Maryam Aslany, Peasants: Makers of the Modern World

Join Maryam Aslany on Wednesday 23rd September at 7pm, as she discusses her extraordinary, out-and-out masterpiece* of a book, Peasants: Makers of the Modern World. Maryam debunks the myth that peasants are backward and archaic, Aslany's rigorously researched volume charts the history of this forgotten class and shows how reliant the world economy still is on their labour.

Peasants never disappeared – we simply stopped seeing them

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 future

This 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

*as described by William Dalrymple

Book your tickets today!

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Event starts at 7pm, please arrive early to secure a good seat.

Tickets start at £3 and there is a Ticket & Book option which includes a signed copy of Blue Giant by Jordan Prosser.

The bookshop has level access, events are seated and speakers use microphones. If you have any concerns about accessibility, please do get in touch and we will do our best to accommodate your needs.

Refunds are reviewed on a case-by-case basis, we are unable to offer a refund after the event.

For more information or if you would like a signed copy because you can't make it to the event, please contact the Blackwell's events team on 0131 622 8222 or [email protected]