Peasants and Citizens explores the processes leading the rural populations of East Central
Europe between the mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to participate in public
affairs more actively by employing a comparative perspective. Seven historians from Europe
the United States and Japan investigate processes through which civic structures were created
in rural areas in the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth
centuries. The authors study the factors that led the peasants gain greater confidence in their
social position and an interest in politics and detect three key agents of change in the
countryside: national movements agricultural associations and the extension of the
franchise.These contributions enable us to compare the different conditions leading to
developments in the political life in various parts of East Central Europe. For example while
there had been universal male suffrage in Cisleithania since 1907 in Romania only six percent
of adult men had a direct vote to the Chamber in 1911. The book extends the study of peasant
politicization to territories that have remained rather neglected until now. This applies
mainly to the Bohemian lands but also to a certain extent to Hungary and Romania. These new
findings complement those from the longer tradition of research in this particular field as in
the case of Prussian Poland and Galicia.
