Examples of peasants in the following topics:
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Society Under the Shang Dynasty
- It was a society that followed a class system of land-owners, soldiers, bronze workers, and peasants.
- It featured a stratified social system made up of aristocrats, soldiers, artisans and craftsmen, and peasants.
- At the bottom of the social ladder were the peasants, the poorest of Chinese citizens.
- Archaeological findings have shown that masses of peasants were buried with aristocrats, leading some scholars to believe that they were the equivalent of slaves.
- Peasants were governed directly by local aristocrats.
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Daily Medieval Life
- As much as 90% of the European population remained rural peasants.
- Each peasant family had its own strips of land; however, the peasants worked cooperatively on tasks such as plowing and haying.
- Peasants usually ate warm porridges made of wheat, oats, and barley.
- Peasants drank wine and ale, never water.
- Even though peasant households were significantly smaller than aristocratic ones, the wealthiest peasants would also employ servants.
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The Economy Under the Ming Dynasty
- Large numbers of peasants abandoned the land to become artisans.
- As the Hongwu Emperor came from a peasant family, he was aware of how peasants used to suffer under the oppression of the scholar-bureaucrats and the wealthy.
- However, the reforms did not eliminate the threat of the bureaucrats to peasants.
- The peasants often became either tenants or workers, or sought employment elsewhere.
- Since the beginning of the Ming dynasty in 1357, great care was taken by the Hongwu Emperor to distribute land to peasants.
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The Ancien Regime
- The rural included peasants who owned their own land (and could be prosperous) and peasants who worked on nobles' or wealthier peasants' land.
- The peasants paid disproportionately high taxes compared to the other Estates and simultaneously had very limited rights.
- Despite regional differences and French peasants' generally better economic status than that of their Eastern European counterparts, hunger was a daily problem and the condition of most French peasants was poor.
- The fundamental issue of poverty was aggravated by social inequality as all peasants were liable to pay taxes, from which the nobility could claim immunity, and feudal dues payable to a local lord.
- Similarly, the tithes (a form of obligatory tax, at the time often paid in kind), which the peasants were obliged to pay to their local churches, was a cause of grievance as it was known that the majority of parish priests were poor and the contribution was being paid to an aristocratic, and usually absentee, abbot.
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Fall of the Ming Dynasty
- For peasants this was an economic disaster, since they paid taxes in silver while conducting local trade and selling their crops with copper coins.
- At the same time, the Ming dynasty was fighting for its survival against fiscal turmoil and peasant rebellions.
- The Chinese military, caught between fruitless efforts to defeat the Manchu raiders from the north and huge peasant revolts in the provinces, essentially fell apart.
- On April 24, 1644, Beijing fell to a rebel army led by Li Zicheng, a former minor Ming official who became the leader of the peasant revolt, who then proclaimed the Shun dynasty.
- Contributing further to the chaos was a peasant rebellion in Beijing in 1644 and a series of weak emperors.
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Rise of the Ming Dynasty
- The Ming dynasty was founded by a peasant rebel leader Zhu Yuanzhang.
- The Ming dynasty (January 23, 1368 – April 25, 1644), officially the Great Ming, founded by the peasant rebel leader Zhu Yuanzhang (known posthumously as Emperor Taizu), was an imperial dynasty of China.
- Zhu Yuanzhang was a penniless peasant and Buddhist monk who joined the Red Turbans in 1352, but soon gained a reputation after marrying the foster daughter of a rebel commander.
- Zhu was a born into a desperately poor peasant tenant farmer family in Zhongli Village in the Huai River plain, which is in present-day Fengyang, Anhui Province.
- Born a poor peasant, he later rose through the ranks of a rebel army and eventually overthrew the Yuan leaders and established the Ming dynasty.
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Impact of the Protestant Reformation
- For example, Bruegel's Wedding Feast portrays a Flemish-peasant wedding dinner in a barn.
- It makes no reference to any religious, historical, or classical events, and merely gives insight into the everyday life of the Flemish peasant.
- Bruegael's Peasant Wedding is a painting that captures the Protestant Reformation artistic tradition: focusing on scenes from modern life rather than religious or classical themes.
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The Black Death
- The great population loss wrought by the plague brought favourable results to the surviving peasants in England and Western Europe.
- There was increased social mobility, as depopulation further eroded the peasants' already weakened obligations to remain on their traditional holdings.
- These regulated what people (particularly of the peasant class) could wear, so that nobles could ensure that peasants did not begin to dress and act as a higher class member with their increased wealth.
- Another tactic was to fix prices and wages so that peasants could not demand more with increasing value.
- In England, Statute of Labourers 1351 was enforced, meaning no peasant could ask for more wages than in 1346.
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Taxes and the Three Estates
- In practice, this meant mostly the peasants because many bourgeois obtained exemptions.
- Peasants and nobles alike were required to pay one-tenth of their income or produce to the church (the tithe).
- In the decades leading to the French Revolution, peasants paid a land tax to the state (the taille) and a 5% property tax (the vingtième; see below).
- Peasants were also obligated to their landlords for: rent in cash, a payment related to their amount of annual production, and taxes on the use of the nobles' mills, wine-presses, and bakeries.
- The tax burden, therefore, devolved to the peasants, wage-earners, and the professional and business classes, also known as the Third Estate.
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Catherine's Domestic Policies
- The unrest intensified as the 18th century wore on, with more than fifty peasant revolts occurring between 1762 and 1769.
- These culminated in Pugachev's Rebellion, when, between 1773 and 1775, Yemelyan Pugachev rallied the peasants and Cossacks and promised the serfs land of their own and freedom from their lords.
- While she eliminated some ways for people to become serfs, culminating in a 1775 manifesto that prohibited a serf who had once been freed from becoming a serf again, she also restricted the freedoms of many peasants.
- During her reign, Catherine gave away many state-owned peasants to become private serfs (owned by a landowner).
- He had a substantial force composed of Cossacks, Russian peasants, factory serfs, and non-Russians.