Aslany's central provocation is simple and uncomfortable: the word 'peasant' became an insult at precisely the moment we needed it not to be. Britain's enclosure acts turned common land into financial asset and produced a template — capitalism requires the elimination of the peasant — that spread globally and became orthodoxy. Voltaire thought peasants too dim to grasp their own misery. Marx thought their attachment to land made them structurally reactionary. Aslany's book is, among other things, a 300-page argument that both were wrong, and that the intellectual consensus they helped cement is now actively dangerous. The historical spine of the book is solid. From 3000BC through the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912, the dominant form of large-scale human civilization was the agrarian empire — built on peasant labor, sustained by irrigation systems and hands-on states, generating the surpluses that funded temples, cities, and bureaucracies. Rice, Aslany notes, is a supremely efficient calorie-extraction technology. The Chinese empire ran on peasant farming for more than 2,000 years. This is not a vanished exception; it is the rule. The four years of fieldwork give the book its texture. In Maharashtra, Aslany watches women harvesting sugarcane — two machete strokes, one to cut the stalk, one to halve it — and learns that sugarcane can't be stored, must be crushed within hours, and that processors exploit this perishability to depress prices. The women fear missing workdays so acutely that many elect early hysterectomies. In Ghana, cocoa farmers contend simultaneously with climate change, crop disease, chronic underinvestment, and galamsey — illegal gold mining whose profits flow to chiefs and politicians, leaving the land poisoned. In Peru, coca-leaf growers have built a parallel moral economy with the cartels who loan them money and offer administrative help, because the state abandoned them entirely. The 20th century is framed as an undeclared war on the peasantry with no consistent ideology: Stalin's collectivization killed millions. American carpet-bombing decimated Vietnam's rural populations. Pol Pot's Cambodian project — return by force to peasant essence — killed millions more. The Maoism celebrated in western universities was too often turned against the very peasants it claimed to champion. By the 1980s, indebted postcolonial states were forced to accept market discipline in their agrarian economies as the price of foreign capital. Western corporate power now rests on peasant foundations while those peasants are cut out of the profits they generate and left alone to absorb the climate emergency. The book's live argument is against what Aslany calls the 'urban fairytale': the belief, held by most of the world's leaders, that urbanization is inexorable and desirable, that the peasantry should and will disappear. Her counter-evidence is a single striking statistic — there are more peasants alive today than at any point in history, roughly 2 billion people, a quarter of the human race. The 350 million tonnes of sugarcane produced annually in India, the world's largest output, tripled since 1980, all comes from family farms. In the absence of universal industrialization (which the Earth cannot absorb), nothing sustains large populations as well as peasant agriculture. There are stumbles. Aslany misreads Adam Smith — he did not argue for wealthy technocratic landlords; he specifically attacked landlords for collecting unearned rents. The claim that William and Mary took the English throne 'without opposition or bloodshed' ignores the subsequent violence in Scotland and Ireland. These are not trivial errors in a book that rests on the credibility of its historical argument. And the reviewer notes the conspicuous underuse of Patrick Joyce's 2024 history 'Remembering Peasants' — cited only in a footnote despite being the most direct contemporary interlocutor — which suggests either a gap in engagement or a strategic choice to avoid a complicating counter-argument. None of this undoes the core thesis, which is both urgent and under-examined. The peasant belief that land is sacred is not sentiment — it is a technology for preventing productivity pursuit from becoming ecological destruction. That much of the world's cultivable land remains in peasant hands is, on Aslany's reading, the last structural barrier against total corporate enclosure of the food system. If the urban fairytale is enacted globally, the consequences are food system destabilization, ecosystem collapse, and a refugee crisis without precedent. The Cambodian farmer's line to Aslany — 'Rice is our companion. We say human beings have nineteen souls, and rice has the same number' — is not quaint. It is a rival epistemology, and the book argues we should take it seriously before we finish destroying it.
