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Peasantry, Land Use, and Change: A Review Article

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Folke Dovring
Folke Dovring
Affiliation:
University of Illinois
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Extract

The accelerated tempo of change since the Industrial Revolution has naturally focussed interest on those phases of development that lead from preindustrial to industrial types of society. Economists discussing development problems, and especially those concentrating on the so-called “take-off” phase, thereby bluntly assume that the pre-industrial, “traditional” or “handicraft” types of society were static, as they easily appear when compared to the dynamic tempo of change experienced — and required — in the modern epoch.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , April 1962 , pp. 364 - 374
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1962

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References

1 On the theory of development phases used by Rostow and others, see for instances Cameron, R. E., “Comparative Economic Progress, A Review Article”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, III, No. 2 (01 1961), pp. 231–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Firey, Walter, Man, Mind and Land. A Theory of Resource Use (Glencoe, Illinois, 1960), pp. 256.Google Scholar

3 Edward Hall, T., The Silent Language (New York, 1959), especially Ch. 4.Google Scholar

4 Bibliography of recent publications on agrarian history (since 1952) in Historia Agriculturae (Groningen); extensive references also in Agricultural History Review (London), Agricultural History (Urbana, Illinois) and Zeitschrift für Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie (Frankfurt am Main).

5 Abercrombie, K. C., “The Transition from Subsistence to Market Agriculture in Africa South of the Sahara”, Monthly Bulletin of Agricultural Economics and Statistics (Rome, F.A.O.), Feb. 1961Google Scholar; cf Jones, W. O., Manioc in Africa (Stanford, Cal., 1959).Google Scholar

6 The Population of Ruanda-Urundi (= United Nations, Population Studies, No. 15) (New York, 1953).

7 For instance, an alleged shortage of ploughs is ascribed to “a pervasive capital insufficiency in the mediaeval economy” (p. 86), although most mediaeval ploughs were made of wood; the system of intermixed (fragmented) holdings is said to be “dictated by the co-operative nature of the plow team” (p. 96), although it exists everywhere in Europe, even in areas with individual light ploughs or no ploughs at all; root crops are said to require hoeing in place of plowing (p. 127)—they require both, of course; and Lord Ernie is taken as authority (p. 128) for the statement that the crisis starting in 1813 caused “the disappearance of most of the smaller landholders.” What Ernie refers to is an alleged (though not conclusively proven) diminution in the number of freeholders or lesser landowners in general. Landholders, as Firey refers to them, include tenant farmers, and we have no evidence of any drastic or permanent change in the number of farms (operational holdings).

8 See, for instance, the “District Census Handbooks” for hill districts in Assam in the 1951 Census of India.

9 Warriner, Doreen, Economics of Peasant Farming (London, 1939), especially pp. 25 sq.Google Scholar

10 Dovring, F., Land and Labor in Europe 1900–1950 (The Hague, 1956), Chapters 3 and 6.Google Scholar

11 Lannou, M. Le, Pâtres et paysans de la Sardaigne (Tours, 1941).Google Scholar

12 Okasaki, A., Histoire du lapon: L'économie et la population (Paris, 1958), pp. 36 seq.Google Scholar