Peasants: Makers of the Modern World

‘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 themFor 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 systemsPeasants dismantles enduring myths about this forgotten class as archaic or backward, revealing instead a fiercely adaptive and politicall