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Record W2038359735 · doi:10.1080/03066150902928306

‘Almost idiotic wretchedness’: a long history of blaming peasants

2009· article· en· W2038359735 on OpenAlex
Jim Handy

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Journal of Peasant Studies · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicHistorical Economic and Social Studies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Saskatchewan
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPeasantBackwardnessCapitalismFamineColonialismModernityPolitical economyRhetoricCapital (architecture)BulgarianLazinessPolitical sciencePoliticsHistoryEconomySociologyEconomicsEconomic growthLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

From the late eighteenth century in Britain to the late twentieth century in predominantly rural societies in the global south, most descriptions of peasants provided by government planners or economists have been remarkably similar. These descriptions focus on five alleged elements of peasant life: (1) peasants are backward and uncivilised – one aspect of that backwardness is their inability to control their sexual urges and thus their tendency to have too many children, (2) peasants are not sufficiently enamoured with consumption and their too easily met needs stifle economic development – this is often considered to be a function of laziness and thus peasants need to be compelled to labour harder, (3) peasants are inefficient and do not use land effectively and thus need to be compelled to labour more efficiently, (4) peasants get in the way of the necessary process of allowing capital to be applied to the land and thus need to be swept from the land, (5) peasants are dangerous and difficult to incorporate into states as responsible citizens. This paper provides examples of the rhetoric used to describe peasants in four different periods and places: during the enclosures and the consolidation of capitalism in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Irish potato famine in the middle of the nineteenth century, the spread of colonialism and a type of modernity in other than European locales in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the rise of development practice and national consolidation in what was then called the third world after the second world war. The paper argues that these descriptions were both the result of faulty imaginings of peasants and deemed necessary as a way to sell economic and social policies that worked to expel peasants from the land and turn them into wage labourers.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.462
Threshold uncertainty score0.490

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.097
GPT teacher head0.260
Teacher spread0.164 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it