Nineteenth‐Century rural England: A case for ‘peasant studies'?

Abstract

Small‐scale family‐based agricultural production was a common feature of rural England before the First World War. These producers were distinct from capitalist farmers in that labour was not normally employed, and surplus value was therefore not appropriated by the farmer. These people have been largely ignored by historians of rural England on the assumption that they were either numerically insignificant or were unimportant. The first of these assumptions is unsustainable and the second is unsubstantiated. In order to examine these people within a developed capitalist economy, concepts developed by students of the peasantry are likely to be of value, and a plea is made for studies of rural England based on class analyses, and including all of the various groups in the English countryside.

Notes

School of Cultural and Community Studies, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, Sussex. Versions of this article were presented to the ‘Peasants’ seminar, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, and to the AFRAS and Social Anthropology seminars at the University of Sussex. I am grateful to the conveners and participants of these groups for valuable comments and suggestions. Especially, 1 thank Terry Byres and Henry Bernstein for extensive and constructive criticisms of an earlier draft.