The Transformation of the World (147 page)

This kind of peasant society, however, was not representative of either Europe or Asia. If we take India (the epitome of peasant archaism for nineteenth-century Europeans) as a second example from the wide range of Eurasian agrarian societies, then we obtain something like the following picture.
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The basic unit of rural life was indeed the village. Its hierarchical structure nearly always included groups with high status, particularly members of upper castes or the army, but it is by no means the case that these were all big landowners. Unlike the typical landlord (
dizhu
) in the Chinese village, they rarely abstained completely from physical labor, but they did function as literate “managers” of village life and played a decisive role culturally. The deepest social rift was not, as in China, between a parasitic landlord class living off rents on the one hand and hardworking tenant farmers or peasant smallholders on the other, but rather between those (often a majority) with relatively stable land use rights and a landless underclass of wage laborers. The typical Indian village, then, was not governed by big landowners living in the city or on sumptuous rural estates, or by Chinese-style landlords under more modest material circumstances, but by a group of dominant peasants who controlled most of the resources (land, livestock, credit). While not deriving automatically from membership in an upper caste, their position did usually correspond to a superior caste ranking. As a rule they were active farmers themselves, working not only on land of their own but also on leaseholds. Colonial law regarded all farmers in principle as free subjects. Large-scale slavery was all but nonexistent in modern India, and remnants of household servitude disappeared with the abolition of slave status in 1848, fifteen years after it was prohibited by law elsewhere in the British Empire. Nevertheless, as in China, moneylending offered scope for reducing weaker members of the village hierarchy to a form of dependence.

The primary goal of Indian peasants was to ensure their family's subsistence. However, in a continuation of processes going back to precolonial times (which meant before c. 1760 in Bengal), commercial relations extended farther and farther beyond village boundaries. In some cases, the growing of cash crops—above all indigo and opium for the Chinese market—led to a concentration on exports. But this was less characteristic of India (or China) as a whole than it was of parts of the New World, Southeast Asia, or Africa, where export monoculture became widespread in the second half of the nineteenth century. The
Indian village usually had an open relationship with the city: it was inserted into trade networks. City-based middlemen would buy up surpluses and sell them in urban markets. Most peasant producers were anyway in no position to make “market decisions.” Being restricted by property relations, environmental conditions (e.g., irrigation or the lack of it), and the power of dominant groups, they did not operate as the “independent entrepreneurs” of rational choice theory. In the first few decades after 1760, India's colonial status made itself felt in the material impact of devastating wars of conquest and in a higher average tax burden. The longer-term consequences were threefold: (1) stabilization of fiscal pressure at a high but predictable level; (2) gradual enforcement of contractual relations in private agriculture, under the supervision of colonial courts; and (3) the favoring of dominant village groups, rather than an acceptance of agrarian egalitarianism or the simple granting of privileges to existing or newly created aristocracies.

In the nineteenth century, India's precolonial social structures changed in various ways, which—as numerous protest movements illustrate—often involved a crisis of one kind or another. The colonial state was by no means the sole originator but interacted with autonomous trends in the economy and society. Agrarian India was flexible enough to adjust to new challenges, but the dynamic for a quite different, “capitalist” agriculture did not arise within it spontaneously. It would indeed be naive to expect that to have happened, since the liveliest counterfactual imagination can hardly conjure up a repetition in India of the northwest European agrarian revolution. In this respect, Indian, Chinese, and Javanese agriculture were similar: the easy availability of cheap labor, the limited scope for mechanical rationalization, and the lack of northwest Europe's distinctive combination of field and pasture stood in the way of radical change.

Types of Enterprise

Comparisons with China interspersed here and there have shown that the world's two largest agrarian societies resembled each other in many ways: farmers were in principle free agents; they produced partly for the market; and the main economic unit was the (often also proto-industrial) family household, which might be supplemented by a small number of servants and laborers. These three features indicate a certain affinity with Western Europe, or at least with France and Germany west of the Elbe, and underline the difference with parts of the nineteenth-century world where plantations, latifundia, and estates were run as large enterprises on the basis of servile or bonded labor. It would thus be wrong to think in terms of a split between free West and enslaved East. China's agrarian structure, with its numerous regional variants, was far freer than the rural order in eastern Europe.

It is hard to classify the variety of agrarian production and rural life, because several criteria that are not easy to line up with one another need to be taken into account. This is true even if we stick to the three most important ones:
(1) the biological-ecological foundations (which crops are grown?); (2) the form of enterprise and labor regime (who has how much leeway in deciding what to produce within a certain organizational framework?); and (3) property relations (who owns the land, who actually uses it, who profits from it and how?)—for example, whereas rice cultivation in irrigated fields (as opposed to wheat or cotton growing) poses great difficulties for a large enterprise, it may prosper under different property relations (individual small ownership, tenant farming, clan or temple ownership).

With regard to the first criterion, a distinction may be drawn between wet rice growing, mixed agriculture and livestock farming, horticulture, and so on.
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Criteria 2 and 3 together yield another typology:

(a) a manorial system combining subsistence farming with unpaid labor on the domain of the landlord (who is at the same time politically dominant);

(b) family leasehold units (rentier landowner versus tenant farmer);

(c) family smallholdings with relatively secure property rights;

(d) plantations (capital-intensive export production of tropical crops using nonlocal, often ethnically foreign, manpower); or

(e) large-scale capitalist agriculture, for which the landowner employs wage labor.
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In reality, however, the transitions between (b) and (c) were fluid: someone who could invoke a hereditary tenancy relationship, whether in Java or the Rhineland, might be the titleholder of land without being its legal owner in the end.

All through the century, nearly everywhere in the world, farm labor remained manual labor; many parts of Europe were similar in this respect to Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
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Class location, too, set up commonalities across cultures: agricultural wage labor on a Pomeranian or Polish estate was not fundamentally different from wage labor in India, although in each case it was embedded within particular hierarchies and cultural environments.
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A material insecurity that made it necessary to move around in search of work meant that there was a basic affinity in people's living conditions and experiences; and, as in earlier ages, migration spread agricultural knowledge over large distances. Such parallels and linkages did not, however, result in transnational solidarity. Unlike in industry and transport, where an international orientation took root with the growth of the early workers' movement, there were no extensive links among agricultural laborers, no peasant international. A farm laborer or peasant in Bihar knew nothing about his counterparts in Mecklenburg or Mexico.

If work was changing, where and how did global processes influence the changes? In general, rising international demand for agrarian products, especially from the tropics, did not necessarily have a liberalizing impact on the conditions of rural labor. Liberal economic theory anticipated that international trade would dissolve “feudal” systems, free people from archaic constraints, and foster in them a spirit of hard work and enterprise. That was indeed a possibility,
especially where small farmers took advantage of new overseas outlets for their produce without the interposition of foreign economic interests. Long-term success, however, required that the national government (as in Japan) should actually promote exports and create the appropriate legal and infrastructural framework, or that a colonial regime, often for the sake of political stability, should consciously side with local farmers against foreign plantation companies. In the absence of such conditions, foreign interests usually had the upper hand.

Plantations

The end of legalized slavery in the European colonies, the United States, and Brazil was by no means followed by the breakup of large plantations. These increasingly controlled production of such sought-after products as coffee, tea, or bananas, competing with (though not always eliminating) small producers in other parts of the world. After 1860, new plantation sectors began to appear: sugar in Natal, rubber in Malaya and Cochin China (South Vietnam), tobacco in Sumatra. The plantation was an innovative, “modern” form of enterprise, which Europeans had been introducing on a large scale in the New World since roughly 1600. Around 1900 it experienced another heyday, based not on the gradual continuity of local conditions but on active foreign intervention to found and organize new plantations. (Sometimes, though, as in Java and Ceylon, local businessmen also took advantage of the opportunities.)
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A new plantation created a rift in the local society at least as deep as that brought by a new factory. Capital and management inevitably came from Europe or North America in the late nineteenth century, and planters tried to establish a rational, scientifically based form of cultivation with optimum yields. For this, apart from a few specialist jobs, they needed only an uneducated labor force. And since most plantations were in thinly populated areas, the workers often had to be brought in from far away. On the great tobacco plantations of East Sumatra, for example, the preference was to recruit Chinese and to house them in work camps. At best nominally free, and usually paid piece rates and further exploited by a contractor, the workers were often subject to such strict discipline and regimentation that conditions were not clearly distinguishable from those on a slave plantation. Abandoning the place of work was punished as a criminal offense.
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In 1900 it was rare for a plantation to be family owned. Almost all belonged to capitalist companies, which invested considerable sums in a railroad and port facilities and kept a close watch on world market conditions. The colonial plantation was not a complete novelty but developed out of the old slave plantation. It was an instrument of global capitalism employed almost exclusively in tropical countries. In contrast to industry, it seldom formed part of a wider process of national economic development.
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Plantations had an industrial component if their produce was actually processed on the spot. The model of such an integrated business was the rubber plantation, since rubber trees can be tapped all through the year and allow a
company to be independent of the seasons. This made the plantation even more factorylike. However, the new wave of plantations in Southeast Asia and Africa around the year 1900 did not mean that global agribusiness now swept everything before it; plantations and export-oriented small farmers would coexist and compete with each other for the whole of the twentieth century. The plantation economy was global also in the sense that both labor and capital came from several different countries. On the island of Sumatra, a core region for these new developments, only one-half of plantation investment in 1913 was Dutch owned; British, North American, Franco-Belgian, and Swiss interests accounted for the rest.
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Plantations sprang up on land bought from indigenous princes, who then lost all influence on conditions within the huge areas in question. But the law of the Dutch colonial state also had limited validity there—and in some cases none at all. A special kind of plantation justice system might then come into force, displaying certain affinities with the patrimonial rule that was exercised independently of the state on large Prussian estates east of the Elbe.
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Very similar conditions had begun to appear a few decades earlier in places such as southwestern India.

Haciendas

The plantation was not the only corporate response to export opportunities. In nineteenth-century Egypt, the application of political power led to the development of large estates, as the government handed over indebted villages to high officials in return for the guaranteed payment of taxes. Land thus became concentrated in the hands of a state class tied to the pasha, while the only way of halting the secular decay of Nile irrigation systems was the organization of renovation work by large enterprises with modern engineering expertise. The estates in question cultivated cash crops, particularly cotton and sugar beets, which promised their owners the high short-term income necessary to finance investments, as well as offering the state a secure source of fiscal revenue. Labor was often brought in from distant places to work alongside local fellahs. If Egypt became one of the world's main cotton exporters after the 1820s, this was due less to foreign initiative and forced incorporation of the country into the world economy than to the policies of Muhammad Ali and his successors. Egyptian estates were organized along plantation lines, even though foreign capital had not played a key role in their development.
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