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From the resilience of commons to resilience through commons. The peasant way of buffering shocks and crises

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2022

Tim Soens  and
Maïka De Keyzer
Tim Soens*
Affiliation:
University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
Maïka De Keyzer
Affiliation:
KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Type
Introduction
Information
Continuity and Change , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , May 2022 , pp. 1 - 11
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

Notes

1 Larson, Peter Lionel, Conflict and compromise in the late medieval countryside: lords and peasants in Durham, 1349–1400 (London, 2006), 8Google Scholar.

2 Vanhaute, Erik, ‘The end of peasantries? Rethinking the role of peasantries in a world-historical view’, Review 31, 1 (2008), 39–59, 43–4Google Scholar.

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8 Mikhail, Alan, Nature and empire in Ottoman Egypt: an environmental history (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Francisco Beltran, ‘Commons and the standard of living debate in Spain, 1860–1930’ (presented at the Design and Dynamics of Institutions for Collective Action, 2012).

10 Ostrom, Elinor, Governing the commons. the evolution of institutions for collective action (Cambridge, 1997)Google Scholar. Miguel Laborda Peman and Tine De Moor, ‘A tale of two commons. Some preliminary hypotheses on the long-term development of the commons in Western and Eastern Europe, 11th–19th centuries’, International Journal of the Commons 7, 1 (2013), 7–33.

11 T. de Moor, The dilemma of the commoners: understanding the use of common-pool resources in long-term perspective (Cambridge, 2015), 158.

12 World Resource Institute, ‘Land matters: how securing community land rights can slow climate change and accelerate the sustainable development goals’ (24 January 2019), available on https://www.wri.org/news/land-matters-how-securing-community-land-rights-can-slow-climate-change-and-accelerate. See also Haller in this volume.

13 Brian Walker et al., ‘Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems’, Ecology and Society 9, 2 (2004), 2.

14 Tim Soens, ‘Resilient societies, vulnerable people: coping with north sea floods before 1800’, Past & Present 241, 1 (2018), 143–77.

15 Guido Alfani and Cormac Ó. Gráda, Famine in European history (Cambridge, 2017).

16 Gary Richardson, ‘The prudent village: risk pooling institutions in medieval English agriculture’, The Journal of Economic History 65, 2 (2005), 386–413.; Richard M. Smith, ‘Dearth and local political responses: 1280–1325 and 1580–1596/97 compared’, Peasants and lords in the medieval English economy: essays in honour of Bruce M. S. Campbell (Turnhout, 2015), 377–406, 400–1; Tine De Moor, ‘The silent revolution: a new perspective on the emergence of commons, guilds, and other forms of corporate collective action in Western Europe’, International Review of Social History 52, suppl. 16 (2008), 179–212.

17 Cottyn, Beeckaert and Vanhaute in this volume.

18 Jan Luiten Van Zanden, ‘The paradox of the marks. The exploitation of commons in the Eastern Netherlands, 1250–1850’, Agricultural History Review 47 (1999), 125–44.

19 Maïka De Keyzer, ‘The impact of inequality on social vulnerability in pre-modern Breckland’, Journal for the History of Environment and Society, 4 (2019), 71–101.

20 Robert Netting and Randall McGuire, ‘Levelling peasants? The maintenance of equality in a Swiss Alpine Community’, American Ethnologist 9 (1982), 273–4; Ostrom, Governing the commons; Maïka De Keyzer, Inclusive commons and the sustainability of peasant communities in the Medieval Low Countries (London, 2018); Tobias Haller, The contested floodplain: institutional change of the commons in the Kafue Flats, Zambia (Lanham, 2013); Péter Szabó and Radim Hédel, ‘Socio-economic demands, ecological conditions and the power of tradition: past woodland management decisions in a central European landscape’, Landscape Research 38, 2 (2013), 243–61.

21 De Keyzer, Inclusive commons.

22 Christopher Dyer, Erik Thoen and Tom Williamson, ‘Conclusion: the rationale of open fields’, Peasants and their fields: the rationale of open-field agriculture, c. 700–1800 (Turnhout, 2018), 257–75, 270–1; Donald N. McCloskey, ‘The prudent peasant: New findings on open fields’, The Journal of Economic History 51, 2 (1991), 343–55, 344.

23 Greg Bankoff, Cultures of disaster: society and natural hazards in the Philippines (London, 2003).

24 Martina De Moor, Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Paul Warde, The management of common land in North West Europe, c. 1500–1850 (Turnhout, 2002).

25 J. M. Neeson, Commoners: common right, enclosure and social change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge, 1993).

26 In comparing yields on manorial demesnes, Slavin only found a significant correlation with elevation: higher situated demesnes witnessed lower yields, according to Slavin, because the driver of the harvest failure – excessive rainfall – was especially pronounced on higher-altitude sites: Philip Slavin, Experiencing famine in fourteenth-century Britain (Turnhout, 2019), 53–4.

27 Esther Beeckaert and Eric Vanhaute, ‘Whose famine? Regional differences in vulnerability and resilience during the 1840s Potato Famine in Belgium’, in Jessica Dijkman and Bas van Leeuwen ed., An economic history of famine resilience (Abingdon, 2019), 115–41, 131–5; see also Cottyn, Beeckaert and Vanhaute in this volume.

28 B. Van Bavel et al., Disasters and history (Cambridge, 2021), 91–5.

29 Michael Turner, ‘English open fields and enclosures: retardation or productivity improvements’, The Journal of Economic History 46, 3 (1986), 669–92.

30 Alexandra Sapoznik, ‘The productivity of peasant agriculture: Oakington, Cambridgeshire, 1360–99’, The Economic History Review 66, 2 (2013), 518–44, 530; for a similar assessment, based on manuring, see also Philippe H. La Poutré, ‘Fertilization by manure: a manor model comparing English demesne and peasant land, c.1300’, Agricultural History Review 65, 1 (2017), 20–48.

31 Amartya Sen, ‘An aspect of Indian agriculture’, Economic Weekly 14 (1962), 243.

32 Haller in this volume.

33 Adam Guerin, ‘Disaster ecologies: land, peoples and the colonial modern in the Gharb, Morocco, 1911–1936’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 59, 3 (2016), 333–65.

34 Cottyn, Beeckaert and Vanhaute in this volume.

35 The epidemics which in the mid-sixteenth century killed 70 to 90 percent of the indigenous population in the Mezquital valley in Central Mexico greatly facilitated the establishment of large hacienda-type estates on former communal lands. This in turn was followed by an episode of dramatic overgrazing by a ‘plague of sheep’ as Melville called it: Elinor G. K Melville, A plague of sheep: environmental consequences of the conquest of Mexico (Cambridge, 1994).

36 José Miguel Lana Berasain, ‘From equilibrium to equity. The survival of the commons in the Ebro Basin: Navarra from the 15th to the 20th Centuries’, International Journal of the Commons 2, 2 (2008), 162–91; Maïka De Keyzer, ‘The impact of different distributions of power on access rights to the common waste lands: the Campine, Brecklands and Geest compared’, Journal of Institutional Economics 9, 4 (2013), 517–42.

37 Henry French, ‘“… a great hurt to many, and of advantage to very few” Urban common lands, civic government, and the problem of resource management in English towns, 1500–1840’, in Jahrbuch für Geschichte des ländlichen Raumes, (St. Pölten, 2019), xvi, 51–75, 74.

38 Leigh Shaw-Taylor, ‘Parliamentary enclosure and the emergence of an English agricultural proletariat’, The Journal of Economic History 61, 3 (2001), 654.

39 De Keyzer and Van Onacker in this volume.

40 Margaret R Hunt, Women in eighteenth-century Europe (Pearson, 2009), 148.

41 Bina Agarwal, A field of one's own: gender and land rights in South Asia (Cambridge, 1994), 455.

42 Stephen Sparks, ‘The peculiarities of South African history: Thompsonian social history and the limits of colonialism’, Social History (London) 45, 4 (2020), 440–52.

43 Ostrom, Governing the commons.

44 Maïka De Keyzer, ‘Access versus influence. Peasants in Court in the Late Medieval Low Countries’, in Miriam Müller ed., Handbook of rural life (London, 2021), 1-25.

45 David Gongwe Mhando et al., ‘Adaptation to changes in the coffee value chain and the price of coffee among coffee producers in two villages in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania’, African study Monographs 34, 1 (2013), 27–56; Haller in this volume.