This is the first world history of peasants. Peasants in World History analyzes the multiple transformations of peasant life through history by focusing on three primary areas: the organization of peasant societies, their integration within wider societal structures, and the changing connections between local, regional and global processes.
Peasants have been a vital component in human history over the last 10, 000 years, with nearly one-third of the world's population still living a peasant lifestyle today. Their role as rural producers of ever-new surpluses instigated complex and often-opposing processes of social and spatial change throughout the world. Eric Vanhaute frames this social change in a story of evolving peasant frontiers. These frontiers provide a global comparative-historical lens to look at the social, economic and ecological changes within village-systems, agrarian empires and global capitalism. Bringing the story of the peasantry up through the modern period and looking to the future, the author offers a succinct overview with students in mind.
This book is recommended reading to anyone interested in the history and future of peasantries and is a valuable addition to undergraduate and graduate courses in World History, Global Economic History, Global Studies and Rural Sociology.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
1 Introduction: The Peasant in Each of Us 1
2 New Frontiers: From the First Peasants to Early Agrarian States 12
3 Extending Frontiers: Agrarian Empires and Their Peasants 34
4 Interconnecting Frontiers: Imperial Growth, Commercial Expansion and the Peasantization of the World 61
5 Intensifying Frontiers: The Territorialization of Peasantries and the Final Enclosure 87
6 Globalizing Frontiers: The Reform of Peasantries in a Neoliberal World 113
7 The End of Frontiers: The Past and the Future of Peasants 131
