Focusing on the Wars: The Lives of the Peasants

Focusing on the Wars: The Lives of the Peasants
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Focusing on the Wars: The Lives of the Peasants
A crisis is an unexpected occurrence that causes stress on the institution’s community or certain aspects of the community. It disrupts the normal operations of the institutions and requires an instant response, as well as monitoring actions following the response completion. The early 17th century in Europe is viewed as a crisis that wreaked havoc across the entire continent, impacting many countries’ demography, political stability, and economy. This essay reflects on the lives of the peasants during the crisis in terms of how it encouraged the emergence of capitalism and promoted serfdom.
The European wars lasted roughly between 1618 and 1698 and were significantly catastrophic in Central Europe. Military operations, population losses, and economic disruptions strained the government resources, thus making it increasingly challenging to support the peasants. The war placed more turmoil on the already burdened peasants, increasing their tax burden. Except for England, the war empowered rulers to extend power over the peasants to extract the optimal from all potential resources (Lambert, 2021). This undermined the ability of the peasants to engage in trade, with the gap between the western and eastern regions widening in the seventeenth century.
Many seventeenth-century European populations were peasants, depending on farming. They lived within nucleated settlements and in recognized boundaries. In this context, the war also led to industry displacement to the countryside, and pro-industrialization spread in certain parts of central and western Europe. This marked the initial era of industrialization. The labor costs were rising in the urban centers forcing the entr...