Bandits article notes

1959 Hobsbawm first brings up social banditry in Primative Rebels

-Argued social bandits were typically peasant outlaws who followed the familiar
practices of the bandit trade but represented unconscious, primitive forms of
popular protest that were devoid of any explicit ideology organization or program
-Aimed at landlords and officials, supported by commoners who benefited
-Avenger a bandit who was excessively violent and often feared by the poor but
still had popular appeal
-Doomed to extinction because loss of support and superiority of state
Blok- bandits actions contradict stories
Achieve mobility at expense of others
Undercut instead of strengthen class solidarity
Beal bandits are selfish and have no interest in rectifying social wrongs
Slatta Banditos
No close class ties
Used more for economic gain than protest
Peasants chose other avenues over banditry
Most banditry in sparse areas without settled peasants
Many elite-bandit alliances
Originated from family feuds, not class injustices
Fails to emerge as distinctive historical type in Latin America
Guerilla bandits
Mexico, independence era
Profited from chaos of war and partisanship
Haiduk Hobsbawms guerilla bandit
Rudimentary political conscience, but support of locals
Liberate peasants
Political bandits
Shifting nature of alliances and power balances
the more successful he is as a bandit, the more he is both a representative and
champion of the poor and a part of the system of the rich pg 13

Banditry is a complex multivariate phenomenon governed by sociopolitical, cultural,

and ecological determinants
Adequate strategy for researching banditry requires police/criminal records and
popular sources
-records document actual behavior
-popular accounts provide social, political, and cultural contexts
Knight supports Hobsbawm
Banditry = significant form of popular protest
Class bonds not essential rely on support of elite
Popular support = characteristic of social banditry
Revisionists rely mostly on police reports heavily biased and rarely focus on
questions relating to group composition and motivation
Elite historiography history of individual bandits and their incorporation into, or
subordination y, a world of power and interests
Guha and Scott
-Forms of peasant resistance must not be understood in essentialist terms but
historically
-Traditional peasant strategies roots can be traced back, relationships to land
and production
-Not archaic, outmoded, or prepolitical
Protest crime actions in defense of peasant moral economy