What Made a Peasantry
Theory and Historiography of Rural Labor in Byzantine Egypt
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12955822 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Paolo Tedesco (0000-0001-5232-8508, University of Tübingen, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue | 1-2 |
| Pages | 333-379 |
| Publication date | 2021-02-16 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Egyptian History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1874-1657 • E-ISSN: 1874-1665 |
| Publisher | Brill (PUBLISHER • NL) |
| DOI | 10.1163/18741665-12340061 |
| OpenAlex | W3130711759 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 50 |
Modern discussions of rural labor in Byzantine Egypt (300–700 CE ) have been bedevilled by disagreement over the definition of that concept. There are three main competing conceptualizations: (i) Rural labor has been defined in terms of serfdom as a parallel outcome to the emergence of “private” (or feudal) large landowners as opposed to the decline of “public powers”; (ii) Rural labor has been described as “free” since it was based on contractual arrangements (primarily, rent tenancy) and on the payment of a public levy to the state; and (iii) Rural labor has been characterized in terms of exploitation, that is, as the instrument through which landholders (both landowners and tenants) extracted unpaid wealth from the population of producers. Building on a vast literature, this essay seeks to clarify that while the notion of feudal serfdom does not find corroborations in the Byzantine sources, the contractual, tributary, and “exploitative” characterizations of labor were not mutually exclusive, but instead describe different aspects and possible developments of the employer-employee relationships
Ancient history · Business · Byzantine architecture · Economic history · Economics · Feudalism · Historiography · Labour economics · Leasehold estate · Market economy · Political science · Population · Serfdom · Sociology · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Byzantine Studies and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · Demography · History · Law
Investment, Profit, and Tenancy
Colonising Egypt
Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism
The Middle East in the World Economy 1800-1914
Framing the Early Middle Ages
The Byzantine Servile State in Egypt
Hellenic Culture in Egypt
Wine, Wealth, and the State in Late Antique Egypt
The Empire That Would Not Die
Theory as History
Constructing Communities in the Late Roman Countryside
Social Networks in Byzantine Egypt
Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425
The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World
Putting Theory to Work
Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity – Gold, Labour, and Aristocratic Dominance
Productive Forces and the Economic Logic of the Feudal Mode of Production
Theories of Practice
The Disguises of Wage-Labour
Money and People in the Late Antique Hermopolite. BM and related texts
The early Byzantine economy in context
The ‘Justinianic Plague’
Les salariés de la terre dans l’Antiquité tardive
Labour status and economic stratification in the Roman world
The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe
Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity
Capital in the Sixth Century
Landholding in Late Roman Egypt
Landholding in the Hermopolite Nome in the Fourth Century A.D
Plague and the End of Antiquity
Real Wages in Early Economies
The Power of Property
Critique of Arnold J. Bauer’s “Rural Workers in Spanish America
Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe
The Invention and Reinvention of the Egyptian Peasant
Law, Politics and Society in the Ancient Mediterranean World
Rejecting Catastrophe
Byzantine Egypt
Mexican Peonage
The peasantry in the feudal mode of production
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |