome. The distinctly varying trajectories in the three crucial instances are explained in these terms.

Some preliminary analytical observations

In each instance I consider a transition from feudalism to agrarian capitalism. I start with some preliminary observations concerning feudal social formations, to help to clear our analytical path. I will then proceed to take each of the cases separately.

Contra many social historians, conflict, rather than harmony, was the principal underlying feature of the relationship between the main classes of feudal society in Europe. As Marc Bloch, the great historian of European feudalism (1961a, 1961b) and of the French countryside (1966), stressed of European feudalism: ‘agrarian revolt is as natural to the seigneurial regime as strikes, let us say, are to large-scale capitalism’ (1966, 170). Rodney Hilton, too, the outstanding Marxist historian of medieval England, and a formidable comparativist, emphasised the importance of conflict – class conflict – in feudal Europe ‘between peasants and ruling groups over the disposal of the surplus (disputes about rents and services) and over the sanctions used to enforce its appropriation (serfdom, private jurisdiction)’ (Hilton 1974, 207). Indeed, the nature, manifestations and implications of this lord/peasant class conflict is a recurring theme in all of his work: ‘the conflict between the peasants as a whole on the one hand and the landowning class and its institutions on the other’ (1974, 210). This was true of each of my three examples.

Peasant resistance in medieval Europe, in fact, falls into different sub-genres. First, ‘some movements were obviously direct confrontations between lords and peasants over the proportion of the surplus product of peasant labour which should go in rents, services and taxes’ (Hilton 1973, 62). Very broadly, ‘on the whole, the[se] more elemental movements with the simplest demands were at the village level’ (1973, 64). The demands in question may have been the ‘simplest’, but they were quite fundamental. They occurred at the points of production and of distribution. These existed throughout the medieval period. They may be sub-divided into those that proceeded via individuals or groups of individuals within a village; and those that involved whole peasant communities seeking village enfranchisement. Secondly, there were those that appear as ‘movements of social, religious or political protest’ (1973, 62). These were a feature of the later medieval epoch. By contrast, ‘the movements affected by the new developments in medieval society tended to be regional in scope, and generally to have wide horizons, which were extended not merely beyond the village but beyond purely social aspirations’ (loc. cit.). They may have sought religious goals, or attempted to confront and moderate the increasing encroachments of the state. Both of the sub-genres were obvious in England and France. It is the direct confrontation over surplus that interests me most here. It is clearly visible in feudal Prussia.

Under feudalism, the peasantry is to be viewed as a single class. Kosminsky, the author of the classic Marxist treatment of thirteenth-century England's agrarian history, insists: ‘And yet whatever distinctions and contradictions may have existed within the peasantry, they do not preclude our seeing in the peasantry of the epoch a single class, occupying a definite place in the feudal mode of production, and characterised by the anti-feudal direction of its interests and its class struggle.’ (1956, 198). Hilton takes the same position, with respect to the final era of English feudalism, 1350–1450, as he does for the whole of the feudal era in Europe (1975, ch. 1, 3–19, entitled ‘The Peasantry as a Class’). What all sections of the peasantry had in common was their servile condition: tied to the land, subject to an array of feudal restrictions, with surplus appropriated via extra-economic coercion – in Chris Wickham's incisively reductive phrase, feudalism is ‘coercive rent-taking’ (1985, 170). Moreover, as the feudal era proceeded, they were subject to attempts at increased exploitation and seigneurial onslaught. That bound them together in hostile conflict against feudal lords.

Despite seeing the peasantry as a class, it is crucial to note that these peasantries are socially differentiated. In Europe, ‘the peasant community was not a community of equals’ and ‘the stratification of peasant communities, moreover, was at least as old as the earliest records which we have of them’ (Hilton 1973, 32). In analysis of differentiation of the peasantry, it is common to refer to three strata: a rich peasantry, a middle peasantry and a poor peasantry. It is appropriate to do so with respect to medieval Europe, and historians like Kosminsky and Hilton proceed thus (see, for example, Hilton 1978, 272, 280, Kosminsky 1956, 354). Hilton stresses that ‘the internal stratification of the peasantry, during the medieval period, was strictly limited’ (1973, 34). Rich peasants hired wage labour, especially at peak seasons: whether from the ranks of poor peasants or from that of a class of completely landless labourers. That this might generate conflict seems possible. Yet, there was remarkably little conflict of this kind (Hilton 1966, 166, 1975, 53). Nor was there a social gulf, or a ‘competitive element’, between rich and poor peasant (1975, 53): ‘The social gulf that was still the most important was that between the peasant and the lord.’ Certainly, the conflict between peasant and lord was far more important than conflict within peasant communities. There was a clear absence of struggle within the feudal peasantry. Yet, differentiation might deepen within feudal limits. Such deepening needs close attention. These observations are valid for all three of my case studies.

I have posited a servile feudal peasantry. Yet there was the possibility of a relatively free peasantry under feudalism. From the eleventh century onwards there was, in different parts of Europe, land hunger and the possibility of alleviating it through the settling of uncultivated land (Hilton 1973, 43, 92). This proceeded as ‘the consequence of increasing population, increased production for the market, and firmer and more ambitious political organisation by the aristocracy and the ruling kings and princes’ and ‘it involved a response by landowners to the search by peasants for more land, which took the form of attempts to direct this land hunger towards the colonisation of forest, scrubland and marsh’ (1973, 43). Hilton distinguishes two distinct movements in this respect. The first was in West Germany, France, England, and Italy, where unsettled areas of such land ‘were filled up by the overflow from crowded villages in old settled areas’ (1973, 43). The ‘best-known’ (1973, 43) and most important historically was, however, the second, which involved the settlement of empty lands to the east, in Slav territories. Peasants needed inducements to cultivate such land, and so was created a free peasantry in Prussia: a peasantry that remained among the freest in Europe until the sixteenth century. That was not so in any general way in England and France. This Hilton describes as ‘the expansion of German colonisation in central and Eastern Europe’ (1973, 43). It included, most importantly, Prussia east of the Elbe.

England

Differentiation and the emergence of a stratum of powerful rich peasants

Differentiation of the English peasantry existed from earliest times. It was a structural feature of feudalism at its very inception (let us say, by the sixth century AD). Hilton (1978, 272) cites Kosminsky (1956, 207) to the effect that ‘the deep-seated causes of peasant differentiation probably lie as far back as the disintegration of the pre-feudal lands into the ownership of single families’.¹ Hilton stresses that ‘the contours of a peasantry divided between a wealthy minority, a solid middle peasantry and a significant proportion of smallholders can easily be seen in the Domesday Book, 1086’ (1978, 272, see also 1973, 33). That it developed and deepened, in the wake of the Norman Conquest, as the medieval era proceeded, is also clear. We have a superb treatment for the thirteenth century and for the century 1350–1450 by Hilton (1949 and 1978) and Hilton and Fagan (1950) and valuable accounts of the thirteenth century by non-Marxist historians (Postan 1966b, 617–32, Miller and Hatcher 1978, 149ff). I have considered this in detail elsewhere (Byres 2006b, 32–53). Here, with the transition to capitalism in mind, I would note the following of the rich peasantry.

In the thirteenth century, a lower stratum of rich peasants held more than 30 acres, while a select few worked more than 60. Hilton stresses ‘the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Critical Agrarian Studies
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 The landlord class, peasant differentiation, class struggle and the transition to capitalism: England, France and Prussia compared
• 2 V. I. Lenin and A. V. Chayanov: looking back, looking forward
• 3 Chayanov's treble death and tenuous resurrection: an essay about understanding, about roots of plausibility and about rural Russia
• 4 Development strategies and rural development: exploring synergies, eradicating poverty
• 5 A food regime genealogy
• 6 Livelihoods perspectives and rural development
• 7 Engendering the political economy of agrarian change
• 8 Everyday politics in peasant societies (and ours)
• 9 Synergies and tensions between rural social movements and professional researchers
• Index