ABSTRACT
Henry Kamen’s evidence shows that a wide range of peasant resistance movements was occurring roughly contemporaneously throughout Europe, and that these movements peaked around the turn of the seventeenth century. Few nineteenth-century historians paid any attention to peasant resistance as a phenomenon sui generis. On the other hand, contemporaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries regarded the revolts of the ‘common man’ as having a logic of their own. Peasant resistance should also be seen in the context of the general process of transition from a feudal to a bourgeois capitalist system. This transition may be seen as the result of the agrarian sector being taken over by commercial or industrial modes of production, by a victorious market-oriented, commercialised agriculture, or by a regionally differentiated ‘agrarian capitalism’. Analysis of the peasant resistance movements can thus contribute to an in-depth examination of the emergence of the early modern political and social system.
