Communities of Grain: Rural Rebellion in Comparative Perspective. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1993 by Ted W. Margadant

Communities of Grain: Rural Rebellion in Comparative Perspective. By Victor V. Magagna (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1991. xii plus 277 pp. $42.50).

This ambitious book seeks to reinterpret the basis of political action in traditional rural societies from the perspective of community institutions rather than class interests. Writing as a political sociologist, the author criticizes the Marxist historians for neglecting conflicts of authority between peasant communities and aristocratic elites in favor of class-based theories about the relationship between agrarian capitalism and peasant revolts. He also criticizes historical sociologists such as Charles Tilly and Theda Skocpol for exaggerating the fiscal dimension of conflicts between absolutist states and rural communities. For Magagna, authority itself constitutes the underlying issue at stake in rural rebellions. Historically, "communities of grain," which he defines as localized "forms of political order" that regulate the conditions of access to agricultural resources, have struggled to preserve their autonomy from the arbitrary power of aristocratic elites and the coercive demands of bureaucratic states. One method of struggle has involved "representative violence," whereby popular groups use collective violence to represent their demands for changes in elite preferences and behavior. According to Magagna, this concept of violence as symbolic representation helps explain not only the prevalence of rural rebellions in aristocratic and absolutist political systems, but the disappearance of such rebellions in modern states that have developed electoral institutions and representative assemblies for the expression of local interests. Rebellions, like electoral campaigns, are political practices that need to be interpreted as contests for authority.

As an extended essay on an important theme of comparative history, this is an impressive book. Magagna synthesizes a vast literature on rural rebellions in a variety of historical settings, and he formulates new concepts and hypotheses that can be applied in future research. For example, he distinguishes between "coercive commercialization" and "voluntary commercialization," depending on whether production for the market is imposed by landlords or tax-collectors, on the one hand, or emerges horizontally within rural society itself. Here more attention to the development of towns would have strengthened his argument that rural populations did not always resist commercialization, although the downside of market transactions in land, such as the cycle of mortgage debt and expropriation, involved coercive legal practices that Magagna overlooks. Also useful is the distinction that he makes in the concluding chapter between different types of rural communities, depending on the extent to which local institutions controlled access to property. At one extreme stands the Russian mir, whose authority to redistribute property among all the households of the village illustrates the concept of a "redistributive community." At the other extreme are "residual communities" that consist of households whose property is subject only to taxation and the right of eminent domain. In between these two extremes are "regulative communities," such as the classic three-field villages of medieval and early modern Europe that enforced communal rights over plots of land that were owned by individual households. Less persuasive is Magagna's argument that the strength of community institutions varied in accordance with the threat of external coercion. While it is true that some premodern states imposed taxes on entire communities instead of individual households, and that landlords often tried to exact labor services or payments in cash or kind from all the households of a manor, it does not follow that redistributive land practices or communal regulations over land usage were caused by such external pressures. Factors such as agricultural technology and kinship organization may have favored distinctive types of community organization independently of aristocratic elites. Magagna is on firm ground, however, in linking high levels of representative violence to extreme degrees of elite authoritarianism. He also makes an important distinction between movements of "secession" and movements of "reconstitution." The former are more likely to occur in societies where market networks are built "from above" through coercive means and subsistence-oriented peasants stand to benefit from expelling market-oriented landlords and farmers. The latter are more characteristic of societies where commercial networks are built "from below" through specialized production for urban markets and where community members have an interest in maintaining supralocal institutions.

In the six central chapters of the book, Magagna reinterprets the secondary literature on rural rebellions in late medieval Europe, early modern England, France between 1500-1900, Spain between 1800-1939, Russia between 1800-1930, and Japan between 1600-1868. Here he presents much historical evidence to support his general theory of the relationship between communities of grain, the arbitrary authority of aristocratic elites and absolutist states, and representative violence. Although these well-documented case studies offer valuable insights about many rural uprisings, they reveal, through selection and omission, several problematical aspects of Magagna's theoretical perspective. To begin with, the role of towns and urban markets in shaping the socio-economic development of rural societies is rarely discussed, and relationships of political conflict or co-operation between towns and villages are almost completely overlooked. Magagna's concept of communities of grain places too much emphasis on economic self-sufficiency and cultural localism to make sense of rebellions that involved towns as well as rural communities. As a result, he neglects the regional dimension of large-scale peasant movements such as the German peasant war of 1525, the French peasant revolts of 1789 and 1851, and the Russian revolution of 1905.