The Transformation of the World (146 page)

Studies of the nineteenth-century work ethic in non-European civilizations are still lacking. What they would probably show is that attitudes to work differed not only, often not even primarily, along cultural lines of division; they were both class specific and gender specific, and external stimuli and a favorable institutional setting kindled work energies in the most diverse circumstances. A good illustration of this is the speedy and successful response of many West African farmers to new opportunities for export production. Efficient sectors—there were some in colonial times (e.g., cotton)—were adapted to the changed conditions, and new ones were created and built up.
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Finally, in all or most civilizations, conceptions of work have been associated with different expectations regarding the “fair” treatment of workers.
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1 The Weight of Rural Labor

Dominance of the Countryside

In Europe, as everywhere else in the world, agriculture was the largest sector of employment throughout the nineteenth century.
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Only in the years immediately after the Second World War did industrial society establish itself as the dominant type all over Europe, including the Soviet Union. Its supremacy was short-lived, however, since by 1970 the service sector accounted for a larger share of total employment in Europe. The classical industrial society was thus a fleeting moment in world history. There were only a few countries—Britain, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland—where industry was the leading sector of employment for more than half a century. It never reached that position in the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Greece, or even France, and it did so for only brief periods in Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia. The brevity is even more striking if we look beyond Europe. Even in the two countries with the most productive industry, the United States and Japan, industrial work never overtook employment in farming and services. Of course, both there and elsewhere there were highly industrialized regions, but in 1900 industrial work had pride of place in only a few countries, such as Britain, Germany, and Switzerland.
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In large parts of the world, agriculture grew in importance during the nineteenth century, since the advancing frontiers were mostly areas where new land was opened up for farming.
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Sometimes the main type of pioneer was the planter or big rancher, but more frequently it was the small farmer: in the highlands of China, in Africa, in the Caucasian steppe, in Burma and Java. Some authors have spoken of a century of “peasantization” throughout Southeast Asia, and it is true that around 1900 its lowland areas were dotted with a myriad of tiny farms.
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Peasants had not always “been there forever,” since the Neolithic revolution. And they could still be “made” in the nineteenth century.

In 1900 or 1914 most people around the world were engaged in agriculture. They worked on and with the soil. They mainly toiled in the open air, where they were dependent on the elements. That an ever-increasing share of all work came to be performed indoors was a great novelty of the nineteenth century. For someone newly arrived from the country, the first impression of a factory must have been of a work
house
. At the same time, as a result of technical advances in mining, work penetrated deeper and deeper underground. Even the most widespread trends of the century—above all, urbanization—had little effect on the position of agriculture as some countertendencies, no less “modern,” also grew stronger. The expansion of the world economy between 1870 and 1914 (especially after 1896) greatly stimulated agrarian production for export, and agrarian interests exerted huge political influence even in the most developed countries. Despite a relative decline in the weight of the upper nobility, large landowners put their stamp on the British political elite until the last quarter of the century,
while in many Continental countries agrarian magnates continued to set the tone. Any regime in France, whether monarchy or republic, had to pay heed to a strong class of small farmers, and agricultural interests in the United States were consistently well represented in the political system.

Most people were tillers of the soil. What did this mean? A number of disciplines have long occupied themselves with this question: agrarian history, agrarian sociology, ethnology, and the largely related study of folklore. For premodern Europe and large parts of the nineteenth-century world, there was no need for a special “agrarian history”; farmers and rural society were anyway the central theme of economic and social history.
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Of the numerous discussions since Alexander Chayanov's pathbreaking studies in the early 1920s, one of particular interest for global history is the debate of the 1970s between supporters of a “moral economy” approach and “rational choice” theorists.
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For the former, the peasantry is subsistence oriented and hostile to the market, favoring communal over individual ownership, avoiding risks, and behaving defensively as a community toward the outside world; its ideal is justice within a traditional framework and relations of solidarity, also between landowners and tenants, patrons and dependents; the selling of land is seen only as a last resort. For the latter, peasants are at least potentially small entrepreneurs; they know how to use market opportunities when these present themselves, not necessarily to maximize their profits but to ensure their material existence by their own efforts, without completely abandoning group solidarity. Capitalist penetration leads to differentiation among such peasants, who may at first have been relatively homogeneous in social terms.

Each of these approaches refers to different examples, so that it is not possible to make a definite comparative judgment as to their empirical validity. In some historical situations one tends to find peasants with an individual business spirit; in others a community-centered traditionalism prevails. The important point here is that regionally or culturally specific classifications do not take us very far. There are no “typically Western European” or “typically Asian” farmers; very similar kinds of market-oriented entrepreneurialism may be found in the Rhineland, northern China, and West Africa. In the case of Japan, it is impossible already in the seventeenth century to find “traditional” peasants producing for no one but themselves in tiny isolated villages. Farmers who switched their crop mix according to market opportunity, using the best seeds or latest irrigation techniques and consciously striving to raise their productivity, were much more representative. They do not correspond to the image of primitive villagers imprisoned in narrow, unchanging life cycles.
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Villages

The actual work situation of people on the land differed in many respects. Nature smiled on many crops but ruled others out completely; it determined the number of harvests and the length of the harvest year. Irrigated agriculture, especially the intensive garden-style cultivation of rice in East and Southeast
Asia, where farmers stood directly in water, required an organization of work different from the hoeing of crops on dry soil. Household involvement was also highly varied, often with a sharp differentiation between the sexes and the generations. The main dividing line ran between two extreme situations: in one, the whole family, including children, would take part in rural labor and perhaps use any free time for domestic crafts; in the other, migrant workers lived apart from their families in all-male makeshift communities, with no insertion into village structures.

There were villages in most agrarian societies. The delineation of their function was of varying sharpness. In extreme cases, the village might be many things at once: “an economic community, a fiscal community, a mutual-assistance community, a religious community, the defender of peace and order within its boundaries, and the guardian of the public and private morals of its residents.”
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Village communities were especially strong where at least one of two factors played a role: (1) the village functioned as an administrative unit (e.g., a government tax-raising center), perhaps even being legally recognized as an independent corporation; (2) the village commune disposed of land for general use or even—as in the Russian
obshchina
—collectively decided on its distribution and redistribution. The latter was by no means a matter of course. In the intensive small-farmer economy of northern China, nearly all the land was privately owned; the state, whose agencies reached down only to district level, did not collect taxes from the village as a body but relied on an intermediary appointed by the community (the
xiangbao
) to work out the best method.
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The village commune was thus less developed than in Europe. In southern China, on the other hand, extensive clan structures—which might be, but were not necessarily, identical with a self-contained settlement—undertook tasks of integration and coordination. It would be wrong to regard such clans as inherently backward or “primitive” in terms of the history of development; they might constitute the framework for highly efficient agriculture. A similar function was served (not only in China) by temple communities that held property in common.

The position of village communes in Eurasia therefore varied considerably. In Russia—at least until Prime Minister Stolypin's land reform of 1907—they played an important role in redistributing land in conditions where private ownership was little developed, whereas in Japan they were a multipurpose institution held together by an ideology of “community spirit” (
kyōdotai
), and in large parts of China (especially where clan ties were absent and the proportion of landless laborers was high) they exhibited a low degree of cohesion.
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The Japanese case also raises the important question of the extent to which a stable village elite developed among the peasantry. In Japan, as in many parts of Western Europe, this happened through primogeniture: the eldest son inherited the farm. In China, and partly also in India, private landholdings were time and again parceled out among the male heirs, and it was difficult to maintain the continuity even of a modest family farm.
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An equally significant dimension of peasant life was access to the land. Who was the “owner”? Who held (possibly graduated) use rights? Was leaseholding (with its numerous variants) part of the picture,
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and, if so, how much use was made of it? Did tenants have to pay a fixed sum of money or a share of the harvest? In what form was it handed over? In other words, to what degree was the rural economy monetized? Were noneconomic (“feudal”) duties still expected of the peasantry—in particular, labor service for the landowner or the state (e.g., road or dike construction)? Were farmers free to sell their land? How was the land market organized?

A last major parameter is the extent to which production was geared to the market. Were the markets in question close or distant? Was there any network of local exchange relations, perhaps centered on a periodic market in a pivotal rural town? How much did farmers specialize, and how much was this at the expense of provision for themselves? Did they take their own produce to the market or rely on middlemen? Finally, what regular contact was there between farmers and nonfarmers? The latter might be city people, but they could also be nomads in the vicinity. The former would include absentee landlords who used local agents and had nothing in common culturally with the villagers. Large local landowners might nevertheless be seen in a church or temple, whereas urban magnates or landlords lived in an entirely separate world.

The Example of India

This diversity of agrarian forms of existence cannot be grouped only by continent or in the categories of East and West. Let us take a fully developed and at first sight typical peasant society, in the year 1863. Of its population of roughly a million, 93 percent live in village communities with two thousand inhabitants or less; nearly all are members either of a nuclear family (more than a half of cases) or of a family spanning several generations. Almost everyone owns some land, which is not generally in short supply; 15 percent of the total surface area consists of fields, pastures, and vegetable gardens. Anyone in need of land can obtain some from their village community. Large landholdings and tenancies are not a feature of the situation. Some peasants are richer than others, but there is no landlord class and no nobility. People work almost exclusively for their own subsistence, producing the food they eat as well as most of their clothing, footwear, household utensils, and furniture. Granaries help to guard against famines. There are few cities that require market relations for their supply. Cash for tax payments can be raised without difficulty through the selling of cattle. There are no railroads, virtually no roads that a horse and cart can use, scarcely any businesses or proto-industry, and no financial institutions. Ninety-eight percent of the rural population is illiterate. Although nominally belonging to a form of “high religion,” people are guided by superstition in their everyday existence. They do not expect much from life and have little ambition to improve things or to work more than is necessary. Few and far between are those who
plough more land than they need to feed their family. An abundance of natural resources means that the country does not strike one as poor. Its per capita national income is estimated to be roughly one-third of Germany's at that time.

This egalitarian idyll is not a “typically Asiatic” society made up of autarkic peasant settlements such as people in Europe imagined in the mid-nineteenth century: loosely controlled archipelagos of self-sufficient villages, with an immobile population consisting of self-sufficient households. Nor is it drawn from one of the fertile areas of tropical Africa. The land described above is European Serbia, at the time of its first more or less reliable census.
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