ABSTRACT
From the 1860s to 1929, from Ireland to the Urals, peasants were on the move and on the make. As late as 1929 peasants comprised close on half the inhabitants of Europe as a whole and almost three-quarters of the population in eastern Europe. Peasants were emerging as a conscious class with specific social, economic and political interests and aspirations, although at first these were often articulated on their behalf by bourgeois politicians and intelligenti, who sometimes used peasants for their own ends. The protracted dissolution of serfdom in eastern Europe between the 1840s and the 1880s, the slowly increasing provision of rural schooling, the growing contact with the slowly expanding ranks of the rural intelligentsia (including village teachers, doctors and local government personnel) and the rural industrial proletariat (including railwaymen and miners), the eye-opening experiences provided by more universal military service and occasional employment in the towns, the widening of peasant horizons by national market integration and railway networks, and growing peasant awareness (as well as resentment) of their remaining disadvantages, all awakened peasants to the growing need to defend their interests and organize themselves politically and economically. By 190507 there were major peasant-based mass movements in Ireland, France, Scandinavia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Russia and Romania. (The great Romanian peasant revolt of 1907 was partly inspired by the peasant revolts in the Russian Empire in 1905-06.) Moreover, during 1906-14 there was a spectacular growth of peasant cooperatives in some countries, consciously modelled on the trail-blazing Danish cooperatives of the 1880s and 1890s. Thus by 1914 most Danish, Swedish, Finnish and Romanian and more than one in three Russian and Irish peasant households belonged to marketing and/or credit co-operatives.
