| 释义 |
peasantry|ˈpɛzəntrɪ|
[f. as prec. + -ry.]
1. Peasants collectively; a body of peasants.
See peasant n. 1 and note there.
a1553Edw. VI in Burnet Hist. Ref. (1681) II. Collect. Records 70 The Gentlemen and Servingmen..ought not..to have so much as they have in France, where the Peasantry is of no value. 1622Bacon Hen. VII 74 In France, and Italie, and some other Parts abroad, where in effect all is Noblesse, or Pesantrie. 1770Goldsm. Des. Vill. 55 A bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once destroy'd, can never be supplied. 1817Cobbett Taking Leave 6 The Labouring classes..are called, now-a-days, by these gentlemen, ‘the peasantry’. This is a new term as applied to Englishmen. 1841James Brigand iii, His garb was unlike that of the peasantry of Savoy. 1903W. Raleigh Wordsworth 172 The peasantry—if that word may be used without prejudice to designate all those who live on the land by their own labour. 1933E. & C. Paul tr. Stalin's Leninism II. 206 Why is the peasantry described [by Lenin] as the last capitalist class? Because of the two main classes of which our society is composed, the peasantry is a class whose economy is based on private property and small commodity production. Because the peasantry, as long as it remains a peasantry, living by small commodity production, will throw up capitalists from its ranks. 1934Encycl. Social Sci. XII. 51/2 In the strongholds of European peasantry—the states formed in the western provinces of the former Russian Empire, the Danube basin and the Balkans—the peasants won a leading position after the World War when the great landed proprietors were compelled to surrender both their land and their dominant political status. 1936tr. Lenin's Sel. Wks. III. 183 The better the condition of the ‘commune’, the greater the prosperity of the peasantry in general, the more rapid is the process of differentiation among the peasantry into antagonistic classes of capitalist agriculture. 1951R. Firth Elem Social Organiz. iii. 87 It is this close economic and social..attachment to the soil that is historically one of the main distinguishing features of a European peasantry. 1964A. R. Holmberg in H. F. Dobyns et al. Peasants, Power, & Appl. Social Change (1971) ii. 33 More than 50 percent of the world's population is peasantry, the large majority of which lives in the so-called underdeveloped countries or newly emerging nations, under natural conditions and social structures that have denied peasants effective participation in the modernization process. 1966Sociol. Rev. XIV. 6 The peasantry consist of small producers on land who, with the help of simple equipment and the labour of their families, produce mainly for their own consumption, and for the fulfilment of their duties to the holders of political and economic power. 1966E. Wolf Peasants 11 It is only when a cultivator is integrated into a new society with a state—that is, when the cultivator becomes subject to the demands and sanctions of power-holders outside his social stratum—that we can appropriately speak of peasantry. 1971I. Deutscher Marxism in our Time i. 28 We see all over the West the disappearance of those middle classes that were supposed to constitute the conservative foundation of capitalism; of the small-owning, small-holding peasantry. 1975J. A. Hellman tr. Stavenhagen's Social Classes in Agrarian Societies v. 66 For some students, peasantries are merely holdovers from pre-capitalist times, which tend to disappear as capitalism develops. While this may be the case in Western Europe, the situation in the underdeveloped countries is quite different. Here we still have hundreds of millions of peasants..who are well integrated into the colonial or underdeveloped capitalist system and who, if present trends continue, will maintain peasant characteristics for many generations.
2. a. The condition of being a peasant; the legal position or rank of a peasant (or German Bauer); the conduct or quality of a peasant, rusticity.
1596Shakes. Merch. V. ii. ix. 46 (Qo. 1) How much low Peasantry would then be gleaned From the true seede of honour? and how much honour Pickt from the chaft..of the times. 1622F. Markham Bk. War ii. ix. §2. 74 Colours so borne, shew Bastardy, peasantry, or dishonor. a1680Butler Rem. (1759) I. 332 Else, as a Gentleman, you could have never descended to such Peasantry of Language. 1762tr. Busching's Syst. Geog. IV. 208 Whoever would appear at the Diet, must previously become a country-man, or assume the peasantry. 1824Lamb Elia Ser. ii. Blakesmoor, Till, every dreg of peasantry purging off, I received into myself Very Gentility. 1937Observer 17 Oct. 19/2, I find it hard to believe that anybody, having read or seen ‘The Power of Darkness’, would not instantly swear..to remove from himself any traces of peasantry that he might possess.
†b. A small territorial division in Germany (= Ger. bauerschaft); a commune. Obs. rare.
1762tr. Busching's Syst. Geog. IV. 348 One hundred and twenty-one villageships [= dorfschaften] and peasantries [= bauerschaften]. |