The one remaining category of nonurban society is that of the peasantry. Peasants are not nomadic but sedentary (thus distinguishable from both hunting-gathering societies and pastoralists); they are not horticultural tribal societies but more intensively and fully agricultural; and neither are they urban, like populations who lived in the centres of the classic civilizations.
Although writers on peasantry have not agreed on a precise definition, accounts of peasant cultures are likely to include these characteristics: peasant communities tend to be small, tradition bound, and resistant to change. Moreover, and perhaps most significantly, peasant societies are “part-societies” or “part-cultures” in relation to some larger civilization, colony, urban centre, state, or elite class. In this relationship the peasant occupies the inferior position because rural isolation tends to make him ignorant and no match for the sophisticated urbanite, and poverty keeps him dependent generation after generation. It is not simply that the peasant is somehow “exploited” (a difficult point to determine in most cases) but that his village is normally small, poor, ignorant, and backward compared with the urban centre. Horticultural tribes, by contrast, though living in even smaller villages and greater poverty and ignorance, possess in some sense a complete culture. What seems universal is the peasant’s low status, with its concomitant ascription of poverty and ignorance, in contrast to other parts of the same culture.
Historical and geographic survey
Peasantries emerged with the urban revolution by about 4000 bc in Mesopotamia and about 1000 bc in Middle America. Some agricultural villages by then had begun to become cities, thereby initiating the process that gradually led to the formation of the empires of classical civilization.
One major significance of the classical empire was that it could protect and thus politically incorporate, at least in some areas, scattered villages of simple cultivators. These outlying agricultural villages could not have survived without internal pacification (in the law-and-order sense) and without some kind of frontier militia. In exchange for such protection the rulers of the urban centre exacted heavy tribute from the peasantry. They soon realized that the price of the protection they extended to the peasants could easily be increased to the point of virtual expropriation. As a result, the peasants were reduced to the barest subsistence level. The urban rulers, by contrast, steadily advanced toward a literate culture, thereby widening the gulf between the city elite and peasantry.
In the course of time the preindustrial urban centre, with its statelike protection and intervention in the lives of peasants, made it possible to extend agricultural domains, usually as peasant holdings, into pastoral or other “wild” territory. An enormous part of the world’s population became peasants as primitive peoples and nomads were dominated and displaced or transformed.
In the 20th century, with the rise of modern science and industry, peasants are being rapidly displaced in all of the so-called developing or modernizing parts of the world. To understand what peasants are, it is helpful to contrast them with what they are not—farmers in an industrialized world. The modern farmer, operating on a cost-accounting basis, has little in common with the peasant family or villager, to whom the tilling of the soil is a traditional way of life rather than a large-scale enterprise.
Peasants could not simply turn into farmers primarily because they lacked the capital. In some parts of the industrialized world, such as Great Britain, central France, and the Low Countries, peasant villages managed to survive by maintaining a low standard of living and long working hours and often by developing some special handicraft for sale as folk art. More often, however, peasants became hired workers in the fields, or they migrated to the cities or overseas to the Americas.
Although there are no peasants in the United States and Canada, except for a few widely scattered villages of French Canadians, Appalachian mountaineers, Southern sharecroppers, and perhaps Pueblo and Navajo Indians, peasantries are still extant in large numbers in Europe, the Middle East, West Africa, southern and eastern Asia, and Latin America. Peasant cultures in these disparate regions vary considerably, depending on both ecological and historical factors.
Elman R. Service The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaTypes of peasant societies
The community of self-serving households
Though peasants are usually thought of as living in small, close-knit communities huddled against outside danger, they sometimes are so well-protected in mountainous or insular isolation that they feel secure enough to live more independently. In such circumstances, they dwell in scattered households in close proximity to the land they cultivate. They require a market centre of some sort where they may exchange goods and services. The Irish countryman, the isolated fermier of the French Massif Central, the Scottish crofter, the Paraguayan campesino, and the Brazilian caboclo are examples of such independent peasants. Occasionally the same people will be found living in close communities and also in scattered, more self-sufficient households. In the state of Michoacán in Mexico, for example, some of the tightest and closest knit communities to be found anywhere on Earth ring Lake Pátzcuaro, in immediate proximity to the large modern market town and tourist centre of Pátzcuaro. These are the fishing-, agricultural-, and handicraft-specialist villages of the Tarascan Indians. But many more thousands of Tarascans also live scattered in the adjacent mountains, making only infrequent visits to the market centres.