Late imperial peasants

In his influential book on France published in 1976, Eugen Weber argued that peasant identities were changed as a result of the development of the transport network and urbanisation, schooling, political participation, and military service in a national conscript army. This chapter reviews the arguments on the 'peasantisation' of Weber's 'agencies of change' in late imperial Russia in the light of more recent work on Russian peasants, such as Sanborn's, which suggests different conclusions. The government of late imperial Russia may have prevented peasants from playing a meaningful part in national politics, but it was very keen to conscript young peasant men into its armed forces. Thus, towards the end of imperial Russia, peasants did start, slowly and gradually, to construct newer, wider identities as they sought to adapt to and deal with the changing world of which they were a part

Ancient history · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History

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  Tomila V Lankina, Tomila Lankina•Europe Asia Studies•2012

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