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The line of approach taken in this study of the agrarian developments in Over-Betuwe is the developments on the market. This thesis is about the efforts made by farmers and other residents in Over-Betuwe to survive economic depressions (after 1650 and 1817) and to take advantage of economic upsurge (after 1750). The book shows that the economy of Over-Betuwe was one of risk-sharing; not only because many people shared the risks of farming with landowners, but also because they often had more than one occupation. It also shows that agriculture in Over-Betuwe changed dramatically. Residents responded succesfully to developments on the market. This led to an increase in the population in the lower social groups in this area. Farmers with more than 40 ha became an elite as they also became very prosperous. The increasing social polarization and the growing wealth of the large farmers is illustrated by changes in the material culture of the various social groups. The large farmers tried to distinguish themselves more and more from other groups by their possessions and customs. Moreover many large farmers bought land in order to achieve political influence.

MODERN SOCIOLOGY AROSE in the mid-nineteenth century. Western Europeans such as Auguste Comte, Alexis de Tocqueville, Henri de Saint-Simon, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx sought to understand what they perceived as a radical transformation of society. Those twin whirlwinds, democracy and industrialization, seemed to have created an entirely new form of society, distinct from the aristocratic agrarian societies that had been typical of all civilizations around the globe for the previous five thousand years. Today, there is still a great gap-in incomes, in lifestyle, and in governancebetween the societies that spawned early sociology and the rest of the world. Some non-European societies have caught up with the West and become democratic, urban, and industrialized. But most of the nations of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia still are lacking in one or more of these characteristics; if we add up those people who remain either under authoritarian rule, bound to rural life, or with pre-industrial levels of income, they would be the majority of humankind. This puzzle-in the words of David S. Landes's title, "why some are so rich and some so poor," remains central to understanding the condition of the world today.' Until recently, the answers to this question have been of two kinds. One answer is that, for a long time, the Western nations had been better-more industrious, more skilled, more inquisitive, graced with a better mix of natural resources, more disciplined-than other nations in ways that mattered for economic growth; this is the argument that Landes presents. The other answer, from the Marxist tradition, is that Western nations and their elites had been more aggressive, more rapacious, and more effective at subjugating other peoples and climbing up over their enslaved and exploited bodies. Either way, the great divergence is due to something the West had that the rest of the world lacked.

The rise and fall of the Left Communist movement the debate on Imperialism Brest-Litovsk the agrarian question the organization of Industry politics and the state the strength of the Left Communist movement - Moscow, the Urals and the Ukraine.

List of illustrations List of tables Preface Acknowledgements List of abbreviations 1. Rural France in the eighteenth century 2. The crisis of the late 'ancien regime' 3. 1789: between hope and fear 4. Dismantling the seigneurial regime 5. The land settlement: collective rights versus agrarian individualism 6. The administrative revolution 7. Terror and counter-terror 8. The balance-sheet Notes Bibliography Index.

FOR THE HISTORIAN DAZED BY THE HEAT AND DUST produced by acrimonious exchanges over the causes, nature, and significance of the French Revolution, the consensus on the meaning of the revolution in the countryside offers a welcome scholarly oasis. There, most agree, the revolution thwarted a fuller liberation of capitalist impulses and retarded the growth of capitalism for most of the nineteenth century. From a Marxist perspective, this juxtaposition of an anti-capitalist, communitarian peasant triumph and a bourgeois and individualistic revolution has always been awkward: was the peasant revolution within, alongside, or contradictory to the dominant bourgeois remaking of France? However, it has also served to highlight what was historically specific about the French Revolution. When Alfred Cobban inveighed against what he labeledand caricatured as-the orthodox Marxist interpretation in The Myth of the French Revolution (1955) and The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (1964), critical reactions from Albert Soboul, Georges Lefebvre, and others hinged on his definitions, his selective use of evidence, and his minimization of the anti-feudal, bourgeois, and transforming nature of the revolution. His characterization of small-holders and the semi-landless as "conservative" and "anticapitalist" after 1789 was not at issue.' Similarly, Georges Lefebvre's argument of sixty years ago is still accepted by historians of widely divergent schools. According to Lefebvre, although much of the revolutionary legislation pertaining to the economy was intended to facilitate agrarian capitalism, the sheer weight of peasant resistance to agrarian individualism prevented its implementation.2 Only recently have historians, and almost exclusively Marxist historians, begun to reexamine the general nature of the peasant movement and