For centuries, peasants were at the heart of civilisation. Yet industrial modernity forced them into obscurity, and so the world came to view them as obsolete. Today, policy-makers, economists and urban elites speak as if peasants no longer exist. But they do - peasants remain the backbone of global food and land management, with two billion of them producing a third of the world's food, while also absorbing the impacts of climate change, corporate land grabs and political neglect.

This book restores this vast global class to visibility.

Peasants is a bold historical and anthropological exploration of the world's largest and most misunderstood social class, dismantling modern myths about peasants as archaic or backward and revealing instead a fiercely adaptive and politically indispensable majority, one whose fate will shape our own. Aslany offers a sweeping history of how peasants shaped empires, led revolutions and built modern states, and journeys into contemporary peasant worlds, from Maharashtra's sugar fields to Cambodia's rice heartlands to Peru's coca valleys, exploring through four crops - sugarcane, rice, coca and cocoa - the exploitative systems which sustain global markets.

Urgent and timely, Peasants speaks directly to our current political and economic moment; food insecurity, migration crises, climate change, rural depopulation and global inequality all converge on the story of peasantry. Understanding the history of the world's largest forgotten class is crucial, for it offers pathways to our own ecological survival; and it is one we cannot afford to ignore any longer.