‘Almost idiotic wretchedness’: a long history of blaming peasants

Abstract

From the late eighteenth century in Britain to the late twentieth century in predominantly rural societies in the global south, most descriptions of peasants provided by government planners or economists have been remarkably similar. These descriptions focus on five alleged elements of peasant life: (1) peasants are backward and uncivilised – one aspect of that backwardness is their inability to control their sexual urges and thus their tendency to have too many children, (2) peasants are not sufficiently enamoured with consumption and their too easily met needs stifle economic development – this is often considered to be a function of laziness and thus peasants need to be compelled to labour harder, (3) peasants are inefficient and do not use land effectively and thus need to be compelled to labour more efficiently, (4) peasants get in the way of the necessary process of allowing capital to be applied to the land and thus need to be swept from the land, (5) peasants are dangerous and difficult to incorporate into states as responsible citizens. This paper provides examples of the rhetoric used to describe peasants in four different periods and places: during the enclosures and the consolidation of capitalism in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Irish potato famine in the middle of the nineteenth century, the spread of colonialism and a type of modernity in other than European locales in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the rise of development practice and national consolidation in what was then called the third world after the second world war. The paper argues that these descriptions were both the result of faulty imaginings of peasants and deemed necessary as a way to sell economic and social policies that worked to expel peasants from the land and turn them into wage labourers.

Keywords:

• peasants
• commons
• enclosures
• capital
• development
• Malthus
• potato famine

Notes

¹In this article, I use peasant to mean a rural cultivator who produces both for subsistence and the market, employing primarily family labour, very limited capital, and for whom significant non-market considerations are in place concerning production decisions, returns to labour, and access to and disposal of land.

²Along with the various editions of Malthus' An essay on the principles of population as it affects the future improvement of society, with remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other writers (London, 1798) including most especially the 2nd ed. in 1803 entitled, An essay on the principles of population or, a view of its past and present effects on human happiness, with an inquiry into our prospects respecting its future removal or mitigation of the evils which it occasions (London, 1803), see Ross (1998), Avery (1997), and Polanyi (1957).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jim Handy

The author wishes to thank the organisers of the ‘Food Sovereignty: Theory, Praxis and Power’ conference held at St. Andrews College, University of Saskatchewan, 17–18 February, 2009 and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council for its support of that conference.