One of the major effects of growth and industrialization in lifeways and societies in the twenty-first century was the decline of the peasantry. Evaluate this statement.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

In 1994, the great British historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) wrote: “the most dramatic and far-reaching socialchange of the second half of this century and the one whichcuts us off for ever from the world of the past, is the death of the peasantry.”

Throughout the Agrarian era, most people were peasantsand peasants produced most of society’s resources. Ifa personhad been born in the Agrarian era, the odds are thathe or shewould have lived in a peasant household that fed itsmembers from a small plot of land made available by overlordsto whom your family paid tributes or rents in labor,kind, or cash. As late as 1800, perhaps 97 percent of allhumans still lived in settlements of less than 20,000 people,and most were peasants. But this would soon change becauseeverywhere, industrialization destroyed peasantries,as they were outcompeted by commercial farmers, forcedto sell their land, and driven to take up wage labor eitherin the villages or in the rapidly growing industrial cities.The decisive shifts occurred in the twentieth century. Bythe middle of the twentieth century, only 75 percent ofhumans lived in settlements of less than 20,000 people, and by 2000, for the first time in human history, only halfof humans lived in small communities. Humans had become anurban species. The peasant lifeways that had shaped thelife experiences of most humans for most of the previous10,000 years were vanishing.

For peasants driven off the land, often into impoverished,dangerous, unsanitary, and polluted environments in townsand cities, the change was destructive and brutal. Yet forincreasing numbers of their children and grandchildren, thechange would eventually raise material standards of livingas the cities themselves became wealthier, as infrastructurespread, as clean water and electricity were installed,as health and education became more accessible, and asjob opportunities multiplied. Gradually, towns, which hadonce been death traps for peasant migrants, began to providemore opportunities and better living conditions thanrural areas.