How peasants lose their land
From time immemorial, the rich and well connected have devised ways and means to grab peasants’ land for various motives. In this article we are going to examine what happened in the past and what is happening now or is likely to happen in the future. But first let us define peasants.
Peasants are “low-status cultivators who are trapped in a double bind of material poverty and political marginality. … Peasants labor in a subsistence economy that is typically precarious and subject to the predation of powerful elites. As a result, peasants in otherwise diverse cultural and historical contexts share a common vulnerability to natural and human made disaster that constrains peasant strategies in the direction of an emphasis on subsistence security and family survival” (Joel Krieger 1993).
There are many examples throughout the world showing how peasants have lost their land. In early 16th-century Europe, rising prices and bad harvests led landowners to squeeze peasants by raising rents, enclosing common lands and increasing feudal dues.