This chapter describes the Tokugawa status order and its change over time by highlighting its constituent groups and their status-mediating functions. The Tokugawa state relied on locally specific status groups to govern the population. These groups were defined by land and occupation and possessed a high degree of autonomy in regulating their own affairs. The chapter characterizes the most common types of groups – retainer bands, villages, block associations (chō), monastic communities, guilds, and outcaste associations – and explains how status was assigned, expressed, and negotiated between the state and these groups, drawing on notions of occupation, privilege, duty, and household as well as on a system of household registration. The chapter surveys the development of the status order in three stages: the formative period of pacification in the sixteenth and seventeenth century; its maturation under Tokugawa rule; and the conditions and process of its dismantling around the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

This chapter examines the ideological, political, and cultural significance of law in the East Roman empire in the ‘Age of Justinian’. It argues that imperial legislation was at the forefront of the political struggles and debates that characterised the era and suggests that knowledge of the law circulated much more rapidly and widely than has often been supposed, even reaching elements of the peasantry. The evidence for the circulation and dissemination of legal knowledge, it is suggested, raises important issues concerning the possible circulation and dissemination of political and religious ideas amongst non-elite strata of East Roman society at this time, and thus may be important for how we think about the broader reception of religious and doctrinal disputes.

By March 1793 revolutionary France was at war with Austria, Prussia and Spain, and Britain was preparing a naval blockade. The National Convention responded to this desperate military situation by imposing a levy of 300,000 conscripts. In the west of France the levy was the trigger for massive armed rebellion and civil war, known, like the region itself, as ‘the Vendée’. The insurrection resulted in terrible loss of life before it was finally crushed in 1794. Estimates have ranged from exaggerated claims of 500,000 rebel deaths to more accepted recent estimates of up to 170,000 insurgents and 30,000 republican troops. The rebellion and its repression left deep and durable scars on French society and politics. In republican historiography, the scale of repression of the rebellion has been seen as a regrettable but necessary response to a military ‘stab in the back’ at the moment of the Revolution’s greatest crisis, whereas right-wing politicians and historians from the west of France have applied the label of ‘genocide’ to the repression and therefore to one of the foundation acts of the first French republic. This chapter argues that ‘the Vendée’ was not a genocide: huge numbers of people were killed, but not because they were a distinctive Vendéan people nor because they were devout Catholics. This was instead a brutal civil war studded with examples of atrocity which would later be known as ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘war crimes’.

Chapter 6 turns to the case of Nicaragua’s land tenure institutions, analyzing the emergence of new land titling rules that stoked insecurity and corruption. It argues that the Contra War (1980–1990) remade the rules of agrarian reform and land titling in ways that subverted the state’s ability to regulate property ownership and opened up a property rights gap. As the perceived threat posed by the insurgency deepened and large numbers of peasant producers defected to the rebels’ side, the increasingly narrow and highly centralized FSLN coalition in power implemented a series of alternative rules that permitted the individual and provisional titling of unregistered lands, which generated greater peasant dependence on the incumbent regime but also heightened corruption and conflict.

Anne Lounsbery illuminates the dauntingly complex system of estates and ranks that stratified Russian life, and the emergence of the “splintered middle” that was Chekhov’s principal focus.

Rosamund Bartlett examines the case of Chekhov’s most important literary influence, placing the younger writer’s lifelong admiration of Leo Tolstoy as an artist, arbiter of good taste, and moral authority, alongside his gradual divergence from Tolstoy over the value of culture, the importance of art and beauty, the questions of marriage and adultery, and the state and future of the peasantry.

This book revives a contested moment in the history of aesthetic theory when Romantic-period writers exploit the growing awareness of irresolutions in Kant’s third Kritik, especially in his critique of judgements of the sublime. Read with hindsight, these openings can be seen to have generated literary opportunities for writings that explicitly embraced the philosophical significance delegated to the aesthetic by Kant, but then took advantage of the licence he had conceded. Romantic writing claimed a wider significance of its own that philosophy now had to learn to rationalise. Consequent aesthetic reorientations, in which splendours and miseries become interchangeable, reflect political instabilities already exploited by feminist and nationalist writing. Falling becomes a kind of rising, and literature’s unregulated power of metamorphosis persuasively challenges hierarchies of all kinds, including its own.

The state that evolved under the second Pahlavi monarch featured rapid economic development and persistent political underdevelopment. Especially from the 1950s onward, when the amount of oil revenues coming into the economy increased significantly compared with before, the economy began showing classic signs of the “resource curse.” As is often the case, resource curse – that is, the negative consequences of overabundance of a single commodity and the riches accrued from it to the economy – had manifold ramifications for Iran. As the economy grew, reliance on its single, biggest source of growth, oil, deepened greatly. This occurred at the expense of other sectors of the economy, especially agriculture. It also hastened rural flight, resulted in unplanned urban growth, and brought about maladjustments between economic needs on the one hand and resources, skills, and opportunities on the other. More detrimentally, it froze or significantly slowed down any transition out of rentier arrangements and strengthened existing institutions and practices where they were. The state may have fostered economic development, but it remained politically underdeveloped itself.

The peasant framework for perceiving rural China was, by the 1930s, fast becoming commonplace, shared across the political spectrum both within the country and overseas. This chapter explores parallels in the 1930s between Guomindang sociology texts and international representations of rural China, focusing on the work of Pearl S. Buck. The chapter does this for what it says about convergences between artistic and academic writing on the nature of rural life, and the global conversations behind the reduction of complex communities into peasantries. The chapter also touches on the development of sociology and anthropology in China in the 1930s and 1940s under Fei Xiaotong. As the chapter demonstrates, whether in the hands of Guomindang sociologists or American writers like Buck, disaster narratives favored generalization in their treatment of how such crises were experienced and responded to, serving as stark examples of social ills targeted for party interventions: village inertia and social predation.

This chapter presents the government’s economic policies and the oppression of peasants by state agents and large landowners. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the building of the modern Turkish republic was financed largely through taxes and monopoly revenues extracted from the agricultural economy. Turkey’s economy was largely based on agriculture, and accordingly, the new state relied heavily on rural resources. Oppression and coercion by state agents such as tax collectors and gendarmes and local dominants such as large landowners or village headmen accompanied the economic exploitation of peasants. This chapter gives a detailed picture of the exploitation and domination mechanisms that afflicted smallholders and the rural poor. It also sheds light on the impact of the Great Depression on Anatolian peasants.

This chapter reexamines the extensively discussed evidence for the circumstances that drove the Jews to a seemingly irrational and hopeless challenge to the power of Rome. The account of Josephus, on which we almost exclusively rely, offers the teleological scenario of a long build-up of hostility that issued inevitably in disaster. While acknowledging the background and circumstances that lay behind the conflict, this chapter emphasizes the numerous contingencies, unanticipated events, personalities, and miscalculations that played a key role in bringing it about. The tension and anxiety that had built up for two generations in a series of individual episodes supplied a significant impetus. But error, accident, and unintended consequences are critical to understanding the course of events. Josephus’ sense of inevitability, born of hindsight and his special situation, needs a corrective.

This chapter is about changes in work practices amongst the ‘peasantry’ still working upon the land in twenty-first-century India. This population may sound very far from the conventional understandings of shifts in technology that regularly affect how work is done in the ‘West’ but the rise of ICT technologies, especially the smart phone, have at least the potential to shift practices upon the land that have remained unchanged for centuries. Before the twenty-first century, large infrastructural requirements saw the triumph of copper so that in some senses a whole material civilisation developed around the electrical and conductive properties of this metal. However, this centralised mode of organising based upon copper has become threatened by a Digital Revolution. New forms of working are allowed by the post-copper technologies and materials of the twenty-first century but this chapter asks how widespread and how deep does this ‘rematerialising of organisation’ actually go?

This chapter discusses the growth of military systems in Western Europe during the period from 1460 to 1560, the preliminary stage of what has often, controversially, been called the ‘military revolution’. The main characteristics of military violence generated by dynastic wars were the inexorable growth of armies and the problems of pay and supply which accompanied this. Military technology affected both the nature and duration of wars: artillery came to dominate both in siege warfare, naval warfare and on the open battlefield. The lives of professional soldiers were drastically affected by new forms of trauma and medical treatment remained rudimentary. At the same time, the relations between soldiery and civilians continued to be conflictual, especially in war zones. Endemic violence accompanied any war. The features specific to this period combine a more intensive kind of violence brought about by changes in military technology and the scale of war with a broadly dysfunctional control system. This meant that the larger armies and more destructive campaign had an impact of casualties and losses among the soldiery as well as a chaotic impact on the ‘civilian’ population, though the patterns of ‘collateral’ violence remained much the same as they had been for centuries.

Between 1780 and 1830, a highly distinctive body of imaginative writing emerged in Ireland, formed by and in turn helping to mould the linguistic, political, historical, and geographical divisions characteristic of Irish life. The intense and turbulent creative effort involved bore witness to a key transition at the beginning of the nineteenth century: the emergence of modern Irish literature as a distinct cultural category. During these years, Irish literature came to consist of a recognisable body of work, which later generations could draw on, quote, anthologise, and debate. This chapter offers a new map of the making of Irish literature in the romantic period, as well as introducing the aims of the volume as a whole.