The Lost World of the European Peasant

Review of Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World by Patrick Joyce (Scribner, 2024)

A fixture of human existence since the dawn of civilization, peasants are rarely a concern of popular discussion today. True, by some definitions, peasants still prevail in some of the world’s least economically developed countries. But subsistence farming has long disappeared from the landscapes of economically advanced nations, and agriculture in general now only occupies low-single-digit percentages of these countries’ workforces. The fraction of the Global North’s population that might still have some personal familiarity with peasants is vanishingly small.

A new book from historian Patrick Joyce seeks to combat this general unfamiliarity with peasants and commemorate their relatively recent disappearance from European soil. In Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World, Joyce uses his familial ties with the peasantry of western Ireland to interweave the story of his relatives’ exit from agriculture with the epic history of the European peasantry’s decline. In declaring that “I am the son of peasants,” Joyce reminds Europeans that they are not as far removed from the world of peasants as often thought.

Joyce writes his “attempt to pay . . . homage” to the European peasantry with a “sense of urgency about [its] passing.” Although the importance of the death of the peasantry has long been recognized — the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm famously called it the change “which cuts us off forever from the world of the past” — Joyce memorializes this experience for a wider audience than peasant matters often receive. Indeed, it has been several…