R. E. F. Smith

Bio: R. E. F. Smith is an academic researcher. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 7 citations.

The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis

Abstract: 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.

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

Abstract: 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.

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

Abstract: 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...

The Russian Stratification Debate and India

Abstract: To debate about patterns of economic and social mobility within peasant societies is hardly a new game. In particular, our modern discussions are the heirs of a Russian heritage, inevitably mirroring, in some aspect, the great arguments about agrarian change which raged there between the late nineteenth century and collectivization. Two elements ensured for the Russian literature a special cogency and the potential for widespread application. Firstly, the mass of zemstvo statistics provided a more reliable empirical base to theoretical discussions than in any other equivalent society. Secondly, the debate over the peasantry was at the very forefront of the economic and political struggle over Russia's future. Russia between 1890 and 1930 was a society uniquely torn between the advanced and the less developed worlds, bouts of extensive, feverishly quick industrial growth coexisting with an agriculture where Malthusian crisis seemed inexorably to be gathering. The economic performance of the peasantry, three-quarters of the population, clearly provided the key to Russia's developmental fate. In addition, understanding agrarian society was crucial to the political battle for the country. If a large and powerful rich peasant class existed or, as Stolypin hoped, could be created, then the countryside's loyalty could be secured for a conservative regime. Alternatively, Lenin's interpretation of an impoverished, embittered majority within the peasantry seemed to promise a much sounder basis for political revolution than the support of the tiny Russian industrial proletariat. This immediate, practical importance of the Russian peasant debate sharpened the cut and thrust of the arguments.

China-India-Russia Moving Out of Backwardness, or, ‘Cunning Passages of History’

Abstract: At different stages of their history, leaders of China, India and Russia, the most prominent constituents of the Eurasian landmass and home to one-third of the human population of the world, have formulated the aim of breaking out of the ‘backward’ state of their respective countries as a major goal of their movements, their strategies and their policies. Almost in all cases, such a state of backwardness has been perceived in relation to the ‘advanced’ Western countries, and more specifically to the industrialised countries of Europe and North America. All three countries have been caught several times in recent centuries in the cunning passages of history. All of them now see light at the end of the labyrinthine tunnel. A recognition of their common destinies as homes of human beings with complicated histories and of the need for cooperation to protect themselves against the forces of evil, in the shape of market fundamentalism, religious fanaticism and super-hegemonic imperialism can help them to guard ...