This chapter assesses the critique of Indian anticolonial nationalism by A. R. Desai, a Marxist sociologist during the post-independence period (1950s to 1990s). By initiating a debate on the class orientation of Indian nationalism and analyzing the exploitative capitalist processes by the nation-state in post-independence India, Desai overturned the complex and convoluted relationship between anticolonial thought, nationalism, coloniality, and social science scholarship in India. He confronted the existing social anthropological and structural functionalist school of thought dominating sociology in the early years after independence while his project of Marxist historical sociology contributed to the creation of new areas of research for sociology in India. The chapter also highlights some of the limitations in Desai’s scholarship and suggests that his sociology was about opening up new areas of research rather than doing a rigorous Marxist analysis of class relations.

This chapter charts how, from the early eighteenth century, imperial elites projected visions of improvement and abundance onto Russia’s wetlands, reimagining them as fuel deposits. The prospect of substituting peat for timber motivated state officials, landowners, scientists, and later the directors of industrial companies to explore ways to convert peat into heat energy. The chapter argues that the appropriation of wetlands for fuel generation was, by and large, an elite project that imposed the developmentalist visions of the imperial state and industrial elites on peatlands and the people living with them. While most peasants continued valuing peatlands for what they offered above ground, elite groups conceptualized peat as a substance on its own rather than a component of a larger web of relationships co-created by living organisms, water, abiotic matter, and the climate. This reductive understanding of peatlands would underpin the history of peat extraction in central Russia until the end of the Soviet period.

Chapter 4 studies the political, cultural, and economic impact of foreign machetes and other agricultural tools. It shows how popular men and women’s expert knowledge about these goods was not transferred from above or received from abroad but inherited and acquired in practice. Peasants and muleteers used machetes to clear the land, grow their crops, and travel the country; artisans, bogas, and smallholders, to defend their honor, their lives, and their property. As this chapter shows, over the course of the nineteenth century, foreign tools, especially the machete, reshaped these popular actors’ collective identities and underscored their contribution to the nation’s material improvement and progress – not only as part of the country’s labor force but as consumers themselves. Although these Plebeian consumers might have had limited choices due to their limited purchasing power, this did not preclude them from appropriating foreign tools, expressing dissatisfaction with certain agricultural implements, and seeking ways to access the ones they liked and preferred. Most important, machetes allowed them to shape and reiterate their citizenship on the ground. As such, Colombia’s popular consumers became not only critical agents in the global market but active and productive citizens of the new republic.

This chapter focuses on the complex relationships between Gaza’s urban elite and the rural population around the city, especially the network of villages in the Subdistrict (kaza) of Gaza. It discusses the composition of the rural population and the ethnic, social, and economic barriers between them including peasants, Bedouins and Egyptians, the involvement of the rural population in urban politics and its alignment with rival coalitions within the city, and the complex relationships with Bedouin groups in the city’s vicinity and farther away.

This chapter examines the countryside of late antique southern Gaul as a context for the development of popular culture at this time, making use of archaeological as well as literary evidence. It covers Provence, with a particular focus on the territorium of the city of Arles, although areas of western Languedoc are also considered due to the exceptional archaeological data available. Key themes and questions arising from recent scholarship are introduced to shape the discussion that follows before the landscape of the region is introduced. The inhabitants of the region are discussed next, in terms of their social and legal status, while the following section considers developments in settlement and social organisation, including the fate of the villa. A detailed look at livelihoods and patterns of productive activity follows. The final section looks at religious structures and landscapes, including the impact of the church in the late antique countryside.

Our survey revealed very few sites belonging to the Early Medieval period (AD 700-1000) apart from Tuscania, indicating a combination of population decline and abandonment of the countryside for the security of the town. There was significant demographic growth in the High Medieval period (AD 1000-1200): 38 sites, together with 30 sites with ‘generic Medieval’ material likely to belong to this phase. The new foundations, distributed throughout the survey area, comprised nucleated but unfortified settlements, a habitation form about which the documentary record is largely silent. In the Late Medieval period (AD 1200-1500: 16 sites), new foundations were established within a few kilometres of Tuscania with little evidence for settlement in the countryside beyond. Most farmers preferred to live in defensible castelli, or within the vicinity of Tuscania. As elsewhere in Italy, the second half of the 2nd millennium has witnessed the increasing abandonment of many small farms by peasant (contadini) families in the face of urban growth and industrialization, with globalization in recent decades accelerating their replacement and absorption by agribusinesses, and the flight to the countryside by middle class commuters from Rome.

As the Middle Ages drew to a close, however, a rising share of Europeans were eating fish from systems other than their natural local waters. By 1500 around Paris, for instance, elite menus featured carp and headless codfish, while lesser folk made do with herring and haddock. Beside the Mediterranean, Valencia was receiving millions of Atlantic sardines and hake, while Romans could get herring from the North Sea, Norwegian cod, and tuna from Sicily. Both cultured carp and fishes from Europe’s economic frontiers changed Europeans’ relations with aquatic nature.

Carp aquaculture colonized nature, creating artificial habitats to rear an organism alien to western Europe. Late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century financial records and instructional manuals from east-central Europe detail an original and distinctive European mode for farming fish. Those practices provide a benchmark to identify and trace their creation in twelfth- to thirteenth-century France – where the carp was a late invader – and subsequent spread eastwards of the innovation. Human-controlled aquaculture created thousands of local ecological revolutions across interior Europe, providing inland elites with a steady source of live fresh fish, serving as a vehicle of elite power over subjected nature and people, and replacing indigenous ecosystems with private anthropogenic habitats tailored for domesticated, soon also feral, invaders. For contemporary writers fish had become objects of human agency.

Chapter 5 is about the economic dimensions of premodern cities. After a discussion of economic growth, the chapter contrasts commercial and command economies and discusses urban craft specialization and the division of labor as well as regional and international exchange systems.

Communal politics is an important and still largely unexplored aspect of social and political relations under the Ancien Régime. This chapter attempts to get at the village view by means of a vendetta which has left a rich trail of archival sources. We get an invaluable and rare insight into non-elite politics before 1789 that goes beyond the standard historical conventions of peasant resistance and rebellion, shedding light on villagers’ motives, deliberations and divisions, as well as their capacity to organise, use the law and exploit the protection offered by local lords and officials. The story that emerges is not simply one of resistance to the royal fisc, centre against the periphery, or the people versus the nobility. Rather, the demands of the state after 1635 divided local society among itself and led to faction and violence within the corps politique. While in the short term these internal divisions posed a challenge to traditional local order, they paradoxically offered an opportunity for the state and its agents to intervene as arbiters, an opportunity that was realised by Louis XIV’s redeployment of the intendants after 1661.

Leo Tolstoy wrote throughout his career about Russian peasants, first at a class-inflected distance but later with admiration for their clothing, labor, and religious and moral feelings. As a Count, he automatically held a particular position vis-à-vis peasants, especially before the 1861 emancipation. His literary works and teaching tales depict peasants variously, sometimes idealizing an individual (from Platon Karataev in War and Peace to Alyosha the Pot), other times looking with distrust or frustration at peasant groups and their stubborn opposition to farming innovations. Eventually, Tolstoy famously adopted peasant garb, practiced many kinds of peasant crafts and labor, and enthusiastically communicated with peasant and sectarian thinkers, admiring their simple Christian faith. His primers for peasant children and collections of teaching tales often picked up folktales, paring their style down to the extreme simplicity that he considered typical and preferable. Toward the end of his life Tolstoy sought out the opinions and experiences of Russian peasant laborers in works of passionately engaged journalism. Major figures in Russian revolutionary movements (Lenin, Plekhanov) admired his insights, letting his authority in depicting peasant life continue into the Soviet period.

This chapter explains the Great Reforms of Alexander II, and Tolstoy’s complex response to them in his work. It explores the basic structure of serfdom, and the ways in which it was fundamental to Russian social and economic structures in first half of the nineteenth century. The chapter explains the process of emancipation, and how it gave serfs a degree of freedom while still keeping economic and social power in the hands of the landowners. Tolstoy recognized serfdom as unjust, but also owned serfs and made only an ineffectual attempt to partially free them before the official end of serfdom in 1861. In his works, serfdom is described as oppressive but also connected with love and family. His works also reflect his concern that emancipation would destroy the nobility without solving the fundamental problems of poverty and exploitation. The creation of the zemstvo as a system of local government was a similar source of ambivalence for Tolstoy. He served in his local zemstvo for some years, but in his fiction the zemstvo is shown as an inadequate solution. His later works suggest that a more radically empathetic solution is needed to break down the barriers between peasants and landowners.

Chapter 2 establishes the context usually neglected by histories of agricultural literature: how farming was learned without books in the prevailing system of knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It examines the discourse on the ‘mystery of husbandry’ (and closely associated discourse of ‘secrets’), a term denoting the knowledge and skills acquired by experienced practitioners that were inaccessible to amateurs, to both elucidate contemporary beliefs about learning through labour and to indicate the ways in which the publication of husbandry manuals disrupted existing notions of expertise. In doing so, it explores the parallels between craft and farming knowledge and borrows ideas from modern studies to argue that early modern husbandmen and housewives would have possessed a ‘peasant epistemology’ analogous to an ‘artisanal epistemology’. The chapter argues that when linked to broader socio-economic changes in farming, the emergence of the term ‘mystery of husbandry’ in the seventeenth century can be seen as a symptom of tectonic shifts in the social system of agricultural knowledge. In short, the knowledge of husbandry was being commodified in an increasingly competitive commercial environment.

This chapter on Orationsargues that Cavendish displayed a wider vision than she is normally given credit for. There was little that did not interest her or that she did not believe herself competent about which to write. She mostly ignored so-called women’s topics, and she gave slant attention to religious or spiritual subjects. Orations particularly demonstrates her interest in politics and topics of import to the country, including the perspective of peasants and soldiers. She identified with women throughout, although often critical of them. Her introduction makes clear that those considered more educated and knowledgeable (especially men) tried to keep her from writing about “their” domain, but they were not successful. This essay reveals her resistance to such control and her resentment against its power. It reflects, as well, the ways those in power directed her and William’s lives following their return to England in 1660. In her Orations, she documented both her intellectual and political interests and her strength of character in stipulating her goals beyond women’s sphere.