Making Peasants Backward, 1900–14

Abstract

The mass cooperative movement encompassed over one-quarter of all peasant households by 1914. To contemporaries and historians since that time, the movement was large and therefore significant, and writers read into it a new form of social organization that challenged the economic stagnation of the old regime and circumvented the system of legal estates.¹ In key regards, however, the movement reflected rather than necessarily offset characteristics fundamental to the old regime, including, in the first instance, caste as a principle of social organization. A new sociological classification of populations by occupation and socio-economic function rather than by legal estate was compatible with the separateness associated with caste; for caste was suggested both in the promise to separate rural populations from each other by way of outside and superordinate intervention, and in the basic dichotomy of the educated and advanced manager and the laboring peasant.