Rural labor, depeasantization, and deagrarianization

Tracing the nature and rate of rural change in African rural labour patterns, this chapter outlines 20th century colonial governments’ state and market policy impositions, which catalyzed the formation of peasant commodity production and reshaped gender and age-specific intra-household divisions of labour. ‘Peasants’ are defined, followed by a review the early 20th century peasant literature and the revival of interest in peasant studies during the 1970s, then defines and considers ‘depeasantization’ and ‘deagrarianization’, linked to peasants’ commercial agricultural involution. The 1970s and 1980s were decades of multiple crises: the oil crisis, the AIDS pandemic, and structural adjustment policies that drastically retracted agricultural market infrastructure and productive input supply. Farming households were propelled into economic diversification to fill the void caused by the decline of peasant cash cropping. The 1990s to the present have witnessed intensified economic diversification as well as out-migration of peasant household members to urban areas and abroad, representing salient trends in the unfolding processes of deagrarianization and depeasantization.