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Peasants and Revolutionaries: Some Critical Comments

Professor Joan Thirsk has recently argued that the history of the peasant is not one history, but several. The demise of the peasant, insisted Professor Thirsk cogently, should be seen against the background of particular farming systems and the stages in their evolution. However obvious this point might be to an historian of sixteenth-century England, it is often lost on sociologists of contemporary Latin America. All too often attempts are made to assess the revolutionary potential of the Latin American ‘peasant’ without distinguishing clearly enough between sections of the rural population, and placing them within the context of the land-tenure system. Failure to distinguish between different groups of peasant farmers has important implications not only for academic research but also for Government policy.