science

Peasant movement

Peasant movement is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Peasant movement rather than just read about it. In short: A peasant movement is a social movement involved with the agricultural policy, which claims peasants rights. Peasant movements have a long history that can be traced to the numerous peasant uprisings that occurred in various regions of the world throughout human history.

Key takeaways

Peasant movement belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Peasant movement to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Peasant movement from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

A peasant movement is a social movement involved with the agricultural policy, which claims peasants rights. Peasant movements have a long history that can be traced to the numerous peasant uprisings that occurred in various regions of the world throughout human history. Early peasant movements were usually the feudal and semi-feudal societies, and resulted in violent uprisings. More recent movements, fitting the definitions of social movements, are usually much less violent, and their demands are centered on better prices for agricultural produce, better wages and working conditions for the agricultural laborers, and increasing the agricultural production. In Colonial India, the economic policies of European merchants and planters during the period Company rule adversely affected the peasant class, protecting the landlords and money lenders while they exploited the peasants. The peasants rose in revolt against economic on many occasions. The peasants in Bengal formed a trade union and revolted against the compulsion of cultivating indigo. Anthony Pereira, a political scientist, has defined a peasant movement as a "social movement made up of peasants (small landholders or farm workers on large farms), usually inspired by the goal of improving the situation of peasants in a nation or territory".

Peasant movements by country or region

India

Several peasant movement in India arose during the colonial era, when economic policies by various British colonial administrations led to the decline of traditional handicraft industries. These policies lead to change of ownership in lands, land overcrowding, increased debt among the peasant classes of India. This led to peasant uprisings during the colonial period, and development of peasant movements in the post-colonial period. The Kisan (farmer) Sabha movement started in Bihar under the leadership of Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, who formed the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha (BPKS) in 1929 to mobilise peasant grievances against the zamindari attacks on their occupancy rights. In 1938, the crops in Eastern Khandesh were destroyed due to heavy rains. The peasants were ruined. In order to get the land revenue waived, Sane Guruji organized meetings and processions in many places and took out marches to the Collector's office. The peasants joined the revolutionary movement of 1942 in great numbers. Gradually the peasant movement intensified and spread across the rest of India. All these radical developments on the peasant front culminated in the formation of the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) at the Lucknow session of the Indian National Congress in April 1936 with Swami Sahajanand Saraswati elected as its first President. In the subsequent years, the movement was increasingly dominated by Socialists and Communists as it moved away from the Congress, by 1938 Haripura session of the Congress, under the presidency of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, the rift became evident, and by May 1942, the Communist Party of India, which was finally legalised by the then government in July 1942, had taken over AIKS, all across India including Bengal where its membership grew considerably. D. D. Kosambi and R.S. Sharma, together with Daniel Thorner, brought peasants into the study of Indian history for the first time.

Korea

Poland

Polish peasant movement focused on improvements in the life of Polish peasants, and empowering them in politics. It was strong from mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. Despite relatively low support on national level, the Polish People's Party maintains somewhat strong position in many local parliaments.

United States

Zimbabwe The struggle for the Liberation of Zimbabwe is a theme that has been accorded fair autobiographical attention in Zimbabwe. Scholarly attention on the war was predicated on the need to understand how the "underdog" freedom fighters managed to paralyse the state-funded Rhodesian armed forces. In this light, the widely accepted view came to be that the "guerrillas" / freedom fighters established rapport with the peasants during the course of the war. Nevertheless, there is an anti-thesis between nationalist and revisionist scholarly interpretation on the matter. The nationalist historians advance a glorious interpretation of the role of peasants by arguing that there was a correlation between the guerrillas' Maoist ideology of relying on mass support to win a war and the peasants' grievances in the white colonial state. They justify this claim by rationalizing that the peasants had long developed a spirit of resentment prior to guerrilla infiltration in their areas, thus, when the guerrillas came, their ideas fell on fertile ground. Contrary to the glorious interpretation, revisionist historians have reasoned that it is misleading to suggest that the peasants always supported the guerrillas out of will since such a position ignores other critical issues such as guerrilla indiscipline, local struggles in the communities and guerrilla coercion as a means for mobilizing the masses. It is a fact to argue that the guerrilla war thrived on the masses’ co-operation.

See also Environmental movement Guangzhou Peasant Movement Institute Land reform Via Campesina United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants

References

Further reading Mark I. Lichbach, What makes Rational Peasants Revolutionary?: Dilemma, Paradox, and Irony in Peasant Collective Action, World Politics, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Apr., 1994), pp. 383–418 M. Edelman, Bringing the Moral Economy back in... to the Study of 21st-Century Transnational Peasant Movements, AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, 2005, VOL 107; PART 3, pages 331-345 E. J. Hobsbawm, Peasants and politics, Journal of Peasant Studies, Volume 1, Issue 1 October 1973, pages 3 – 22 Marcus J. Kurtz, Understanding peasant revolution: From concept to theory and case, Theory and Society, Volume 29, Number 1 / February, 2000 Henry A Landsberger, Rural protest: peasant movements and social change, Barnes and Noble, 1973, ISBN 0-06-494029-2 P. McMichael, Reframing Development: Global Peasant Movements and the New Agrarian Question, CANADIAN JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES, 2006, VOL 27; NUMB 4, pages 471-486 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Yale University Press, 1985

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Peasant movement

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Peasant movement claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Peasant movement before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Peasant movement ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Peasant movement

In research: Peasant movement appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Peasant movement in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Peasant movement is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Agrarian politics, Social movements, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Peasant movement outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Peasant movement in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Peasant movement means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Peasant movement out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Peasant movement in simple terms?

Why does Peasant movement matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Peasant movement?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Peasant movement.