Dissertation Information for Christopher Mills Isett NAME: - Christopher Mills Isett
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (1998)
ADVISORS: - Philip C.C. Huang - Kathryn Bernhardt
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - None
MPACT Status: Incomplete - Not_Inspected
Title: State, peasant and agrarian change on the Manchurian frontier, 1644-1940
Abstract: This study links long-term socio-political change to economic developments on the Manchurian plain. It examines the appearance and initial formation of peasant communities, lays out how peasants subsequently set about organizing village socio-economic activities, and then traces the unfolding of the peasant economy over the course of the Qing and first half of the twentieth century.
Despite state endeavors to the contrary, villages in rural Manchuria attained a remarkable degree of autonomy. By the mid 1700s servile forms of labor and tenancy, the socio-political basis of the early Manchurian agrarian order, had retreated in the face of an increasingly free and assertive peasantry. With village autonomy secured, and the authority of the land-possessing peasantry in place, the ground was cleared for the formation of a free peasant economy rooted in peasant proprietorship.
Under these conditions, despite two centuries of trade growth, peasants producers did not respond to the market in a Smithian fashion: (1) shielded from the competitive pressures of the market, by virtue of their possession of land, they were neither compelled to specialize or match technological improvements made by other producers; (2) even though the market may have provided opportunities for gain, the trade off from these gains were offset by the risks of market uncertainties and the threat the market posed to long-term peasant strategies of reproduction. Peasant production was characterized by low market involvement and a preference for crops which intensified labor inputs and best met subsistence needs rather than maximized profits.
The dissertation draws on two major sources. First, it uses Japanese ethnographic surveys of Manchurian villages conducted in the early 1930s. Second, it uses court cases from local archive collections in China.
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calculated 2008-10-09 10:21:40
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