One problem peasants tended to face was (slow) population growth in the face of limited land to feed that population with. There’s only so far that you can divide your farmlands between your sons before it’s not enough to sustain them any more. Some might be able to find employment elsewhere, but you’d eventually be left with young people (men in particular) that were desperate for a livelihood and out of options.
You can imagine that some of them turned to violence. I wonder, how that would play out today. Circumstances differ, so I’d caution transferring past patterns onto current situations is prone to error, but there is some tendency in human social dynamics to repeat. Not necessarily in results, but in mentality at least.
As a random thought:
One problem peasants tended to face was (slow) population growth in the face of limited land to feed that population with. There’s only so far that you can divide your farmlands between your sons before it’s not enough to sustain them any more. Some might be able to find employment elsewhere, but you’d eventually be left with young people (men in particular) that were desperate for a livelihood and out of options.
You can imagine that some of them turned to violence. I wonder, how that would play out today. Circumstances differ, so I’d caution transferring past patterns onto current situations is prone to error, but there is some tendency in human social dynamics to repeat. Not necessarily in results, but in mentality at least.