Knowra Peasant Peasant A rural person who works small-scale agricultural land, often within a traditional social structure. Peasants have included tenant farmers, smallholders, and laborers, with status and rights varying by place and era.
Agrarian society : A society in which agriculture forms the main basis of economic life and settlement. Peasant households were central to societies organized around farming.
Russian serfdom : The system that legally bound many Russian peasants to estates until emancipation in 1861. It illustrates a peasant population subject to extensive state-backed obligations.
Peasant revolt : A collective uprising by rural cultivators against landlords, taxes, state authority, or other burdens. Such revolts made rural grievances visible and could destabilize political orders.
Farmer : A person who cultivates land or raises livestock as an occupation. Farmer is broader and less tied to small-scale production or traditional social rank.
James C. Scott : An American political scientist known for studies of state power, resistance, and rural society. His work examines how peasants resist domination through everyday practices as well as open revolt.
Land tenure : The legal and customary arrangements through which people hold, use, and transfer land. Tenure determined whether peasants owned plots, rented them, or owed labor and dues.
French Revolution : The political upheaval in France beginning in 1789 that ended feudal privileges and transformed the state. Rural grievances and the abolition of feudal dues reshaped French peasant status.
Jacqueries : A series of French rural uprisings, especially the 1358 revolt against noble power during the Hundred Years’ War. The name became associated with violent peasant revolt in medieval France.
Agricultural laborer : A person who works for wages in farming without necessarily owning or renting the land cultivated. The distinction separates hired labor from peasant household production and land use.
The Moral Economy of the Peasant : A 1976 book by James C. Scott explaining peasant political action through subsistence security and reciprocal obligations. It frames rural protest as defense of customary expectations, not merely pursuit of higher income.
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