Sunday book review – Peasants by Maryam Aslany

This is a very interesting book and although I wouldn’t say it will have changed my life it has given my thinking a shove in a different direction, and I thank the author for that. What it has done is tell me a lot that I didn’t know, whet my appetite to know more and fill in a few of the many gaps in my knowledge of world history.

What are peasants, where did they go and why? If you can confidently answer those questions then you don’t need this book, but if you didn’t realise that the second was a trick question and that there are hundreds of millions of peasants still in the world this book might be an eye-opener. You don’t hear much about peasants in the UK, except sometimes as a term of mild abuse, and this book will tell you why you don’t see many peasants in the UK and have to make do with Pheasants, which are everywhere, instead.

I was very struck by the importance of the peasantry in China for the last couple of thousand years and the type of symbiotic relationship between the peasantry and the imperial bureaucracy – and how different that was from the landed noble class and the peasants in Britain.

The first part of this book explores what is the peasantry and how its strength in numbers and influence has changed globally and then the book moves on to four 21st century case studies centred around sugar cane, rice, coca and cocoa.  These interested me less but the last I found very gripping because I’ve visited Ghana several times, including the borders with Ivory Coast and Togo and had no idea of what was going on at them in terms of cocoa smuggling. In my defence, I was more interested in Ghana’s slave-trade past and the number of migrant terns offshore at the time, but the analysis is very revealing.

This is a mind-expanding read and I thoroughly recommend it.

The cover?  Yeh, it’s OK. Peasants are apparently female in this book. North America gets more of a show on the cover than it does in the text of the book but the USA and Canadian market is probably larger than that of India and China. I’d give it 6/10.

Peasants: makers of the modern world by Maryam Aslany is published by Bloomsbury.

You could buy this book from Bookshop.org and I have set up a booklist to make that easy through this link https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/MarkAvery I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.