“Banditry is freedom, but in a peasant society few can be free. most are shackled by double chains of lordship and labour, one reinforcing the other.”

Source: Bandits (1969), Chapter Two
Context: Banditry is freedom, but in a peasant society few can be free. most are shackled by double chains of lordship and labour, one reinforcing the other. For what makes peasants the victim of authority is not as much their economic vulnerability - indeed they are as often as not virtually self sufficient - as their mobility.

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Eric Hobsbawm 47
British academic historian and Marxist historiographer 1917–2012

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