Remembering Peasants: a Personal History of a Vanished World. By Patrick Joyce. Penguin £10.99.
The author was ‘the London-born child of Irish rural immigrant parents’, and here he examines the history and current situation of peasants, concentrating not just on Ireland (where he discusses his own family history) but also Poland, and in addition with some attention to Italy. It is an eloquent and wide-ranging account, supported by a range of photographs, the earliest dating back to the late nineteenth century.
One chapter deals with the problem of defining who counts as a peasant, but there is no simple answer to this. Peasants are not necessarily serfs; they consume (part of) the products their work creates, with the family and its economy having a central role. They do not seek to maximise their income, and either owned the land they worked or had long-term tenancies. They may produce for the capitalist market, but the extent of this varies according to time and place. They live in ‘cultures of scarcity’, where prosperity for one person means another going without. Any money earned was not re-invested but kept at home or lent at very low interest rates. And ‘peasant societies are societies of the gift, not the commodity … What is given should be given freely: that which is given without expectation of return feeds the giver again and again.’ (The different tenses in this paragraph reflect those in the book.)
Religion often involved various traditional beliefs being incorporated into christian world-views, but ‘Religion usually had the law on its side, and so it also had the support of those who upheld the law, the landowners and state.’ There was a great deal of ‘everyday suffering’, and in some places it was the best of the crop that was surrendered in rent. Most years there would be ‘pre-harvest famine’ from spring onwards.
A powerful chapter deals with peasant revolts and rebellions. Peasants could feud with and even kill each other. There was a code of behaviour, which even the powerful had to recognise, and minor acts of revolt, such as quiet sabotage, could be used to get even. Sometimes this could escalate to violence and murder. In Ireland in 1882, for instance, a land agent was killed after many hundreds had been evicted and an estate converted to a place for fishing and wildlife shooting. There were larger peasant uprisings, such as the German Peasants War of 1524–5, the Romanian rebellion of 1907 and the Tambov Rebellion in Russia in 1920–1. The twentieth century indeed saw much violence inflicted on peasants: ‘These barbarities were foundational for the emergence of modern states.’ Most of those imprisoned in Soviet gulags were peasants.
Depending on the terminology used, peasants have now largely been replaced by small farmers, and globally over a billion people still do agricultural work, mostly in India and China. But whichever labels are employed, it is clear that peasant history was largely one of struggle, poverty and repression.
Paul Bennett
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