A draft of this paper was presented at the meetings of the American Sociological Association, September 1977. I received helpful criticisms of the draft from Jonathan Cohen, Paul David, John Eatwell, S. Rugumisa, Jack Wayne, and Jonathan Zeitlin. An earlier version of the analysis benefited from suggestion by Karen Anderson, Barry Edginton, George Homans, Nancy Howell, Michael Mann, Theda Skocpol, David Stark, Harrison White, and Gavin Wright.

¹ See the comprehensive statement, from the point of view of the development of the productive forces of European nations, by Landes, David S., The Unbound Prometheus (Cambridge: The University Press, 1972), pp. 231–49Google Scholar. Mandel, Ernest, in Late Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975), Chs. 4 and 5, gives one of the possible Marxist accounts of the importance and relationships among these factors.Google Scholar

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⁴ Farnsworth, Helen C., ‘Decline and Recovery of Wheat Prices in the 'Nineties,’ Wheat Studies, 10:8 and 9 (1934), 293–94Google Scholar. The development of the triple expansion steam engine was of particular importance on the 1890s. For the prior period see Graham, G. S., ‘The Ascendancy of the Sailing Ship, 1850–85’, Economic History Review, ser. 2, IX (1954), 74–88.Google Scholar

⁵ For data and analysis of the rise of a world wheat market and the two price falls, see Friedmann, , op. cit., Ch.2.Google Scholar

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⁷ Some households producing wheat as a cash (or rent) crop at the outset of the period reverted to subsistence production during the period. This reversion is a separate question from the relation between capitalist and household commodity producers. See Friedmann, op. cit., especially Chs. 1 and 6.

⁸ Calculated from data in Malenbaum, , op. cit., pp. 238–39Google Scholar. An excellent history of Argentine wheat production is Scobie, James R., Revolution on the Pampas, A Social History of Argentine Wheat, 1860–1910 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964). This combination of capitalist and household wheat production within the national economy also characterized Germany and Hungary.Google Scholar

⁹ The growth of tenancy has been an important theme in the historiography of American agriculture largely because of its incompatibility with the goals of much public land policy. The implied loss of independence is not to be underestimated, but it does not affect the fundamentally different relations to the means of production of households from that of people who sell their labor power on the market. The possibility of comparable advantages existing for simple commodity producers is suggested by Gates, Paul W., Landlords and Tenants on the Prairie Frontier. Studies in American Land Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), pp. 255–58, 298–301Google Scholar. For the general question of tenancy in America, see Bogue, Allan G., From Prairie to Cornbelt: Farming on the Illinois and Iowa Prairies in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), Ch. IIIGoogle Scholar; Shannon, Fred A., The Farmer's Last Frontier. Agriculture, 1860–1897 (New York and Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., 1945) passim, esp. pp. 161, 418Google Scholar; Gates, Paul W., Fifty Million Acres: Conflicts over Kansas Land Policy, 1854–1890 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1954), pp. 230–94Google Scholar; Danhof, Clarence H., Change in Agriculture: The Northern United States, 1820–1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 88–93.Google Scholar

¹⁰ These comments apply to commercial forms of production only. The relation to, for example, feudal rent, is beyond the scope of this essay.

¹¹ The important wheat exports from India in the late nineteenth century were from new settlers on government organized lands. Many of them gained title during the period of expanding exports. See Wright, Conrad P. and Davis, J.S., ‘India as a Producer and Exporter of Wheat,’ Wheal Studies, 111:8 (1927), 317–412.Google Scholar

¹² In addition to the examples mentioned in this paragraph, the most important instance is the dependency school, and its more comprehensive variant, the world-system approach. For the former, see Frank, Andre Gunder, Latin America, Underdevelopment or Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969)Google Scholar, and for the latter see Wallerstein, Immanuel, The Modern World-System. Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974)Google Scholar and by the same author, ‘The Rise and Demise of the World Capitalist System,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, 16:4 (1974), 387–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹³ Johnson, Arthur H., The Disappearance of the Small Landowner (1909), reprinted by Oxford University Press, 1963CrossRefGoogle Scholar, a classic of English agricultural history, explains the decline of small landowners (usually called ‘peasants’) through the growth of commercial agriculture in the sixteenth century. Small holders, as I attempt to show here and elsewhere (Friedmann, , op. cit.), are not survivors in any sense from the sixteenth century, but a new kind of household producer, a specialized commodity producer.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Given the wide empirical variation, and the lack of agreed and consistent analytical definition of ‘peasants’, I shall avoid using the term except when used by others in specific instances. Some attempts to characterize peasantries generally are, e.g., Wolf, Eric, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966)Google Scholar and Shanin, Teodor, ‘The Peasantry as a Political Factor,’ reprinted in Shanin, T., The Awkward Class, Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society, Russia 1910–25 (London: Oxford University Press, 1972)Google Scholar. For a critique of the concept, see Ennew, Judith, Hirst, Paul, and Tribe, Keith, ‘“Peasantry” as an Economic Category,’ The Journal of Peasant Studies, 4:4 (1977), 295–322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁵ Wolf, Eric, ‘Types of Latin American Peasantry: A Preliminary Discussion’. American Anthropologist, 57:3 (1955), p. 454.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁶ Hill, Polly, Migrant Cocoa-Farmers of Southern Ghana (Cambridge: The University Press, 1963).Google Scholar

¹⁷ The linguistic identification of commodity and capitalist production is reinforced by neo-classical economics, which focuses on the motivations of producers and their responses to constraints of various sorts. Therefore, the importance of the internal structure of ‘enterprises’ lies primarily in mediating the quantitatively conceived responses of producers. Qualitative differences in the organization of production, such as family or hired labor, imply the necessity for structural categories in cases where different producers are equally subject to market pressures.

¹⁸ See the leading historian of recent European agriculture, Dovring, Folke, Land and Labor in Europe 1900–1950 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965)Google Scholar and ‘The Transformation of European Agriculture,’ in Habakkuk, H. J. and Postan, M., eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe (Cambridge: The University Press, 1965), Vol. VI, Pt. II.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Weber, Max, ‘Capitalism and Rural Society in Germany,’ in Gerth, H. and Mills, C. W., eds., From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 382Google Scholar

²⁰ Sargent, F. L., ‘From Feudalism to Family Farms in France’, Agricultural History, XXV:4 (1961), 198–99.Google Scholar

²¹ Calculated from data in ‘A Century of Agricultural Statistics, Great Britain, 1866–1966,’ (Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1968), p. 19Google Scholar

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²⁴ ‘The Solidarity of Occupational Groups,’ in Parsons, T., Shils, E., Naegele, K. D., and Pitts, J. R., eds., Theories of Society, Vol. I (New York: The Free Press, 1961), p. 359.Google Scholar

²⁵ ‘The Social Organization of Production,’ in Parsons, , et al. , op. cit., pp. 468–69.Google Scholar

²⁶ For example, in Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1967), Vol. III, p. 334, Marx observed that pre-capitalist production sometimes involves economies which allow it to ‘put up a stubborn resistance to the products of the big industries.’Google Scholar

²⁷ While Marx himself was not entirely explicit or consistent on these questions, which were largely marginal to his central concerns, certain of his followers have addressed them directly. See Lenin, V. I., in The Development of Capitalism in Russia (Moscow: Institute of Marxism-Leninism, 1957)Google Scholar and The Agrarian Question and the Critics of Marx (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976)Google Scholar; Kautsky, Karl in Banaji, J., trans., ‘Summary of Selected Parts of Kautsky's The Agrarian Question,’ Economy and Society, 5:1 (1976), 2–49.Google Scholar

²⁸ This definition excludes subsistence plots which function as a supplement to a wage which in itself would not allow for the reproduction of a working class. The most widely known instance is South Africa, discussed by Michael Burawoy, ‘The Functions and Reproduction of Migrant Labor: Comparative Material from Southern Africa and the United Slates,’ American Journal of Sociology, 81:5 (1976), 1051–87Google Scholar, and by Wolpe, Harold, ‘Capitalism and Cheap Labour-Power in South Africa: From Segregation to Apartheid,’ Economy and Society, 4:1 (1972), 425–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It also characterizes the hacienda system in Latin America; see Wolf, Eric R., ‘The Hacienda System and Agricultural Classes in San Jose, Puerto Rico,’ in Béteille, André, ed.. Social Inequality (Harmonsworth, England: Penguin, 1969), 172–90.Google Scholar

²⁹ In the school of Marxism following Louis Althusser, ‘social formation’ is the term used for historical ‘social wholes’ (see Poulantzas, N., Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1973), p. 15) in contrast to analytical abstractions such as the mode of production. It is meant to identify what social scientists usually mean by a ‘society.’Google Scholar

³⁰ The most direct, if not unproblematic, statement of this position is from Marx himself, in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1970)Google Scholar. The term can be interpreted to refer to the ‘economic foundations’ only, but this reading leaves the ‘superstructure’ hanging in an analytical void. One need not have exact ‘correspondence’ between the ‘levels’ of a social formation, much less simple determination of one by the other, to appreciate the necessity of an analytical basis (beyond the supposedly ‘concrete’ categories of ‘social structure’ or ‘social formation’) for incorporating both and their mutual relations. See Foster-Carter, A., ‘The Modes of Production Controversy, New Left Review, 107 (1978), 73:1Google Scholar. Cf. Althusser, Louis and Balibar, Etienne, Reading Capital (London: New Left Books, 1975), pp. 42, 216–24Google Scholar, and Hindess, Barry and Hirst, Paul Q., Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 13–17.Google Scholar

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³³ As Foster-Carter, ibid., p. 74, argues, to allow any empirical variation to define a new mode produces ‘inevitable inflation and debasement of the coinage: each Andean valley has its own mode of production, and individuals may change them two or three times a week like underwear.’

³⁴ Commodity production is a relation in itself. Simple commodity production is like most subsistence production in its household basis of organization (though not in the extent of kin ties included within the household), but differs from it in being tied completely to other commodity producers through the market. In the latter set of social relations, simple commodity production is like capitalist production, and for this reason, they must share the range of productive techniques, which in conjunction with local conditions can generate production within the enforced range of labor productivity, if both are to survive.

³⁵ This usage more or less follows Marx. The term personal consumption replaces the more usual individual consumption. These categories are, moreover, consistent with Wolfs distinction between ‘replacement fund’ (encompassing personal and productive consumption) and ‘surplus.’ See his Peasants, pp. 6–10.Google Scholar

³⁶ This assumption is justified by considerable research in industrial sociology, which shows that workers with any hope, however unrealistic, of independent household production (generally agricultural) see themselves and participate in the labor process differently from those without. More than 30 years ago, Collins, Orvis, Dalton, Melville, and Roy, Donald, in ‘Restriction of Output and Social Cleavage in Industry,’ Journal of Applied Anthropology, 5:3 (1946), 1–14Google Scholar, argued that the worker identified with normal work practices hostile to management only when he came to believe ‘that his “station” in life ha[d] become fixed’ (p. 14). Workers who identified with management were often from farm backgrounds and retained a sense of property ownership even when it was no longer realistic. More recently Bernoux, Philippe, in ‘Les O.S. face à l'organisation industrielle,‘ Sociologie du Travail, 4 (1972), 410–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar, characterized differences among workers in a factory as ‘peasant culture’ and ‘worker culture.’ In this case the former understood their lack of relation to the capitalist enterprise, but in the context of dreaming of a return to independent production, however futile the hope (414–16). Finally, in a most interesting recent article, Hartmut Neuendorff and Charles Sabel have argued that whatever their objective relation to peasant production, certain workers have a specific ‘interpretive model’ for understanding their mode of life and labor which derives from their self-definition itself rooted ‘in the world of the peasant.’ In ‘Modèles d'interpretation et categories du marche du travail,’ Sociologie du travail (1978:1), 61–62. I am grateful to Jonathan Zeitlin for suggesting this argument and providing the references.Google Scholar

³⁷ One instance of the latter situation is described by Marx, in Capital, Vol. I, pp. 278–97.Google Scholar

³⁸ See ibid., Vol. Ill, pp. 142–99.

³⁹ See note 36. Specific conditions of skill, seniority, and so on, which affect the conditions of employment of individuals in modern enterprises, are the result of organizational struggles and technical developments over the past century and a half. Agriculture has not shared fully in these developments, though they have not, as we shall see below, been entirely absent. The remnants of capitalist relations in English wheat farming today show limitations on this instrumentalism, but these seem to derive from a combination of the legacy of extreme exploitation during the 1930s and the enforced personalism of those who remained behind in a small village. See Blythe, Ronald, Akenfield (Penguin, 1972) for a vivid ‘portrait of an English village’ in the arable region of East Anglia.Google Scholar

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⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 408. Cf. Brown, Beverley, ‘Natural and Social Division of Labour—Engels and the Domestic Labour Debate,’ m/f, 1 (1978), p. 42.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Chayanov focuses on both the labor and consumption aspects of household demography, as reflected in the consumer/producer ratio. This is more important for partial subsistence households in which personal consumption (and sometimes demands of surplus product) is a much larger proportion of the total product than productive consumption. For specialized commodity production households, the reverse is true, so that variations in the number of consumers in the household is of little importance, whereas the number of laborers required under conditions of competition is of fundamental importance.

⁴⁷ See, for example, Easterlin, Richard A., ‘Population Change and Farm Settlement in the Northern United States,’ Journal of Economic History, 36 (1976), 63–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar. and Hohenberg, Paul. ‘Change in Rural France in the Period of Industrialization, 1830–1914,’ Journal of Economic History, 30 (1972), 227.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ See Bogue, Alan G., From Prairie to Cornbelt. Farming on the Illinois and Iowa Prairies in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 185Google Scholar, for the nineteenth century. Contemporary cooperation has been described by Bennett, J. W., ‘Reciprocal Exchanges among North American Agricultural Operators,’ Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 24 (1968)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Kohl, Seena. Working Together (Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1976), pp. 42–43.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ As argued above, a surplus product may be required in the form of rent, taxes, etc., depending upon conditions within the social formation, but it is not inherent in the form of household production itself.

⁵⁰ See note 36. That this is the real alternative to failure for commercial agricultural households is generally acknowledged. See, for example, Hedley, Max J., ‘Independent Commodity Production and the Dynamics of Tradition,’ Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 13:4 (1976), 413–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁶⁶ In a rare case in which such detailed data were reported. 79.4 percent of the owners of family farms in Cass County, North Dakota, in 1920, were married, while most other occupations in this specialized wheat producing district were held by single men. The only other occupational category with any significant number of married men (17.1 percent) was the pool of permanent agricultural wage laborers, which provided only one quarter of all reported labor. Galpin, C. J. and Larson, V. B., Farm Population of Selected Counties, United States Bureau of the Census (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1924), p. 150Google Scholar. For an analysis of the role of wage labor, see Friedman, H., ‘Simple Commodity Production and Wage Labour in the American Plains,’ The Journal of Peasant Studies, in press.Google Scholar

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⁸² Ibid. At its peak in 1934, government credit accounted for 82.3 percent of existing farm mortgages in the American plains.

⁸³ See North, Douglass C., ‘International Capital Flows and the Development of the American West,’ in Scheiber, Harry N., ed., United States Economic History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964).Google Scholar

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