Terence J. Byres

From Peasant Studies to Agrarian Change

This inaugural essay surveys themes and approaches in agrarian political economy over the last three decades, especially with reference to contributions to, and debates in, the Journal of Peasant Studies of which T. J. Byres was editor from 1973 to 2000 and Henry Bernstein editor from 1985 to 2000. We indicate intellectual strengths and lacunae, new approaches to longstanding issues, and new concerns which emerged over that period, and which inform the project of this new Journal of Agrarian Change and the challenges it presents.

From ‘One of Europe’s Freest Peasantries’ to Feudalism and the Eve of Abolition of Serfdom

When Engels, in 1894, identified ‘Prussia east of the Elbe’ as one of only two instances in western Europe of peasants being totally displaced by capitalist agriculture, he was referring, in Prussia, to what was by then, of course, not an independent nation state but a crucial part of Germany. It was a Germany that had been united only since 1871. More precisely, the territory referred to by Engels is that of ‘Germany east…of the River Elbe and its tributary the Saale, which together formed a line bisecting Germany from Hamburg to the modern Czechoslovakian frontier’ [Perkins, 1986: 287]. It is this territory — ‘Germany east of the Elbe and north of the Erzgebirge and Riesengebirge’1 [Engels, 1965: 155] — and the historical trajectory of its agrarian political economy that is our concern here.

The Comparison, Some Implications, and Some Contemporary ‘Lessons’

What, then, emerges from our consideration of the Prussian path and the American paths? We may proceed at three levels.

The North and the West: From Early to Advanced Petty Commodity Production

We turn, finally, in our long quest, to the North and the West. We have identified above the states and territories that came to constitute these regions (see Tables 5.1 and 5.2). We have considered already the brutality with which American Indians were driven from the land, as part of the process of primitive accumulation in the North and West. We must now consider the social formations that were established in place of the original, native social formations. We have noted the particularly strong resistance of the Northern colonies to the attempts to introduce feudalism in the seventeenth century; and the failure of slavery to take root there. Neither feudalism nor slavery, we have seen, proved a solution to the problem of endemic labour shortage. Another answer to the labour question was necessary.

Origins, Context and Method

This essay concerns the peasantry, petty commodity producers and the transition to capitalism. Its approach is that of Marxist political economy, which I shall refer to hereafter simply as ‘political economy’. There are, of course, other methods of political economy, but these are not my concern here.

The Agrarian Question, Diversity of Agrarian Transition and the Two Paths: ‘Capitalism From Above’ and ‘Capitalism From Below’

There was an awareness of the diversity of successful agrarian transition from the very outset of Marxist writing on the agrarian question. That awareness is worthy of note. It is consideration of part of the diversity that is the object of this book.

The South: Slavery

The beginning of the import of African slaves into the ‘New World’ is usually put at 1502, ‘when the first references to blacks appear in the documents of Spanish colonial administrators’ [Fogel, 1989, 18; see also Fogel and Engerman, 1974: 15]. In North America, the first blacks arrived in Jamestown, Virginia (the earliest permanent English settlement in North America — it was settled in 1607) in 1619. In that year, the Virginia Company of London purchased, in Virginia, twenty black Africans from a Dutch captain.

Attempted Feudalism, Primitive Accumulation and Eradication of Native Populations

Lenin, we recall, pointed to the diversity to be found in the United States. He captured that most vividly and effectively. But, for Lenin, it was a diversity that, while noteworthy, did not need to be identified analytically. It was a diversity structured by particular dominant tendencies: those of a capitalist agriculture, which had emerged from petty commodity production; with petty commodity producers as the essential agents of change; speedy expansion of the productive forces and especially of mechanisation; a rapidly expanding home market; and, above all, the growing preponderance of wage labour. These tendencies, he argued, regulated and controlled the diversity noted. The diversity to which he draws attention he does not consider substantive.

The Postbellum South: From Slavery, Through Unfree Labour to Wage Labour

Just as Prussia’s crushing defeat by Napoleon in 1806 was followed by the edict of 1807, which brought serfdom to an end in Prussia, so the South’s surrender in the American Civil War spelt the demise of slavery. That surrender came effectively on 9 April, 1865, when General Robert E. Lee handed his sword over to General Ulysses Simpson Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia (although it was not until July, 1865 that the final skirmishing was over and it was brought entirely to a completion). Having erupted on 12 April, 1861, it had lasted almost exactly four years.1 Its ostensible cause had been the existence of slavery in the South, the determination of the South to maintain slavery, and the desire of the North lo see it eradicated. Its causes are, of course, more complex than can be so briefly represented, but in 1865 slavery, assuredly, was abolished: In 1864 the Republican Party had endorsed a constitutional amendment that would end slavery in America forever. On January 31, 1865, Congress finally passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude in any lands within the jurisdiction of the United States. [Levine et al, 1989:463]

The Prussian Transition: Full-Blooded Capitalism From Above and Its Consequences

In 1799, in response to ‘the distant effect of the French Revolution and the increasing ferment among the peasant population’ [Harnisch, 1986: 65], in all provinces peasants on the royal demesnes were given the opportunity to commute labour services into annual money rents; while in a few provinces peasants were allowed to purchase holdings by paying the so-called Erbstandsgeld [Harnisch, 1986: 64]. But the Junkers resisted successfully attempts to abolish hereditary serfdom or commute feudal dues (especially labour obligations) into money rents on private land: such attempts failing to proceed beyond the stage of preliminary negotiations (loc. cit.).