Sociologist Maryam Aslany says peasants hold the key to a more sustainable future. Although industrialisation marginalised them, they still make up a quarter of humanity. Aslany argues that modern society ignores their vital contributions. Her new book, Peasants: Makers of the Modern World, shows how they remain central to our lives.
For millennia, peasants were at the heart of society. With industrialisation, they started getting marginalised. But they still make up a quarter of humanity.
While they remain an integral part of modern capitalism, their contributions are erased, and the very ideology of the modern has come to be defined in opposition to everything peasant, argues Maryam Aslany, a sociologist of the countryside, in her new book, Peasants: Makers of the Modern World (Bloomsbury).