Peasants: Makers of the Modern World

“Peasants hold up the modern world, yet their labour and voices have been hidden in plain sight.” Telling the story of the “world’s most overlooked majority” through four crops – sugarcane, rice, cocoa and cocaine – this marvellously researched global portrait of the peasant class transports us across three continents, from Indian sugar fields to the coca valleys of Peru, to show that food insecurity, migration crises, climate change, rural depopulation and global inequality all intersect with the two billion lives on the frontline of producing the world’s most vital commodities – who also contend with extreme weather, crop failures and biodiversity loss.