‘Peasants has earned a place in that very short shelf of books which genuinely makes you see the world anew … Peasants is not just an extraordinary debut, it is that most precious rarity: an out-and-out masterpiece’ William Dalrymple
Peasants never disappeared – we simply stopped seeing them. For centuries, they fed empires, led revolutions and built modern states. Yet industrial modernity forced them into the shadows. Today, political and economic elites speak as if peasants are relics of the past, even though this two-billion-strong workforce grows a third of our food and sustains our landscapes, producing everything from supermarket staples to the most exclusive luxuries. Like Atlas, they hold up the modern world, yet the true story of how they shaped it has long been obscured.
Their story uncovers the hidden architecture of our global systems. Peasants dismantles enduring myths about this forgotten class as archaic or backward, revealing instead a fiercely adaptive and politically indispensable majority whose fate is inseparable from our own. Travelling from Indian sugar fields to the rice landscapes of Cambodia, the coca valleys of Peru to Ghana’s cocoa belt, Maryam Aslany explores contemporary peasant worlds to uncover the exploitative systems that power global markets – and the human lives at their core.
Understanding peasants is essential to understanding our future. This isn’t a history of the distant past; food insecurity, migration crises, climate change, rural depopulation and global inequality all converge on the story of peasantry. Understanding the history of the world’s largest forgotten class is crucial, for it offers pathways to our own ecological survival. We cannot afford to ignore their voices any longer.
