Peasants And Farmers

The traditional medieval system of farming in England, in which land was divided into strips and managed by an individual only in the growing season, being available to the community for grazing animals during the rest of the year.
It had mostly three elements individual peasant holdings in the form of strips scattered among the different fields; crop rotation and common grazing.
A rich farmer: When the price of wool went up in the world market the rich farmers wanted to expand wool production to earn profits. They were eager to improve their sheep breeds and ensure good feed for them. They were keen on controlling large areas of land in compact blocks to allow improved breeding. So, they began dividing and enclosing common land and building hedges around their holdings to separate their property from that of others. They drove out villagers who had small cottages on the commons, and prevented the poor from entering the enclosed fields.

A laborer: Over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the English countryside changed dramatically. Before this time, the land was not partitioned into enclosed lands privately owned by the landlords. During open field system, laborers used to live with landowners and helped their masters doing a variety of jobs. The laborers used to collect their firewood from the forests, or graze their cattle on the commons.

A peasant woman: In the open field systems, the peasants used to cultivate on the strips of land around the village they lived in. Peasant women used to help the peasants. Cow keeping, collection of firewood, cleaning, gathering of fruits and berries from the common lands was done mostly by women and children.

The factors which led to the enclosures in England are:

(a) Enclosures were necessary to make long-term investments on land and plan crop rotations to improve the soil.

(b) Enclosures allowed the rich landowner to expand the land under their control and produce more for the market.

(c) Enclosures filled the pockets of landlords. After enclosures, everything belonged to the landlords, everything had a price which the poor could not afford to pay.

Extensive scale enclosure forced the poor to leave their lands. They found their customary rights gradually disappearing. Deprived of their rights and driven off the land, they tramped in search of work. The coming of modern agriculture in England meant many different changes. The threshing machines helped the riche landowners to produce more with less investment as they started employing people during harvest only. Therefore, the poor in England opposed threshing machines as their income became unstable, their jobs insecure, and their livelihood precarious.

Captain Swing was a mythic name and used in threatening letters, written by the workmen against the use of threshing machines by rich farmers. The threshing machines robbed of poor peasants and workmen of their jobs. The name symbolizes the anger or misery of the laborers against the use of threshing machines by rich farmers or big landowners.

By the early twentieth century, the White Americans had moved westward and established control up to the west coast, displacing local tribes and carving out the entire landscape into different agricultural belts. After the war of Independence from 1775 to 1783 and the formation of the United State of America, the white Americans began to move westward. By the time Thomas Jefferson became President of the USA in 1800, over 70,000 white settlers had moved on to the Appalachian plateau through the passes. Seen from the east coast, America seemed to be a land of promise. Its wilderness could be turned into cultivated fields. Forest timber could be cut for export, animals hunted for skin, mountains mined for gold and minerals. Westward movement also forced the American Indians to give up their land and move westward.

Advantages of the use of mechanical harvesting machines in the USA:

The dramatic expansion was made possible by new technology. Through the nineteenth century, as the settlers moved into new habitats and new lands they modified their implements to meet their requirement. In 1831, Cyrus McCormick invented the first mechanical reaper which could cut in one day as much as five men could cut with cradles and 16 men with sickles. For the big farmers of the Great Plains these machines had many attractions. The new machines allowed the big farmers to rapidly clear large tracts, break up the soil, remove the grass and prepare the ground for cultivation. The work could be done quickly and with a minimal number of hands. With power-driven machinery four men could plough, seed and harvest 2000 to 4000 acres of wheat in a season.

Disadvantages of the use of mechanical harvesting machines in the USA:

For the poorer farmers, machines brought misery. Many of them bought these machines, imagining that wheat prices would remain high and profits would flow in. If they had no money, the banks offered loans. Those who borrowed found it difficult to pay back their debts. Many of them deserted their farms and looked for jobs elsewhere. Mechanization had reduced the need for labor. And the boom of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seemed to have come to an end by the mid-1920s. After that even most of the rich farmers faced trouble. Production had expanded so rapidly during the war and post-war years that there was a large surplus. Unsold socks piled up, storehouses overflowed with grain, and vast amounts of corn and wheat were turned into animal feed. Wheat prices fell and export markets collapsed. This created the ground for the Great Agrarian Depression of the 1930s that ruined wheat farmers everywhere.

The expansion of wheat agriculture in the Great Plains created several problems. In 1930s, terrifying dust storms began to blow over the southern plains. As the skies darkened, and the dust swept in, people were blinded and choked. Cattle were suffocated to death. Tractors and machines that had ploughed the earth and harvested the wheat in the 1920s were now clogged with dust, damaged beyond repair. In part they came because the early 1930s were years of persistent drought. The rains failed year after year, and temperatures soared. But ordinary dust storms became black blizzards only because the entire landscape had been ploughed over, stripped of all grass that held it together. Zealous farmers had recklessly uprooted all vegetation, and tractors had turned the soil over, and broken the sod into dust. The whole region had become a dust bowl. The American dream of a land of plenty had turned into a nightmare. The settlers had thought that they could conquer the entire landscape, turn all land over to growing crops that could yield profits. After 193, they realized that they had to respect the ecological conditions of each region.

When the British conquered Bengal, they made a determined effort to produce opium in the lands under their control. As the market for opium expanded in China, larger volumes of opium flowed out of Bengal ports. Before 1767, not more than 500 chests were being exported from India. Within four years, quantity trebled. A hundred years later, in 1870, the government was exporting about 50,000 chests annually. Supplies had to be increased to feed this booming export trade.

Unwilling cultivators were made to produce opium through a system of advances. In the rural areas of Bengal and Bihar, there were large number of poor peasants who do not have enough money to pay rent to the landlord or to buy food and clothing. From the 1780s such peasants were given money advances to produce opium. The peasants thought that the advances given to them could meet their immediate needs and they can pay back the loan at a later stage. But the loan tied the peasants to the headman and through him to the government. It was the government agents who were advancing the money to the headman, who in turn gave it to the cultivators. The peasants were forced to produce opium as they had taken loans from the headman of their villages. And for British Government, opium was a good source of international income and hence, they wanted the peasants to grow as much opium as possible.

For a variety of reasons, Indian farmers were reluctant to grow opium.

● First, the crop had to be grown on the best land, on fields that lay near villages or were well manured.

● Second, many cultivators owned no land. To cultivate, they had to pay rent and lease land from the landlords. And the rent charged on good lands was very high.

● Third, cultivation of opium was a difficult process. The plant was delicate and the cultivators had to spend long hours nurturing it.

● Finally, the price paid by the government to the cultivators for the opium they produced was very low. It was unprofitable for the cultivators to grow opium at that price.