The Imperfect Peasant Economy

The story of the survival of a rural household economy of small-holders in nineteenth-century France.

This is a revised and expanded edition of a popular textbook on the economics of farm households in developing countries. The second edition retains the same building blocks designed to explore household decision-making in a social context. Key topics are efficiency, risk, time allocation, gender, agrarian contracts, farm size and technological change. For these and other topics, household economic behaviour represents the outcome of social interactions within the household, and market interactions outside the household. A new chapter on the environment combines exposition of economic tools not previously covered in the book with examination of household and community decision-making in relation to environmental resources.

Covering the time span from the Shang to the Qing Periods (1520BC - 1911AD), Gang Deng examines important factors in the decline of the Chinese economy from medieval sophistication to modern underdevelopment. These factors include: * resource endowments * socio-economic structure * property rights * state and bureaucracy * ideology and values * geo-political environment * internal rebellions * external invasions and conquests The Premodern Chinese Economy is a comprehensive analysis of China's economic history and provides essential background to the study of this country's modern struggle for growth and development. Deng's emphasis on comparative analysis offers new insights into the concept of underdevelopment and theories of transitional economics. This will become a major reference work in the fields of Chinese studies, economic history and development studies.

Challenging the claim that Palestine's peasant economy progressed during the 1920s and 1930s, Amos Nadan skillfully integrates a wide variety of sources to demonstrate that the period was actually one of deterioration on both the macro (per capita) and micro levels. The economy would have most likely continued its downward spiral during the 1940s had it not been for the temporary prosperity that resulted from World War II. Nadan argues that this deterioration continued despite the British authorities' channeling of funds from the Jewish sector and the wealthier Arab sectors into projects for the Arab rural economy. The British were hoping that Palestine's peasants would not rebel if their economic conditions improved. These programs were, on the whole, defective because the British chose programs based on an assumption that the peasants were too ignorant to manage their farms wisely, instead of working with the peasants and their own institutions.

In 1920s France the far-right peasantry wanted an authoritarian and agrarian society. This study examines their singular lack of success and the enduring French perception of themselves as a peasant nation.

This bibliographical guide contains 10,000 references to the economic and social history of 30 European countries during the period 1700-1939. More than 3000 periodicals have been consulted to obtain references, as well as books, edited collections and conference proceedings. The information is listed in categories such as industry, agriculture, finance, migration, labour conditions, urban communities and organizations. Full publication details are included, so that references may be located easily.

The central theme of this book is the changing experience of childhood in nineteenth-century France.

The individualism of the French peasantry during the nineteenth century has frequently been asserted as one of its most striking characteristics. In this 1999 book, Alan Baker challenges this orthodox view and demonstrates the extent to which peasants continued with traditional, and developed new, forms of collective action. He examines representations of the peasantry and discusses the discourse of fraternity in nineteenth-century France in general before considering specifically the historical development, geographical diffusion and changing functions of fraternal voluntary associations in Loir-et-Cher between 1815 and 1914. Alan Baker focuses principally upon associations aimed at reducing risk and uncertainty and upon associations intended to provide agricultural protection. A wide range of new voluntary associations were established in Loir-et-Cher - and indeed throughout rural France - during the nineteenth century. Their historical geography throws new light upon the sociability, upon the changing mentalités, of French peasants, and upon the role of fraternal associations in their struggle for survival.