Peasants: Makers of the Modern World

Four crops, three continents, two billion lives: This is the world of the global peasantry, both historic and present, upon which civilization depends—and it’s under threat.

"An out-and-out masterpiece." —William Dalrymple, author of The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

For centuries, the peasantry, who worked the land to feed empires, was a major political force—they led revolutions and built modern states. After the Industrial Revolution, however, these small farmers became an afterthought, even a relic from an “underdeveloped” past.

As rural sociologist Maryam Aslany illustrates in this dazzling journey across the globe, this is a convenient fiction. Today peasant households make up roughly a quarter of the world’s population; they put food on our tables and move markets. But as the demand for cheap goods increases, mankind’s most vital and innovative demographic is being forced into ever more destitute conditions. Here, Aslany brings us into their lives. We meet Indian sugarcane cutters, Cambodian rice farmers, Peruvian coca cultivators and traffickers, and Ghanaian cacao growers. We hear from men who have been driven to extremism by failing livelihoods, women who have been forced to bear the burden of agricultural labor and family survival, and families of the farmers who have died by suicide. Aslany explains how their struggle is directly tied to the crises we now face: food insecurity, mass migration, and ecological collapse. On our current path, the peasantry’s demise coincides with humanity’s.

Peasants is a bracing introduction to a brilliant new voice and a landmark work of synthesis that combines intimate storytelling with a grand new vision of both past and present.