The Peasant Betrayed

After studying land reform in 16 countries and offering illustrative examples from 11 more, Powelson and Stock conclude that government land reforms generally harm the rural poor more than help them. Detailing case after case in which government intervention has impoverished the peasant, the authors find only a few cases in which the government has made the peasant better off. In contrast, they show that in Third World countries where the state has left farming to the farmer, agricultural output has soared, famine has been overcome, and the welfare of the peasant has vastly improved.

Kapil Kumars research on peasant struggles and their relationship with the national movement takes into account the myriad complexities involved in order to understand the contemporary realities that confront rural India. He argues that there was a definite move by the dominant leaders, big businesses and the landed aristocracy to suppress the peasants an approach very much still in practice today. Hence, the need for a historical perspective. Part 1 deals with the struggles of the Oudh peasants and the role of Baba Ram Chandra in mobilizing them. The use of religious literature in mobilizing the peasants and characterizing the Congress leadership, Taluqdars, the British, etc., is a unique example of liberating the religious texts from the ritualistic functions and interpreting them to explain contemporary social realities and offer solutions. The plight of rural women and their struggles is another vital theme covered. Part 2 focuses on Congress-peasant relations during the national movement and the papers deal with a host of issues like the victimization of peasant leaders at the behest of dominant nationalist leadership; the collaboration between the landlords, big businesses and the dominant leaders and also reasons for the peasants support to Gandhi. In Part 3 Kumar argues for a paradigm shift in studying the history of Partition and understanding inter-community relations. This volume is invaluable for scholars of colonial and modern Indian history.

The Chinese economic miracle is happening despite, not because of, China's 900 million peasants. They are missing from the portraits of booming Shanghai, or Beijing. Many of China's underclass live under a feudalistic system unchanged since the fifteenth century. They are truly the voiceless in modern China. They are also, perhaps, the reason that China will not be able to make the great social and economic leap forward, because if it is to leap it must carry the 900 million with it. Chinese journalists Wu Chuntao and Chen Guidi returned to Wu's home province of Anhui, one of China's poorest, to undertake a three-year survey of what had happened to the peasants there, asking the question: Have the peasants been betrayed by the revolution undertaken in their name by Mao and his successors? The result is a brilliant narrative of life among the 900 million, and a vivid portrait of the petty dictators that run China's villages and counties and the consequences of their bullying despotism on the people they administer. Told principally through four dramatic narratives of particular Anhui people, Will the Boat Sink the Water? gives voice to the unheard masses and looks beneath the gloss of the new China to find the truth of daily life for its vast population of rural poor.

The period from 1876 to 1946 in Korea marked a turbulent time when the country opened its market to foreign powers, became subject to Japanese colonialism, and was swept into agricultural commercialization, industrialization, and eventually postcolonial revolutionary movements. Gi-Wook Shin examines how peasants responded to these events, and to their own economic and political circumstances, with protests that shaped the course of postwar revolution in the north and reform in the south. Utilizing interviews, documentary research, and statistical analysis, Shin analyzes variation in peasant activism and its historical, political, and socioeconomic roots, and offers a major revisionist interpretation. The study contributes to an understanding of Korea’s rural political economy during the colonial era, Japanese agricultual policy, and the historical legacy of colonialism for post war social and political change in Korea.

Until late in the eighteenth century, the peasantry of the German states had been dismissed contemptuously by the aristocracy and middle classes as brutish and virtually subhuman. With the advent of organized movements for peasant emancipation and agrarian reform, however, many German writers and publicists began also to reassess the role of the peasant in society. Within less than a century, the public image of the German peasant had been completely changed. Where formerly he had been scorned as untermenschlich, by 1840 he was firmly established in the public mind as an embodiment of the highest national virtues—a patriotic citizen with special qualities of singular importance to the fatherland. Mr. Gagliardo's study is a suggestive inquiry into the origins and development of a modern rural ideology and its relationship to German doctrines of nationality.

"A fresh multi-faceted look at the overthrow of the Soviet State, the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, and the campaign to introduce capitalism from above. Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny have given us a clear and powerful Marxist analysis of the momentous events which most directly shaped world politics today, the destruction of the USSR, the 'Superpower' of socialism." -Norman Markowitz, author of The Rise and Fall of the People's Century "I have not read anything else with such detailed and intimate knowledge of what took place. This manuscript is the most important contribution I have read." -Phillip Bonosky, author of Afghanistan-Washington's Secret War "A well-researched work containing a great deal of useful historical information. Everyone will benefit greatly from the mass of historical data and the thought-provoking arguments contained in the book." -Bahman Azad, author of Heroic Struggle Bitter Defeat: Factors Contributing to the Dismantling of the Socialist State in the USSR