Patrick Joyce’s “personal history” of the European peasantry will likely become the standard introduction to this knotty, misunderstood, and urgent subject. The peasant world “vanished” (to borrow from the book’s subtitle) during the past century. Thanks to global capitalism’s so-far unstoppable acceleration, much of this “vanishing” has taken place only in the past fifty years.
Peasants are not gone, however. There are more than a billion worldwide. Exact figures are hard to come by, partly because of the various definitions of “peasant” in different places and cultures. (Joyce himself embraces the word’s “original innocence” as indicating “a country person, a person of the land.”) Yet the destruction of traditional “peasant” agriculture across much of the world is only one of myriad breakdowns in the relationship of humans to the earth that has led our vast, fast, impatient civilization to a reckoning with the long past that we have abandoned for progress. And it’s clear to even a casual observer that the industrial agribusiness model we’ve stuck with—in its reliance on monocultures, its heavy use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides, and the consequent exhaustion of the earth’s capacity to regenerate (“60 harvests left,” one much-debated claim has it) is reaching a vertiginous dead end—all in the name of short-term productivity and narrowly concentrated profit.
An Emeritus Professor of History at Manchester University, Joyce’s previous works of social history have focused on the nineteenth century’s acceleration toward the industrial, urban, “liberal” and “democratic” world we have inherited. Late in his distinguished career, he made a turn toward the personal. Going to My Father’s House, published in 2021, was a meditation on the meaning of national identity, based on his family’s emigration from the west of Ireland to west London in the 1930s. In Remembering Peasants, Joyce continues to use the personal to examine what history has come to mean in our own time—the relentlessly obliviating “now” that, in Joyce’s words, “engulfs us.” Peasants are history’s survivors, erstwhile dwellers in what Joyce calls “circular” rather than “linear” time. And they are the most unsettling rebuke to the apparent interminability of the present.
In three sections—“Endings,” “Worlds That Have Gone,” and “Remembering”—Joyce moves with both focus and freedom through time and space, summoning his ancestors on his father’s side who farmed a straddle of land between Mayo and Galway in the west of Ireland until, with the passing tides of post-famine emigration, only a few remained. Patrick’s cousin Seán, a “small farmer-cum-peasant” was one of the few to remain. “The mountains took Seán’s life,” Joyce writes. Seán never married. His “hill bachelor” existence was perhaps the result of one of the important contributing trends in peasant decline: mass exodus of young women as well as young men, drawn by opportunities to swelling modern cities.
There may still be plenty of “peasants” left in the world, but global trends are following Europe’s example. In 1950, only 20 percent of the world’s population lived in cities; now it is 60 percent and rising. The past thirty years have seen the number of agricultural workers decline by almost a quarter. Joyce also gives a briskly sobering overview of the cold facts. The utter destruction of millennia-long patterns of life across Europe in the twentieth century—driven by both capitalist and communist governments—almost defies belief. Take Spain: in 1950, just under half of the Spanish population worked on the land; by 2020, that number was less than five percent. (Other European countries tell a similar story: from a quarter of France’s workforce in 1950, to less than three percent in 2019; from 37 percent in Germany in 1950 to one percent in 2019.) Whether you were East or West certainly made a difference as to how, but the same extinction of lifeways took place everywhere.
In the book’s middle section, Joyce excavates these lifeways, which—as the astonishing consistency of peasant tradition across Europe shows—was really a lifeworld, or what Joyce, borrowing a phrase from Ignazio Silone, dubs “the church of the peasants.” It was a world that seems vastly strange to most of us, a world of practical ritual and superstition, of awe before nature’s mystery and power.
We should all recognize that the past Joyce summons, the past of the peasants, is ours. Unless your name is Hapsburg, you probably would not have to trace your family tree back very far to find someone living on, off, and for the land. There were complex gradations of peasant, and Joyce makes the “multiplicity of peasant society” clear early. One might loosely define a peasant life as a land-based subsistence one. Whether you were a free tenant farmer in England or a hired laborer in France, a Russian serf or a roving and destitute beggar in rural Poland, you were enfolded within a peasant society.
Joyce explores five key relationships of this peasant world: to the society of the village or commune, to the family and the home, to the natural world, to the divine, and to suffering—still popularly understood as the old peasants’ lot in life. Joyce never romanticizes the “bent by toil” nature of peasant work: the terrifyingly total reliance on the body as “a finite and precious resource.” Hunger, death, destitution, and chaos were all immanent realities, never more than a blight or a pillaging army away. As one of the many direct peasant accounts which the work cites has it, poverty and despair were figured the “‘bitch’…ever ready to pounce.”
It was not only nature with which one had to contend. The bailiff and the land agent, the tax official and the press gang—endless human malevolence might also be “ready to pounce.” In the face of the powerful, which they were not, and of nature—vast and wild beyond comprehension—peasants had the strength of belonging, or, in Joyce’s more imaginative formulation, “dwelling.” The peasant obsession with owning land to pass down to one’s descendants, and the peasant sense of “the house” containing a “cosmological significance” both stem from this deep practice in, and understanding of, dwelling. It is not only the house, but the world that surrounds and encloses the house, “the farm unfolding…to the fields, then the mountains, the forests, the wastelands.” And it was not only space that extended, but time, since dwelling in one place requires relationships across time to the dead: “At the same as the living watch over the dead, the dead watch over and care for the living.”
A peasant was located, both in space and in time, and experienced nature through the repetitions of the farming calendar in a particular place. To give a better sense of the worldview such intimacy with the land nurtured, Joyce quotes the opening of a study on Polish peasants, first published in 1958: “Every field knows its owner, the Earth is indignant at every crime committed on its face.… Nothing bad should be said near water. The wind listens and talks.… While animals do not know as much as man they know things he does not.”
Nature, in other words, was urgently animate, and, as Joyce writes, “the natural, the spirits and God, in practice, merged one into the other” in the peasant’s “threefold” view of things. When someone died, for instance, it would be necessary to patrol the farm and inform all the animals, possibly the house and out-buildings too. We could dismiss this as ritual superstition, or we could view it as the peasant did—as an interactive engagement with the extended world.
The middle section of Remembering Peasants is the most enlivening: Joyce’s powers of evocation recreate the intensity of this world, which we might have assumed to be irrecoverable to us. One of many lessons that emerge from Joyce’s account is that the achievements of the peasants—and there are many: intellectual, practical, spiritual, human—were hewn from the raw need to stay alive. Perhaps this, more than anything else, is what we should begin “remembering” about the peasants. For the past fifty years we have been basking in false promises of endless material abundance. As that promise begins to crack on a rapidly warming planet awash with extinctions, poisons, incomprehensible injustices, and still full of so many surviving beauties, the hardship and resilience of the peasant may no longer seem as irrelevant as it did even a decade or two ago. We should be grateful to Patrick Joyce for this book. Where we’re going, we might need it.
Remembering Peasants
A Personal History of a Vanished World
Patrick Joyce
Scribner, $30, 384 pp.
