Today most people tend to view peasant agriculture as an increasingly marginal activity, an anachronistic holdover from an agrarian past doomed to disappear. Foundational thinkers across the social sciences, like Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Barrington Moore, Raymond Williams, Eric Wolf, and Eric Hobsbawm, among others, also envisioned peasant agriculture as fated to vanish with the advance of the modern world. And yet, the historical record tells exactly the opposite tale. Far from emptying out, over the twentieth century the countryside filled with more peasants than ever before, and they began to farm at a previously unimaginable scale. In fact, across Africa, Asia, Latin America and elsewhere, somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 billion people (roughly one-in-four of us) currently toil a small parcel of land less than ten hectares in size as their primary mode of subsistence and produce around 40 to 60 percent of all global foodstuffs.^[1] But what actually happened to peasant agriculture over the twentieth century? Why did it prove such an enduring activity? And how does this chronically misunderstood story compel us to reconsider some of the most deeply rooted assumptions in agrarian history and indeed the broader social sciences?

To address these and other questions, this panel draws on a diverse array of historical scholarship from some of the world’s oldest and still most populous peasant regions. We will explore the role of Mexican peasants as the catalyst for the first social revolution of the twentieth century, and how their identity as peasants shaped the evolution of its most vaunted legislative promise, agrarian reform. So too the panel will examine how peasants in late colonial southern India developed an identity as indigenous ‘Adibasi’ as part of their agrarian struggles with the state. In a similar same vein, we will see how Gambian peasants, administrators, local elites and new energy regimes underpinned colonial governance. Elsewhere, we will examine the role of peasants as counterrevolutionary groups challenging the People’s Republic of China in the early 1950s as well as how they defied Latin America’s most radical agrarian reform in 1970s Peru, seizing and redistributing rural land for themselves. Altogether, this panel will highlight a wide array of peasant experiences over the twentieth century as we seek to develop a fuller picture of one of the period’s most overlooked yet clearly consequential actors.

[1] Eric Vanhaute, Peasants in World History (New York: Routledge, 2021), 3: Jo Handelsman, A World Without Soil: The Past, Present, and Precarious Future of the Earth Beneath Our Feet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 100; James W. Wood, The Biodemography of Subsistence Farming: Population, Food and Family (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 3; Van der Ploeg, New Peasantries, 1.