The purpose of this paper is to present, or more correctly, to revive, a hypothesis regarding the causes of agricultural serfdom or slavery (used here interchangeably). The hypothesis was suggested by Kliuchevsky's description of the Russian experience in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it aims at a wider applicability.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0022050700078566

The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis

Blending fine-grained case studies with overarching theory, this book seeks both to integrate Southeast Asia into world history and to rethink much of Eurasia's premodern past. It argues that Southeast Asia, Europe, Japan, China, and South Asia all embodied idiosyncratic versions of a Eurasian-wide pattern whereby local isolates cohered to form ever larger, more stable, more complex political and cultural systems. With accelerating force, climatic, commercial, and military stimuli joined to produce patterns of linear-cum-cyclic construction that became remarkably synchronized even between regions that had no contact with one another. Yet this study also distinguishes between two zones of integration, one where indigenous groups remained in control and a second where agency gravitated to external conquest elites. Here, then, is a fundamentally original view of Eurasia during a 1,000-year period that speaks to both historians of individual regions and those interested in global trends.

Strange parallels : Southeast Asia in global context, c 800-1830

This essay revisits aspects of the ‘Lenin–Chayanov debate’ which was so prominent in the formative period of The Journal of Peasant Studies: to distinguish some of its various strands, to identify some of its tensions and ambiguities, and to reflect on the legacies of Lenin and Chayanov. The resonances and ramifications of Lenin's and Chayanov's work encompass so many aspects of the world-historical, and highly charged, theme of the fate(s) of the peasantry in the making of modernity – the development of capitalism and (once) socialism – that the observations and suggestions presented here can only be selective. They are offered in the hope of clarifying and stimulating consideration of patterns of agrarian change today: how they differ from, and might be illuminated by, past experiences and the ideas they generated.

V.I. Lenin and A.V. Chayanov: looking back, looking forward

This paper takes an interdisciplinary perspective to focus on the role played by the rural-urban dual system in China’s urbanization and migration. We explain its establishment in China in the 1950...

Two systems in one country: the origin, functions, and mechanisms of the rural-urban dual system in China

Cover; Half title; Series; Title; Copyright; Contents; List of Figures; List of Maps; List of Tables; Acknowledgments; Archives and Abbreviations; 1 Nature and Power in the Soviet North; 2 Assimilation and Conquest; 3 Stalinism as an Ecosystem; 4 Deep in the Tundra; 5 Scarring the Beautiful Surroundings; 6 Transforming but not Transcending; 7 The Life of the Soviet Environment; Index.

Geoffrey A. Hosking

Papers

Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivisation.

The Enserfment of the Russian Peasantry.