Maryam Aslany PEASANTS

Peasants

For centuries, they fed empires, led revolutions and built modern states. Yet industrial modernity forced them into the shadows. Today, political and economic elites speak as if peasants are relics of the past, even though this two-billion-strong workforce grows a third of our food and sustains our landscapes, producing everything from supermarket staples to the most exclusive luxuries. Like Atlas, they hold up the modern world, yet the true story of how they shaped it has long been obscured.Their story uncovers the hidden architecture of our global systems.

Peasants dismantles enduring myths about this forgotten class as archaic or backward, revealing instead a fiercely adaptive and politically indispensable majority whose fate is inseparable from our own. Travelling from Indian sugar fields to the rice landscapes of Cambodia, the coca valleys of Peru to Ghana's cocoa belt, Maryam Aslany explores contemporary peasant worlds to uncover the exploitative systems that power global markets - and the human lives at their core.Understanding peasants is essential to understanding our futureThis isn't a history of the distant past; 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.We cannot afford to ignore their voices any longer.

Maryam Aslany

Maryam Aslany is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at Yale University and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, with a background in economic sociology and political economy. Her work focusses on the crisis of the global countryside.

Maryam holds a PhD in Economic Sociology from King’s College London (2018) and an MSc in Indian Studies from the University of Oxford (2013). Her doctoral research examined the class structure of the Indian countryside, and identified a large but previously neglected group – the rural middle class – with markedly different material conditions and social aspirations from its better-known urban counterpart.

Following her doctorate, she conducted a collaborative study of the political economy of climate-change adaptation in Fiji, which was funded by the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. In 2019, she joined Wolfson College, University of Oxford, as a postdoctoral researcher and Junior Research Fellow, where she continued her research on climate-change adaptation, with a comparative perspective on India. From 2020 to 2022, Maryam worked at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) as a senior researcher, where she worked on a large-scale EU-funded research project concerning youth and future migration from West Africa.

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