Peasant agriculture

Seventeenth-century Europe was a peasant society. It is easy to lose sight of this fact when contemplating the imperial power of its monarchs and the capitalistic development of its bourgeoisie. The strivings of Europe's privileged and urban classes were supported by the often fragile scaffolding of a peasant economy. The ambitious plans of the kings, aristocrats, clerics, merchants, scientists, and scholars depended on the peasant economy with an immediacy that made it impossible for these persons to forget it for any length of time.

We may be faulted for overdramatization in asserting that the potential for the development of the European economy was locked up in its peasant villages and hamlets. Yet it could hardly have existed elsewhere – here the great majority of the European population lived and worked. It is customary today to identify in underdeveloped countries a modern, urban sector and a backward, rural sector, and to attach one's hopes for economic progress on the ability of the urban sector to reach into and transform the lethargic agrarian economy. Such an identification of “modern” and “backward” would be inappropriate in application to preindustrial Europe. The urban sector, in contrast to the cities of present-day peasant economies, was not linked to and supported by a modern, urban world elsewhere. As a consequence the peasant economy of Europe had to develop through its own efforts; it could not be stimulated by inputs, technology, or subsidies from an advanced society as transmitted by nearby cities.