The End of Peasantries? Rethinking the Role of Peasantries in a World-Historical View

This tentative essay tries to understand today's concerns about the decay of the peasantries and the loss of food security on a massive scale within a long-term and global perspective. Guiding questions are: How to handle the local scale of the peasant with the global scale of societal transformations? How to define peasantries? How is the fate of peasantries linked to economic development and social inequality? What can new research on the success and decline of peasantries learn us? Understanding the old and new 'agrarian questions' calls for new historical knowledge of the role of peasantries within capitalist transformations. The existing knowledge is all to often deformed by a twofold myopia, the English Road to capitalist agriculture, and the European Experience of the dissolution of the peasantries within the industrial and post-industrial economies. Laying down the old premisses of westernized development reveals a different picture of a highly productive family based agriculture, promoting local and regional income and survival systems, and internalizing costs of production and reproduction, contrary to the dominant and ultimatelly dead end tendency within historical capitalism.Peasantries, depeasantization

From famine to food crisis. What history can teach us about local and global subsistence crises

The range of famine prone regions in the world has been shrinking for centuries; it’s currently mainly limited to sub-Sahara Africa. Yet the impact of endemic hunger has not declined and the early 21st century seems to be faced with a new threat: global subsistence crises. In this essay I question the concepts of famine and food crisis. I will formulate some suggestions to understand these seemingly unrelated processes in a more integrated way. The article successively debates historical famine research, Europe’s ‘grand escape’ from hunger, past and contemporary ‘depeasantisation’, and the state of 21st century food systems. Only more integrated models of interpretation can supersede the dualistic histories of food and famine that have been dominating developmentalist stories for so long.famines food crisis peasantry depeasantisation

Mutual effects of land distribution and economic development : evidence from Asia, Africa, and Latin America

Land plays an important role in the economies of developing countries, and many theories connecting land inequality with different dimensions of economic development already exist. Even though efficacious land distribution allows societies to transition from poverty to a human capital-based developed economy, ongoing issues related to property rights, inequality, and the political economy of land distribution are unavoidable. The general objective of this paper is to explore the nexus between land distribution and economic development. The specific objectives are to: (i) identify which land distribution programs/activities contribute to economic development; (ii) investigate the role of stakeholders in land distribution programs that affect the growth of productivity; and (iii) assess the deficiencies of current land distribution policies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to explore how economic development theories contribute to decreasing income inequality. This paper provides an overview of land distribution history and the main economic development theories. It also highlights the links between land distribution and the main elements of economic development. Finally, it provides a comparative review of the most recent empirical works regarding the characteristics, limitations, and potential (mutual) effects of land distribution and economic development settings on developing countries worldwide

Into their land and labours : a comparative and global analysis of trajectories of peasant transformation

The fate of rural societies in the past and today cannot be understood in a singular manner. Peasantries across the world have followed different trajectories of change and have developed divergent repertoires of accommodation, adaptation and resistance. Understanding these multiple trajectories requires new historical knowledge about the role of peasantries within long-term and worldwide economic and social transformations. This paper aims to make sense of this diversity from a comparative, integrated, and systemic approach. The paper is structured around the notions of peasant work, peasant frontiers, peasant communities and peasant regimes. These concepts figure as key analytical tools in an innovative research framework to analyze the paths of peasant transformation in modern world history beyond idealization and teleologization

Who is afraid of global history? Ambitions, pitfalls and limits of learning global history

This essay debates the present state of global history from four angles: defining global history, debating global history, teaching global history, and researching global history. My comments and suggestions reflect my own experiences, but also configure and support the choices I make in my teaching and research missions. We are witnessing new, global shifts as the centuries-long hegemony of European and Western societies and theories are increasingly challenged. This urges us to broaden and deepen the paths of global history. This is an essential task since the topics that we are dealing with have never been bigger, the questions we are tackling have never been more important, and the stakes have never been higher.This essay debates the present state of global history from four angles: defining global history, debating global history, teaching global history, and researching global history. My comments and suggestions reflect my own experiences, but also configure and support the choices I make in my teaching and research missions. We are witnessing new, global shifts as the centuries-long hegemony of European and Western societies and theories are increasingly challenged. This urges us to broaden and deepen the paths of global history. This is an essential task since the topics that we are dealing with have never been bigger, the questions we are tackling have never been more important, and the stakes have never been higher