Historians and sociologists agree that England between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries was a ‘peasant’ nation. By this they often mean no more than that it fitted within the definition proposed by Firth when he wrote that by a peasant community ‘one means a system of small-scale producers, with a simple technology and equipment, often relying primarily for their subsistence on what they themselves produce. The primary means of livelihood of the peasant is cultivation of the soil.’ England would also appear to have been a peasant nation in the more precise sense that it was, to follow Kroeber and Redfield, a society where those living in the countryside constituted a ‘part-culture’ dependent on towns, markets and a state. One consequence of this interpretation is that the basic contrast is held to be between industrial nations on the one hand and ‘peasant’ nations on the other. Thus England is lumped with continental Europe, Ireland and Scotland up to the nineteenth century, with pre-revolutionary Russia and China and with contemporary India and Mexico. It is assumed that useful lessons can be learnt by comparing basically similar social and economic structures. There has been a growing interest recently in refining such a crude dichotomy in order to make it possible to distinguish between different agrarian systems. Following the lead of Chayanov it has been suggested that one extra feature is needed in order to make the label ‘peasant’ appropriate for an agricultural ‘part-society’. This final criterion is described by Thorner as follows.