Were peasants ever the problem? Rethinking 300 years of economic development

Maryam Aslany believes that the above Weltanschauung — of peasants and smallholder farmers being a drag on progress and incompatible with a modern economy — has been subscribed to as much by advocates of free-market capitalism as by Marxists.

For Karl Marx, peasants were akin to individual “potatoes in a sack”, lacking the collective class consciousness of the industrial proletariat and incapable of revolution: “They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented”. The Bolsheviks went a step further. They, like the American technocrats, embraced a vision of large-scale farming. Worse, agriculture was a source of surplus that had to be forcibly extracted from the countryside to fund the Soviet Union’s ultra-rapid industrialisation. Under Joseph Stalin, peasants were stripped of their landholdings and brought to work on kolkhoz collectives or State-owned sovkhoz industrial farms deploying armies of tractors and combine harvesters.

Aslany is right that the peasant has all but been “eradicated” in the West. The United States today has only 1.9 million farms that directly engage 1.2 per cent of its total workforce. The average farm size was 466 acres in 2024, with 50.2 per cent of the aggregate value of production coming from those with $1 million or more in annual gross cash income. The European Union has more farmers (8.8 million) but agriculture’s share in employment is a mere 3.9 per cent.

But this is not so in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Aslany estimates that as many as two billion people live in peasant households worldwide. After 300 years of “modernisation”, peasants still constitute a quarter of our humanity, vastly outnumbering assembly-line workers, miners, taxi drivers or office drones. And more than a third of the world’s food comes from farms under two hectares.

The Iran-born-and-raised economic sociologist’s contention is, perhaps, supported by evidence from India. The country has around 100 million landholding farmer families, with agriculture accounting for 43 per cent of its employed labour force in 2025. That’s down from 64.6 per cent in 1993-94, which isn’t significant enough from a Lewis model standpoint. The minuscule rise in manufacturing’s share, from 10.4 per cent to 12.1 per cent, makes it an even less impressive structural transformation story.

Aslany’s book makes two central arguments. First, peasants were key to what she calls the “biological order”, when human activity was powered almost exclusively by plants and animals — and the people imbued with knowledge for collaborative relationships with their natural cycles. There could be no states or empires without peasants. They not only supplied food but generated the agricultural surpluses that made it possible for cities to exist and for kings to maintain standing armies and build architectural wonders — from the Egyptian pyramids and the Great Wall of China to the Kallanai Dam and the Angkor Wat temple complex.

Not for nothing that successful rulers valued the peasant and nurtured the agrarian economy by investing in irrigation systems, keeping taxes and levies to a bearable level, and restraining rapacious moneylenders and malicious aristocrats. India’s most fertile and revenue-yielding lands — be it the Indo-Gangetic plains, the Cauvery, Krishna, Godavari and Mahanadi deltas or even the Deccan and Malwa plateaus — were also the ultimate trophies in epic wars, mythological and real.

Second, the transition to an “industrial order” is not seamless. The death of peasant agriculture is a phenomenon highly specific to the US and western Europe. Average farm sizes are small in Japan, South Korea and China. China has brought down the share of its workforce in agriculture from 59.6 per cent to 21.7 per cent between 1991 and 2025. But as Aslany notes, “China is exceptional; it cannot become the general condition”. Not every country can be the world’s factory, and today’s factories, moreover, create far fewer jobs than in the past.

Aslany’s sweeping history of peasants not just aims at bringing “the most enduring class of humanity” back into the global conversation. By telling their stories from ground up — through growers of sugarcane, rice, coca and cocoa in Maharashtra, Cambodia, Peru and Ghana — it does so in an engaging manner. Far from being backward and insular, peasants are shown as practical and adaptive to change. Contending with the forces of nature breeds in them innovativeness as much as hardiness and endurance.

Where the book falls short, however, is in offering a blueprint for the future of peasant agriculture. Even in countries where it is far from dead, retaining the best lands and human resources is a challenge for which there are no easy solutions.