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49-709: Land reform may also entail the transfer of land from individual ownership—even peasant ownership in smallholdings —to government-owned collective farms; it has also, in other times and places, referred to the exact opposite: division of government-owned collective farms into smallholdings. The common characteristic of all land reforms is modification or replacement of existing institutional arrangements governing possession and use of land. Thus, while land reform may be radical in nature, such as through large-scale transfers of land from one group to another, it can also be less dramatic, such as regulatory reforms aimed at improving land administration. Nonetheless, any revision or reform of

98-525: A manor presided over by a lord or a bishop of the church . Peasants paid rent or labor services to the lord in exchange for their right to cultivate the land. Fallowed land, pastures, forests, and wasteland were held in common. The open field system required cooperation among the peasants of the manor. It was gradually replaced by individual ownership and management of land. The relative position of peasants in Western Europe improved greatly after

147-789: A country's land laws can still be an intensely political process, as reforming land policies serves to change relationships within and between communities, as well as between communities and the state. Thus even small-scale land reforms and legal modifications may be subject to intense debate or conflict. Land ownership and tenure can be perceived as controversial in part because ideas defining what it means to access or control land, such as through "land ownership" or "land tenure", can vary considerably across regions and even within countries. Land reforms, which change what it means to control land, therefore create tensions and conflicts between those who lose and those who gain from these redefinitions (see next section). Western conceptions of land have evolved over

196-443: A cultural and political invention. He writes: This divide represented a radical departure from tradition: F. W. Mote and others have shown how especially during the later imperial era ( Ming and Qing dynasties), China was notable for the cultural, social, political, and economic interpenetration of city and countryside. But the term nongmin did enter China in association with Marxist and non-Marxist Western perceptions of

245-591: A landlord (the hacienda system), most Latin American countries saw one or more extensive land reforms in the 20th century. The land reforms of Latin America were more comprehensive initiatives that redistributed lands from large landholders to former peasants — farm workers and tenant farmers . Hence, many Campesinos in Latin America today are closer smallholders who own their land and do not pay rent to

294-487: A landlord, rather than peasants who do not own land. The Catholic Bishops of Paraguay have asserted that "Every campesino has a natural right to possess a reasonable allotment of land where he can establish his home, work for [the] subsistence of his family and a secure life". In medieval Europe society was theorized as being organized into three estates : those who work, those who pray, and those who fight. The Annales School of 20th-century French historians emphasized

343-419: A landlord. In Europe, three classes of peasants existed: non-free slaves , semi-free serfs , and free tenants . Peasants might hold title to land outright ( fee simple ), or by any of several forms of land tenure , among them socage , quit-rent , leasehold , and copyhold . In some contexts, "peasant" has a pejorative meaning, even when referring to farm laborers. As early as in 13th-century Germany,

392-674: A sense of French nationhood was weak in the provinces. Weber then looked at how the policies of the Third Republic created a sense of French nationality in rural areas. The book was widely praised, but some argued that a sense of Frenchness existed in the provinces before 1870. Farmers in China have been sometimes referred to as "peasants" in English-language sources. However, the traditional term for farmer, nongfu ( 农夫 ), simply refers to "farmer" or "agricultural worker". In

441-784: A village community. Different people in a family or community had different rights to access this land for different purposes and at different times. Such rights were often conveyed through oral history and not formally documented. These different ideas of land ownership and tenure are sometimes referred to using different terminology. For example, "formal" or "statutory" land systems refer to ideas of land control more closely affiliated with individual land ownership. "Informal" or "customary" land systems refer to ideas of land control more closely affiliated with land tenure. Terms dictating control over and use of land can therefore take many forms. Some specific examples of present-day or historic forms of formal and informal land ownership include: Land reform

490-565: Is a commonly cited example of the perils of such large-scale reforms, whereby land redistribution contributed to economic decline and increased food insecurity in the country. In cases where land reform has been enacted as part of socialist collectivization , many of the arguments against collectivization more generally apply. An early example of land reform was the Irish Land Acts of 1870–1909. Most all newly independent countries of Eastern and Central Europe implemented land reforms in

539-505: Is a deeply political process and therefore many arguments for and against it have emerged. These arguments vary tremendously over time and place. In the twentieth century, many land reforms emerged from a particular political ideology, such as communism or socialism. In the 19th century in colonized states, a colonial government may have changed the laws dictating land ownership to better consolidate political power or to support its colonial economy. In more recent times, electoral mobilization and

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588-429: Is a set of properties and characteristics of the environment, either generalized or local, as they impinge on human beings and other organisms. It is a measure of the condition of an environment relative to the requirements of one or more species, any human need or purpose. Environmental quality includes the natural environment as well as the built environment , such as air , water purity or pollution , noise and

637-534: Is an intensely political process. Thus, many of those opposed to land reform are nervous as to the underlying motivations of those initiating the reform. For example, some may fear that they will be disadvantaged or victimized as a result of the reforms. Others may fear that they will lose out in the economic and political power struggles (especially in under developed countries) that underlie many land reforms. Other groups and individuals express concerns about land reforms focused on formalization of property rights. While

686-570: Is called a "Bauer" in German and "Bur" in Low German (pronounced in English like boor ). In most of Germany, farming was handled by tenant farmers who paid rents and obligatory services to the landlord—typically a nobleman. Peasant leaders supervised the fields and ditches and grazing rights, maintained public order and morals, and supported a village court which handled minor offenses. Inside

735-399: Is commonly used in a non-pejorative sense as a collective noun for the rural population in the poor and developing countries of the world. Via Campesina , an organization claiming to represent the rights of about 200 million farm-workers around the world, self-defines as an "International Peasant's Movement" as of 2019 . The United Nations and its Human Rights Council prominently uses

784-499: The Black Death had reduced the population of medieval Europe in the mid-14th century, resulting in more land for the survivors and making labor more scarce. In the wake of this disruption to the established order, it became more productive for many laborers to demand wages and other alternative forms of compensation, which ultimately led to the development of widespread literacy and the enormous social and intellectual changes of

833-849: The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). Predecessor bodies were merged in 2001 to create this department with a broader remit to link rural activities to the natural environment. Some responsibilities are devolved to the Scottish Government and are exercised by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) and the National Assembly for Wales , while delivery of environmental initiatives often use partners, including: British Waterways , Environment Agency , Forestry Commission , and Natural England . DEFRA also has

882-657: The Enlightenment . The evolution of ideas in an environment of relatively widespread literacy laid the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution , which enabled mechanically and chemically augmented agricultural production while simultaneously increasing the demand for factory workers in cities, who became what Karl Marx called the proletariat . The trend toward individual ownership of land, typified in England by Enclosure , displaced many peasants from

931-512: The peasant movement in India and to the theories of the revolution in China led by Mao Zedong starting in the 1920s. The anthropologist Myron Cohen, however, asked why the rural population in China were called "peasants" rather than "farmers", a distinction he called political rather than scientific. One important outlet for their scholarly work and theory was The Journal of Peasant Studies . Environmental quality Environmental Quality

980-507: The "great tradition" and the "little tradition" in the work of Robert Redfield . In the 1960s, anthropologists and historians began to rethink the role of peasant revolt in world history and in their own disciplines. Peasant revolution was seen as a Third World response to capitalism and imperialism. The anthropologist Eric Wolf , for instance, drew on the work of earlier scholars in the Marxist tradition such as Daniel Thorner , who saw

1029-588: The "imposition of the historically burdened Western contrasts of town and country, shopkeeper and peasant, or merchant and landlord, serves only to distort the realities of the Chinese economic tradition". In Latin America, the term "peasant" is translated to "Campesino" (from campo —country person), but the meaning has changed over time. While most Campesinos before the 20th century were in equivalent status to peasants—they usually did not own land and had to make payments to or were in an employment position towards

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1078-455: The "peasant," thereby putting the full weight of the Western heritage to use in a new and sometimes harshly negative representation of China's rural population. Likewise, with this development Westerners found it all the more "natural" to apply their own historically derived images of the peasant to what they observed or were told in China. The idea of the peasant remains powerfully entrenched in

1127-460: The 18th and 19th centuries. Serfdom was abolished in Russia in 1861, and while many peasants would remain in areas where their family had farmed for generations, the changes did allow for the buying and selling of lands traditionally held by peasants, and for landless ex-peasants to move to the cities. Even before emancipation in 1861, serfdom was on the wane in Russia. The proportion of serfs within

1176-421: The 19th century, Japanese intellectuals reinvented the Chinese terms fengjian ( 封建 ) for "feudalism" and nongmin ( 农民 ), or "farming people", terms used in the description of feudal Japanese society. These terms created a negative image of Chinese farmers by making a class distinction where one had not previously existed. Anthropologist Myron Cohen considers these terms to be neologisms that represented

1225-541: The Latin pagus , or outlying administrative district. Peasants typically made up the majority of the agricultural labour force in a pre-industrial society . The majority of the people—according to one estimate 85% of the population—in the Middle Ages were peasants. Though "peasant" is a word of loose application, once a market economy had taken root, the term peasant proprietors was frequently used to describe

1274-588: The Modernization of Rural France, 1880–1914 (1976), historian Eugen Weber traced the modernization of French villages and argued that rural France went from backward and isolated to modern and possessing a sense of French nationhood during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He emphasized the roles of railroads, republican schools, and universal military conscription. He based his findings on school records, migration patterns, military-service documents and economic trends . Weber argued that until 1900 or so

1323-475: The Western perception of China to this very day. Writers in English mostly used the term "farmers" until the 1920s, when the term peasant came to predominate, implying that China was feudal, ready for revolution, like Europe before the French Revolution. This Western use of the term suggests that China is stagnant, "medieval", underdeveloped, and held back by its rural population. Cohen writes that

1372-588: The aftermath of World War I . In most countries, the land in excess of certain limits (20–500 ha (49–1,236 acres), depending on the region and type of land) was expropriated; in Finland , it was redeemed and placed into a special fund. Peasant A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or a farmer with limited land-ownership, especially one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to

1421-583: The complexities of the French Revolution, especially the fast-changing scene in Paris, reached isolated areas through both official announcements and long-established oral networks. Peasants responded differently to different sources of information. The limits on political knowledge in these areas depended more on how much peasants chose to know than on bad roads or illiteracy. Historian Jill Maciak concludes that peasants "were neither subservient, reactionary, nor ignorant." In his seminal book Peasants into Frenchmen:

1470-485: The concept of "peasant" could imply "rustic" as well as "robber", as the English term villain / villein . In 21st-century English, the word "peasant" can mean "an ignorant, rude, or unsophisticated person". The word rose to renewed popularity in the 1940s–1960s as a collective term, often referring to rural populations of developing countries in general, as the "semantic successor to 'native', incorporating all its condescending and racial overtones". The word peasantry

1519-689: The economic and pro-poor benefits of increased formalized land rights are still inconclusive according to some critics (see "Arguments against land reform" below). Other arguments in support of land reform point to the need to alleviate conflicting land laws, particularly in former colonies, where formal and informal land systems may exist in tension with each other. Such conflicts can make marginalized groups vulnerable to further exploitation. For example, in many countries in Africa with conflicting land laws, AIDS stigmatization has led to an increasing number of AIDS widows being kicked off marital land by in-laws. While

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1568-581: The economic and social benefits of formalized land rights are often touted, some research suggests that such reforms are either ineffective or may cause further hardship or conflict. Additional arguments against land reform focus on concerns over equity issues and potential elite capture of land, particularly in regards to reforms focused on greater land formalization. If improperly or inadequately implemented, critics worry that such reforms may further disadvantage marginalized groups such as indigenous communities or women. These concerns also lead to questions about

1617-468: The empire had gradually decreased "from 45–50 percent at the end of the eighteenth century, to 37.7 percent in 1858." In Germany, peasants continued to center their lives in the village well into the 19th century. They belonged to a corporate body and helped to manage the community resources and to monitor community life. In the East they had the status of serfs bound permanently to parcels of land. A peasant

1666-449: The family the patriarch made all the decisions, and tried to arrange advantageous marriages for his children. Much of the villages' communal life centered on church services and holy days. In Prussia, the peasants drew lots to choose conscripts required by the army. The noblemen handled external relationships and politics for the villages under their control, and were not typically involved in daily activities or decisions. Information about

1715-437: The great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit

1764-407: The importance of peasants. Its leader Fernand Braudel devoted the first volume—called The Structures of Everyday Life —of his major work, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century to the largely silent and invisible world that existed below the market economy. Other research in the field of peasant studies was promoted by Florian Znaniecki and Fei Xiaotong , and in the post-1945 studies of

1813-506: The institutional capacity of governments to implement land reforms as they are designed. Even if a country does have this capacity, critics worry that corruption and patrimonialism will lead to further elite capture . In looking at more radical reforms, such as large-scale land redistribution, arguments against reform include concerns that redistributed land will not be used productively and that owners of expropriated land will not be compensated adequately or compensated at all. Zimbabwe, again,

1862-463: The land and compelled them, often unwillingly, to become urban factory-workers, who came to occupy the socio-economic stratum formerly the preserve of the medieval peasants. This process happened in an especially pronounced and truncated way in Eastern Europe. Lacking any catalysts for change in the 14th century, Eastern European peasants largely continued upon the original medieval path until

1911-494: The land will be better stewards of it. Land reforms carried out in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea are credited with contributing to the industrial development. The equitable distribution of land led to increasing agricultural outputs, high rural purchasing power and social mobility. Many of the arguments in support of land reform speak to its potentially positive social and economic outcomes. Yet, as mentioned previously, land reform

1960-745: The lead implementation responsibility for most major federal environmental laws (e.g. Clean Air Act , Clean Water Act ) is the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Other federal agencies with significant oversight roles include the Council on Environmental Quality , Department of the Interior and the Army Corps of Engineers . In the United Kingdom, the environment has been the primary responsibility of

2009-413: The past several centuries to place greater emphasis on individual land ownership, formalized through documents such as land titles. Control over land may also be perceived less in terms of individual ownership and more in terms of land use , or through what is known as land tenure. Historically, in many parts of Africa for example, land was not owned by an individual, but rather used by an extended family or

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2058-597: The poor in formal legal and economic systems, increase the poor's ability to access credit and contribute to economic growth and poverty reduction. Many international development organizations and bilateral and multilateral donors, such as the World Bank, have embraced de Soto's ideas, or similar ideas, about the benefits of greater formalized land rights. This has translated into a number of development programs that work with governments and civil society organizations to initiate and implement land reforms. Evidence to support

2107-536: The potential effects which such characteristics may have on physical and mental health. In the United States, the term is applied with a body of federal and state standards and regulations that are monitored by regulatory agencies. All states in the U.S. have some form of a department or commission that is responsible for a variety of activities such as monitoring quality, responding to citizen complaints, and enforcing environmental regulations. The agency with

2156-706: The repressed. Arguments in support of such reforms gained particular momentum after the publication of The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto in 2000. The poor, he argues, are often unable to secure formal property rights, such as land titles, to the land on which they live or farm because of poor governance, corruption and/or overly complex bureaucracies. Without land titles or other formal documentation of their land assets, they are less able to access formal credit. Political and legal reforms within countries, according to de Soto, will help to include

2205-531: The rural population as a key element in the transition from feudalism to capitalism . Wolf and a group of scholars criticized both Marx and the field of Modernization theorists for treating peasants as lacking the ability to take action . James C. Scott 's field observations in Malaysia convinced him that villagers were active participants in their local politics even though they were forced to use indirect methods. Many of these activist scholars looked back to

2254-585: The term "peasant" in a non-pejorative sense, as in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas adopted in 2018. In general English-language literature, the use of the word "peasant" has steadily declined since about 1970. The word "peasant" is derived from the 15th-century French word païsant , meaning one from the pays , or countryside; ultimately from

2303-448: The traditional rural population in countries where smallholders farmed much of the land. More generally, the word "peasant" is sometimes used to refer pejoratively to those considered to be "lower class", perhaps defined by poorer education and/or a lower income. The open field system of agriculture dominated most of Europe during medieval times and endured until the nineteenth century in many areas. Under this system, peasants lived on

2352-533: The use of land as a patronage resource have been proposed as possible motivations for land reform efforts, such as the extensive redistributive land reforms of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Arguments in support of land reform focus on its potential social and economic benefits, particularly in developing countries , that may emerge from reforms focused on greater land formalization. Such benefits may include eradicating food insecurity and alleviating rural poverty. And

2401-561: The woman may have both customary and statutory rights to the land, confusion over which set of laws has primacy, or even a lack of knowledge of relevant laws, leave many AIDS widows at a significant disadvantage. Also, conflicting formal and informal land laws can also clog a country's legal system, making it prone to corruption. Additional arguments for land reform focus on the potential environmental benefits of reform. For example, if reform leads to greater security of land ownership , through either formal or informal means, then those that use

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