Peasants in world history. By Eric Vanhaute, New York and London: Routledge. 2021. 146 pp. £136.81 (hbk); £36.59 (pbk). ISBN: 9780415740937, 9780415740944.

Abstract

The author is faced with a major challenge in writing a textbook on peasants in ‘world history in action’ … ‘allowing discussions of changes and continuities’ and … ‘comparisons of relevant similarities and differences’ while evaluating them in ‘global contexts’ (p. ii). These citations are from the series editor of ‘Themes in World History’, and this book is the fifth in this series. Vanhaute follows this brief by analysing peasants in world history from 10,000 BCE (Before the Common Era) until today using a ‘peasant frontiers’ approach for this purpose. It is a useful organizing device, and each chapter, except for the introduction, includes the key term ‘frontiers’ followed by a subtitle. The exposition is chronological starting with ‘New Frontiers: From the first peasants to early agrarian states’, followed by ‘Extending Frontiers’, ‘Interconnecting Frontiers’, ‘Intensifying Frontiers’, ‘Globalizing Frontiers’ and finishing with ‘The End of Frontiers’, each with their respective subtitle. A question immediately arises in my mind—does the end of frontiers also mean the end of the peasantry? This has been a key question in the debates on the agrarian question and the future of the peasantry, and the author does not shy away from confronting it as we will see. It is with great interest and expectation that I started to read this book as it reminded me of a review I wrote over 40 years ago of a book with the title Peasants in History edited by Eric Hobsbawm et al.; see Kay (1982). Some of the themes discussed in this book also resurface in the book by Vanhaute such as the analysis of the transformation of the peasant economy and its future, although Hobsbawm et al.'s book is limited to the period from the transition of feudalism to capitalism to the late 1970s, hence before the neoliberal-globalization turn in the world system which figures prominently in Vanhaute's book. But in theoretical terms, Hobsbawm et al.'s book casts its net wider as Marxist and Chayanovian peasantist perpectives are well represented while Vanhaute's book is firmly rooted in the peasantist camp.

As expected, peasants are at the centre of the book under review even to the extent that they appear in the author's view to be at the centre of human history. There are, of course, different theoretical approaches for analysing the history of peasants, and in the literature on critical agrarian studies, there are two main contesting approaches—the peasantist and the Marxist. The peasantist approach derives mainly from the writings of Alexander Chayanov, Teodor Shanin, Jan Douwe van der Ploeg and Philip McMichael (all mentioned in the selected readings) while the Marxist approach derives mainly from Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Kautsky and Henry Bernstein (only Bernstein is mentioned in the readings). Vanhaute's approach is clearly embedded in the peasantist approach, as will became evident later, but he does include in the selected readings some Marxist authors of various shades, or texts which discuss the Marxist position, although he does not discuss their analysis. These two approaches have some common elements, and hence, we find authors who combine both approaches, but this is not the case in the book under review. Hence, it is not surprising to find in this book that there is no class analysis nor discussion of processes of social and economic differentiation among the peasantry, or other topics favoured by Marxism.

This text is not really set up to discuss the controversies on peasants in world history as Vanhaute's focus is to develop his own views on the matter while being aware of other interpretations and sometimes using them in his own particular way. Those readers interested mainly in the world history of the development of the world capitalist system, and its impact on the agrarian frontier and the peasantry may wish to focus their reading from Chapter 4 onwards, which is on interconnecting frontiers, imperial growth, commercial expansion and the peasantization of the world, starting roughly from 1500 CE (Common Era) continuing in subsequent chapters to the present with a proposal for the future. It is these chapters which are the focus of my review.

This book dispenses with direct references to authors as well as with footnotes or endnotes and only has about six quotations. This contributes to the fluidity of the writing and the slimness of the book. At the end of each chapter, there is a well-chosen list of selected readings organized under a few major headings. Those familiar with the literature will immediately recognize the particular source on which Vanhaute draws in his analysis. However, those readers unfamiliar with the literature will have to dip into the selected readings not knowing who are the main authors in these debates. Each chapter tends to start with a general argument about the processes of transformation during the particular frontier period under study followed by a brief analysis of the particular characteristics, commonalities and variations which these changes presented in various regions of the world. Tables, graphs and figures are also absent; instead, the reader is provided throughout the text with some key general data which provide the most significant empirical evidence for his historical analysis. For example, the fact that with the peasantization of the world after 1500 CE and the multiplication of agricultural frontiers ‘global croplands probably doubled between 1700 and 1850 CE’ (p. 84) and that with closing of the major frontiers after 1900 CE ‘still, the land used for pasture, arable crops and tree crops increased by about 25 percent between 1950 and 2000’ while ‘the agricultural workforce doubled to 1.3 billion’ thereby ‘putting strong downward pressure on average farm sizes, from 21 hectares in 1950 to a mere 5 hectare in 2000’ (p. 103) with the consequence that peasants had to work longer and harder on their land (which Chayanov referred to as self-exploitation) as well as seek other sources of income by pursuing non-agricultural activities on their farm and/or off-farm activities to gain their livelihood.

This leads me to Vanhaute's analysis of the interrelated processes of de-agrarianization and de-peasantization which have become more prominent and intensified with neoliberalism and globalization. De-agrarianization arises when peasant farmers can no longer make an adequate living from their agricultural activities but have to seek additional sources of income through non-agrarian on-farm activities and/or off-farm activities largely through seasonal wage employment or self-employment in the informal sector in rural, but more likely, in peri-urban and/or urban areas. As a consequence, the share of small-scale farming or petty commodity agricultural production declines relative to capitalist farming. Meanwhile de-peasantization or proletarianization means that peasants are losing their access to land as they no longer can make a living from it, or for other reasons, such as land grabbing, or other forms of land dispossession, or because they found, or expected to find, better employment and living conditions by migrating to cities or even migrating abroad. Some authors consider that de-peasantization also occurs when peasant farmers work under contract to agribusiness which determines what has to be produced, under what conditions and other requirements thereby losing control over farming and becoming ‘peasants in disguise’ and, in fact, like wage workers paid by result. Surprisingly, Vanhaute does not mention in the selected references the important writings of Anthony Bebbington (1999) and Ian Scoones (2015) on this topic using the rural livelihoods framework, which would have enriched his analysis.

However, Vanhaute also refers to processes of re-agrarianization and re-peasantization during this period of globalizing frontiers. He mentions that ‘reforms of rural worlds also created opportunities’ (it is not clear to which reforms he refers to), ‘peasants use of local spaces … where creativity and robust solutions to everyday problems and issues can unfold … have led to strategies of taking control of the territory, of re-agrarianization and re-peasantization’ (p. 122). I think this is expressed more in hope than what is mainly happening on the ground. In this sense, his analysis becomes ambiguous. Most of his analysis refers to ‘processes of dispossession and land concentration, … the abandonment of farming as a source of livelihood and a deluge of … landless proletarians’ and to ‘weakened peasantries live close to the threshold of survival’ (p. 121). Furthermore, ‘the global food system … has caused the destitution of a significant portion of the world peasantry’ (p. 122), and so on. Yet at the same time, he emphasizes the agency of the peasantry, their knowledge, culture, ecological capital and sovereignty as resources they can draw upon in their present-day struggles. Furthermore, ‘peasant agriculture is more resource-efficient and more productive per unit of farmland’ as compared to capital-intensive agricultural systems and hence ‘the continuity and promise of peasant farming fundamentally call into question the concept of de-agrarianization and de-peasantization’ (pp. 119–120). Again, he fails to refer to the debate on the efficiency between peasant farming and capitalist farming which is still rumbling on. This is partly due to the different meanings and ways to calculate efficiency. Also, some of the possible higher efficiency of peasant farming may be due to the self-exploitation of family labour. I certainly agree with Vanhaute that agricultural efficiency needs to be reconceptualized and his proposal makes sense as it includes ecological, biodiversity and conservation, among others, which favour peasant farming, see p. 138.

Chapter 6 on globalizing frontiers offers an excellent analysis of neoliberal transformation of the rural world, which has been dramatic as evidenced by the skilfully selected data he marshals which allows the reader to grasp the overall picture and not get lost in the details. It is a hard hitting and shocking reality whose magnitude I had not fully appreciated. It reveals the rising inequalities in the rural world, between and within the Global North and Global South. Additionally, ‘massive subsidies and lower export costs created a world market dominated by farmers from the North … benefited large-scale farmers and corporate growers and allowed them to increase productivity and depress prices, with devastating consequences for millions of peasant farmers in the South’ (pp. 116–117). It is a world agrarian system dominated by large agroindustrial conglomerates which intensified the peasant crisis leading to ‘the end of independent family farming’ (p. 129) whose members increasingly ‘live close to the threshold of survival’ (p. 121).

Returning to the initial, long standing and much debated question about the fate of the peasantry, Vanhaute in his last chapter on ‘the end of frontiers: the past and the future of the peasants’ critiques the argument on ‘peasant persistence’ as well as on ‘peasant extinction’ as being essentialist and teleological, respectively, and for both being a-historical and functionalist. He therefore argues that the peasant question needs to be reformulated and updated in view of the dramatic global agrarian transformations mentioned before. He explores various possibilities concluding that the peasant way is the only way as it has become a social and ecological imperative requiring a massive and sustained effort at re-peasantization. Some of his memorable phrases express this very forcefully, for example, ‘twenty-first-century agriculture does not need peasants, but the world does’ (p. 137) and ‘the world …. has to embrace the peasant way, if not by choice, then by necessity’ (p. 138). He sets out the various reasons for these statements in a veritable ‘Vanhaute manifesto’ which is influenced by the programme and campaigns of the transnational agrarian movement ‘La Vía Campesina’ (LVC), that is, The Peasant Way, while also introducing some new aspects. The book appropriately ends with a long quotation from LVC which aims at supporting peasant farming for food sovereignty, social justice and dignity as well as opposing corporate agriculture.

Vanhaute early in his book argues that despite the increasing external stresses facing peasants, ‘they reveal, in all their complexity, that peasants were social and political actors making their own history’ (p. 103) and that they continue to do so in the present as well as in the future. But as Marx (1967) reminds us ‘men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please’, and in my view, the peasants' room for manoeuvre has been increasingly undermined, and perhaps fatally so, since the neoliberal globalization. Hence, for LVC and other peasant and indigenous movements, hopefully in a close alliance with the ecological movements, the struggle for peasant farming faces enormous challenges. To guide the struggle in an achievable way, it would have further strengthened Vanhaute's analysis if he also had examined some of limitations of the strategy and aims of LVC's programme which need to be overcome. In this regard, see the analyses by Henry Bernstein (2014), Kees Jansen (2015) and Mark Tilzey (2018), only the latter author is mentioned in his selected readings but not discussed; see also Jansen et al. (2022) and Saturnine Borras Jr. (2020) who reminds us that there are also right-wing agrarian social movements who have a different agenda to that of LVC.

In short, this book fills a major gap in the historical studies on the peasantry and agrarian change from the first peasants to the present. It is well suited for students and general readers, despite my caveats, due to its wide historical range, clarity of exposition and remarkable ability to synthesize the key features of peasants in world history.