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Once were/still are peasants? Farming in a globalising ‘south’

New Political Economy suggested the following questions for contributors to consider: Has marketisation/liberalisation generally enhanced peasant farmers’ well-being? How have increasingly intense forms of international/transnational economic integration affected peasant societies? Does globalisation signal the decline of peasant societies? Or is it rather the case that peasants are adapting more diverse livelihoods or becoming more differentiated? These are important questions but pursuing answers to them may well be obstructed by the use of the terms ‘peasant’ and ‘peasant societies’ that I have highlighted in italics, and which seem to me anachronistic and misleading in the context of capitalism today. My purpose here is to explain why this is so, and to propose another analytical language and approach to the political economy of agrarian change. To begin with a snapshot of a long past: starting from about 10,000 years ago, one form or another of settled agriculture became the material foundation of society for most of its recorded history, and for an increasing majority of humanity. Agrarian civilisations came to encompass most people in Asia, the ‘sown’ areas of North Africa and Europe, and parts of the generally less populated expanses of subSaharan Africa and the Americas. In such agrarian societies, peasants were the vast majority who worked the land, thereby sustaining and reproducing both themselves and the dominant classes and institutions (states, religious orders, aristocracies, bureaucracies, armies), which extracted rents and taxes from them. The more recent past began with the transition to agrarian capitalism and its ‘elimination’ of the peasantry, initially in 16th-century England and more dramatically with the emergence of industrial capitalism in the late 18th century and its subsequent, if highly uneven, spread across the world economy that it created. The timing, sequences and manifold effects of industrialisation are also the source of most of our key ideas and concerns about development today. In this context, the place(s) of peasants in a modern world became a matter of intense, and highly charged, interest for theories or doctrines of development and how to achieve it. Those termed ‘peasants’ comprised the majority of humanity at least until the mid-twentieth century. What is their fate since then, particularly in the current phase of globalisation? New Political Economy, Vol. 11, No. 3, September 2006