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"This book provides an historical and comparative perspective of peasant productivity using case studies portraying the extraordinary efficiency with which English cottagers, Jamaican ex-slaves, Guatemalan Mayan campesinos, Nigerian hill farmers, and Kerala hutdwellers, obtained bountiful and diversified harvests from small parcels of land, provisioning their families and often local markets. These stories provide us with pictures of carefully limited needs, of sustainable livelihoods, and resilient independence attacked relentlessly and mercilessly in the name of capital, progress, development, modernity, and/or the state. For two hundred years we have been told that the hundreds of thousands, or millions, or billions of hungry mouths require that peasants be dispossessed to allow more industrious farmers to feed them. This book helps make it clear how wrong we have been for these two hundred years. The approach used is original and will be of interest to people engaged in the history of the peasantry."--

Introduction: The Multiplication of Wretchedness -- The Yoke of Improvement -- The Enchantment of Property -- A Rooted Hatred between the Rich and the Poor -- Political Economy and the Rural Poor -- Nassau Senior and the New Poor Laws -- The Most Elementary Truths -- Bad Farming: The Ghost of a Dead Monopoly -- Ireland: They Lie beyond the Pale -- Cooked Land, Cotton, and Slavery -- Conclusion: The Home-Civilization of the Rural English.

Between 1760 and 1860, the English countryside was subject to constant attempts at agricultural improvement. Most often these meant depriving cottagers and rural workers of access to land they could cultivate, despite evidence that they were the most productive farmers in a country constantly short of food. Drawing from a wide range of contemporary sources, Apostles of Inequality argues that such attempts, driven by a flawed faith in the wonders of capital, did little to increase agricultural productivity and instead led to a century of increasing impoverishment in rural England. Jim Handy rejects the assertions about the benefits that accompanied the transition to "improved" agriculture and details the abundant evidence for the efficiency of smallholder, peasant agriculture. He traces the development of both economic theory and government policy through the work of agricultural improver Arthur Young (1741–1820), government advisor Nassau William Senior (1790–1864), and the editors and writers of the Economist, as well as Adam Smith and Thomas Robert Malthus. Apostles of Inequality demonstrates how a fascination with capital – promoted by political economy and farmers' desires to have a labour force completely dependent on wage labour – fostered widespread destitution in rural England for over a century

This article explores the reasons for the spread of vigilante justice (linchamientos) in contemporary Guatemala. It investigates three specific linchamientos and suggests that the roots of such vigilante justice lie in a collapsing peasant economy, insecurity of all sorts, and an unravelling of the social fabric in rural communities through the militarisation of rural Guatemala.The article also argues that linchamientos are caused partly by a conflict over the attempts by the Guatemalan state to impose a certain type of order in rural Guatemala. It discusses the literature on customary law, in Guatemala and in various other locales around the world, and suggests that attempts to impose a state sanctioned legal system without adequate provision for customary law has helped contribute to a perception that the legal system is illegitimate, not just incompetent.

The 'revolution' from 1944 to 1954 prompted important changes in rural communities in Guatemala. The extension of many government services to rural areas for the first time, the involvement of political parties in village politics, and the growth of a rural labour federation all altered the political, economic, and social organization of rural Guatemala irrevocably. Changes became even more dramatic and more significant after 1950 with the growth of a national peasant league and the passage of a comprehensive agrarian reform law in 1952. Despite its importance, the changes that came to rural Guatemala with the revolution are not well understood and the shape of the'revolution in the countryside'continues to be debated.

During 1984 and 1985 there was much discussion of an apparent 'resurgence' of democracy in many countries in Latin America. As the military handed over the reins of government to elected civilian rulers in Honduras, El Salvador and Argentina, and steps toward the same end were taken in Uruguay and Brazil, the American media and the Reagan administration – conveniently forgetting its earlier support for military dictatorship – began to speak glowingly of a new 'Latin spring'.

Versuch einer Einschätzung des gegenwärtig zu beobachtenden Rückzugs der Militärs aus der guatemaltekischen Staatsführung auf der Basis einer Retrospektive des Verhältnisses zwischen zivilen und militärischen Herrschaftsformen seit 1944. Im Ergebnis wird die Machtübertragung an die zivile Regierung Vinicio Cerezo eher als Ausdruck der Stärke interpretiert, da erstmals die Streitkräfte die absolute Kontrolle auch und gerade in den ländlichen Gebieten erlangt haben