H. Hessell Tiltman. Peasant Europe. London: Kegan Paul, 2005. 282 pp. $161.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7103-1155-9.

Reviewed by David Mayes (Department of History, Sam Houston State University)
Published on H-German (February, 2007)

Power to the Peasants!

In 1933, H. Hessell Tiltman, a journalist from Britain, headed east to find out how Europe's agriculturalists were faring. The following year he wrote this book, which did not receive its first publication until now. Except for chapter 2, on Austria, very little of this volume pertains to the central parts of the German-speaking world. Instead Tiltman journeyed among those peasants living between the Black and Baltic Seas: the Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, South Slavs and so forth. This volume shows him as a man on a mission, undeterred by obstructionist police authorities who tried to prevent him from getting his story.

The book's value now is as a timepiece, a window onto how one person in the 1930s looked upon the European peasantries and lobbied on their behalf. Because Tiltman sympathizes with the embattled peasants and romanticizes their time-worn virtues, a reader today might imagine his intention was to sound an eleventh-hour alarm about the imminent demise of a centuries-old peasant Europe and to appeal to his readership's sentiments to preserve its culture for posterity before it was too late. On the contrary, he sees peasant Europe as the source of an untapped, untold potential for the European nations and his book is an unbridled call for the liberation of this potential.

Tiltman does nothing to cloak this ambition. At a time when the Great War loomed large in the collective rearview mirror, Tiltman in his foreword fires a shot against the industrial western Europeans. Their self-inflicted maelstrom of reckless militarism and imperialism has endangered their own civilization as well as blinded them to the reality that the majority of Europeans are peasants and those peasants are fighting for aims not shared by the few who exercise political power. He traveled among the eastern peasantries, one assumes, because there the relative absence of industrialization and western notions of progress would lift the blinders and give one an unfiltered view of how the "other half of Europe" lives and desires to live. Not least, Tiltman admires the self-sufficiency of the peasants, who meet their daily needs with their own materials and their own labor. Indeed, they do more than that, they keep everyone alive. "Men Who Feed Vienna" reads the caption to a picture of Lower Austrian farmers threshing grain; "The Wealth of Modern Hungary" reads another of farmers harvesting wheat and, in a jab at western industrialists, a Ukrainian woman decorating Easter eggs is captioned as "A Village 'Industry.'" The eastern peasantries are, in contrast to industrial-minded westerners, unpolluted by consumerism, and Tiltman no doubt wants it to remain that way. Reading between the lines a little further one understands that it is the western manufacturing world that has something to learn from the peasants' industriousness, not the other way around.

This volume has little historical depth. Tiltman is not a scholar concerned with the historical record or the correct interpretation of it; there are no footnotes and no bibliography here. Rather, as a journalist, he is fashioning an account of what he sees and hears in the present. Not surprisingly then, the peasants' trials and tribulations, which he recounts in great detail, appear as the result of immediate causes as opposed to any longue durée. The book is like a photograph, portraying the peasantries as they are in the early 1930s, suffering from a world gripped by economic and agrarian crisis, from the ongoing effects of the Great War and from government officials who habitually neglect the well-being of agriculturists. Yet Tiltman also believes his snapshot captures the peasants at a critical juncture in their history. They were catching on to revolutionary ideas about their essential human rights and objecting to diplomatic settlements from World War I that outraged nationalist sensibilities.

Just as the causes of peasant hardships cited by Tiltman are immediate, so, too, are the solutions he proposes. In a word, the menacing, chauvinistic governments must cease to be oppressors of the peasant populations and instead be facilitators of agrarian improvement. Only then will the peasants be free of regimes that promote destruction with their fascism, warring ways, fragile diplomatic peace, calculated repressions and persecution of national minorities. Only then can "justice retur[n] to the peasant lands" and peasants realize their "freedom and security" (p. x). He is implying here the agriculturalists everywhere in Europe. For though the eastern peasantries are separated from one another by "artificial political walls" and not all equal in their socio-economic standing, they--along with their western agricultural counterparts--still constitute a "single unit" joined by common interests and a common fate. It is, in Tiltman's mind, a fate by no means sealed by modern industry. The outcome still hangs in the balance. "Will 'Greater Rumania' Achieve Greatness?" he asks in the title to chapter 8. It will if political forces, national resources and industry are bent in favor of the peasants instead of against them. To illustrate the point, Tiltman makes note of reforms recently instituted in various countries and the benefits already enjoyed by the peasants and nations as a result. "The New Bulgaria" is heading in the right direction due to initiatives in agricultural education, "the key to future prosperity of the agrarian nations" (p. 72). Czechoslovakia has been "A Successful Experiment" because the government has transferred close to one-third of the land to peasant ownership, supported modern agricultural education and respectfully treated peasants belong to national minorities within its borders. By contrast, the Polish government in Warsaw has failed to follow through with a Sejm bill outlining a Ukrainian University in Eastern Galicia. Thus the Ukrainian peasants, a national minority within Poland, are left with their own, albeit impressive educational initiatives, such as the erection of village institutes and libraries with their own hands and resources.

In his concluding chapter, "The Peasants Look at the Future," Tiltman returns to his principal storyline. After many generations of conservatism and ignorance, the peasants were starting to awaken, something he views as an unprecedented development whose ramifications one could hardly imagine. It was also a promising development. Tiltman believes the nations of Europe can reach their destiny only so long as the peasantries are reaching theirs. "It is a growing strength," he notes, "but not one that Europe need fear. For the peasant is, above all things, conservative and constructive. He is a builder, not a wrecker" (p. 274).

His thoughts in this respect, that the peasants were becoming newly politically conscious and active, betray a naïveté and shallow knowledge of history. The European peasants in centuries past knew quite well the politics of their day at local and state levels. They regularly protested abuses of power and occasionally mounted stiff challenges to the powers-that-be. They also showed the capacity to contribute to their own domination. In the final analysis, the peasants of Tiltman's day were little different from what their ancestors had been and descendents would be, exploited for manpower, taxation and agricultural produce.

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Citation: David Mayes. Review of Tiltman, H. Hessell, Peasant Europe. H-German, H-Net Reviews. February, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12884

Copyright © 2007 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.