ABSTRACT
Individual smallholders were able to retain access to their means of subsistence through a range of stratagems that included permanent or temporary migration to other provinces and, most relevantly, making their small plots yield more by increasing the number of crop choices. Simultaneously, local social formations such as lineage developed greater coherence. These and other patterns of community organization strengthened the peasants' rights to land and even allowed tenancy rights to become inheritable. The tie to the land was so successfully maintained that, on the eve of the twentieth century, China was less urbanized than it had been some 800 years before; less than 8 percent of the population was urban in the 1890s.33 It was also this class of smallholders and their needs, I suggest, that ushered in the second agricultural revolution by making use of the new crops from the Americas.
