1. Eric Vanhaute Ghent University WHA Conference Beijing, July 10th 2011
Trajectories of Peasant Transformation.
The incorporation and transformation of rural zones
Eric Vanhaute
Ghent University
WHA Conference Beijing, July 10th 2011

2. Doing global history: structuring time and place
- Comparisons and Connections
… and Systems
how do scales of human action interact?
in a world that is not equal

3. Understanding a global process: towards a world without peasants?
Equals de-agrarianization? De-ruralization? De-peasantization? After divergence more convergence?

4. In search for a methodology
Local, regional and global dimensions
Rural zones and frontiers
Combining a comparative analysis with a (world-) systemic perspective:
multiple scales of time / place / unit of analysis

5. 1/ Defining actors: peasant / peasantries
Peasants as a social group
Peasantries as a social process
Processes of ‘peasantization’ (de- and re-)

6. Peasants are rural, agricultural producers who control the land they work either as tenants or as smallholders
who are organised largely in households and in village communities, that meet most of their subsistence needs (production, exchange, credit),
who pool different forms of income and
who are ruled by other social groups who extract a surplus either directly via rents, via (non balanced) markets, or through control of state power (taxation)
Key words are (some degree of) autonomy, income-pooling, household based village structures and surplus extraction outside local control

7. Redefinition / Recreation Struggles:
Acces to land
Access to household labour
Access to commons
Access to knowledge
 Old and modern enclosures

8. 2/ Defining spaces: zones and frontiers
- Frontiers as zones of sustained contact between different social systems - External / horizontal frontiers Internal / vertical frontiers - Peasant zones as (peripheral) spaces of exploitation and recreation

9. The redefinition of ‘peasant spaces’
16th century: peasant zones around capitalist centers around North Sea
19th century: forced (re-) peasantization in European colonies
21th century: (re-) peasantization as anti-systemic force ?

10. Old and new peasantries? The redefinition of ‘peasant spaces’
The reduction of ‘peasant spaces’ by - Recreation/redistribution/appropriation of wealth - Redefining livability of local systems of protection/support/credit - The enclosure of ‘commons’  An increasing vulnerability

11. Contextualizing ‘the European way’: de-peasantization as a part of the ‘theory of progress’
Economic growth cum social welfare
From informal to formal protection systems
From local/regional to national/global scale
Externalizing (part of) social en ecological costs (green revolutions)

12. Collective research project: trajectories of peasant transformation
Different roads of transformation of peasant societies:
North-Western Europe (North Sea Area)
China (Yangzi River Delta)
Latin-America (Central Andes)
Central Africa (Great Lakes)

13. Social and spatial differentiation
Uneven incorporation and uneven commodification
processes of de- and re-peasantization are also the outcome of changing strategies of peasant livelihood diversification
decrease of the margins of survival

14. Central field of struggle: Rights of Access and Rights of Property
To means of production: labour, capital goods, land and natural resources, knowledge

15. Actors (who has rights / who defines rights)
Peasant (families)
Village institutions
Lords
Markets
States (government)
Social movements

16. Trajectories of change
Defining rights / redistribution of rights
Types of labour /surplus accumulation
Types of peasant organisation / resistance
Systemic changes: agricultural and food regimes

17. Interconnected models of peasant transformation
As internal frontiers (core processes)
As external frontiers (peripheral processes)
‘hybrid/mixed models’?
 social and regional differentiation in a global model