Research Catalog

The land and the loom : peasants and profit in northern France, 1680-1800

Title: The land and the loom : peasants and profit in northern France, 1680-1800 / Liana Vardi.
Author: Vardi, Liana.
Publication: Durham : Duke University Press, 1993.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Filter by

1 Item

Item details
Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan Not available - Please for assistance.	Text	Use in library	HD1536.F8 V37 1993	Off-site

Details

Description

xii, 297 pages : illustrations, maps; 25 cm

Summary

In the modern imagination the peasant survives as a creature of the land, suspicious of the outside world and resistant to change, either the repository of pristine innocence and virtue or the manifestation of everything nasty, brutish, and at best dull. The Land and the Loom replaces this picture with a richly textured, deeply researched portrait of the peasant's life and world in northern France in the early modern period. Supported by evidence culled from parish registers, notarial records, and judicial archives, this masterful depiction of village life, detailing the development of the linen weaving trade in Montigny, revises accepted notions of the peasant's place in rural industry. The peasants emerging from Liana Vardi's study are not the figures of tradition, driven solely by symbolic attachment to the land and unreasonably devoted to village solidarities. Instead they reveal remarkable flexibility and diversity, a readiness to adapt to changing incentives. As Vardi shows, they not only improved farming methods and raised yields during the eighteenth century, but also used land to finance investments in industry and to develop local business, far-flung commercial networks, and complex credit mechanisms. Vardi reveals how the peasants' responses to market opportunities depended largely on their status, with the very poor and the well-off staying out of the linen business, while a broad middle group leaped into the trade, setting in motion a gradual shift of wealth and power within the community. As this analysis makes clear, the importance of patrimony and tradition had much more to do with economic interests and common sense than with deep-seated cultural and emotional constraints. The eighteenth-century French countryside emerges as a region of capitalist experimentation, cut short by pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary crises. Meticulously documented, broadly interpretive, and beautifully written, this fascinating book will permanently alter conventional perceptions of peasant life and rural industry and, ultimately, the way ordinary people are seen in seemingly distant times and places.

Subject

Genre/Form

History.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (p. [277]-292) and index.

Contents

Conversion Table -- I. The Setting. 1. The Human Context. 2. The Institutional Setting -- II. The Land. 3. Landholding. 4. Tenancy. 5. Agriculture. 6. Rural Transformations and the Turn to Weaving -- III. The Loom. 7. Weaving. 8. Trade. 9. The Rise of the Merchant-Weavers. 10. Credit and the Crisis in Entrepreneurship. 11. Revolution in the Village.

ISBN

0822312840
9780822312840

LCCN

92023231

OCLC

ocm26299794
26299794
SCSB-1978573

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library